Katie:

Welcome back to the Money with Katie Show. I'm Katie Gatti Tassin, and this week is a cover reveal of my book Rich Girl Nation. Rich Girl Naysh. Wow, what a sentence.If you're listening to this, that means you can officially pre-order the book.

So since it's the beginning of a new year, I was like, hmm, it might be kind of a nice time to take a step back, reflect a little bit on where Money with Katie has been, what comes next, break the fourth wall a little bit, if you will, and then share some updates about our show schedule in 2025. Because if you are a particularly engaged listener, you may have noticed that you did not see a new Rich Girl Roundup episode in your feed on Monday. So we'll get to that shortly.

But in the meantime, today I want to talk a little bit about how we've gotten here metaphorically, literally 255 episodes and three years into the Money with Katie Show.

Because this all began in October, 2021 when I recorded myself on my phone's voice recorder app and uploaded the raw unedited MP3 file to rss.com. I think my first episode was called “Home Ownership Rant: My Real Beef with the Debate,” and it was just 26 minutes of me complaining that nobody understands opportunity cost.

But the show has really become the centerpiece of the brand and the thing that Henah and I and our audio engineer Nick (shout out) spend most of our time working on, aside from the essays. So by the way, if you are interested in the business of Money with Katie for some reason, we did a behind the scenes Rich Girl Roundup in October 2023 that is still more or less accurate, so we will link that in the show notes.

But if you're newer to the show, let's take a little walk down memory lane. I want to hit some high points. We avoid doing reruns on this show, and I think the reason for that will be obvious in a little bit. So I ended up scrolling back through our entire back catalog and I picked 10 deep dives that we have done over the last three years that I would consider Money with Katie canon. I think they're worth revisiting depending on where you are in your financial journey or what you're just interested in. Many of these episodes actually became the foundation for their own sections of the book, so they felt deserving of this shout out given the circumstances. So these are the episodes that we often find ourselves linking to or referencing the most when we are responding to listener questions or emails.

• Number one, the first one, this is a deep dive called Set Yourself Up to Pay no Penalties or Taxes In Early Retirement, and this is maybe the most strategy heavy episode we've ever done. It originally aired in 2022, so it still uses tax data that are a few years old, but it addressed how you can invest in a tax advantaged way now and still retire early without penalties or taxes.

• The next was another 2022 tactical explainer called How to Construct a Diversified Stock Portfolio of Major Index Funds. Again, this is a staple.

• Next up was a 2023 episode called Upgrading Your Lifestyle: Realistic, Targeted Financial Goal Setting. This was a quick 20-minute listen about how to marry the sort of financial daydreaming, so “what would I do if money was no object” with tactical goal setting. I found myself revisiting this one a lot in 2024 when it became clear that I had actually achieved many of the upgrades that I thought I wanted in life and then was almost surprised by the results. So there's a little cliffhanger for you.

• This next episode was a real highlight of my career in personal finance. It was an interview with Bill Bengen, the man who discovered the 4% safe withdrawal rate in 1994, which was coincidentally my birth year, no connection, I'm sure. It was called Does Early Retirement Still Work with 2023 Inflation? I quoted this interview pretty extensively in chapter three of the book because it was so valuable to get to ask him directly about whether his model portfolio was still the go-to. So I think there is a bit of a connection between this episode and the how to construct a diversified portfolio episode.

• I'm also throwing in a 2023 Rich Girl Roundup entitled Why Katie Made Henah Max Out Her 401k. Now, this was a fun episode for us to record, but I didn't anticipate at the time just how much sustained follow-up we would get from it. There were a lot of people who reached out in the year following its release and were like, yeah, this convinced me to try contributing the maximum, and I never looked back. So I think we maybe inadvertently stumbled into some powerful psychology in that one.

• Up next is the 2023 episode, Does the Perfect Save Rate Exist, which felt like one of those flash points for the show where we notice something funky in the numbers that we often take for granted and we're like, hmm, okay, that feels important. So this episode attempted to quantify the savings rate beyond which you are not going to be buying back that much of your future. So spoiler alert, it's around 40%-ish and it felt kind of like a breakthrough because I think in traditional financial independence world, people say go for at least 50%, and when we looked at the numbers, I think we made a pretty good case for pairing it back.

• Okay, this next one was a bit of a sleeper, but it's an episode that I still think about all the time. It was a 2024 release called A Sabbatical Will Change Your Life and Finances. Now, to be honest, part of me often fantasizes about falling off the grid for a couple of months and removing what I perceive to be pressure to produce interesting things. So I don't know, what do y'all think? Maybe like three month hiatus in 2026. Maybe we'll go in on that together.

We'll get back to it after a quick break.

• Okay, three left up. Next is a 2023 episode about my totally patented, very trademarked Traditional versus Roth strategy, which I explain in excruciating detail in chapter six of the book, called A CFP Poked Holes in My Traditional Versus Roth Strategy. Does It Still Hold Up? This was a fun gut check for one of my go-to hair-brained optimization schemes, and it's an episode that I basically will send to anybody who has any questions at all about traditional versus Roth investing because we really covered the gamut.

• And my second to last plug was a 2024 interview I did with the Godfather of Financial Independence, JL Collins, called the Easiest Way to Build Wealth. I'm pretty sure this ended up being our most downloaded episode of all time. So thanks for that JL. And I really enjoyed it because we got the chance to talk to him about things that I've never heard him discuss before. He told stories that I've had never heard from him before. So that can be tricky if you're interviewing someone who's very prolific and I think you're going to like that one.

• Okay, and lastly, this was a banger from 2024 that really felt like a turning point for the show I think, more on that in a second. It was an episode called The Cognitive Dissonance of “Getting Rich” and Imagining a Better “American Dream”. It was one of the first times that we grappled very directly on this podcast, the ethical implications of hoarding wealth basically, and the paradox of existing and thriving under capitalism if you disagree with its fundamental premise. It featured two interviews, one with Paco de Leon and the other with Caroline Claire Burke, and it remains one of my favorite and most shared episodes to this day. So we will link that list in the show notes in case you want to revisit one of the oldies too.

• One bonus just for fun, because it was one of our most downloaded episodes, a Rich Girl Roundup called The Bachelorette Party Industrial Complex is Ruining My Life, all about the penis straw nuclear fallout of the bachelorette party arms race. So if you have been similarly radicalized against week-long bachelorette trips to foreign countries, I promise you you don't want to skip this one.

So for a little fourth wall breaking interlude for almost the entirety of the five years that I've been doing money with Katie as my job, I have created both written and audio material. So it began with two essays a week, and then it was one essay a week and one episode a week, and then it was one essay and two episodes a week, and you kind of get the gist. We were always combining them in different cadences and different amounts.

And something that I was reminded of when I was scrolling through the back catalog was that there was a little stretch of time there where we were kind of sincerely challenged by how to determine whether something should live in an audio or a written format. And that sounds not that big of a deal, but it was really creatively stifling to have these ideas and be like, okay, now where do we put this? What should we do with this? We were also challenged for a time about whether or not we should be trying to create thematic consistency in all the material every week, particularly in a time when we were producing a lot on social media too. And in 2024, I feel like we really hit our stride with the show and with the writing, and it's making me excited to share my updates about what to expect this year.

So that is a quick stroll down memory lane. If you are a newer listener of the show, you may not be as familiar with the back catalog. You might have missed some of our more canon 2022 and 2023 material, but if you've been here for a while, you have likely noticed a sort of evolution, if you will.

If you have been listening from the beginning, you've sort of witnessed me grow up, and I can't emphasize enough, again, how little forethought and strategy went into the launch of this podcast or brand more broadly, like, jump to voicenote recording. But I've basically followed my interests wherever they have organically taken me over the last few years and tried to sort of bring y'all along for the ride.

But in 2022, I became interested for the first time in the political, economic and cultural impacts on our personal finances when I started doing this full time because before that it was just one of a few jobs that I had. And so my time was very limited to things like infographics or math-based assessments of investment accounts, things of that nature. So back then, I rarely ever went deep enough into any one thing to encounter opportunities to connect more interesting dots and to tell more interesting stories frankly.

But once it became my full-time job, I suddenly had the luxury of an entire work week to dig into a single topic that caught my attention. I would get a bill in the mail for a procedure that I thought was supposed to be covered and then it would just send me on this crusade to make sense of this perceived indignity. So I'd start with like, okay, how do I negotiate a medical bill? This is $200 that I don't want to spend, and I think it's supposed to be covered, which would then inevitably lead me to some website about medical overbilling, which would inevitably lead me to some book about how the American healthcare system got so broken in the first place. And that's a pretty typical example of how I would end up in some rabbit hole that I never initially intended to seek out.

And then I would come on this show, share what I found and be flooded with emails from others who experienced something similar and often on a much grander or more extreme scale than I had. I heard from people who came back from the brink of death only to be faced with tens of thousands of dollars in bills and people who had children with disabilities who could not get off of a wait list for the state benefits that they were entitled to.

And so I like to say that doing Money with Katie really exposed me to the breadth of experiences in America and frankly opened my eyes in a way that I do not think they ever would have opened had I not been learning so publicly. And it was interesting because the same process happened again and again for enough seemingly disconnected fringe personal finance topics that I began to notice something that I felt like I couldn't ignore anymore, which was that my sort of insular solutions were useful, but I would increasingly find myself thinking things like, man kind of seems like we wouldn't have to spend so much time strategizing things like debt payoff if people didn't have to take out $60,000 to go to college. When I started to learn that that was actually pretty rare globally, it made me curious about other ways to do things.

And in retrospect, I think this, and what some have jokingly called my “real-time radicalization” isn't actually as incongruous as it may have seemed or looked on the surface. When you consider what traditional financial independence retire early beliefs are really about because if you like me or someone who earnestly believed in and sought out financial independence, then you believe someone who has to exchange their time and effort for money to survive is not free, that that's not financial freedom and that a self-directed life means you own the means that you need to survive. So in that way, I think FI/RE philosophies actually fit really hand in glove with the progressive ideas about ownership and democratization of workplaces and public goods. Ultimately, you can locate that same central question within 4% safe withdrawal rates and the fight for universal services, which is how do we live a more fulfilling, freer life?

So as this journey progressed, I could feel myself getting more and more frustrated with a lot of normal money content which seemed to refuse to acknowledge what felt like the basic realities that I could no longer unsee. And it wasn't that I thought it was wrong to teach people how to budget—just that harping on budgeting without mentioning the neoliberal elephant in the room felt fundamentally dishonest to me. And it left me in kind of a weird place because here I was supposedly a platform self-described about personal finance and building wealth who was beginning to really question the entire validity of the field, or at the very least beginning to feel as though I wasn't really telling people the whole story.

So the first visible crack in my confidence was in a 2022 episode that basically asked, is the American Financial Independence Movement a Sign that Something Has Gone Very Wrong? So in other words, maybe this thing that I thought was just a normal aspiration is actually proof that modern life and work have become something that people want to escape from.

And at the time, I had only really noticed some of the more egregious issues like the fact that we had really terrible wealth inequality or a stubbornly high poverty rate, the fact that we had basically no social services, but I had not yet reached the point where I was questioning the validity of the system itself. Those things just seemed like rogue bad outcomes that could be fixed with a few tweaks as opposed to inevitabilities.

And most money in business content is very, very friendly to that worldview known as neoliberalism or a belief in low taxes, deregulation, and an unflagging faith in markets to solve the world's problems via competition between individuals. Even in the era in which I had embraced those ideas, there was still always one shortcoming that felt fundamental for a system that was supposedly the best way for organizing society. And that was that this winner's take all approach simply did not scale. It literally by definition could not have worked for everyone at the same time. And I was never really sure what to do with that loose end.

And so this process that I felt like I was going through was sort of beginning to answer some of those questions for me. And as I continued to dig deeper, it seemed that taking such a narrow view of our money was severing our experiences from the systems and the environments that were producing them and teaching us how to deal with disembodied symptoms rather than addressing or speaking frankly about root causes. And so the things that once attracted me to the space were beginning to repel me, it was a pretty confusing time. Videos on social media about how many dozens of doors someone had accumulated in their rental property empire started to disgust me. I was like, oh my god, things have gone so off track. This is not aspirational. So sure we can have an entire cottage industry of personal finance writers banging out rent versus buying analysis with the housing market at all-time highs, but maybe the stakes of those aforementioned opportunity costs would not be so high if private equity firms were not permitted to run roughshod over the housing market, or if we prioritize the building of permanently affordable decommodified housing and not in the “subsidies for developers who are apparently insufficiently incentivized by their existing profits” way, but in the publicly owned goods way. Rather than doubling down on trying to squeeze more blood out of the stone that we've been given, why not ask the question like, hey, why have we all accepted this bloody stone as our reasonable take when 0.1% of our population sits on an exponentially expanding pile of diamonds?

We'll get right back to it after a quick break.

So yeah, I reached a bit of a crossroads near the end of 2023. I still believed in financial responsibility and I still believed in the promise of financial freedom, but I was also really starting to question capitalism as a system and beginning to feel like I just did not align ideologically. It's funny because I used to perceive complaints about capitalism as naive or unrealistic like high in the sky, but learning more about history, about the economy, about our political landscape, about other places in the world made me realize that maybe accepting it unquestioningly was actually the naive view.

And part of what gave me the courage to ask that question and push a little bit further was actually an email from a listener named Mandy, and it was so interesting that I want to include it here. She wrote:

“Longtime listener and lurker. I really appreciate the financial education I'm getting through engaging with your podcast. As someone who came up in a single parent working poor household, we're simply paying the monthly bills was a struggle. I learned precious little about financial management except for how to hustle the shit out of life in order to meet your basic needs, much less anything about the financial industries that dictate so much of our lives. Now, in my early forties, I spent the majority of my career working in low wage roles in the nonprofit and media sectors, but for the last decade, I've worked to significantly increase my knowledge of how money works and doesn't work for people through roles primarily in philanthropy, which I assure you is mostly just another institution to promote the capitalist tax, evading power, hoarding aims and interests of the uber wealthy.

“And this brings me to why I'm writing you today. Something that sticks in my craw from time to time when listening to your show is the way you're operating within the frame of inherited assumptions about money and financial systems, which we all do, of course, to some degree or other. To illustrate what I mean, an example may be to assume that charitable giving is necessarily taking place due to one's generosity and positive moral compass rather than say being motivated by the tax break and the reputation washing, that one gains through such giving.”

And this is the part that really stuck with me, sidebar, she wrote, “This makes me wonder if you've considered doing shows that take a deeper look at some of the assumptions that underpin the ways people think and behave with regard to money, sort of like you did in the most recent episode about whether supporting small businesses is better than buying things on Amazon. In the episode you state that you don't think it should be solely up to the consumer to change their behavior and therefore how the system functions. And then you offhandedly cast aside the idea that people are able to change the system in other ways like policy. But this is precisely the work that many activists, labor organizers and lobbyists are doing, and it's work that your listeners could be doing that has a more durable impact than whether they buy their coffee at Starbucks or a locally owned cafe.”

So basically Mandy was inviting me to engage a more systems-oriented mindset. She was saying, yeah, you're starting to ask these questions, you're getting closer, but you're kind of still missing the big picture because you haven't questioned the core assumptions of a capitalist mindset or a capitalist system. She gave another example of a discussion we had about these small business versus big corporation shopping debate and at what point scale becomes a problem, like when are you no longer a small business? And she pointed out that part of what that conversation or debate assumed was that the size of the business was the important thing because businesses are necessarily structured in a hierarchical fashion where one entity owns and controls it and everyone else just works there as opposed to shifting away from this idea that size is the most important thing and thinking more about ownership structures.

And so when I read her email, I initially felt a little bit defensive and a little bit embarrassed at first I had missed something super obvious, but in retrospect, her probing was spot on. And I think that shift in mentality of getting out of that core operating assumption about what makes life good under capitalism was part of what enabled me to ask more interesting questions.

But I was not just containing myself to progressive ideas at this time. I was looking everywhere for answers. So I read books by famous conservative economists like Thomas Sowell. I read papers and reports by the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, which are both right-wing think tanks. And from time to time I'd be like, yeah, this is sort of useful. But I ultimately found many of the ideas that I encountered to be unfaithful to the reality that I lived in. I found myself swinging further and further left. When I say left, I don't mean capital D Democrat, I mean more like Bernie Sanders’ left vision of America as opposed to Bill Clinton liberal/neoliberal vision of America.

And I think that this is a common experience for people who begin to question our hyper competitive individualist and often antisocial culture and look under the hood, it's like once you see some of this stuff, you can't unsee it.

So again, little moment of personal fourth wall breaking. This is why I have found it challenging over the years when I was going through this process and then critiques of my work would bemoan the fact that it had become political and the tone of the occasional one star review or angry email would often suggest that this listener believed that they had caught me doing something sneaky like, oh, she says she's talking about money, but she's really trying to sell you a political message.

And it just feels like a good time to state on the record: I reject that, not just because I've been saying for years that part of what I want to do with this platform is interrogate the status quo more honestly, go deeper, have more interesting conversations just selfishly. But also because everyone is selling you a political message, personal finance material that feigns ideological neutrality is also making a political choice, and making a statement that individual behavioral change is all you need and that nothing else needs to change. And I personally do not believe that that's true, and that is not a message that I personally am interested in spending my life reinforcing. I haven't been interested in doing that for a few years now. And so when I would read feedback like that, I would often feel like someone showed up at a Mazda dealership and was like, where are all the Hondas? I thought I was going to get a Honda. And it's like, well, no, you're at a Mazda dealership. So I felt like it was necessary to just put that out there.

This is not intended to be sneaky. There is a worldview, there is a perspective on this show, and this is my attempt at clarifying that explicitly and honestly, part of what's cool about reaching financial independence because I'm not there yet, but the finish line is in sight, is that you actually don't have to do work that you don't want to do. And I am only interested in making this show for as long as it allows me to feel like we're still growing, we're still learning, we're still, I don't know, making some headway and understanding the world around us. And hopefully if you're listening, you feel that way too.

And the coolest thing about learning in public for half a decade has been chronicling how my beliefs have shifted over time. And so I'm not writing anything in stone obviously, but at this stage in January, 2025, I have been using this lens on my material for longer than not. And I think we gain a ton from using a systems-based mindset in the world of money because what originally attracted me to this world beyond the obvious, desperate need to understand it in order to protect myself financially was the way in which money infiltrated so much of our lives. It felt like it touched everything. Even the parts that we traditionally don't really consider financial, like our relationship with our bodies and our appearances or our hobbies and interests, our relationships, money touches all of these things.

And so the quote, ignorance is bliss thing might be true. This is a phrase that someone emailed me recently with regard to going along on this journey with the show. They were like, man, I feel like I really understand the world, but holy shit, I've had a way rosier outlook before I knew any of this.

But I also think there's an opportunity once you begin to see through that matrix, so to speak, to imagine something genuinely pro-social and genuinely better a society that is truly democratic, where we acknowledge how interconnected our interests are. And we think of money as this holistic force as opposed to something to hoard and achieve dominion over. And you'll hear that belief expressed in many different ways on this show in everything from our calls for Medicare for all, to the belief that billionaires are evidence of a society that is rotting, to our episode about how the popularity of F-150s is a symbol of American individualism and the failure of public infrastructure investment. I'm only half kidding, but if you're like me, these revelations and ideas will also change the way you behave. They will change the way that you consume, the way you interact with others in your own life.

So we are moving in April. I've alluded to this before, and for a long time I had really internalized this idea that success in young adulthood basically meant buying a big house in the suburbs. So we moved to a big house in the suburbs, and this felt like such a natural part of the growing up script. And so over time, our housing expenses really expanded. We're in the suburbs, so we have two cars. And for all my talk of wanting to live in community with others, to be around other people, to have a simpler existence, for a long time, I didn't really see the relationship between my relative geographic isolation and my feelings of loneliness. And so I was thinking about the fact that I will often talk about wanting these things and how I wish our society was set up to engender those ideals.

But I was also kind of making choices that were taking me further away from them. So this spring we are downsizing from our 3,000-and-something square foot home in the suburbs to a 1200 square foot two bedroom apartment in the city again. We're going to have neighbors, we're going to be in the middle of everything. We're cutting our housing costs and utilities as well, obviously because it's so much more expensive to live in a single family home by—get this—around $2,000 per month. And I feel so excited about this change, especially as I'm entering my thirties. It kind of feels like countercultural to go back from the suburbs back into the city. But I felt a little bit, honestly like that meme that's like when you remember you have free will, I was like, oh yeah, we can just move. We can just go somewhere else.

And so all that to say, my hope is that by having candid money conversations that are rooted in reality and don't shy away from the forces that are actually acting on us and our decisions, we can start to understand just how much better we can feel and how much more valuable money could be, how much easier life could be if we see our interests as aligned with one another. And if we overturn citizens United for the love of God.

Imagine raising a family in a country where housing was affordable, childcare was free, public transportation was viable, towns were walkable. Public education ran through college and medical debt didn't exist. Sit with that for a second. How many of your money problems would just disappear if that were the case?

And I think if you had laid that out in front of me five years ago, I would've been like, alright, snowflake sounds like a nice pipe dream got to rise and grind, babe. I would've not even been able to imagine it. But we don't have to imagine it. You just have to visit another country. Often countries that have less money than the United States does who have already made that version of society more or less a reality. What if you had a four day work week? What if you had paid sick time? What if you had paid family leave? What if you had a year of paid family leave

 I'm just saying think about how fundamentally that structure of society shapes the decisions that you feel you can make when some choices are structurally incentivized. You are not a hundred percent operating with free will. You are kind of going with the flow that the system has set up for you. And so what I'm trying to say is I think we all deserve a lot better than that. And I believe it's necessary to talk openly about those things while we discuss things like how our taxes work and the 4% rule and whether we should be spending more or less on restaurants.

We just can't lose sight of the reasons why we have to be doing things like say for retirement and fund it almost entirely by ourselves. We can't forget why accumulating a down payment is so hard and whose decisions have made it that way and who is still benefiting from it being that way. And so those are the underlying ideas of my work. And I have come to believe that it is possible to speak honestly about ways to improve our lives using the mechanisms that are currently within our control without gaslighting ourselves, without pretending that those issues do not exist.

And historically, it has been extremely difficult to change those things because as we know, as we have covered the corporate interests responsible for them in our country, own our political system and most of our politicians on both sides. But that is not evidence to me that we should just throw up our hands and stop talking about it and get over it and, I don't know, just pick an individual solution and shut up. To me, that's proof that we need to be louder about this. We need to spread more awareness. We need to be having these conversations in more public forums, not fewer.

And so my goal is to continue striking this balance, and I want to strike it really well. I don't want to just talk to people who already agree with me either. So many brilliant thinkers have changed my mind over the years, and I know even if you do not see eye to eye with me on my entire laundry list of beliefs, we likely have at least some common ground. And in creating this show and reading your feedback over the last few years, I have learned that many, many of you share this lens and many of you are interested in personal finance material that will apply it.

In fact, in the minutes before I sat down to record this episode, a review came in that I think perfectly encapsulated my entire goal. They wrote, “I've been listening to this show for a couple years and her investigative episodes are getting more and more interesting. In fact, they're so well told that it's changing my perspective on economics. Thank you for tackling such huge issues while still talking about ground level personal finance.” So BeccaNC2000, love you. Shout out. Thanks for that. “Tackling such huge issues while still talking about ground level personal finance” is like, put it on my tombstone.

Okay, so what happens next? Back to the silent Monday on your feed this year, we will be publishing one episode per week on Wednesdays, and we'll release four or five, usually five in a row depending on how the calendar shakes out before taking one week off. You'll still hear from Henah in the good old Rich Girl Roundup style format, but we are going to structure it differently moving forward. The roundups are going to be adopted into the Wednesday show cadence, and the intention is that they'll offer us a chance to talk about your listener feedback from the last batch of episodes and to answer follow-up questions they may have sparked or engage in a different way, which is a change that I've wanted to make for a long time. Because we receive so many emails about our episodes, so much interesting feedback stories, you name it. And I frequently find myself wanting to basically have a channel on which we can devote more time to that dialogue.

So this should give us a chance to do that in a very smart, integrated way. The Rich Girl Roundup in our main episode production has always felt a little lopsided to me because we would batch record of the Rich Girl roundups and we'd aggregate a bunch of topics from a single moment in time and then bang 'em out in a single day. We'd record four of them in the same day for the entire month as opposed to the more elongated and kind of thoughtful and time-consuming process at the full length episodes would get, which are typically more involved. So my hope is that this switch is going to allow Rich Girl Roundup as a format to be more valuable and to bolster the main material of the show and kind of give us that chance to expand based on what we're hearing from you.

Because when I think about the quality of the work that I want us to be producing, I want every single minute that you spend with us in your ears to feel worth it and producing just one episode per week feels like it's going to give us the best shot at doing that.

We're also going to produce more episodes like some of the ones you've heard in recent months. So great conversations with financial authors like JL Collins, Ramit Sethi, Dana Miranda. We're going to invite more journalists and economists like Grace Blakeley who did the amazing Vulture Capitalism interview onto the show, who are working on interesting stories and theories that affect our finances. We're also going to be doing those longer form audio essays like the healthcare episode that we produced recently with the intention of synthesizing a lot of different ideas, but responding to something timely in the news cycle to try to add clarity, nuance, what have you, to something in popular discourse.

And I don't know about you, but I'm feeling excited about what's to come. I hope you are too. I want to continue to keep this fresh and to continue evolving. So thank you. Thank you for listening to the Money with Katie Show. Thank you for your support over the years. And now that we've set the stage for 2025, it's time to do it.

[Flashbacks]

Welcome to my very high production quality video setup and welcome back to Money with Katie. You're probably really tired of my voice, but hopefully we learn something today. Sam is my cat. Sam Cat, did you see this tail? Yes, a kitty.

But today I really want to talk about how you are taxed in retirement, what to do with your stimulus check, traditional versus Roth. Let's talk about my net worth. Glow up. What your dream life actually looks like. I'm still in my pajamas and have not yet brushed my teeth. Welcome back, Rich Girls, new and old to the Money with Katie podcast. Today we're talking about the most romantic thing that I can imagine, the prenup. This week we're going to explore something a little less intense common 401k mistakes. Today we'll be hearing from several current and former teachers and rich girl nation to humanize some of the dollars and cents. Today we are talking about life coaching. Welcome back to the Money with Katie Show, Rich Sugar Girls and Boys. Today we'll be talking about the resurgence of sugar dating culture. Today we're talking about the costs of infertility. Today we are talking about shelter.

Sam. He's whacking the table with his tail. So one second, Sam, stop. Okay, I'm going to wait because he's attacking me. Georgia's barking. Beans. Georgia. Beans. Georgia. Stop. That's enough.

Rich Girl Roudnup. Welcome back, rich girls and boys to the Rich Girl Roundup weekly discussion of the Money with Katie Show. Henah, how are we doing today?

Henah:

I'm good. This week's question is how do we navigate money conversations with boomers? What are our ideal company benefits? How will the US election, dun dun dun, impact the average person's finances, but the market seemingly always at all-time highs? Is now really a good time to start? Or should we wait to see if there's a bear market ahead? We're talking about kids, two childless people talking about kids. How does having two sources of income affect your tax burden? What is the socially acceptable approach for splitting costs with friends?

Katie:

I don't want to subsidize everyone's alcohol for four days in a row.

Henah:

A hundred percent, which I think is really fair.

Katie:

Except when you go out with parents.

Henah:

Your parents don't count.

Katie:

That I feel like is the exception where you're like, I'm getting the nicest drink I am getting and desserts…

Henah:

When I go with my parents, I'm getting an appetizer, two meals…

Katie:

And that's all for this week. We will see you on Wednesday. Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and me, Katie Gati Tassin with our audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is our chief content officer, and additional fact checking comes from Scott Wilson.