Ep 38 | Redefining Rich: What Wealth Actually Means in Your 30s (feat. Katie Gatti Tassin)

She’s one of the smartest (and sassiest) voices in personal finance and today she’s here to talk about money, mindset, and building a life with intention.

In this episode, Priya sits down with bestselling author and podcast host Katie Gatti Tassin, aka Money With Katie, to unpack what wealth really means, the mindset shifts that unlock financial clarity, and how we can balance ambition with self-compassion in a world that constantly tells us we’re behind.

They also get personal about what it's like to date, partner up, and build a life when you’re the one in the relationship who has your financial sht together. Whether you’re early in your wealth-building journey or already making six figures but still feeling unsure what “on track” really looks like—this conversation will leave you inspired and equipped.

Tune Into This Episode to Hear:

• Why having a plan is the turning point for most high achievers

• The emotional shift that happens when you finally start investing (spoiler: it’s not about being perfect)

• Why money and self-respect are more connected than we think

• What Katie wishes more couples understood about shared finances—and why “separate” accounts don’t always mean separate money

• The balance between acknowledging systemic barriers and reclaiming your financial agencyFollow Priya Malani:

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THE STUFF OUR LAWYERS WANT US TO SAY: Stash Wealth is a Registered Investment Advisor. Content presented is for informational and educational purposes only and is not intended to make an offer or solicitation for any specific securities product, service, or strategy. Consult with a qualified investment adviser (that's us) before implementing any strategy. Investing involves risk, including the loss of principal. Past performance does not guarantee future results. There…we said it.

Transcription

Hey guys, it's Priya. Welcome back to the F word, the show where ambitious 30 somethings, get their financial shit together so they can live well now and build wealth for later.

Today's guest needs absolutely no introduction, but I'm gonna give her one anyway. Katie Gatty Toan, better known as Money With Katie, is the bestselling author of Rich Girl Nation, taking Charge of Our Financial Futures. She's also the host of the Top Rated Business podcast, the Money With Katie Show with more than 11 million downloads.

She also co-hosts the Politics and Culture Podcast. Diabolical Lies Badass. Katie, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much. I loved the introduction. I feel like Taylor Swift going on new heights. Whoa.

That's a big ass compliment. I love it. You, you've earned it. And then some. So Katie, I obviously know that a lot of people listening definitely know who you are, but for those that don't, uh, I have a couple icebreakers that I was hoping you would play along with how you feeling?

Let's

do it. Let's do it.

Okay. Okay. This is gonna throw you a little bit, um, it's Stash wealth. We have a dinner party question that we like to ask people we're meeting for the first time. We actually even use it on interviews. You may have heard, heard of this one. It's the communion question. So in the Christian Church, the cracker represents the body of Jesus.

The red wine represents the blood. If there were a church of ka, what would the communion be? Remember, you're seeking converts.

My gosh. I think that the communion bread. Okay, listen, as a Catholic, I'm biting a sip. As as a Catholic school kid, this really, this question resonates. The bite would be an almond croissant and the sip would be a double espresso.

Oh my God. That is so good. I'm converted. I'm joining. That's awesome. Yes. Come join my cult.

My of financial responsibility. Have you been to apartment

F in Brooklyn yet? No. What is that? The parts in Mall four F It's the couple during the pandemic that, um, basically started making cross onset of their apartment, and now they're like all over the place.

They actually just opened up an outpost in the West Village. You have to go. Cool. Okay. I will have to do that next time I'm in New York. Yes. Yes, yes. Yeah. Where are you based? Denver. Yeah, that's right. Oh, okay. Denver. Very cool. Okay, next. Five to nine, what's your five to nine? After your nine to five? I know you're an entrepreneur, so you don't really have a nine to five.

Maybe something you don't talk about very much that's just for you, like something you do in your downtime.

Okay. So I actually listen to a lot of podcasts too. It's a, it's an art form that I love both producing and listening. So I actually spend a lot of time outside of work listening to podcasts. Some of my favorites are snarky leftist comedy podcasts.

So like if books could kill huge fan. I also watch a lot of television with my husband. That's like our favorite thing to do together. So like, oh, what are your hobbies? I'm like, I don't know, HBO. So we, we actually watch a lot of TV together and our, I'd say like my five to nine time is usually eating dinner phones away, unless we're like on a podcast, walk computers away and we are watching some show together.

I was gonna say, are you love island people? No, but Caroline made me watch an episode of Love Island for Diabolical Lies. 'cause we did an analysis of it and I could not believe what I was watching. I felt like I was watching something that was AI generated. It was absolutely bizarre. We live in a new world.

Okay, final icebreaker question. When you get sad, what do you buy?

I think food, actually, that's fine. Food is my go-to. If I'm down in the dumps, if I need a mood boost, if I'm trying to interrupt some negative pattern, it's usually, I will usually be like, okay, down the street there's this restaurant called Sino.

It's a chain in Denver. It might be elsewhere too, but they have like a grilled cheese and tomato soup meal, and I get that with olive oil cake and like a side Caesar salad. And that's my like go-to comfort meal if I'm needing a little bit of like warmth.

I love that. I love that. Mine is food too. Do you have good go to stiff martini.

Nice. Some steak fruit That seems to do the tricks. Yes. Seems to do the trick. When I was going through my divorce, I probably ate my body weight and tacos. And drank margaritas. It worked. Do you have a

go-to restaurant for your tacos? Are you like a, like a diehard evangelist for any particular place?

So when it's in New York City after going out late night, I love San Loco.

Okay. Have that. They this thing called, uh, taco Loco and it's sort of like a crispy taco and a soft shell taco. It's after drinking out all night is like the perfect taco. It's not fancy at all, but I absolutely love it. Ta Loco. Okay,

I will, I will hit that place up after apartment. Was it F four? Part four F.

Okay. Alright. Yeah, they, we were actually the whole

food tour planned the, I don't know if you watch CBS Sunday morning. I watched that some Sunday mornings sometimes. Um, but they were just featured and so now everyone's gonna know about them. It's the big thing. Okay. Thank you so much for playing along and, uh, let's get into it.

Yeah, Katie. You may or may not remember this, but you and I almost crossed paths about seven or eight years ago. Funny enough. You actually talk about it in the beginning of your book, rich Girl Nation. It turns out that we both have a bit of an emotional entanglement with money diaries.

We sure

do. Yes.

Can you tell me about that time?

Yeah, I was, let's see, this would've been fall 2018. I had been working full-time for about a year. I was interested in money in the same way that I think most young professionals are interested in money, which is kind of out of a sense of self-preservation and this vague, ambient insecurity of not doing enough.

And I had this friend at work named Kylie. Lives in New York now, but we were both in Dallas at the time and she had invited me to go to the Money Diaries book tour stop in Dallas. And I didn't typically do things on what I call school nights. I usually would just go home after work and decompress. This was a Tuesday night and I decided to go and I was really kind of blown away by this event.

'cause typically that sort of networking style, you know, you're surrounded. By people you don't know. I am extroverted, but I don't tend to actually enjoy things like that very much. And for whatever reason, that evening just felt very different. I felt very comfortable. I felt at ease. The programming is really cool.

I was kind of amazed actually by the types of questions that were being asked in the q and a particularly, because if you've ever gone to something like that before, you. Tend to expect that the q and a portions can be kind of reserved and shortened, maybe awkward even. And people were just asking really, really intimate questions or questions that revealed intimate details about their financial lives.

And I could not deny that. I was just very. Interested and enthused. I didn't want the night to end Really. Wow. And that was a sign for me that this was actually a topic that I was more interested in than I had realized and that I wanted to keep talking about it. So it was a really pivotal part of the beginning of my financial journey and those early years of reading personal finance books, or maybe listening to a Rogue podcast or reading the odd blog post, but not really identifying with it as something that.

I could actually. Take part in producing. And so Lindsay Stanbury, the founding editor of Money Diaries at Refinery 29, and who was the author of the book, she was on stage that evening. And I just, you know, always kind of kept tabs on what she was doing after that because she was one of the first women who was talking about money professionally that I, you know, professionally started to follow and enjoy her work.

And so when my book came out this past summer, she was the panel co-host with me at my. Book launch event at 92nd Street Y, which was a very special full

circle moment, kind of surreal. Amazing, amazing. Yeah. Lindsay and I go way back to her refinery 29 days and Shameless plug, uh, stash, Welch's advice was actually featured in Money Diaries and I actually even joined Lindsay on the, uh, Chicago leg of her book tour.

So cool. Yeah. Such a moment in time, um, I feel like that book really changed the game for so many people and, uh, and now you're doing the same.

No, I agree. I think that was the first, it was just such an interesting and fresh take on how we talk about money and this very kind of dishy behind the scenes intimate view of how people are spending in their real lives and what they're earning.

It was, there was nothing else like it that I had ever been exposed to before, and I just remember being like, whoa, I, I feel this visceral attraction to this subject that I hadn't realized was there.

She made it so much more, uh, accessible and relatable. Truly brilliant. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Well, you've been, uh, producing a shit ton of digital content in the personal finance space since 2018.

I mean, and really impressive.

Why did you feel like Rich Curl Nation needed to exist as a book now offline? That's a great question.

I have always thought of myself, first and foremost as a writer. And so writing a book was always on my list of things that I would want to do. Mm-hmm. So when the opportunity presented itself to me and I was approached by the editor who ended up buying the book from me, it was automatic.

Yes. And one of those things where I am going to emotionally, I've already decided I'm going to do this. So now I need to invent the reasons and the logic and the rationale on the back end to make this make sense. But.

I think that was one of those things where the instinct at the time was like, obviously I'm going to do this.

And as the project progressed, 'cause it takes a very long time to write a book into the traditional publishing schedule. We started working on the proposal in fall 2022. We didn't sell that proposal and have a final concept until June, July, 2023. Spent the next 18 months writing and editing it and then.

It didn't come out until June, 2025. So it's a really long process and in that time as I was evolving and changing and my perspectives were shifting and my interests were shifting, it kind of transitioned into I feel like I have made my perspective on personal finance known. And as you know, the best practices kind of are what they are.

There aren't many ways to reinvent the wheel after you've got.

The basics and then the intermediate and then the advanced stuff down. It is what it is, and I felt like I had really said my piece over the years through hundreds of blog posts and hundreds of podcast episodes, and so I started to think about the book as the.

This is my manifesto on money. If you wanna know everything that I would tell you, if we were close friends, trapped in a room together for a week, and we were going to teach you everything that you needed to know about personal finance, this is what I would give you. This is what we would cover. And I wanted that to exist out in the world as something that will.

Kind of live on, even as I transitioned away from just producing personal finance related, tactical, practical advice, and that felt like a very fitting, I don't wanna say bookend, because money with Katie isn't ending. But it did feel like it gave me a little bit more permission to expand the type of work I'm doing on a weekly basis beyond the realm of, and here's how we strategize your taxes in retirement.

Here's how we optimize your capital gains tax bracket, whether you're single or married, right? I wanted that to be accessible to people. Whether at their local library or if they wanna buy a copy and own it forever. I wanted that to be there, but I also wanted the freedom to be able to move on. So I think that it has served a little bit of a dual purpose for me in that way.

That's amazing. Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, personal finance is not that hard. And once you figure out what you need to be doing, you wanna put it on autopilot and then go live your life. Like if you're, we always say smart money management does not require micromanagement. It's just like, figure it out, get it automated, and then move on with your life.

Oh, I love that. And so do you think you're kind of a one and done, or are you kind of hooked on the authoring?

Well, I would definitely love to write another book, but I don't think it will be another how to slash self-help book. That was the genre that I fell into was business self-help, how to, and like I said, it was a book that I think I really needed to write to kind of put the, the final bow on the chapter of my tactical personal finance advice, life on the internet.

But I would really love to write a book of essays or something that, the way that I kind of conceptualize it and have been describing it is I feel like Rich Girl Nation was trying to give a lot of answers, and I am now more personally interested as a creator in work that asks more interesting questions and gets people thinking differently about things.

And so that I think is what's going to come next, but.

We'll see. I'm gonna spend the next 18 to 24 months really figuring that out. I think

that's awesome. One of the things that I really appreciate about your content and now your book is that it doesn't just explain what to do with money, but it really gets into how we think about it, and it sounds like that's a continued area of interest.

Okay. This one's a bit of a spicier question, um, but I'm hoping you'll take it in the right spirit because I am very, very curious and I'm definitely not as well researched on this as you are.

Okay. So I'm looking to learn, okay. Okay. But I was having a conversation earlier this week about how sometimes we hold ourselves. In the roles that society assigns us, even when we know better. And I'm specifically talking about, I guess, the tension between being a victim of systemic inequality, which is very real and unintentionally keeping ourselves stuck inside that system.

So like, where's the line? At what point does awareness turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Hmm. Yeah. This is something that.

I have grappled with a lot over the years. I was talking to Paco De Leon about this because their work is so amazing too, and she was basically expressing this feeling of, sometimes I feel as though I have called attention to these systemic issues, and then I almost will see downstream of that conversations in my comment section.

Or emails that I will receive, or just the general zeitgeist of people maintaining this attitude of hopelessness. Like, well, it's not worth even trying because everything sucks and everything is hopeless. And she was just expressing that she felt some responsibility for that outcome. And the fact that she started to wonder, did I do somebody a disservice?

Ha have I done a disservice to this community by calling their attention to these systemic problems and making them aware of them. I certainly agree that it is a balance from the standpoint of remembering your autonomy and remembering your maneuverability within a system. I guess the way that I think about it is that American culture writ large is exceedingly bootstrappy.

Exceedingly individualist. I think it is baked into the fabric of this country, this idea of the American dream that anybody can succeed with.

Enough hard work and enough ingenuity, and I think that the data around social mobility pretty much dispels that and like more or less puts that myth to bed that this is actually not a very.

Hospitable country for social mobility and that the class that you are born into actually does have quite a big impact on where you will end up in life. And that's not to say that you cannot break out of a bad situation, but that it is very hard and there are a lot of systemic factors that are going to influence that.

Mm.

I think all of that being said, I tend to think about and conceive of the economy and our role in it in the sort of two class dimension. This is something that I wrote about. A couple weeks ago how there are definitely, there is a portion of the population for whom no amount of personal finance advice is really going to be useful to them.

I would say that this is probably between 25% and 50% of the country. The bottom half, we'll say their net worth is effectively zero. The average American, not the average American, 'cause that gets skewed up, but like the median American. Owns nothing. So most Americans are trapped trading their time for money.

And in the absence of additional education, upskilling, et cetera, they're probably gonna stay in that position. And cutting back on, you know, the type of food they're buying at the grocery store is not going to change that. And I think that it is important that we look at that realistically and honestly, because the solution for that portion of the population is policy.

There's just no way around it. But.

There's also a portion of the population, which is the one that I was in as like an educated, upwardly mobile person who at the time was, you know, young and earning below median wages, had potential, was able bodied, didn't have kids, you know, lived with a roommate who with hard work, with cutting back on spending with knowledge, with information, was able to really change her situation.

So.

That to me is the, the portion of the population that actually can, through their labor and through their surplus value at the individual level, they have enough margin if they care to create it. If they can detach themselves from the consumerist hamster wheel, they can buy their freedom by buying cash flowing assets, whether that's real estate, whether that's stocks, what have you.

And that is the part where your individual autonomy and.

Your personal responsibility has to play a role. And if you're not willing to do that, that is kind of on you. And so I do think about it in that way that I, there's always kind of that binary that I'm thinking about when I'm making content, when I'm talking about systemic issues.

It's not that the systemic issues don't affect the people in the latter group, but they're not insurmountable for that group. And it's something that I, I don't feel I have a hundred percent landed the plane on personally. Mm. I don't know a hundred percent where I come down on it because I think that life in America is much harder than it would need to be, and I desperately want to see that improve.

I don't feel like the culture needs more bootstrap, individualist, rah rah advice. I think we've had a lot of that. I think what we need is more people to recognize the collective power that we hold and actually that together we are not helpless. That these things that we think of as unsolvable or intractable, there are countries all over the world that have already solved these problems and that it is actually the insistence that we keep approaching them at the individual level that is keeping us stuck, and we have to start thinking differently about collective power and how we wield it.

And so I think that awareness is the first step in getting people to become more politically active and not politically active in the electoral sense. I'm not saying remember to vote every four years. That's not what I mean. I mean, at the local level, getting involved in your community, I mean organizing your workplace, I mean actually recognizing that together we do wield a lot of power and that by withholding labor, by withholding spending, by withholding purchases, it's we the people that control this economy and.

I think that it only serves those who already hold all of the wealth and power in society if we remain atomized and fragmented. And so I try to deliver personal and individual advice through a lens that acknowledges that gap and says, Hey, this is the beginning of your work. This is not the end of your work.

You do need to get yourself afloat. But that's not the end. Like we actually do have a lot of work to do and we can only do it together.

Can push for further change. Wow. So powerful. Thank you so beautifully said. Thank you. And so empathetically handled because so many of us feel stuck and it's up to the people that we're speaking to.

It's up to us to, to get unstuck and control what we can control. I know that's a cliche. Yeah. But you talk about it, that you don't need to make six figures to even build real wealth. Mm-hmm. Not saying we shouldn't keep pushing for change, but you don't wanna lose sight of doing what we can do within the system.

Yeah, yeah. And I think helplessness and apathy and nihilism, these are all, these are all very tempting emotions. 'cause there is a sort of complacency that they permit of. Well if it's hopeless, I don't have to do anything. And that doesn't serve anybody, least of all, not you. I think that when I think about it in the international sense, which is something that I feel very fortunate that my job permits me to learn enough and spend my time, you know, reading the books that have given me more of an international or global perspective Now.

After having just, you know, grown up in America, not known any different, you know, didn't even leave this country and stepped foot on another continent until my mid twenties. But I think those of us in what is sometimes referred to as like the imperial core, like you are a, a live in the west, you live in the United States.

We of all people do not really have a leg to stand on of claiming helplessness and hopelessness. We really have benefited tremendously from the global order over the last a hundred years, so we kind of have to be at the forefront of improving things. And I think about that a lot too, that in the context of the United States, yes there's a lot of wealth in equality, but when you look globally, we still retain so much wealth in this country.

I think about that a lot and I think that has, that has started to inform my work even more. That like, no, no, no, we actually have no time and like we can't afford to be hopeless and helpless. We actually have to be at the forefront of this change.

That is such a great reminder. Thank you. Just that historical context.

Okay. I could keep going down this rabbit hole with you forever.

So I wanna dig into some of the themes that come up again and again, not just in your work, but in the conversations I think we're both having with our respective communities. So just to dive into a couple questions. First up. A lot of people in their twenties, and I guess still think financial planning is something you figure out later, but for those of us who've experienced it and know just what a game changer it is, um, how do you, from that perspective, can you speak to a, a little bit to what role the, the role that having a plan has played in your life and maybe how it's shifted your approach to your money?

For sure, for sure. I think the best example of this comes from when I finally sat down. To make a plan for the first time because at that point, this was, again, 2018 ish timeframe. To give you a sense for, we weren't in the inflationary spike yet. The cost of living hadn't really exploded in the way that it had now, but I was a below median earner at the time.

I think I earned probably $53,000 a year when I was sitting down to do this. And I lived in Dallas, Texas, which is a medium cost of living city. It's not cheap, but it's also not New York or San Francisco. And I didn't have any sort of semblance of a plan. I had concepts of a plan from the standpoint of money was coming in and money was going out.

And I generally knew, you know, the, the high level numbers. But the discover statement at the end of the month always surprised me. I was always like.

Something has gone awry. I have been defrauded. Let me go through and check every single purchase. Oh no wait. That was all me. So that was like a common fixture in my financial life at the time.

I didn't think I earned enough to savor invest with any regularity or consistency. And so when I sat down to make a plan, I figured what I was gonna find was a confirmation of that assumption. But what actually happened was I listed out all my fixed expenses that I knew about, particularly the big things that we know we have to plan for, the rent, the car insurance, those recurring expenses that come to mind pretty easily.

And what I found was that even after adding things like, oh, my typical grocery budget based on how much I know I spend on groceries, and oh, I know I go out twice a week and this is typically what it costs. Even after adding that stuff in, I still had something like a thousand dollars on accounted for, and I was so surprised by that that I actually.

Redid the math. I was like, certainly I have missed something. But no, there was an extra thousand dollars that was just not accounted for, and that really made me look twice at things and go, okay, I actually maybe can afford to be investing. Let me give this a shot. So I started with the automatic transfers into the Roth IRA, into the high yield savings account at the time, 'cause I was still really building up an emergency fund.

And then later with a small transfer every month after each payday to a taxable brokerage account and.

Putting that one change in place, my net worth grew rapidly, and that was really surprising to me. So it wasn't that I started earning more money, or even really consciously was spending differently, but because the money was just leaving my account before I had the chance to notice it sitting and checking and to spend it on something, I was making really quick progress.

And honestly, that experience was a big part of the reason. Why I wanted to start blogging about money, because I saw how, like you said, some of this stuff is easy and I know that that sounds really, again, in the world that we live in, especially in 2025, it sounds a little out of touch to be like, oh, this is easy.

But I was at the time surprised by the ease with which.

Just making a couple what felt like small tweaks in about an hour of setting up automatic transfers just radically changed my financial position and I wanted to share that information with other people because it just felt like a knowledge gap.

Yeah, I appreciate that. And when we talk about it being easy, I think one of the things I'm always thinking about is going up against Wall Street, um, and traditional advisors who like to make it feel so hard and so complicated and we almost just buy into that and then.

Think we can't do it, so we don't.

But I love the story that you shared because it is inevitably the experience that we have with everyone, right? We're dealing with a high earning population that's essentially making six figures, but living paycheck to paycheck. Mm-hmm. And every single time, the same thing happens. I'll never have any money left over.

There's nothing extra. And you sit down and you go through the numbers the first time and it's like, whoa. I actually have this much extra and it's so empowering to be like, yeah, what do you wanna do with that?

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So it's, that is so true and I figured after, so I started tracking back then I have my, my Excel spreadsheets from 2018 still that I can go back and see what did I spend on groceries in July, 2018?

What was my net worth? What was the balance in the Roth IRA, and I love having that data look back and I figured.

After a certain point that tracking it would stop being beneficial. But what I have found consistently and what has been very surprising to me as somebody that thinks about this stuff all day long and has what I would classify as a, a very advanced grasp on these topics.

Is that even now when I sit down at the end of the year and I annualize everything and I look at how did we spend in all these categories, what were our contributions? What was our total income? What did we pay in taxes? Every single time I am surprised by something to the extent that we end up.

Taking an insight from it and making a, making a tweak, making a change.

And I think it's just so difficult. At least my brain doesn't work this way. It's very hard to intuit numbers from those day-to-day interactions. Mm-hmm. Those day-to-day transactions. And so I still am a big believer in the power of tracking. I don't think that it has to be micro managey to your point, but I still get so much insight.

And derive a lot of value from doing that. So it's still something that I, I like to do. And so Big believer in that.

Yeah, and I mean, I think you're speaking to the awareness piece, which is what originally Money Diaries was all about is like, take a look at what you're spending. Mm-hmm. That's amazing. So when you do that, when you become aware of where your money's going, and you do inevitably find out that you're gonna have money left over investing, sort of as you get into your, I guess maybe late twenties, early thirties, you kind of feel like you should be doing this.

Mm-hmm. Yet it still scares a lot of people our age. They see it as risky or confusing or something like finance bros do. Mm-hmm. So how do you talk to people? Like how do you talk people through that fear and help them reframe what investing is actually for?

It's a really good question, and it's something that I coincidentally was just reviewing and editing a blog post about this yesterday because we're in the process of revamping our website and in doing so, we're migrating hundreds of old posts over, and something that I had written years ago that I'd completely forgotten about was essentially talking about how saving and investing feel different emotionally.

The experience is very different. When I first made that switch from, okay, I'm not just hoarding, I'm not just stockpiling in a metaphoric pile of cash in my Chase savings account. Now I'm actually buying assets with this money and the hopes that those assets will go make more money for me. I remember being really nervous and feeling quite exposed and quite vulnerable, and the first thing I ever did was I essentially.

Mentally had to get myself to the point of I had a Robinhood account at the time, not what I would recommend using now, but I didn't know any better, so I, I thought, okay, I have this emergency fund saved. I think at the time it was like 20 or dollars, maybe that was the extent of my assets. My net worth was in that savings account, and I knew it was time to start investing.

I learned enough to know that it was time. And so I thought, all right, if I were going to Vegas, like what amount of money would I feel comfortable losing? This goes to zero, right? And I somehow talked myself into $1,500. I don't really even remember why that was the amount, but it was like that was the, the upper limit for what I was comfortable risking.

So I transferred it over to Robin Hood. I bought a couple ETFs, just standard Vanguard, SP 500. I think there was like maybe a tech ETF in there. And then I just would stare at the screen. I would watch it, Bob up and down, red and green, like minute to minute. And it was kind of this little, I'm gonna dip my toe in and just like see how this feels.

And once I noticed that like, oh, it's not going away, it's still there. Maybe it's down $10. But over time, as I saw that money actually gaining value or more or less staying the same, it made me feel a little bit more comfortable with, okay, this, this actually doesn't seem as risky as I thought it was at first.

Sometimes what I'll tell people is, Hey, if you just have like an emotional hangup, like you've already done the research, you understand that you are buying a little piece of companies that are producing real value, that are making real profits, that are being returned to you. If you've already seen all the data about how you have a 98% chance of making money in the s and p 500 over a decade, and you know you don't need this money for decades, but for whatever reason, there's still that hangup.

You just need to put a little bit of money on the line that you would be comfortable going to zero and just get a little bit of skin in the game so you can get comfortable. It's like exposure therapy, and that's what I needed to get started. And then over the years, as I watched my net worth grow in some of these investment accounts, fortunately, right, like I'm investing, I was investing during a bull market until March, 2020, and then that quickly rebounded as well.

But once I got some skin in the game and saw my net worth growing, then the, the fear actually flipped where if I had too much money in savings or too much money in cash, I would start to be like, oh gosh, I need to get that money to work. I need to put that money in the market. 'cause I want it to start growing.

I don't want it to just be languishing in my savings account. So I do think that 90% of it is a mental flip that has to be turned on.

It's tough because again, to the detriment of the typical investor, the messages we've been receiving and absorbing have been that gambling and investing are the same thing and they're not.

And with investing, right, like often we'll tell people you can't learn to swim by dipping your toe in the water. You actually have to get in. But interesting. I hear you. You wanna move away from that idea that it's money you can lose. That's when you go to Vegas. Yes. That's money you can lose. Yeah. And you don't wanna do that with your hard-earned money.

But I hear you on the exposure therapy, like just like getting in there and realizing, oh, this isn't gambling, this is diversified. Exactly. Long term. Right. It's not going, that's what.

I was worried that it felt like gambling. There was something about it that felt like gambling. I think because particularly in this instance, the Robinhood interface definitely engenders that feeling in you that you're gambling and built for engagement could go for you to log in, right?

It was only through being like, well, what's the worst case scenario? Well, the worst case scenario is it goes to zero. Okay, well, what amount would I be fine? Totally losing, sure. Just to get myself over this hump. And then once I saw that, not only am I not losing it, but it's growing, then it was like, okay, now I have physically internalized the idea that this is not gambling.

Now this viscerally feels safer to me. And like I said, I had done the research to know that it was quote unquote safe. I mean, obviously.

Future returns are not, not guaranteed. Historical returns are not indicative of future returns, et cetera. But I still had that emotional difficulty hurdle with the money that I was gonna start investing.

And I think what's been fascinating over the years is I talk to a lot of people. And have gotten to meet a lot of people who are accountants or went to business school or studied finance like that was their major. They have a degree in finance who don't know anything about personal finance. And that was kind of eyeopening to me because as a communications major, I had this story in my head.

That had I just gone to school for this, I would be further ahead. I would know more. And that all these people who went through the business school or who became accountants or who studied, you know, high finance, that like all of them knew how to manage their personal finances. And I just made the wrong choice.

And that's why I was behind. And I talked to those people all the, I'm like, no, they don't teach you any of this.

Stuff in school. We didn't get this either. Like everyone has to learn this on their own. Unless you are literally studying to become a financial planner and you are studying the CFP course material, which again you're not getting in college, that's a completely separate professional endeavor.

You also are not learning these things. So that also gave me a little bit more confidence that like, wait, I'm not actually like out in the cold on this. Nobody knows you're not behind. Everybody has to learn.

Totally. Totally. I appreciate that. It makes it so much less daunting to know that you're not alone, you're not behind.

Mm-hmm. And everyone, yeah. And I'm a dumb ass

with a PR degree, so like if I can do it, so can you, frankly.

Totally. Um, okay, let's switch gears a little bit. Uh, one of my favorite topics, relationships, and money. Since this is something that you're so interested in, was it important to you to find a partner who was good with money or willing to learn with you?

And do you think that both people in a relationship need to be equally? Involved with the finance stuff.

So I met and started dating my husband around the same time that I became interested in money. So.

By default. We ended up talking about it sometimes almost from the perspective of, here's this hobby I am interested in, as opposed to we are talking about our own relationship to finance.

So that was kind of an interesting dynamic that I think has ended up serving us well because he was similarly interested in the financial independence, retire early movement, which is how I got my start. But I think if I were starting over now and my husband did not exist and I was looking for a partner, I don't think that I would necessarily need somebody who was equally proficient or was as interested.

I think that I'm probably in the high nineties scale wise of like interest in personal finance as a topic. I don't think I, I would, it would be reasonable for me to expect to, you know, partner up with somebody who was at the same level interest wise. But I do think that as I reflected on that question and on the importance of, you know, a partner, why does it matter to me beyond the practical.

I think that there's an element of self-respect that comes in to at least knowing the basics, where if somebody respects themselves and respects their time and respects their own energy, you have to work for every dollar that you get in most cases. And so if you are spending 40 hours, 50 hours, 60 hours a week to earn this money, and you have no interest in what happens to it, you have no interest in managing it, and you're just kind of floating through life.

To me, me as a person looking for a romantic partner, that might signal to me that like you are not really taking your own time and energy that seriously, seriously like you're not respecting yourself to the level that you should be. Like you deserve better than that. And so I think that is probably.

That is the sort of baseline that I think I would be looking for.

Has an attempt been made? Is there an interest in managing this money as what it represents, which is your time, energy, your future freedom? Do you take those things seriously? And so I think that's the sort of attitude. Shift or that is the wavelength that I would be looking for someone to meet me on.

Not like, oh, do you know the PE ratio of like the s and p 500 index this week? So I think that's, that's kind of philosophically what I would be most attracted to.

Yeah, you have your financial shit together and he was able to get his financial shit together, like the learning curve. You were on the same learning curve at the same time.

But if you start dating someone and.

You know, you have your shit together and they don't. Mm. There might be a mismatch in, like you said, how they value, how they respect themselves, their time, their energy.

Mm-hmm. And I think that there's also the practical side of it too. I mean, to me that's kind of the romantic chemistry side and what I look for in other people that I spend time with.

But I think that there's, there is just the practical piece of this, which is that.

Money, unfortunately, is a really big determinant of the type of life that you will lead and the quality of life that you will get to have, and it will be very difficult, practically speaking, to build a life with somebody who views this topic completely differently than you do.

And it's not that it will be impossible. I mean, I've interviewed certified financial therapists on my show before who work with couples all the time. It's not that it's an insurmountable problem, but both people.

Have to want to get on the same page. And sometimes there are situations wherein one partner is not interested in changing.

And much like with every other realm of relationship that's gonna present problems. And in a capitalist economy where we trade our time and energy and labor for money, those problems are gonna have really direct impacts on you and on your quality of life. And so I think it's just, that's why the fourth chapter of the book is all about.

Marriage and partnering up with somebody. And how do you combine finances strategically, and what are the conversations that you need to be having with this person? And what sort of legal protections do you need to be putting in place for both of your benefit and what are the long-term ramifications and risks that it just makes sense to be aware of before you sign your name on the dotted line with like a, a.

Lifelong binding contract between you and this person and the government. It just, it's just like the practical considerations that I would tell anybody signing a contract of that nature to take into consideration.

Well said, that was an amazing chapter and.

Thank you. We are also big proponents of the hybrid approach.

Mm-hmm. To keep some autonomy, but at the end of the day, you don't wanna be nicking and dimming each other and vening each other for, I think you used half the toilet paper that you, you know, you, it, it's just like you said it as a team, right. You wanna be on the same page, you're a team and at the end of the day, what you spend your money on or how you spend your money tracks back to your values and values aligning are a good indication of success in a relationship.

Right.

And I mean, I think the biggest takeaway for me that.

Feedback wise, what I have heard that surprises people most about that chapter is that the separation of accounts in a marriage is mostly an illusion, and that even if you are keeping everything in different accounts that are titled separately and your name is on your stuff, and their name is on their stuff, and the eyes of the law, all of that belongs to both of you.

So I always try to just remind people that there is certainly a strategic.

Role for separate accounts to play, but sometimes they can serve as a little bit of a, like an a scapegoat or an exit ramp from even having the conversation. And then that is often when you find yourself unpleasantly surprised down the road when it's like, I've been saving and investing so diligently they haven't, and now we're splitting up and they are technically entitled to half of my retirement savings.

That is worst case scenario and I never want somebody to find themselves in that position.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Uh, I wanna be respectful of your time to, on a note of imperialism. I guess we'll wrap up there. Let's wrap with something a little bit lighter, a little light. Yeah, sure, sure. Of course. So money can be heavy, right? So we're gonna, we'll close out with something.

We'll call a palate cleanser. We have a segment I always close the show with called Best Bite. I'm a foodie if you can't tell the number of food questions. So, Katie, tell us what's the best thing you've eaten recently? It doesn't have to be in Denver. Just something unforgettable. Where do we need to go?

What do we need to order? Food or drink?

Okay. There is a restaurant in Denver in the Highlands called Mead Street Provisions, and I think it was actually opened by someone from New York. I think they might be from Brooklyn. I dunno for sure. But best sandwiches.

In Denver, every single thing I've eaten there has been incredible.

The wings are incredible. The sweet potato fries are incredible. Like you will not be disappointed. So if you come to Denver and you're looking for just like a solid like casual dining option. Go to Mead Street. Provisions in the Highlands

coming. Mead Street Provisions. Great rack. Love it. Putting it on the list.

I'm gonna go there now. Actually, I'm probably gonna go get a sandwich after we hang up. Hungry before I let you go. Where can people find you, Katie? Follow you. Get your book.

Yeah. Okay. So Rich Girl Nation, wherever books are sold, go support your local library money with katie.com. That's where I post my essays every week. The Money with Katie newsletter, you can sign up for, again, every Wednesday I am sending out. Economic analysis, essays, things of that nature, personal finance tools and the Money With Katie Show, if you like podcasts, we have an interview usually every week and we try to talk to really interesting people who are taking a unique approach in their work to money, culture, class, politics, the economy, et cetera.

Beautiful. Go. Your podcast is incredible. Thank you goes without saying, but if you haven't already grabbed a copy of Rich Girl Nation, get on it. Um, Katie, thank you so much for joining us. You're an absolute powerhouse. Your work is the reason that so many more people are talking about money. Thank you.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. And to everyone listening, if you love this episode, please send it to a friend who needs to hear it. That's how we grow the show and keep bringing on awesome guests like Katie. Alright, see you next time.