Ep 49 | She Built a Portfolio Career While Raising Two Kids
In this episode, Priya sits down with writer, money expert, and off-Broadway creator Catie Hogan, whose “portfolio career” proves you can build a life on your own terms, even while raising two kids. From stitching together multiple income streams to surviving a surprise layoff at six months pregnant, Catie breaks down the real tradeoffs behind flexibility, the financial shock of parenthood, the myth of “having it all,” and why your career might actually get better when you stop chasing perfection. They also dive into affordability, home-buying stress, humor as a financial education tool, and how Catie turned a Grease parody into an off-Broadway hit. This one is part money talk, part motherhood reality check, and part masterclass in designing work around your life (not the other way around).
Takeaways:
The flexibility everyone wants comes with a price.
If you want kids someday, “we’ll figure how to afford it later” is not a good plan
You don’t need the perfect house. You need the house that lets you keep your life, budget, and sanity intact.
The biggest financial shock of parenthood isn’t diapers, it’s the unpredictability you cannot budget your way out of.
Guest Bio:
Catie Hogan is a personal finance expert and educator. She's the author of the family finances newsletter, Cents of Humor, and an equity analyst for The Motley Fool. She previously ran a financial planning firm for Millennials and spent a decade in financial services. Catie most recently served as the Head of Advice for a New York City-based fintech. When she's not helping people with their money, Catie is an award-winning comedy writer and the creator of Vape! The Grease Parody, which is playing off-Broadway at Theater 555 through January 4th.
Guest Links:
Newsletter - Cents Of Humor
Off-Broadway - Vape The Musical
Follow Priya Malani:
LinkedIn | Instagram | Youtube | Stash Wealth
Transcription
Layoff Sparks a Flexible Portfolio Career Path
Yeah, the affordability crisis in this country, obviously, you know, we're not going to solve it in a day. Don't let it completely deter you if you want to have a family. But maybe think about what do I need to do today? What do I need to do over the next year? What do I need to do over the next five years to put myself in a better position to not have to panic every day when my kid ultimately costs more than I anticipated?
Who the fuck am I to tell you what to do with your money? My name is Priya Malani, currently managing millions of hard working dollars. Enough for play, let's talk. Welcome to the F word smart money.
All right, hey guys, welcome back to the show. I've got an incredible and I feel like I always say that, but she is seriously the coolest guest. Her resume kind of reads like 3 people stitched together. Katie Hogan is a writer, a money expert, a mom, a creative, and now the mind of an Off Broadway show that I was lucky enough to see last night. We'll talk more about that in a SEC. Oh my God, Katie Hogan, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me. That was a very generous and very kind introduction. Wow.
It's all you, girl. Every time I get in touch with you, you're always doing something different and fascinating and you have two babies now and I just just all the things, I'm so excited to chat. So I want to start with the obvious question, which I feel it's obvious when people ask you, what do you do? How the hell do you answer that?
First and foremost, I'm a writer. I always have been. That's like what I went to college for. So, you know, my parents are thrilled that I'm like actually using my college degree. So I, I've always been a writer. So I go, I lead with that. But yeah, I, I kind of have stitched together this portfolio career mostly because now I have two kids and life demands it. And with having a family now I need to kind of stitch together a lot of things to to make it all work and pay the bills and make sure that there's food on the table and all of that. So I I consider myself a Cade of all trades, which I used to think was a weakness and now I really think is is ultimately my strength but.
You call yourself a writer first and foremost. So you touched on this term portfolio career, which you've leaned fully into concept. You're living it where people like, I think, idealize it maybe. But can you talk about what it actually is? What is a portfolio career?
I guess the easiest way to to explain it is it's kind of an aggregation of all of my side hustles. And it really happened because I was about 6 months pregnant and I got laid off from my steady nine to five tech job and I was six months pregnant and I was like, Oh no, what am I going to do now? I reached out to a lot of people on my network and I started freelancing and I started doing some consulting work. I've also been doing speaking gigs for a company called Electives for like 4 or five years now. And so between the speaking gigs, the writing gigs, and then trying to get my show off Broadway, it's sort of we all came together.
I think if I had tried to do this ten years ago, I wouldn't have had the experience or know how. But you know, being in my later 30s now with a lot more experience, a lot more to offer it it it was like the perfect time to really say, OK, I want to I want to have this portfolio career. I want to bring all these side hustles together in just a 11 path of here's what I offer, here's what I can do for you. Here's what I charge. I'm not going to undersell myself or or really charge less than I'm worth anymore and it's it's working out. I hope. I hope I can continue this for the rest of my.
It certainly is.
Navigating the Trade-offs of a Flexible Portfolio Career
So a collective of your side hustles and outside of like the financial aspect of a portfolio career, which I do want to get into in a SEC, what would you say are the pros and maybe some of the the benefits and the drawbacks of that choice?
Yeah, I think the benefits for me first and foremost is the flexibility in my ability to say yes or no to certain things. And I can kind of lean into, do I want to do more writing? Do I want to do more speaking? Do I want to do more consulting? I can, I have flexibility there, which is great. I can take my kids to a doctor's appointment. I don't have to ask for permission to to do anything. I'm my own boss, which I really love. The downside though, is it's all on me. You know, if, whether the business succeeds or drives and the business being me and what I can offer people, it's, it's, you know, it's do or die and it's, it's all on me.
There's no, there's no fall back. You know, I've been married for a long time and he has a stable normal job. So that gives us a, a level of, of privilege and, and a little bit of a security and safety net. But ultimately whether this works or not is, you know, it's, it's all up to me and there's, there's no benefits. I can set up a four O 1K myself and all that but like it doesn't come inherently.
So you describe it as like designing your work around your life can take kid to doctor's appointment. That's an interesting way to put it. But you also speak to the privilege that allows for that flexibility because if you do you think if you didn't have a partner with a stable job that you would have been able to do a portfolio career and have you seen people out there doing it even if they don't have that stability?
Yeah, I've seen it happen. I think for me, it gives me a little bit of sense of comfort that I can take more risks. But yeah, I think it's definitely possible. It just makes it a little bit harder. You know, it's already hard, but if you don't have any sort of safety net, like at a big emergency fund or a partner you can lean on, it does make it more difficult. I can put the pedal to the metal or I can kind of take my foot off the gas as needed, which is really, really nice. If I didn't have a partner with a stable job, I'd be peddled to the pedal the whole time, which, you know, again, has its pros and cons, but, you know, you might be a little more burned out.
And I couldn't have done this 10 years ago. I think it was the right time, right place. You have to really, you know, I have almost 20 years of work experience. So it's something that I've had to build up over a long, long period of time.
Yeah, you keep using this word of flexibility and a lot of our listeners are in their 30s. They're starting families, definitely craving flexibility. But it also seems, and it sounds like you're speaking to this as well, that ambitious people like us can. It can get out of hand because you don't know when to stop, when to say no. And so you take on so much that you actually lose flexibility.
This is a constant struggle for me. I have a tendency to overbook myself and double and triple book myself, which is definitely something I'm always working on. Ultimately, I think, you know, you have to really be mindful of your calendar. If it's not on my calendar, it's not getting done. So I need, I put everything on my calendar. Like I schedule all of you know, my lunch time. I schedule everything for my kids, everything for myself professionally, personally, everything has to go on my calendar. Otherwise I will say yes to everything and I will suddenly be double and triple booked and people will be very upset with me and I'll be upset with myself.
So I rely so heavily on my calendar calendar to make sure that I'm saying, OK, right at 5:30 or 6:00 PM I'm stopping making dinner, doing bath, then bedtime. And then I can go back to working at 7:30 and work for a couple hours then. And and I am religious about time blocking absolutely religious about it.
Yeah, we're big time blockers over here as well. I live and die by my calendar. Do you find yourself working more or less? Well, working is a hard term, right? Because you've got 16 jobs, most important one being a mother, which just has you working 24/7 on your laptop time. Do you find yourself working more or less than when you were in a corporate or more traditional job?
Yeah, honestly, between me being my own boss and then having two kids who demand so much of my time, which I I love, but it has focused me in a way I didn't know I could focus. And I know that, you know, when 5:00 PM rolls around, like I want to be able to put my phone down, close my laptop and just be present with them, give them the the time, love and energy that they deserve. So it has really truly focused me in every single morning that I wake up that I open my laptop like I have a purpose. I have a mission, I guess one of the, the great things about no longer being like a corporate atmosphere or like a traditional company atmosphere is I, I don't really have to do the, the water cooler talk.
I don't really have to do, you know, the, the chit chatting, the meetings, you know, sometimes it can get quite lonely just sitting here in my den. But at the same time it, it gives me, you know, a real sense of purpose and mission where I, if I complete something in 45 minutes, I'm done with it. I move on and, and that's been really, really good for the kind of life that I I'm trying to build.
That's well said.
The Unexpected Financial Realities of Raising a Family
And now if you are doing FaceTime, it's with your two cute little ones. How old are your kids?
They are almost 3. So I have a a 2 1/2 year old. She'll be 3 in at the end of January and then I have a 7 month old. Oh.
My God, that's insane. OK, so let's switch gears and talk a little bit about motherhood because there's a lot of lessons that I'm sure you've learned as you've stepped into that role. Love to talk about the biggest financial adjustment or surprise that you and your partner have faced since becoming parents?
This is well known, but like childcare costs a fortune and like quality childcare costs even more. And we are, we're very, very fortunate. We have a, a wonderful nanny who comes and you know, my, my older daughter, she has a lot of food allergies and, and some medical challenges. So we, we chose to keep her home instead, instead of sending her to a traditional daycare. You know, it costs a lot of money. And then like all her medical stuff, like we didn't anticipate that, but you got to do what you got to do to make sure your kid is healthy.
So, you know, we're, we're spending a lot of extra money on that. But I would say to people who are going to be parents or who are new parents to expect the unexpected. Like we kind of had a, a budget in mind for what we were going to spend on kids every single month between the child care, the, the food, the toys, the clothing, the diapers, all that stuff. I would like add 20% to it honestly, like just just to be safe.
Could be a universal question. I'm curious your take. To what degree do you think people should consider affordability in their family planning, or at all?
I think you have to consider it. I think you do I, I don't think we're going to have a third because it's so expensive. It's so expensive. But also, yeah, it is something you need to to consider.
Why? Because right, we see so many parents push off money decisions that kind of get to this place of, oh, we'll figure out the rest later. It's all about childcare right now. Like what would you say to them?
I would say you will figure it out. You will, but it makes life a lot easier when you have accrued the assets or the income that you're going to need to to support it without even really panicking about it. Kids are stressful. They're the most wonderful things in the entire world, but they are very stressful and it it's going to demand every ounce of your being. So if you can set yourself up financially beforehand and, and really have that, you know, a great household income, have some assets built up, it's going to make life a lot easier for you.
So you can really focus on the demands of your kids without adding that additional stress because you know, it, it does take a toll on your relationships. It takes a toll on your mental health. Yeah. The affordability crisis in this country, Obviously, you know, we're not going to solve it in a day. Don't let it completely deter you if you want to have a family. But maybe think about what do I need to do today? What do I need to do over the next year? What do I need to do over the next five years to put myself in a better position to not have to panic every day when my kid ultimately costs more than I anticipated?
Or be ready for the trade-offs because that's another thing I see where if you're like, no, you know what, it's just going to happen When it happens. It's a blessing. If it comes to us. Whenever it happens, it's meant to happen. The other flip side of that coin is then a lot of times when you're used to a specific lifestyle, it can become very difficult. I mean, inherently some things go away, right? You're not dining out as much, You're definitely not traveling as much in the first couple years, but thinking about what else you need to be doing to set yourself up financially so that you don't put yourself in a position where you have to play a ton of catch up. Because like you said, it's a huge responsibility. You don't know the wild card that your kid is going to throw you, and you're going to want to be able to give them everything and then some.
Yeah, absolutely. And again, I don't want it to like completely deter people, but but really start to plan ahead of time. If you want to have a family in the next one to five years or whatever it may be, you don't know when it's going to happen exactly, but start saying OK, like anticipating those needs, the child care needs, the, you know, all the sick visits to the pediatrician, you're absolutely going to have. My entire house has a cold right now. There's a lot of things you can plan ahead for, whether it is, you know, going to happen in the next, if you're pregnant now and it's going to be 9 months from now or you know, 10 years down the road, you can start to set aside just like every other financial goal, right?
You can put money towards something, toward buying a house, toward your retirement, toward family planning. You can absolutely start putting that money aside. You're not maybe not going to cover the entire financial burden of it, but at least you can cover some of it. That's the kind of the same concept of an emergency fund. Like you might not be able to cover the entire emergency with your emergency fund, but that's a little bit less you need to go into debt for. So that's what I would tell people is, is just start planning now. Start, you know, stocking some away because it's expensive. It's great, but it's expensive.
Start planning now and then tack on 20%.
Embracing Imperfection and Planning for Your Future Home
And added, yeah, add 20%. It's like a, it's like a home renovation budget, right? Like.
It it's so is and speaking think of home renovation. Another thing that I, I think I'd be curious what what you guys did is it feels like the family planning decision often goes hand in hand with upgrading your housing situation. How did you guys think about like not only expanding your housing costs to accommodate a family, but then the fact that that family is going to cost more money? Like, I think that gets underestimated.
Yeah. Oh, yeah. So I, I was very lucky. My, my father-in-law is very skilled at, at carpentry and all that. He was an engineer, so I was very lucky. But we had to consult with him about, you know, can we afford this? We bought a fixer upper. We could have bought something more turnkey and spent more money and all that, but we decided to not make ourselves completely house rich, cash poor. So we bought a fixer upper at a lower price. And then over, literally over 10 years, we're gonna have to fix this place up. We've done a lot already, but kind of coming to terms with the fact that I'm gonna hate my kitchen for a long time. And that's okay. We have more square footage, which is great.
So we decided to, yeah, buy something under budget and save that money. And then slowly but surely improve the house to make it our forever dream home. That was something that we spent probably three years thinking about. It wasn't a fast decision. And I, you know, consult with experts if you have Realtors in your life, if you have people who are great at the trades, like home renovations, things like that. Consult with all of those people before you pull the trigger on anything. You know, if it wasn't for my father in laws being like, hey, you're going to get a heck of a deal on this house. It's got great bones, you know, and, and you can fix it up over the course of a decade, you know, I don't know if we would have done it.
Yeah, that's a good example of a trade off and, you know, a novel concept shooting for something under budget, especially in this market where things are going. I mean, in New York City, it's gone crazy. People are bidding it up, I mean, all over. But I was actually talking to a friend the other day who was like, yeah, we went for a rental and the rental got bid up. I was like, I didn't even know you could do that. Point being, shooting for under budget and then using the additional that you might take your first home and turn it into your forever home over time. Even if it doesn't look like you're exactly what you imagined yourself moving into with your, you know this, this idealistic idea of like moving in, you're going to have a baby, it's going to be as beautiful as a nursery, Everything's going to be perfect.
Throw the word perfect away, especially if you're planning on that's another thing. It's like add 20% to your budget. And then like if you're thinking about the word perfect at all, just get that word out of your vocabulary. Because the sooner you can realize that it's nothing is going to be perfect. Nothing in your house is going to be perfect anymore because kids like ruin furniture. But yeah, get perfect out of there. Your finances aren't going to be perfect. And I know like Ramit Sethi talks about this all the time, like you have to give yourself grace when you have young kids because for that first five years especially, it's so expensive that you're like, I'm I've ruined my chances of retiring.
No, you haven't. You got to just realize that you're not going to be able to save. Like I used to be like a maniacal saver, like crazy investing as much as I could, like fully in the fire movement, all that. Then I had two kids and I was like.
Like.
Let's let's just try to save something this month. And that's OK. It's not going to be perfect. And as they get older, I'll be able to return to a certain level of saving and investing as their, you know, as their child care needs lessen, as they become more independent, they're, you know, there's going to be other expenses, but we'll be able to get back on track, you know, once they're in school and all of that. So give yourself a lot of grace.
Is that something that you built a plan around? Like, obviously for you, you wouldn't have to play as much catch up because you were definitely, like you said, a maniacal saver and getting ahead of the game. But it seems like in order to give yourself that grace or that Peace of Mind, knowing what you're going to have to return to could be helpful.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I, and I know I'm like a huge nerd, like I love to crunch the numbers and all of that. Again, like my ideal life is going to look like has really shifted what retirement's going to look like has shifted a bit and all of that. But I, I'd like to have an idea of, you know, if I'm getting off track, what's it going to take to get back on track? And, and that looks a little bit different for everybody. Everybody's like, well, what do you need for retirement? What do you need for this? It's, it depends on your spending. It depends on what you want it to look like. It's different for everybody. There is not one right answer. And, and I think it's so important that people take some time to really think about what they want their life to look like. And then you can reverse engineer and, and attach a number to it. So, you know, there's no, there's no one-size-fits-all.
From Financial Comedy to an Off-Broadway Hit Musical
You're speaking my language. Set a goal and then reverse engineer. OK, switching gears, one of the things that you do brilliantly is you make money. Funny, you and I, when we met almost 10 years ago, you had just done a Ted Talk on that topic of bringing comedy to financial literacy and using it to teach financial literacy and now you're writing a newsletter, right, called Sense of Humor CENTS and.
It was like the first title I could like came up with and I was, I was like pregnant, seven months pregnant when I started writing it. And I was like, this is good enough. Like no, my like some friends and family are going to read it and that's it.
And and it clearly it's grown. Who is your newsletter for? And tell us a little bit about how you use humor to teach people about money. Like what is your thesis?
Yeah. So this all started, Yeah, again, like over a decade ago when I was a young financial advisor in my 20s and no one wanted to listen to me. No one cared what I had to say. I was having a really hard time getting clients. And it was because, like, OK, she's got like a year of experience and what could she possibly offer anyone in terms of managing their money? I had heard, like Michelle Obama actually has this quote where she says first you get them to laugh, then you get them to listen. And when I heard that, I was like, maybe I could take like a little bit of a different approach than every other financial advisor and try to some way somehow use humor to teach people about personal finance to get them to like want to work with me.
And it slowly but surely it kind of worked. So I ended up doing a Ted, a Ted X talk on it. Yeah. And it was all about how to use humor to teach the fundamentals of personal finance. And there's like a lot of science behind it that when you can get people to laugh and loosen up, they actually retain information better. And so I was like, oh, maybe, maybe I'm on to something. So that's kind of been the, the thread throughout my entire career is like, how can I make personal finance less intimidating something that people enjoy either reading or listening to.
So I always try to, you know, put personal anecdotes in there, you know, written 2 humorous personal finance books. I did for a while, did my own podcast. And like now I am doing a newsletter where it's all about just because of where I am now in my life, family, finances, you know, best practices. You don't have to be a parent, but if you're somebody in your 20s through 50s and you're working and you want to make the most of your money, I try to put a lot of best practices in there.
Love, absolutely love. We're going to drop a link to Sense of humor in the show notes so everyone can subscribe and follow and learn about finance through humor. It's such a great angle. I cannot wait to talk about your Off Broadway. I saw it last night. I've been dying to talk to you about it. Everybody vape the Grease parody musical. Hilarious. Before we started recording, you told me you wrote this years ago.
Gosh, about 8 years ago now. Yeah, almost eight years ago.
What inspired you? It is so funny and I'm so excited that this episode is going to release and people will still have it's running through like January.
It's running through January 4th is the last weekend yeah. So it we've got a little while still, you know, we're recording this mid November and we opened November 3rd and it's going really well. I'm like super, super excited that people seem to like it. It's the honor of my life. I'm.
Thrilled. What inspired it? How did this idea come to you? How the hell did you write it with little kids and all that? I just it seems impossible.
So yeah, we wrote this a long time ago. What happened was is back when I had this idea of to incorporate humor with personal finance, I was living down South outside of Atlanta and needed to make some friends and really wanted to try out comedy classes. So I found this theatre group called Sketchworks Comedy and they were offering offering writing classes, acting classes. And it was something I had wanted to do since college, but I just like didn't have the confidence to do it. But you know, at some point your life, you're like, whatever, I'm just going to go for it. If people make fun of me, if I suck at it, who cares?
So I started taking these classes. Absolutely loved the people who were involved with this year. They were wonderful and was having the time of my life. Found out like I'm, I'm not that bad at comedy writing, like, and I really, really, really enjoy it. So I kept doing it. I kept writing more and more for their shows. I kept writing for different publications online. And a bunch of people went to go see the 40th anniversary of Grease the film. They went to go see the Broadway version down in Atlanta after they had been drinking like all night. They called me and they were like, hey, would you be down to write a parody? And I was like, well, that's not anything I've ever done in my life. I'm not a playwright, but I will give it a shot. Basically, like what online, like how do you do this? How do you, you know, construct this whole three act play and learned how to write a play?
And then I worked with some folks, my friends, Julie and Lana, they wrote the the original lyrics and I wrote the book. And we just tried to incorporate kind of like layers of humor. So we make fun of the film, we make fun of the characters, we make fun of the actors who play the characters, we make fun of the plot holes. And then we bring it into modern times and we make fun of modern teenagers and how the times change. But the problems of teenagers never really do. Whether you were a teenager now or 50 years ago, we're all stupid and making very bad mistakes.
The slang changes, but nothing else does. So we really wanted to play on that. And there were a lot of different levels of humor there. And I spent a whole summer working on it. And this was before I had kids, so I had a little bit more time. So I would write it at night and then like run it by my friends and see what they thought. And then we started performing it in Atlanta and it like developed this like weird little cult following, which was cool. We thought it would play for a couple weekends and then I would never hear from about it again. But it just kept going. It just kept going and going and going.
We got invited to perform it in New York and then we got a cease and desist from the rights holders of Greece. So it was like the lawyers doing lawyer, lawyer things. It wasn't like the actual people who were involved with the original Greece, just their lawyers. But we fought back because we, we knew we had not done anything wrong. We'd follow the letter of the law. Cut to 2 1/2 years later, because of like COVID and all that, we won our case. And they were like, you're free to perform this parody wherever you want. So we, we got some press. We performed it finally in New York. And then a company called Visceral Entertainment, they had come to see a performance and they said, hey, we think we could help you develop this into an Off Broadway run.
And we're like, OK. And sure enough, for the last two years, we have been working with the team at Visceral. We brought on this absolute genius named Billy Reesey and then Danny Salas. And they helped us to really bring the music to where it needed to be to be Off Broadway. And then again, like they worked with me to make the to make the script as tight and as funny and as awesome as it could possibly be. It took a lot of work. Not for the faint of heart. And then we had to raise a lot of money and now it's it's Off Broadway. It's crazy. No words.
I went last night. It was a Monday night. It was a jam packed theater, which it's not that I didn't expect that, it's just that when I went in the morning to get tickets, I was like, OK, there are seats, but by the time I sat down and the lights went down, it was not an empty seat in the house. I don't know who your marketing team is, what you're doing. It is so funny, It is so intelligent. The humor where you riff off of modern teenagers and the references you bring in. The songs are good, The singing is excellent. I'm really, really blown away by your talent. And you wrote it before kids, but you brought it to life and created an Off Broadway with two little ones in, in top of your portfolio career. I don't know it, it's it's awesome, Katie. It's so, so I want everyone to go see it.
OK. We're going to put a link to vape the Grease parody in the show notes. And I have a feeling it's going to get an extension. I don't know how that Off Broadway thing works, but I I really. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, we're looks to dad's ears. That's what we're hoping for. We would love to afford to have a, a really long, long life. I've just been so blessed that we, it's gotten this far. So I would, I would love for people to continue to support us because it would be great to, to have it, you know, extend in New York and then beyond wherever we go. It would be amazing.
Final Advice: Grace, Planning, and a Delicious Recommendation
Be amazing. We all need a little more humor in our life. And it was genuinely, I was cracking up, tears rolling down my face. It was so funny. I loved it was so clever. I loved, I loved it anyway, clearly I loved it. OK, you are a finance coach to clients. I want to end on one of your go to bits of advice. Like, what is one of the bits of advice that you give to help families feel more in control of their of their finances?
Yeah, and I touched on this like a little while ago, but this is ever since I became a parent, this has become kind of my thing that I repeat to myself, it's you have to give yourself grace. You have, it's not going to be perfect. You got to just put a plan in place. But know whether you deviate to the left or to the right of 10%, whatever, it's going to happen. And you can't like destroy yourself over it. You can't get so frustrated that you give up completely. You know, if you have a goal in mind and you get 85% of the way to the goal, you still are succeeding. You're 85% of the way there. Whereas if you hadn't set that goal at all, you wouldn't, you'd be 0% of the way there.
So just give yourself a lot of grace. I know like I get all these, you know, people writing me emails and, and clients that I coach coming to me and they're, they just get so down on themselves when they screw up or they spend too much money or they didn't save enough this month or they didn't invest enough this month. And I'm like, listen, it's OK, it's OK. You can rebound from this. It's it, it's going to be about the choices you make now going forward. We're all going to make mistakes with our money. We're all going to make bad decisions. It's how you respond to that and how you really decide to go forward that's going to make the difference.
That's great advice. Give yourself grace. But I want to hold on the original point, which is whether you deviate to the right or the left, you're deviating from a plan. Have a plan so you know when you're deviating and also have the North Star to get back on track because too many people have that. We'll figure it out later and you will, but you will not like what you have to do and the amount of catch up you have to play. So even if you have a loose plan, yeah, it's like otherwise you're driving without, you're driving without directions.
And I always tell people like, don't be an aimless wanderer. Like actually the one of the best examples I had was a woman that I coached a few years ago. She said, I've never set a financial goal. And I said, OK, great. I go, well, tell me what you would like to be able to do. You know, you've got two kids, you've got parents. And she said, well, her family was back in India. She's like, I'd like to be able to help my parents back in India. And I said, OK, well, what does that look like? Are you sending them a dollar or $10,000? Like what do you, what does that, what does that look like? And she's like, well, I would like to be able to send them like $1000 a month.
And I said, OK, well, when would you like to start that? And she's like, well, when my kids are out of college, so probably in like 5 years from now. And I was like, OK, you just set a financial goal. Like we, we want to be able to send $1000 a month to your parents five years from now, like, OK, we can work with this. We can start to see like, OK, how much do you need to save now? How much do you need to invest now to make that happen? When we think of financial goals, we just think of numbers. But it's not, you know, you can do that with anything. Like what do you want your life to look like? Who do you want to help? You know, where do you want to be? What do you want your life to look like from the moment you get up to the moment you go to bed? What are you doing like? And then we can put a number to that and figure out how to get there.
Yeah, you're either intentional or you're an aimless wanderer. Like you said and values driven, intentionality usually yields the feeling we're all looking for, the feeling of contentment.
Success.
Having something to show for it, but it starts with knowing what you want. Good conversation. We always end with a segment that I call Best Bite. I'm a foodie. I want a recommendation, something that you've had recently that has absolutely blown your mind. So delicious. Katie Hogan, where do I need to go? What do I need to try?
OK, I had an espresso with martini, which don't judge me, people don't judge me. I had an espresso martini at the West Bank Cafe, which is actually near the theater that my show's at where, Oh my God, it was phenomenal. And I did have a really great Cobb salad. There. It was. It was fantastic. So go to the West Bank Cafe, get yourself an espresso martini and a Cobb salad. You'll be thrilled.
West Bank Cafe near Theater 555. You're gonna go see Vape and you're gonna get yourself an espresso. I'm gonna go again and get myself an espresso martini. And I love a cob. Oh my God, Great recommendation. They don't really feel like they go together, but they're both excellent on their own that I will totally have them together.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I, I ordered it because I was there for opening night and I needed, I needed to eat something, but I didn't want to eat something too heavy because I was so nervous and I also needed a little energy. So that's why, yeah, I ended up doing that combo and it turned out great.
Makes sense to me. Oh my gosh. OK, Katie, give us your handles. Where can people find and follow you? How do we stay part of your journey?
Sure. Yeah. So if you subscribe to Sense of Humor CENTS, it's my newsletter. You can you can read it once a week. I don't clog anybody's inboxes. So I'm just sending it, sending it out once a week, usually on Wednesdays. And then you can follow me usually on Instagram at Katie dot Hogan and then on LinkedIn, I post a lot as well. So you can find me on LinkedIn too. And and yeah, that's that's where I am. Other otherwise you can see me, you know, walking around the theater 555 kind of in a panic trying to produce this show.
Awesome. Thank you so much Katie for joining me. You are certainly building a life on your own terms and there is no doubt that everyone listening to this finds you a source of inspiration in some way or another. There's so many amazing things that you've taught us today. For those of you listening, if this conversation made you feel even the slightest bit lighter, we'd love for you to spread the word. I think the more that we talk about money, the less power it has over us. And that's the goal. Also, shameless plug, if you're not already subscribed play, please consider doing so. Definitely will help us build out this show, reach more people, bring on more amazing guests. All right. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.
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