← BiggerPockets Money Podcast
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- [00:00]
Mindy Jensen
What if the biggest threat to your financial independence isn't market crashes or job loss, but the mental traps that sabotage you before you even realize it? Today's guest has cracked the code on the psychological and strategic mistakes that derail most people's fi journey. And she's here to share mindset shifts that could save you years of frustration and get you to financial freedom faster than you ever thought possible. Hello, hello, hello and welcome to the BiggerPockets Money Podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen and with me, as always, is my fire fanatic co host Scott Trench.
- [00:39]
Scott Trench
Thanks, Mindy. It's great to be here with my rich girl co host, Mindy Jensen. We talking about that all day. BiggerPockets has a goal, creating 1 million millionaires. You are in the right place if you want to get your financial house in order, because we truly believe financial freedom is attainable for everyone, no matter when or where you're starting or whether you're held back by the dreaded pink tax and some of those items that I know Katie is super. Our guest today is super familiar with. Today we are so excited to welcome Katie G. Gadi Tassen back to the BiggerPockets Money podcast. As you may know, Katie is the founder of Money. With Katie, all of her content there focuses on building wealth, questioning conventional wisdom and creating a great life. Katie is a genius, a thought leader, a writer. She loves to put in these really long form posts on, on Instagram that go into that go into philosophizing. I'm usually there deep in the comments arguing with someone on there. And you can order her book Rich Girl Nation. Rewriting the rules of wealth for a new generation that is focusing a lot of those same concepts she talk about all the time in her content. We can't wait to discuss this with you. Welcome to the show, Katie.
- [01:39]
Katie Gadi Tassen
You know what, it is so great to be back. Thank you for having me. And I just have to say I love your mission. A million millionaires. That's so inspiring and very empowering. I love it.
- [01:49]
Scott Trench
Thanks. We just, we just did an analysis and we're actually going to have to update the goal now because we think we've achieved it.
- [01:55]
Katie Gadi Tassen
No kidding.
- [01:56]
Scott Trench
We did the math. We said, you know, right behind me is the number of people who've ever signed up for BP bigger pockets. And that's 3.17 million. And we know that 29% of them are millionaires for pretty robust survey data. And that does not count the bigger pockets money audience, which is another several million over the years. So we think we've easily rounded that goal without officially tallying it with just the current members. So that's a fun one that we've passed.
- [02:21]
Katie Gadi Tassen
Congratulations.
- [02:22]
Scott Trench
Well, you're probably pretty close to that with your, your audience there, so.
- [02:25]
Katie Gadi Tassen
Oh my goodness. I would hope so. I won't even know how I would begin to check something like that. But I do think that it's, I love that because it's so illustrative of just as individual people with passion and interests, we can have that crazy ripple effect. I mean, that's amazing.
- [02:42]
Scott Trench
Yeah. The goal is just to be a small part of the journey for 1 million millionaires. And I think, you know, that's, that's kind of cool. So I think though that the, the two and a half million isn't the new million. So, yeah, two and a half. Two and a half millionaires.
- [02:54]
Katie Gadi Tassen
Is that what they're saying these days?
- [02:55]
Scott Trench
Gosh, yeah. So going back, we last had you on BiggerPockets Money on episode 341 and you mentioned you had a financial awakening in 2018 that changed the trajectory of your life. Could you kind of repeat that, summarize that experience for us, for folks who have not gone back and listened to that episode and give us a kind of crash course on what's been going on for you since we last spoke?
- [03:17]
Katie Gadi Tassen
Sure, I'd be happy to. So, yes, this financial awakening, I mean, it was kind of multiple steps. But I do write about one of the critical pieces of that awakening in the introduction for the book. And this is kind of why I keyed in on the the 1 million millionaires thing. Because a big piece of the work that I do now and that I think is so important is kind of this concept of bringing others along for the ride. And in 2018, I had a friend at work named Kylie who invited me along to the Money Diaries book tour stop in Dallas, Texas. And it was like a Tuesday night and usually I didn't go out on school nights and I was like, ah, okay. I had already started getting interested in money at this point. I had been having some conversations. I think I might have found choose a five by this point. I can't quite remember, but this was really the first time that I had ever gone out and attended an event with a bunch of like minded people that wall to wall with women that wanted to talk about money and that were interested in money. And it was just totally electric. And I left that night being like, oh my gosh, I, I want to know everything about this. And that really Sent me on a path to learn everything that I could. And I, I, as part of writing the book, went back on my old blog to kind of see like what was, what were some of the first things that I was writing online, like when did I go to this event and then how soon after was I talking about this publicly? And like within a month I'm on my, my old blog, my old website, just so overzealous, so enthusiastic being like, I am learning things that are absolutely blowing my mind. It has transformed my relationship with spending and with instant gratification and all of these things that I think I had never really been exposed to before. And just this, it opened my eyes to this kind of new way of designing your life and, and designing your money. And from there we were just totally off to the races. So since then, I guess the last time I was on the show would have been 2022, is that correct? 2023. It's been a couple years. Yeah. Since then I've been running Money with Katie and really exploring all the different aspects of, I guess my interests and not just personal finance, but the economy and the way that money plays a role in our culture and class politics and all of these things. Just really widening the aperture and exploring anything that really piques my curiosity. But part of that, you know, 18 month, two year time period was spent writing this book, which was really my attempt at distilling all of what I believe is the best advice and the most strategic path for any woman who is serious about managing her money and planning for her future. So that's been really exciting and it is basically here, which is hard to believe.
- [06:16]
Mindy Jensen
You just said once you went to this, this meeting about, with like minded women, you were starting to talk about money on your, your website and you said the things I'm learning are completely transforming my relationship with spending. And that's one of the biggest, I don't know what the right word is, problems issues is that people are so used to spending. You were, you were spending on, you know, you were the hot girl. You were spending money on the hot girl hamster wheel to try and like you. And you say in your book you were spending money on like your haircut and color were $200. I can't remember the frequency. Every three months.
- [06:55]
Katie Gadi Tassen
Yeah.
- [06:55]
Mindy Jensen
I knew a girl who did 175 every three weeks because she had very, very short hair.
- [07:01]
Scott Trench
Yeah. Meanwhile, Mr. Money Mustache there with his $10 universal men's grooming device.
- [07:08]
Katie Gadi Tassen
The 7 in 1 body wash. Yeah.
- [07:12]
Mindy Jensen
But so what were some of the things that you learned that transformed your relationship with spending. Because I hear from a lot of women, especially, you know, younger women, not throwing you younger ladies under the bus, but I hear from a lot of younger women, well, it's my time to have fun now. I just got out of college. I, you know, had to be super frugal then. I want to spe spend money and get my eyelashes done and get my eyebrows done and. And I mean, I do need to get my eyebrows done because it's nice to have two instead of one, but that's, you know, that's an easier thing to spend money on because it's like 15 bucks or something. But all of this, like, you were spending, what, $3,000 a year just to look good, and you look good now.
- [07:54]
Katie Gadi Tassen
Oh, well, thank you. Thank you very much. Wish I could go back until 2018 me that. Yeah, yeah. So I kind of want to take this in two parts. The first is, what was it that I learned that transformed my relationship with money and with spending and with instant gratification? Because I think that that was really the. The main driver of the. The bigger shift. And I think part of it really clicked for me when I started to understand that a dollar spent today versus a dollar saved today are not equal. I used to think, okay, I can either spend this money now on this thing that's going to bring me joy immediately, or I can save it and have the same amount of money in the future. Question mark. Like, all right, well, then I'm just going to spend it now. And I think once I started to learn about some of the foundational fire concepts, particularly the 4% rule, I started to see that, oh, okay, no, it's not a dollar now or a dollar later. It's a dollar now or ten dollars later. And I think that some people, that realization is enough. Like, they're the type of personality type where they see that benchmark or that goal post and they will. It kind of immediately clicks, and they just want to run toward it as fast as possible. That was really the experience that I had. And so once I started to understand, compounding we were. I mean, that's all she wrote. Frankly, I was like, all right, I want to get there as fast as I can. And it was fun. Like, I think that that was the big thing was the kind of fleeting thrills of consumerism that I had been benefiting from before really paled in comparison to watching line go up. And so I think line go up can. Can be kind of a trap of its Own and we can get into that. But at the time, I mean, that was really what I needed to get it together on the concept of the hot girl hamster wheel and spending on beauty. I call this the hot girl hamster wheel. And I think many women who are on this hamster wheel will relate to this. Or if you are a guy listening who's like, huh, hot girl hamster wheel. Maybe your wife, your sister, your daughter will relate to this. But this is how I describe.
- [10:05]
Scott Trench
I think the way they can relate to that is that's the $45,000 pickup truck with that.
- [10:12]
Katie Gadi Tassen
Except this is even more insidious because it's the, the litany of recurring expenses that are necessary to uphold what I will jokingly call the capital A, capital F, like acceptable feminine appearance. Now it's a hamster wheel because the nature of these purchases is such that you cannot just do them once. Anybody who has ever gotten their hair highlighted, anyone who has ever gotten acrylic nails put on, you know that it looks really, really good for like maybe a couple of weeks. And then your body starts to reject these enhancements and you now have to do something about that. The grown out highlights look worse than just uncolor treated hair. The untreated nails look better than the acrylic nails that are grown out. So I know I'm being very specific, but the point is that there is this insidious kind of coercive force that keeps you there because it's not as easy to just be like, okay, I'm just going to stop cold turkey. Because now my hair looks worse than it did before I started. Now my nails look worse than I before I started. So you mentioned that I spent $3,000 per year on beauty. That's true. That represented roughly 10% of my take home pay at the time. And that was a real revelation for me because I was like, whoa. That means that I am working for almost an entire month every year just to look good. And that was a wake up call for sure. But it turns out that your average woman does spend somewhere in the ballpark of around $300 per month on beauty and personal care. Now bear in mind that was back in so pre aesthetic boom in the cosmeceutical world, the Botox, the fillers that are far more ubiquitous now and most ubiquitous among young women. This is a kind of unspeakable opportunity cost from my perspective. I think we've gotten really, really good at talking about beauty and beauty standards as being psychologically oppressive. But I do not think that We've gotten very fluent yet in discussing them in the terms of being financially or economically oppressive. And so it's something that I want to call attention to because over the years as I was learning about these things and parsing it for myself, I didn't really see many personal finance blogs, podcasts, whatever, going into very much detail about these things. And it was really one interview on shoes Fi with Mrs. Frugal woods where she was talking about like why would I buy makeup when I could buy my freedom instead? That I was like, like, whoa. I've never heard a woman like address that. So head on. So I look at investing in your beauty and that social capital of being beautiful as over time just a losing proposition. We know that actual capital grows in value over time. Beauty is a depreciating asset. It's something that will constantly require more cash flow to maintain. And it's only going to, it's only going to get worse over time because in our culture beauty basically means you. So that's not a good ROI to me. It's not a good place to be wrapped up in or to be constantly on that hamster wheel. So that's why I start the book there. And it does come mostly from personal experience with that.
- [13:22]
Scott Trench
The book's goal, I think, you know, as I read it, is, is to achieve financial independence. Right. I mean you a huge pennage. I would say the back third of the book is really dedicated to this concept of the 4% rule and the savings rate needed to achieve that and the specific strategies and use of tax advantaged accounts in there. So, you know, and I think that that makes perfect sense to me. That's what we talk about day in and day out here. Those are well established components here. Walk us through how important. I mean this is a clearly an issue, but give us, give us an idea of in the pie of spending from an average American household, maybe, maybe a single household led by a single woman, for example. What is the damage done by this dynamic and disadvantage for women as compared to men, for example, in achieving that outcome?
- [14:09]
Katie Gadi Tassen
Yeah, well, you know, let's say that over a 40 year career you do keep up that $300 per month average spend. Hell, pretend it never even goes up with inflation, pretend these beauty treatments in these services never go up in price and you are just clocking in at $300 a month. If you are assuming average historical returns. We are talking about an opportunity cost over those 40 years of $1 million. So we're not just talking about cost at the margins I think sometimes it can be easy to slip into that trap of kind of dismissing these. Who cares? It's like the frivolous treats, whatever, these are retirement supporting amounts. I mean, there's no way around that. And I think if we lived in a world where financial autonomy and financial freedom was something that was ubiquitous, that we all achieved, I'd be like, yeah, who cares? But we don't live in that world. We live in a world where, you know, half of people retire with basically nothing. So I think it's really important to look at these things seriously and like, look at where women's money is going. And I, I totally recognize that. And I kind of talk about this in the chapter that sometimes when we talk about these things, it can be misconstrued as like, it's a lose lose, or like, oh, you're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't. Because these beauty standards exist and you probably leave your home and receive signals every single day that the way that you look matters. We know in the there is research that shows that attractive people do have easier lives, like they are treated better. That's just true. So like, like it's not like it's all in your head and that there's no ROI to investing in the way that you look. But I would argue the ROI is poor compared to an extra million dollars in retirement and that these choices that we make as individuals do not just affect us because the way that beauty standards work is the more women who strive to uphold a particular beauty standard, the more normalized that standard becomes and then the more incremental pressure is exerted on every woman who looks at you to kind of try to strive for that standard too. So I think it can be very powerful to recognize that in opting out of some of these things, you are actually lessening the pressure on other women that you may encounter in your day to day life to have to, you know, jump through that hoop too.
- [16:40]
Mindy Jensen
We have to take a quick ad break, but while we're away, we would like to ask a favor. Can you please hop on over to our YouTube channel and make sure that you're subscribed? YouTube.com.
- [16:52]
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- [17:24]
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- [17:55]
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- [18:22]
Scott Trench
Welcome back to the show where I have a conversation with two rich girls. When I think about the the differences and and I'm I'm not an expert on this by definition so I'm asking but this is I I'm asking by posing a hypothesis and asking you to reject or support it with this. But I I would hypothesize that the biggest barriers in order for women achieving financial independence versus men are one the gender pay gap to this dynamic you just discussed here the hot girl hamster wheel. I called the pink tax earlier. Sorry about that. But that concept and the third I would say is this kind of maybe this educational aspect where there's a societal norm that is changing I believe but it has been there in the past where perhaps in many households men are just assume the role of managing the money in more of a direct way than many women in there is that is that a rate my hypothesis and if if you agree with it, let me know what you think about those and how to fix some of those issues.
- [19:22]
Katie Gadi Tassen
Well, I think that that's pretty close. When I sat down to write the book I wanted to was basically spurred on by by learning that the wealth gap is much worse than the wage gap women have, I don't know, something like 55 to 57 cents in median wealth for every dollar that the Median man has that's. I mean, that's substantial. That's pretty serious. And so I set out to figure out what are the most pressing drivers of that wealth gap. And you're right, you hit on a couple big ones. I think the hot girl hamster wheel is a very particular manifestation of what I would consider just kind of like the increased pressure that is exerted on women to spend in different ways and to kind of, at the risk of sounding crass, like, piss away any capital that they do get on other things. I think the gender wage gap is inextricably connected to the motherhood penalty and the caregiving gap. So I think that that's the one piece that I would fill in some color there. I spend a lot of time in chapter two of the book, which is primarily about earning more and finding ways to increase your income, because as we know, income is the lifeblood of wealth building. You really can't do without working on increasing your income. At least you're going to have a lot easier time if you can increase your income. And so I spend a lot of time digging into essentially what is the driver of this wage gap and why do we see this. And I think there is a bit of a misconception that when we talk about a wage gap, what we mean is that, you know, there are men and women out there that are doing the exact same job, that are being paid differently. And that's not really what's happening. It's a little bit more complex than that. I mean, that does happen in some industries. There are some particularly egregious examples, like surgery, for example, where the controlled gender wage gap is something like 10%. But by and large, it's more so about the way that men and women's lives unfold over time. Some of that is downstream of policy, some of that is downstream of cultural norms. But I really appreciate the work of the Nobel Prize winning economist Claudia golden on this stuff. And that is basically that, that the wage gap widens for women as they progress in their careers, as their family responsibilities become more significant in their lives. So I think that talking about it in that context and kind of understanding that a wage gap in the professional world is probably actually related back to how that person is spending their time within the domestic sphere. That is really critical for understanding how we fix these things. It is true that men work more paid hours, roughly one more hour of paid work per day than women do, but we know that women are spending roughly twice as much time doing unpaid domestic labor in their homes. And so what is the natural result of that? Well, women are going to end up with fewer resources. And that is what we see then. I think the other thing that's worth looking at is just kind of the boring morbid reality of lifespan, that women do live about six and a half percent longer on average, which means they are statistically more likely to bear the brunt of poor financial planning. And because of what you mentioned, Scott, about kind of the cultural societal norms around who is considered the de facto money manager in many households, even households with millennial high earning women, who are more likely to defer that long term financial planning to a male partner who knows if he's good at it or not. I mean, like that's kind of a crapshoot that they're going to be more likely to bear the brunt of that poor planning and probably not even realize that the planning was poor until it's too late. So I basically look at all these obstacles and I go, how do we know that these are affecting women's outcomes? Because we can see it in the data because women retire with 57% as much money as men do. 84% of widows in the US are women. So even happily married women who go their whole lives, they never get divorced will still need to manage their money on their own at some point, will still need to know how to do that. So I do think that the knowledge gap is a, is a critical piece and is why I spend all of chapter three kind of trying to fill in the gaps. But yeah, I mean it's a complex problem and I think it's so much bigger than kind of subjective bias or some of the more popular talking points. I'll say it's much, it's much bigger than that. And I think that getting, getting our arms around it is important for how we start to solve it.
- [24:11]
Scott Trench
I have my, a couple, a couple reactions this. First, I have my wow, I'm talking to a true master who has all their facts and figures in place and all their frameworks well rehearsed, has really thought about this and has clearly put in that the 10,000 hours in studying this problem. So awesome on there. That's my, that's my little smile I get when I, when I talk to people that are this well versed in their subject matter.
- [24:33]
Katie Gadi Tassen
Oh, thank you.
- [24:35]
Scott Trench
Second, I'm just, I'm laughing because I know women live much longer than men, but I am in the lucky cohort because I have two daughters. I will enjoy many of those longevity benefits here. As a man apparently, on average. So apparently that. That extends.
- [24:48]
Katie Gadi Tassen
Is that a thing if you have female children?
- [24:51]
Scott Trench
I believe so. Yeah. So.
- [24:52]
Katie Gadi Tassen
Wow.
- [24:53]
Scott Trench
That's what Virginia tells me. I'll have to go confirm that with some detailed research here. Let's go through these three. You know, if we agree that those kind of. It sounds like you agree that those three. That's a reasonable way to articulate the problem with those three frameworks. Right? The gender pay gap, the hot girl hamster wheel, slash pink tax, depending on what term you're familiar with for those listening. And then this educational gap, or maybe it's the wrong word, but I'm going to use it. This abdication or allowing the male partner to make all those decisions and not really investing the time maybe to learn about that. What, what. How do we solve this? What are kind of like the. If. How do we distill those problems into three maybe headline takeaways? Is it stop paying the pink tax? Stop. Get off the hamster wheel. Don't worry about it. Is it read a bunch of books? Is it negotiate with your boss? Like, what are those? How do we.
- [25:45]
Katie Gadi Tassen
Yeah, I mean, all the above. Read Rich Girl Nation, babe. But. But no, I think there are a couple things that I would say to start with, if you find yourself in that position where you're like, oh, this is kind of resonating. And I do kind of feel like I've. I've experienced these. These things that this crazy lady is. Is yammering on about. I really structured the book in such a way that I wanted to kind of chronologically take somebody through the considerations that they're likely to face and will be most impactful for them. So starting with the hot girl hamster wheel, the broader conversation there is what are you spending on? And are you spending on things that you genuinely value and that are essentially supporting you, rather than you supporting maybe systems or ideas that you don't necessarily agree with? I think the, the big. The big overall word there is like consumerism. Are you engaging in something that, like, may eventually you're not really supportive of, Then we move into earning more money, negotiating for more. And I am of the mind, based on many conversations that I've had, that most people who find their way into this space and find their way to a book like this are probably pretty hard workers. And I am always reticent to tell somebody like, well, you just need to work harder. I think that there are certain ways that you can work smarter such that you're going to make it way easier for yourself when you go into those important negotiation conversations and you are asking for more money. Then we move into, okay, so you've, you've looked at the spending, you've increased your income, you're working smarter, right? You've had that successful negotiation conversation. Maybe you've started a business, maybe you've changed companies. Now you're really going to learn the ins and outs of how financial freedom, how attainable financial freedom is for you based on these two factors. Because if we know you're spending and we know your income, good news, we can tell you how long it's going to take you pretty much down to the year to achieve financial independence. And once you have that very powerful knowledge, you can now make even better decisions about. Okay, well, it's actually much closer than I thought. Thought. So I'm going to let my foot off the gas a little bit. I'm going to prioritize something else or, oh, boy, this is quite far away from me. I didn't realize how long this road was going to be. I need to go back to 1 and 2 and either cut spending more or increase income more and make some other changes. And then the back half of the book, as you alluded to, I get into a couple things that I really think are important for women in particular, based on what we know about what happens to women when marriages end. So I have a chapter that's all about basically managing money as a team within a marriage and how you can do that in, like, the most balanced way of morale boosting, but also legally protecting yourself. I think that's critical. And then, okay, now we're thinking about children, right? So what do we, if we know that child care is going to cost this much in this many years, like, how do we need to start saving and prepping for that now? Where should we be saving that money? What should the strategy be? And then finally we conclude with, all right, great. So you've, you've navigated these big classic pitfalls. Now we want to make sure you don't outlive your assets. We want to make sure those assets outlive you. So how can you, again, work smarter, not harder, to invest as efficiently as possible? So that timeline that you're on is, you know, if you're being as tax efficient as possible, probably about 15% shorter. That's really important.
- [29:28]
Mindy Jensen
Right?
- [29:28]
Katie Gadi Tassen
We want to, we know the path now. We want to start looking for shortcuts. So that's kind of how I would lay out the big things. Like, let's focus on the areas where we know we are statistically likely to have the most challenging obstacles thrown our way. Let's focus our energy on those things.
- [29:48]
Scott Trench
All right, this is our final ad break and we'll be back with more after this.
- [29:51]
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- [30:22]
Mindy Jensen
I really love how you started with what are you spending on? Do you genuinely value those things first and foremost? Because it doesn't really matter how much you're earning or, you know, what flavor of fi you're pursuing. If you're spending everything that's coming in, it's going to be really hard to save money. And this, I love that you call it the hamster wheel because it really is a hamster wheel. So first and foremost, like people, I get this question all the time. What's the first thing you would tell people that are, you know, want to change their finances? Look at what you're spending, track your spending, see where it's going and track it, every single penny. And track it in real time is what I would say as well. Because when there are, there are ways, you know, oh, let me just go and look at all of my credit card receipts from last month. Well, that's great that that's already happened. You can't make changes midstream when you're at the end of the stream. So you need to go and track it in real time.
- [31:19]
Katie Gadi Tassen
Well, I mean, we've all heard that analogy with the bucket with the holes in the bottom. I mean, I'm sure you all have have encountered this situation too where you, you meet someone and they make 200, $250,000 a year and they're like, oh, I don't know where all the money goes. I live paycheck to paycheck. I am so grateful that I discovered fire and fi when I made like $50,000 a year because I set that baseline for my spending so low that I was like, like, oh, okay, now every incremental amount of income is just going to get dumped into this fund for the future. And that's not to say that there hasn't been lifestyle creep. There absolutely has been, especially with the inflation that we've seen over the last few years. I certainly spend more now than I used to. But I do think that there is a, there is a real, there's a real value in learning about these things when you already know that you're capable on living with less. Because once you let that lifestyle creep genie out of the bottle, it is very hard to go backwards. It is hard to downsize. And so I think in many ways somebody that finds that path, earning $60,000 a year is, is in many ways going to probably be a little bit better off than someone who has already like allowed the lifestyle to expand to fill the high income and then is like, oh crap. And how. Now I got to figure out how to start undoing some of this.
- [32:50]
Scott Trench
Just on this, on this note, there's this fascinating statistic I came across recently where there's this conception that the top 1% of income earners are this like elite class of people. And it's really hard to break into in that. But 12% of Americans will earn a top 1% income and almost nobody will stay in the top 1%. Less than 1% of the people who make it to the top 1% will stay in the top 1% of income generations for more than a decade.
- [33:18]
Katie Gadi Tassen
Oh, wow.
- [33:19]
Scott Trench
And so this is the one, the, the elite income generation world is not some static environment in there. And that, that's true all the way at the very top too. The same, same, same general rule applies for the top 400 earners in America at the very, very tippy top. And I've just, I've observed in my life, and I think, you know, maybe other people can, can share this if they've experienced it for themselves, but when you observe a family that goes through forced lifestyle reduction, the percentage of the time it destroys that family is absurd. Right? It's just, have you ever noticed this in your life where that's the catalyst for just really big pain in that environment? And I think that's what you're saying here, that the stakes for setting the spendings as low as possible, keeping it there and never going beyond that, because it's really hard to earn an elite income. It's really hard to, it's almost impossible to sustain it. Almost nobody in this country does that over the course of decades and keeping that spending low, building the asset base, focusing on wealth and spending only a small percentage of your wealth on an annual basis, I think is the way to avoid that. Trap in a more fundamental way.
- [34:27]
Katie Gadi Tassen
Yeah. There's a formula that I include in chapter three called don't live beyond your assets. And I think in a way it's kind of inspired by or connected to the idea that you're talking about, which is that high incomes can be fleeting and they often require a lot of work to get and then to sustain. And you know, most of us, at least if we're trying to build the asset base, are not interested in working 80 hours a week for our entire lives. We might be willing to do that in sprints or to make progress, but that's not the end goal. We don't want to do that until we're 60 years old. And so, so I talk about how sometimes when you first start to earn a lot of money, you can kind of get starry eyed about like, oh, money kind of starts to feel a little worthless or like meaningless or there's always going to be more because there's another paycheck coming in. That's, you know, for me at least when I became a high earner it was like, oh, this is like more money than I could ever spend. This is great. And you kind of stop thinking about it as hard. But I have, you know, in that period when I went through that transition, really was looking for some sort of heuristic that I could, could use to be like what is actually a safe amount for me to, you know, for me to spend. I don't want to cling to the lifestyle that I was living on $60,000 a year because I do feel like I want to go up a little bit, but I don't want to jeopardize my future in expanding my lifestyle. I want to be very intentional about it. And so I thought, all right, I'm not going to base my spending decisions based on my fleeting and subject to change income. I want to base it on how much progress have I already made to five. So the formula that I came up with was around 4% of your current invested assets averaged with your current income. And then looking at that and going all right, that is probably like the absolute upper limit that I should be safely like indulging and I didn't end up getting very close to it.
- [36:26]
Scott Trench
That's an awesome formula.
- [36:28]
Katie Gadi Tassen
Yeah, it's just I think the using the 4% of the current invested assets kind of grounds you in the reality of like, hey, now know, let's not get carried away and has been useful for me, it's kind of like a checkpoint in my head of like all right, I'm not getting too close to that, am I? And obviously, as you, as your net worth continues to grow, that number will go up too. Because I, I think the opposite is also kind of a trap of like, you know, I never want to be the person with like $10 million who's afraid to take a vacation. Like, to me, that's also losing the plot. So I don't want to lose the plot anywhere on the this spectrum. I want to be grounded in the reality of my situation.
- [37:04]
Mindy Jensen
What is the difference between lifestyle creep and identifying with your net worth? This is something that I have struggled with personally, and I think that I'm spending $40,000 a year. And then you get to the end of the year and you're like, well, that wasn't accurate at all. However, I can afford it, so I shouldn't feel guilty about it. We in the FI community talk about don't let lifestyle creep hit up on you, but then you are the $10 million net worth person who takes the super cheap vacation and flies standby and you know, all the things. Yeah, you laugh, but when I was on the Ramit safety podcast with my husband, I got an interview. So I got a lot of people reaching out to me saying, I am in the exact same position you are in, or like, my net worth is way more and I can't even spend as much as you like. There was so many people saying, I totally identify with this. And I think that on the one hand, don't let lifestyle creep affect you is really great advice for when you're in the beginning of Your and your $50,000 a year job and you're in the beginning of your journey where, you know, you really, oh, you just got a raise. Stick with the $50,000 and put that extra in your emergency fund or pay down debt or put it into investments or wherever your, your investment plan that everybody should have is going. But then after a while, you need to start identifying with your net worth a little bit more. Where's the, the tipping point where you're no longer letting lifestyle creep drive you and you're now starting to identify.
- [38:47]
Katie Gadi Tassen
So I'm not sure, Mindy, if this is going to resonate with you or if, if this will be kind of what your experience was. But I think for me, the big. And this is, I kind of alluded to this earlier when I was talking about the line, go up. The line, go up mentality. And being very committed to that can also be, can be a trap of its own. But I think for me, money became a bit of a scoreboard because realistically I had more than I needed. I was not that I was good, you know what I mean? I was, I was fine. And I think that I started to look to the money to tell me that I was doing a good job and that I was successful. And when the line was going up, it meant I was successful and I was making good choices. And if the line was going down, then that meant the opposite. And that's a very, that can be a very powerful motivation. In the beginning. I always tell people that are starting, you need to track your net worth. Because when you see that number going up, up, boy, let me tell you, it's going to be very motivating. And you are going to, you're going to have a lot easier time sticking to the sacrifices that you might be making. So I think that it can be, it can be very useful in the beginning. And I agree. But I do think that sometimes line go up mentality, asking the money to affirm things about your identity, that for me became a bit of an issue. And I knew it was an issue because I was realizing that my other values were taking a backseat. Other values being, I want to be a better writer. This is important to me. But the way that I was trying to determine whether I was a good writer is if, like, the business's revenue was going up and I had a coach be like, you do know that more revenue doesn't mean you're a better writer, right? Like, you do know that those things are not actually connected. And I was like, ah, I guess you're right. I guess that's true. That's like, really not the same thing, is it? Or I want to think about myself as a generous person. Well, I wasn't giving any money away. And it's like, well, it's kind of hard to think about yourself as a generous person who cares about others. If you're just hoarding all of it for yourself, like, that's kind of antithetical. So I think once I started to notice that my, my values were really taking a back seat, that's when I was like, okay, I need to like, seek some, some guidance and some coaching. So I did hire a coach, someone who I could talk to about these things and who helped me to, to kind of break the break that, that natural connection that had formed between, like, more money means I'm doing good and less money means I'm doing bad. That was a very calcified connection in my brain from years of striving for financial independence that it started to get in the way and I needed to let let loose of those reins a little bit. That said, on the lifestyle inflation piece, I will share that personally speaking, I had moved into a much larger home when we were renting a home in California for our last duty station for the Air Force and our housing expenses really exploded. We rented a house that was too much space for us. Anyone who's ever, I mean it was in Sacramento, so desert California, very hot, had very high ceilings. So the energy bill was just like you. I mean you would gag. It was, it was crazy. 50 cents a kilowatt hour, just unbelievable. And so our housing expenses really got high and we moved back to Denver. We were both like, I don't think we need that. I don't think we need a single family home even. I think we should, we should try something radically different. And so we downsized quite consider considerably. We moved into a two bedroom apartment. Again it's now smaller than the house that we lived in five years ago. And we are so happy. We are so happy. It was the best choice and our housing expenses got cut in half. So I think that there's also so an important thing to remember that sometimes the better lifestyle decision for you at a given point in time or the lifestyle expansion quote, unquote, that might actually be the better thing for you, doesn't necessarily have to cost more money. These things are not always one in the same. More is not always better. And so that's been kind of a fun lesson to learn of like earning more, spending more, experimenting and then going, you know what? I don't really need all that, that I'm actually gonna, I'm gonna quote, unquote, go backwards in the kind of the standards of like the American dream. And I'm gonna actually choose something different. And it's been, it's been really fun and kind of cool to see like, oh yeah, we can expand our lifestyle and then downsize it again and be happier for it.
- [43:16]
Mindy Jensen
Okay, you said you hired a coach. What kind of coach did you hire?
- [43:20]
Katie Gadi Tassen
She, you're gonna laugh. I was looking for a business coach because I wanted someone to help me with tactics and strategies and whatever. And then after I interviewed a few people, the person that I ended up choosing is like, definitely builds herself more as like a life coach. And that is something that I was very skeptical of and kind of like a life coach or whatever. And I still kind of feel that way to be honest, but not about her. I did hire someone who, who really could help me find those blind spots. I think having that sort of objective third party person where in the beginning I set the expectation of like, I want you to call me out on my stuff. Don't let me get away with like, you're, you'll know if I'm telling you what you want to hear. Don't let me. And that has been really, really valuable. We've been working together for like 18 months and it's been great.
- [44:08]
Scott Trench
We have people come on bigger pockets, money all the time. With like a finance Friday, they'll bring us their, their financial information and say some version of what should I do next? And that's one of our favorite types of things to do. The, the biggest problem that we run into with a lot of these and we had to actually set the expectation ahead of time before we got them on the show going forward because it was this big of a problem, is they don't know what they want. Like, there's just, there's no goal to find at the end of the journey. So it's like, how do you, how do you help somebody plan financially for like an ambiguous future? It doesn't, it doesn't make any sense. Once the goal becomes financial independence, okay, at this point in time, we can know how bad do you want it? You want it so badly you're going to move into a dilapidated shack in the middle of a cornfield. Great, we'll get you there in seven years on it. You want, do you, do you want to do it with, with these constraints on it by spending this much, or are you locked into, you know, all that kind of stuff? You, I, you know, when you say you hired a coach, that is, there's almost never. Do you have someone who's got a coaching relationship like what you've got set up without that clarity of goals in place? Was that in place beforehand when you hired them?
- [45:15]
Katie Gadi Tassen
Oh, it's a good question.
- [45:17]
Scott Trench
Was it in place afterwards? And what are those? What do you know what you want in a fundamental sense? And does that make everything else. Else easy to plan for?
- [45:24]
Katie Gadi Tassen
Yes and no. I think part of why I wanted to hire help. And again, it's expensive, right? It's expensive to pay for somebody else's time. And so I did chafe at that a little bit because I was like, oh, I don't need this. You know, I can, I can, can find, I can talk to my friends, I can talk to my husband. I'll figure this out. But ultimately, what I was looking for really was clarity. I felt Like, I could go in a bunch of different directions, and I was having a really hard time picking which one. And I think overall, the values that I had that I was trying to. To align my life to, I knew it's, you know, autonomy. I want to be able to make decisions independently of the influence of, you know, I don't want to have to rely on money. That was important. Like, I want to be able to make decisions completely autonomously. But it was also that, you know, I really want to, like, make my mark on the world. I want to make a difference in some capacity, and I want to make sure that my work is always furthering that goal. I want to constantly nurture intellectual curiosity. I don't want to get. Get complacent, ever. And when I was starting to sense that my life was veering away from some of those values, that was kind of the alarm bell of like, okay, you need to do something that is going to get you back on the right track and, and prioritize the things that you say are priorities. Because right now you say those are the priorities, Katie, but really you're kind of just prioritizing making and saving as much money as possible. And, like, that's a pretty easy path to stay on if you're good at it and you like it. Like, society will just kind of pat you on the back for as long as you'll let it if, if that's what you're doing. Nobody really, like, will interrupt that level of success and be like, maybe you should kind of reconsider things. So, yes, in a broad sense, I knew what my values were and I could say, tell something was off, but I really wanted to hire somebody who could help me find that clarity about where I wanted to go next and how. How I get there.
- [47:28]
Scott Trench
Yeah, I will say this, though. You know, I, you know, when I was 23, 24, discovering fire, like, I didn't have all these answers to, like, the what? Like what, what life wanted to look like, whatever. So I pursued money, I pursued financial independence, and I'd do that again. I wish more people would, frankly, because. Because all these people have become, fine, they become philosophizers and they've got this philosophy of life and all that kind of stuff. And that's a privilege afforded to people who are financially independent. That's not afforded to somebody who's not there, by and large. And so I actually would say, if you don't know what you want, become financially independent, because you can spend the rest of your life figuring it out. It'll probably change six times on you as well. But acknowledging that there needs to come a point where you stop.
- [48:13]
Katie Gadi Tassen
Stops.
- [48:13]
Scott Trench
You stop accumulating more. That cutoff point for me, I would say, is draw to two and a half million on there where, like, there's no reason for most people, you know, maybe three and a half million if you're in California and two, you know, 1.8 if you're in Memphis, Tennessee, whatever, you know, adjust for your. Your area that you want to live in or whatever. But once you get there, if the goal is still a ton more, probably something's starting to be wrong.
- [48:35]
Katie Gadi Tassen
Oh, wait, can I clarify something? So you're kind of a personal wealth not limit, but kind of the point at which you would go, okay, if the goalpost is continuing to move, something has gone off track here is around two and a half million.
- [48:50]
Scott Trench
Well, I would say the goal in life is not to accumulate tens or hundreds of millions of dollars and miss out on the rest of it. Right, the goal.
- [48:56]
Katie Gadi Tassen
But.
- [48:56]
Scott Trench
But it's really hard to enjoy or it was really hard to experience autonomy, as you phrased it, if you do not become financially independent completely point in life. And so I just think it is a baseline requirement for, for really, you know, for many people. Not like, not everyone's this way. There's a spectrum. Right. But I think people listening to this podcast will agree by and large that that that pursuit of that next phase begins as one approaches financial independence. And that, that privilege of being able to think the way that you think and set your goals and think about those types of things and the way that you think I am Indy, that. That's really an evolution, a phase there. That grind is real. This, this lumber go up phase, as you called it, is a real price to be paid in America in 2025 to have the privilege of being able to visualize life that way. And not everyone does it, but I just think for most.
- [49:52]
Katie Gadi Tassen
No, I mean, I think that makes a lot of sense. You're right. I mean, I never, I never had those bigger picture questions until that phi goal for me had been reached. Because then you kind of get there and you're like, all right, what next? Like, all right, well, I guess I could just keep making. I could just keep trying to make that number go higher. But to what end? And so. Yeah, no, I totally agree. I think it's funny. The philosophizer, yeah, there's just.
- [50:14]
Scott Trench
There's like, there's no autonomy. You have to show up to work every day for 40 hours a week for most people to live the lifestyle that is a baseline expectation of America. Americans in 2025 for years and spend less and earn more on that path in order to have this privilege. So again, some people are able to free themselves mentally from that constraint and they are able to, like, live this, this barista fi lifestyle, you know, out there. I just, most people can't do that. It's just not wired that way. I'm not wired that way.
- [50:43]
Mindy Jensen
Katie, it has been so great talking to you today. Where can people pre order Rich Girl Nation rewriting the rules of wealth for a new generation? When. When does it come out and where can they pre order it?
- [50:54]
Katie Gadi Tassen
Well, thank you so much for asking. It comes out on June 10th and you can find it at moneywithkatie.com rich girl nation. And if you like podcasts or you, you know, like anything that you heard today, you can also find me on the Money with Katie show every Wednesday. I also have a newsletter with Morning Brew that we send every Wednesday where I send some of my longer form writing. But yes, I, I really appreciate you guys having me back and it was a pleasure to be back in biggerpocket Nation.
- [51:27]
Mindy Jensen
Great. Katie, thank you so much for your time today and we will talk to you soon.
- [51:31]
Scott Trench
All right. That was Money with Katie. Mindy. What'd you think?
- [51:35]
Mindy Jensen
I thought that was a fascinating conversation. She had so many little snippets that were so great. She talked about the formula for spending as your income increases. I really liked that one. And she talked about a dollar, say how she discovered a dollar saved today isn't equal to a dollar spent today. And like, how that just completely changed her mindset. And you really, you know, I think there's, there's a turning point in everybody's FI journey. They hear a thing, they read a blog post. They, you know, they hear a one little snippet, they're like, I get it now. And I just, I love that she shared that with us. The dollar thing really was really speaking to me. Scott, what'd you think of the show?
- [52:27]
Scott Trench
I think Katie is a master in her subject matter expertise with all this. She's a master of all things personal finance and five related, of course. But specifically, she just brings an extra level and extra gear to discussion of the specific roadblocks that women face as they approach fi. And you take a lot of those things for granted, or at least I do as a man in this. One example that came to mind during the episode I was thinking about is I was house hacking in an up and coming neighborhood when I was 23. And this was no issue for me, right? I'm a large single guy and I can bike at 9pm at night back from rugby practice or whatever, back to this, through this kind of, you know, dangerous neighborhood basically in there and build wealth that way. And that may be a harder another, yet another one of those obstacles as silent obstacles that are in the way for a lot of women. And I just love the fact that so many people are now starting to do work like Katie to shine a light on these things and begin to change those trajectories. I would hypothesize, I'd imagine they are starting to change. There's a ton of work left to do here, but I would imagine the gender pay gap is declining fairly steadily over time and that wealth inequality between genders is declining and there is more awareness of these issues. But there's a long way to go.
- [53:41]
Mindy Jensen
That highlights something that she said earlier in the episode. She said the right people put the right information in front of me at the right time. And I think that that is. Katie is one of the right people. She's, you know, I, I truly believe there's a personal finance voice out there for every single person. And if it's not, you know, if it's not us, if it's not Mrs. Frugalwoods, if it's not the mad scientist, maybe it's money. With Katie, it's just she's got so much information. She's, I would say she's 100% self taught. She didn't go to school for this. And I think that's even more important when someone is self taught. It's. The information just seems more genuine. They're like, I had to go and find this information. I did it on purpose. I found it on purpose and I wanted to bring that back. And now she's so excited. She wants to share it with everybody and she has such an easy, easy to understand way of sharing her information. So, yeah, it's always fun to talk to Katie. Scott, should we get out of here?
- [54:39]
Scott Trench
Let's do it.
- [54:40]
Mindy Jensen
That wraps up this episode of the Biggerpockets Money podcast. He is Scott Trench. I am Mindy Jensen. Saying adieu, Lou. My French accent isn't so great.