← HerMoney with Jean Chatzky
HerMoney with Jean Chatzky
Ep 459: How To Retire Early Without Hating Your Life
00:42:39
FIRE isn’t all rice and beans and extreme frugality anymore.
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Podcast Announcer
You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast.
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Jean Chatzky
This episode is brought to you by State Farm. You might say all kinds of stuff when things go wrong, but these are the words you really need to remember. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. They've got options to fit your unique insurance needs, meaning you can talk to your agent to choose the coverage you need, have coverage options to protect the things you value most, file a claim right on the State Farm mobile app, and even reach a real person when you need to talk to someone. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Hey everyone, I'm Jean Chatky. Thank you so much for joining us today on HerMoney, where today we are talking about all things related to the FIRE Movement. FIRE is the acronym for financial independence. Retire early. For the uninitiated, the movement is huge. It has a lot of devotees. It also has some detractors. In a nutshell, FIRE says live below your means. Invest as much as possible as early as possible so that compound interest can work its magic and give you a life where you don't have to work if you don't want to work. You can retire early if you want. You could do work that is more along the lines of things that you enjoy. But many FIRE folks, they take things to the extreme. Sometimes they save half their income. Sometimes they live a very austere life so that they can bulk up their savings as quickly as possible, arguably missing out on the occasional fun that life has to offer. But the deeper that you dive into the movement, you realize not everybody is taking that path. There are countless ways to get there that don't involve living off rice and beans for a decade. The Fire Movement itself, it's nothing new. It's been around since 1992, but it has gained significant ground in the last decade, particularly as younger generations save more for retirement earlier than previous generations did. My guest today, Shang Saavedra, achieved fire at age 32, and she is not afraid to share the ups and downs of her journey. She is the founder and CEO of the personal finance platform Save My Sense. And in her new book, wealth is a Mindset, change your mind, change your money, she shares the root causes of many of our money problems and explains how we can get out of a loop that we don't want to be stuck in, whether we want to retire early or just retire comfortably. Xiang, welcome. Thanks for being here, Jean.
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Shang Saavedra
It's an honor to be here. I'm so fangirling right now that I'm.
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Jean Chatzky
Oh my gosh. Thank you so much. And I want to start with your fire story. Many people who want to achieve fire do it for extremely personal reasons. What was it that drew you to this at such a. Such a young age?
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Shang Saavedra
Yeah, and I want to note two things. One, it was somewhat accidental. And two, I had a lot of privileges on the way that I want to acknowledge. So let's talk about the accidental stumbling into fire. I didn't know what fire was. I had been frugal most of my life. I was lucky that my parents shared a very frugal mindset and lifestyle with me because we were immigrants into the United States when I was a young child, and I'm an only child, and they took the time to teach me about financial literacy. A privilege that I enjoyed was that because my parents, frugality and their investing, they sent me to college debt free, which is a massive step up, I think, relative to many other people of my same age. I graduated school without having to worry about student loans. I got into a fantastic industry, management consulting. It's high paying, gives me a lot of great skill sets, allows me to network and grow into eventually Fortune 500 strategy companies. But throughout my early career, I'd always been attending these women's panels. Mom life. What's it like to be a woman in the corporate world? And over and over again, I got to the same conclusion, which is it's extremely difficult to be a working mom in the corporate world. And you may be. And at that time, there wasn't so much conversation about maternity leave and paid leave. So we're talking about unpaid leaves or taking career breaks that would really impact your career progression and possibly a lot of financial outlays that you need to set aside to become a mom. When I met my husband in business school, he actually separately had come up with the same thought. And he's like, what if we removed the worry over becoming parents financially by just learning to live off of the lower of our two incomes and maintaining that for the rest of our lives so that the additional costs of becoming a parent would not impact us significantly. So the first stumbling into fire wasn't, oh, I wanted to retire early. It was, hey, let's not fear the fact that we may become parents in the future. And then eventually, over time, our frugality. The approach came out to our friends in bits and pieces. And one of my very smart friends said, you remind me of Mr. Money Mustache. Read the blog, check it out. And that was the first time I even realized that I had been unconsciously part of the fire movement.
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Jean Chatzky
When you and your husband made this decision to basically live on less than half of your combined income. What did that do to your lifestyle and what did it do to your overall happiness?
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Shang Saavedra
I was the spender in the relationship. Coming in, I had dreamed, and I wrote about this in my book, I dreamed that after business school, my husband and I met in business school. I went to business school on a scholarship and then some support from my parents, another privilege. And I thought I would come out with a fancy six figure job. I would live in the heart of New York City. I'd have my it girl bag in my cool closet, and I would live the life. And that was not going to be compatible with the budget that we had agreed to upon marriage. And so I would say the initial attempt at living off of the lower of our two incomes was pretty misery inducing for me. I struggled day in, day out. I saw all my friends enjoying their lives on social media. And I knew that I didn't have it in my budget to travel the way they did, even go to fancy weddings or even agree to eat out at the latest restaurants. And I struggled that very first year just thinking, am I doing something wrong? Am I just really not good at budgeting and that? And that's why I can't afford to do everything else that my friends did. Or maybe they made a lot more money than I did and I just didn't notice. So I was questioning myself that first year for sure.
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Jean Chatzky
Of course, they made as much more money than you made because they were spending two incomes in a lot of cases, right? Rather than a single income. How did you get yourself to stick with it?
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Shang Saavedra
I guess because of me stumbling into fire. Eventually I realized, wait, Xiaomi, you're actually doing something very unusual, like people don't have the kind of budget that you're doing, but you're doing this in preparation for hopefully a relaxed future as a parent. And once I realized I just had different goals, then my friends, then my social media feed, I relaxed a little bit more. And then I also stumbled into a new epiphany, which was you could still have fun and have a very fulfilled life without spending a ton of money, even in Manhattan. And slowly I started asking myself, what was it that actually brought a lot of joy and fulfillment into my life and how can I achieve that without spending through the roof? And it started actually with eating out. Because I was a foodie, I enjoyed my food, I would like to eat out. But I realized what I truly sought after was actually companionship and not so much the eating out part. And I realized I can have companionship with my friends by having a dessert, a walk around the park, a bagel breakfast. Don't need to spend $100 on a bagel breakfast. And once that unlock started, I was like, oh, I could do something like that and be okay. I started applying that same line of thinking to every other part of my life. We already had a very low rental situation, but I applied it to my clothing, my travel, my own cooking, our enjoyment of entertainment. And that was when the habit of trying to live off of our lower of our two incomes finally stuck with me.
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Jean Chatzky
You started this when you were, I believe, 25 years old and achieved a six figure net worth by the time that you were 25 years old. I wonder about the emotional benefits to going this route. And just so my listeners know, we will get tactical. We will get to the how do you do this if this is something that you want to do? But in your book, at the very beginning of your book, you not only said that you grew up in a household that discussed money all the time, but you said that you had strong and anxious feelings about money that didn't seem to go away. Did over saving. Because I think fire is essentially saving more than you have to right now and in order to give yourself choices, additional choices down the road. Did over saving make those anxious feelings go away? Did it sort of deal with some of that anxiety?
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Shang Saavedra
I think my frugality was partially fueled just by this very rabid sense of needing to prove myself to the world. I talk about being bullied as a child and how from that bullying I suddenly decided I just needed to be good at everything that I did in order to gain validation from the world and escape my childhood bullying. And so even in my early 20s, when I was already saving money relative to my other college graduates because I had no school debt so I could start saving. And I reached six figures into my early my mid 20s. And then from the mid 20s to 31, that's when I reached seven figures. I guess it was ingrained in me, but also because I just had this crazy personality trait where once I commit to a goal, I do whatever it takes to meet that goal because I just had this childhood wound, that desired affirmation. And to me, achieving crazy goals was a way for me to gain that affirmation. Thankfully, I eventually learned I needed to go through therapy to address that part of my life. But as a side effect of me not knowing how to place those misplaced childhood wounds, the side effect was just a lot of achievement, a lot of goal orientation, a lot of drive to do crazy things. Throughout my early 20s, I wouldn't necessarily.
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Jean Chatzky
Put fire in the crazy bucket. I think sometimes we need big, audacious goals in order to motivate us. I just ran a marathon for my 60th birthday. Now, I know that's not exactly the same, but, you know, that, for me, was big and audacious. It is, and it was very motivating as well. You did this, as you point out, in New York City, which is a very expensive place to live. So can we break down, first of all, for people who don't understand how it works, the fire math? And then I want to talk about those specific categories and what were the smartest things that you did in each category in order to stay on track? How does fire math work? They're two different formulas, right?
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Shang Saavedra
Yeah. The most popular one is called the 4% rule, where it basically states that if your annual expenses are equal to 4% of your net worth, then you're considered to have enough in net worth to fuel your lifestyle and retire for the rest of your life. That comes with the assumption that your underlying net worth and your assets are being invested and growing at a higher rate of call, 8 to 10% on the market. So that even if you extract 4% from your portfolio each year, the underlying portfolio is still growing at a faster rate, and so it wouldn't go down over time. To build up to this very large amount of net worth means that you need to raise your income, lower expenses. And that difference, that gap between your income and your expenses is your savings that you then put into investments. And it is pretty common for people who are pursuing fire that they're putting away 40, 50, or even higher percentages, 40, 40% or above of their income into savings and investings each year. And then with the underlying market growth of those investments, that pushes their net worth eventually to 25 times their annual expenses.
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Jean Chatzky
So when you look at the different categories where you had to make radical changes in order to achieve fire, in order to live this way and not be miserable as you were when you started this journey, let's sort of take it one by one. I mean, you started with food, and I thought it was interesting that you not only pointed to eating out, which we know is just a sinkhole for so many people, but you reference the way that you cook at home. And a lot of people think as long as they're cooking, they're living inexpensively, but these days, that's just not true.
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Shang Saavedra
Yeah, I also keep in mind these were the years 2013 to the late teens. So this is before we had rabid inflation in grocery prices as well. This was during a low inflation period, so I had the benefit of low food prices. I happen to have been coached by a fitness and nutrition coach around the same time I was starting this journey, and she taught me about macros and how to think about my food in terms of proteins, fats, and carbs. So I was like, wait, that's actually kind of a pretty simple formula. I don't really need to have really complicated recipes. And then so I started designing all of my meals as a protein, a starch, and a veggie fruit of some sort. And. And so instead of thinking of my cooking as I need to make all these recipes, I was like, I just need to pre cook batches of essentially chicken tofu, batches of veggies and salads, and batches of pastas and rice. And that really simplified down my cooking and also the amount of ingredients that I need to buy at any given time.
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Jean Chatzky
What other categories did you find yourself? Having to make big changes in your.
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Shang Saavedra
Housing is the biggest lever that you can pull. And my husband, being the one who came up with the idea of us living off of the two lower incomes, he knew of somebody in who lived in Upper west side Manhattan who had just had a baby. So they were outgrowing their apartment. And they're like, we can put in a good word for you to our landlord. It's rent stabilized, which is a huge key word because it meant that there's only so much that the landlord can raise in the rent each year. And I mean, the apartment's nothing Fancy. It was 420 square feet. I think the kitchen had two burners, no countertop space. I had to cantilever the drying rack on the stove to pour into the sink overnight. But it was convenient. It had a lot of light, lots of ceiling space, so we could. We basically used everything underneath our furniture as another layer of storage space. Our bed had under bed storage, Our couch had under couch doors, our desk had under desk storage. But that apartment, the starting rent was. Was $2,000 a month. That is a steal for Manhattan. And so that was a huge part of how much we were able to save is by lowering the housing expense, dealing with the consequences of it. But if I had to go go back and do it all over again, I would, knowing that it was difficult, but it was worth it.
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Jean Chatzky
I have to ask, because some people say that fire is primarily for high wage earners. You and your husband had both been to business school. School. How much were you earning at the time? And what do you say to that criticism?
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Shang Saavedra
We both made more than a hundred thousand dollars, so we were definitely in the high earner category. And I do agree, I think that aspiring to fire is a lot easier when you are higher earning, when you're privileged like me to not have student loans to achieve something similar. But on a lower income primarily means that you need to have lower expenses. So that may mean not living in a prime city like New York City or San Francisco. There are many other places in the United States where rent doesn't even reach $2,000 a month.
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Jean Chatzky
We've been talking pretty much exclusively Xiang about one side of the equation. Money has an income and there's the money that goes out. I want to flip the discussion and really talk about boosting your income if that is the lever that you need to pull. But we're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back.
- [18:16]
Podcast Announcer
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- [18:25]
Shang Saavedra
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- [18:27]
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Jean Chatzky
I am back. I'm talking with Shang Saavedra about the fire movement. So we know that there is a huge emphasis on saving, reducing expenses in fire. But what about increasing your income? Are there overlooked ways that people should be thinking about doing that? And let me ask that question in the context of what's going on right now in the job market. It's become harder to get that next job.
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Shang Saavedra
It is. There's a lot of evolution in AI that is automating many business processes. And Wall Street Journal recently reported on this. This has probably been the toughest job market that white collar workers have faced in a very long time in the US History. I think it will remain to be seen how AI's impact is going to roll out over time. Right now, because of the high costs of AI processing, they're largely going after high paying, profitable companies with large back offices that they can probably automate. So I definitely recognize it's tough. At the same time, I think that the the best thing that you can do is not see your career as one set path with one kind of job. If you can be flexible and think of yourself as somebody who has a collection of skill sets and networks and the capability to learn and that you can evolve that into different industries, then part of the reason why I was able to grow my income significantly as well, I think over the course of my lifetime, my starting compensation versus my ending compensation was five times my starting compensation. That was around the time that I left corporate. And part is identifying growing profitable industries. I had this very, perhaps a bit of a naive idea. I really wanted to be in fashion, retail. Who doesn't love it? I love clothes. But I quickly realized when I was working for a retailer that my same set of skills would get me paid $40,000 a year more if I went to a different industry. And so part of it was swallowing my own pride and be like, do you really want to be in this industry but not have that extra $40,000? And that was a huge challenge. And eventually I was like, no, I kind of want more money. So I did switch industries. If you are young and you don't have a lot of other responsibilities, like I didn't have kids for a long time, you could also consider doing a side hustle, having more than one stream of income, which is really good because there's always a huge risk that your income may be impacted at any time by layoffs or just, you know, your company losing a big client. I took up a second job completely unrelated to my corporate strategy world, which was I became a wedding photographer. Super fun. Very unrelated to what I do now, but it was pretty steady. I think I made about five figures each year in profits that I was also able to add to my investments over time.
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Jean Chatzky
When you think about fire, I would imagine that any community trying to accomplish a big goal, it can get lonely. How important is it or was it for you to find other people who were pursuing the same thing? And how do you all. They call it a movement now? In the beginning, it wasn't a movement. It was just, have you heard of this thing? But now it's a movement. And how important is the fact that there are a lot of people trying to reach the same place?
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Shang Saavedra
I was so lonely the entire time. Like, before I discovered a Mr. Money Mustache blog, it was just me and my husband. I was actually too scared and too ashamed to even share what the heck that I was doing with any of my friends because I was like, I don't think people are going to understand what it is that I'm doing. So it just makes me look like a poor person.
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Jean Chatzky
So.
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Shang Saavedra
So, I mean, I had all these, like, misconceptions in my head that it just don't talk about it. And then by the time I discovered Mr. Money Mustache, and then eventually I started seeing people talk about it on social media, I'm like, ah, I wish I had that community back when I was doing it. Because you gotta find your people to continue doing what it is you're doing. And it's great. I love that there's so many subreddits dedicated to all kinds of hobbies these days. And that not only do we have a very healthy personal finance conversation and community across TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, but we also have a leading trend of celebrating under consumption these days. Like people actually talk about under consumption or not aesthetic homes and making that a normal thing to show. And I was like, I wish I had y'all around me 10 years ago when I was doing this.
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Jean Chatzky
So where are you now? You're a mom. You are out of corporate life. Tell us a little bit more, but also tell us what happens once you hit your fire number. Like, what do you do then?
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Shang Saavedra
I actually had a lot of fear, even after hitting my initial fire number, because that was a fire number for two adults. It did not include children. So I knew that it wasn't realistic at that time for my husband and I to quit. And also because our original goal wasn't to leave work, it was to sustain children. So we knew, okay, we're done saving for our own retirement now any extra dollar can go towards having children. And it was gobsmackingly expensive to send a child to daycare in Manhattan. We didn't end up staying partially for that reason. So had my first kid in 2019, had my second kid in 2022, by which point we moved from Manhattan to Southern California to be closer to my in laws, who do help every now and then with our children. But more importantly, what actually eventually led me to make the decision to leave corporate? My husband's still working. Corporate was a health scare. I couldn't have foreseen this, but right after delivering my second child for an unrelated reason, I ended up being in the icu. And that was awful. There was a person dying across the hall. And I was like, oh my gosh, am I here because I'm dying? Like, how can that be? By that time I was 37. I was like, no way, no way. Like, I shouldn't be here. And I guess that event really pushed me to ask myself, what? Do you want to be working in corporate or would you Rather do something else with your life, you now actually have the financial freedom to do it. But at point save my sense, my personal finance platform and coaching business had grown significantly and I was like, you know what, just do that, just pursue that. And I got my book deal around the same time. So it's just all God's perfect timing. Just saying here's a sign, like a really, really strong sign to stop fearing yourself and do something meaningful. And so nowadays I do full time save my sense. But also I'm the primary parent. So if anything happens to my children, if they need to stay home because they're sick or whatever, then I do no work. I dedicate my time to my children. My husband works a relatively stable chill corporate job that provides the health care.
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Jean Chatzky
The retire early part of fire is the part that seems a little bit squishy, right? If everybody seems to want financial independence, not everybody wants to retire early. There are a number of FIRE practitioners who, like you, go on to teach other people about fire, which is great, and about personal finance. There are others who just take jobs that make them happier or that they don't hate as compared with the one that they had before they achieved financial independence. How do you think about the juxtaposition between the FI and the re?
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Shang Saavedra
I think the FI gives you the options to define what RE is going to look like for you. And whatever you choose for it to look like, that's going to be your journey. And I celebrate that. Like I said, I wasn't starting out to retire early either. I wanted the optionality of not fearing my finances as a mom and that was what I was lucky to be able to achieve today. I also have coached many clients where the RE looks very different for a lot of them. For many of them it is stepping to a part time role, a less stressful industry, or taking a work sabbatical for a couple of years starting a business, also a very common one, and for some of them might be one person becomes more of the stay at home parents while the other person, like my husband, continues to work for the healthcare. Because a blind spot that a lot of people have going into early retirement is recognizing, oh, suddenly you're responsible for your own health care. Oh yes, and that can cost $20,000 or more a year. I mean, that's a very significant expense that many people are not prepared for.
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Jean Chatzky
I want to leave everybody with a place to start and you lay out in your book a very helpful framework called Fit for getting started making changes with your savings. Can you tell us just enough about it that we can grab on and maybe give it a try.
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Shang Saavedra
Yeah, FIT stands for F H I T, which is the order of accounts that I like to recommend to people to consider using to save for retirement. You don't have to listen to me, but I think this order also allows you to save and have your investments grow tax free for the most part, which is also huge because that just gives you ever so much an extra edge in having your investments grow over time. F stands for most of the accounts that start with the number 4. So think 401k, 403b, 457, any employer sponsored accounts. I like maxing those out. H. I joke that the H is silent because the H is for an optional account called the Health Savings Account. Great account for saving for healthcare, but not applicable to everybody. That's why I say it's an optional. Then it's the I that stands for ira. Typically that looks like either a traditional ira, Roth IRA or in some cases for high earners, a backdoor Roth ira. And then finally the T stands for taxable Brokerage, which is just a regular investment account that can open with any financial institution, but it doesn't offer you any tax free growth.
- [29:10]
Jean Chatzky
Great hierarchy to get started with. Shang Saavedra, thank you so much for being with us today. I know that you are going to come back and answer some mailbag questions for our listeners on a later show. So let me just tell everybody to pay attention and look for that. And just a reminder, Xiang's book is called wealth is a Mindset. Change your mind, change your money. Thank you so much for being here.
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Shang Saavedra
Thank you so much Jean for having me.
- [29:37]
Jean Chatzky
And we'll be right back. We are back for our mailbag. Emily White is joining me. So Emily, take it away.
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Podcast Announcer
So our first question comes from Heather. She writes, hi Jean and team. I've been a listener since episode one and I've stayed committed for the community and the knowledge. Much gratitude. I've been hearing that it's a good time to invest in bonds and I would love to know if it's better to invest in bond ETFs or mutual funds in 2025. I'm particularly trying to learn whether corporate or government, municipal and federal, or both are prime for the coming conditions. Should we focus on one or diversify across these sectors? She took a pause from Investing Fix over the holidays and wouldn't be surprised if you've covered this recently.
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Jean Chatzky
Well, Heather, I hope we'll see you back at Investing Fix in the coming weeks and Months. I actually haven't covered bonds recently. But the big difference is not so much between bond ETFs and mutual funds, but between individual bonds and bond ETFs or mutual funds. So when you buy an individual bond, you are guaranteed to get the return, the rate of interest that you are promised on that bond, as well as get your principal back if you hold that bond till maturity. So if it's a one year, you hold it a year. If it's a two year, two years. And it rolls like that. With these pools of bonds, you don't have the control. The manager of the bond fund has the control. And so for that reason, the fluctuations in the value of these pools of bonds can be greater than what you are signing up for if you buy individuals. Now, the reason that a lot of people go with bond funds or bond ETFs is because it can be really difficult to pull together a diversified portfolio of bonds by yourself, or what we sometimes call a bond ladder. Difficult, but not impossible. And once you sort of get it going, it kind of feeds itself. And the way that you set it up is so that you buy different bonds that come due at different times, and as they mature, you replace that bond with another bond. And it's a little like dollar cost averaging. You're buying at all levels, you're buying at all interest rates. And for that reason, it provides you with the same kind of diversification, but a little more control than you might get from a bond fund. Personally, I've got individual bonds in my portfolio. If I was going to go with a bond fund, I would probably just go with a low cost index fund or ETF that invested in intermediate term bonds and basically call it a day. You can also get a total bond market fund. But I tend to think that individuals are the better way to go. And we will put it on the list for a deeper dive in an upcoming investing fixed class. In fact, maybe we should bring in a bonds expert to talk to us both on the podcast and in the class. I think that's not a bad idea. So thanks for teeing that up. Heather. What do you think, Emily?
- [33:51]
Podcast Announcer
I love that I have one immediate follow up, which is I've kind of always understood the difference between ETFs and mutual funds in terms of the tax advantages of ETFs. I'm wondering if that also applies here.
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Jean Chatzky
So the tax advantages of ETFs depend on the ETF. So ETF stands for exchange traded funds, which I think that you know, and when we talk about Buying, say, AN S&P 500 Index Fund versus an S&P 500 ETF, you're not going to have heavy taxation in either one because there's not a lot of turnover in an S&P 500 portfolio because both of those portfolios are adhering to the index. When we have actively managed mutual funds that are trying to beat the market or actively managed ETFs that are trying to beat the market, you're going to get more of a tax implication either way. The biggest difference is that ETFs can be traded at any time. Mutual funds are only priced once a day at the end of the day, and a lot of people just have a preference for one versus the other.
- [35:22]
Podcast Announcer
Yeah, that makes sense. The other thing I'm sensing in this question is kind of a little bit of uncertainty about the future, which we just recorded the episode with Katherine Edwards where you talk a lot about that. And I'm wondering how that plays into this kind of focus on investing in bonds now.
- [35:44]
Jean Chatzky
Well, bonds are very dependent on interest rates. What we saw in 2024 was 3 reductions in interest rates. But at the end of the year, Fed Chair Jay Powell basically said, yeah, we'll probably continue reducing interest rates this year, but we're gonna take it as it comes. We're gonna watch what happens. We're gonna, we're not gonna tell you that we're gonna give you one in the next month or two or three. We're gonna wait and see what happens. The markets didn't like that because the stock market doesn't like uncertainty, but the bond market really doesn't like that. And so that's sort of what I'm, what I'm sensing. There have been a couple of articles and Heather, you should check out the recent coverage in the Wall Street Journal about really the place that bonds deserve to have in your portfolio overall, which is why I think it's a really good time to do a deeper dive into bonds. And we are, we are going to look, look forward to that. I know bonds are going to cause some people to say, really? And roll their eyes and maybe yawn, but they are an integral part of your investments. And so we should and will take a closer look. Let's take the next one.
- [37:05]
Podcast Announcer
So our next question comes from Sharon, who is asking about prepaid gift cards. She asks, hi, Jean. I love your newsletter and podcast. My husband and I receive Amex prepaid clear rewards cards every so often from our Amex credit card account in increments of 25 or $50. I used to purchase Amazon gift cards with those prepaid cards, but now Amazon kicks me out if I try to do that. A few stores in Brooklyn where I used to use the prepaid cards when shopping don't take them anymore. Any suggestions? I also got my last rebate award from the 1-800-contacts in the form of a $40 prepaid debit visa card. I haven't even tried to use that yet, but would also love suggestions for what to do with it.
- [37:53]
Jean Chatzky
Really good question. And the reason that there are stores that are not taking prepaid debit cards, prepaid gift cards, is because there's been an increase in fraud where those sorts of cards are concerned. I would just pick up the phone and call Amex and say, hey, I'm having trouble using this on Amazon. Can you help me do this? Can you give me some tips for what to do with this? And I might even ask, and I don't know if either Amex or 1-800-contacts will do this, but I might even ask if they would send you a check instead or do a transfer to a checking account. They may send, say absolutely not and may not be set up to do that. And if not, there are still plenty of places that will take these cards. Use it at the grocery store, use it for something else, and then take the $25 that you would have spent at the grocery store and buy the $25Amazon gift card that you want to give as a gift to somebody else. I think this sort of mental let's just take a little money from bucket A and move it over to bucket B and replace it with other money. It's all the same, right? $25 is $25. You want to use it in a place that's going to be easy for you to use and not stress out about this too much. But that's what's going on.
- [39:22]
Podcast Announcer
The only thing I would add is I wonder if in the Amex situation, they might even be willing to apply that as a credit back to the credit card balance itself. At least that's what my credit card does. And that's.
- [39:35]
Jean Chatzky
That is a very good suggestion. Yeah, that's an excellent same deal, right? You just took $25 and now you can take $25 from a different place that you don't have to pay and put it toward getting the other thing that you absolutely wanted to get, a little mental accounting to help you get on with your day. Emily, thanks so much.
- [39:55]
Podcast Announcer
Thank you for having me.
- [39:57]
Jean Chatzky
If you've got any other money related questions we'd love to hear from you. Send them our way by emailing us@mailbagar hermoney.com thanks to Shung Saavedra for sharing the pros and cons of the Fire movement these days. If you love this episode, please give us a five star review on Apple Podcasts. We always value your feedback and if you want to keep the financial conversations going, join me for a deeper dive. HerMoney has two incredible programs, finance Fix, which is designed to give you the ultimate money makeover, and Investing Fix, which is our investing club for women that meets bi weekly on Zoom. With both programs, we are leveling the playing fields for women's financial confidence and power. I would love to see you there. Her Money is produced by Hayley Pascalides. Our music is provided by Video Helper and our show comes to you through Megaphone. Thanks for joining us and we'll talk soon.