← HerMoney with Jean Chatzky
HerMoney with Jean Chatzky
Ep 487: From $100k to Millions: Tori Dunlap on Building Wealth That Lasts
00:38:06
Learn how the Financial Feminist herself makes money work for her.
Loading summary
Transcript38 lines
- [00:02]
Tori Dunlap
I am 99.9% in index funds and I think that shocks a lot of people. Index funds are a great way to invest, especially because they're diversified and they're low cost. So index funds are a group of stocks. So rather than trying to cherry pick the hot stock, you can basically choose from if you know hundreds, if not thousands of different companies and have the hot stock every time.
- [00:27]
Jean Chatsky
Hey everyone. Thanks so much for joining us today on HerMoney. I am Jean Chatsky and today we are talking about investing. Specifically, we're talking about how women are claiming their seat at the table like never before, building wealth, stepping into our financial power. Because here is the truth, the great wealth transfer, it's coming and women are poised to inherit the majority of it. That means that women need to know how to grow, how to protect, how to own our wealth today in a way that we've never understood it before. And my guest today is one of the most powerful voices pushing that movement forward. Tori Dunlap is the founder of her first 100k and host of the financial feminist podcast. She preaches what she practices that investing is not just an option for women, it's a requirement. Amen to that. And the last time we had her on the Show Back in 2021, she had hit that first milestone. Well, today she's a multimillionaire, a business owner and a leading advocate for financial feminism. We're going to take a very quick break. You know what doesn't belong in your summer plans? Getting burned by your wireless bill. Whether you're planning beach days, barbecues or that long overdue girls weekend, your phone bill should be the last thing holding you back. That's why so many smart savers are making the switch to Mint Mobile and keeping more money in their pockets each month. Mint offers premium wireless service including unlimited talk, text and high speed data on the nation's largest 5G network. This year, skip breaking a sweat and breaking the bank. Get this new customer offer and your three month unlimited wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month at mintmobile.com/hermoney. That's mintmobile.comhermoney upfront payment of $45 required equivalent to $15 a month limited time. New customer offer for first three months only. Speeds may slow above 35 gigabytes on unlimited plan. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. Tori it's such lately I've been traveling a lot, speaking at conferences, meeting with teams, logging in from hotel rooms and air and more coffee shops than I can count. And Every time I open my laptop to check email or review slides, I know I'm taking a risk if I'm not protected. Public WI fi may be convenient, but it's also one of the easiest places for hackers to grab your personal info. Passwords, credit cards, even bank logins. That's why I love ExpressVPN. It creates a secure, encrypted tunnel between your devices and the Internet so you can stay connected and confident no matter where you are. You simple to use. Just one click and it works across your phone, laptop and tablet. If you travel or work on the go like I do, this is one tool that you need in your digital toolkit. Secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com hermoney that's E-X P-R-E-S-S V P N.com hermoney to find out how you can get up to four months extra free. Expressvpn.com hermoney it's a pleasure to have you back.
- [03:59]
Tori Dunlap
Thank you for having me. Hard to believe it was 2021. I feel like the world and my life is so different since 2021.
- [04:07]
Jean Chatsky
I know in, in so, in so many ways, but in your wealth is one of them, right? As I just said, you're a multi millionaire. You. You own that. You talk about it on your social media channels all the time, which I kind of love because I think not enough women are out there and saying, yeah, I have a lot of money and I feel good about that. Walk us through your journey. What were the most important investing lessons that helped you get on that road?
- [04:41]
Tori Dunlap
Yeah, so I grew up with parents that were really financially minded because neither of them grew up with a lot. And so I was lucky enough to have a financial education for my parents. And I believe we talked about this on the previous episode. So I won't go into it too much, but my dad sat me down at my first corporate job. I think even the couple months before I had landed a job out of college. And he was like, okay, here's how the stock market works. Here's what a Roth IRA is. Here's how to go into, you know, this brokerage account and choose vti. And here's what VTI means and all of that. And it was a huge gift he gave me. And just like the rest of my financial education, I kind of took it for granted. Cause I didn't know anything else. And I was like, okay, I'm sure most people know this, right? Most women know this. And of course that wasn't the case. And so I became the friend all of my friends were coming to for advice and guidance around money. So her first 100k started with my own 100k journey of trying to save 100k at 25. And that was a combination of both liquid savings but also investments. I achieved that at 25 years old. I am 31 now. I just turned 31. Hard to believe, but we went from 100k at 25 to being a millionaire at 27 to multi millions at 28. And that wasn't accidental. That was very strategic one. It was entrepreneurship. Like I would not have made the money that I did to get me from 100k to a million had I not owned my own business and had that not been successful. But investing was also that kind of rocket ship behind that growth. And you know, you've talked a million times on your show and I've talked a million times on mine, but investing is one of the easiest ways, if not the easiest way, to make your money work as hard as you do. And especially for women, we are told all of these narratives around investing, that it's too complicated or too scary or that we should hand over our money to somebody else to manage it for us. And none of those things are true. And unfortunately, it's leaving us behind in terms of the wealth gap, in terms of our own financial agency. And me saying unabashedly that I'm a multimillionaire and that I want other women to be millionaires too is part of the whole shtick. It's part of the idea that I want you unabashedly pursuing wealth because wealth means options. Having money means options for your life and choices so you never have to stay in a situation that makes you feel stuck or unsafe. And you can put yourself in the situations that make life so joyful and healthy and exciting.
- [07:03]
Jean Chatsky
You describe it as financial self care, which I think is a, is a really wonderful way to think about it. I mean, we do so many different things in the name of self care. We see therapists, we exercise, we have dogs to keep us company. I mean, there, there's, there's just a, a laundry list. And this should be high on that list because if you don't have enough money, you can't do any of those other things.
- [07:32]
Tori Dunlap
Exactly.
- [07:32]
Jean Chatsky
Why do you think that women, so many women still feel intimidated?
- [07:39]
Tori Dunlap
Oh, gosh, again, I could. I mean, I literally wrote a whole book about it. I think that there's just misconceptions around money generally, right. That it's about numbers and math and. Oh, we're bad with numbers and math. And so, you know, therefore I'm bad with money. And money is a learned skill, just like anything else. If I want to learn a new language, if I want to learn to play a new instrument. I just bought a house and I'm learning how to garden, right? And I feel really bad at it. Like I don't feel good at doing this because I don't know anything, right? It's a learned skill. So. So that first bit especially feels really uncomfortable. Yet we believe we should just be like born with the good with money gene or born with the quote unquote bad with money gene. It is a learned skill. So that's everything. Money that's paying off debt, that's saving, that's budgeting, but it's also investing. I think unique to investing. This information has been gatekept from us. And I'm gonna sound a little like conspiracy theory here, but like I have the research to prove this. Like we have a multi, multi billion dollar industry, which is the traditional financial services industry that is built on making women feel like they're too stupid to understand. Like, we have the vast majority of the system, but also individual financial professionals who mansplain to women who only speak to husbands in the room and who make their living off of saying, oh well, all of this is really complicated, so why don't you give me your money and I'll charge you a 3% fee, which by the way is insane sane, and then I will just manage it for you. And in research for my book Financial Feminist, I found that only 25% of professional stock pickers outperform traditional diversified investments, which means that they're not good at their job. Like if I went to an open heart surgeon who only was successful 25% of the time, I'm getting another surgeon, right? I'm not going through with that surgery. But because we have been made to believe that we need a certain degree or we need a certain set of skills or knowledge, we're so afraid of making the wrong choice or losing money that we either don't invest at all or we hand it over to somebody who's really statistically not very good at their job and who's charging us an insane amount of money to be not good at their job.
- [09:52]
Jean Chatsky
I think that our tendencies to perfection also get missed.
- [09:58]
Tori Dunlap
Absolutely.
- [09:59]
Jean Chatsky
There is no perfect there. There is just. There's no perfect in this world. There is good enough and good enough is great. At least it's Been great lately. How do you wrap your brain around that?
- [10:12]
Tori Dunlap
I think you're 100% correct. And Liz Gilbert has this great quote that has driven me for so many years where she said, perfectionism is fear and stilettos. Right? Like, we. I love that we laud ourselves on being perfectionists. Like, it's something that we wear as a badge of honor. Perfectionism is just fear and stilettos, Right? It is you being too scared to take action for good reason. Right? Again, you're told it's complicated. You're told it's risky. There's so many myths that I debunk on our show and in my book where I've talked to thousands of women and they're like, well, my dad lost all the money in 2008, and that's like gambling, right? And I have to tell them and walk them through that there's the more risky type of investing, but there's the more stable, consistent over years, if not decades type of investing. And so there's all of this kind of misinformation or these, like, scary myths swirling around. But I also think it is back to the fact that even as children, boys are taught to be risk takers. They're taught to climb the monkey bars and jump off. Right. And girls are taught to play it safe. They're taught to, you know, make the safe choice to not get hurt, to not hurt others and just to not mess with the status quo. And I think investing is the perfect example of that, unfortunately, affecting us into adulthood and beyond. Where it seems so scary, right? It seems so scary. The stock market's scary. I can lose money. The 2008 can happen. The beginning of COVID can happen. Right. What happens when Donald Trump freaks out and the stock market responds? Right. Like, all of these things seem very scary. And you're exactly right. If you're chasing perfection, the stock market's not a good place for you. But you should not be chasing perfection. In fact, it's probably the thing that's keeping you broke.
- [12:05]
Jean Chatsky
Let's talk about your investing philosophy. You mentioned vti. Are you indexing everything? Are you picking individual stocks? What's your personal mix? We do a little bit of both here, and we can talk about that and why, but I'm interested in how you go about it these days.
- [12:24]
Tori Dunlap
I am 99.9% in index funds, and I think that shocks a lot of people. Again, if you are more financially savvy or financially minded, you know that between listening to both of us, Warren Buffett, Right. Like index Funds are a great way to invest, especially because they're diversified and they're low cost. So index funds are a group of stocks. So rather than trying to cherry pick the hot stock, you can basically choose from, you know, hundreds if not thousands of different companies and have the hot stock every time. But also if you know, stocks underperform or if a certain company goes bankrupt, that doesn't affect you as much because you're in with again, hundreds if not thousands of different companies. So this is the strategy that my dad taught me. This is the one that I teach in our stock market school where, you know, diversified investment has not lost so far. It never has. And so the only individual stocks I own, and I need to add Costco to this list every time somebody asks me because I am a ride or die Costco girl. I own Bumble and Shopify and that's it. I own Bumble because I wanted to support their IPO because they're a woman founded organization and so literally bought them when they IPO'd and Shopify we had worked with and it was on the up and up. And I like supporting them as a partner. So I take the more like the, the value kind of support. When I buy individual stocks, it's actually less about performance because I have so much of my money in those diversified index funds that when I'm buying individual stocks, it's like my personal stamp of approval of I like this company or I like what they're doing and I want to support them. And that's again why I'm like, I need to buy Costco. Because if Costco called me and they're like, we need a kidney, Tori, I'd be like, which one? So, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think that that's another misconception. Gene is, it's like, it's, oh, investing is about picking the hot stock or spending hours a day researching stocks and then, you know, selling them and trading them. And like that's the risky type of investing to me. Yeah, you can own a couple individual stocks, that's totally fine. I don't think that should be the majority of your portfolio, nor the majority of your time. Like I have Timothy Chalamet YouTube compilations to watch. I have a garden to maintain. I got better things to do with my life than like research hours and hours and hours every day or even every week. So I am a truly set it and forget it type of person when it comes to investing. And I buy the same thing every time, which is something like VTI or VX us, which I believe is the international stock ticker there. And that's kind of what I do long term.
- [14:56]
Jean Chatsky
It's interesting that you mentioned Costco, because Costco is one of the stocks that we've teed up in our investing program, which is an investing club for women. And I'm, look, I'm like you. I grew up at the heel of Jason Zweig. I have been an indexer since I started investing, in part because as a financial journalist, as you know, you're not allowed to buy anything. You work for a publication owned by the Wall Street Journal, as I did for many, many years. You can't buy anything that might be covered except for very, very broad, diverse index funds. So that's how I grew up. It served me well. But I found that there are a large group of women that want to be able to talk about stocks, that want to understand how do the companies behind these indexes work. And so that's, that's what we do in our investing program. And it's, it's actually a big confidence booster for a lot of the women. I've bought a few of our holdings along the way. Things that particularly talk to me. But I agree with what you say and the numbers agree with what you say. You've talked a lot about systems and systems being the secret to financial growth. What do you mean?
- [16:15]
Tori Dunlap
I think that you can get to a point, and I know because I'm living it and I've watched other people live it, where the money is not stressful or the money is not even top of mind, and you're not having to actively work to grow your money because it's all happening for you. So the budgeting method, for example, that I teach is like called the three bucket budget, right? And it's basically bucket one is your expenses, bucket two is your goals, and bucket three is everything fun. If you can automate bucket number two, meaning that you can automate your savings or automate your contributions to your 401k, the rest of it gets really easy because everything left over in your checking account, okay, is for expenses. And then everything left over after you pay your rent and your groceries and daycare is what you get to spend on fun stuff. And like, you just budgeted and you didn't have to track every penny. You didn't have to like categorize your money or whatever. You did the hard thing first. And if you get that set up, everything is just easier because you've, you've contributed your money to your emergency fund or to your other financial Goals. And you can check that box. So for me, even as a financial expert, gosh, I probably spend 30 minutes or less on my personal finances every month because I have systems that work for me. My investing is automated, my bills are automated. I know what feels good when I spend money and what doesn't feel good. I've spent years figuring out how that feels inside my body when I spend money in a way that's just to help me cope versus something I actually want. And so I think that those are the type of things that I hope you and I can teach women is that especially when you first get started again, like any other skill, like if I'm learning French, it's going to be really hard. I'm going to be trying to remember how to conjugate certain verbs. And then when you become fluent, it's like breathing. And so when you're fluent in money, when you have the system set up to support you, it's not an active choice every single day. You don't have to actively go, okay, I have to set up my money here and I have to invest here and I have to do this. It's happening on autopilot for you.
- [18:30]
Jean Chatsky
And you have to remember, I mean, 401ks do it for us, which is amazing and brilliant. But if you've got an IRA or a Roth or an HSA or a 529, you got to do it for yourself. But you only have to do it once and then it can go on automatic pilot. Tori, we're going to take a very quick break. When we come back, I want to dig into the great wealth transfer and a really special scary statistic that I just found about inheritances. Back in a sec. So here's a little behind the scenes moment. My producer Hailey got married a couple years ago and like so many couples, she and her husband had no idea where to even start when it came to merging their finances. Different accounts, different spending styles and a lot of awkward. You spent how much this week on takeout conversations. But then they found Monarch Money and it changed everything. It became their go to tool for syncing up financially. They linked all their accounts, checking credit cards, even investments and started doing regular monthly check ins. Now they track spending, set vacation goals and stay on the same page without all the stress. And the best part, Monarch makes it feel easy, like you're both in control of your financial future together. Get control of your overall finances with Monarch Money. Use code hermoney@monimalmoney.com in your browser for half off your first year. That's 50% off your first year at monarchmoney.com with code hermoney. You know that feeling when you walk in the door, kick off your shoes and just melt into your favorite spot? For me that's my bet. Especially now that I have Cozy Earth sheets. Cozy Earth bedding, made from viscose from bamboo is temperature regulating. Very important. It's also buttery soft and don't even get me started on their bubble cuddle blanket. It's got this plush feel that turns an ordinary night on the couch into a full on self care moment when the world feels chaotic. Cozy Earth helps reset and once you feel it there's no going back. Plus it's a risk free upgrade. You get a hundred night sleep trial and a 10 year warranty. But personally I don't think you're going to need the return policy. Head to cozyearth.com and use my code hermoney for up to 40% off. That's cozyearth.com code hermoney and if you get a post purchase survey make sure to let them know you heard about Cozy Earth right here. Because your bed should be more than a place to sleep, it should be your happy place. Cozy Earth makes that possible. We are back with Tori Dunlop. We're talking about investing. We're talking about the fact that women are expected to inherit the lion's share of the huge amount of money being passed down from parents and spouses to the next generation over the next few decades. It's coming mostly to women because women will inherit twice. It's not as I tell my brothers that my parents loved me better. It's just that we'll inherit from our parents, but we'll also inherit from those husbands that we will outlive when we inherit money. And this is a non gendered statistic. Research shows that within a year about 40% of that money has just gone poof. We have blown it. And in part it's because we don't understand how to handle large sums of money. In part it's because these inheritances are not as big on average as the trillions of dollars that are being passed down make. It sounds like they are front loaded to the very wealthy. Although there is some that will make its way through to everybody else. When you talk to women who know that one day they will receive an inheritance, what do you want them to know?
- [22:42]
Tori Dunlap
I haven't heard that 40% statistic and that makes that's going to keep me up tonight. That's just oof. I Want women to understand that this is an incredible opportunity. And I don't want to like, scare you, but I want you to make the most of it. I'll give you an example that's kind of related. A couple of years ago I was at, and I know you've been to plenty of these, this was my first, like, fancy New York dinner where you like get flown out for just the dinner. And like, I was sitting with like a bunch of influencers and content creators and I think I was the only, like, financial influencer, creator, author there. It was a lot of like, women doing fashion or like lifestyle content. And if I had to like put a net worth on that table, it was probably 50, 100, maybe $150 million. Like the women at that table were making and bringing in a lot of money. And all I could think about was that statistically none of these women, or at least a very, very small percentage of them, knew how to make it count. And that broke my heart because there's nothing cooler than women getting compensated fairly. There's nothing cooler than women acquiring money again, because money means choices and options and freedom. And it breaks my heart to know that that opportunity could be there and they don't know what to do with it, or they don't know how to manage it, or they're going to trust somebody who says they know how to manage it, but is just going to take and take and take. And I think the same thing shows up with inheritances, with acquiring a bunch of money, especially if you have not done the financial trauma work to understand what are your emotional triggers, what is your own scarcity, beliefs around money. Do you believe that people inherently with money are bad people? That's one I hear a lot, is that I don't want money because money makes you a bad person, or only bad people or evil people have money. And so I need you to take your financial education seriously any day, but especially in preparation for something that is going to feel big and like a big responsibility. But that is life changing money, hopefully. And I need it to be life changing for you.
- [25:12]
Jean Chatsky
Yeah. And the, the unfortunate impetus. And I just had this fascinating conversation with a researcher named Russell James, who's a professor out at Texas Tech University. And we were talking about, we were talking about inheritances, which are his field of expertise. And the unfortunate thing about inheritances is the money is so psychologically laden with guilt. I mean, he described it as a bag of mom death money. Like, what do you want to do with the mom death money? You want to get rid of it as soon as you possibly, possibly can. And. And that is why we just cycle through it so quickly. So even if you have to sit on your hands and park it in a savings account. High yield, please.
- [25:59]
Tori Dunlap
Yep.
- [26:00]
Jean Chatsky
Just do that until you've processed whatever loss got you to that point.
- [26:06]
Tori Dunlap
No, but you're so right with that, too. And I'll be brief here, but it's so true where money is emotional. People think money is about math and it's about numbers. No, money is a. So. So psychological. And especially when that is a direct correlation. Right. I got money because a loved one died. Ugh, that feels so emotionally loaded. So your first step is actually to do nothing financial. Your first step is to go to therapy. Like, your first step is to take $150 and go pay a good therapist. And that's your first step, is to make sure that you are emotionally processing how that feels before you make any sort of financial decision.
- [26:44]
Jean Chatsky
A hundred percent. Let's talk about the flip side. When women speak boldly about money, they get backlash, and you get a lot of it. I mean, I. I follow you on social. I look at your socials. I just. I get so angry at the people who lash out at you because they don't understand what a service you are doing for the world. They don't get it. And it. I mean, you're talking about breaking your heart. It really, like, it hurts to see other people who should be saying thank you, not saying thank you, but instead saying really heinous, awful things. Why do you think it's so triggering?
- [27:31]
Tori Dunlap
Oh, gosh, again, how long do we have? First of all, that's really nice of you to say thank you. I'll actually, again, I'm going to split it by gender. I think men feel. Some men feel threatened by powerful women. And I think they also feel threatened if in a traditional gender binary or in traditional gender roles, a man is the provider. If Tori's providing for herself, what are they good for? Right. And I think if you are to really go down a couple layers, that's a lot of this is. We know patriarchy and gender roles hurt men just as much as they hurt women, sometimes more. And I think that when some men see powerful women who make their own money and who like themselves and who feel confident and who can show up unabashedly, that feels like a threat to them and a threat to their own masculinity, but also a threat to the very role that they've been told to play for. You know, since the dawn of time, when men are mad at me, I don't care. The sad thing is, women are like. Because that's. Those are the ones that really affect me. Because, one, I think a lot of women, when they feel silenced by men or just by the Internet, they shrink in on themselves and they stop talking. And I'm like, I need your voice. I need your voice. I need what you have to say. And so I hope that I continue to show women that no matter how quote, unquote big you get or how many followers, like, there's always going to be people who are interested in not supporting you, but you have to keep going anyway. But when women do respond and they feel threatened or they feel uncomfortable, there's a really interesting challenge there that I think most women are either unable or unwilling to take on, which is we have been told as women that there's one seat at the table, right? And maybe not even a seat at all. And so patriarchy has done a great job of convincing all of us women that we can't support each other because we need that one seat. We got to push every woman out of the way to get that one seat. And rather than see it as an opportunity to go, oh, I feel uncomfortable watching her content for some reason, let me investigate what that reason is. It's a lot easier to respond in a negative way or respond in a way of, well, why is she talking about how much money she has? That's bragging, right? And I have so much empathy for that because again, we've. It's one seat at the table. No wonder you feel like you have to drag me down to make yourself feel better. And I hope that we get over that at some point. I hope that every single woman, both individually and collectively, starts to see other women and other women's success as opportunity of, oh, she has something I want. Not I'm jealous or envious or I want to take it from her, but rather, that means it's possible for me. That means that the life that I see her live that makes me uncomfortable for some reason, is actually telling me I really want that. And not only do I want it, but I've seen her get it, so maybe I can have it too, or have a version that feels right to me. And I think just with money generally, just like any other taboo topic, it's really uncomfortable. People don't want to talk about it. That's why I'm so unabashedly transparent about what I want, how much money I have, what I want to do, the Mission of our company and the mission of our work. Because I want you to feel a little uncomfortable and then ask yourself, well, why do I feel uncomfortable about this? And like, who is that serving? Who is that uncomfortability serving? Because it's not serving me.
- [31:21]
Jean Chatsky
Yeah. Yeah, boy. I'm sitting here and you're watching me shake my head and probably roll my eyes because my very first job out of college was at working woman magazine, which was that world. This was 1986 and this was a world. Women's magazines are the worst place on earth. Let me just say they are the worst place place on earth for exactly that reason. Because you are with a group of people who all feel as if they're working or you were at least with a group of people who feel as if they're all working for the same individual blue ribbon. That was 1986. It's been 40 years. It's been more than 40 years. I wish. I wish it was different. I wish it was different. All right, let's switch gears here with the few minutes that we have left and talk about one of your superpowers which is maximizing credit card points. I am very, very interested. I recently discovered point me. It has kind of changed my life. But you have. I know you. You use them to travel free, get into lounges, dining, perks. What are your very best tips?
- [32:38]
Tori Dunlap
Yeah, again, I'm going to start with a misconception because everybody has myths just like investing or debt. It's the same thing with credit card points. Oh, I need to be a business traveler. I literally talk to my mom about this every month. We have a phone call where she goes. But I don't travel as much as you, Tori. And I'm like, it does not matter. You don't need to be a professional business traveler to earn points or to like get perks. I need to be spending hundreds of thousands on the card a year. No, you don't. I need an immaculately good credit score. I think for some of the better cards. Yeah. A score over like 650 to 700 is going to unlock certain things for you. But you can start a cash back card with a credit score that's not that high. Okay. So I mean, I literally just booked three weeks ago a lie down flat business class seat from Seattle to Europe for credit card points. And it would normally have cost me a couple thousand of dollars. And I am not interested in paying a couple thousand dollars for a flight. But I can have experiences or experiences unlock for me when I have these cards. Available, I wouldn't spend money on that kind of business class. I wouldn't spend twelve hundred dollars a night at really fancy hotels. But my credit card points, I'll spend those. So I think the first tip is get yourself a good credit card. This is obvious, but some credit cards are better than others. And if you like me in my early 20s was just with my first card that my dad told me to sign up for as opposed to the one that might get you even better points and miles. It's something to look into. General, cash back cards are great starter cards because you earn cash back on anything you buy. And then if you do want to get more of those travel perks, there's travel specific credit cards. The second tip is to sign up for a card that is more of a general, like a bank card rather than like a particular airline or a particular hotel brand. Never sign up for a store credit card. Do not get a Victoria's Secret TJ Maxx Macy's card. It's not going to do anything for you except statistically put you in debt. So we're looking for like a Chase card or an American Express card rather than, especially for your first couple cards rather than like a Hyatt card or an American Airlines card because you're going to have more flexibility on where those points go. And my last tip for you is almost never book things through the portal that your credit card company gives you. So I'm a devout Chase credit card user. I have a Chase sapphire reserve that's my like go to Everyday card. It's also a metal card, so I feel badass when I throw it down on the table to pay. It's great. But Chase has a portal where you can go in and you can book flights from the portal. Ultimately, if it's a free flight, I, I don't care how you book it, but it is not the best use of your points. Instead, when I just booked this flight on I think it was Virgin Atlantic, I transferred my Chase points out of Chase and over to Virgin and I was able to get a much better deal for my points than trying to go directly through the Chase portal. So that's my final tip, is use the portal for almost nothing, especially when you're booking flights. Transfer your points to the airline that you want to book with.
- [35:56]
Jean Chatsky
Yeah, because not only do you get a better deal by transferring, but if you ever have to try to change that flight and you have booked through the portal, it is a hair. Yeah. Oh, it's just, it's just awful. So I have that card too. Are you feeling any hesitation at all about paying the increased fee?
- [36:19]
Tori Dunlap
I have both a Chase Sapphire reserve and an AMEX Platinum.
- [36:23]
Jean Chatsky
Oh, I cancel. That makes Platinum.
- [36:25]
Tori Dunlap
I'm thinking I've had for probably the last year or two inklings of like, I think I need to cancel the AMEX Platinum because I don't use it as much. And I think that this is a perfect example. I'll use myself where it's like, your cards should be working for you. And I don't know if my Amex Platinum's been working for me, to be honest. I just finally redeemed the last of my points. I have like a couple left over, but I just redeemed those at a hotel in Hawaii a couple months ago with my partner and I think it's probably time to cancel it because, yeah, those, both of those annual fees are about 800 bucks and I'm definitely getting the use out of the reserve less. So on the Platinum, I think I've probably, I probably paid like half of that annual fee back in perks, but that's probably not enough for me to continue having that card.
- [37:10]
Jean Chatsky
I actually went to gold.
- [37:12]
Tori Dunlap
Oh, yeah. Yeah. So I was going to say one of the things, one of the things I'm going to do is the first thing is I'm going to call and be like, hey, I'm thinking about canceling my card. Help me stay. So I've had friends who have gotten, you know, their annual fee waived for a year. Or you go, yeah, can you, you know, give me a point boost? Like, you're not going to give me money. Can you give me points instead to stay? Or can you downgrade my card?
- [37:37]
Jean Chatsky
Yeah, and it worked. Works just as well. Tori Dunlop, you are the best. Love talking to you. Thank you so much for this. What's the best place for our listeners to just keep their eyes on you?
- [37:50]
Tori Dunlap
Yeah. We have a free personalized money plan that if you take this six question quiz, it's not pass or fail. It's just to learn more about what's going on in your financial life. And we'll send you that free plan so you can go to her first 100k.com/quiz. And I'm also her first 100k on all the socials. Instagram is my favorite, so I'd love to see you there.
- [38:09]
Jean Chatsky
Thank you, Tori.
- [38:10]
Tori Dunlap
Thank you.
- [38:11]
Jean Chatsky
If you love today's episode, please take a moment to leave us a five star review on Apple podcast. Your feedback means the world to me. And if you're ready to keep the money conversation going. Her Money has three amazing programs designed to help you feel more calm, confident and in control of your money. There's Finance Fix. It's our four week coaching program that helps you rethink your spending, find hidden savings and make smarter choices for the future. Our Pre Retirement program runs for six weeks and walks you through building a retirement strategy that's personalized for your next chapter. Finally, there's Investing Fix, our investing club for women. It meets every other week on Zoom. It is a supportive space to learn, ask questions, grow your investing confidence and build your portfolio. And your first month is absolutely free. These programs are truly helping level the playing field for women financially. I'd love to for you to join us. Her Money is produced by Haley Pascalides and our music is provided by Video Helper. Thanks so much for listening and we'll talk soon.