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- [00:00]
Farnoosh Torabi
Hey there, it's Farnoosh. If you've been meaning to finally get your investments working smarter, join me on Tuesday, September 30th for my live investing workshop. I'm gonna walk you through a very simple portfolio that you can actually maintain. How to pick the right accounts, automate your contributions and avoid costly mistakes. No day trading, no jargon, no crypto. You know me. Plus I leave time for your questions. Spots are limited, so save your seat now at somoneyworkshop. Com.
- [00:31]
Mario Lopez
Hey folks, it's Marc Maron from wtf. Today I want to talk to you about Boost Mobile offering reliable nationwide coverage backed by a 30 day money back guarantee. Love your service or get your money back, no questions asked. Boost Mobile offers the coverage, network speed and service you're used to, but at more affordable prices. Why pay more if you don't have to? You can get an unlimited plan for $25 a month that will never increase in price and ever no price hikes, no multi line requirements, no stress. Visit your nearest Boost Mobile store or find them online@boostmobile.com After 30 gigabytes, customers may experience slower speeds. Customers will pay $25 per month as long as they remain active on the Boost Unlimited plan. Does it ever feel like you're a marketing professional just speaking into the void? But with LinkedIn ads, you can know you're reaching the right decision makers. A network of 130 million of them in you can even target buyers by job title, industry, company seniority, skills and Did I say job title? See how you can avoid the void and reach the right buyers with LinkedIn ads. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a free $250 credit for the next one. Get started@LinkedIn.com campaign. Terms and conditions apply. Hey, what's up? It's Mario Lopez. Back to school is an exciting time, but it can also be overwhelming and kids may feel isolated, a vulnerability that human traffickers can exploit. Human trafficking doesn't always look like what you expect. Everyday moments can become opportunities for someone with bad intentions. Whether you're a parent, teacher, coach or neighbor. Check in, ask questions, stay connected. Blue Campaign is a national awareness initiative that provides resources to help recognize suspected instances of human trafficking. Learn the signs and how to report@dhs.gov Blue Campaign.
- [02:30]
Farnoosh Torabi
So Money Episode 1885 the Financial Advice every woman needs to hear.
- [02:35]
Mario Lopez
Right now you're listening to so Money with award winning money guru Farnoosh Torabi. Each day get a 30 minute dose of financial inspiration from the world's Top business minds, authors, influencers, and from Farnoosh yourself, looking for ways to save on gas or double your double coupons. Sorry, you're in the wrong place. Seeking profound ways to live a richer, happier life. Welcome to so Money.
- [03:04]
Katie Gatti Tassen
One of the biggest and best negotiation tips that I've ever gotten comes from a woman named Katherine Valentine. And it's to stop talking. And I know that sounds so crass, but it really makes sense when you think about it because women are socialized to put other people at ease, right? How do you be a good girl? What do you learn from the youngest age? You make other people comfortable. You're accommodating, you're nice, Right? But asking for more money is uncomfortable. That is not, on its face, a very pleasant conversation. It feels like you're making a demand of somebody else. And that really goes against the grain of how many of us are brought up.
- [03:44]
Farnoosh Torabi
Welcome to so Money, everybody. I'm Farnooch, and my guest today is one of the most vibrant and necessary voices in personal finance today. Katie Gatti Tassen is the founder of the wildly popular Money with Katie platform and host of the podcast by the same name. And she's back on our show with a brand new book that is as bold as it is brilliant. It's called Rich Girl Nation. It's not your average money guide. Katie weaves sharp analysis, real world context, and her signature wit into a sort of manifesto for financial independence, especially for women. Navigating things like the beauty tax, the motherhood, penalty, work plays, politics, and a world where financial systems were not exactly built with us in mind. You know, we discuss why her first chapter is called the Hot Girl Hamster Wheel. How Investing in Yourself Early Can Pay off big. I have a personal story about that and why financial independence is not just about retiring early. It's about creating and affording options. Here's Katie Gatti Tassen. Katie Gatti Tassen, welcome to SO Money. It's so nice to see you.
- [04:57]
Katie Gatti Tassen
Thank you for having me back, Farnoosh.
- [04:59]
Farnoosh Torabi
You have a very important book coming out called Rich Girl Nation. I love that you're on the COVID and I also love that you have this face that says, I feel very Zen, but also don't fuck with me.
- [05:13]
Katie Gatti Tassen
Okay, So a funny story about the COVID is that the original cover photo before November was a smiling photo with a megaphone. Cause it was a tongue in cheek.
- [05:24]
Farnoosh Torabi
Yes.
- [05:24]
Katie Gatti Tassen
Better way to indicate that I have a lot of opinions that I'm going to say very loudly than holding a literal megaphone. But then after the election, we got together and we were like, feels like we might need to take a more serious, tacky. And that's how the COVID changed relative to the last minute.
- [05:42]
Farnoosh Torabi
Your book is very good at understanding the context of, okay, we need to take care of our money, but also the world is a mess. Here's how we're going to do it. And do it calmly to the extent that we can, but not say sometimes we need to get mad and angry too.
- [05:59]
Katie Gatti Tassen
Yes. And in the moments where that anger is motivating, or as you've spoken to in your work, where fear can be a really healthy fact, a really healthy motivator. For me, I believe that all women can and should be financially independent. Even though, and this is what I try to cover in the book, even though systemically we are up against very real obstacles, very real challenges. But what I wanted people to take away from it is that you don't have to be, quote, unquote, rich in the traditional sense in order to be financially independent. You don't have to be literally retired early in order to operate independently of anyone else's influence. And if you structure your financial life in a certain way, you're going to find yourself in a radically different position just six months or a year from now. And so I think when we're in moments politically like the one that we're in right now, where even just this morning I see an executive order that appears to be attempting to chip away at the Equal Credit Opportunity act, which is the law from 1974 that gave women the power to access credit without a man's approval. We are in a very scary time. And so I don't see my role as ever downplaying that. But I also don't see it as inflaming that further. I think that there are real steps that we can take. And a big message of the book that I conclude with is that after you get your financial life in order, it is your duty to bring other women along for the ride, teach other women what you've learned, to help other people, that we're only going to make real progress if we start thinking about this as a larger collective project and not just an individual effort to be undertaken privately and personally.
- [07:55]
Farnoosh Torabi
Yes, I want to get into the chapters of your book, but you said something that was really important, which is the importance of community and bringing each other up as we rise. And your story started in that way as a 22 year old going to an event with your friend, being in a room, finally with other financially Spirited women who. So it was a Money Diaries event. Money Diaries, an important book written by Lindsey Stanberry, who been on the podcast. She's a friend of the show. Manisha Thakur was there as well, who's just a force in the personal finance world. And they were hosting an event. You were there and a light bulb went off. But you didn't get there without a friend bringing you there. I just found that to be like what you said and how your story started. Take us to that moment. Because also, Katie, everyone should know you had this sort of come to Jesus about your personal finances being important and wanting to build wealth at a pretty young age. So I kind of want to understand that too. Like, how do you become Katie at 22, caring about money and your financial independence?
- [08:59]
Katie Gatti Tassen
That Money Diaries event was a life changing evening for me. It is the story that I opened the book with because it really is where it all started. And it started there because a woman who was also my age, who I had started to have conversations about money with. We weren't either one of us financially sophisticated, but we got credit cards at the same time. We were coworkers. We figured out how to get our first credit cards together. And then we had to figure out how did these work. I remember we worked for an airline, so we traveled to San Diego and we were trying to rent a car there. We had no money, remember, we were so broke, we made $12 an hour. And so because we worked for an airline, we could fly for free. But then once you get to the place that you've flown, you now have to start paying for things. And I remember this friend, she went to rent the car with her new Discover card or Imagine Discover cards, and it declined because her credit limit was 500. And if you've ever rented a car, you know that they put a hold on the card for around $350. She didn't have that much leeway on the card. And so we were both panicked there in the Hertz office being like, what do we do? Okay, let's try mine. And so I think we had enough kind of friendly, lifey conversations about money just through the process of doing life together and trying to figure it out together. That when that Money Diaries tour came to Dallas, she got me out of the house on a Tuesday night and was like, dude, we should go to this. Yeah, we gotta figure this out. And it was that invitation and it was that bridge that somebody else who I trusted, who knew because I had shared with her that I cared and wanted to know More, knew that I cared and wanted to know more and took that extra step. Once I got into that room, I was absolutely blown away because I had never been in a space before where there were hundreds of women talking about money together, where they did a little Q and A at the end of the night, and I figured, oh, that this night's over. I've been to these things before. People don't ask questions. Hand after hand flew into there and people were asking questions that, by definition, was revealing intimate things about their personal financial lives. And I was like, whoa. If people care that much that they're willing to reveal this financially intimate information to this room of strangers, I think a lot of people want to talk about this more. I think that this is actually something that, like, I am not alone in. And so that really set me off on this path of I want to know more. I'm capable of learning more and more. I need to tell other women about what I'm learning, because the more that I learned and the more that I got into the financial independence space and started to grasp how life changing these decisions can be, particularly if you're making them young, I felt like I had to tell other people about it.
- [11:59]
Farnoosh Torabi
Yeah. Wow. What I love about your take and the way that you deliver your content is that it's not just tips. It's context plus tips. It's analysis plus advice. It's real. And even the way you organize the book. I've read a lot of personal finance books. I've written a lot of personal finance books. I think this might be the first book for women about money where you tackle these. For example, the first chapter, the Hot Girl Hamster Wheel. We all know that there is a tax for being a woman in this country. If you want to look a certain way, the culture tells you have to look a certain way. And so you try to uphold these standards of beauty that ends up costing us. That's right. And you decided to start with that. Why?
- [12:42]
Katie Gatti Tassen
To me, the hot girl hamster wheel was the concept that was most conspicuously absent from all other personal finance advice that I had read.
- [12:53]
Farnoosh Torabi
Yes.
- [12:53]
Katie Gatti Tassen
And most of the personal finance advice that I read in the beginning, to be totally honest with you, was written by men, because most of it is written by men. And so I remember doing my first budget audit when I was like, okay, I'm gonna get my life together. I'm gonna. I'm gonna become financially independent. It was Inspired by a Mrs. Frugalwoods interview on the Choose Fi podcast. And on this podcast, Mrs. Frugal woods talked about the fact that she doesn't buy makeup, she doesn't pay for haircuts. And this was like a radical admission to me as a 22 year old woman living in Dallas, Texas, where it's like the bigger and blonder the hair, the closer to God. Everyone has fake nails, everyone has fake eyelashes. Now five to ten years later, everyone has fake lips. It is a very high level of aesthetic upkeep that is just the baseline in that city. So it really surprised me to hear another woman talking about beauty as a financial topic. I had heard about, oh, the beauty industry is terrible for women's self esteem. I had never heard somebody say the beauty industry is terrible for women's financial health. And so I felt like that was a topic that I really needed somebody to speak to directly and lay it all out on the line for me and say, hey, you are totally free to spend your money however you like to, but you should know that you're spending an average of at the time for me, it was around $300 per month. That is actually quite in line with the average, which is around $320 per month as of 2017. And that over a 40 year career of you spending that way, just know that you're giving up about a million bucks in opportunity costs. If that's fine with you, go forth and prosper. But I don't think many of us think about those decisions as optional. I know I didn't really feel like it was optional to have a nice manicure in my office because everyone else did. And so I think that these are conversations that really exemplify that intersection between personal choice and systemic change. Because Jessica Zaffino does wonderful work on this. The way that beauty standards work is that the more people who labor and spend to uphold them, the more that pressure is exerted on every other woman to do the same. While it's comforting to think about those decisions as being made in a vacuum, the reality is if I get Botox and walk down the street, the women that I interact with are going to subconsciously receive the message that their faces shouldn't be moving either. And so I think when we start to talk about how we can change our own personal decisions and link that back to. And here's how that's going to impact the people around us too. It's going to make us healthier, wealthier, wiser, but it's also going to lessen the pressure that other women feel to meet those norms. I think that's a really critical conversation for personal finance professionals to be having. And I think it just perfectly illustrates how a lot of these financial choices that we think of as individual really are not.
- [16:02]
Farnoosh Torabi
Right. So the question you must ask yourself is if you are going to go do the thing that you want to do for beauty reasons, are you doing it because you want to or you feel pressure to? And I think it's also important to realize why this is so important. $300 a month, a million dollars in lost wealth. But also you're talking to a demographic that makes significantly less than men, Right? We live longer than men, so we need our money to last longer than men. It' especially important to have this conversation with women. Look, if men and women were both spending money on makeup equally, it would still be more important to tell the women, that's right, because you're not earning as much.
- [16:43]
Katie Gatti Tassen
You're.
- [16:44]
Farnoosh Torabi
It's. You're not able to endure your career typically as much because again, society places this pressure of caregiving on you disproportionately than on men. Let's talk about that chapter where you talk about every mom is a working mom.
- [16:58]
Katie Gatti Tassen
So this is the chapter in the book that was inspired by a conversation that you and I had on my show a while back where you taught me about the bigger math. By bigger math, you meant that even if when your children are young and you are staying in the workforce, and we know childcare is astronomically, inexcusably expensive in this country, it is laughable the extent to which the federal government expects families to privately bear this burden. We know that this is true. And we also know because of all of the factors that you just listed, the lower wages, the tendency for the management class, women included, to view mothers as less committed, less competent, perhaps more likely to call out, because again, if you have a family, you have other obligations. And this is something that we all need to understand and be supportive of.
- [17:54]
Farnoosh Torabi
But.
- [17:57]
Katie Gatti Tassen
If your net income during the time that your kids are in childcare is mostly just going to childcare, it is really easy to view that as a wash and to go, I guess I should just stop working. I guess it would just be better for me to stay home because right now it's like I'm just working to pay for childcare. But you taught me about the fact that is an investment in the future when you leave the workforce, when you take a few years off. It's not that you can't do that. And there's absolutely ways that you can be strategic about this. So I don't mean to say that it's definitionally going to set you back. But oftentimes that is, in reality, the practical effect for people is that they take five, six, seven years off, they try to get back in, and they find that the workforce they're trying to reenter is very different, and they're now starting from a much lower place. So the bigger math is thinking about when you stay employed, even if in the short term it feels like a wash, you are investing in higher lifetime earnings. And to your point on my show, more flexibility later in your career when your kids are older and they're getting off the bus, when they're 13, 14 years old and they really need you there at home. And like now you actually might be able to be there because you have a little bit more seniority, you have a little bit more trust in your organization, you have a longer track record, you have savings.
- [19:17]
Farnoosh Torabi
One thing that I did when my kids were little, littler. They're still little. They're 8 and 10. I was very aggressive with investing, so maxed out all my retirement accounts and invested in a brokerage account. This brokerage account, I didn't know what to call it. I was like, I don't know, this could be like, supplementary for my retirement. Who knows? But I don't need this for the next five years at least. So I'm gonna take a risk and invest this money. Now, five years, six years later, that brokerage account has grown. And for me, it serves as a source of calm. Where now in my mid-40s, my kids are older, they do need me more in. In more mentally difficult ways. Like, I feel like when you have little kids, it's very phys. Exhausting. As they get older, they challenge you. It's a lot of like, mental gymnastics with. This is at least my family anyway. All this to say that I continued working. Yes, because I did the big math and it is already paying off. Not when there are teenagers, but now when they're 8, 10. And we're living in an economy with so much uncertainty, I may not want to work as hard as I was five years ago. And I have the Runway now to be able to have options. Which is the biggest theme from your book that I took away, was that if there's anyone out there, man, woman, do you want options? Do you want to have choices in your life that you can afford, that you can create and then afford, like, the option may not even be out there, but, like, you can put it. Make it out, out of thin air yourself. I think that's a message that is universal but is not often communicated well. And you do it very well.
- [20:54]
Katie Gatti Tassen
Thank you. I think that there's something that I struggled with while writing the book is the recognition that there is a contingent of the workforce in the United States. It's probably about the lower quartile, so the bottom 25% of earners who are being paid such low wages and have such little leverage to get ahead and to make different choices that I knew there were going to be people for whom in their current situation this advice was not going to be as applicable. And I think that's why I really wanted to weave in the systemic aspect of hey, this is the economy we exist within, this is the system that we exist within. And these are the consequences of that system. And the more that you can understand the forces that are acting on your financial life, it just might help you reorient your energy to the places where it's going to go the furthest. And for some people, what's going to go the furthest is fighting for more income because that is oftentimes the first step for those who they're not saving not because they don't want to, but because literally just cannot afford to. And so we also spend a lot of time talking about that is how do you earn more such that you now can start to really make different decisions and have a little bit more maneuverability.
- [22:26]
Mario Lopez
Hey, what's up? It's Mario Lopez. Back to school is an exciting time, but it can also be overwhelming and kids may feel isolated, a vulnerability that human traffickers can exploit. Human trafficking doesn't always look like what you expect. Everyday moments can become opportunities for someone with bad intentions. Whether you're a parent, teacher, coach or neighbor. Check in, ask questions, stay connected. Blue Campaign is a national awareness initiative that provides resources to help recognize suspected instances of human trafficking. Learn the signs and how to report@dhs.gov blue campaign. The market's uncertain, revenues tight and hiring on hold. That's why results driven companies are using upwork to keep work moving. Go to upwork.com today and start hiring proven freelance talent fast. No bulky overhead, no rigid long term contracts. Just the right expert right when you need them. Work smarter and faster with Upwork. Go to Upwork.com now and find your freelance expert. That's Upwork.com post a job for free and get started today.
- [23:35]
Katie Gatti Tassen
Emoji moment from Mark who writes, I just want to thank you for making GLP1s affordable. What would have been over $1,000 in.
- [23:43]
Farnoosh Torabi
Is just $99 a month with Mochi.
- [23:46]
Katie Gatti Tassen
Money shouldn't be a barrier to healthy weight.
- [23:48]
Farnoosh Torabi
Three months in and I have smaller.
- [23:50]
Katie Gatti Tassen
Jeans and a bigger wallet. You're the best. Thanks, Mark.
- [23:54]
Farnoosh Torabi
I'm Mayra Amit, founder of Mochi Health. To find your mochi moment, visit joinmochi.com Mark is a Mochi member, compensated for his story.
- [24:04]
Mario Lopez
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- [25:05]
Farnoosh Torabi
Yeah, how do you recommend we earn more?
- [25:08]
Katie Gatti Tassen
Well, it's interesting because one of the biggest and best negotiation tips that I've ever gotten comes from a woman named Catherine Valentine. And it's to stop talking. And I know that sounds so crass, but it really makes sense when you think about it, because women are socialized to put other people at ease, right? How do you be a good girl? What do you learn from the youngest age? You make other people comfortable. You're accommodating, you're nice, right? But asking for more money is uncomfortable. That is not, on its face, a very pleasant conversation. It feels like you're making a demand of somebody else, and that really goes against the grain of how many of us are brought up. And so often women will make the ask, hey, these are the reasons why I would like to negotiate for this raise and then immediately begin negotiating against themselves and offering all the reasons why they understand if it's not doable right now. And I know that this is asking for a lot, and I totally get it if you can't do it, et cetera. But once you make your ask, once you have laid out the reasons and in the book, I Outline all the specific ways that you can structure this. Ask for the best results. Stop talking. Allow for the uncomfortable silence. See what the person on the other side of the table has to say. And the other critical thing to remember is that workplaces are much to many of our chagrin, like glorified high school lunchrooms. And in many ways, perception is reality. Humans are flawed, right? So workplaces that are just full of humans also going to be flawed. So the best time to begin setting the groundwork for that negotiation conversation is way before you sit down to have it it. So there are two components of how I think you can think about this. The first is your perceived value in the company. This is something that you have more direct control over. The second is your market rate. And aside from upskilling, that is going out and gaining more hard skills that will boost what you can command on the labor market. You really can't control your market rate as directly as you can control the perception of your value. There are a couple of tricks that I like to use that I think disproportionately shift shape your perceived value in an organization to the other people that you are working with. The first is socializing your wins. So often popular negotiation advice will encourage you to keep a list of your accomplishments. I think that's great, but it is better if people know about them as they are happening, if there is a widespread perception that these accomplishments are happening. Now this is an art and a science, right? Because you don't want to be annoying about it. You don't want to be teachers pet vibes. But there was one gal that I worked with at Southwest who did this really well. She got promoted pretty much every time there was a promotion cycle. And I swear it was because she was just really excellent at doing this. She would communicate her team's wins. So it's like, hey, we just did this. I'm sharing out these learnings of this initiative. It might be useful to these other teams, right? So she's always top of mind for people. Whenever you think about this person, you're thinking about someone who is, is very communicative, who is constantly getting things done right. And it's subtle, but it really leaves that residue in people's brains that you are somebody that gets shit done. The next is going the extra yard. So I love this one because I think sometimes we think that we have to be like really over the top amazing at our jobs to get promoted. And I found that's not really the case. You don't have to go the Extra mile, you just have to go the extra yard. So again, a couple small ways that you can implement this quickly. If you have a deadline for three factors that are impacting conversion, and it's due Friday, hands in over Thursday, and throw in a fourth. Right. Just a little bit extra, that incremental bump. If you are meeting with somebody, send an agenda ahead of time, manage up, take control of the interaction and, and guide that conversation. Again, just gives that impression that, hey, you're here, you're thinking ahead, you're with it. This is especially important if you're bringing an issue to a manager. If you're setting up a meeting and bringing an issue to a manager, and that's the extent of, hey, this has gone wrong, that's no good, right? What you want to do is either you can come in with the explanation, here's what's causing this. Even better than that, here's what went wrong, here's what caused it, here are a few solutions. But if you want to come in with the best approach, it's, hey, here's my issue, here are the potential solutions, here's what I recommend we do, and that here's why I've already solved it and I'm just keeping you in the loop. So. So again, it's thinking about the workplace the same way that you would think about the way that you maybe interacted with other teenagers in high school. It's how can I make sure that the good work that I'm doing is widely communicated, that people are aware of it? And so when the managers are getting together and they're deciding who's going to get promoted, your name is always top of mind. It's an easy sell.
- [30:12]
Farnoosh Torabi
Yes, I've done this. And my philosophy around it is just anticipate what they need and then do it. And I think at the end of the day, while it's a little bit of work, it also puts you more in control of the outcomes. We all just want to feel more empowered. We want to feel more like we did everything we could. We don't look back and go, oh, maybe if I had done this or that you did everything, because sometimes you still might not get the raise even if you went the extra yard, the extra mile. But at least you can feel good about how you showed up.
- [30:44]
Katie Gatti Tassen
And I would say that the other piece of that is if you have found that you are in a workplace where your manager doesn't appreciate you or you are not being recognized and it is feeling a little bit, we'll say chronic as Opposed to. I had a bad month. Get out. Don't be afraid to go seek something better. Because I think that's the other piece of negotiation advice, which is sometimes the best way to force somebody's hand is to just have a better offer that is almost always going to deliver the results you want. Because even in the event that your current employer is. Nah, that's cool. Okay. Now you have a better offer that you can take.
- [31:25]
Farnoosh Torabi
Yeah. Be willing to walk away. Yeah.
- [31:28]
Katie Gatti Tassen
Yes. I think loyalty is something that with the degradation of labor rights over the last 40 years, loyalty is not rewarded anymore. And so the moral expectation that we would have for one another to be loyal to a faceless corporate entity for whom you are aligned on a spreadsheet is just. It's just not worth it. It's not worth it. And I would add one of the most proven ways to increase your wage to have a better shot at things like paid family leave is to join a union. So if you have the option to join a union or you are feeling brave and you want to unionize your workplace, that also works really well and is an incredibly impactful way to put collective action into action rather than just trying to negotiate as you be individual.
- [32:22]
Farnoosh Torabi
Yes. Yes. I have to ask you about the uncertainty that we're all facing in the markets. And given that your audience, sort of the archetype of your woman audience member is, I would you say like a gen Z or 20 something thing?
- [32:39]
Katie Gatti Tassen
I think it's probably like mid-30s to mid-40s. Oh, really? Okay. I think it tends to actually skew a little bit older even.
- [32:48]
Farnoosh Torabi
Are you Katie Bullish on the age old philosophy of stay the course? People have been asking me this, do I just ignore my 401k? Do I keep saving? Do I just keep my head down at work? What do I do with so much uncertainty? I don't know if we're heading for a recession. My 401k, I'm afraid to look at it. And I think that I would say that if you are someone who has decades ahead of them until needing that money, that you do continue to invest as you have consistently, hopefully incrementally. But if you're approaching retirement. Yeah. And you've seen your 401k blow up, maybe that's a sign that you're over indexed in the markets. You can't really afford to have that much skin in the stock market game. But now we're really questioning a lot of this stuff. What do you say to that person who is in her 30s? Let's say who's in the middle and questioning a lot of these traditional belief systems around money, that even though they've worked, we're not sure.
- [33:49]
Katie Gatti Tassen
Again, totally. First, I want to acknowledge that I think those fears are rational, if only because the last hundred or so years of stock market data that we have looked to assure us that returns will hit a particular average all represents a period of increasing globalization order in which the US was the dominant economic power and effectively had an infinite money spigot at its disposal because the US dollar is the world's reserve currency and we are just a huge economy with frankly a lot of money. And so I think it is legitimate to take a step back right now and be asking the question of okay, if we have an administration that will be in power for the next four years that is looking at blowing up that global economic order, does my long term strategy need to change? To that I will say three things. Number one is that for me personally as a 30 year old, I have not changed anything. I have continued to stay the course with my own diversified portfolio. Now I own the S&P 500 and total stock market funds. I also own developing markets, emerging markets, small cap value. I invest internationally. So I do not have all of my eggs in the US basket. That is something that I have been talking about for years because I think anyone that is a student of American capitalism has seen the writing on the wall that we have been on an unsustainable trajectory for quite a long time. For quite a long time. So to me, diversifying outside of American equities and owning everything in a truly global sense has been good advice for a while. It just hasn't felt pertinent in the US in the last five or so years because large cap US equities have been so dominant and have been doing so well. Again, I will reference the infinite money spigot because a lot of the federal spending that happened over the last decade has really flowed directly into assets. So there are reasons why that happened. But if you are someone who has a 401k that's in 100% US equities and you still have decades ahead, I would absolutely not be rushing to sell anything. I'd probably be weathering this storm. And when I say weathering the storm, I mean giving it years. But I'd also be looking at, okay, I probably do need to be rebalancing a little bit. I probably am too concentrated because from my perspective, and in my opinion Only owning US stocks is putting all your eggs in one basket. Even if you own all 3,000 of them, you are still making a very concentrated bet that a regulatory regime, the rule of law, liberal democracy, that all of these things are going to last forever. And I just personally have never felt comfortable betting at all on America. That said, if you are somebody that is in maybe a more urgent. You're facing a more urgent question. Right. You are either already in retirement or you're facing retirement soon and you're now going up. I am 100% in stocks or I'm 90% equities. And I really should have thought about diversifying into some bonds or some other fixed income instruments a little bit earlier. And now I'm nervous. I would also just think, yes, we're down 12% year to date. But Christine Benz did a really great piece on this not too long ago for Morningstar where she wrote about the fact that this market dip, it really just set us back to like last October. Yeah, it's not the sky has fallen, so it's not like it's too late to diversify. But it is a good lesson that it's like Warren Buffett says, be greedy when others are fearful, be fearful when others are greedy. In the moments where you're like, why wouldn't I own 100% S&P 500? It goes up 30% every year. That's when you have to check yourself and be like, you like, yeah, but I need to protect my downside. So maybe that means just moving into more of a 60:40 portfolio over the coming months. Maybe it means hiring a fee only CFP and having them take a look at it and going, hey, what really would be a realistic risk profile for me given my timeline, my needs, et cetera? But it's not like the market has wiped out 60% of its value. We are really not. It feels really extreme, but it really isn't.
- [38:10]
Farnoosh Torabi
Yeah, the media has done an excellent job of hyping this up. Like, I saw a headline where I was like, our 401ks are 101 1ks. And I was like, what?
- [38:18]
Katie Gatti Tassen
Yeah, hardly. No, that's not.
- [38:21]
Farnoosh Torabi
Did you only buy Tesla? I don't understand. Not to downplay the fear that we're all feeling or undermining it, but always bringing the research and the context. Katie Gaddy Tassen, thank you so much. Congratulations on Rich Girl Nation. We only scratched the surface of your book, but intentionally, because I want people to go out there and buy it. And in addition to the Hot Girl detox, you have advice on how and why to create a prenup up, saving for child care, retiring independently. Thank you so much. I'm so happy to see your work out there. Continuing to be out there. Everybody follow Katie Gaddy Tassen, author of Rich Girl Nation, host of Money with Katie, you're the best.
- [39:03]
Katie Gatti Tassen
Oh thank you so much. It was truly my pleasure.
- [39:07]
Farnoosh Torabi
Thanks so much to Katie Gatti Tassen. Her book is called Rich Girl Nation. I've got the link in our show. Notes notes. I'll see you back here on Friday for AskFarnouche. I hope your day is so money.
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Katie Gatti Tassen
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