Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Jean Chatzky: Master Your Money, How to Optimize Your Earnings and Wealth | E299

Episode Date: July 15, 2024

Determined to master her messy personal finances, Jean Chatzky immersed herself in learning all about money. She worked on Wall Street to understand investing, then transitioned to personal finance journalism. After she got fired for being too expensive, she combined her side hustles and launched HerMoney, a safe space for women to learn about finance. In this episode, Jean shares practical tips on mastering personal finance and optimizing wealth. Jean Chatzky is an award-winning journalist and bestselling author. She is also the host of the popular podcast HerMoney and was the longtime financial editor for NBC's Today show. In this episode, Hala and Jean will discuss: - Jean's transition from journalism to finance - The value of skill stacking in entrepreneurship - The gender wage gap in 2024 - Women as primary breadwinners  - The importance of gender-neutral financial advice - Why many successful women are single - The inevitable transfer of global wealth to women - Practical tips for budgeting and investing - Strategies for clearing debt and improving credit - Homeownership vs. renting - And other topics…  Jean Chatzky is the CEO and co-founder of HerMoney Media, a digital platform dedicated to improving financial literacy and wellness among women. She is an award-winning personal finance journalist, bestselling author, and host of the HerMoney podcast. With a background that spans Forbes, SmartMoney, and a 25-year tenure on NBC's Today show, she has earned many accolades, such as the Gracie Award for Outstanding Host. She has authored multiple bestselling books, including Women with Money and Pay It Down! She frequently appears on major platforms like CNN, MSNBC, and The Oprah Winfrey Show.  Connect With Jean: Jean’s Website: https://jeanchatzky.com/ Jean’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeanchatzky/   Jean’s Twitter: https://x.com/jeanchatzky   Jean’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jeanchatzky/   Jean’s Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JeanChatzky/  Jean’s Podcast, HerMoney: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hermoney-with-jean-chatzky/id1098802558  Resources Mentioned: MoneyType Personality Test: https://moneytype.hermoney.com/ Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg: https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Women-Work-Will-Lead/dp/0385349947  Beautiful Girls by Ted Demme: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115639/  LinkedIn Secrets Masterclass, Have Job Security For Life: Use code ‘podcast’ for 30% off at yapmedia.io/course.   Sponsored By: Shopify - Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at youngandprofiting.co/shopify  Indeed - Get a $75 job credit at indeed.com/profiting  BetterHelp - Sign up for a webinar on mental health for entrepreneurs presented by BetterHelp at youngandprofiting.co/mentalhealth.  Rakuten - Start all your shopping at rakuten.com or get the Rakuten app to start saving today, your Cash Back really adds up!   More About Young and Profiting Download Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com Get Sponsorship Deals - youngandprofiting.com/sponsorships Leave a Review - ratethispodcast.com/yap Watch Videos - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting   Follow Hala Taha LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ TikTok - tiktok.com/@yapwithhala Twitter - twitter.com/yapwithhala   Learn more about YAP Media's Services - yapmedia.io/

Today's episode is sponsored in part by Rakuten, BetterHelp, Indeed, and Shopify. Get cash back on every purchase with Rakuten, the smarter way to shop and save. Start all your shopping trips at rakuten.com or get the Rakuten app to start saving today. Stop comparing and start focusing with convenient online therapy from BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash profiting for 10% off your first month. Attract interview and hire all in one place with Indeed. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com slash profiting. Shopify is the global commerce platform

that helps you grow your business. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash profiting. As always, you can find all of our incredible deals in the show notes. When women make more money, we see that they take on more of their responsibilities at home. If you are in a relationship where your partner can't support your success or doesn't want

to support your success, then it's not going to work. Being a homeowner is a helpful way to save money over the long term. When you own, you're building equity in this house and that is a form of forced savings. But if you're not gonna be someplace for five years, I don't think you should buy. You just had $100,000 cash, where would you put it? What I'm doing with that kind of money right now is...

Gap fam, the world is changing. It used to be that men had all the money and that men made all the money. But that is no longer the case. Women are making more and more money. We are closing the wage gap. Women are graduating college at faster rates than men now. Women are getting more inheritances because they're living longer. Women are becoming the breadwinners of families. And I see that all around in my life right now,

more and more. This is changing the world as we know it. This is changing gender roles as we know it. And whether you're male or female, this is something you gotta learn about. Which is why I'm having this topic on today's episode of Young and Profiting podcast with Jean Chatsky.

Jean Chatsky is the CEO and founder of Her Money. She's also the host of the Her Money podcast, and she's a bestselling author. She started her career in journalism and then later TV, and now she's an awesome entrepreneur here to share all of her advice to us in terms of this changing world and how we're all gonna be impacted by the fact that women are making more money. Even the products we buy, our cars, the airplanes, they're all gonna change because they're gonna be based on

not just men's preferences, but women's too. It's such an interesting topic to me, such a great conversation that we had. I can't wait for you guys to hear it. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Jean Chatsky. Jean, welcome to Young and Profiting podcast. Thanks, Hala. Thanks so much for having me.

I'm so excited for this conversation. I think it's going to be so insightful from my audience. I really love your work. You didn't really start off in finance, which I thought was interesting. And I'd love to get some backstory from you in terms of your journalism background. You were an English major. How did you end up first getting interested in finances? I got interested quite honestly because my own financial life was a bit of a mess. And simultaneously, the journalism job that I got was business adjacent. I started my career as an editorial assistant at a magazine that no longer exists called Working Woman, and got to report some stories on things like business and careers and management trends and investing. And I was interested enough in them to try to get a job in personal finance,

business journalism when I left that job, which turned out to be really, really difficult because all the big business magazines on the planet, I applied to all of them, thought working woman was a joke. And finally, I got a little bit of advice that what I needed was an MBA, but I didn't have really any interest in going back to school at that point. So instead, I got a job on Wall Street.

I worked in equity research for a couple of years. I learned investing inside and out. And when I came back out, I was able to re-enter journalism, join Forbes from there to smart money. And from there, I ended up on the Today Show for 25 years. Amazing. So when I looked at your career journey, it reminded me a lot of my own in terms that you skill-st stacked to become an entrepreneur.

So I call this skill stack entrepreneurship, where basically you worked for other people and you gained all these skills over the years and then you became an entrepreneur basically putting these skills together. And then you came out with her money and nobody could do her money better than you because you had all the experiences to put together this unique offering, to put together this awesome website, this awesome podcast, and you had all the background and the skills, the writing, the journalism,

the broadcasting, the knowledge of that actual topic. It's a lot like what I did with YAP Media and my podcast network and my social agency. So I'd love for you to just talk to us about that for all these young people listening. Talk about the skills that you acquired over the years and then how you sort of use that in your entrepreneurship journey. I was one of the original side giggers, right? I think I had a side hustle before it was called a side hustle.

Pretty much always because journalists make very little money, or at least when you're starting out as a journalist because journalists make very little money or at least when you're starting out as a journalist you make very little money. So originally my side hustle was teaching SATs but as I started to become a stronger writer and a stronger content creator I was able to hustle in my own industry. So just by doing that, I picked up a lot of the adjacent skills that I then needed to launch this business. Once I was on the Today Show in particular, a lot of doors started to open.

These were the days where everybody was watching the Today Show. And so I got a lot of offers to go out and speak, to write books, to consult for different companies in the employee benefits departments where they were trying to improve the financial health of their employees. And I didn't become an entrepreneur until a full-scale entrepreneur, until 20 years down the road when I left my last magazine job. I actually got fired from my last magazine job because I'd gotten a little too expensive for their payroll. And I looked at all of the other things that I was doing.

I was doing radio for Oprah over here, and I was doing speaking here, and I was on my 10th book over here, and I had three other clients over here. And I thought, why am I getting another job? I have five other jobs. I just need to put them together. Her money as a company came along after her money as a podcast.

I was doing some work with Fidelity Investments. They were our original launch sponsor. The fabulous team there basically said, what else can we do together? And I was like, how about a podcast? So we launched and very quickly it became apparent to me that we were growing a community of like-minded women who wanted to learn about money. And Her Money, the company, launched around that. Amazing. Well, you've been doing such a great job. I know that your podcast is super popular. Your blog is very well known. I've heard about her money for many years now. You also have so many books and you've just become such an accomplished author and a majority of her content is actually geared towards women. So I want to talk to that for a minute because I know that all the advice you

give is applicable to all genders, right? Doesn't necessarily need to be just for women, but we do need to understand why women have traditionally had an uphill battle when it has come to their finances. Can you give us some insight in terms of the gender wage gap? And I think a lot of people have the assumption that that's not really a thing anymore. So can you talk to us about if it is a thing in 2024? Oh, it's a thing. It has budged, which is good. Over the last year and a half, it's moved up a smidge so that at this point, women earn

83.5 cents to every dollar that a white man earns. But the American Association of University Women say we are going to be halfway through the next century before this gap actually closes. That's how slowly it's moving. And it's worse for women of color. And the problem with the gender wage gap is that when you combine it with all of the other factors that women deal with in terms of earning money and growing money for retirement. They put us behind.

Women are the ones to take breaks from work, to care for kids and care for older parents. We saw that in the pandemic in spades, but it's been true all along. Because we take those breaks, we have less money growing in those retirement accounts, we earn fewer social security credits, we get to the end of the line, we've got a smaller nest egg, and then we have to make the money last longer because we go and we outlive men by six, seven years. So it's an uphill battle, but you're right in terms of the advice being gender neutral.

There are not a ton of differences in the advice that somebody would give to a man versus a woman. Jane Bryant Quinn, who is one of my mentors and a leading personal finance journalist, just a trailblazer, she likes to say that stocks aren't pink or blue, money's not pink or blue, it's green, right? And she's 100% right about that. The problem is that women sometimes don't feel as safe as we need to feel to ask the questions that we need answered in

order to get us to take the steps to start investing, to put our money to work, to ask for that raise. And what I've found and the reason that I launched her money was that when I was in a room full of all women given some sort of a talk talk and I would get to the Q&A section, the hands would just fly up in the air. And when I was in a mixed group, the response was a lot more muted. Women really held back and didn't want to share as much. And so what I set out to create was a safe space. But am I going to tell women that they should buy NVIDIA as we did for our investing club

two years ago and tell men that they should not? No, absolutely not. Such good advice. And by the way, that stock has done really well because I have it too. Yeah. So a lot of my listeners are business owners. A lot of them are people of power. We have employees.

We have our own small businesses. What is our responsibility when it comes to the gender wage gap? I think our responsibility is to level it. And it has to come from the employers because if employers don't take a look at our payrolls, don't take a look at how we are treating our employees irrespective of gender, irrespective of race, these gaps are never gonna close. And so we have to get really honest about who's doing what work

and how much are they being compensated for it. And it's not a matter of need. It's a matter of the work that we need them to do, but it's not a matter of our perception of the money that they need to take home, which is how it used to work. You know, years back, you would hear conversations where a boss would tell a female employee, well, of course, John is going to get paid more than you do. He's the breadwinner and he's got multiple mouths to feed at home. We're now in an era where more women are the breadwinners. And if you look ahead, if you look out to 2030 and into the 2030s, women are actually expected to control the lion's share of the wealth and the spending in this country and across the world.

And it's because of educational trends that are leading women to have more qualifications than men in many, many instances. And it's also because of the way that the transfer of wealth, the $41 trillion transfer of wealth that is going on as we speak is playing out. Women are inheriting twice, and not because our parents prefer us to our brothers, but we're inheriting twice because if we have brothers, chances are we split the family pie with them. But then when our husbands die, we inherit that money as well. So good. And this is really, really fascinating to me. I really want to spend a lot of time here on these social and

economical changes that are going on. So I got some incredible stats from your work and I'm going to rattle some off and ask some questions about them. I'd love for you to really just give us as much insight, as much color as you have about them. So the first one is for every hundred men who graduated from college last year, 132 women graduated. Can you talk about how this really snowballs into various social demographic economic changes? Absolutely. If you look at the types of jobs that college grads hold. And the types of jobs that you need to have a college degree in order to get, they tend to be the higher paying jobs. We are seeing some movement in trades, in apprenticeships, in vocational programs. I grew up in Wheeling, West Virginia in a

high school that had a big welding department in the basement. And I believe that we need to see more of these opportunities. But there's no question that a college degree helps you land a better salary. And when you look at the lifetime earnings of a person with a college degree versus one who doesn't have one, it's hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more. And the way that

that then drives change in society is that you have these families where you tend to have not just one, but two college educated people because college educated people often meet in college. And those two income college educated households are going to be making significantly more money in many cases than those who are not college educated. And what we wind up with is just a bigger income disparity in this country than we have right now. And as you know, it's already problematic. So we look at it and we see these things starting to march in that direction. The other problem though, and I hear of this from my daughter and from people younger than

her is that if you are on a college campus and you're heterosexual and you want to date, it's gotten an awful lot harder. I definitely want to talk about that, but let's hold that thought for a second. Let's talk about how by 2028, women will control 75% of discretionary spending around the world. By 2030, 66% of America's wealth will be with women. You alluded to this a bit, but what are some of the factors of why women are going to have so much

more money in the future years? So it's education and it is the transfer of wealth. Those are the two big factors that are playing into this. But when you talk about the fact that women are going to have the money, what people don't do is sort of follow the breadcrumbs and think about how that's going to change everything. When you follow the breadcrumbs, what you see is that the fact that women are making these purchasing decisions changes things. If you look at cars, it's going to change the way that cars are designed because they're going to be designed with women buyers more in mind. You'll have a better place to park that bag

that you carry around on your shoulder all the time. The seat will be adjustable in a different way so that you'll be able to see over the front of the hood if you're height challenged in the way that I am. It'll change the design of homes. Single women buy many more homes than single men. They've become a very important segment of home buyers. And we are seeing homes designed with the things that women want in mind. So it's not just a matter of the fact that financial advisors are a little bit up in arms about this because they have seen studies that show that when the male spouse in a family

dies 70-ish percent of women are likely to leave the advisor and find somebody of their own choosing. Those trends are underway as well, but it's gonna change the look and feel and design of a lot of products. Oh my gosh, so interesting. You know what you just reminded me of? So I took my mom to Cancun on vacation and I got us first class tickets. We only

brought checked bags and I remember me and her trying to put our bags up on the airplane. We're both petite. We had to help each other and actually my mom accidentally slipped and the bag fell and it was so embarrassing and it kind of caused a commotion. And in my head I was thinking, I just paid over $2,000 for these tickets and I was expected as a five foot one girl to put up a bag with my 70 year old mother by ourselves. And I was thinking, how ridiculous is this? Who are these airplanes designed for? It's obviously not considering petite women.

Yeah, it's obviously not considering petite women. Yeah, it's definitely not. And maybe if they start to see that more women are buying their own business class seats, that'll be something that will change. Or the folks who make the away bag that we all seem to carry will come up with some sort of a hoister to help us get it up in that luggage compartment because I have the same trouble that you do. It's the worst part about flying for me. It is. Okay so 38 percent of women are their family's biggest earner or primary breadwinner. How does that impact society and contribute to the fact that 50 percent of women are single right now? Look, there's a lot of research on when a woman

is the primary breadwinner and whether or not it causes strife in relationships. Generally, if when a man and a woman form their relationship, the woman is already the higher earner, then that status quo doesn't rock the boat too much. It's when there's a shift in the dynamic over the course of the relationship that impacts the balance of power in the relationship in other ways that things go a little bit sideways. And that's where we start to see breakdown in communication. That's where we start to see women compensating

for the fact that they make more money. I mean, I'm sure that you have seen this research, Halid. It's so troubling. When women make more money, we don't see that they offload more of the responsibilities at home. We see that they take on more of their responsibilities at home. We see that they take on more of their responsibilities

at home and the logic behind that is that we feel somehow bad about that and that we have to make nice to our spouse's ego. So of course we're gonna make dinner and do the grocery shopping and take care of the kids. And that's where burnout comes from and that's where anger comes from. And in some cases, that's where divorce comes from. Let's hold that thought and take a quick break with our sponsors.

Yeah, fam, it is not easy to be an entrepreneur. We are more likely to deal with things like burnout, stress, loneliness. We're so busy focusing on our business, we forget about our mental health, we forget about our relationships. And on top of all of this, entrepreneurs are more likely to have neurodiversity. We're more likely to have things like ADD and ADHD.

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You're like kind of alluding to this when you were talking about your daughter. And I'm going to get a little bit personal here. So I'm in my mid thirties and I have no kids. I'm not married. I'm literally never single. I can get a boyfriend like this, but I haven't really found the one. And I kind of know the reason why. I feel like it's because a lot of guys that I date they seem like they're cool with a successful woman and they're

successful too. They're all executives or whatever they are but I'm growing really fast and they end up getting insecure like you're gonna outgrow me is what they think right? You're gonna outgrow. And so we end up breaking up and I haven't found the right partner. Now, there's a couple things that have recently opened my eyes. Number one is Marshall Goldsmith. I have a social media agency. He's one of my longtime LinkedIn clients. He's a leadership coach. He is always trying to get me married and he's always telling me, Kala, this happened to my daughters, you have to marry down. You can't be worried about marrying up. You've got to marry down. You'll find a great guy.

He doesn't have to be richer than you or like you've just got to marry down. And for a while I was trying to find somebody that was equal that I could grow with. But like the other thing that really opened my eyes is that I started this podcast network and I've got a lot of women who like, I feel like I'm going to be like in a few years, like Jenna Kutcher, Amy Porterfield, Kelly Roach was my social client and they all have either retired their husbands, they have house dads basically, or their husband works with them or for them.

And that made me realize, cause their families are so happy. And I was like, well, maybe I'm just like looking at this in the wrong way. Maybe I should feel like almost not like a man, but that I just need to find a great partner. They don't need to have the career that I want them to have. It's more about the person, right? So I just love your thoughts on this. I am married for the second time. And I agree with that. First of all, I think, and no disrespect to Marshall, but when he says you have to marry down, I think that that's the wrong

word. I think that you have to marry and date different. Yeah, you need a partner who is going to be really supportive of your efforts and your career. Because let's just be honest about this. And I felt the same way when I first had kids. My former father-in-law said, well, when are you stopping working? Because all of his other daughters and daughters-in-law had stopped working. And I said, yeah, not me. I'm not doing that. We will figure out how these kids will have care during the day. And the way that we did it

was that my ex-husband didn't travel for work and I did. And that balanced us out for a very, very long time. If you are in a relationship where the egos are clashing or where your partner can't support your success or doesn't wanna support your success, then it's not gonna work. It's just gonna fail. Have you ever seen the movie Beautiful Girls? No.

Okay, you have to watch the movie Beautiful Girls. It's old, 20 years probably. Natalie Portman and Annabeth Gish and Timothy Hutton and Matt Dillon, a whole bunch of people. But the part of that movie that sticks with me is there's a very successful woman in it. She's dating Timothy Hutton and he is a piano player in a bar who also happens to be an accountant and he's been putting a whole lot of pressure on himself to get a real

accounting job so that he can keep up with her. And finally she just said, musicians are sexy. Accountants are not sexy. Musicians are sexy, giving him the permission to continue to do this thing that he enjoyed and continue to bring that sexy energy to their relationship, which is what she needed from him. And so that's the balance I think that you're looking for. There's a lot of lean in Sheryl Sandberg's book that people have dismissed over the past number of years. I think the thing that really holds up from that book

is the importance that she put on selecting your partner. She picked a guy that she knew was going to let her be her and let her do the work that she wanted to do and help them create a life where that was going to be possible. And that's what you need. Yeah, more generally for everybody tuning in, I just feel like it's just harder to find traditional roles and partners anymore for men and for women. And I just would love to understand even more advice from you for the young people tuning in. How can men feel like men and women feel like women

in their relationships when everything is sort of getting switched around in terms of who's the breadwinner? I just feel like it's so difficult for us to date. I think the way that you do it is by knowing yourself and knowing your partner and closing ranks. This is your business and it's your partner's business and it's not your mother's business or your mother-in-law's business or your friend's business or Instagram's business.

It is nobody's business but yours and if it's working for the two of you, then who the hell cares? but yours and if it's working for the two of you, then who the hell cares, right? What anybody else has to say. You just have to respect the boundaries that you've created with the two of you and what that allows you to do. Look, I'm the breadwinner in my marriage. I have been for many years.

My husband is largely retired. He works about 15 hours a week these days. He's older than I am. And he had an incredibly successful career. But the fact that I out earn him, he could care less. He knows the value that he brings to our marriage. I certainly know the value that he brings to our marriage. I certainly know the value that he brings to our marriage and it's nobody else's business really, despite the fact that I'm talking about it on your podcast. I love it.

Thanks, Jean, for all of that. Okay, so women are getting richer. Can you talk to us about how women are gonna treat this new found wealth compared to how men traditionally have treated wealth? Men have traditionally invested it, and women traditionally have been slow to the party. If you, again, and you pulled out

a whole bunch of statistics, I'm grateful for that, but one of my favorites is that women keep about 70% of our assets in cash, men keep about 60%. It's a really big and important difference because investing our money is the only way that we are gonna make sure that it is working as hard as we are working ourselves.

And so what we're starting to see is women move into the ranks of being investors, wanting to be investors, wanting to learn about investors. Whether you've got all your money in a 401k where you put it in a target date fund and you let that fund do its thing or you're buying individual stocks, we want to learn. I was telling you about my investing club. I run this investing club with Karen Feinerman, who is one of the panelists on Fast Money on CNBC.

She's a hedge fund manager. You would love her. She's so brilliant. And we're teaching 300 women and growing how to invest every other Monday night on Zoom. And we pick stocks together and we talk about diversification and trends, and everybody can ask their questions. And investing is the kind of thing that is hard for women because there are no

right or perfect answers. There are no right or perfect answers. There's some parts of personal finance where if you ask me a question, I can give you an answer and I can be 100% right. What is the best cash back credit card? I can look at them all. I can run the numbers. I can give you an answer. I can know that I'm correct.

What's the best stock? Can do it. Because no perfect answer exists because we have backward looking information and not forward looking information. And so we have to trust in the historical accuracy of what has come before. That is difficult for a large portion of women

who like to know the answer to any question before we even ask that question. We have to get comfortable, and the way to get comfortable is by actually doing it. And one thing that has really, really helped when you look at Gen Z and millennials is that we're now being across the board automatically enrolled in these 401k

and other retirement plans at work where we have them. The money is being automatically invested into a default like a target date fund. So you're investing whether or not you are doing the work of investing yourself in many cases and if you can allow yourself to sit with that and get comfortable with the fact that you're not only doing it, but you're doing it pretty well, that helps people. I love that. This was to me such an interesting conversation, honestly.

I feel like this whole gender wage gap and transfer of wealth, it's really shifting everything. Let's move on to some more general advice, tactical financial advice. I wanna start with the concept of financial freedom, right? I feel like the concept of financial freedom has changed, especially for millennials, for Gen Z. How do you think we should go about thinking

about financial freedom? Well, I'm interested in knowing how you think it's changed. What is it to you? Well, I feel like now it's more about enjoying life, doing what I want, right? It's really not about becoming a billionaire. It's what's the amount of money that I need where I can live comfortably, buy what I want and enjoy life, work out, be healthy, sit in the sun. You know, that's what I think of. That's pretty much my definition too. It's just my definition I think extends

for a longer period of time because of my age, right? So I look at this and I think I want all of that but I want to be able at some point to just work when I wanna work and know that those things will continue for as long as I live. So I think that's where the disparity in financial freedom comes in. I think younger generations define it in terms for today and older generations define it in terms that include a retirement that might last for three decades.

So one of the things that I think a lot of my listeners are probably going through right now, we've got a lot of 30 year olds, is buying or renting. And traditionally, when we're talking about the American dream, financial freedom, a lot of it is also like being a homeowner, right? Do you feel like it's important to be a homeowner? Do you feel like it's a good investment strategy? And what are some of the things we should think of renting versus buying? I feel like being a homeowner is a helpful way to save money over the long term. If you think about buying versus renting, month to month, right now the costs are actually closer than they've ever been.

But when you own, you are putting equity, you're building equity in this house. And that is a form of forced savings. And what happens if you get to the end of the road, if you pay down a mortgage for a long enough period of time, or even if you swap out of in and out of a couple of homes, but you've built up some equity and then you build up some more, you end up with this cushion of cash. And you can use that cushion to supplement your standard of living.

You can use it to pay for long-term care. You can use it to keep a roof over your head. You can use it to sell and move to Costa Rica. You have choices because you have this additional cushion. And if you've rented your whole life, unless you took the difference between the renting cost and the buying cost, which is a lot slimmer than it used to be,

and you put that away every single month, you don't have that additional sum of money. That's where being a homeowner, I think, is additive to your bottom line. There are other differences. We know in a whole bunch of different situations that autonomy is one of the things that make people happy. You're happier at your job if you feel like you've got enough autonomy to rearrange the furniture or to put your

own stuff up on the walls or to decide that you're gonna come in at 930 rather than 9 o'clock. You're just happier. And you are happier where you live if you feel like you have enough autonomy to make the place what you want it to be. And you're more likely to have that if you own rather than if you rent. But there are a lot of cases where you shouldn't own.

If you're not gonna be someplace for five years, I don't think you should buy. The cost of buying is just too steep. I don't think that mortgage rates at this level should stop people who want to be in a place for six, seven years and more, you'll eventually hopefully get an opportunity to refi that loan. But there are cases where renting is just better. You gave such good advice. Like I'm in this predicament now.

To your point, I see a lot of my friends who have been homeowners and I see them like really leveling up because every time they switch house and they'll make like 200 grand and they just keep playing with that money and growing it and growing it. So I do see a lot of my friends who have dabbled in home ownership do really well.

That's inspiring to me. It's just that in New York, it gets crazy. It's so crazy. So I feel like people who are in different cities also have a different experience. It's way easier to buy a house if you live in the suburbs, you know. But you have more choice now than you used to have. I know young couples who are thinking they live in New York where the price of homeownership

is unsustainable. They're looking at Philadelphia. They're looking at Charlotte. They're looking at other places where because they can work remotely, they could keep their jobs. They could make some friends, and they could be homeowners and have a standard of living that just is a little bit easier. Okay, so something that you talk a lot about,

and I was looking around your website, and I saw that you were like, what is your money type? And you have this quiz that people can take for their money type on hermoney.com. So talk to us about money types. What is that? Why is it important to know? It's important to know how you're wired

and why you're wired the way you are. The money type is love languages, right? If you ever read the five love languages, money type is that, just for money. So we worked with PhD who developed this in-depth tool that has been tested on men and women to help figure out why you are the way you are with money. I mean, you may know that it is hard for you to spend or easy for you to spend. You may know that you have trouble losing money or more or less trouble taking risk than other people.

You may know that you would do anything for the members of your family, even if it meant putting yourself at financial risk. All of these things are tied up in our five personality types. And I would bet just knowing a little bit more about you and about your audience, that if people went to hermoney.com and they took our diagnostic, our questionnaire, our money type quiz, you've got an audience that is full of what we call visionaries. A lot of entrepreneurs are visionaries.

And visionaries have to be careful when it comes to their own personal finances because it is really tempting to throw all of your money against the business and think that that business is gonna be your retirement plan and we know the statistics on businesses that succeed versus fail.

And you give up a lot of years trying to get that business off the ground and very quickly you can get yourself in trouble. The other thing that I like about money type so much is that we're not all just one type. We've got a primary type. And then we have a couple of secondary types that make up our personality.

And if you know your money type and your partner's money type, it's helpful in navigating the relationship and the conversations that the two of you have about money. I was recently on a different podcast and the hosts had taken the money type questionnaire and they said, I feel so seen because there's something about this diagnostic.

It just gets people. I felt this way the first time I took it and I'm a producer. That's my primary money type with a little bit of connoisseur, which means I like to spend in as well. And it's really true. And it's really interesting that a test can get you so well. It's so true. And I'm happy that you brought up relationships because I actually recently ended a relationship. And one of my primary reasons was our views on money

were so different. He's richer than I am and was so cheap. And I was just like, I can't do this. I like to live a life of luxury. I like to spend my money. Not that I'm frivolous, but it's just like, what's the point of choosing such a hard job if you're not— Right.

If no one's spending their money, why are we working so hard? Yeah, and it's good that you figured this out before you got engaged to the guy or worse, married the guy, right? In my house, we say this is why we work, and we say it for exactly the reasons that you just described. We work hard and we work hard so that if we want to get on a plane and fly across the country we don't have to think about it. This is the payoff of working so hard and producing and I acknowledge we are definitely privileged. I'm fortunate to have a career that I love, which makes working hard feel like not working as hard. But this is why we work. If they didn't pay us, we wouldn't work so hard.

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Okay, a couple more questions. Let's talk about budgeting. There's so much inflation going on. Everything is just way more expensive. There's a lot of keeping up with the Joneses with social media, a lot of comparison, feeling like you need to keep buying. And for instance, with me, I feel like I always got to buy so much clothes because I'm always photographed in my outfits and then suddenly I don't want to wear the same thing again.

And so talk to us about how we can avoid overspending. Well, first of all, are you not on the real real? You should just be turning over your closet. All that. I mean, this is what I do because I'm the same. I do a lot of appearances and I don't want to be wearing the same thing all the time. And I wear it a couple of times and I send it to the RealReal and I buy something else on the RealReal and I run a credit and it makes me feel like I'm shopping for free, even though it's not quite shopping for free and that I'm doing something a little bit

better for the environment. And so that's my shopping suggestion. But when it comes to overspending in general, I think that the secret is that most people have absolutely no idea where their money is actually going. So when we teach budgeting and we have a program called Finance Fix where we teach budgeting and how to do this in a way that you can actually save something. We put people through this process of figuring out where their money is going. We use technology to do it so you don't have to do it by hand. And once you see where you've been using your money, then you have the tools and the ammunition to make

changes about where you consciously want to use your money. And so it's not, don't buy the coffee, right? Everybody's least favorite example. It's if the coffee is the thing that lights up your day, then by all means buy the coffee. But if you could care less, and really what you want is a little bit of caffeine to help you get out the door, then make it at home and have a sip and go about your day and spend your money on something that you actually value.

I know where all my money is going. It's Sephora and Revolve. All my money is just going straight there. Okay, let's talk about paying down debt. A lot of people have student loans. A lot of people have debts. You've got this avalanche method. Talk to us about the best strategies for paying down debt in your opinion. The cheapest way, the cheapest, fastest way to pay off debt is to just stack it highest interest rate to lowest interest rate. Pay off the highest interest rate debts first while making the minimum payments on the rest.

Once that high interest rate debt is gone, then you just move on to the next one and so on and so on and so on. The student loan debts are a little bit of a different beast. Long-term debts, student loans, mortgages, car loans. You basically wanna try to pay those off on the schedule that you're given. If you're struggling with your student loan debts and their federal debts, then you wanna make sure you're enrolled

in an income repayment program through the Department of Education. We're getting some changes to those programs that are helpful. As long as you're enrolled, you should get notified of the changes and they should come your way. But don't let paying student loan debt faster get in the way of doing important things like grabbing the match from your 401k cuz if you look at the return on your money. The way that we think about the way that we should think about return on your money is equivalent to the interest rate. So if you're paying off a student loan debt at six percent that's like getting a 6% return on your money. If you're getting 50 cents on the dollar as a match in your 401k, that's a 50% return

on your money. And you can't not get that because you want to pay off the debt at 6%. You just pay off the debt at 6% a little bit slower. Let's talk about improving your credit. So I actually recently messed up my credit because- Oh no. Yeah, it was really dumb. I was spending everything on my business credit cards and I just thought it was good

that I wasn't spending on my own credit cards. And like, I was like shutting down my personal credit cards and then I realized, oops, I wasn't supposed to do that. You need to actually have credit cards. And I always used to, because I have a lot of cash, I would just pay it off, pay it off to zero balance, and you're actually not supposed to do that. Oh no, you are supposed to do that.

You are supposed to do that. Tell me about it, because I feel confused about what should we actually be doing with our personal credit. You should be using your personal credit cards, and you should be paying them off every month. Just to zero? Pay them off to zero. Interest rates are way too high.

The average credit card interest rate, I just looked this up yesterday, is 28%. That's insane. It's insane. You don't want to be paying interest on a credit card. So the way to do this is to understand that there are a couple of factors that go into your credit score and you need to simultaneously manage all of them. Number one, you got to pay your bills on time. If you pay late, especially if you pay late more than once, that's really gonna hurt your score.

The second, and this is where you got in trouble, is credit utilization. That's the percentage of credit that you have available to you that you're actually using. We wanna keep that number below 30% at all times. So if you have a heavy spending month, sometimes when I go on vacation, I have a heavy spending month that I spend more than 30% of my credit limit on a card. If you do that, the

thing to do is just pay the bill now. Pay it twice a month rather than once a month to bring the utilization down. The problem that you got into by closing those credit cards is that you shrunk the pool of available credit that you had and that hurt your score. The other thing that you did, another factor, it's not as big as the first two, but it's something called length of credit or credit history. The longer your credit relationships, the more beneficial it is to your score. When you close those cards, if they were the cards that you had had the longest, you heard that factor too. So that's how you do it. Yeah. And actually I did have a credit card that was with me for like so long and then

the credit card company ended the card and I was like, oh man, I'm really screwed. They ended it because you weren't using it, right? No, no, like that type of card retired because I had it for so long. Then suddenly I was like, oh my God, I have no credit cards and I didn't even realize. I'm fixing it though. It's not that terrible, but I'm fixing it.

Cool, so let's talk about investing in general. I'm just gonna give you a general question. I actually asked Susie Orman this question when she came on the show. If you had $100,000 to invest, you already had your emergency fund, you already had savings, all that. You just had $100,000 cash.

Where would you put it? What I'm doing with that kind of money right now is splitting it up and buying the stocks that we've been picking for our investing club, right? I have a diversified portfolio that is set up to get me to the retirement that I want to get to. I am on track, I have met my savings goals. So if this is quite literally free money,

I'm gonna put it into the picks that we're picking for our investing club. And so recently we've been looking at, at stocks like Lululemon, we've got JPMorgan Chase, we've got a bunch of stocks in the portfolio, but we add one about every month. And sometimes we sell one and I would do that. That's so cool.

So this investment club is basically you guys like all talk about stocks and give guidance to each other. How does one join your investment club? So you can go to hermoney.com. It's called investing fix. If anybody wants to try it out, you can do it free for a month. But the way it works is that every month we present four different investing options. We look at them on four different dimensions.

How do they make their money? What do we like about them? What don't we like about them? And would we buy them at the current price? And then the club votes on what we add to the portfolio and what we buy them at the current price and then the club votes on what we add to the portfolio and what we take away from the portfolio. It's a democracy, democracy rules and it's been a lot of fun. Some of the women in our club have stepped up and presented stocks that they're interested in and some of those have been purchased for the club. One of our members suggested United Rentals and we bought that.

It's been a huge win. So we're all learning from each other, which is just so amazing. That's so cool. So it's actually like you guys are pooling your money together and investing together? We're not. We run a group portfolio that the club itself runs and is invested by the votes that the club decides. But a lot of members like me are buying the picks for our own portfolios. I love it. Well, Jean, this was such an awesome conversation. I end my show with two questions that I ask all my guests. Then at the end of the year, we typically do something fun with it.

So the first one is, what is one actionable thing our young and profitors can do today to become more profitable tomorrow? Start tracking your spending. Figuring out where that money is going for real. Yeah, if you don't know where it's going, then you have no control over what it's doing for you, whether it's a business expense or a personal expense. And I know

it's tedious and I know it's boring, but sometimes boring is better. And what is your secret to profiting in life? And this can go beyond financial advice. My secret to profiting and I got to tell you, I lost my mom recently, and my lifelong friends came out of the woodwork and haven't left me alone in a good way, in the best way. And my secret is to invest as much energy as absolutely possible in those friends. That's so beautiful.

That's so true. Sometimes you forget about relationships and nothing in the world is more important, I think, than relationships. 100%. Jean, where can everybody learn more about you and her money? So I'm on social pretty much everywhere at jeanchatsky and you can find us at hermoney.com.

Amazing. Well, thank you so much for joining us on Young and Profiting Podcast. Thanks for having me. Man, this was such a good interview with Jean. I really loved learning about the changing socioeconomics of the world. And whether you're a man or a woman, this is gonna impact you.

I always try to make sure my episodes are relevant to everyone. And I want to get into that. But first I want to talk about Jean. Jean is a woman of so many talents. I often talk about this idea of skill stacking entrepreneurship. And I really think that if you want to be an entrepreneur, the best way to do it is to be a skill stacking entrepreneur. Meaning that you get a lot of experiences in your 20s and even in your 30s and even in your teens. I was getting sales experience and stuff working at the mall when I was a teenager.

So like your whole life, you get all these experiences and you start to figure out what you're good at and you start to get pretty good at a lot of different things. And then the key to being a successful entrepreneur is to like merge all the things you're good at into one thing that somebody wants. Jean did it with her money. She built this platform. She had like corporate financial experience.

She could teach people. She had journalism experience. She figured out how to build a community, she probably had ran communities in the past and other experiences that she didn't even talk about in the podcast, then she put it all together and created her money and now she's a huge success, she has a huge podcast, huge brand,

best-selling author, all that. And nobody could replicate that because it's her own unique thing. And there's lots of ways to be an entrepreneur, you could put out a product, but's lots of ways to be an entrepreneur. You could put out a product, but a really great way to be an entrepreneur, in my opinion, is to stack up your skills and then put out an offering. So the key here is that you gotta get experiences.

Something that you learn in 10 years, you might make millions of dollars off that skill. Me, working in the mall at every freaking clothing store from 14 years old to 20 years old made me personable, made me social, made me outgoing, made me confident and dress well, made me a great sales negotiator. And now I'm making millions of dollars on it, but when I worked at the mall, I was making minimum wage.

I worked at a radio station for free for three years. The station never gave me $1. Now I get paid $2,000 every time I read a commercial on my podcast. It all adds up later. So don't worry about making money now. Get the experiences now. Okay? So let's go back to women and money.

We are at the start of a huge shift in wealth towards women in upcoming decades. Like Jean said, if you follow the breadcrumbs, you will realize just how much this could change everything, including business and finance communities. We're already seeing the effects of this shift in other places, like automakers who are designing vehicles with female purchasers in mind, and how long before other products and services follow suit. Perhaps someday in the future, there will be overhead compartments on airplanes that I can actually reach.

I doubt it, but a girl can dream, right? If women are going to have more money, they're going to have to figure out how to spend it and invest it wisely. On average, women are still less likely to invest their money than men and are less comfortable investing than men are. But this is changing, and like Jean said, the best way to get comfortable with investing and managing money is by actually going ahead and doing it. So this is my call to action. If you are a woman listening to this podcast, start investing.

Even if it's a thousand dollars, start investing. And if you are a man listening to this podcast, encourage your girlfriend, your wife, your sister, your daughter, your mother to start investing. And if you are a man listening to this podcast, encourage your girlfriend, your wife, your sister, your daughter, your mother to start investing. It is your responsibility as well. Let's all help everybody grow their wealth and change the world. And speaking of actually doing something, if you listened, learned, and profited

from this episode of Young and Profiting Podcast, then please share it with somebody who might enjoy it. Drop us a five-star review on Apple Podcast. I love reading our reviews. Nothing makes me happier. Nothing says, thank you so much, Hala, for this awesome content than writing a review on Apple Podcast. I read every single one of them.

I check every single day for new reviews. Good or bad, I want your feedback. Please drop us a 5-star review. And if you prefer to watch your podcasts on videos, you can find all of our episodes on YouTube. Just look up Young and Profiting, you can find all of our episodes there. You can also find me on Instagram at Yap with Hala or LinkedIn by searching my name. It's Hala Taha. Finally, I gotta give a big shout out to my Young and Profiting team. You guys are amazing. I have the best team in the world. This is your host, Hala Taha,

AKA the Podcast Princess, signing off.