Everything I Know About Money—and Why We Won’t Talk About It

In this solo episode, Emma shares how she thinks about money, from the lessons she learned growing up in East London to the principles she uses today. She gets into her personal financial priorities, why your earning power can matter more than your savings, how to negotiate from a position of strength, and why no woman should ever outsource the understanding of her own finances. In this episode, you’ll learn: What your financial priorities should be in your 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50sWhy your ability to earn can be more valuable than your savings early in your careerHow your beliefs about money can influence what you earn, ask for, and keepHow to negotiate salary, equity, and other forms of compensation more effectivelyThe difference between earning money, building wealth, and protecting what you’ve builtWhy investing early matters—and what can happen when you waitHow to think about financial independence as freedom, security, and choice

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:09Emma Grede?

  Hi my darlings and welcome back to Aspire. Today, we are talking about one of my favourite things: money. And let me tell you something that I don't say often enough. One of the biggest reasons I actually wanted to start this show was money. Not just about making it, really talking about it, understanding it, and getting really clear on the end goal that we as women need and deserve more of it. I will never stop talking about it out loud, in public, with other women and on the record, because that conversation almost never happens. And the silence around money is quietly costing you a fortune. I wanted to create a place where we could finally shift that.

• 0:52Emma Grede?

  The truth is, you're allowed to want to be rich. Oh, yes, you are. I need more women to actually say that part out loud. But we're not, not on stage and not even with the women closest to us. So I built Aspire to be a place where that finally happens. Because the truth is this: the gender pay gap, career interruptions for things like caregiving, longer life expectancy and historical exclusion from financial conversations all mean that women need to be more intentional about money and not less. So as I have done from the very beginning on this show, I'm going to continue to introduce you to the best money experts in the world.

• 1:33Emma Grede?

  And practically, I'm going to share how I think and what I actually do when it comes to my own money. So let's get into it, shall we?

• 1:49Emma Grede?

  Here is how my brain actually works. These cameras, the ones filming me, I know what they cost. The chair, the chair that I'm sitting in, the chair my producer's sitting in, the lights up there, like absolutely everything, I know the cost. I've asked and I understand it. I know what it costs to run this entire room. People think I'm joking when I say that I know the price of everything. But believe me, I am not. I know what a head of lettuce costs, I know what a pint of milk costs. I know, and I run businesses that are worth a great deal more than either of those things. People read that as me being like tight or overly frugal. But what it actually makes me is fluent.

• 2:31Emma Grede?

  And I stay this close to money because you cannot have a healthy relationship with money or with anything that you refuse to look at. So let me show you exactly what I mean. I once, and I've told this story a couple of times, I once sat on a panel called Women, Power and Money. I thought it might be my favourite panel that I'd ever sat on in my life. It was a row of the most seriously impressive women, all from different industries, all from different backgrounds, but like real power. I actually remember getting on there and thinking, wow, what an impressive group of women. But as we talked, I could literally feel my patience growing. I could feel myself getting annoyed and angry because we covered everything

• 3:14Emma Grede?

  except the one thing that's actually useful for women to talk about: money. It was like right there in the title, but no one said a word about it at all. You want to know when the real conversation happened? When the mics were cold and the cameras are off. And only by the way, because I insisted and I asked the questions that I hoped we were going to give answers to. So it's important for me to know and for you to know exactly how much people are getting paid, how their deals are made, for example, how and when their structures change, what their lawyers cost them, all the little nitty gritty details. But it fascinates me how many women, in particular those that just like will decide to shift uncomfortably at my questions, even when you're off the record

• 3:58Emma Grede?

  and on a stage that's actually built to talk about, quote unquote, women's progress. Not a chance. So Aspire was actually made for that reason. And it isn't only panels, it actually happens on this show too. I cannot tell you how many unbelievably successful women that I've sat down with and I can barely get a straight answer out of them about money. They just won't indulge it. And then a doodle turn up, a Michael Rubin, for example, he'll sit in exactly that chair, a man who built, what, a $30 billion business. I asked him every money question that I could think of and he answered every single one. Not a flinch, not an apology, not a sausage. Now that gap is the whole reason that I wanted to make this episode.

• 4:42Emma Grede?

  And so today, I'm going to break the rule. This is everything that I know about money. A lot of it is in my book, Start With Yourself, especially the money chapter. The book goes far deeper. But today, I wanted to bring that conversation to life and I want to bring it directly to you. I am not here to teach you how to budget. You can find a thousand people online for that. I actually want to talk about the practicalities, what I have actually done, your money relationship and how it should change as much as you do, decade by decade. Because just like our faces, a little work can go a long way, if you know what I mean. So here's where I want to start. I want you to understand that money isn't dirty and it isn't crass.

• 5:27Emma Grede?

  It's a neutral tool. So just take that in for a second. You don't need to bring all of your relationships that you have with money. Just think about it just like this: it's a tool. And the discomfort that you feel when you're talking about it, that was actually taught to you. And trust me, you can put it down. You must and you absolutely can unlearn that shit. I was never, and I never have been, I've just never been scared of money. My mum used to sit at the kitchen table every single month, probably every week actually, and she would balance her accounts by hand. We didn't have much, but when the lights went off, I learned why the lights went off. That is your money story, by the way. Not the number that sits in your bank account,

• 6:10Emma Grede?

  but the thing that you actually absorbed about money in your childhood. The thing that you learned before you were old enough to question it. It actually, it stays with you and it's your responsibility to understand that and work to unlearn it. Now, one thing before we go into detail on the decades, and I am going to take you in this conversation, decade by decade, with my own experience, the benefit of my own experience. Because a lot of people have gotten this so wrong about me. I didn't marry for or into money. When Jens and I got together, he was not rich. He was 29 and I was 24. We both actually had very little. But he believed in me as a businesswoman long before there was any romance.

• 6:54Emma Grede?

  I have always had my own, I will always have my own. And that is the whole point. You build your own and you stay in every decision. Because underneath all of this is very, very simple. You should never outsource your money, not to a partner, not to an advisor, not to anyone. The onus is on you to learn it and to have the hard conversations. So I really want you to approach it in the way that you'd approach anything that you want to get good at, with curiosity. You have to ask the questions, you have to think about it constantly and you have to take an interest. Every single decade that you have has a different financial job. The mistake is thinking about money as though it is just about earning.

• 7:39Emma Grede?

  Money is actually about earning, keeping, growing, protecting and eventually building your wealth. And different decades require very different priorities. Remember, and this is the important one, I want you to like write this down, underline it, all the things. Remember that you should never measure yourself against the outliers. It is so easy to think that we should all be like some insane, amazing tech giant that came out of Silicon Valley, like forget about it. Social media will have you believing that we should be billionaires in our twenties. Don't buy into that lie. Most people actually don't make money until their 40s. And the truth is, building wealth actually takes a really long time.

• 8:23Emma Grede?

  What is key is that you take responsibility for it and you can do that at any age.

• 8:37Emma Grede?

  So let's get into it decade by decade, starting with your twenties. Oh, I remember my twenties, I think it was just yesterday. So the financial job of your twenties isn't getting rich, it's becoming valuable. Think about it for a second. Your greatest asset in your twenties isn't your savings account, it's your ability to earn money. That is a fundamental shift that I want you to take in because the biggest mistake that people make in their twenties is focusing on saving money instead of increasing their earning potential. Because listen, you can only budget your way so far, but you can dramatically change your life by increasing your income. What I want women to focus on is learning skills that are actually scarce and valuable.

• 9:22Emma Grede?

  Taking more risks, yes, risks, we're going to talk more about that later. Building a reputation, always asking for more money and understanding investing early. And we are going to get into that in a little bit more detail later on. The biggest mistakes that you can make in your twenties are under negotiating your salary. Because that has a trickle down effect. The other one is living beyond your means to appear successful. Just don't do it. Then people carry debt or they wait to learn about investing. And lastly, they choose comfort over growth. Avoidance will cost you dearly. So many of us will actually spend hours and hours researching a vacation or where we should eat

• 10:04Emma Grede?

  or a new item for our wardrobe and just minutes researching an investment account. The first step to financial power is awareness, which leads me to my next point. You must heal your story and build the foundation. Here's the part that most money advice just skips right over. Before any of the practical stuff works, you have to deal with your story. You didn't arrive in your twenties as a blank page. You actually showed up already carrying a story about money that somebody actually handed you. And for a lot of women, that story is about scarcity. So think deeply about yours. Scarcity is the deep belief that there is never enough. And that if you get more, then somehow somebody else is getting less.

• 10:48Emma Grede?

  For others of us, it's shame or it's just pure avoidance, like ignoring and avoiding ever looking at your money. The real work in this decade in your twenties, before the budgets, before the negotiation, is to name yours out loud. You have to name and understand your story. And I write about this so much in my book. I write about what it means to understand your story. Because if you get that story wrong, none of the rest will stick. Pinky Cole, who's the founder of the restaurant chain Study Vegan, she actually said it best at a conference. I don't hate all conferences, but she said it best at a conference. She said, if you're scared of money, you ain't going to make no money. And it's really true. I'll be honest, I'm just not scared of money.

• 11:31Emma Grede?

  I don't carry the scarcity story because I worked out early that scarcity is a trick that people play on you. And boy, do they play it on you. But I have a money story too, and it actually drives my husband completely crazy. Mine is that what goes boom can also go bust. Because I watched that reality happen around me everywhere where I grew up in East London. Someone would hit it big, they'd have a big moment, and then they would have nothing, absolutely nothing. So when Jens and I started dating, I told him straight, I don't go backwards in lifestyle. I probably take it a little bit too far. But that story is exactly why I understand every facet of my finances and why honestly I've taken cash off the table whenever I can.

• 12:14Emma Grede?

  Now, I am definitely not telling you to adopt my story. But I am telling you that it's a good idea to actually figure out your story and to say it out loud. Now, Rich Kleiman, which is literally one of my favorite interviews, we got into this on the show. So you should watch that episode I did with him if you can. Because the hardest story to change is the one that you tell yourself. Once you see and you understand your story, you can actually work on it. And the place that it actually bites the hardest is when you have to go and ask for money. When Maury Teraport came in, she actually said something that stuck with me the most. Before you can negotiate for anyone, you have to heal the story that you tell yourself about what it is that you're worth.

• 12:56Emma Grede?

  The number you're brave enough to ask for sits downstream of actually what you believe you deserve. So here's the practical work for this decade. Just assume you're underpaid, because very likely that you are, and ask for more. Learn to feel the moment that you've got leverage. Because by the time somebody is actually sitting across from you, they already want the deal. Watch your own language, because you've got to be able to strike all the cushioning out of your emails. The little bit that goes, you know, if it doesn't work, I completely understand. Like stop being so helpful. Think very carefully before you give your services away for free. And by that, I mean, if you're not being paid for it right then and right there, it better be leading to something.

• 13:41Emma Grede?

  But make no mistake that doing favors has a price. And you need to calculate the cost and the potential return of anything that you do for free. Women leave a fortune on the table doing unpaid work and waiting quietly to be noticed for it. Nobody's coming to notice you. You've actually got to be willing to say out loud that you want to be paid and paid well, I might add. Now, I started working when I was 12 years old. I had a paper route at first and then literally any job that I could get my hands on. But I learned the value of a wage really early. I didn't have all of the rest of it sorted, but an old boyfriend actually used to call me a squanderbird.

• 14:21Emma Grede?

  Because I'd spend every little bit of cash I had the second that it landed on a pair of shoes, on a night out, whatever it might be. But I told you, I don't have a scarcity mindset. So learning to hold on to money instead of just earning it and then watching it disappear, that took me years. I learned it the hard way. I learned it and that's what counts. Now, there's one thing I did really understand early though, even before I had the word for it. And that was optionality. I left school with nothing, so if I wanted the unpaid internships for the experience that would actually get me somewhere, then I had to fund those myself. So I would actually just split my week. I did a few days of paid work just to cover myself and the rest I spent working for free in the rooms that I needed to be in.

• 15:06Emma Grede?

  But I was always asking the same question. How much do I need to get from here to get to the next thing? Now, Julia Collins, who's the first black woman to co-found a unicorn, said it even more deliberately when we spoke. She was on a spire recently and she did an incredible episode. She said as a teenager, she worked really hard to save $10,000 before college and then $100,000 after with a bartending job and weekend tutoring, all of these jobs that she amassed. But it was precisely so that she could afford to take a low salary at an early stage startup and bet on herself in the future. That buffer allowed her to pay the risk. The story comes first, the skills come after, but you actually will need both.

• 15:51Emma Grede?

  Now for your thirties. So the worst thing that you can be to me ever actually is uninformed. You have to learn about everything, but you definitely need to learn about money. You need to learn how your industry works. You need to learn about the connections between what it is that you do and how the actual business that you're in works. You need to learn also, and really importantly, how the economy affects your wallet. So let me break this down for you and explain exactly why some of the things that you read about or the things that you hear about in the news really affect you and how you need to think about them, more importantly. So the first one, inflation. Let's call this the silent pay cut.

• 16:34Emma Grede?

  Now imagine this, if your grocery bill last year was $200 a week, this year the same cart cost you $230. Your paycheck didn't change, but your money buys you so much less. That right there, that's inflation. Here's how it hits you directly. Your rent goes up, but your salary doesn't follow. Savings sitting in a bank account lose value over time if the interest rate is lower than inflation. The dollar you saved five years ago is worth maybe 80 cents today in buying power. Inflation doesn't just affect rich people or big companies. It's essentially like a hidden tax on everyone. But it hurts lower and middle income earners the most.

• 17:18Emma Grede?

  Because the bigger portion of their income goes to necessities like food or rent or utilities. Now, you hear about gas prices all the time, right? Like nonstop, it's always on the news. Yes, and rightly so, because there is a direct correlation between gas prices and what you pay for goods. It's literally like a domino effect. Most people just think about gas prices like if you drive around a lot. That is totally wrong, because gas prices are like a tax on absolutely everything. Every single thing that you buy had to be shipped somewhere. So higher fuel costs mean that trucking companies charge more. They mean that grocery stores pay more, which means you pay more at the checkout. Airline ticket prices rise.

• 18:02Emma Grede?

  Local businesses with delivery costs, they rise their prices. Farmers pay more to run their equipment, therefore food gets more expenses. The trickle is on and on. So even if you take the bus, gas prices still reach you in your pocket through the price of nearly every single product that you touch. Lastly, I want to touch on market fluctuations, because again, these are not just for Wall Street. They actually affect you. So many people think that the market is just a rich person's game. But if you have a 401k, a pension or any retirement account, you are in the market. When the markets drop, 20%, your retirement savings can drop 20% too. A market crash can trigger layoffs, companies cut costs, jobs disappear.

• 18:47Emma Grede?

  A booming market creates jobs, raises and business opportunities. Interest rates set in response to the market conditions, they directly control what you pay on your mortgage, on your car loan and any credit card debt that you might have. So when the Fed raises interest rates to fight inflation, your credit card APR goes up. A $5,000 balance that cost you $80 a month suddenly costs $110 a month just because of an economic decision that was made in Washington. Here's the reason you need to understand this. If you don't understand the economy, you get caught off guard by price hikes. You keep savings in a low interest account during high inflation. You can take on a variable loan rate when rates are rising.

• 19:32Emma Grede?

  A recession can completely blindside your career and you panic sell investments when markets drop. Whereas if you do actually understand the economy, you can plan ahead and budget when price hikes are actually happening. You could move your money into assets that keep up with inflation. You could lock in a fixed rate at the right time. You would build a little emergency fund before any kind of recession actually hits. And most importantly, you stay calm because you actually understand what's going on. The bottom line is that the economy isn't something that happens to powerful people. It happens to everyone. Every time you fill up your tank, every time you pay rent, as you swipe your credit card or you check your retirement balance.

• 20:15Emma Grede?

  Understanding even the basics puts you ahead of most people. It means that you're going to make decisions proactively and not reactively. And over a lifetime, those small informed decisions, they can mean the difference between financial stress and financial freedom. So when I talk about learning, and I've done this in so many ways, but it is so key that you stay curious about the industry that you work in. You have to read industry press, understand what's happening in the underlying of the businesses that you're in and ask questions all the time because all of this will help you form an opinion about what you should and shouldn't be being paid. You've got to understand the difference between saving and investing.

• 21:00Emma Grede?

  And honestly, most women in their 30s, they save, but far fewer invest. This is a critical mistake. Open a Roth IRA, just contribute to it every year because it grows tax free, meaning that future you pay zero taxes on decades of growth. Your 30s are actually when you have real things to negotiate over. A salary that actually matters and potentially at some point, maybe some equity on the table. So this is the decade to get really, really good at it. And this is the framework that honestly, I so wish that someone had handed me when I first started my career, working for so many different companies.

• 21:45Emma Grede?

  Number one, the first offer is never the real offer. It's just where the conversation starts. So don't grab it, don't over explain your ask because the explaining is usually where you quietly talk yourself back down. Now remember this, because at the time, sometimes it can seem like, I don't know, is this worth fighting for? Remember, a $5,000 raise at 32 years of age doesn't mean 5K more this year. It actually compounds into hundreds of thousands of dollars in lifetime earnings. So do your research properly, which means asking people what they actually earn.

• 22:24Emma Grede?

  Don't just ask women, men are included in this too, because let me tell you, they will tell you that number and that number is power. Vivian Tu had a great story about this when she sat down on the podcast with me. So she talks about going into her end of year review and she pulls a work friend to the side in the bathroom and she just asked flat out, what do you make? And then she used it to benchmark her own raise. So when she gets back to her desk, she told her friend exactly what she'd asked for. She told her friend exactly what she's got and the friend then went back and used that information in her end of year review. So the two of them actually just ended up getting paid more because of one very simple conversation. So I really think you should try it.

• 23:05Emma Grede?

  Here's the thing about that story, you have to go in from a place of abundance instead of fear. The best negotiators that I know aren't aggressive at all. They simply believe that there's a deal to be done that can work for everyone and they're completely willing to walk away if there isn't. So you have to build enough optionality into your life so that you can always walk. The day that you're able to leave is the day you actually have leverage. Now, number two, watch who you measure yourself against because women compare themselves to each other constantly, but not the guys. Men compare themselves to what's possible. That is like a totally different way of thinking.

• 23:49Emma Grede?

  When a man says he wants to be rich, we just call it ambition. When a woman says it, we call her a gold digger. A man sees another man doing well and thinks, if him, then why not me? A woman sees another woman doing well and quietly worries if, you know, maybe she takes more, that she's taking it from her. And that is the scarcity story just dressed up and it's totally nonsense. Because what your colleague earns has nothing to do with what you can go out and command. Stop running the comparison and start running the numbers on what the work is actually worth. That is the shift right there. So I learned this the hard way at one of my first jobs.

• 24:29Emma Grede?

  The owners love to pit me and this other girl against each other for the good assignments and for their approval. It was completely and utterly exhausting, but it trained us, like literally trained us to see each other as rivals. So eventually, much like my friend Vivian Tu, I just went to her and I said, why are we doing this? Like, let's stop, you take this job, I'll take the next one and we'll just sort it out between the two of us instead of like clawing at each other for the scraps. It took her like a little moment just to make sure that I wasn't messing around with her, but then we did exactly that. And boom, the spell was broken because that's all scarcity is. It's a spell and it's almost always completely manufactured, usually by someone who benefits from you believing it.

• 25:13Emma Grede?

  So think about that, who actually benefits from you having this way of thinking because it definitely isn't you. Now, the third thing is that you need to learn how to read what you're actually negotiating over. The first question that I ask myself about any business is four words. Where is the money? Where is the money? Not where's the mission, not where is the vibe, no, no, no. Where is the actual money in this and who is it flowing to? If you can't answer that, you don't understand the business yet and you certainly shouldn't be signing anything. My 30s were when I learned to read a deal for real. So when a company puts an offer in front of you, you've got to look past the salary. Salary is just one line.

• 25:56Emma Grede?

  Always research your market value. You can go on Glassdoor, you can go on LinkedIn, you can look at industry reports, but also negotiate not just salary, but any PTO. Remote work, you know, my favorite, bonuses, professional development budgets, all of those things. The equity, the structure, what you're actually going to give up to get it. That is where the money actually lives. Ask who owns what, ask what happens to your piece if the company gets bought. Vivian Tu made this point on the show better than I could. She actually walked away from a $600,000 salary on Wall Street. And what she'll tell you is that salary is only ever a floor. The building is what you get to do on top of it.

• 26:38Emma Grede?

  And if you're making a life with somebody in this decade, decide how the money actually works between you. Out loud and super early, because you can love someone completely and still keep your own accounts and your own lawyers. I'm telling you, because I did. Every woman should absolutely know her net worth, the household income, the debt, the investments, the insurance and the estate plans. And be very, very worried if it's a problem for you to know this information. You don't need to know this because you expect something to go wrong, but because financial literacy is just a part of adulthood. Remember, income pays your bills, assets actually create freedom. So stay involved with everything.

• 27:23Emma Grede?

  That way you're always going to know exactly where you stand if ever anything changed. Okay, now the 40s, protect and compound. This is my decade right now. So I'm going to talk about it literally as I'm living it. The financial job of your 40s is optimization. By now, many women are at the peak of their earning years. The game changes, it stops being how do I earn more and becomes how do I protect and grow what I've built? I honestly believe that women should focus aggressively on investing, eliminating any bad debt, protecting their assets. But also really thinking through, how do I spend my own time so that it actually compounds?

• 28:07Emma Grede?

  This is often the decade when women become the financial safety net for absolutely everybody around them too. Parents, children, friends, a partner. But with all of that comes so much pressure. So you have to be extremely disciplined about boundaries. You cannot save everyone else if you haven't secured yourself first. And here's what nobody warns you about. Money doesn't get less important once you have it, it actually gets more important. So when you run a business, your money decisions stop being about just you. There's a payroll, there's people whose mortgages and whose kids' life depend on you getting it right. Multiply that across a few companies and the weight is real and it's daily. And that's how I feel all the time.

• 28:50Emma Grede?

  So the founders who've hit a bit of success and decide that they've earned the right to stop looking at the numbers. Those are the exact ones that run out of road. You'll never get to stop paying attention, the stakes only go up. Protecting what you've built has its own discipline. Mine actually comes straight from that boom and bust story that I told you earlier. But I do have a rule that I live by. Valuation is vanity, profit is sanity and cash is king. Meaning that I take money off the table whenever I genuinely can. Now, I know people that have hit wild valuations and they've refused to sell down even like a slither of their stake because they were certain that there was something else in the future. Something was coming and then they watched the whole thing turn into nothing.

• 29:36Emma Grede?

  Years of work and absolutely nothing to show for it. And here's the hard one that sounds like the opposite of what I told you about negotiating your pay. When you are asking to be paid, never ever take the first offer. But when you're selling something you've built, the first offer is usually the best one. Now, you might not want to hear that, but companies are bought, not sold. Take that in for a second because it's absolutely true. And the fantasy that a better buyer or something better is just around the corner is how people end up with nothing. I would rather pull cash out steadily and sleep at night. I don't need to be the richest woman in the room at 70. I want to live well now and still be standing later. Now, once you've got that cash, do not let it just sit there.

• 30:21Emma Grede?

  This is something I had to unlearn because I was raised to believe that money in the bank was the whole point and that borrowing was something to be ashamed of. But both of those are actually wrong. Cash in a plain old current account is quietly losing to inflation every single year. So it needs to be invested, it needs to be working. And borrowing, used well, is actually one of the most powerful tools that you'll ever have. The wealthy rarely sell down a great asset to play for something. They just borrow against it and let the asset keep growing and growing. And protect yourself before you ever think that you need to. You know, Julia Collins told another great story on the show that I have thought about so much.

• 31:03Emma Grede?

  Long before her big exit, she had a wealth manager who made her go back and actually read her operating agreements, made her check her acceleration clauses and understand exactly what her rights were inside of her own company. So when things actually later fell apart with her co-founder, she wasn't scrambling, she wasn't getting, she knew precisely where she stood and she could stay calm and steely when it came for her time to fight. Now, you have to read the paperwork while everything is still good. That is the only time that you get to read it clearly. You need to make financial literacy a habit well before this decade. So you're not panicked about it when you arrive here. This is also why Nicole Lappin, a financial expert, was like one of the early guests on this show after we launched.

• 31:48Emma Grede?

  I wasn't going to build a show about ambition and leave money out of it. She walked through the actual mechanics, the debt strategies, the money vocabulary that nobody bothers to teach you. You've got to get fluent in that. Read the Financial Times, read the Bible of whatever industry you're in, but make sure you take learning and make it a serious priority. By now, curiosity about money should be a standing appointment within your calendar.

• 32:24Emma Grede?

  Now we get to the 50s, the long view. Now, of course, I'm not in my 50s yet, so this part is about me being able to think forward, honestly. But the way I think about the financial job of my 50s is ultimately one of ensuring choice. By your 50s, money should be doing a job for you, not the other way around. The focus really needs to be on retirement readiness, healthcare and estate planning. You're going to need to understand exactly what your retirement will cost you and really have eliminated like all of the financial blind spots. I think the biggest mistakes that I see that I actually think about preparing myself for are assuming that somehow your retirement is going to work itself out.

• 33:08Emma Grede?

  I see so many dear friends who need to support their adult children indefinitely. And right now, of course, as a society, we're grappling with underestimating how long we're even going to live. Whatever happens, we know that women often live longer than men. And that means that we frequently need more money than we think. And we cannot avoid the conversation of what happens if I'm on my own. Many women never ask this question until they absolutely have to. And a good financial plan will work with or without a partner. Financial independence means having choices, not necessarily having millions. The question then turns into what is all of this actually for? The other question that defines this decade is what is enough?

• 33:52Emma Grede?

  Because the goalposts will move on their own if you let them. For years, all I wanted to do was just be the woman who didn't have to check the prices on a menu. And I got there and I thought to myself, oh, you know, I want to fly at the front of the airplane. But what I imagined for myself just kept expanding alongside my bank balance. And at some point, you've got to actually decide what enough looks like for you on purpose, or you're going to spend your whole life just chasing a number that keeps running away from you the whole time. That decision has to be entirely yours and one that you've thought really deeply about. If you want a way to pin that down, instead of leaving it to a feeling, Vivian Tu has

• 34:34Emma Grede?

  this brilliant calculation for envisaging what your financial future actually holds for you. I like the name of it, Tori. She says, to figure out your fuck you number, envisage what a perfect year looks like for you, literally down to where you live, how you travel, what you want to support, like a life that, you know, you just get to do whatever it is that you want. And then you add up what that year realistically costs you. You divide it by 0.04, which reflects a kind of conservative return. Some savings accounts right now actually give you a 4% return, but that number that you've just calculated is what you need to have invested to never work again and live your life. That is what you're working towards.

• 35:17Emma Grede?

  Enough stops being like this kind of vague anxiety and starts becoming a figure that you can actually aim for. And here's the real answer to what it's all for. It's just freedom. The number is just how you buy it. Tori Dunlop actually put this better than anybody when she came in. She calls a financial education a woman's best form of protection, even a form of protest. Money is what lets you say yes to whatever you want to and no when you need to. It's what lets you walk away from a job that doesn't respect you or a relationship that isn't safe. The hardest messages she gets are from women who stayed somewhere because they shouldn't

• 36:01Emma Grede?

  have, purely because they couldn't afford to leave. So when I talk about wanting money in the hands of women, I'm not talking about luxury. I'm talking about choices and the power to author your own life. Now, there is an even harder piece, and I got onto this with Michelle Obama once because we both grew up without any money. And when you make it and the people that came up with you didn't, so much guilt comes out of that. And there's a pull to actually rescue everyone, to be the one who fixes it for your family, that fixes it for your old friends, which honestly, I completely understand. But I've learned that you can't take care of anyone properly until you've made yourself secure first.

• 36:44Emma Grede?

  You have to put your own house in order and then you get to be genuinely generous instead of generous in a way that actually drags you under with them. As I said, this is the decade you finally plan for the version of the story where you're actually not in the room. And I don't mean that darkly, I mean the unglamorous part, the wheels, the trusts, the estate planning that absolutely nobody wants to think about, but the machinery that decides whether the people you love end up getting taken care of or left in a mess. I've always been fierce about this in my own life. No one holds power of attorney over me. I sign everything. I read every line myself and I have never once handed the understanding of my own money to another person.

• 37:29Emma Grede?

  Vivian Tu told me about messages that break her heart. Women who were married for years, lost their husband and then realized they didn't even know the password to their own bank account. Don't let that be anyone that you love and don't let it be you. Everyone close to your money should be able to find their way through it without you in the room. The other half of it is what the money points at. Because the further I get, the more the question becomes less about the next number and more about what the whole thing is actually in service of and what I even want to leave behind. That is the work of the 50s as I see it. I'll report back when I get there. So in closing, here is what you need to know. Financial confidence doesn't come from how much money you have.

• 38:12Emma Grede?

  Honestly, I have met women with millions and millions of dollars who are just terrified of money because they don't understand it. And I've met women with very little who actually feel completely empowered because they know exactly where they stand. But that comes from knowing the truth about your money, facing it honestly and making decisions from a place of ownership. Because money isn't really about dollars, it's about freedom. And freedom belongs to the woman who's willing to take responsibility for creating it. So regardless of your age, these truths never change. Financial independence is freedom. It protects you in every type of relationship. Know your numbers always, you cannot manage what you don't measure. Invest early and consistently.

• 38:57Emma Grede?

  Time is the only thing that you can never buy back. You need to protect your income and your assets. Women live longer and your money has to too. The most powerful financial decision any woman can make is the choice to be fully, unapologetically in control of her own financial life in every season and at every age. No one will ever care about your financial future as much as you do. And here's the part that really nobody likes. You don't get to decide the rules of the game. The systems are the systems and pretending otherwise won't pay your mortgage. You still have to work, but inside of those rules, you can literally decide everything that matters. You decide the relationship you want with money, you can set the parameters and in the

• 39:42Emma Grede?

  same way you set them in any relationship that's going to work out good for you. So you just have to ask yourself the real question. What are you actually optimizing for? Is it security or a certain kind of freedom? And then the harder one, are you on the path that gets you there or are you just hoping? And here's the thing I wish more people understood. Money isn't there to make your dreams come true. That is just the fantasy that we get sold. Money is a tool. It buys you choices and the bigger it gets, the bigger the responsibility that comes with it. Treat it like a magic wand and it's going to humble you. I put everything I know about this into Start With Yourself, my book. The book hands you the knowledge, but the deciding is all yours.

• 40:28Emma Grede?

  You get to decide what money is for. Most people, they just never bother.

• 40:36Emma Grede?

  If you're loving this podcast, be sure to click follow on your favorite listening platform. While you're there, give us a review and a five star rating and share an episode you loved with a friend. We'll be so grateful. Aspire with Emma Grede is presented by Odyssey. I'm your host, Emma Grede. Our executive producers are Ashley McShan, Derek Brown and me. Executive producers from Odyssey are Asha Saluja and Leah Reese Dennis. Producer KK Sublime. Stephen Key is our senior producer. Sound design and engineering by Bill Schultz. Angela Peluso is our booker. Original music by Charles Black. Video production by Phil Sweetech and Carla Stelgardo. Social media by Olivia Homan, Catherine Bale.

• 41:18Emma Grede?

  Special thanks to Brittany Smith, Sydney Ford, my teams at The Lead Company and WME. Josefina Francis, Hillary Schaff, Eric Donnelly, Kate Hutchinson Rose, Tim Mecoll, Evan Cox, Kurt Courtney, Andrew Steele, Sean Cherry and Lauren Viera. If you have questions for me, you can DM me at aspirewithemmagreed. Grede is spelt G R E D E. That's aspire, A S P I R E with Emma Grede. Or you can submit a question to me on my website, emmagreed.me.