Pod Insights The Moth Introducing: What We Spend About this episode Imagine if you could ask someone anything you wanted about their finances. On What We Spend, people from across the country and across the financial spectrum are opening their wallets—and their lives—to tell you everything: what they make, what they want, and—for one week—what they spend.
Transcript 0:01 Speaker 00 Hi, everyone. As a Moth listener, we know you enjoy the magic that comes from first-person storytelling and are deeply curious about people's lived experiences. That's why we'd like to present a new podcast we think you'll enjoy. It's called What We Spend, and it allows us a unique window into a subject matter that feels taboo to openly discuss: money. In each episode, host Courtney Harrell talks with one person as they document a full week of their lives and all the ways money has factored into it. People from all over the country and all walks of life share the ways they make money, the ways they spend money, and all the thoughts and emotions they have along the way.
0:42 Speaker 00 The conversations are intimate, thoughtful, often fun, sometimes emotional, but always real. In this preview, we hear from Kelly as she navigates life with the all-too-familiar burden of outstanding student loan debt. For the full episode, be sure to search for What We Spend on your favorite podcast platform.
1:00 Speaker 01 You know how you always want to know about everyone else's money? You do, right? Like, you'll see someone buying something you want or taking some amazing vacation, and you think, "How can they afford that?" Or you meet your friend's new girlfriend, and she has some very impressive job, and you think, "How much money does she make?" I think when it comes to money, even if you don't want to admit it, we're all a little nosey. But I don't know, I actually think that's good. I think we should be talking about money more, and all the ways, big and small, that it impacts our lives.
1:41 Speaker 01 On this show, we are actually gonna do that. We are gonna go somewhere that we almost never get to go: deep into the heart of someone else's finances. Here's how this is gonna work. Each week, I'm gonna introduce you to a new person from somewhere across the country, and they are gonna tell us everything about their finances: how much they make, how much they want to make, what they worry about, or if they don't worry at all. And then, for one week, we'll follow them through their daily routine. Every day, they'll record an audio diary with all the nitty-gritty details of how they're spending their money. I mean, the coffees, the groceries, the rent that's due, the car accident that's suddenly up and everything.
2:21 Speaker 01 And after that, we'll talk about what the week brought up for them, what it's made them feel. Because whatever you're buying, or not buying, or saving, or spending, at the end of the day, money is always about more than your balance.
2:40 Speaker 01 I'm Courtney Harrell, and this is What We Spend.
2:55 Speaker 01 How much school debt do you have?
2:58 Speaker 02 I have $150,000. I had more. I had $300,000 after my master's. I had a great uncle pass away who was an artist. And my parents chose with their share of that that they would help pay off all my private loans. And so that was a crazy night. We like, I remember pressing submit on the $150,000 payment and just being like, holy shit. And they were like, yay, doesn't that feel so much better? And I was kind of like, it feels like 50% better. And it still feels like I have still $150,000 of debt.
3:42 Speaker 01 This is Kelly.
3:43 Speaker 02 I turned 32 in one week, and I live in Salt Lake City.
3:47 Speaker 01 Kelly is one of the 42.8 million Americans who has student loan debt. And also, like a lot of her generation, she wants to buy a home and have a baby. And she's trying to figure out if it's possible to make all that work. Kelly married her husband about a year ago. And eight months ago, the two of them moved from Tennessee to Salt Lake City, Utah. Ben is an engineer for a software company. Kelly's a director of client experience at a medical spa. And she's also an online mental wellness coach.
4:16 Speaker 02 I used to be a therapist. And for lots of reasons, I'm not right now. But I will always have therapy or coaching in my life. And I will probably go back to that full time at some point.
4:30 Speaker 01 Kelly is paid hourly, but she makes about 50K a year. And Ben makes about 78K. That's before taxes and health insurance. Together, that puts them just under the average income for married couple families in Salt Lake City.
4:49 Speaker 01 How would you describe your relationship with money?
4:52 Speaker 02 Consuming.
4:54 Speaker 01 Oh.
4:54 Speaker 02 I would describe it as all-consuming, yeah. The thing that keeps like coming to mind is, you know, when someone has like an addiction or a struggle and they call it like the monkey on their back.
5:04 Speaker 01 Yeah.
5:05 Speaker 02 Cause you just can't get away from it. It's just clinging and it's present with you all the time. It feels like that.
5:10 Speaker 01 Hmm.
5:11 Speaker 02 And I try really hard to like be in control, like maintain my control.
5:16 Speaker 01 Yeah.
5:16 Speaker 02 But it's kind of this tug of war.
5:21 Speaker 01 What do you do on a weekly basis to manage your expenses?
5:25 Speaker 02 Uh huh. On a Sunday, I will sit down and look at the budget. Um, and I made a spreadsheet.
5:33 Speaker 01 Okay, yeah. So walk me through your spreadsheet. So I would love to hear what all of your regular expenses are and like what you kind of typically pay in each category.
5:43 Speaker 02 So rent and utilities, twenty eight hundred. That's pretty expensive for rent. Anytime I tell someone that, they're like, that's more than my mortgage. I'm like, yeah, I, I know. Please don't tell me what your mortgage is. I don't wanna know.
5:59 Speaker 01 Two gym memberships, one oh eight. Car insurance, two fifty four.
6:03 Speaker 02 Gas, a hundred and twenty five.
6:05 Speaker 01 Do you have a car payment?
6:07 Speaker 02 No, we just buy used cars.
6:09 Speaker 01 Nice.
6:10 Speaker 02 Ben's car, basically the, the roof flies off, but you know,
6:15 Speaker 02 just don't take it on the highway, you know? We don't have a car payment.
6:18 Speaker 01 Who needs a roof?
6:19 Speaker 02 Yeah, who needs that? It's a, it's a convertible.
6:23 Speaker 01 Phone payment, seventy five. Pet insurance, seventy six. And physical therapy for two fifty. It helps with Kelly's chronic back pain and osteoarthritis.
6:31 Speaker 02 And then groceries, this one sucks the most right now. And I really feel like everyone will understand, uh, I put six hundred a month for groceries. And I mean, that includes like toiletries and stuff too.
6:44 Speaker 01 They have a Costco membership, but they pay that yearly fee with the cash back they get from their credit card.
6:49 Speaker 02 Medications and supplements, like Ben works out, so he has like this huge bag of protein batter that he gets from Costco. So Ben's is mostly workout supplements and just one medication. And mine is, I think, like four medications and like a probiotic and some multivitamins. Total for that is six fifty.
7:13 Speaker 01 Streaming platforms?
7:15 Speaker 02 No, we mooch off of our families.
7:18 Speaker 01 Some of the subscriptions are on them, though. Dropbox for twelve, SoundCloud for six, Spotify for ten.
7:24 Speaker 02 Hair, my hair. I put forty dollars next to my hair. And that's so I can spend that forty dollars and get my hair washed by somebody else one time every month. And it is like the gift to me to have somebody else wash my hair every once in a while. Isn't that shitty that like even now just reading my own budget, that it really is just my business? I still feel the need to justify like, I just need to treat myself sometimes and have my hair washed.
7:54 Speaker 01 What does that make your expenses altogether, your regular expenses?
7:57 Speaker 02 Around forty eight hundred a month, but then you get to debt.
8:03 Speaker 01 How much debt do you have?
8:04 Speaker 02 A lot. If you are including my student loans, we have two hundred and two thousand, seven hundred and twenty eight dollars in debt.
8:15 Speaker 01 Where did you go to school?
8:16 Speaker 02 I went to Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee.
8:20 Speaker 01 Why did you go to school?
8:23 Speaker 02 I thought I was supposed to because I was told that, you know, this is, this is the next step. And I think this is part of like the, the dream or the lie that was sold to my generation was like, if you don't go to college, you're going to end up working at McDonald's.
8:39 Speaker 02 You know, and like you're going to be a deadbeat and you're going to have to live with your parents and you're probably going to use marijuana even.
8:49 Speaker 02 And like you're going to be a bad person essentially if you don't go to college.
8:54 Speaker 01 Kelly's degree cost about forty grand a year. And after undergrad, Kelly went on to grad school at the same university. She has a master's in mental health counseling. But as Kelly sees it now, the math doesn't make much sense. I want to ask you something about that, and I mean no judgment with this. How did you think you were going to pay off that amount of tuition? Or were you at the time like, I know I can't pay this off? Like, how did you think about it then?
9:22 Speaker 02 Oh, no, it's a good question. I didn't. I did not think about it. I had no clue what I was doing. It wasn't like, hmm, I wonder how I'm going to pay this off when the, you know, average annual salary for a therapist is forty to sixty thousand dollars a year. I was not thinking about that. I had no idea what I was doing and I didn't really have anyone around me who was explaining what I was doing. Like, your prefrontal cortex is not developed when you are making those decisions.
10:05 Speaker 02 Ultimately, I don't regret anything because I am who I am and I'm happy. But I'm financially trapped.
10:17 Speaker 01 So that's Kelly. And this week, instead of just tracking it in her spreadsheet, she's going to tell us about every dollar she spends and every feeling that comes with it. How are you feeling about tracking your finances for a week?
10:31 Speaker 02 I'm feeling nervous because maybe I will just realize through tracking every expense that I'm actually just a dumb dumb and I'm very irresponsible and this is all my fault. But I'm feeling curious. I'm just curious to see what comes with it.
10:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, me too. I will check in with you on the other side of your week.
10:54 Speaker 02 Okay.
10:59 Speaker 00 To listen to more, follow What We Spend, an Odyssey original podcast, wherever you get your podcasts.
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