Jean Chatzky: Women Are Getting Richer. Here’s What It Means for Money and Business | Finance | YAPClassic

Determined to fix her messy personal finances, Jean Chatzky built a career from journalism to investing on Wall Street and back to financial media, learning how money works. Along the way, she saw a major economic shift taking shape as women began earning, inheriting, and controlling more wealth. So she built HerMoney, a platform helping women become financially empowered. In this episode, Jean shares how this economic shift will reshape investing, relationships, and consumer behavior, plus practical strategies for spending, debt, credit, homeownership, and financial freedom. In this episode, Hala and Jean will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (02:20) Jean’s Transition From Journalism to Finance (04:13) The Value of Skill Stacking in Entrepreneurship (07:33) The State of the Gender Wage Gap (16:10) Why Women Will Control More Wealth (21:14) Dating as a Successful Woman (27:52) How Women Are Learning to Invest (31:15) Financial Freedom, Renting, and Homeownership (36:51) How Money Types Shape Financial Decisions (41:20) Budgeting, Debt, and Credit Strategies (48:40) Investing Extra Cash Wisely Jean Chatzky is an award-winning journalist and the founder and CEO of HerMoney, a multimedia company dedicated to helping women build financial confidence. She spent 25 years as the financial editor for NBC’s Today show and has served as AARP’s personal finance ambassador. Chatzky is also a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the HerMoney podcast, where she and a team of experts help women take control of their money. Sponsored By: Indeed - Get a $75 sponsored job credit to boost your job's visibility at Indeed.com/profiting Shopify - Start your $1/month trial at Shopify.com/profiting. Northwest Registered Agent - Get a complete business identity with Northwest. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com/YAPFree and start using free resources to build something amazing. Mindstone - Master practical AI skills without the complexity with Mindstone’s AI Competency Programme. Head to experience.mindstone.com/yap and get 10% off. AT&T Business - Stay connected with reliable, secure internet built for entrepreneurs. Switch to AT&T Business at business.att.com. HoneyLove - Treat yourself to the most advanced bras and shapewear on the market. Save 20% off Honeylove by going to honeylove.com/PROFITING! #honeylovepod ElevenLabs - ElevenAgents by ElevenLabs helps businesses deliver better customer experiences. Start with a demo at ElevenLabs.io/profiting Quo - Bring your calls, texts, and contacts together in one place. Try Quo for free, plus get 20% off your first 6 months when you go to quo.com/profiting. Resources Mentioned: Jean’s Website: jeanchatzky.com Jean’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jeanchatzky/ Jean’s Instagram: instagram.com/jeanchatzky/ Jean’s Podcast, HerMoney: bit.ly/HerMoney-apple MoneyType Personality Test: moneytype.hermoney.com Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap YouTube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting Newsletter - youngandprofiting.co/newsletter LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Social + Podcast Services: yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship Podcast, Business, Business Podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal Development, Starting a Business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side Hustle, Startup, Mental Health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth Mindset, Stock Market, Scalability, Investment, Risk Management, Financial Planning, Business Coaching, Finance Podcast, Saving

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:08Speaker 01

  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 going to be someplace for five years, I don't think you should buy.

• 1:43Speaker 00

  You just had a hundred thousand dollars cash. Where would you put it?

• 1:47Speaker 01

  What I'm doing with that kind of money right now is...

• 1:54Speaker 00

  Yap gang, it is such a great time to be a woman. More women are becoming breadwinners, building successful companies, and creating wealth on their own terms. And as a female entrepreneur, I see this shift happening all around me. So today, we're unlocking the Young and Profiting archives from my conversation with Jean Chatzky. She's a financial journalist and the founder of CEO Her Money. Jean breaks down why women growing economic power isn't just changing our bank accounts. It's reshaping relationships, businesses, and even the way products are designed. And she explains why the next big step is making sure women feel just as confident investing in their money as they do earning it. I learned a lot from this one, and I think you will too. Let's dive in with Jean. Jean, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast.

• 2:36Speaker 01

  Thanks, Hala. Thanks so much for having me.

• 2:38Speaker 00

  I'm so excited for this conversation. I think it's going to be so insightful for my audience. I really love your work. And 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?

• 3:00Speaker 01

  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 sort of 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,

• 3:41Speaker 01

  business journalism, when I left that job, which turned out to be really, really difficult because all the big business magazines on the planet, and I applied to all of them, kind of 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,

• 4:23Speaker 01

  from there to Smart Money. And from there, I ended up on the Today Show for 25 years.

• 4:28Speaker 00

  Amazing. So when I looked at your career journey, it reminded me a lot of my own in terms that you skill-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, you know, 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

• 5:12Speaker 00

  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.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  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, 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. 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

• 6:06Speaker 01

  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.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  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? Like, 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

• 7:29Speaker 01

  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.

• 7:51Speaker 00

  Your podcast is super popular. Your blog is very well-known. I've heard about Her Money for many years now. You also have like so many books, and you've just become such an accomplished author. And a majority of your 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? It 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?

• 8:32Speaker 01

  It's a thing. It has budged, which is good. Over the last like year and a half, it's moved up a smidge, so that at this point, women earn 83 and a half 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

• 9:10Speaker 01

  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

• 9:52Speaker 01

  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...

• 10:32Speaker 01

  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 group, a room full of all women, giving some sort of a talk, and I would get to the Q and 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

• 11:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 11:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, such good advice. And by the way, that stock has done really well because I have it too.

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• 14:54Speaker 01

  Split the family pie with them, but then when our husbands die, we inherit that money as well.

• 15:01Speaker 00

  So good. And this is really, really fascinating to me. I really want to like, 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 100 men who graduated from college last year, 132 women graduated. Can you talk about how this really snowballs into various social, demographic, economic changes?

• 15:37Speaker 01

  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

• 16:18Speaker 01

  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

• 17:00Speaker 01

  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.

• 17:40Speaker 00

  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?

• 18:03Speaker 01

  So it's education, and it's the transfer of wealth. Those are the two big factors that are playing into this. But when you follow the breadcrumbs, what you see is that the fact that women are making these purchasing decisions changes things. It changes, 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 your height challenged in the way that I am. It'll change the design of

• 18:47Speaker 01

  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 going

• 19:30Speaker 01

  to change the look and feel and design of a lot of products.

• 19:34Speaker 00

  Oh, my gosh. So interesting. You know what you just reminded me of? So I took my mom to a treat. I took her 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 like, so embarrassing. And it like, 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, like, how ridiculous is this? Like, who are these airplanes

• 20:18Speaker 00

  designed for? It's obviously not considering petite women, you know?

• 20:23Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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.

• 20:48Speaker 00

  So worst part about flying, bro. So 38% of women are their family's biggest earner or primary breadwinner. How does that impact society and contribute to the fact that 50% of women are single right now?

• 21:01Speaker 01

  It, 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.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  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, this research, Holly. 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. And the logic behind that is that we feel somehow bad about that and that we have to, you know, 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.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  And that's where burnout comes from, and that's where anger comes from. And in some cases, that's where divorce comes from.

• 22:34Speaker 00

  I want to talk to you about the availability of suitable partners for successful women. I think you were talking, like, kind of, 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 30s and I have no kids. I'm not married. I'm literally never single. I can get a boyfriend like this, you know, first date. Everybody wants to be my boyfriend. It's kind of honestly overwhelming. I feel

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• 26:24Speaker 01

  So I am married for the second time and I agree with that. First of all, I think, and, and no disrespect to Marshall, but when I, 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, and your career. Because, you know, let's just be honest about this. And I felt the same way when I first had kids. My, my former father-in-law said, well, when are you stopping working?

• 27:07Speaker 01

  Because all of his other daughters and daughters-in-law had stopped working. And I said, yeah, not me. You know, I'm, I'm not, I'm not doing that. We, we will, we will figure out how these kids will have care during the day. And, and the way that we did it was that my ex-husband didn't travel for work and I did. And, and that, you know, that balanced us out for a very, very long time.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  If you are in a relationship where the egos are clashing or where your partner can't support your success or doesn't want to support your success, then it's not going to work. It's just, it's just gonna fail. Have you ever seen the movie Beautiful Girls?

• 28:00Speaker 00

  No.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  Okay, you have to watch the movie Beautiful Girls. It's, it's, it's old, 20 years probably. Natalie Portman and Annabeth Gish and Timothy Hutton and Matt Dillon, a whole bunch of people. But the, 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 like, get a real accounting job so that he can keep up with her. And finally, she just said, musicians are sexy.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  Like, 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, 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, is the importance that she put on selecting your partner. You know, 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

• 29:31Speaker 01

  and, and help them create a life where that was going to be possible. And that's what you need.

• 29:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I just feel like, like more generally, for advice, everybody, for everybody tuning in, I just feel like it's just harder to find like traditional roles and partners anymore, for men and for women. And I just would love to understand, like, even more advice from you for, 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.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  It, I, I think the way that you do it is by knowing yourself and knowing your partner and closing ranks, right? 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, right? It is, it is nobody's business 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, for many years.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  My husband is, is largely retired. He works about 15 hours a week these days. He's, he's older than I am. And he had an incredibly successful career. But the fact that I outearn him, he could care less. You know, he, he knows 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.

• 31:27Speaker 00

  I love it. Thanks, June, for all of that. Okay, so women are getting richer. Can you talk to us about how women are going to treat this newfound wealth compared to how men traditionally have treated wealth?

• 31:39Speaker 01

  Like, what are they going to do with their money? They have traditionally invested it, and women traditionally have been slow to the party. We, if you, again, and you, 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 going to 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

• 32:22Speaker 01

  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, we want to learn. I was, 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

• 33:05Speaker 01

  diversification and trends, and everybody can ask their questions. Investing is the kind of thing that is hard for women because 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't do it, right? Because no perfect answer exists because we have backward looking information and not forward looking information. And so we have to trust

• 33:50Speaker 01

  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.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  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's 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.

• 34:50Speaker 00

  This was, to me, such an interesting conversation, honestly. I feel like it's 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 want to 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?

• 35:19Speaker 01

  Well, I'm interested in knowing how you think it's changed. What, what is it to you?

• 35:24Speaker 00

  Well, I feel like now it's more about personally, like enjoying life, doing what I want, right? It's really not about becoming a billionaire. It's like, how, 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.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  Well, that's, I mean, 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 want to work and know that those things will continue for as long as I live. So I think that's where the disparity in, in financial freedom comes. And I think, 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.

• 36:33Speaker 00

  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?

• 36:55Speaker 01

  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

• 37:39Speaker 01

  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, you know, sell and move to Costa Rica. You can, you, 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

• 38:21Speaker 01

  sum of money. So 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 going to come in at 9:30 rather than 9 o'clock. You're just, 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

• 39:05Speaker 01

  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, right? If you're not going to be someplace for five years, I don't think you should buy. The cost of buying is, 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, you'll eventually hopefully get an opportunity to refi that loan. But, but there are cases where renting is just better.

• 39:49Speaker 00

  You gave such good advice. Like, I'm in this predicament now. And I feel like, 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, they're like switch a house and they'll make like 200 grand, and they just keep playing with that money and kind of growing it and growing it. So I do see a lot of my friends who have dabbled in homeownership do really well. That's inspiring to me. It's just that in New York, it gets crazy.

• 40:17Speaker 01

  It's so hard.

• 40:18Speaker 00

  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 like you live in the suburbs, you know?

• 40:26Speaker 01

  But you have more choice now than you used to have. I mean, I know young couples who are thinking, they live in New York where the price of homeownership is unsustainable. They're, 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

• 40:56Speaker 01

  A little bit easier.

• 40:58Speaker 00

  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?

• 41:14Speaker 01

  It's important to know how you're wired and why you're wired the way you are. It's 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

• 41:59Speaker 01

  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, 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

• 42:43Speaker 01

  throw all of your money against the business and think that that business is going to 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

• 43:27Speaker 01

  the conversations that the two of you have about money. When I was recently on a different podcast, and the hosts had taken the money type questionnaire, and they said, I feel so seen. Because it, there's something about this diagnostic, it just, it just gets people. I felt this way the first time I took it. I'm a producer. That's my primary money type with a little bit of connoisseur, which means I like to spend. You know, it's really true. And it's really interesting that a test can get you so well.

• 44:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's so true. And I'm happy that you brought up relationships, because I actually 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 like, I'm frivolous, but it's just like, what's the point of choosing such a hard job if you're not, and like, you know, like, to me, I'm just like, if no one's spending their money, why are we working so hard? Like, you know, like, so it just didn't make sense to me.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's good that you figured this out before you like, got engaged to the guy, or worse, married the guy, right? I mean, 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. You know, we, we, this is, this is the payoff of working so hard and producing. And, you know, I acknowledge, we are definitely privileged. I'm fortunate to have a career that I, that I love, which makes working hard feel like not working

• 45:23Speaker 01

  as hard. This is why we work. If they didn't pay us, we wouldn't work so hard.

• 45:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, I love that. This has been such an awesome conversation. Okay, a couple more questions. Let's talk about budgeting. There's so much inflation going on. Everything is just way more expensive. I think a lot of, 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, you know, your clothes, like, 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.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, are you not on the real real? You should just be turning over your closet. All the, I mean, this is what I do. Because I, I'm the same. I, you know, 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 real real, and I buy something else on the real real, 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. But, and, and that I'm doing something a little bit better for the environment. And so that, that's my, that's my shopping suggestion. But when it comes to overspending in general, I think that the secret is that

• 46:47Speaker 01

  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

• 47:26Speaker 01

  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.

• 47:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, 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.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  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 want to try to pay those off on the schedule that you're given. If you're struggling with your student loan debts, and they're federal debts, then you want to make sure you're enrolled in an income repayment program through

• 49:04Speaker 01

  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 a student loan debt faster get in the way of doing important things, like grabbing the match from your 401k. Because if you look at the return on your money, The way that we think about or 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 6%,

• 49:47Speaker 01

  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.

• 50:07Speaker 00

  Let's talk about improving your credit. So I actually recently messed up my credit because

• 50:12Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 50:14Speaker 00

  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. I thought, and like, I was like shutting down my personal credit cards. And then I realized like, oops, like, I wasn't supposed to do that. You need to actually have credit cards. And you're actually, and I always used to, because I have a lot of cash, I would just pay it off, pay it off, like, to zero balance. And you're actually not supposed to do that.

• 50:41Speaker 01

  Oh, no, you are supposed to.

• 50:42Speaker 00

  You are supposed to do that. Tell me about it, because I feel confused about like, what, like, what should we actually be doing with our personal credit?

• 50:49Speaker 01

  You should be using your personal credit cards, and you should be paying them off every month. 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%. It's insane. It's insane. You don't want to be paying interest on a credit card. So the, 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 going to hurt your score. The second, and this is where you got in trouble,

• 51:33Speaker 01

  is credit utilization. That's the percentage of credit that you have available to you that you're actually using. We want to 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 and I'm, I, 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, 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.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  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 hurt that factor too. So that's how you do it.

• 52:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, and actually, I did have a credit card that was with me for like, so long. And then the, the credit card company like, ended the card. And I was like, oh, man, I'm really screwed.

• 52:55Speaker 01

  They ended it because you weren't using it, right?

• 52:57Speaker 00

  No, no, like, it's like, that, like, type of card, like, retired because I had it for so long. And 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'll get, it's not that terrible, but I'm fixing it. Um, cool. So, um, let's talk about stocks or let's talk about investing in general. I'm just going to give you a general question. I actually asked Suzy 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?

• 53:37Speaker 01

  I mean, 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 going to put it into the picks that we're picking for our investing club. And so, uh, recently, we've been looking at, at stocks like Lululemon. We've got JP Morgan Chase. We've got, got a bunch of stocks in the portfolio, but we add one about every month.

• 54:21Speaker 01

  And, uh, sometimes we sell one and, and I would do that.

• 54:26Speaker 00

  That's so cool. So this investment club is basically, you guys like, all talk about stocks and, uh, basically give guidance to each other. How, how does one join your, it sounds really cool. How does one join your investment club?

• 54:38Speaker 01

  So you can go to hermoney.com. It's called Investing Fix. Uh, there is, 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 do it, uh, 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, the club votes on what we add to the portfolio and what we take away from the portfolio. And so it's, it's a democracy. Democracy rules. And, uh, it's been a lot of fun. Some of the, some of the women in our club have stepped up

• 55:22Speaker 01

  and presented stocks that they're interested in. And some of those have been purchased for, for the club. One of our members, uh, 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.

• 55:41Speaker 00

  That's so cool. So it's actually like, you guys are pooling your money together and investing together?

• 55:45Speaker 01

  We're not. We run a group portfolio that the club itself runs and is invested, uh, by the votes that the club decides. But a lot of members like me are buying the picks for our own portfolios.

• 56:02Speaker 00

  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 profiteers can do today to become more profitable tomorrow?

• 56:21Speaker 01

  Start tracking your spending.

• 56:26Speaker 00

  Figuring out where that money is going for real.

• 56:29Speaker 01

  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.

• 56:45Speaker 00

  And what is your secret to profiting in life? And this can go beyond financial advice.

• 56:52Speaker 01

  My secret to profiting, and I got to tell you, I, I lost my mom recently. And my lifelong friends came out of the woodwork and have not let me, um, have, haven't left me alone in a good way, in, in the best way. Um, and, and my secret is, is to invest as much energy as absolutely possible in those friends.

• 57:22Speaker 00

  That's so beautiful. It's so true. Sometimes you forget about relationships and they're, the, nothing in the world is more important, I think, than relationships.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  100%.

• 57:32Speaker 00

  Jean, where can everybody learn more about you and her money?

• 57:35Speaker 01

  So I'm on social pretty much everywhere, at Jean Chatzky. And you can find us at hermoney.com.

• 57:43Speaker 00

  Amazing. Well, thank you so much for joining us on Young and Profiting Podcast.

• 57:47Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.