298. Ask Tori: Investing and Retirement

0:00Tori Dunlap:What are your biggest questions about investing, about retirement, about what the hell you're supposed to do with your portfolio when the market gets weird and scary and every headline is telling you to panic? Because listen, I get these questions constantly in my DMs and in my comments. And honestly, I love that you're asking because it means that you're paying attention instead of just closing out the tab and hoping it works itself out. So today we are answering your questions. Mortgage versus investing. What retirement actually looks like logistically? What to do with an old 401k you've been ignoring since your last job?

0:28Tori Dunlap:And here's the thing though, answering questions one time is great, but it is not the same as somebody sitting you down and teaching you how the whole thing works. And this is why I'm hosting two live stock market workshops for free. It is the class that I have now taught to over hundred thousand women. And it's the one that I wish somebody had handed me instead of some wall street guy in a bad suit talking down to me. We are talking about how to know you're ready to start investing in plain English. Why investing isn't the same as gambling, no matter what your uncle says and how to stop feeling like the stock market is a room you weren't invited to.

1:01One of the women who went through at Beverly said it took the scary out of finance for her. And that is exactly what we're trying to do. So every single person watching this, I expect you to be there. It is free. Herfirst100k.com slash FF pod to get signed up for this free investing workshop.

1:17Tori Dunlap:All right, let's get into it. But first a word from our sponsors. I think in the year of our Lord, 2026, everybody needs a website. Maybe you're a business owner, maybe you're a freelancer, or maybe you're someone who just needs a place where all of their work can live, especially when you're applying for jobs or getting new clients. And Squarespace is going to make that really, really easy. You can offer your services on Squarespace. They offer as well cutting edge design tools with like drag and drop. So you don't have to know how to code at all. And you can buy domains on Squarespace, which is what we did.

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2:45Tori Dunlap:Today on Financial Feminist, I'm answering your biggest questions about retirement, investing, and what the fuck to do with your portfolio if a recession happens. Hi, financial feminists. Welcome to the show. Very excited to see you as always. Thank you for being here. Thank you for supporting feminist media. My name is Tori. I'm a multimillionaire. I'm a money expert. I'm a New York Times bestselling author. I fight the patriarchy by making you rich. And if you're an oldie but a goodie, you knew that already. This episode is value packed with so much information about everything, investing, everything stock market.

3:15Tori Dunlap:Before we get into this episode, I want to highlight a couple of things for you. When we talk about investing, when we talk about the stock market, when we talk about anything that's going on, whether the stock market is performing well or underperforming, my advice doesn't change. The common question I'm getting right now is, is there a recession coming? Is there a stock market crash coming? What the fuck is Trump doing and how is it going to affect my money? So should I do something different? Our advice here at Her First Hunter K, our advice at financial feminist is no different depending on who is president or what's going on in the economy or what's going on in the stock market.

3:51Tori Dunlap:You need an emergency fund, whether the grass is green or it's not so green. You need to have paid off your credit card debt or working to pay off your credit card debt, no matter what's going on financially. And with the stock market, it is always a good time to invest, even when things feel volatile. I'm going to keep bringing you this reminder because I know it's going to keep coming up. But the stock market is a long term play here. It is not over days, weeks, months, or even a year. This is over years, if not decades. So when we talk about the fears of stock market crashes or recessions, I am not changing my financial strategy at all.

4:29Tori Dunlap:I am a multimillionaire with millions in the stock market. If anybody should be nervous about a market downturn, it's me, right? I got a lot of skin in this game. but I don't. And the reason I don't is that this is to be expected. There are market downturns. And frankly, it's been a long time since we've had a significant market downturn. The stock market from 2020 to 2025 has been up 125 % when the average year to year that we can expect is 78%. So the market correction is not entirely surprising. We stay the course. Now, the Trump of it all is a whole different thing, right? This is why financial feminism can not just be about our own personal choices, but also about the policies we support, how we protest, how we vote with our dollars, the activism we do outside of that.

5:19Tori Dunlap:But if you're concerned about your own money, which is probably why you're here listening to this episode, you don't do anything different. You keep saving your emergency fund. You keep making sure you're investing because the last thing we want is for you to put your financial progress on hold. That's what Trump wants, right? He wants you to not be as financially stable. He wants you to not be as financially whole. I can't have you making decisions about your money because you're so afraid of Trump that only fuck you over. We get a lot of questions about investing. So in this episode, I answer a few of them from our community, including questions about how to take your money out of the market when you're ready to retire, which is a common question right now.

6:00Tori Dunlap:Okay, the stock market is volatile. If we're coming up against a recession and I'm about to retire, what should I be doing? We're going to chat about whether I think you should invest or pay down debt first. And yes, there is a correct answer here. And it's an answer that a lot of people get wrong. And my thoughts about rolling over retirement accounts when you move jobs. And if you want more information, including a free workshop that I do about investing in the stock market, you can go to herfirst100k.com slash secrets. It is the signature stock market workshop that I have given to over 100 ,000 people.

6:33Tori Dunlap:So herfirst100k.com slash secrets. It's entirely free. There's no reason not to sign up. It's a nice compliment to this episode. And it's going to allow me to continue to assuage your fears about the stock market and give you some really, really important information that you need to know, especially right now. Without further ado, let's get into the episode.

7:08Hi, everybody. Welcome back to the show. My name is Tori. I host Financial Feminist, which is a show committed to talking about how money affects women differently and also how you can use money as a tool of protest in this bullshit capitalist society. If you're an oldie but a goodie, welcome back. If you're new to the show, welcome. Hope you stick around for a good time and a long time. Let's take our first question about investing, and this is from our Facebook community. So I'm going to go ahead and read it here. All right. Can we talk about paying down our mortgages versus investing? Recovering Dave Ramsey person here.

7:37I'm buying a home after selling a home from 10 years ago. It is quadrupled in equity. My new mortgage payments will be about $450 a month. Oh my God. That sounds so nice. Sorry. $450 a month. I'm not sure where this person lives, but oh, I kind of wish I lived there. Gosh. My new mortgage payments will be about$450 a month over 25 years, which is unbelievable. Yes, it is. Okay. I've done the math over 25 years with my current savings, plus my new yearly savings, which is cutting out the commute and the equity built in my sold home, minus the mortgage interest I would pay over 25 years. It was still a projected difference of$300 ,000 versus paying off my home in five years, which would be less mortgage interest paid, but also less money in long-term investments.

8:25So in case you're wondering with all of that, basically she's asking, again, do I pay down my mortgage quicker or do I invest? She says, does anyone else feel a weird emotional pull to pay off your mortgage ASAP even when you've crunched the numbers? I hope all of this makes sense. So many thoughts flying around in my head right now. I would absolutely love Tori to talk about this on a podcast. I'm doing it. Dear listener, dear reader, I'm doing it. Okay. So let's talk about this. This is a question we get all the time. Again, should I pay down my mortgage faster or should I invest instead? The quick and dirty answer is you should invest instead.

9:03I have an entire free investing workshop called Stock Market Secrets that we will link down below. And this is actually one of the myths I debunk that all of your debt needs to be gone before you start investing. Now, some of your debt needs to be gone. High cost debt like credit card debt should be gone before you prioritize investing. But with something like a mortgage where your interest rate is normally 3 % to 4%, right now it's not great, but it's normally under that 7 % to 8 % that we could be expecting in the stock market. It's actually more advantageous to put any additional money beyond your monthly mortgage payment towards your investing.

9:41Why? Because again, you could be making more money by investing, but also let's say hypothetically, you do wait until your mortgage is paid off. Well, if your mortgage is a 30-year mortgage, and let's say you do pay it off early, let's say you even cut it in half, which is an incredible accomplishment, right? Let's say that you pay off your mortgage in 15 years, and then you start investing. Well, guess what? You can't get those 15 years back. And as we know from previous episodes of the show, time is way more important than the amount of money when it comes to investing. so you've just waited 15 years to start allowing compound interest to work harder for you right and what happens with Dave Ramsey in particular right and this mindset that like all debt is bad and must be gone immediately and that you got to pay off your debt as quickly as possible is that it costs you actually a more fruitful stable retirement it costs you mental stability and peace of mind, this narrative, and this person is mentioning that she feels this weird emotional pull to pay off your mortgage.

10:53That's not a fucking accident. That's like Dave Ramsey 101 shit, which is shaming you for having debt and making it your number one priority in your mind, as opposed to actually crunching the numbers and being realistic about how life works. Let's say you're lucky enough to buy a house at 25. And then again, we pay off our mortgage 15 years early. Well, now we're 40 years old before we even think about prioritizing investing. That's not a great experience, right? And then let's say that we prioritize investing after our 30-year mortgage, right? Let's say that we're not able to pay it off early.

11:32Well, then we're looking at you being 55 by the time you're saving, right? The average retirement age in this country is 57 to 65, right? In that range. So we've literally done the math. We have a graph that I show you in the Stock Market Secrets Workshop that demonstrates that the math works, the psychology works, the you protecting yourself for retirement works. So yes, continue paying your monthly payments, right? We're not defaulting on our payments to do this, but with your additional money, as opposed to chipping away at your mortgage faster, it will probably mathematically make more sense for you to actually contribute towards your retirement, towards investing instead.

12:18So to this person who's asking, should I pay down my mortgage faster or should I invest? You know the answer. And even it sounds like in this post, you know the answer, but the little like Dave Ramsey devils on your shoulder being like, nah, you gotta pay off your debt first. So investing is the right move here.

12:38Tori Dunlap:you're trying to save more money you probably wouldn't be listening to this show if you weren't and everything's really really expensive right now and there's also the pressure of looking at your money all of the time especially when you're spending hours plugging in your expenses in a spreadsheet but that's why rocket money is here to help rocket money is a personal finance app that helps find and cancel unwanted subscriptions monitors your spending and helps lower your bills so you can grow your savings. Rocket Money has been sponsoring the show forever. I love using them. I think you'll love them too.

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14:46Tori Dunlap:All right, let's take our second question. This is from our podcast community in a voicemail from Emily. Hi, Tori. Thank you guys so much for all you're doing. I have a really possibly dumb question. What does retirement actually look like logistically when you're trying to take the money, when you're at the stage of taking the money out of your IRA accounts? And are you having to sell all those stocks kind of all at once and then you get that money, then you get it in distributions, are you doing it a little bit at a time? And if that is the case, what if the market is really bad at the time that you're retiring?

15:21Let's say if somebody was trying to retire like tomorrow and the market is super low and you have to sell all these stocks in there. So if you could provide a little bit more clarification on what the logistics look like post-retirement and how you would actually pull your money out of those funds once they've grown and sat in those accounts for a while, that would be super awesome and helpful. Thank you so much. I appreciate it with Emily's voicemail that I think we heard some wind chimes in the back and it was very ASMR soothing. And I just, I don't know. I just really appreciated that. Okay, Emily, this is a question we get a lot, a question that we have answered in a full workshop in Stock Market School.

15:59So I'll give you the TLDR. If you are anticipating retiring soon, this is not the time to start planning for how you're actually going to use this money. What I mean is if you're 64 and expecting to retire at 65 with some money in your retirement accounts, that's not the time to start thinking about, oh, I'm going to need this money tomorrow. We're going to backtrack a little bit. And if you can, we're going to start thinking about you needing this money five to 10 years before you actually need it. I'll give you the example of my parents. My parents are in their early 60s. And for the past couple of years, what they've been doing is slowly taking out money from their retirement accounts and from their general brokerage account, which as a reminder is not a retirement-focused account, but is an investing account.

16:50And they've been putting it in what's called a CD ladder. What is a CD ladder? It is various CDs with various terms, like year amounts. So for instance, they might have one CD that matures, for instance, 10 years from now. And then they'll have another CD that matures eight years from now. and then five and then four and then two and then one, so that they're slowly getting that money as they will need it, you are not taking all of your money out of your investing accounts for retirement at once. One, that's going to be a tax nightmare. And two, the point is you want to allow your money to continue to grow the money you don't need yet, right?

17:34So if you spend, let's say, $50 ,000 a year, if your expenses every year are$50 ,000, maybe the time you're thinking about retirement, right? And those maybe five years before, you're slowly starting to pull out that money. So, you know, you might take out, if we're retiring at 65, at 58, you might take out 50K. And then when you're 59, you might take out another 50K and then another 50K, right? You're not taking out this whole lump sum of money at one time, but you're moving it instead to places where your money is safe and at a less high of a risk, right? You mentioned in your voicemail, like, oh my God, what if I am taking out my money for retirement, but the stock market isn't performing well during that time?

18:20This is why we're slowly taking out our money in anticipation of needing it to protect it in places that aren't the stock market, hence a CD. And again, as a reminder, a CD, we've talked about this before, is a certificate of deposit. It's like a souped up savings account. It is holding your money for a period of time. And in exchange for you not being able to access your money, you're getting a higher percent interest rate. So that's one strategy that you can employ. My parents have done that. Again, a CD ladder and just being more strategic about when you're taking out your money and how you're using it.

18:58So the biggest thing to think about to your question is one, no, you're not taking out all of the money at one time. That again would be a nightmare in terms of managing it. But two, you want your investments to continue to grow as well as during retirement season, let's call it. You don't want to hypothetically start planning for your retirement like six months before you're set to retire. This is something we want to think about in anticipation of retiring. And this is the perfect time, just like any time to sit down and make sure that you are setting yourself up for success, not just right now financially, but in the future.

19:33So this is why my parents have done something like slowly siphon their money out of retirement accounts in order to protect it in lower risk or really no risk savings accounts. And the thing that they've done, because if you know a bit about retirement accounts, you might be asking yourself, well, how did they do that without paying a penalty, right? How can you start withdrawing money out of a Roth IRA, for instance, without paying a penalty. Fun fact, you can take your Roth IRA contributions out penalty free. So your$6 ,500 that you've contributed, right, year over year, and it's been different depending on the year, right?

20:13But that contribution that you've made, you can take out penalty free. So that's part of what my parents have done is take out their contributions, but not their earnings of their Roth IRA early so that they don't have to take a penalty. But it's only if you're under age 59 and a half that you have to pay a penalty for withdrawing your earnings. So if you're over that age, right, my parents are now over that age, they can start taking even more money out of their Roth IRA. That might be an option for you. This is all in the weeds, right? But if you are somebody who's trying to plan for early retirement, you are somebody who's trying to help an older family member, or you maybe are an older listener to the show, then this is a just general piece of potential guidance.

21:01But you got to figure out what's right for you. You got to make sure that this works for you. And I'll also say too, we have had so many conversations in stock market school about like, how do I stop working as soon as possible? And these are those kind of strategies that are more, again, slightly more complicated because they are more strategic. They're kind of in a positive way, gaming the system that exists so that you can say fuck off to your work life forever and retire. So yeah, that is my answer to that question. You're not taking all the money out at once. You're being more strategic about it.

21:38And if you can plan ahead, we're talking years, if not like a decade, that can be really, really helpful for you in strategizing your future retirement. All right, let's take our next question. Hi, Tori. A few months ago, I quit an incredibly toxic job that was severely impacting my mental health and my well-being. And recently I got a new job, which has been such a welcome change in terms of work, culture, and having a kind and empathetic manager. And I even managed to negotiate my salary to get$3 ,000 more than the job offer. Now that I've settled in at my new job, I'm wondering what I should do with my old 403B retirement account from my former job.

22:20The account is currently managed by Vanguard. Should I leave those funds with my former employer, transfer it to a 403B account with my new employer, transfer it to a Roth IRA, or something else? I don't particularly like the idea of leaving that money with my former employer, but I want to figure out what would be most beneficial for those funds. Thanks for all your help, Tori. All right. First of all, congratulations are in order in two regards. One, you left that toxic job, baby. We got to love it. I just love that you decided I don't want to do this anymore. And then you negotiated and found yourself a better opportunity somewhere else.

22:59Double win for you of getting out of a bad situation and then putting yourself in a really good spot. So congratulations. All right. Let's talk about ruling over your 401k. You're 100 % right. Your impulse is 100 % right. We are not leaving our money with an old employer. That is like leaving money with an ex-boyfriend. I don't trust my ex-boyfriend with my money. No, thank you. I don't know what he's going to fucking do with it. Like, no. The reason we don't want that to happen is, I mean, many. One, we don't know what the employer is going to do with it. It's your money. Let me be clear. But they might switch 401k providers.

23:35And because you don't work there anymore, of course, you might not know that they're switching 401k providers. And then when you do go and try to find the money in a couple of years, you're like, I don't know where the fuck it is. Two, it's just you're not going to remember your login. You're going to have to manage a bunch of different accounts from a bunch of different past employers. And that's going to be a headache. And so we just we do want to consolidate. We do want to get your money out of your old employer. And we have two options. Just like you said, we can either put it in our current retirement accounts offered by your employer.

24:07But if you don't have a retirement account offered by your employer, you can roll it into a Roth IRA. And that does not count for your Roth IRA contributions for that year. So again, Roth IRA contributions for this year are$6 ,500. If you roll a 401k into that Roth IRA or into a general IRA, you are not contributing. That doesn't count towards that$6 ,500 contribution. we I will shamelessly plug we have a partner tool that we use and recommend and love called capitalize they will literally do this for you for free so if you are the person that's listening and going I forgot to do that or I have been meaning to do that and I don't remember my login and I don't even know where the 401k lives and I've been stressed about it but I have just not looked at it well cool capitalize can help we will put the link down below again it's entirely free.