2025 Investing, Renting vs Buying, $$$ Planning with ‘Money with Katie’

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0:27Good Morning Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, how are your personal finances looking for the year ahead? Don't worry, Money With Katie is here to put you on the path to success. It's Wednesday, January 1st. Let's ride.

0:47Neil, happy New Year's. Going to put you on the spot. What is your New Year's resolution for 2025? I usually don't do resolutions. I don't think I've made a single one or actually committed to one. Maybe those are two different things. But this year, I really want to see the two remaining United States I haven't been to. Those would be Kansas and Alaska. Those are the only two left. During COVID, I just did so many road trips and just worked from Airbnbs all over the country. So I knocked off a lot of states. I have two left. Kansas and Alaska. Not a lot of things tying those two together would be a very long road trip as well.

1:24Maybe you have to take a cruise up to Alaska. Could be a fun winter holiday thing to do. my new year's resolution. So last year I tried to run every single day. I made it about two and a half months in and then got injured. So I'm going to aim a little lower this year. I think my goal is to just do my first Ironman triathlon. I've done a couple of marathons. I think Ironman is the next step. Speaking of the new year, we're very excited for y 'all to hear this episode. Katie is one of our favorite people here at Morning Brew. She hosts the Money with Katie podcast and is one of the best personal finance thinkers and writers out there in the game right now.

1:58Take out a pen and paper because you're going to learn so much from this podcast. We really hope you enjoy it. Katie, thank you so much for joining us and happy new year. Thank you so much. Happy new year to you too. So we're releasing this episode on January 1st, obviously a popular time to make resolutions for the new year. What are a couple practical steps our listeners can take in the new year to improve their financial health specifically? so i just had my friend ramit sati on the show so his perspective is sort of fresh in my mind right now but something that i think he really gets right in his personal finance philosophy is this idea that you are not going to quote unquote become responsible with money unless you have a vision for the role that you want money to serve in your life like there has to be a more alluring end state that you are working toward than just, oh, I'm going to budget because like adults budget, right?

2:59So with that being said, if you are looking to do a little bit of a checkup for 2025, whether you are someone who has this stuff locked and loaded, or you've maybe never sat down and looked at your finances before, I would say pick two different weekends to do these exercises. Don't try to do it all at the same time. Don't try to do it all at the same day. But in your first sit down with yourself, you are not going to look at your numbers at all. Okay. You're just going to spend some time answering the question, where can money improve my life? Where, if I had the money, would my life really genuinely get better?

3:37You're probably not going to sit there and be like, oh, you know, I'd order more stuff on Amazon. There's probably some specific things that you might have never actually like let yourself really dream about before. So this is an opportunity to dream big for a second about how you would organize your life if money were not an object and then put some numbers around that. So I had a friend do this and she was like, man, if money wasn't an object, like I would get my hair washed and blow dried professionally every week. I would go into the salon and get it done so I didn't have to wash it all week.

4:09That would be amazing. So we start penciling it out and I'm like, this is like a couple hundred bucks a month. We're not talking about a billionaire level change here. It wasn't really insurmountable. But the point is you want to get a holistic vision for like, where would I live? How would I eat? How would I travel? I'm going to put some ballpark numbers around the type of life that I really want to live. And then the next time you sit down with that vision in mind, now you're sitting down with your data. So that's your spending data from the previous year. That's how much you earned. That's how much you managed to contribute to your savings and investments.

4:43And you're basically going to go, okay, I have this vision. Is there anything here that I could actually have right now if I just made slightly different spending decisions? Or, okay, in order to save, say, 20 % of my income, in order to make these really serious steps toward this vision for my life, I actually have a new salary target. I'm probably not going to spend a whole lot of time worrying about if I'm going out to eat once a week or twice a week. I actually need to focus a lot of the energy on I'm negotiating for a new job. I'm switching companies. But the point is, you're just going to start connecting the dots between where you are, where you want to be.

5:21And it can actually be really, really fun. And the budgeting part, the sitting down and like making the plan part, that comes last because that's just the roadmap to how you're going to make these things happen. And you know what? It might take a while. When I sat down years ago and decided, hey, I actually, I want to have more money. Like I am tired of feeling strapped all of the time. I don't think I should be, but I think I want to have more money. It probably took about 18 months for the changes to really kick in, but you're going to set your vision. You'll sit down. You're going to get intimate with your own numbers, and then you're going to start putting pen to paper and making the plan.

5:57Well, let's talk about getting intimate with your numbers. As you just described it. You have this product. It's called the Money with Katie Wealth Planner. It is this prodigious spreadsheet that I've played around with. It's incredibly impressive to just even look at. Why is it important for someone to have a tool like that when it comes to managing their finances? When I first became interested in personal finance, the most challenging thing was understanding how my current behavior was going to translate to the future. Like, I will never forget my first call with a financial advisor because I asked, okay, how much should I be trying to save?

6:40Like, I just got this job. I'm trying to sign a lease. Can I afford this apartment? Like, I had no idea. I didn't have any grasp on what was reasonable or what was too much. And since they were actually insurance salespeople, neither did they, honestly. But I think your personal financial tool, so whether you are using a wealth planner or you are using something else, should be able to do two things for you. Number one, it should give you some scaffolding around which you can build your budget. It should help you determine some high-level guidelines for what you, with your income, with your tax liability, with your goals, what you should be spending on everything from housing to travel so that you can then plan accordingly.

7:22So you can have a benchmark number to say, I'm actually going to dial that up because it's really important to me. Or, hey, that's great to know I could spend 10 % on my transportation, but I don't need that. I live in New York City. I don't need 10 % for that. Secondly, it should be able to help you understand what your path forward looks like if you continue to earn, spend, and invest in the way that you have been. So that was the biggest thing that I felt was missing from most of the tools that I had tried and what I was trying to solve for when I made the first 12th planner a couple of years ago, I didn't need to know how much I was spending on shampoo every month.

7:59That didn't matter. I needed to know how much longer am I gonna have to work for income based on how I'm spending, how I'm investing right now. So that's what we built. And that's what we have continued to iterate on every year. I think that's a perfect lead into this next question. You got your start writing about personal finance. And part of that messaging was how to achieve FIRE, which is financial independence, retire early. For someone who is listening, who's working maybe a corporate job right now, what is something that you'd tell them as we enter into this new year that could set them on this path towards financial freedom, towards FIRE?

8:35Yeah, I still have so much respect for the FIRE movement. I would still consider myself on that path, although without the extreme frugality element, there was a period of time when I was working in an office, I would figure out, I kind of became friends with one of the big EAs in the office. And I got her to share the calendar with me that showed where the lunch meetings would be. And then I would bring Tupperware to work and like go into the lunch meeting after it was over and like take some of the leftover food. So I didn't have to buy groceries. So there was a, there was a period where I was quite extreme about it.

9:12I think I have a more healthy relationship with money now, But FIRE is in many ways an approach to challenging the status quo. It says you can retire as soon as you have enough investments such that you can live off 4 % of the balance every year. And so what I would encourage someone who might be curious about that to do is to figure out how much your life costs. Very simple question. What do I spend in a year? How much does it cost to be me? And another way to ask that, the flip side of that is, what's my savings rate? So what percentage of my take-home pay am I managing to invest for the future?

9:55Both of these questions will allow you to understand what your timeline to total financial freedom is. Now, total financial freedom means like you no longer have to work for income. That's the end state that is probably many years away. But if you start organizing your life in this way, you are going to achieve some level of financial freedom really, really quickly. So for example, if your savings rate is 10%, you can assume that it means it's going to take you roughly 41 years to become financially independent. If you bump that up to just 15%, you now shave seven years off that timeline. You're looking at something closer to 34 years to financial independence, as opposed to 41.

10:36So you get familiar with these numbers, you start to see, okay, the jump from 10 to 15%, that's really not that meaningful on a monthly basis. But if it's going to make my working timeline seven years shorter, that is really meaningful. If you can get up to 20%, 25%, you're talking between 26 and 30 years now. So it's all proportional. These formulas, is it doesn't matter what you earn. It just takes what percentage of your income you're contributing to long-term investments with an appropriate risk profile for that timeline. So people that are really hardcore FIRE are saving 50, 60, 70 % of their income, and they're focusing on condensing their expenses as much as possible.

11:19So it's a movement that's very compatible with the minimalist movement, for example. What is the state of the FIRE movement? Is it growing? Is it shrinking? Like, I just haven't heard so much about it. And I wonder if broader changes have, you know, led more people to seek out this type of lifestyle or less. My assumption based on just kind of vibe checking it is that there's still a pretty devoted micro, you know, there's always going to be that microcosm of people who is very attracted to this. But I do think that with the shift to work from home and telework, I think that there's been a bit of a, maybe I don't want to say existential crisis, but like if you're not having to go into an office every day, that is probably going to lower the pressure that you feel.

12:08It certainly lowered it for me. The difference between being physically in an office from eight to five every single day all week long, that is a different mindset than someone who could, okay, well, I can actually continue to earn money from my house or maybe I'm going to work part time. There's a little bit more flexibility now, which I think has maybe taken the urgency out of it for some people, which I think ultimately is healthy. Let's talk about saving for retirement. So the last couple of years have really been the golden age of cash, thanks to those really high interest rates. I could stick my money in a high yield savings account, maybe get something like a 5 % yield.

12:44That, though, is going to change. Interest rates are coming down, which means yields in cash accounts are going down. How should people approach the lower interest rate environment we are entering? And I don't mean low, low, but lower than we have. Yeah. So first of all, I would say any money that you are hoping to keep saved and growing for the long term shouldn't be in cash anyway. So your cash accounts, whether high yield or not, should really be for short term savings, money you intend to spend within the next couple of years. So can you seek more yield in money market funds or bonds? Could you do that?

13:23Sure. I personally don't really stress myself out too much over savings account rates because in the grand scheme of things, your savings account yield matters so much less than your bigger picture investment questions like, okay, how much are you contributing to your long-term investments every single month? What is your asset allocation? Are you appropriately diversified? Those are the things that I think really move the needle in the long run. So I always kind of tell people like, hey, don't overthink things like savings account yields. Ideally, your short term savings are on the smaller side when compared to the money that you are saving and investing for the long term.

14:06I think probably the only use case where I would say that's different is if you are saving and investing for something like house down payment, where you are probably going to be accumulating quite a lot of money in this account. But again, in the grand scheme of things, if you're only going to be saving for, we'll say, fewer than five years, that's not really a meaningful amount of time for interest or your returns to compound anyway. So is it maybe not perfectly ideal or perfectly optimized? Sure. But it's not going to be a game-changing change. Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about time management.

14:48You've discussed this need to create these neat, time-blocked chunks of the day for yourself, even bringing in ideas like industrial capitalism to describe just how regimented your days had become. Take us through, though, how your relationship with time has changed and evolved as you've kind of grown into yourself. Yeah. Well, I am quite type A. But to put it simply, I had gone down this rabbit hole learning about how the historical introduction of industrial capitalism fundamentally changed human beings' relationship to their time. and it goes something like this. When we shifted as a society from like craftsmen and people that were working for themselves or, you know, working in this way that they were like, it was like artisanal, right?

15:41You're picturing someone like a cobbler with shoes. You're shifting from that to like wage-based factory work. We began to be paid by the hour. Now, this is different from someone who, again, used to make a living by like working for themselves. It's like a craftsman or something. If you are being paid by the hour, that means you are clocking in, you are clocking out. Suddenly the hour becomes a commodity. And this was a big, a big thing kind of in the dawn of industrial capitalism that like workers wouldn't be allowed to have their own clocks in the factory because the person that controlled the time was kind of in control of how much was getting done.

16:20And so there would be, I read stories about like factory people that controlled the factory floor, kind of like, you know, setting back the clock a little bit to make them stay a little bit longer. Anyway, your time becomes something that someone else can pay for. And so by extension, it becomes something that can be wasted or something that can be optimized. And so before industrial capitalism, this whole concept of time would have felt pretty foreign to people. Time was not thought of as something that could be, quote unquote, wasted or bought by another individual. It was just something that passed.

16:51And that got me thinking about the way in which I had sort of internalized this idea of my own time and how it was contributing to this sense of just constantly being in a rush, constantly being behind, constantly being busy, this like sense of urgency that no matter what, I always felt like I was falling behind. And I kind of saw this connection between these two ideas. And so I started to interrogate where that was coming from and A, whether it was actually allowing me to do my best work and B, honestly, if it was preventing me from being happier while I was doing that work. And ultimately, I realized that I think the obsession with optimization for many people is just a response to things becoming more untenable and frankly, not trusting yourself to handle that.

17:40So after you had this realization, like what changes did you make? Well, I blew up my calendar. So I got rid of all the little color coded time blocks. And I started thinking about my time a little bit more holistically. So I would at the beginning of a week be like, these are the things that need to get done this week in order for me to meet the deadlines that I have to meet. At the beginning of every day, I'm not sitting down anymore and going, okay, these are the 15 minute increments and I'm going to plan all the micromanage all this ahead of time. I tried to give myself a little bit more latitude around when I get things done, how I get things done.

18:16And I started to think about it, this mental shift between optimizing my time and protecting it. And so if I'm thinking about my time as something I have to optimize, I'm trying to cram in as much as possible. If instead I'm thinking about it as something that I should protect, now I'm empowered to say no to things that I don't think are good opportunities to tell someone, hey, I actually can't get that done this week. Let's talk about it next week. And it's been a nice mental shift for allowing me to slow down a little bit. Let's keep on this topic of maybe history. Last month, you did a show on the last 40 years of the U.S.

18:55economy. Incredible episode. Everyone should go listen. It went absolutely viral. This is a topic that fills up entire books. So would you mind giving us the TLDR on the last 40 years? And I'm also curious why this episode seemed to have resonated with people. Yeah. I think because we tend to have a lot of recency bias about what political and economic forces are driving the ship right now. So a lot of the analysis that I was reading, it was comparing, say, the last four years to Trump's first term. And really, like, the beginning of the history in a lot of these analyses seem to start around the time of the pandemic.

19:36I think because the pandemic was such a paradigm shifting event and there was a lot of change that followed, also because inflation had become such a huge headline. But I think as I zoomed out and I really thought about, OK, why are we in this position right now? Why did right wing economic populism have such a moment in this last election? It occurred to me that I think the real story of the economy that we're in right now did not start four years ago. It started 40 years ago. That's when we started cutting corporate tax rates and tax rates for the highest earners for the first time and started associating those tax changes with this will bring growth.

20:18This will bring prosperity. that's when stock buyback regulations were loosened pretty substantially. So before 1981, I think it was something like less than 5 % of all corporate profits were used for stock buybacks. Now it's something like half. Obviously, that's going to lead to an increase in financialization. And finally, the death knell, I think, was probably Citizens United. So when corporations were basically granted personhood in the United States, such that corporate interests really fully like enveloped our political system. So if you're just talking about this election at the rhetorical level and you are considering those 40 years of changes and how they have led us to where we are now and, you know, these appeals are being made to this deep seated sense that I think a lot of Americans feel that something has gone very, very wrong.

21:07I think if you have one candidate who seems to represent the status quo insofar as they're coming from the incumbent administration. And then you have another who was promising to blow it all up and saying, literally, I'll fix it. I don't think we should be surprised that the all fix it rhetoric was effective. And so going over those 40 years, pulling it all together, trying to weave those threads together, connecting those dots. It was actually very cathartic for me, honestly. So I'm really happy that it resonated with so many people. I do want to drill a little deeper on something you just said, which is like the financialization of our world.

21:40One of the byproducts of that is just this explosion in the availability and ubiquity of personal debt, student loans, car loans, credit cards, mortgages. These are all things that our listeners are no doubt very familiar with. How does that fit into and shape, in your opinion, just like the current economic landscape that we find ourselves in right now? Oh, man. Yeah. Well, okay. At the most microcosmic level, I think we perceive and experience a lot of policy failings as personal finance problems. Like, okay, I can't afford to buy a house. My car payment is too expensive. Childcare is too expensive.

22:23These are personal finance problems, yes, but with perhaps different housing, with maybe the median home not costing$400 ,000. Maybe you don't need a car anymore if you have public transit options. Maybe you don't need$2 ,000 a month for daycare if we treat a child care like infrastructure. So I would say before we even talk about debt, we have to talk about the fact that a lot of the most intractable personal finance problems that feel the hardest to solve are often downstream of policy failure. But if you make a society very challenging to thrive in, you have to give people some way to pay for the things that they need.

22:59Right. And what better way to structure a system like that than making the way that they pay for these things that they need done so with for profit financing? And I think it sounds kind of conspiratorial, but it's really not. I think the availability of credit is why we haven't reached a tipping point sooner. But that's why I believe personal finance education becomes ultimately very critical. Because if you're aware of these conditions and you understand that the system is sort of set up to guide you toward a lot of debt, a hyper-competitive individualist mindset, but you can see that there's a better way, I think it can shift the decisions that you make.

23:37it might also allow you to have a more accurate perception of what you have control over and what you don't have control over. So I think you'll interact with, for example, convenience discretionary consumer purchases differently. If you can see the connection between, as Gia Tolentino writes, like the relief that that experience is going to bring you and the entirely connected squeeze that you are experiencing. And I think that that context matters. So for me, having that realistic understanding of the system that I exist within allows me to make better financial decisions in the short term. And that applies to the way that I interact with debt.

24:14I don't want to engage in rampant consumerism anymore. I, if I can see that like, okay, corporate interests have a really outsized influence on like the policies that are affecting me. Well, I don't really want to make those corporations all that richer. I don't want to funnel my money back to them. I don't want to see my fellow worker as my competition. Yeah, so I think ultimately our current system does make personal finance education necessary to thrive, particularly that around the way we engage with debt. My dream would be that we live in a world where you do not need to have a sophisticated understanding of the financial system to live a life of dignity, but that's not yet the world that we live in.

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