Money with Katie Chats Financial Freedom & New Book "Rich Girl Nation"
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Good morning for your daily show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, a personal finance brain blast for the ages. We spoke with Katie Gattitassin, aka Money With Katie, about her new book on achieving financial freedom. It's Monday, May 26th, Memorial Day. Let's ride.

Good morning on Memorial Day 2025. Hope you're all somewhere on a beach or at least far away from your computers or anything having to do with work. We have a very special episode for you today where Toby and I caught up with Katie Gaddy Tassin from Money With Katie, who is coming out with her very first book, Rich Girl Nation, about taking charge of our financial futures.

Katie explains what the 4% safe withdrawal rule is, how hard it is to write a book, what the heck the hot girl hamster wheel is, and how to get off of it. If any of those concepts sound intriguing to you, our conversation is just the tip of the iceberg. Right after you finish this episode, run, don't walk.

Run to moneywithkatie.com slash richgirlnation where you can pre-order her book. It's out on June 10th and makes for a perfect beach read. Neil and I both read it, and man, am I fired up to reap the benefits of compound interest. But first, a word from our sponsor, Planet Oat. Toby, you know how a good soundtrack can make an okay movie feel epic?

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Thank you. I'm so happy to be here. So maybe the best place to start this interview is right at the very start of the book with the acknowledgement you wrote to the anonymous guy who works in finance that used to relentlessly comment on my nascent website in 2018, urging me to quit writing about money and keep it to myself. I hope you're well. Elite Mic Drop, tell us more about the story and how it's motivated you. Yeah, isn't that nice? Obviously, I'm really good at like forgive and forget.

Um, so I started writing about money informally online in 2018, after I had this very revelatory experience at a book tour for a book called money diaries. And I started writing about money on my personal blog. So I had maintained this blog in college and I just kind of posted missives on it to, I don't know, like the 15 or 20 people that bothered to check in half of whom were probably related to me.

And I became so enthralled with money and personal finance that like kind of overnight, I stopped writing about personal things and started publishing content about money and my relationship to money and all the exciting things I was learning and why I thought it was important that everyone should be talking about this and

From the very beginning, there was somebody who would comment on the blog posts anonymously and kind of badger me. Be like, oh, you know, you shouldn't be doing this. Oh, you know, I kind of gathered from the way that they were talking or the things that they were saying that like they had a series 65 and a series this and a series that and basically saying like, you're not qualified to have public facing opinions about

personal finance, you need to stay in your lane. And so it just felt very fitting and very full circle because I don't think this guy has ever written a book about money and now I have. So I thought, you know what, why not? Why not dedicate it to him?

Yeah. I mean, look at the beautiful book in front of us now. It's behind you on the wall. You're on your Rich Girl Nation book tour. But I did want to ask why Rich Girl Nation and why not Rich People Nation? What's behind your drive to write a personal finance book specifically for a female audience instead of a more broader audience?

Totally. Well, at a high level, it is true that personal finance and investment best practices will be the same for everyone. But the majority of personal finance books have been written by men, which means that they have been shaped in subtle and overt ways by men's experiences, men's preferences, and men's priorities. And the reality is that women statistically face different financial challenges than men do.

So first of all, you have an entire industry, beauty and personal care. This is what I cover in chapter one that almost exclusively markets its products to women. Now, the average woman who spends money on her appearance as of 2017 was spending around $300 per month on beauty and personal care over a 40 year career. If you had invested that money instead getting average market returns, we're talking simple index fund, nothing fancy.

You're talking about around a million dollars in opportunity cost. So...

We're not just talking about costs at the margins. These are retirement supporting amounts. Then you have to consider the fact that women now negotiate just as often as men do. There is no longer a negotiation gap, which was kind of a popular talking point in the early 2010s. But they are still 15% less likely to get a raise when they do. And part of the reason that this happens is because the advice to be aggressive, the advice to demand your worth,

That doesn't work for women the same way it works for men, because women who pursue what we perceive to be masculine goods or who we perceive to be behaving in masculine ways, they

They are more likely to face pushback. Now, the same is true, by the way, for men who pursue flexibility or behave in more feminine ways. So basically, if you're behaving in a gender-incongruent fashion, you are more likely to be penalized in the workplace for that. But it just so happens that that penalty for women means fewer material resources. So...

Sometimes this manifests in what we come to think of as like the gender wage gap. Women do earn around 15% less on average as like an aggregate group. This is a gap that widens as women progress in their careers. It's actually the largest for women in their 50s and like late 40s. And

I talk about this in the book as a function of kind of the caregiving and unpaid labor gap. It's the opposite side, really, of what's happening at home. So we have to be aware of that when we're planning for our financial futures. And then finally, you have the simple reality that women live around six and a half percent longer on average than men do.

So, statistically speaking, women are more likely to be the ones who will bear the brunt of poor long-term financial planning. So, their portfolios need to last longer. They need to invest more aggressively. And they also need to know how to manage money alone. More than 80% of widows are women. So, even women who never get divorced are going to have to know how to do this. So,

You look at all these factors, right? You expand that over an entire lifetime. And we can see that these disparities are compounding. Women retire with about 57% as much money as men do. So could a man pick up this book and get really rigorous tactical personal financial information out of it? Absolutely. But I wanted to tailor a book toward the statistical realities that women specifically face. So that's what I did.

One of the more intriguing concepts you talk about in the book is this hot girl hamster wheel. So I would love if you could explain that in more detail and also explain how you got off the rich girl hamster wheel or the hot girl hamster wheel. Toby, you can answer too. I'm still on the hamster wheel. This is all Katie.

Okay, so the hot girl hamster wheel is how I describe the litany of recurring rotating expenses that are necessary to uphold what I will jokingly call the capital A capital F acceptable femininity. So I call it a hamster wheel because the nature of these purchases are such that you cannot just do them once. Like each dollar that you spend functions like a commitment to spend more money in the future.

So the particularly insidious thing about a lot of beauty treatments and personal care treatments is that they will actually leave you quote unquote worse off than you were before. So like any woman listening to this, who's ever gotten acrylic nails knows what I'm talking about. They look good for like two weeks. And then when you finally either like yank them off or soak them off, your natural nails underneath are going to be brittle and discolored. And so you kind of get into this cycle where you have to keep

Women are taught from a young age to value the social capital of beauty kind of above everything else. This is a very insidious argument.

You know, socialization that all women experience is like the way you look is the most important thing about you. And you probably receive signals every time you leave your home that this is the case. But the problem with this is that investing in beauty is kind of an inherently losing proposition for reasons that are probably obvious.

It's an inherently depreciating asset. As you get older, it will take more and more cash flow to serve that master. That is not a good ROI. And obviously the counter to that is investing in real capital because if that's invested wisely, it's going to grow. It's going to get better with time. So in chapter one, I really tease apart some of these forces and talk about the process that someone can take to, in a very curious and

exploratory way, figure out how much of your take-home pay you're spending on these things, and then really reassess your relationship with them and figure out where you are getting a worthwhile return on investment and where you are maybe upholding systems that are not good for you or anyone else. And I do remember reading that first chapter and one stat that just absolutely blew my mind was approximately half of the women serving as CEOs for S&P 500 companies

have blonde hair. How does blonde hair specifically play into this idea of the hot girl hamster wheel? So less than 2% of the world's population has naturally blonde hair, but around one third of women in the West will bleach their way there. And to your point, roughly half of CEOs of S and P 500 companies, women CEOs have blonde hair.

Anyone who has ever bleached their hair, and Toby, I'm looking at you, babe. I know you know this struggle. I'm guilty. I'm guilty. Knows that this is a very impractical aesthetic choice. It is extremely time and capital intensive to have salon quality blonde hair. It requires a lot of upkeep. I had friends in college who dyed their hair blonde, who were in a salon every seven weeks getting their roots touched up for hundreds of dollars. When

you get highlights as i have for many years what you are really signaling whether you realize it or not is what you actually possess in absence of blonde hair which is time and money

Now, this is how all modern beauty standards work. So it's not like blonde hair, the only place that we see this. You can think about any popular trend and you can pretty much trace it back to these same factors. But it's a particularly pernicious one just because of how time and capital intensive it is. And so I find it to be quite an interesting example. And I made it kind of a focus in that chapter for that reason.

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Shifting gears a little bit from the hamster wheel, you've also talked about this feeling of being a corporate cog in your early career. So maybe to anyone else listening who is early in their career, maybe first or second job out of college who are dutifully reporting day in, day out, but are looking around and saying like, damn, is this it? Is this really the rest of my life? Give them maybe some soothing or some not so soothing words about how to confront or maybe quell some of their anxiety.

Totally. So let's start soothing first. If that is a feeling that you are experiencing, then

Good news, you are the perfect candidate for getting really serious about your finances. I remember the moment where I had that realization where I liked my job. I liked my coworkers. I liked my company. But I felt absolutely trapped in that two-week cycle of working for a paycheck and coming to the end of every cycle and being like,

What do I have to show for that? I just spent 80 hours working. They gave me my paycheck. I spent it all. And now I'm back to square one. That was an incredibly claustrophobic experience and realization.

And what ended up happening is that spurred me to go become interested in personal finance because I thought there has to be another way. There has to be another path. I discovered the financial independence retire early movement through that soul searching process.

And here we are. So I think if you are feeling that way, the good news is that rejiggering your financial life can be a step toward more optionality, more freedom. So you can really take chances with your career and pursue things that you're actually interested in. So I would say like as much as you can embrace that mantra of life is a video game. And at any moment you can be like, this isn't what I want to do. It's never too late, right?

to pick a different path to start over. And that was partially why the dedication to the book is what it is, because I think it was that sort of force saying, you're not a money person, right? You're not qualified to have opinions about this. You shouldn't be talking about budgeting on the internet to just be like, oh, actually, yeah, I didn't study that before. I can study it now. Who cares? You can always make that change.

Still, confronting this idea of focusing more on your personal finance is a daunting task for a lot of people. And one of the

uh, things that you, you'd say people experience is that you say, Oh, I know I should budget, or I know I should say, but I don't know how much to save. I don't know how much to budget. But then a lot of things started to crystallize around this idea of the 4% safe withdrawal rate. And I'm sure a lot of people do have that abstract sense of the importance of saving, but how can that 4% rule really crystallize and guide their financial habits?

So I spend all of chapter three digging into the 4% rule and understanding how your spending and your income taken together can essentially tell you how long it's going to take for you to reach financial freedom. So why is this important? Because you're probably going to get some outrageous number. It's probably going to be over a million dollars, right?

It's important for a few reasons. Number one, it really connects the dots between how your lifestyle choices and spending and expenses impact the top of the mountain where you're trying to go. And so what you'll notice if you play around with this is that as you spend less, that number goes down. If you can live on less, if you can really live beneath your means and invest more of your income, you will get there faster.

infinitely faster. So a really nice example of this and something that I talk about a lot in the book, I have this chart where I show you, depending on the percentage of your income that you're saving, here's how long it will take you to go from zero dollars invested to total financial freedom. Now I really can see what's on the other side of that. Now it's not just, well, if I don't spend this money, I save it and then

who knows what, who cares? It's, well, if I can save and invest this money, that directly means fewer years of working. And oh, by the way, I can see exactly how many fewer years. So for me personally, that information was very impactful. And it was what enabled me to transition from working in sort of a corporate nine to five setting to entrepreneurship and

some variations of self-employment and getting to take more risks with my career because I wasn't dependent on a paycheck. It's very cool that you have written this book. It's not often we get to talk to an author who just, you know, put two years of her life into making this thing a reality. So we wanted to ask you some questions about just the process that goes into creating this amazing book that you have. Is there something that you changed your mind about as

as you were going through the process of writing the book? Because it's a long time, like two years is a long period of time. Is there something that you started with like, oh, this is definitely going in that you maybe changed throughout the writing process? Well, I think my philosophy and my thinking more generally evolved a lot over the two years in ways big and small.

But there was a chapter that we ended up having to cut that I had spent a lot of time writing. And it's a topic that I feel very strongly about, which is the decision to rent or buy your home. It's a topic that I feel strongly about because I think it's one of the most misunderstood decisions in life and finance, particularly in the United States.

And I think a lot of people go into it with the wrong information. So there is a cut chapter that we were not able to keep in the book about rent versus buy and how this decision actually is different mathematically for women. Some of the data around it's very interesting. So we ended up using that as it's like a free bonus. If you preorder the book, we will send you that chapter. So you could read, you could read a chapter today that should have been in the book and didn't make it in. Quick plug.

The last time we talked to you, Katie, we talked about that rent versus buy question. So you can either read Katie's supplement or potentially go to our previous conversation in our previous podcast. Because Toby, I remember you were like, I'm facing this decision right now. Katie, walk me through it. And you did a great job explaining it. And I did end up on the renting side of the equation.

after we spoke a little bit. Yeah. Cause I mean, it is, it does come down to numbers at the end of the day is like, what does make more sense for you financially? So I'm sad it didn't make us in, but also another plug to go listen to our previous conversation with you because we did hit that topic. All right. So here's maybe a unique question about writing a book in 2025. Did you use AI to help at all? So I didn't use AI to help with the writing of the book, but

But one of the elements of writing a nonfiction book that I really underestimated the time that it takes is going back and creating all of your end notes and citations. So there is a lot of data in the book, and most of the data comes from reports that in many cases are very long. And so I had read them enough as I was writing to be like, I think this says something.

what I think it says. I think this supports my point, but as we all know, data can be manipulated to prove pretty much any point you want. So when I went back through and I had to actually build out all the end notes and kind of beef that up a little bit,

I wanted to kind of double check every single one. I wanted to make sure that I had not misinterpreted anything. And when it took me six hours to do half of one chapter, I was like, okay, this, I am not going to be able to finish this in time. So part of what I ended up using AI for at the very, very end was helping me parse like, okay, here's the source. Here's what I think it says about

does it really say this? Is there anything that I'm missing here? So I kind of would go back and forth and make sure that if there is some 60 page report that I'm taking like one little factoid out of the middle of it, help me make sure I'm understanding this correctly and that I'm not

misrepresenting what this data really says. So that was, that was toward the tail end, but yes, it was very helpful. It probably saved me 60 hours of work. I, uh, I feel like I'm an irresponsible reader where I kind of don't always look at the footnotes the first go around. So knowing the labor of love though, that you put into it, I'll go back. You're trusting me. Yeah. I'm trusting you. I am trusting you.

You also recently recorded an audio book for this book, which is also par for the course these days because so many people listen on audiobook. What did you learn about yourself, the work itself from recording this out loud? Well, I was a little bit nervous about it.

Because there is a lull when you publish a book. So it takes, it does take years in many cases. I guess some people go faster, but I was also running money with Katie and doing other things on the side. So I, this is just the kind of one thing that I was working on for the years that I was writing it. You sell the proposal, you

And then you spend 18 months writing and editing it. You turn in the manuscript. And then it takes about six months from when you turn in the manuscript to the book actually coming out. So there's a bit of a lull. And I had been so immersed in it for the entire time that I was writing it. And you're so close to the material that if you've ever even written like a term paper or an article that you spend a lot of time on, sometimes you almost start to feel like,

I don't even know if I like this anymore. I remember turning in the manuscript and being like, I hate it. So I was so sick of it. So then those six months pass, I go to record the audio book. And it was the first time that I was reading it again, since I had handed it in. And I was really relieved reading it because I was like, Oh, thank God, this is good. Like now that I've had distance from it, I actually felt really good about it. I was like, No, this is a really good

really rigorous book. And I think a lot of people are going to get a lot of value from it. And I will say, if you like the way Katie sounds and you enjoy listening to these episodes, reading your book, I heard you and I could just feel your voice coming through on that. So even if you don't opt for the audio book, you write with your voice in mind. And that was just very clear. So either medium that you choose to consume it in, you will hear Katie in it.

All right. That's very kind. Thank you for saying that. We got one more question. If you could get a blurb on your book from any person and it doesn't have to be realistic, who would that be?

Gloria Steinem. Oh, that is a good answer. We thought maybe you were going to toss a Warren Buffett out there, but Gloria Steinem is pretty solid. He's not a rich girl. He's not a rich girl. He's a rich guy. Very rich. I do. I do. I do like Warren Buffett, but yeah, Gloria Steinem. There was a, the inspiration for the cover was like an old photo of Gloria Steinem from the seventies at a March. I am very inspired both politically and aesthetically by Gloria

the 1970s era women's movement. I think it was just a very cool time in history. And so, yeah, she's the OG. She's the coolest.

Very cool. Katie, thank you again for jumping on. I always leave our episodes we record together feeling smarter and ready to reap the rewards of compound investing. If you guys enjoyed this conversation, make sure you pre-order Katie's book, Rich Girl Nation at moneywithkatie.com slash richgirlnation. It is out on June 10th. Katie, until next time. Thank you so much for having me. It was as always a pleasure.

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