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00:01:34.640 | Hello and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks, a show about upgrading
00:01:45.000 | your life, money and travel all while spending less and saving more.
00:01:49.160 | I'm Chris Hutchins, and I'm thrilled to have you on my journey to optimize my
00:01:53.240 | life, and I couldn't be more excited for the conversation I'm about to have with
00:01:57.560 | Stephanie O'Connell-Rodriguez.
00:01:59.160 | She's the author of The Broken Beautiful Life.
00:02:01.880 | She's the founder of Statement Event and Statement Cards and the host of the
00:02:05.880 | incredible podcast Money Confidential.
00:02:08.120 | She has a wealth of knowledge about finance, and her work has been featured in
00:02:12.120 | The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, and she's appeared as an
00:02:16.680 | expert on ABC World News, Bloomberg and so many more places.
00:02:20.640 | In our conversation, we'll talk about some great hacks for expensive cities,
00:02:24.520 | whether you live there or just visiting.
00:02:26.800 | We'll talk about some of the ways we've tried to change things up around the
00:02:29.720 | holidays for gifting, both to save money and to get back to the true spirit of
00:02:34.520 | giving, and we'll dive into some fascinating things Stephanie's been
00:02:38.080 | learning about money from the first season of her podcast, where she's gone
00:02:41.320 | deep to solve some real money issues for her listeners.
00:02:44.200 | All right, let's jump in.
00:02:46.040 | Stephanie, thanks for being here.
00:02:50.000 | Oh, man, it's been a long time coming.
00:02:52.800 | I know.
00:02:53.760 | So we met in 2018, and I've only really known you as a money person.
00:02:59.280 | This is kind of what you've been doing.
00:03:01.520 | But as I researched this podcast, I realized you did not grow up and start
00:03:07.280 | your professional career with the aspiration of being a financial expert.
00:03:11.800 | So I would love to understand how you went from, you know, I'll let you tell
00:03:16.000 | the story, but to becoming this financial expert.
00:03:20.240 | Yeah, like you said, talking about money for a living was the farthest thing from
00:03:24.640 | my mind as a young teenager millennial with a lot of dreams in the nineties.
00:03:30.240 | Right.
00:03:30.600 | So I went to college with the aspiration that I was going to be a Broadway
00:03:34.440 | performer, and it was so much of that narrative of like, you know, pursue your
00:03:39.760 | dreams, follow your passion, and everything's going to work itself out.
00:03:43.680 | You know, this naive notion that we all had growing up a little bit like American
00:03:48.200 | dream for the millennial generation, and then I actually did work in the arts for
00:03:53.800 | about five to seven years full time.
00:03:56.600 | And when I say full time, you know, I made money performing, but I also, you
00:04:01.600 | know, waited tables.
00:04:02.760 | I was a personal assistant.
00:04:04.320 | I basically did anything I could do to make money in legitimate ways in between
00:04:11.160 | my jobs, because I would go out and I'd be on a tour for like a year.
00:04:16.520 | And I was always interested in the money aspect of it, the money making aspect of
00:04:21.520 | it.
00:04:21.640 | And I would just squirrel away everything I earned and we would get per diem.
00:04:25.400 | And I'd be like, Ooh, this is not taxable income.
00:04:27.800 | Let me save as much of this as I can.
00:04:29.920 | And then I would come home and be like, I can't bear to spend any of this money I
00:04:35.680 | just made.
00:04:36.640 | It took so much work.
00:04:38.200 | Let me go find all of these side hustles.
00:04:40.600 | And basically the reason I got into money was that cycle was completely
00:04:45.080 | unsustainable. It was exhausting.
00:04:47.960 | I was tired of making very little.
00:04:51.200 | I was just feeling like I was never going to get ahead.
00:04:55.680 | One of the big turning points for me was having an accident with no, not an
00:05:00.480 | accident, an incident with my teeth.
00:05:02.960 | It's like, oh, you go to the dentist one day and then they're like, you need to
00:05:08.320 | have a dental implant.
00:05:09.760 | That's going to cost two thousand dollars.
00:05:11.880 | And I just sobbed.
00:05:13.640 | I sobbed in the dentist chair in front of the dentist like a lunatic because I
00:05:19.360 | couldn't fathom where that money was going to come from.
00:05:23.800 | And I was like, this is the worst feeling.
00:05:26.400 | I am totally at the mercy of the money that I do not have and I do not like it.
00:05:31.560 | And I want this to change.
00:05:33.160 | And that got me very into personal finance like the nerd that I have become with
00:05:39.440 | my spreadsheets and my personal finance books.
00:05:42.320 | And now eventually into a career where I cover personal finance full time.
00:05:47.240 | And one thing you didn't mention is that all of this was happening in New York
00:05:51.160 | City, not not the cheapest city in the country or the world, probably one of the
00:05:57.880 | most expensive.
00:05:58.720 | I think this is the hard thing about a lot of low paying careers is that they're
00:06:03.080 | centered in very expensive cities.
00:06:05.720 | So think about the arts, right?
00:06:08.000 | It's New York or L.A., generally speaking.
00:06:11.240 | If you think about fashion, if you think about PR, even these are careers that are
00:06:17.200 | very notoriously poorly paying in some of the most expensive places in the world.
00:06:23.560 | And so what I did find to be really helpful was that I wasn't alone in my
00:06:30.280 | pursuit of trying to make it and actually leaning on community of people who are
00:06:36.120 | similarly not making a lot of money in these big cities was a huge help because
00:06:41.960 | for me, status quo was not having my own apartment in the financial district where
00:06:48.440 | it costs three to four thousand dollars a month.
00:06:50.840 | Status quo was having four roommates and subletting your room whenever you can to
00:06:56.320 | make extra money and, you know, splitting things and living out in Inwood or in the
00:07:03.120 | Heights or wherever else to cut costs.
00:07:06.120 | So I think part of it was just having an understanding of what your version of
00:07:11.680 | normal is.
00:07:12.720 | For me, it's been at 35.
00:07:15.640 | I've never lived alone.
00:07:16.640 | And that's normal.
00:07:17.600 | And that that perception has saved me a lot of money over time.
00:07:21.560 | Yeah, I started my career in New York as well.
00:07:25.240 | I had a job that paid more, but not enough to really live that kind of life that you
00:07:31.400 | want to live.
00:07:32.480 | I actually worked as an intern for the first nine months of my professional post
00:07:36.840 | college career.
00:07:37.760 | And that's a story for another day.
00:07:39.920 | But interns don't make the most.
00:07:41.560 | But what's interesting, and I'm curious if you had the same experience, is a lot of
00:07:46.320 | the things that I did to save money early on living in a city.
00:07:50.800 | Yes, they were.
00:07:52.120 | Some of them are things that I probably don't do anymore, but a lot of them carry
00:07:55.840 | through.
00:07:56.360 | And I think as we've talked over the past few years, I've learned neither one of us
00:08:01.960 | wants to have a crappy experience in life.
00:08:03.880 | Like we want to like do the things you you worked in the arts.
00:08:07.280 | You want to participate in that.
00:08:08.520 | You want to go to shows.
00:08:09.560 | We both like food.
00:08:11.240 | I'd love to just dig into some of the things that you did either before or even
00:08:16.720 | continue to do in a city to make it kind of an amazing experience, but to still spend
00:08:23.080 | less money and save more and be really responsible.
00:08:26.760 | Yeah, as you mentioned, I love to go out.
00:08:31.800 | I love to see things.
00:08:33.280 | I love to have really fantastic experiences.
00:08:36.360 | And the wonderful thing about cities is they are just bastions for free cultural
00:08:42.280 | enrichment. And there is just endless calendars of workshops.
00:08:48.200 | You can go to performances.
00:08:49.600 | You can go to things you can do that literally cost zero dollars.
00:08:53.640 | Of course, at this point in my life, I am very happy to pay for these experiences, too.
00:08:58.240 | But as you mentioned, you know, early on, there just wasn't the money for an
00:09:02.840 | entertainment budget, to be honest.
00:09:04.520 | But what I used to do is I would go to the New York Public Library website where they
00:09:10.280 | have a very comprehensive list of all of the events that are coming up and the
00:09:15.800 | exhibitions that are coming up and the concerts and talking series, almost all of
00:09:20.760 | which are completely free.
00:09:22.520 | And this is not a New York specific things.
00:09:24.720 | Almost every town or city has a parks department calendar, has a library calendar,
00:09:31.720 | has like a chamber of commerce or town calendar where they have so much programming
00:09:37.760 | that is either free or low cost or has a lottery system or tickets or things like
00:09:43.520 | that. So I was always getting in on whatever was available on those calendars.
00:09:48.680 | And then I also worked a lot of really cool events.
00:09:53.040 | So one of my side hustles was just being a greeter or somebody who's helping
00:10:00.920 | distributing materials for a pop up conference or a concert.
00:10:05.840 | I think I saw A-Rod give a talk during a I don't even know.
00:10:10.200 | I think it was like a fancy baking event.
00:10:12.440 | And I was like, OK, I'm going to just stand inside.
00:10:16.040 | And then at the end, I would be the person who would go pass the mic to people who
00:10:20.120 | wanted to ask their questions for him after he was done with his interview.
00:10:24.440 | So I have found a lot of creative ways to access some of the things that I would
00:10:29.560 | never be able to access if I had to pay for it out of my own budget.
00:10:33.360 | How did you find these side hustles?
00:10:35.600 | Because I feel like, you know, it's one thing to find a way to make some extra money.
00:10:39.560 | It's another thing to find a way to make extra money while doing something that you
00:10:43.040 | otherwise could never do or like you might not even be able to buy tickets to some of
00:10:47.840 | these events or shows, even if you had the money.
00:10:50.440 | So part of it really is what I was mentioning before about community.
00:10:54.360 | If you have a lot of people who are in a similar circumstance, you already have a
00:10:58.760 | network of people who have a similar need, probably a similar interest and are well
00:11:04.200 | connected enough to their own opportunities that that when, you know, another body is
00:11:10.480 | needed to cater this event that I don't know J-Lo is singing at, like you
00:11:17.720 | can get the call if you're honest and open and vulnerable enough with people to be
00:11:22.280 | like, listen, I need money right now or listen, I'm looking for work.
00:11:25.880 | So I think you just honestly need to be up front about the fact that maybe you do
00:11:31.080 | need extra money or you do need side hustles or maybe you're just interested in
00:11:35.120 | certain things so that you become the person people think of and call when those
00:11:39.160 | opportunities arise.
00:11:40.480 | I think the other piece of it is I really leveraged social media and this is early
00:11:46.360 | days. This is like I want to say late 2000s, early 2010s.
00:11:53.480 | And so social media was a little bit different back then, but I remember I would
00:11:58.440 | post things on Facebook or I would search Facebook posts and see if people were
00:12:05.760 | around in a given city.
00:12:07.960 | For example, I picked up a babysitting gig once on my day off on a tour because I was
00:12:13.880 | searching for friends who live in, I think it was Seattle.
00:12:16.880 | And I searched that person's post and the person said, oh, my goodness, I'm looking
00:12:21.360 | for people who are in the Seattle area and I need them tomorrow for a babysitting
00:12:25.960 | gig. And I was like, I'm on it.
00:12:27.360 | And I would also find access to opportunities that way.
00:12:30.480 | So, you know, when we went to Vegas, I was like, hey, I'm headed to Vegas.
00:12:35.080 | Who do I know? And somebody was like, hey, I work at Cirque du Soleil.
00:12:38.240 | Do you want free tickets?
00:12:39.360 | So I can be pretty shameless about where I am and what I need.
00:12:44.600 | And that has actually served me pretty well.
00:12:46.960 | That's amazing. I want to come back to one thing that you so briefly mentioned that I
00:12:52.080 | took advantage of in New York, which was all the theater lotteries.
00:12:55.960 | So for anyone who doesn't know, almost every stage production, Broadway, off
00:13:02.320 | Broadway, has some system, whether it's a lottery or show up and get standing room
00:13:07.320 | only tickets, where for usually and you are way more connected to the theater
00:13:11.960 | industry than me for 20 or less dollars, you can usually get tickets.
00:13:16.000 | Sometimes they're the front two rows.
00:13:18.520 | I know we've seen Wicked and Book of Mormon and Hamilton and Rent all on lottery
00:13:24.600 | tickets where we paid, you know, 20 bucks, 30 bucks and got tickets.
00:13:28.600 | And most of them were all front row seats.
00:13:30.600 | My first date with my now husband was front row Book of Mormon.
00:13:36.880 | We entered the lottery two hours before the show.
00:13:39.400 | We won the lottery and we got that those seats for like, yeah, 20 bucks, maybe 30
00:13:43.720 | bucks inflation. Who knows what it was, what it is now?
00:13:46.440 | But it's cheap.
00:13:47.560 | It's really cheap.
00:13:48.600 | And my husband works on Broadway, so I get a couple extra connections through that.
00:13:54.400 | But I think part of it is, again, just being willing to ask, let people know and tap
00:14:00.560 | into your own network, too.
00:14:02.360 | And, you know, you mentioned the lotteries, but there's also, you know, free
00:14:06.400 | performances that come up.
00:14:07.720 | And this is where the social media aspect comes in.
00:14:11.120 | Hamilton was, I think, doing something where they were filming a show and they
00:14:15.440 | needed to fill the audience for the taping.
00:14:19.600 | And so, you know, on their Twitter, they posted something and you could then be
00:14:24.400 | like, oh, I want that ticket.
00:14:26.200 | And you like filled out the Google form and they notified you.
00:14:28.360 | But you, you know, you have to move quickly.
00:14:30.480 | So part of it is just keeping on the pulse of what's going on and following the
00:14:36.280 | shows or the museums or whatever it is you want to do on Twitter.
00:14:40.880 | I mean, that's a goldmine for free stuff.
00:14:43.320 | Yeah. A couple other good hacks here.
00:14:45.960 | So one I learned about when we were trying to see Hamilton before we got a lottery
00:14:50.800 | ticket was if you notice on a lot of sites like StubHub, if you're out a week, two
00:14:57.200 | weeks before the show, it's really expensive.
00:14:59.600 | And then within like the last hour, everything gets really cheap because people
00:15:03.760 | are sitting on these tickets.
00:15:04.920 | They're trying to make money.
00:15:06.000 | And so if you just find and in New York, it's great.
00:15:10.360 | Almost all the shows are right near each other.
00:15:12.240 | And so what we would do is we would look like 30 minutes before and we would just
00:15:17.440 | go to like a FedEx Kinko's to print off the tickets.
00:15:20.760 | This is oftentimes they're not always able to be digital.
00:15:24.040 | And which is to your advantage, right?
00:15:25.680 | If they're digital, you can go to the last second.
00:15:27.600 | If they're not, those last 30 minutes, people will drop the price significantly
00:15:31.320 | because they just need to sell the tickets.
00:15:32.640 | So we would do that.
00:15:33.840 | There's also a lot of shows and especially live tapings where I'm not sure why they
00:15:38.760 | don't charge because they seem there seems to be a lot of demand.
00:15:41.520 | But we went to the Colbert report.
00:15:44.160 | We went to SNL.
00:15:45.600 | That kind of stuff was all free.
00:15:47.480 | It's all sign up.
00:15:48.880 | Usually for SNL, you sign up like a year in advance or something.
00:15:52.200 | And then they just send you an email.
00:15:53.240 | They're like, hey, you have two tickets to this thing.
00:15:56.600 | And by the way, if you ever do go to a live taping of SNL, the way it works is
00:16:01.400 | everyone lines up in the lobby of 30 Rock and there's people that just walk through
00:16:06.360 | that line and select the people who are going to sit on the floor.
00:16:10.440 | And so my wife thought I was such a crazy person because I was like, every time this
00:16:15.640 | person comes near us, let's just start laughing and let's just like be funny.
00:16:19.920 | And like three times in a row, I was like, all right, now, now, now, now.
00:16:23.680 | So this woman walks by and I'm just like, my wife just starts laughing.
00:16:26.720 | She's like, you're an idiot.
00:16:27.600 | This is so we look ridiculous.
00:16:29.320 | And then the fourth time she walked by, she was like, can you two please come in
00:16:32.200 | this line?
00:16:32.720 | And so we moved into the floor seat line.
00:16:35.520 | So that's my my little mini hack for for getting floor seats at SNL.
00:16:39.600 | But yeah, I feel like I've tried everything I can to have this awesome experience in
00:16:46.160 | cities without having to pay for it.
00:16:47.880 | And if I do have to pay for it, great.
00:16:49.960 | But, you know, if there's a museum you want to go to, yeah, you can pay to go to it.
00:16:53.880 | And then there are like days of the month where locals are either free or I remember
00:16:58.840 | for a while, Bank of America, like if you had a Bank of America debit card, you got
00:17:02.040 | in free on a lot of days.
00:17:03.440 | Oh, yeah.
00:17:04.480 | Check those credit card rewards.
00:17:06.680 | If you have an Amex, you can do so much.
00:17:09.080 | Yeah, they used to do a lot of pre-release movies before they come out.
00:17:15.080 | There are actually I don't know if this is still a thing.
00:17:18.280 | Covid probably kind of tampered this down.
00:17:20.600 | But when I first moved to San Francisco, I found all these websites where you could
00:17:24.920 | sign up to go see pre-release movies and they would just all the time have free movie
00:17:30.360 | tickets to go see movies like the week before they came out.
00:17:33.880 | And I always assumed they were going to ask me some survey to learn about the movie.
00:17:37.040 | They never were. I have no idea what was in it for them.
00:17:39.840 | But I probably went to the movie theater and saw like eight movies or 10 movies in my
00:17:43.960 | first couple of years here. Totally free.
00:17:46.520 | Any other city hacks, maybe on food or anything else that you think makes makes high
00:17:52.200 | cost of living a little bit lower?
00:17:53.880 | I mean, I think when it comes to the necessities, one of the things I did for medical
00:18:00.840 | care for a long time was I made use of the schools.
00:18:04.680 | We have excellent schools here.
00:18:06.200 | So I went to NYU Dental School and they have seriously discounted dental work that you
00:18:12.160 | can get. Even if you have health insurance, you might not have dental coverage.
00:18:15.240 | So that was a big thing.
00:18:16.560 | We have a lot of great clinics here, public health resources.
00:18:19.800 | Again, those tend to be pretty concentrated in cities.
00:18:22.560 | So that's where there's a big benefit.
00:18:24.240 | Obviously, it'd be great to have benefits that you don't need that stuff.
00:18:28.040 | But in case you don't, it's a good thing to have.
00:18:30.320 | And then even stuff like salon services.
00:18:33.320 | I can't remember the last time I actually paid for a haircut because there's all these
00:18:37.160 | schools here that are cosmetology schools.
00:18:39.840 | So they offer free haircuts.
00:18:42.600 | It's called SalonApprentice.com and it's I think it's dot com.
00:18:46.640 | If you Google Salon Apprentice, you'll find it.
00:18:48.840 | It's in a lot of cities.
00:18:49.880 | And you can just see if like a student is looking for somebody for a cut, for a color.
00:18:54.920 | If it's not free, it's super discounted.
00:18:57.200 | So there's just so much of that kind of stuff where you can even take some of your
00:19:01.800 | essentials and find ways to hack them.
00:19:04.680 | Yeah, I remember being at the time I remember it was like called a hair model or
00:19:09.560 | something. It's like, oh, but the only catch was for some of them, it's like, I want to
00:19:13.920 | work on this type of haircut.
00:19:15.360 | So you have to make sure you don't pick someone that's like, I want to learn how to
00:19:19.080 | completely shave someone's head.
00:19:20.520 | That might not be what you're looking for.
00:19:22.680 | That is true, though.
00:19:24.080 | I will give everybody some assurances that I have never had a horror story and I've
00:19:29.320 | probably done it 50 times.
00:19:30.880 | Wow. Yeah.
00:19:32.520 | And women's haircuts are much more expensive than men's haircuts.
00:19:35.840 | So, yeah, to be fair, I'm not too concerned about how I look, but I do care a little
00:19:40.000 | bit. I do television.
00:19:41.080 | So it is I can't look like totally out there.
00:19:43.920 | Yeah. OK, so, you know, we very rarely talk about high cost of living hacks because
00:19:51.000 | especially in the industry, because so many of these bloggers are, you know, I read all
00:19:56.120 | these fire blogs that are like, oh, I'm trying to be financially independent.
00:19:59.480 | Here's my hack so that you can live on ten thousand dollars a year.
00:20:02.800 | And I'm like, OK, I don't think I've seen an apartment that goes for ten thousand
00:20:07.440 | dollars a year in all of San Francisco.
00:20:09.240 | So I think it's I think it's cool that there are actually ways to make make expensive,
00:20:14.400 | higher cost of living cities a lot cheaper.
00:20:16.080 | It seems like with every business, you get to a certain size and the cracks start to
00:20:22.520 | emerge. Things that you used to do in a day are taking a week and you have too many
00:20:27.200 | manual processes and there's no one source of truth.
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00:23:23.000 | And these cities have a ton of value they provide.
00:23:27.640 | I hate when we reduce these conversations just to the expense alone as opposed to
00:23:32.000 | thinking about what's the total value of the experience, right?
00:23:36.440 | Yeah, it costs a lot of money to live in a big city, but if it connects you to a cultural
00:23:41.680 | circle that you care about, a community that you care about, career opportunities that
00:23:45.680 | you care about, as it does for me, as it does for my husband, who's a Broadway stage
00:23:49.480 | and like being in New York has an enormous value.
00:23:52.360 | And my career would not be where it is if I did not live here.
00:23:55.880 | That's not to say that you can't have really wonderful career opportunities elsewhere
00:24:01.400 | and that I may not have found success in other ways.
00:24:04.000 | But I attribute so much of the income gains that I've had and the career growth that
00:24:10.600 | I've had by the sheer fact that I am in the city where it happens, in the room where it
00:24:15.920 | happens so much of the time.
00:24:17.680 | So one of the things that Covid has kind of brought up is this kind of so-called exodus
00:24:23.680 | from all of the cities.
00:24:25.240 | And I know so many people that are now trying to geo arbitrage.
00:24:28.680 | They're like, oh, I'm going to move to the middle of Nebraska and I'm going to work
00:24:32.720 | remotely. I'm going to make my Bay Area salary and pay Nebraska rent and it's going to
00:24:37.680 | be fantastic. And, you know, I still live in San Francisco.
00:24:41.040 | You still live in New York, presumably for a similar reason to what you just described,
00:24:45.560 | which is I believe that the career financial life upside of being in the middle of where
00:24:53.560 | an industry that you're a part of is is happening.
00:24:56.360 | And I think for me, that's worth it.
00:24:58.360 | And like you, I've seen a lot of benefit in the past.
00:25:01.360 | Do you think that benefit keeps coming or do you think anything major has actually
00:25:05.560 | changed in the way we work such that that value proposition is is less now in a post
00:25:11.560 | Covid world?
00:25:12.160 | There's been nothing more powerful in my career than face to face interactions, and I
00:25:17.560 | do not foresee that changing.
00:25:19.080 | I do believe there will be more opportunity for hybrid work, for flexible work, but it
00:25:25.320 | is really hard to recreate the experience of being in a room with somebody, not just
00:25:30.320 | because of just the physical interaction, but it just facilitates a night, right?
00:25:37.560 | Like, you're not just meeting for the hour that you have coffee with somebody or for
00:25:42.040 | the networking thing.
00:25:43.200 | It's like, OK, let's go get dinner.
00:25:44.840 | Let's go get drinks.
00:25:46.040 | Let's go see a show.
00:25:47.160 | And I do think that building relationships, even whether it's for personal or
00:25:52.560 | professional reasons, I think it requires that amount of spontaneousness.
00:25:59.200 | And I think it requires that interaction if you're going to create a level of depth.
00:26:04.200 | And in my experience, it's depth of relationship that really creates the
00:26:08.800 | opportunities that have created the most benefit for me.
00:26:12.800 | Now, I'm not going to say there's no value, obviously, in having that off the grid
00:26:17.120 | lifestyle. Of course, that's high value.
00:26:19.520 | And if you're in a place in your career where you feel really confident and secure
00:26:23.680 | and you don't really have much interest in pivoting into something else, great.
00:26:29.160 | Go do it. But I do think there's a lot of risk that hasn't been talked about in going
00:26:33.400 | out and like living 300 miles away from wherever you are now and just assuming that
00:26:39.640 | you're going to be stable for the rest of your life under the same conditions that
00:26:43.960 | have brought you to where you are in your career now.
00:26:46.480 | Yeah, I I totally agree.
00:26:49.320 | I think maybe the type of work you do could matter, I think, in in in a world where
00:26:54.840 | relationships are really important to your job, if you're in sales, like it just seems
00:26:59.480 | really important if you are an engineer and that's just what you want to do and you
00:27:02.760 | found a company and you want to work there for 10 years.
00:27:04.720 | Yeah, you might be able to save a significant amount of money.
00:27:07.640 | I know at least on the rent side, you could save a significant amount of money leaving
00:27:11.720 | the Bay Area. But if your aspiration is to start a company, if your aspiration is to
00:27:17.560 | run an entire organization or a team, I think it's I think I personally think you're
00:27:22.640 | missing out on value by being where it happens.
00:27:25.760 | But I am jealous of the people who took the last two years to move somewhere else and
00:27:32.520 | just completely geo arbitrage their income while all of those room where it happens are
00:27:37.680 | closed. Let me tell you one thing about that, because I spent almost a year of my
00:27:41.920 | pandemic in upstate New York in a beautiful place with my family, and it was wonderful
00:27:48.320 | in many ways. I could not be happier to be back in New York City.
00:27:52.840 | And I think part of this is also knowing yourself.
00:27:55.360 | I think some people are more attuned to the value proposition that a city provides, and
00:28:01.400 | some people are more attuned to the opposite.
00:28:04.520 | And I think sometimes we romanticize both.
00:28:07.760 | And I think part of it is about getting really honest with yourself about what you care
00:28:11.640 | about. And at the end of the day, I care about having access to delivery and take out of
00:28:17.200 | good food 24/7.
00:28:18.800 | Yes, huge value.
00:28:20.960 | OK, so you just mentioned family and there's a lot of stuff I want to cover.
00:28:24.760 | But a thing that I realize is I spent the last week talking with family on both sides
00:28:30.000 | about what are we doing for Thanksgiving?
00:28:31.520 | What are we doing for Christmas? And one of the things that I've heard you give advice
00:28:35.840 | about, I think you've been on like Good Morning America talking about is gifting and the
00:28:40.840 | holidays. And I'm just wondering, as we approach this time of year, are there any hacks
00:28:46.120 | you have around finding gifts for people, buying gifts, deals, shopping, any of that
00:28:50.960 | stuff that people might want to use?
00:28:53.120 | So I'm of the philosophy that my time and energy is not particularly well spent by going
00:29:02.240 | deep into the weeds of couponing and comparison shopping.
00:29:05.840 | That said, I am interested in anything I can do that easily facilitates a discount.
00:29:11.480 | So, you know, installing a browser extension that searches for deals and coupons
00:29:17.400 | automatically when I'm buying things online or cashback portal where you go in and it's
00:29:23.640 | like, oh, you get five percent cash back if you shop at J.
00:29:27.640 | Crew on this day and I'm shopping for J.
00:29:30.040 | Crew anyway. Great.
00:29:31.200 | Happy to do that.
00:29:32.520 | That's pretty easy, pretty seamless, pretty low lift for an easy reward.
00:29:36.960 | So that's the kind of hack that I'm interested in.
00:29:39.120 | The other thing is, like, I have really no issue with opting out of things.
00:29:44.280 | And I know that's very difficult for most people.
00:29:46.640 | I think a lot of holiday stuff and this is probably true for anything related to family.
00:29:52.480 | You know, you're talking about family, things like weddings, things like birthdays,
00:29:55.600 | anything where there's a sense of obligation, where things get emotional, where they get
00:29:59.520 | sticky. I think it's the emotional piece of it where people get really carried away.
00:30:04.120 | And that's where things get out of hand.
00:30:06.040 | So I think part of it has been for me just kind of interrogating what is this really
00:30:11.160 | for? What is the gifting really about?
00:30:13.680 | What am I trying to do with the gift?
00:30:15.680 | And that has really made me realize that, like, for me, gifting and the holidays is
00:30:22.440 | about spending time with my family.
00:30:24.240 | It's not about, you know, making sure that I'm partaking in the office Secret Santa
00:30:29.640 | because everyone else is doing it.
00:30:31.360 | I can tell you that I rarely partake in any kind of ancillary gifting groups and it has
00:30:40.520 | made no difference in the quality of my network or experience.
00:30:44.320 | And it's not like I'm a Grinch and, you know, I think that you all should not be doing
00:30:49.240 | this and or I'm a cheapskate.
00:30:51.320 | It's just there's just not enough value that comes out of the experience.
00:30:55.360 | And that sounds super cold.
00:30:56.920 | But to me, it's like, OK, do I want to spend like fifty dollars on 10 different group
00:31:05.200 | gifting circles or do I want to buy a plane ticket so I can go visit my family?
00:31:09.800 | That's not a difficult exchange.
00:31:11.800 | I think we're just not being honest about how much of leakage there is through this
00:31:15.880 | little stuff that adds like no value.
00:31:18.320 | And then also just a little soapbox, I'm very against like decor and candy of all
00:31:24.800 | kinds. Wow.
00:31:26.560 | I just don't find that it's like this this little junk that is so expensive as it
00:31:37.240 | collects. And then like you have to deal with it afterwards versus like if I don't buy
00:31:44.640 | any of that, what I can do is get you.
00:31:48.120 | I don't know, not an Apple Watch, nothing that expensive, but something like actually
00:31:54.040 | useful, maybe a subscription to like Broadway HD, because my mother loves Broadway and
00:31:59.080 | Broadway's been closed so she can stream it for the next year.
00:32:01.960 | So again, for me, a lot of money stuff is not necessarily about the numbers so much as
00:32:08.800 | it is about the value and then like really getting clear on what's the purpose of the
00:32:13.920 | thing I'm trying to do.
00:32:15.080 | And honestly, spending fifty dollars on candy canes for like a hundred different
00:32:18.560 | people is not a good value for me.
00:32:21.400 | Yeah, so I've gotten in a little bit of trouble in the last few years with my family
00:32:26.600 | perspective on gifting.
00:32:27.960 | I've always thought that the idea of creating a list of the things that I want and
00:32:34.840 | sending it to family and having them buy the thing on the list is like my nightmare
00:32:39.520 | because things in my world either fall into I really want them or I don't.
00:32:43.880 | And if I want them, I'm going to find a way to buy them.
00:32:46.040 | And a lot of times I'll buy them on Facebook Marketplace or I'll wait for them to go on
00:32:50.600 | sale and I'll use cashback portals and all this stuff.
00:32:53.120 | If someone else buys them, the thing that I could have gotten for thirty bucks, they're
00:32:57.080 | paying fifty dollars.
00:32:58.000 | And that drives me crazy.
00:32:59.360 | The other thing that drives me crazy is everyone's always asking like a month out.
00:33:03.120 | They're like, what do you want?
00:33:03.840 | So then you go do some research and you're like, well, here's seven things that I want
00:33:06.480 | to buy. Now I just want them.
00:33:08.560 | So it's like the whole gifting for me got so stressful because I'd find a thing that I
00:33:12.920 | finally like, yes, I want this shirt.
00:33:14.760 | And then it's like now I've got to wait five weeks to have the shirt and I know you're
00:33:19.200 | going to overpay for the shirt.
00:33:20.520 | And all I really wanted was like some kind of gift that was meaningful.
00:33:27.240 | Like I care much less about the fact that you're willing to spend fifty dollars on me
00:33:31.520 | than I do that you spent a little bit of time trying to find something that you thought
00:33:34.560 | would be cool. And so I proposed that.
00:33:38.600 | We just do away with lists and everyone thought that was crazy.
00:33:42.680 | And so then I went one step to the extreme to try to make my point.
00:33:45.840 | And this is where it kind of went off the rails.
00:33:47.400 | I said, look, if we're all just going to buy each other things off each other's lists,
00:33:50.920 | what if we just made a spreadsheet and we all typed in how much we were going to spend
00:33:54.680 | on each other? And then we just netted it out.
00:33:56.720 | So if you were willing to spend eighty dollars on me and I was willing to spend seventy
00:33:59.880 | dollars on you, you could just Venmo me ten dollars and we just call it a day.
00:34:03.440 | And they're like, well, that takes the fun out of it.
00:34:05.560 | And I was like, I know, but it's already not fun.
00:34:08.240 | Oh, my gosh, that's so funny.
00:34:10.560 | But I told, of course, it didn't go well.
00:34:13.240 | I totally get it. You know what I wish for gifts?
00:34:15.800 | I wish I could buy gifts when I see something and I'm like, oh, that's perfect for
00:34:20.160 | so-and-so. And that's it.
00:34:21.880 | I don't buy them any other gifts any other time.
00:34:24.560 | I just get the thing when I'm like, oh, that is the thing for this person.
00:34:28.720 | So that's so when you talk about opting out, it's interesting.
00:34:31.960 | We finally got to a place with families that, you know, we don't see both sides of the
00:34:37.120 | family for Christmas every year.
00:34:38.720 | So we just said, hey, look, on the years that we're not going to see you guys, we're
00:34:42.760 | opting out and everyone actually opted out.
00:34:45.480 | So we just don't do gifts there.
00:34:46.760 | And then on the years that we do, we actually just have a there's my wife has two
00:34:52.240 | sisters and parents.
00:34:53.720 | So there's four kind of groups.
00:34:55.560 | We just everyone gets one person.
00:34:57.760 | We get them one gift and like we call it a day, except for kids.
00:35:01.560 | Everyone under like 10 is opted in every year.
00:35:05.000 | The kids get some gifts because it's exciting.
00:35:07.040 | But all the adults have kind of gotten to a point that they opted out, which has
00:35:10.240 | actually worked incredibly well.
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00:36:22.960 | Do you all remember episode 122 when I spoke to Chef David Chang about leveling up
00:36:30.000 | your cooking at home?
00:36:31.280 | If not, definitely go back and give it a listen.
00:36:33.440 | But one of his top hacks was using the microwave more.
00:36:36.800 | I'll admit I was a skeptic at first, but after getting a full set of microwave
00:36:41.640 | cookware from Anyday, I'm a total convert and I'm excited to partner with them for
00:36:45.960 | this episode.
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00:37:14.000 | recommend David Chang's Salmon Rice.
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00:37:30.760 | Again, that's allthehacks.com/anyday for 15% off.
00:37:36.200 | I just want to thank you quick for listening to and supporting the show.
00:37:41.280 | Your support is what keeps this show going.
00:37:44.120 | To get all of the URLs, codes, deals, and discounts from our partners, you can go
00:37:49.320 | to allthehacks.com/deals.
00:37:52.400 | So please consider supporting those who support us.
00:37:55.520 | I was going to ask you how you are feeling about navigating all this now as a
00:38:00.040 | parent, because I do not have children, but I think it would make me crazy if
00:38:05.720 | people kept buying my kid just garbage.
00:38:09.400 | So the number of gifts we've already thrown out is like, I can't count on my
00:38:15.560 | hand because everyone's like, "Oh, I sent you this thing."
00:38:18.680 | And it's like, we got this one stuffed animal and it was like covered in like
00:38:22.840 | this smelly glitter.
00:38:24.080 | And it just seemed like it was the cheapest thing ever.
00:38:26.520 | And if someone put it in their mouth, they would probably get some toxic
00:38:28.920 | chemical.
00:38:29.560 | And so I do think that, you know, registries for kids is one of these
00:38:34.320 | hysterical things where you're like, "Here are the 20 things we need for our
00:38:36.720 | kid."
00:38:37.040 | And they're like, "I'm so glad you sent that list.
00:38:39.280 | I got you this other thing that I thought you would want."
00:38:42.040 | And I'm like, "No, if I wanted it, I would have put it on the list."
00:38:45.800 | Every now and then, it's a really cool sentimental thing, but for the most
00:38:50.160 | part, they're not.
00:38:50.920 | But your dream is something my wife and I have decided, which is we no longer do
00:38:56.600 | birthday and Christmas gifts for each other.
00:38:58.880 | We just, throughout the year, when we see something really exciting for each
00:39:02.320 | other, we buy it and we just have random gifts.
00:39:04.160 | It's like, "Hey, we're at dinner."
00:39:05.560 | And I'm like, "I saw this book.
00:39:07.200 | I thought you'd love it."
00:39:08.000 | And a cool book that I will actually share, which I think is really cool, is
00:39:12.760 | this website or book or company called Adventure Challenge.
00:39:16.320 | So the whole premise is you get this book and it's like 50 dates, but you
00:39:23.120 | don't know what they are and you have to scratch them off and you commit to doing
00:39:27.160 | them and they give you some requirements.
00:39:29.160 | So it's like, "Tonight, you're going to need two hours.
00:39:32.520 | It needs to be dark out and you need 30 bucks."
00:39:35.640 | And then you just see this thing and you're like, "All right, you're ready?
00:39:38.440 | We're going to scratch this off and that's the date."
00:39:40.240 | So that was a recent gift and we've only gone on one date and it sent us to Target
00:39:45.240 | to make like little scrapbooks for each other with stickers.
00:39:48.480 | It was like, it sounded like the dumbest thing ever.
00:39:50.440 | And then we did it and we went to like a bar and got some beers and we were
00:39:53.840 | like putting these stickers in.
00:39:55.040 | We felt like we were designing our trapper keepers back in the day.
00:39:58.520 | But I shout out to Adventure Challenge because I thought that was a really
00:40:01.880 | fun gift that keeps on giving, I guess.
00:40:04.160 | I love that.
00:40:05.240 | I've also taken to having the best gifting experience with my husband,
00:40:10.280 | which at this point is really just treating ourselves to extravagant meals
00:40:14.960 | and trips.
00:40:15.680 | And I honestly, if that's what gifting was, I would be much happier.
00:40:20.000 | Yes.
00:40:20.760 | I think we both share that love for travel.
00:40:22.760 | Okay.
00:40:23.200 | So we haven't talked at all about the biggest thing that I think you're
00:40:27.000 | working on right now, or maybe there's multiple, but you know, last, in the
00:40:30.400 | middle of the pandemic, you started a podcast and it was something that I don't
00:40:36.720 | think I'd really seen recently, which was talking to people kind of off the
00:40:41.080 | record, confidentially about their money issues and trying to solve them.
00:40:44.520 | And so I'd love to hear a little bit about how that came together and some of
00:40:49.960 | the interesting things you've been learning that maybe you were surprised by.
00:40:53.960 | Yeah.
00:40:55.520 | So the podcast is produced in partnership, well, it's their podcast.
00:41:00.800 | It's Real Simple Magazine.
00:41:02.160 | And so they hired me as the host and I'm a producer on the show.
00:41:05.840 | And they basically had this idea of, we really want to talk to people
00:41:10.200 | confidentially about their money problem and then have an expert come on and
00:41:14.120 | explain how to solve the problem.
00:41:16.800 | And that's the framework they gave me.
00:41:18.840 | And I was like, Hmm, this could go so many ways.
00:41:21.640 | How are we going to really bring it together?
00:41:24.200 | And one of the things that I've found in doing the actual interviews and seeing
00:41:30.800 | what brings it together is that it's almost never about the money.
00:41:37.000 | It's almost always about the feelings about the money, the shame, the fear,
00:41:43.600 | the everything else, the family, the friend, the husband, the wife, you know.
00:41:51.440 | And almost every single person thinks they are totally alone and it makes them
00:41:59.080 | feel like they're a failure.
00:42:00.440 | Everybody else around them is succeeding and they are hopeless.
00:42:04.600 | And so they internalize whatever they're going through as this experience of,
00:42:09.920 | Oh, it's just me as an identity.
00:42:12.960 | I am bad with money and that is who I am.
00:42:16.240 | And that is just a quality that I must have been born with or inherited from my
00:42:22.280 | family.
00:42:22.800 | And thus, there is no hope.
00:42:25.800 | And that is a really painful place to try to make a positive change from.
00:42:31.120 | You can't really hack your way out of that.
00:42:33.960 | You know, we talk about optimizing these things, using the deal sites and trying
00:42:39.400 | to set these boundaries of people in our lives.
00:42:41.480 | But if you are in a place where you don't even think it's possible for you to
00:42:46.440 | change, if you're saying I'm bad with money, not I've made a money mistake,
00:42:51.040 | that's a really hard place to move forward from.
00:42:53.640 | And so on the show, when we're talking to people and we bring on the experts, not
00:42:59.880 | only do we have to go into the hacks of like, OK, here's what this means for your
00:43:04.040 | spreadsheet and here's what this means for your budget and your investment
00:43:07.400 | account and your savings account.
00:43:08.960 | We also have to go into, well, here's what this means for your relationship to
00:43:14.480 | your mother or here's what this means for your relationship to yourself.
00:43:18.080 | And it is really emotional.
00:43:21.440 | And I don't say that to say that we're trying to be a kind of therapy podcast.
00:43:27.440 | We're not. But I notice when it's confidential, people start to open up about
00:43:32.200 | what's really behind why the numbers on the page aren't adding up.
00:43:36.800 | And when people do that, you really just start to see how much of it is about shame
00:43:41.080 | and isolation and how much can really be helped by having these conversations that
00:43:46.040 | you and I are having, where we're like, I actually hate this thing that we all do.
00:43:50.600 | You know, maybe we should change that, because if you don't have that
00:43:53.960 | conversation, you continue to feel obligated and you continue to feel overstretched
00:43:59.240 | and you continue to get trapped in this cycle where nothing's working out for you.
00:44:03.520 | So I think the coolest thing about the show has just been really talking to the
00:44:06.800 | listeners themselves and seeing what they've been willing to be vulnerable about
00:44:11.160 | and, like, realize for themselves in the process of sharing what's going on.
00:44:16.480 | Because a lot of it is these aha moments that they never thought about before.
00:44:20.120 | They never thought about, oh, well, why isn't this working?
00:44:22.320 | Then, you know, the budget's not working.
00:44:23.840 | But as they talk it out, you can hear them start to have these aha moments.
00:44:28.160 | And that's super cool.
00:44:29.600 | Can you walk through an example of an interview you've done and kind of some of
00:44:33.480 | the learnings you've had?
00:44:34.480 | Yeah, we had one listener on the show who called in and she said, you know, I'm
00:44:38.520 | really struggling to figure out how to plan for the future with my boyfriend because,
00:44:44.040 | you know, I make 30 percent more than he does.
00:44:47.560 | Oh, no, it wasn't 30 percent more.
00:44:48.760 | It's $30,000 more than he does.
00:44:51.520 | Just a significant income difference.
00:44:53.200 | And she was in her mid-20s.
00:44:55.560 | They were both in their mid-20s.
00:44:57.120 | And presumably that difference could grow a lot more in the future.
00:45:01.640 | And so she's like, you know, I just can't seem to figure out how we're going to
00:45:06.840 | make it work.
00:45:07.800 | And what I realized in talking to her and having her talk through how they were
00:45:13.520 | managing the expenses, what did it look like when the paychecks came in, what did
00:45:18.520 | the conversations look like around dividing expenses up, was all of their
00:45:23.520 | conversations were based on the premise that fair is 50/50 and there is nothing
00:45:29.960 | else. And it was just an interesting assumption that equal is same.
00:45:37.000 | And that is not necessarily true.
00:45:39.320 | You know, what does equal mean in a relationship?
00:45:42.400 | It sounds like a super heavy topic.
00:45:44.160 | But if you've never really interrogated that, then you can't make a good financial
00:45:50.160 | plan for your relationship because the fact is almost nothing is ever 50/50 in the
00:45:55.960 | course of not just a moment in time, but certainly over the course of a marriage
00:46:01.480 | that could potentially be 20, 30, 40 years.
00:46:04.560 | And so that's an example of something that it starts with, like this really simple
00:46:08.240 | thing. It's like, well, how do we split our rent?
00:46:09.960 | You know, I make $30,000 more than he does.
00:46:12.480 | But then if you kind of strip away all the layers, what it's really about is like,
00:46:16.880 | oh, well, I've been conditioned to think that like what it means to to be an
00:46:22.560 | empowered woman in a relationship is that, you know, it's equal 50/50.
00:46:28.320 | And I'm making more.
00:46:29.720 | So what does that mean now that I'm the breadwinner?
00:46:32.280 | And where do my thoughts about this come from?
00:46:35.240 | And why is it creating resentment?
00:46:37.560 | And why is this now a point of tension in our every day?
00:46:41.200 | And so it's just like really wild to see what comes up when you keep digging behind
00:46:47.520 | the layers and asking more questions.
00:46:49.720 | And what's the advice for someone like that?
00:46:52.840 | Is it to just talk about it?
00:46:54.760 | Is it, you know, how do you get past it?
00:46:56.880 | Is it just, you know, it doesn't have to be 50/50.
00:46:59.280 | So a lot of the money stuff is like what it's not about the money stuff again, like
00:47:07.080 | always comes back to everything else.
00:47:08.560 | It's like, OK, what is your perception of what it means to be fair?
00:47:13.600 | What is the model of behavior you experienced growing up?
00:47:17.840 | Was it that your parent told you that you had to do everything and provide for
00:47:24.320 | everyone? Was it that it's a bad thing if you're a woman and you make more money than
00:47:29.360 | your spouse? And so, you know, you should feel somehow ashamed if you're in that
00:47:34.000 | position. These might not be things that were explicitly said to you, but these are
00:47:37.560 | also things that you might need to stop and go through those memory banks to be like,
00:47:41.560 | wait, what are these kind of models of behavior I either witnessed growing up or the
00:47:46.000 | messages I got, whether they were explicit or maybe like maybe not so explicit, but
00:47:51.800 | you felt it. And then you have to talk about those things with your partner because
00:47:57.000 | you both had totally different experiences growing up.
00:48:00.040 | And so you are not going to match perfectly with your finances because you have had
00:48:05.880 | completely different outlooks.
00:48:07.680 | You have had completely different histories.
00:48:09.840 | You had completely different models of behavior.
00:48:12.120 | And the only way to really get on the same page about what is fair is to kind of
00:48:18.040 | interrogate all of those things together.
00:48:20.560 | And it's really uncomfortable to do that, especially when you're dating, because,
00:48:24.600 | you know, you don't want to sit down on the first date and be like, you know, tell
00:48:28.120 | me your entire family history with money and your credit score and your debt load.
00:48:31.760 | You know, that's not the answer.
00:48:33.320 | But the answer is, right, the answer is, though, that like you can't lean out of that
00:48:38.080 | conversation entirely until you're after a legally, like financially obligated to
00:48:41.840 | somebody in a marriage, which is unfortunately, I think what happens a lot.
00:48:44.800 | Yeah, I saw on your website a guide of 25 talks to have with your partner about money.
00:48:51.240 | So I'm going to link to that in the show notes, because I imagine that would help a
00:48:55.040 | lot of people get past these things.
00:48:56.640 | It does. And it also kind of lays out at what point in the relationship to do these
00:49:01.600 | things, because, again, you don't want to be that person on the first date asking
00:49:06.400 | about, you know, student loan balances.
00:49:08.440 | Yeah. I mean, this isn't money related, but something I found was when we had our
00:49:13.720 | daughter, my wife doesn't have the same last name as me.
00:49:16.640 | And, you know, that was something that didn't matter to me.
00:49:19.920 | But she was kind of like, are you sure?
00:49:21.320 | Are you OK? And I'm like, yeah, it doesn't bother me.
00:49:23.560 | So then we have to pick what our daughter's last name is.
00:49:25.760 | And for most people, it's just like assumed.
00:49:29.480 | And I think for me, I was like, well, you have a cooler last name, like your last
00:49:33.640 | name's Fox. That's a pretty cool name.
00:49:35.400 | We should give our daughter that name.
00:49:36.840 | And it was just surprising how many people were like blown away by the fact that we
00:49:42.440 | gave our daughter my wife's last name, so much so that some people either chose to
00:49:48.320 | ignore it or didn't know or just assumed.
00:49:51.440 | And they'd like sent her like, you know, a monogrammed pillow with the wrong
00:49:55.480 | initials and that kind of stuff, as if, you know.
00:49:58.880 | And so I just realized that her assumption of what we would do and my assumption of
00:50:03.720 | what we would do weren't even on the same page.
00:50:05.880 | And when we talked about it, it was like, oh, OK, she'll have, you know, and mine's a
00:50:09.680 | little more systematic.
00:50:10.720 | I personally, I really struggle with hyphenated names because I'm like, well, if
00:50:15.120 | we give all our kids hyphenated names, then all our kids are going to get married to
00:50:18.200 | other kids with hyphenated names.
00:50:19.600 | Then they're going to have quadruple hyphenated names.
00:50:21.880 | And then their kids are going to have eight last names and so on and so on.
00:50:24.480 | So mine's more like a process and system argument for not doing that.
00:50:28.800 | But I think my wife also just has a much cooler last name.
00:50:31.880 | And I slightly regret not taking her last name because I feel like Chris Fox, like
00:50:36.800 | would just be a much better podcast host, much better name on the billboard, all
00:50:41.080 | those things. I mean, it's never too late.
00:50:43.480 | So one of a few things that you touched on in that conversation was about, you know,
00:50:49.760 | you talk to this woman who makes more than her husband.
00:50:51.840 | And I know you've been spending a lot of time digging into the data that comes
00:50:56.680 | around. And by data, I mean studies, research with women who make more than their
00:51:02.960 | husbands try to be too ambitious.
00:51:05.120 | And you've even kind of coined the term "the ambition penalty." Could you talk a
00:51:08.720 | little bit about what you've been learning and what you've been sharing?
00:51:11.440 | And we'll go from there.
00:51:14.000 | Yeah, so I got really interested in a lot of the advice that we have been giving
00:51:22.240 | women in particular in order to close these really persistent gaps in pay, in
00:51:28.680 | wealth, in leadership, in workforce representation, because I think in the last
00:51:33.560 | decade or so, you've seen a lot of the Instagrammable advice of like, OK, just
00:51:39.240 | speak up, just be more aggressive, just ask for more, just negotiate.
00:51:44.200 | And I wanted to challenge the assumption that women were not doing those things.
00:51:49.480 | And what happened is when I looked into the data, what I found is women actually
00:51:53.320 | are doing a lot of these things.
00:51:55.920 | They are asking for more.
00:51:57.360 | They are speaking up.
00:51:58.480 | They are trying to reach leadership positions.
00:52:00.760 | But what happens is when women engage in these behaviors, there is a backlash to
00:52:07.520 | the behavior. So there's a lot of studies that look at, for example, a resume.
00:52:12.920 | And what happens if you change the name from a Howard to a Heidi is if you have
00:52:18.640 | all of the same qualifications, if you have all of the same perceptions otherwise
00:52:25.120 | other than the name, then the Howard is more likely to be judged favorably compared
00:52:31.360 | to the Heidi, who not only is she less likely to be judged favorably, if the cover
00:52:37.040 | letter is seen as somehow aggressive or self-advocating, then she's actually likely
00:52:43.400 | to get a backlash.
00:52:44.840 | She's likely to be labeled unlikable.
00:52:47.520 | And this isn't just about likability.
00:52:50.280 | This has real tangible financial consequences.
00:52:53.440 | In fact, on one episode of Money Confidential, I interviewed a woman who was
00:52:58.800 | negotiating her salary after getting a job offer, and the job offer was rescinded as
00:53:05.880 | a result. So they withdrew the job offer.
00:53:09.400 | That is a tangible financial penalty that woman got for trying to negotiate a raise.
00:53:15.400 | And that is not an anomaly.
00:53:17.280 | This has been borne out in the data.
00:53:19.840 | And that's just one example, a job offer being rescinded.
00:53:23.040 | This happens when women try to get promotions, reach leadership positions.
00:53:27.120 | There's all of this backlash, and a lot of it has a tangible cost.
00:53:32.600 | And my takeaway in covering this is not that, well, we should just not negotiate or we
00:53:39.200 | should just not try to reach these leadership positions or whatever else it is.
00:53:44.120 | My takeaway is we need to broaden the conversation so that it's not so overly
00:53:50.280 | simplistic, because when you say, oh, just speak up, just be more confident, just be
00:53:55.600 | more assertive, the assumption is that somehow we're not already doing these things
00:54:01.000 | and that getting to pay equity is as simple as that.
00:54:05.240 | And the truth is, it's not that simple.
00:54:08.280 | It's being borne out in the data that it's not that simple.
00:54:11.360 | And it also puts so much of the onus on women, especially women of color, basically
00:54:16.920 | anyone who's, you know, outside of the gender binary to be the person who's going to
00:54:24.320 | solve for what's really a structural inequity.
00:54:27.120 | And so I think for all of us who are trying to navigate in this world, we need to have a
00:54:31.080 | broader conversation about how do we recognize these biases and then how do we
00:54:35.280 | manage them in the context of these conversations of negotiating, getting
00:54:41.400 | leadership positions, leaning in, all of that.
00:54:43.800 | So.
00:54:45.280 | I mean, it's fascinating that a lot of times I hear these stories, but I've never dug
00:54:51.360 | into it, so you've actually linked out to a lot of different studies that show what's
00:54:56.520 | happening. And I went deep on a couple of them and like, you know, the Journal of
00:55:01.160 | Psychology and that kind of stuff.
00:55:02.400 | What do you think someone listening today and especially for me, right, I'm on the
00:55:07.720 | other side of of the gender here.
00:55:10.280 | What can I start doing to make this better?
00:55:13.960 | Is it as simple as just talking about it?
00:55:15.800 | What can happen at work?
00:55:17.120 | What can we do to promote an environment that kind of makes this I mean, it's not
00:55:22.840 | going to go away overnight, but kind of works on making this go away.
00:55:26.960 | I think talking about it is actually more powerful than we might think it is,
00:55:32.120 | because as we kind of talked about earlier, a lot of this stuff isn't explicit.
00:55:36.720 | Nobody is out there being like, we don't want women to be leaders.
00:55:40.640 | We don't we want to suppress the ambitions of minorities.
00:55:45.240 | Nobody is saying that.
00:55:46.560 | But this stuff is really deep.
00:55:49.520 | It's structural.
00:55:50.560 | And so part of it is really just bringing awareness to the ways in which we do
00:55:55.400 | undermine women, people of color, LGBTQ individuals when they do advocate for
00:56:00.960 | themselves. And if you see it happening, you know, if you're in a position of power
00:56:05.440 | to go ahead and say something, that means something.
00:56:09.000 | If you can support that person through the process of a negotiation and be their
00:56:13.720 | mentor, be their advocate, that means something.
00:56:16.400 | I think part of this, too, especially in personal finance world, is that we have to
00:56:21.520 | do better. Me, myself included, I have given that advice of, you know, be more
00:56:27.320 | confident. But that is really insulting to just imply that confidence alone is going
00:56:33.760 | to solve for what is really a structural and systemic inequity.
00:56:38.480 | And so I think we have to say, OK, you know, if we see a little gap in how much men
00:56:44.440 | and women are negotiating, maybe we should interrogate why.
00:56:48.760 | What is going on there?
00:56:50.960 | Is it because women aren't confident or is it because they have a realistic and
00:56:54.720 | borne out fear of backlash?
00:56:56.920 | It's not just a lack of confidence.
00:56:58.960 | It's a real legitimate and borne out, proven fear that if I do this, I'm going to be
00:57:07.640 | labeled aggressive. I'm going to be labeled unlikable.
00:57:10.600 | They're going to say I'm not a great fit for this company the next time that I'm in
00:57:16.400 | the running for a promotion.
00:57:18.720 | So I think part of it is really about just interrogating the assumptions we have
00:57:24.280 | around a lot of the career and financial advice that we are giving to these
00:57:29.000 | historically marginalized communities.
00:57:30.920 | Are there any tactics that someone in one of these communities can use to try to
00:57:38.640 | lighten or reduce the likelihood that they face this backlash?
00:57:44.880 | Yeah, so a lot of this, you know, in my research around why this is happening, that
00:57:52.400 | part of it stems from our expectations around how certain communities are, quote
00:57:57.520 | unquote, supposed to act.
00:57:59.080 | And historically speaking, women are, quote unquote, supposed to act in a way that is
00:58:05.280 | deferential, that is serving, that is nurturing of the community.
00:58:09.040 | And men are supposed to, quote unquote, act in this way that is, you know,
00:58:13.160 | aggressive and being the provider.
00:58:16.840 | And so basically what happens is when a woman asserts the qualities that we
00:58:22.400 | associate with, you know, heteronormative masculinity, this isn't typically a
00:58:28.600 | conscious thing. But subconsciously, there's this feeling of like, oh, you
00:58:32.720 | know, that's just like a little bit too much.
00:58:35.560 | You know, there's just a little bit not the right fit.
00:58:38.880 | And we have this instinctive reaction around like, we don't like this person because
00:58:44.400 | they're not conforming to this expectation of how we think they should behave.
00:58:49.280 | And so what we can do as people managing these biases, if you're a woman and, you
00:58:56.520 | know, you know that you're in a company where maybe there's some bias and
00:59:02.640 | discrimination you've seen firsthand, maybe you can think, OK, so I know that I'm
00:59:08.320 | in an environment where there is a lot of this bias.
00:59:11.360 | What is it that I can do to advocate for myself in a way that's not going to be
00:59:17.640 | seen as I'm the bitch or difficult or whatever for just engaging in these very
00:59:23.040 | basic self-advocacy behaviors?
00:59:25.560 | So what I can do is frame my ambition through the net benefit to the
00:59:31.720 | organization. So, for example, if I'm saying if what I really want is a raise,
00:59:37.920 | what I can do is instead of, you know, framing what I think I should get a raise
00:59:43.440 | for through just me and my contributions, I can also frame it through the
00:59:49.640 | perspective of what this work has done to benefit the community, the people around
00:59:57.000 | me, the company, and really play more into that, you know, traditional nurturing
01:00:02.520 | vibe, even as you're doing this self-advocacy that might be seen as more
01:00:06.840 | masculine, if that makes sense.
01:00:08.280 | No, it makes total sense.
01:00:10.000 | So there is so much we could keep going.
01:00:12.880 | I actually have a bunch of questions that I'll save for the next conversation.
01:00:17.080 | But where can people who want to see some of this data and want to learn more
01:00:21.560 | about what you're learning find everything you're doing?
01:00:24.320 | Yeah, so I've been writing a lot more in detail about the ambition penalty and
01:00:30.200 | sharing these firsthand accounts that women have had on my bulletin, which is a
01:00:35.560 | newsletter service, which you can find at ambition.bulletin.com.
01:00:40.520 | We'll link to that in the show notes and anything else that you're working on
01:00:45.720 | online or anywhere that people should look for.
01:00:48.520 | Yeah, you can listen to our Money Confidential podcast wherever you're
01:00:52.960 | listening to this podcast and hear some, you know, not just experts, but real
01:00:57.440 | people sharing the real stories and like a lot of the interesting emotions and
01:01:03.520 | stories behind those numbers on the page, which I always find fascinating.
01:01:07.880 | Yeah, I've been listening.
01:01:09.560 | It's fantastic.
01:01:10.520 | Stephanie, thank you so much for joining.
01:01:13.040 | What a fun time.
01:01:14.760 | Thank you.
01:01:16.440 | Wow.
01:01:17.440 | I always have so much fun talking with Stephanie and I hope you all enjoyed the
01:01:20.840 | conversation too.
01:01:21.840 | For anyone new here, I love hearing from listeners and especially love hearing
01:01:26.000 | about topics you'd love me to cover in the future or any questions I can answer
01:01:30.120 | in a future Mailbag episode.
01:01:31.680 | Speaking of which, if you tuned into the last Q&A episode, I'd love to know what
01:01:36.280 | you think.
01:01:37.040 | So please shoot me a quick note and let me know if you want to see more or less
01:01:40.720 | episodes like that.
01:01:42.280 | You can always get ahold of me at chris@allthehacks.com or I'm @hutchins on
01:01:47.320 | Twitter.
01:01:47.680 | And finally, if you're not already subscribed to the All The Hacks newsletter,
01:01:51.360 | please check that out at allthehacks.com/email.
01:01:54.560 | All right, that's it for now.
01:01:56.680 | See you next week.
01:01:57.800 | I want to tell you about another podcast I love that goes deep on all things
01:02:10.960 | money. That means everything from money hacks to wealth building to early
01:02:14.520 | retirement.
01:02:15.120 | It's called the Personal Finance Podcast, and it's much more about building
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01:02:34.560 | I know because I was a guest on the show in December, 2022, but recently I
01:02:39.680 | listened to an episode where Andrew shared 16 money stats that will blow your
01:02:43.800 | mind.
01:02:44.240 | And it was so crazy to learn things like 35% of millennials are not participating
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