Jo_Piazza_July_2024_edit
00:00:00.000 | Hello, everybody. It's Sam from the Financial Samurai Podcast. And on this episode, I have
00:00:12.960 | Jo Piazza, a bestselling author, podcast creator, and award-winning journalist. Welcome to the
00:00:19.040 | show.
00:00:20.040 | Hi. Thanks for having me.
00:00:21.040 | So I first heard of you when you were on Farnoosh Torabi's You're So Money show. And the topic
00:00:28.600 | y'all talked about was about traditional wives or tradwives.
00:00:31.960 | Tradwives, yeah.
00:00:32.960 | Yeah, I'd never really heard that term before, tradwives. But could you talk about that a
00:00:39.240 | little bit? And could you share with us what does that mean? And how does that compare
00:00:44.680 | to a stay-at-home parent, a traditional or modern stay-at-home parent, I guess?
00:00:49.460 | Yeah. You know, the term tradwife, it's often hashtag tradwife, has come to prominence on
00:00:56.720 | social media. It started on Instagram, and now it's moved over to TikTok. And it's a
00:01:01.920 | very particular sort of partnering and really, really vibe, to be honest, and almost a character
00:01:12.160 | that it seems like a lot of these folks are playing on social media, which we all know
00:01:17.000 | is just content. But it is a woman who says that she is in a "traditional marriage,"
00:01:26.800 | which they define as very traditional gender roles. The man is the one who goes and earns
00:01:31.420 | the money. The woman works in the home. She raises the children. She has pretty much no
00:01:36.240 | agency over their lives or their finances. Also, she says she doesn't want it. She's
00:01:42.040 | very submissive to her husband. She dresses the way he wants her to dress. She does her
00:01:47.080 | hair the way he wants her to dress. They say things like, "Women shouldn't go to college
00:01:53.960 | because it interferes with their years of potential breeding." Now, this is very different
00:01:59.800 | than a stay-at-home wife or a stay-at-home parent. I respect the hell out of stay-at-home
00:02:05.120 | parents. They are the CEOs of their households. This is a conformity to, you would say, 1950s
00:02:14.120 | gender roles, but really, mostly the kind of 1950s gender roles that you saw on television,
00:02:19.520 | not that necessarily existed in reality, at least not in this picture-perfect kind of
00:02:25.480 | way.
00:02:26.480 | Got it. Yeah, I remember watching one of my favorite shows, Leave It to Beaver. It was
00:02:31.920 | black and white. It was a great show.
00:02:34.080 | It's a good show.
00:02:35.080 | But I guess, yo, why do you think there's been this trad wife movement?
00:02:42.440 | I think for a lot of reasons, to be honest. Frankly, social media is obsessed with it.
00:02:48.320 | When the algorithm latches on to something, people see an opportunity to grow their audience.
00:02:54.320 | We've seen a lot more people moving into this trad wife category because Instagram and TikTok
00:03:00.000 | seem to like it. They can get more views and then perhaps make more money. I do think that
00:03:04.000 | there is some base entrepreneurship there.
00:03:07.800 | That said, I also think that people are hungry, especially women, for an identity, for a purpose.
00:03:18.200 | The corporate world has not been kind to women and especially not to mothers. By identifying
00:03:25.760 | themselves as this thing, by finding a club of "like-minded people," it's a lot easier
00:03:34.240 | to find purpose in the kind of work done in the home, which typically does not get very
00:03:39.840 | much respect.
00:03:40.840 | Yeah, so it's interesting about the trad wife movement. More power to them if they want
00:03:45.840 | to be trad wives or trad parents. But it seems that financial dependence on someone is a
00:03:52.000 | little bit dangerous because, as we know, 40% to 50% of marriages end in divorce, people
00:03:56.640 | split up. What happens then after there's a breakup and you're a traditional parent
00:04:03.040 | who hasn't been earning money, who hasn't been saving for themselves? What goes on then?
00:04:07.760 | Yeah, exactly. That's my biggest concern. It's the financial dependence on another person
00:04:14.140 | and not having agency over your own life, your own decisions. I spoke to one woman who
00:04:20.320 | calls herself a former trad wife. She met her husband when she was young. He told her
00:04:24.720 | to quit college, said, "What did it matter to pay for her education? Why did she need
00:04:30.280 | to be educated if she was just going to be in the home and raising their children?"
00:04:34.260 | When she tried to leave him nearly two decades later, she had no education, no work experience,
00:04:40.400 | no money of her own. It was incredibly hard. She did it. She did it. She was brave. She
00:04:47.320 | was so smart in the things that she did to get out of that. Her warning was, "This felt
00:04:54.360 | like an impossible situation. I felt like I couldn't leave even though it was a bad
00:04:57.920 | marriage because I had no agency and I had no money."
00:05:03.360 | I do think that we're seeing a phenomenon of young women look at these pretty images
00:05:08.840 | of #tradwives on Instagram, on TikTok, and be like, "You know what? The working world
00:05:14.000 | does suck now. Maybe I want to stay home and bake bread and wear pretty dresses and do
00:05:20.920 | my hair and raise our kids." Cool. Sure. If that's your jam, great. But find a way
00:05:27.440 | to make your own money. The flip side, the irony of all of this is that by putting this
00:05:31.640 | content out on social media that you are not dependent on your husband, you may be making
00:05:35.720 | money off of that.
00:05:36.720 | Right. Right. One of the reasons why I wanted to reach out was because you always said you
00:05:43.160 | were looking for the male version of the #tradwife. I offered myself up to you as the male version
00:05:49.720 | of the #tradwife.
00:05:50.720 | You did. You did. You offered yourself up as a sacrificial lamb. You are a stay-at-home
00:05:55.200 | parent and I want to hear a little bit about your journey to becoming a stay-at-home parent,
00:06:00.320 | a stay-at-home dad, and what that's been like for you. How did you get here?
00:06:05.080 | Well, so I didn't know I always wanted to have children. We tried for several years
00:06:09.960 | when I started 34 or something and it didn't really work because I was so focused on my
00:06:16.280 | career. I worked in banking for 13 years, 60 plus hours a week. In 2012, at the age
00:06:23.560 | of 34, I decided I had enough. It was just too stressful. I wanted to do something else.
00:06:28.440 | I enjoyed writing and I started Financial Samurai in 2009. It was something that I really,
00:06:34.880 | really enjoyed doing and it started making a little bit of money. So I said, "Oh, okay.
00:06:39.960 | Maybe I can – there is life after banking."
00:06:43.040 | And so –
00:06:44.040 | There's always life after banking. It's just, you know, it's – you probably will
00:06:48.100 | make less money.
00:06:49.100 | Yeah, yeah. I definitely made 80% less money the first year. It was a little bit shocking,
00:06:54.180 | you know, not getting that steady paycheck that I've been receiving for 13 years. But,
00:06:58.840 | you know, we had enough. We were frugal. We had our expenses down pat. And it was interesting.
00:07:05.520 | Once I left banking, the stress melted away. The white hairs went away. The weight stopped
00:07:12.560 | increasing. The sciatica, the lower back pain, all of that stuff went away. And we were actually
00:07:18.240 | able to have a child after I left work and after my wife left work also at the age of
00:07:23.560 | 34. And so something to be said about less stress when you're trying to produce life,
00:07:30.800 | there's like a positive correlation there or an inverse correlation there.
00:07:35.120 | And so I decided after our son was born in 2017 that I was going to be a stay-at-home
00:07:40.320 | father for at least five years or at least until he went to school full time. And then
00:07:45.480 | we had a daughter in December 2019 and I wanted to make the same promise. And the reason why
00:07:50.880 | I did it was all the books said the fastest and most important development is in the first
00:07:55.320 | five years. So I figured, well, I already gave up the money back in 2012, might as well
00:08:00.560 | not give up the time I spend with my children because we all know that they grow up so quickly.
00:08:06.240 | So that's where I am.
00:08:08.680 | Did you find it hard to find a community of other stay-at-home dads? And how do people
00:08:13.840 | respond to you when you say that you're a stay-at-home parent?
00:08:17.560 | Yeah, it's really hard to find a community of stay-at-home dads. I couldn't find one.
00:08:23.120 | So what I did was I went to a new mother's outing at Golden Gate Park one day and there
00:08:28.320 | were six moms. And then after about a 45-minute stroll, we all sat down in the garden with
00:08:35.000 | blanket and then all the moms started breastfeeding. So I was like, "Oh, this is a little weird."
00:08:39.280 | So I decided to give privacy and walk away for about half an hour.
00:08:43.640 | And so I looked for dads and there was this dads group once a month, but I could never
00:08:48.460 | meet up at the time that they wanted to meet up. And so what I ended up doing was just
00:08:53.080 | figuring it out on my own online. There's really no community that I see of online stay-at-home
00:09:00.880 | fathers. And so it's just I had to figure it out on my own. It was like my dads don't
00:09:06.200 | seem to share their stories. They don't seem to share their dad guilt because I think there's
00:09:11.920 | a huge amount of dad guilt out there.
00:09:14.360 | Talk to me about that because I talked to so many women who say they don't think that
00:09:18.520 | their husbands have any guilt whatsoever. What is dad guilt for you?
00:09:21.960 | So dad guilt I think is just like mom guilt. Dad guilt might be even more powerful than
00:09:26.420 | mom guilt in a way because if the traditional role is for the dad to make the money, if
00:09:33.720 | that is the traditional role, then the dad not making the money and being a stay-at-home
00:09:38.440 | dad is feeling – it creates more guilt because the dad is not out there trying to hunt for
00:09:45.840 | food and make the big bucks to provide for his family. And so that is something that
00:09:51.760 | I dealt with. I know other men who are stay-at-home parents deal with that as well because also
00:09:57.880 | it's really hard to be a stay-at-home dad because in the first one year of life especially,
00:10:03.280 | the baby latches on to the mother because the mother is the food source.
00:10:06.960 | And then in the second year of life as the baby becomes a toddler and starts knowing
00:10:13.440 | what to do, the toddler will also often rebuff the father for the mother because the toddler
00:10:21.560 | has been so connected with the mother for so long. So it's almost like a evolutionary
00:10:26.800 | push for dads to get out of the house and go back and hunt for food and make money after
00:10:31.400 | the first year.
00:10:33.000 | Right, right. No, I can see that. It's interesting because I push back on that so
00:10:41.520 | hard in my own family. Yes, the kids constantly come to me like, "Mommy, mommy," when
00:10:47.640 | they fall down or they need help with something. And I did not do this in the very beginning.
00:10:53.200 | In the beginning with the first kid, I just accepted it as gospel. I'm like, "Oh,
00:10:57.200 | it's me." It's a mothering instinct. And now I push back and I'm like, "No, go
00:11:03.340 | to daddy. I'm busy." And I don't wake up in the middle of the night anymore. This
00:11:08.080 | is a third baby thing because I'm a psychopath if I don't get sleep. My anxiety goes up.
00:11:14.800 | All of my body and back pain goes up. I can't make good decisions. I can't write books.
00:11:19.560 | I can't do anything really. And I'm a crap parent.
00:11:23.440 | So Nick is the one that gets up at night whenever any of the children cry. And I think that
00:11:30.200 | that has made them go to him. Not more, maybe not even equal, but definitely more than before.
00:11:41.680 | And it's getting closer to equality. But I do think that that is something that couples
00:11:50.760 | have to work on because the baby is definitely attached to the mother for food, physically
00:11:59.520 | attached to her for nine months. But yeah, it is an uphill battle. And I can imagine
00:12:04.000 | that uphill battle had to be hard for you with no one to talk to about it. My husband
00:12:09.240 | has never talked about what we just talked about with anyone, any other human.
00:12:13.600 | Well, yeah. I guess men don't really open up about their struggles of being a stay-at-home
00:12:18.800 | father, maybe because there's fewer of us, I'm not sure. Would you?
00:12:24.240 | Or being a father at all, that's the thing. I mean, just being a dad, I don't see, I count
00:12:31.600 | myself very lucky that I have so many amazing mother friends and female friends that I talk
00:12:39.560 | to all the time. But I don't think we've created a culture where dudes talk about this
00:12:45.240 | stuff.
00:12:46.240 | No. So I hope, I mean, regarding the FIRE community, for example.
00:12:51.080 | Oh, yeah. So you were part of the FIRE community. Explain to our listeners what that is.
00:12:56.000 | Yeah. So in 2009, I helped kickstart the modern-day FIRE movement, which stands for Financial
00:13:01.360 | Independence Retire Early. And the idea was to save as much money as possible so you can
00:13:06.600 | get out of your corporate gig as soon as possible, so you can have as much passive investment
00:13:11.740 | income to cover your desired living expenses. And if you do that, you're financially independent.
00:13:18.440 | And that is what I did in achieving that when I left my day job in 2012. I had about $80,000
00:13:24.920 | in passive income. It wasn't huge for San Francisco, but my wife still worked and I
00:13:30.100 | told her she's three years younger than me, so I said, "If you can get to 34 years old
00:13:34.560 | like me, retiring at 34, you too can leave your day job and we can go live a crazy wildlife
00:13:40.440 | together." And so what's interesting about the FIRE movement is that I still think there's
00:13:45.100 | probably 70%, 80% of the participants or enthusiasts are male. And there are many males actually
00:13:52.680 | who say they've retired early. But really, they're just stay-at-home dads because their
00:13:57.640 | wives still work, provide healthcare, and bring home the money. And so it's an interesting,
00:14:03.080 | curious, psychological case where men aren't willing to save their stay-at-home fathers.
00:14:08.720 | They rather say they are retired early, early retirees than the other way around. And so
00:14:15.880 | I think men just need to accept realities and be okay and treat the other partner as
00:14:22.160 | equal and accept their situations in life.
00:14:25.480 | Yeah. No, I mean, look, from your lips to Goddess's ears, yes, men do need to treat
00:14:34.000 | their partners as equal. I say that all the time. It's amazing to me that it's something
00:14:39.400 | we still have to say out loud. But I do have a question because this podcast is about social
00:14:47.320 | media. When you look at social media, do you see anything supportive for you? For dads,
00:14:54.440 | I mean, for a stay-at-home dad, but also just for dads?
00:14:59.280 | I don't. Maybe I'm not looking hard enough. I'm not on Instagram. I see TikTok, but I
00:15:05.200 | don't see any support groups for dads. I'm on Twitter, but Twitter is more – I'm just
00:15:09.680 | focused on investing and finances and career and stuff like that. So not really. Not really.
00:15:15.200 | And I'm interested in hearing from you, would you like your husband to be a stay-at-home
00:15:22.880 | dad, the male version of a trad wife? And do you think other women would like more of
00:15:29.140 | their husbands to be stay-at-home fathers? Because I hear – what I do see is maybe
00:15:35.240 | jokingly or not jokingly, complaints that men aren't doing enough around the house.
00:15:40.360 | And that's probably true.
00:15:42.360 | So that's a really interesting question because my husband and I have gone back and
00:15:48.440 | forth between who is the breadwinner, who makes more money, who brings home the health
00:15:53.680 | insurance, which is a huge, totally annoying thing in our country. Yes, I think that I
00:16:01.480 | would love it. That said, I do think that there is an enormous pressure of being the
00:16:11.600 | sole breadwinner, of being the person who is providing all of the income for the family.
00:16:19.980 | So if you're the person providing all of the income for the family and you can have
00:16:25.340 | a stay-at-home dad and the roles are very set where he genuinely is taking on all of
00:16:32.980 | the things that a stay-at-home parent would be taking on and taking that off of your plate,
00:16:37.900 | yeah, that sounds great. But I do think that that is tricky and I don't know how often
00:16:45.220 | that happens. Tell me how your setup works.
00:16:50.020 | Well, so I'm glad you announced the other side of it because if you're a stay-at-home
00:16:57.840 | parent, you have to rely potentially on the other one for all or most of the income. And
00:17:03.060 | if you're the provider of all the income, it's really stressful. It can be really,
00:17:06.980 | really stressful, especially as your family size grows. Going from zero to one child is
00:17:13.380 | pretty stressful. It's shocking. You're a new parent, all these expenses. And then
00:17:18.140 | going to two is maybe not as stressful, but there's like, "Oh, you got to think about
00:17:23.740 | two college educations now."
00:17:25.500 | Oh, my God. Try thinking about three, man.
00:17:28.020 | Oh, yeah. If you have three college – that's –
00:17:30.460 | Crazy. Absolutely crazy. I can't even think about it. I'm pretending college isn't
00:17:35.020 | going to happen at this point.
00:17:36.700 | Yeah. It's like $800,000 for four years in 15 years. It's like the worst case scenario
00:17:42.860 | of four years of private school, right? No scholarships, nothing. And so, yeah, you're
00:17:46.740 | going to have to have like $2.5 million plus for college education, Joe. And so when you
00:17:52.300 | start thinking about that, there's a lot of stress.
00:17:56.500 | And so for my setup, my wife doesn't have a traditional day job. She helps do a lot
00:18:02.100 | of great stuff for me at Financial Samurai for us. She does the finances. She edits the
00:18:08.180 | podcast. She edits a lot of the writing, a lot of the blocking and tackling that comes
00:18:14.260 | with having a website, a business. But the thing is there's no direct money coming
00:18:20.540 | in, right? We don't really run Financial Samurai to make money. We run Financial Samurai,
00:18:26.500 | one, because it's great to create a community. I enjoy writing. I enjoy podcasting. And also,
00:18:32.300 | we want to create an archive of content, verbal or written for our children as they grow up,
00:18:38.860 | as they wonder what was mom and dad up to during the pandemic and so forth.
00:18:43.380 | So it's been stressful for me as our children. We have two children, private school, college,
00:18:50.820 | all that. And so I'm trying to figure out how to balance that being a stay-at-home father
00:18:55.540 | with also trying to make sure our finances don't blow up, that there's some supplemental
00:18:59.780 | income. And I see the light kind of at the end of the tunnel because our daughter will
00:19:04.580 | be going to preschool full-time in the fall of 2024. And so that frees up two more days
00:19:10.800 | that I can actually do something to make money, for example, if I need to. And I think I need
00:19:15.860 | to. And so it's going to be there where, okay, when they're both in school full-time,
00:19:23.260 | it's time to go back to the grind a little bit. I think that's the responsible thing
00:19:27.340 | parents should do.
00:19:28.340 | LS: Yeah, no. I also have this view that in a perfect world, and so a lot of these
00:19:35.060 | ideas are if I could create a perfect world that we lived in, is that different seasons
00:19:40.780 | of life for careers and jobs and parenting, we don't live in a corporate world that accepts
00:19:48.820 | those right now because for so long we lived in such a male-dominated, still male-dominated
00:19:55.060 | corporate world where it was just dudes going to work at 8.30, coming home at 6.30, and
00:20:02.380 | not worrying about what happened in the home. And they didn't have to worry about taking
00:20:06.500 | off because they literally had to push a baby out of their vaginas. But in my ideal world,
00:20:13.460 | you have a situation where one parent can be either the fully stay-at-home parent or
00:20:19.060 | the flexible parent, which is a different thing too, right? The parent that doesn't
00:20:24.020 | have to be in the office or be on calls all day long and can be there to do pick-up and
00:20:29.020 | drop-offs and things like run-to-doctors appointments. And then you can switch. Then you can switch
00:20:35.420 | over to, "All right, I did this for these four years. Now I wanna go back and do this
00:20:39.980 | work thing. Now you do this." And that would be the ideal situation for me because I also
00:20:46.060 | get twitchy if I'm outside of a real job. Actually, I don't wanna say real job. If I'm
00:20:50.500 | outside of an office corporate job for too long, I just started doing some new consulting
00:20:56.060 | and I'm using Airtable for the first time in a couple of years. I'm like, "Oh my God."
00:21:01.100 | But it's nice, right? Because I get to remember what it is like to work with other humans
00:21:06.260 | and to use the platforms that are being used right now. So if we had that kind of flexibility
00:21:11.420 | to come in and out of the workforce, but that would require a much more benevolent government
00:21:16.900 | that actually cares for people and a corporate world that actually cares for people. So that's
00:21:21.340 | what's happening.
00:21:22.340 | I'm curious. When all kids are in school full-time, what does the trad parent, let's say trad
00:21:31.060 | parent, do? I know there's pick-up, drop-off, house cleaning, food prep, scheduling after-school
00:21:38.460 | activities, but that probably doesn't take more than three hours a day. So what does
00:21:44.860 | the trad parent do for the rest of the day?
00:21:48.300 | I don't know. And everyone has different levels of what they do do in the home. So I have
00:21:57.380 | a lot of friends who serve on a lot of boards, who do a lot of volunteer work with schools,
00:22:03.660 | who are stay-at-home parents, not trad parents. I don't have a lot of trad parent friends.
00:22:07.660 | My mother-in-law was a fully stay-at-home mother for my husband and his brother's whole
00:22:13.340 | lives. And she did a ton of volunteer work. And she was essentially being executive of
00:22:21.300 | these nonprofits for free, which is the work that women did for so long. Volunteer work,
00:22:27.500 | board work, things like that. So I think that there is a lot of work, right? It's a lot
00:22:32.060 | of labor. It's just it's not being acknowledged or respected.
00:22:36.580 | Yeah. Got it. No, thanks for that. No, no, that helps because I'm trying to anticipate
00:22:41.100 | the future, 2024 and beyond. And what am I going to do filling my time? And so I've really
00:22:48.220 | zeroed in on consulting. Maybe not full-time work because it's so foreign, but consulting
00:22:54.180 | seems like the proper balance, maybe 20 hours a week to fill that time to do something productive,
00:23:00.380 | to feel part of a team, to make some money, but also to still have enough time to do other
00:23:05.700 | things like, I don't know, play pickleball or tennis or hang out, go for walks. I think
00:23:11.420 | that's the right balance, consulting.
00:23:13.140 | Well, I mean, and that's what I do now, right? It's some consulting. But one of us does have
00:23:19.220 | to have a full-time income and make no mistake, I have income coming in from these podcasts,
00:23:26.500 | not as much as when I was with a major network, but I'm growing it. So now I consider myself
00:23:31.900 | an entrepreneur, which I don't really like, but I think that's the direction a lot of
00:23:37.420 | us are going in. And my books, right? So as long as I can keep writing books, that is
00:23:42.740 | a major, major source of our income. That's a nice plug for everyone to pre-order The
00:23:46.980 | Sicilian Inheritance, the greatest book I've ever written.
00:23:49.820 | I have a couple of fire questions for you. Can I throw those out there?
00:23:53.540 | Sure.
00:23:54.540 | What kinds of things do you invest in to generate a consistent income?
00:24:00.460 | Yeah. So about 50% of my investments are in real estate. So owning physical rental properties.
00:24:08.140 | I've been, since 2016, slowly investing more in private real estate syndication deals.
00:24:14.560 | So you can basically crowdfund and invest in other properties around the country. It's
00:24:18.540 | for diversification and also for more passive income. Because after owning, I would say,
00:24:24.500 | three rental properties for myself, managing it starts becoming a pain, right? And so you
00:24:32.060 | just want to focus more on passive. At least I do, the older I get. And then there's dividend
00:24:38.060 | income. You can just invest in the S&P 500 or any dividend stocks, generates 2% to 5%
00:24:45.420 | in dividends. And then now treasury bonds yielding 5% plus risk-free. I mean, it's amazing
00:24:52.540 | because it's all relative to inflation, but inflation is now at about 3.5% and it seems
00:24:57.700 | like it's heading down towards 2%. If you can lock in 20 years of a 5% treasury bond,
00:25:03.940 | that's a real inflation rate. What else? Those are the main things in terms of income production.
00:25:12.180 | I think that's so interesting because when I talk about trad waves, I heard from a lot
00:25:20.240 | of stay-at-home moms that, again, they felt badly because I said, "I don't think anyone
00:25:27.200 | should be completely financially independent on another person." And I think that-
00:25:31.740 | I agree with that.
00:25:32.740 | I don't. And I'd like to say a man is not the plan. And I do think that investing and
00:25:39.580 | generating passive income, again, something very hard to do. It's hard to make money in
00:25:44.820 | this country, but especially enough to be able to invest. But that is another way that
00:25:51.240 | stay-at-home moms can have their financial security if they are choosing to invest on
00:25:57.320 | their own, separate from their husbands.
00:26:00.000 | Oh, absolutely. I think depending on someone, no matter how much you love them, is really
00:26:06.440 | risky. Because think about, obviously, divorce, 30% to 50% divorce rates. Think about untimely
00:26:12.000 | deaths. Everyone needs to figure out what they're going to be able to do. How can they
00:26:17.920 | make money just in case the worst happens, right?
00:26:22.400 | Absolutely.
00:26:23.400 | Someone close to me was a stay-at-home mother for 12 years, 13 years, and then they divorced.
00:26:29.820 | She had alimony, but she wasn't able to get a job for more than minimum wage because she
00:26:35.780 | had let her skills atrophy over the past 12 to 13 years. So I hope everybody has their
00:26:42.060 | own pot of money, is investing separately as well as together, and keeps up their skills
00:26:49.140 | so that they don't find themselves on a deserted island one day trying to survive.
00:26:54.260 | Which is what will happen. Actually, tomorrow I'm talking to a woman, a trad wife, former
00:27:00.900 | trad wife, who really regrets that she did depend on her husband for so long because
00:27:07.180 | when they got divorced, she found herself really, really struggling. She wants to send
00:27:13.100 | the message to young women, again, that a man is not the plan.
00:27:16.860 | Yeah. Well, tell me about your household. You work writing, podcasting. What does your
00:27:23.780 | husband do?
00:27:24.780 | Okay. So I work writing books, podcasting, and some years it is wildly lucrative. Then
00:27:35.620 | I have no idea if I will have any income in the future. The media landscape is that much
00:27:43.060 | of a wild west right now. It was not always like this, but it is right now. So some years
00:27:49.340 | I am the breadwinner in our family.
00:27:51.980 | My husband has a very steady, very traditional job. He works for a company that sells carbon
00:27:58.820 | offsets and does climate sustainability consulting. He is a person who is typically on Zooms in
00:28:06.700 | our household from about nine to five, and sometimes outside of those hours too because
00:28:12.620 | they're a global company. So I am the more flexible parent. That said, sometimes I have
00:28:23.380 | the "bigger job," the job that makes more money because you never know what a podcast
00:28:29.660 | deal is going to look like. They look much worse now than they used to. I can say that.
00:28:34.180 | Now I'm looking so much more intensely at investing and creating passive income. I think
00:28:41.940 | that's where a lot of us are at. And I wish there were more places online for women to
00:28:48.300 | look to for that kind of advice, much like how there's not enough places for men to look
00:28:54.220 | to for parenting advice. I'm only just discovering a lot of the places online for women to look
00:29:00.060 | to for advice. I will say it is hard to navigate this world because much like everything with
00:29:06.140 | Instagram and social media, someone is trying to sell you their package of advice and you
00:29:10.020 | have no idea how to vet who is actually useful and who is not.
00:29:14.140 | Got it. And what if, goodness forbid, there's no more book deal, no podcast supporters,
00:29:23.020 | how do you think your husband will feel in terms of the finance?
00:29:29.540 | Not good. Not good. Yeah.
00:29:31.980 | What would be this plan though? Let's just say you just couldn't make any money. Let's
00:29:37.860 | just think in extremes.
00:29:39.500 | If I can't make any money, if I can't even do something else. The thing is, I'm constantly
00:29:43.660 | looking for my next job too. I'm like, "Oh, am I too old to become a commercial airline
00:29:48.300 | pilot or maybe I'll go back and get a PhD and become a professor," which also seems
00:29:53.420 | to be a career that is waning these days. I'm constantly thinking about what can I do
00:29:59.940 | next and what skills can I apply to another job. But say I was completely taken out of
00:30:04.740 | the situation and it was just my husband supporting our entire family. We could make it work,
00:30:14.420 | but our lifestyle would be drastically changed. And we're also not a big spendy family. We
00:30:19.460 | have one modest car that we do not drive a lot. We live in a city. We chose to live in
00:30:25.020 | a smaller city. We live in Philly and we bike everywhere. We would definitely travel less
00:30:30.860 | because a lot of my writing involves travel. And so that is part of my job and we love
00:30:36.820 | to travel. And we would tighten our bootstraps and I think we could get through it. We could
00:30:41.540 | do it. It would be very difficult.
00:30:46.060 | When the kids go to school full-time, let's say all the kids go to school full-time, what
00:30:50.860 | do traditional stay-at-home parents do for that eight-plus hours a day? We know about
00:31:00.860 | preparing the meals, shuttling them to practice and all that good stuff. But what else? Because
00:31:07.980 | I'm trying to anticipate fall 2024 when I have two more free days because my daughter
00:31:13.980 | is currently going to school three days a week. She's going to then go five days a week.
00:31:17.660 | And I'm trying to anticipate what am I going to do with that time. I can't play pickleball
00:31:20.980 | or tennis every single day.
00:31:22.780 | You could.
00:31:23.780 | I could and actually my hips would fray off and I wouldn't be able to walk.
00:31:28.260 | Yes, they would not work any longer.
00:31:31.100 | And so I'm thinking consulting is the answer. But for those who choose to continue to be
00:31:35.700 | stay-at-home parents and not do any consulting or take a full-time job after the kids go
00:31:40.780 | to school full-time, what is the mindset and what are they doing, you think?
00:31:47.300 | We should ask our audience. I think that there's lots of different things. In one respect,
00:31:52.500 | this is the reason that we've seen the rise of influencers, to be honest, because there
00:31:57.780 | have been a big chunk of women. Influencers really grew out of the Mormon community where
00:32:04.620 | women do typically stay and work in the home. And once all the kids were in school, they
00:32:10.340 | had a chunk of time and they thought, "Oh, okay. You know what? I'm a very educated woman.
00:32:15.260 | I can create this content." And so we're seeing more and more influencers because that
00:32:21.860 | is something that you can do between the hours of 9 and 2, 2.30, 3 o'clock, when your kids
00:32:29.600 | are in school and make income and find a purpose. And I think finding a purpose is the big thing.
00:32:35.420 | My husband's mom, my wonderful mother-in-law, she was a stay-at-home mom. She was on a lot
00:32:40.860 | of boards. It was a different time. That was 50 years ago. A lot of volunteer work, a lot
00:32:48.380 | of boards. One of my very good girlfriends has been a stay-at-home mom since she adopted
00:32:55.980 | her daughter. And also a lot of volunteer work, a lot of boards. Another female friend
00:33:03.500 | of mine, I don't have any stay-at-home dad friends, which is you're my first one. She
00:33:09.780 | decided to, and she's calling it early retirement. I think she took a severance package. She
00:33:15.620 | decided to retire early at 43 because they couldn't keep up with both of them traveling
00:33:23.220 | for work and also the shuttling of the kids to the activities all of the time. That is
00:33:29.700 | a full-time job and it's not even something that's easy to find a babysitter for. And
00:33:35.860 | so she's going to do consulting. I think it's so interesting and important for us to keep
00:33:40.660 | talking about all of these things because the school day isn't set up for two parents
00:33:46.340 | to work. Most corporate jobs will not allow you to quit working at two o'clock or three
00:33:53.180 | o'clock whenever you have to do pickup. And afterschool programs are not always easy to
00:33:58.820 | cobble together. So I think we do need to find more and more opportunities to re-enter
00:34:06.980 | the workforce in a way that works for parents, but to re-enter the workforce in a meaningful
00:34:14.660 | way. So not just re-enter in a gig economy, but to re-enter in a way that you feel like
00:34:21.040 | you have a career that is giving you purpose, right?
00:34:26.380 | Yeah, I think purpose is the biggest one. Maraudery, purpose, you're doing something
00:34:31.300 | that adds value to society and you feel good about. I think one of the things that I'm
00:34:37.500 | experiencing is so much of my time has been spent trying to take care of my children for
00:34:43.340 | the first five years of their lives. Then when it's done, it's like, "Oh, now what?"
00:34:48.540 | I mean, I had that experience after publishing my book, Buy This, Not That. Two, two and
00:34:53.740 | a half years writing it, editing it, marketing it, it did well. And then there was a trough
00:34:58.900 | of sorrow that I felt where, "Oh, now what? What's that void?" It's like the deeper
00:35:06.360 | you dig, the bigger the hole, the bigger the void. And so I think it's probably wise and
00:35:12.580 | good for parents who are stay-at-home parents to think about that what next before that
00:35:16.700 | what next happens.
00:35:18.700 | Yeah. And I do think that being a stay-at-home parent shouldn't be a default. It should
00:35:27.740 | be a very conscious strategy. So, okay, I'm going to be the one who does this. But then
00:35:33.140 | when we move into a different phase of life, this is what I'm going to try to do. I think
00:35:38.380 | a lot about, I used to do this podcast called Committed, which was about marriage and how
00:35:43.620 | people made marriages work. And I interviewed an astronaut and his wife, Chris, was it Chris
00:35:51.980 | Hadfield? I need to look up his name. And I always get his last name wrong. And so,
00:35:57.820 | you know, she spent a lot of time being an astronaut's wife, getting him to freaking
00:36:03.660 | space, right? You can't, it's not and they had kids too. So yes, she was a stay-at-home
00:36:10.900 | mom and she focused on the home and parenting and getting that done. So he could literally
00:36:16.900 | go to outer space. Okay, it is Chris Hadfield. I looked it up. And then he went to outer
00:36:21.660 | space and he's a very famous astronaut. And then what he told me is he was like, it's
00:36:27.540 | her turn. And I'm going to do what it takes to build her up and help her start a new kind
00:36:34.660 | of career now. And I love that because I think it's important to think about life and marriage
00:36:39.340 | and parenting as seasons. So this is your season for doing this, but you always have
00:36:44.060 | to have a plan for the next season. Yeah, I think that's a great strategy. My worry
00:36:51.500 | is that the window of opportunity that we have might not be as wide or as open as we
00:36:57.580 | think it will be. And the reason why I say that is, for example, society is not set up
00:37:02.980 | to give us other windows of opportunity in the corporate workforce. Maybe one that is
00:37:08.740 | ageism, that's definitely one. Two is health. So for example, at 46, for me, I feel like
00:37:16.060 | my eyes can't stay open in terms of looking at a screen for longer than a couple hours
00:37:20.640 | before they get really dry. And so as a result, my ability to write for let's say five, six
00:37:26.100 | hours has waned. And so I was like, okay, well, maybe I won't write as much. Maybe I'll
00:37:30.820 | do some more podcasts. And then maybe one day my voice will go away, or my mental capacity
00:37:36.060 | will go away. And when I was competing in league tennis, I was feeling pretty good in
00:37:41.780 | my 30s, but now in my 40s, not as good in terms of recovery and all that. So I like
00:37:48.780 | the seasons. That's a good analogy. I think folks should maybe just maybe think about
00:37:53.980 | shortening the seasons a little bit. Because if it takes 20 years for your spouse to become
00:37:58.460 | an astronaut and go to outer space, that's a long 20 years.
00:38:02.620 | That's why I wouldn't marry an astronaut. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it sounds cool, right?
00:38:07.620 | Like, oh my God, I'm married to an astronaut. But that is a lot of work as the spouse of
00:38:10.700 | an astronaut. Yeah. Have you seen the show Selling Sunset on
00:38:16.900 | Netflix? No, I haven't seen it. Is this something
00:38:19.700 | I should be watching? No, it's really trashy TV.
00:38:22.740 | Okay. I like trashy. I like trashy. I'm into trashy shit.
00:38:26.580 | Well, it's really trashy TV that my wife and I enjoy. But what we noticed was that all
00:38:33.700 | the real estate agents are female and there's a lot of fighting. A lot of fighting. And
00:38:39.660 | then the guys, the really rare guys who are on the show, they're not fighting too much.
00:38:45.140 | They're just like, "Oh, whatever." And I'm trying to understand because I see this on
00:38:49.140 | social media as well. What is your opinion on the fighting between women versus the fighting
00:38:55.660 | between men? And do you think women fight more than men or are meaner than men?
00:39:01.900 | No. I think that society really loves to talk about women fighting. I think culture and
00:39:06.780 | media love to talk about women fighting. And I can say this as a person who created a lot
00:39:13.700 | of media for a long time, who created trashy tabloids, literally created them, who wrote
00:39:20.780 | for very reputable newspapers and magazines for a long time. Our media loves the idea
00:39:27.220 | of what they like to call a cat fight. And so, for example, Sex and the City, the women
00:39:34.300 | who work on Sex and the City, they love nothing more than headlines about how they're in a
00:39:39.340 | cat fight. They hate each other. They're fighting. You would never see a story about the cast
00:39:45.300 | of, say, Ocean's 11 getting into a bro fight. The media does not talk about male ire or
00:39:55.020 | male confrontations that way. We love to portray women as bitchy, as hating one another, and
00:40:01.740 | that merely perpetuates the stereotypes such that young girls grow up thinking that that
00:40:07.060 | is the way to behave to one another.
00:40:09.460 | Okay. So maybe I'm being manipulated by the media.
00:40:16.540 | You're definitely being manipulated by the media. We all are. We all are on a very, very
00:40:20.380 | regular basis.
00:40:21.380 | Okay. Okay. Good to know. Good to know. I'll be more cognizant of that bias going forward.
00:40:29.060 | Because when I think about the trad wife, you talked about how it seems like trad wife
00:40:35.500 | influencers pit or make other non-trad wife women feel bad.
00:40:40.900 | They do. They absolutely do. But here's the thing that I think a lot of non-trad wife
00:40:48.220 | women didn't realize, that then often at times, trad wives and stay-at-home moms feel bad
00:40:55.500 | looking at the posts about women who work outside the home and talking about their professional
00:41:01.700 | successes. I do believe the Instagram algorithm sends us things to get us riled up. And so
00:41:09.020 | you can't win. You just can't win. You feel bad if you're staying at home. You feel bad
00:41:13.220 | if you're working outside of the home.
00:41:14.740 | I feel weirdly bad right now that I'm working and my kids are with our babysitter watching
00:41:21.260 | TV because they're all homesick. Meanwhile, they're freaking happy. They don't care that
00:41:25.540 | I'm not sitting down with them. They really don't. They're like, "Okay, great. I'll see
00:41:29.020 | you later. Thanks for letting me watch Jurassic World Lego version," or whatever.
00:41:34.020 | Let's say you have a spouse, you have a wife who's been stay-at-home for 5, 7, 10 years
00:41:39.420 | and they're comfortable with their lifestyle. They're comfortable with the dad going to
00:41:43.420 | make the money, doing all that. Transitioning is hard. What would you say to them?
00:41:50.300 | Transitions are hard. Transitions are impossible. And we don't live in a society that makes
00:41:54.540 | them possible, easy, smooth, any of that. And so I don't have an easy answer. I really
00:42:06.060 | don't. I think that we're going to experience so much more of a shakeup now. And I hate
00:42:10.140 | to be so doom and gloom about what AI is going to do to a lot of jobs, but we're going to
00:42:15.100 | see a lot of people very shaken up in "white-collar jobs" about what will be available to them.
00:42:23.540 | And so this is a conversation we need to be constantly having. What will you do next?
00:42:28.980 | What can you do next? What are you qualified to do next? We're qualified to do very little,
00:42:35.060 | to be honest. Could I be a dog walker?
00:42:39.980 | Yes, you can.
00:42:42.700 | I could. I could. Absolutely. And it's also, I genuinely believe getting rid of some of
00:42:48.980 | the stigma around certain jobs. Hollywood is really terrible at this because Hollywood
00:42:53.740 | mocks a lot of jobs. They mock a lot of gig jobs. They mock a lot of hourly wage jobs
00:43:00.340 | as not being as good as other kinds of jobs. And I think that, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.
00:43:07.340 | I mean, if you just look at how they treat people like plumbers in movies, right? When
00:43:13.780 | a plumber is a really good job, you do very well.
00:43:18.660 | Make $150,000.
00:43:20.180 | Exactly. Or how in a lot of, if you're watching romantic comedies, or let's actually just
00:43:26.340 | talk about Christmas movies, all of the Lifetime and Hallmark. And now I think they're on everything,
00:43:31.780 | all of the Christmas movies. It's always some high-powered lady who works in a shiny office
00:43:38.580 | building going home to meet a working class former boyfriend. And working class people
00:43:45.260 | are portrayed very badly in most Hollywood productions. They really are. They're looked
00:43:50.220 | down on. Hollywood is very condescending to working class people. And I think that we
00:43:56.540 | have to stop being condescending about a lot of different kinds of jobs because we're going
00:44:01.220 | to see a massive shift in how people work and what they work at.
00:44:06.260 | Yeah. I'm glad you brought up AI because definitely I am a little bit paranoid about all the jobs
00:44:11.860 | that will be taken away or eliminated in the next 10 to 20 years for our children. Because
00:44:16.980 | look, college is getting more expensive, yet the value of college is declining because
00:44:21.460 | everything can be learned online for free. And then the jobs are going away as well.
00:44:27.180 | So in my opinion, there's several ways to counteract AI. One is to learn physical skills
00:44:35.580 | that you can use with your hands like plumbing, electrician, landscaper, so forth. And the
00:44:40.300 | other one is to invest in AI. Because if you invest in AI and it becomes a huge revolutionary
00:44:49.820 | technology, then you're going to get rich in 10 to 20 years. And if it becomes a dud
00:44:54.740 | over height technology, then you're not going to get rich, but at least your children will
00:44:59.300 | still have those jobs that they want. So that's what I plan to do.
00:45:04.740 | How are you investing in AI? Tell me.
00:45:07.700 | Well, you can invest one in public companies. This is not investment advice, but you can
00:45:12.420 | invest in public companies that invest in AI. So for example, Microsoft, anybody can
00:45:17.580 | buy MSFT that has a 10 plus billion dollar stake in the AI company, OpenAI, which is
00:45:25.780 | a private company. You can invest in NVIDIA, which makes the chips that power AI. You can
00:45:31.820 | invest in Google, any of these public companies. And then from a private company standpoint,
00:45:39.020 | you can invest in private AI companies that are only investable if you know the person,
00:45:45.740 | have connections, or you invest in a venture capital fund that invests in AI companies.
00:45:52.900 | So that's something for folks to look into. Personally, I'm going to allocate a good chunk
00:45:58.520 | of money to private growth companies and AI companies over the next three years, because
00:46:03.540 | I want to hedge. I want to hedge for what is potentially a bleak future, because it's
00:46:09.460 | been really clear to me from the OpenAI debacle when they fired the CEO, that they are very
00:46:16.000 | profit driven. They're supposed to be a non-profit company, that's supposed to help humanity,
00:46:21.420 | but they're a for-profit company. And when you're a for-profit company, and you have
00:46:25.540 | this "cap profit" of 100x, which is total BS, you're going to crush industries for the
00:46:33.500 | sake of your own financial gains. And so it's either you're going to get crushed by it,
00:46:37.700 | or you're going to try to invest with them. And so unfortunately, I think you have to
00:46:40.740 | join them.
00:46:41.740 | We have to join them. Oh, the worst. The worst. But yes, that is good advice. And again, I
00:46:52.820 | like talking about this advice on this show, even though we are a show that focuses on
00:46:57.460 | influencing and motherhood, again, because I think talking about finance gives women
00:47:02.620 | so much more agency over our lives, right?
00:47:06.900 | Yes. Please, please read as much as you can about personal finance, investing, asset allocation,
00:47:13.540 | retirement planning, because the more information you know, the more you're going to actually
00:47:17.480 | take action to shore up your finances. And the more you're going to think about multivariables
00:47:22.980 | that you probably weren't thinking about in the past, and the more you think about it,
00:47:27.580 | the more protected you'll be. Because anything can and will happen. It's like Murphy's law,
00:47:32.180 | right? If you don't think it's going to happen, it's going to happen.
00:47:36.100 | Exactly.
00:47:37.100 | All right, everyone. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Joe Piazza on the trad wife
00:47:40.140 | movement. I had no idea such a movement existed. Sounds interesting. I can see how that movement
00:47:46.260 | could grow given the responsibility of work and parenthood is so much. Some people are
00:47:52.420 | just like, "Forget it. I just want to focus on family and the way things were back in
00:47:57.260 | the 1950s." I see that. I have been a stay-at-home parent since 2017, and it's been so much work.
00:48:05.460 | But the thing is, I've also had to write consistently on Financial Samurai three times a week. Now
00:48:11.340 | I'm podcasting once a week. I've got random business development deals. So juggling all
00:48:16.020 | this has been exhausting. I wouldn't trade it for going back to work full-time, but I
00:48:22.780 | will say it's been a lot of work.
00:48:24.720 | So anybody who says a stay-at-home parent isn't making money for the family or isn't
00:48:29.620 | saving money for the family really don't know what they're talking about because it can
00:48:33.460 | be a 24/7 job. The job is worth at least the median household income of your city, if not
00:48:41.220 | plus another 50 to 100 percent, because one look away could mean disaster for your child.
00:48:47.820 | For example, I've been teaching my kids how to swim, and we go in the pool for 1 to 1
00:48:54.660 | hour and 45 minutes. They just have endless energy. But because they don't swim very well,
00:48:59.420 | I need to constantly be on because if I look away for 5 seconds or 10 seconds, they might
00:49:05.300 | drown and drowning is a top 5 reason for death for kids under 5 years old. So please be aware
00:49:12.140 | of that.
00:49:13.140 | And I would say for those who are stay-at-home parents, more power to you. For tradwives
00:49:18.060 | out there, if that's what you want to do, great. I would try to develop your own income
00:49:23.720 | stream a little bit on the side, have your own savings on the side just in case you never
00:49:28.820 | know what's the downside of protecting yourself financially.
00:49:33.180 | I'll stop here, folks. If you enjoyed this episode, I'd love a positive review on Apple,
00:49:38.220 | Spotify, Google Play, wherever you listen to this podcast episode. And if you want to
00:49:42.500 | keep in touch, join 60,000 plus others and subscribe to the free Financial Samurai newsletter
00:49:47.940 | at financialsamurai.com/news. Take care.
00:49:53.100 | [Music]
00:49:58.100 | (explosion)