Rich Girl Nation: Taking Charge of Our Financial Futures - Hardcover

Gatti Tassin, Katie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593718860 ISBN 13: 9780593718865

Verlag: Portfolio, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

USA Today Bestseller

From the founder of Money with Katie, a leveled-up finance guide for ambitious women everywhere—and a rallying cry for a new money movement

Women experience money differently than men do. In the United States, women have only 55 cents for every dollar of wealth held by men, are more likely to end up in poverty following a divorce, and are less likely to retire with the resources they need. What can women do to build wealth and claim financial power in a system that wasn’t designed for them?

Katie Gatti Tassin, personal finance writer and host of the popular podcast The Money with Katie Show, has built an energized following of smart, ambitious women seeking a deeper understanding of the financial issues that affect them. In Rich Girl Nation, Tassin deconstructs the unique challenges women face on their journey to financial freedom, offering context and nuanced guidance on money matters including:

• Performing a budgetary “Hot Girl Detox”
• Proven salary negotiation strategies that effectively navigate gender bias
• Investing frameworks that make you the leader of your financial life
• How (and why) to create a prenup
• Preparing and saving for childcare efficiently
• Retiring independently (and in a tax-optimized way)

Packed with scrupulous research and Tassin’s trademark wit, Rich Girl Nation uncovers the real story behind our financial system and shows us exactly how to thrive within it while we fight for broader change. It’s time for women to unite in unapologetic financial autonomy with the net worths to show for it—and to change the playing field not just for ourselves but for the next generation of Rich Girls, too.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Katie Gatti Tassin is the host of the podcast The Money with Katie Show and author of the Money with Katie newsletter. Her fresh personal finance advice tackles the subject at hand with a unique outlook, and her casual approach and deep self-taught knowledge speak directly to followers who want to understand the economic and cultural context they exist within while they take their finances to the next level. Before founding Money with Katie in 2020, Tassin worked in user experience design for Southwest Airlines, Dell Technologies, and Meta. This is her first book.

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1

The Hot Girl
Hamster Wheel

We don't consider the gender gap in time and money spent on beauty, but time and money matter. They're essential sources of power and influence and also major sources of freedom.

-Dr. Renee Engeln, beauty sick

One of the more challenging tasks I set out to complete when my personal finance journey began was getting a real handle on my expenses. Surprisingly, I found that my fixed expenses (home, car, other needs)-areas I was warned were troublesome for most-actually weren't too bad. I had a roommate, my car was relatively affordable, and I lived in an apartment complex that was built in the '90s and looked like it. In many important ways, I lived comfortably beneath my means.

But there was one notable outlier: My Hot Girl category was staggering. Based on an early inventory, I calculated that I was spending:

$200 every three months for my cut and color

$100 per month on eyelash extensions

$15 per month on eyebrow threading

$100 per month on manicures and pedicures

$500 per year on makeup

The first time I examined these expenses in their totality, I thought my calculator had added an extraneous zero. After confirming it was, in fact, a totally warranted zero, I knew I couldn't justify this superficial hemorrhaging any longer. So in 2019, I decided it was time to hop off the Hot Girl Hamster Wheel-at least temporarily.

The Hot Girl Hamster Wheel is a term I coined that describes the litany of rotating, recurring expenses necessary to make one "conventionally attractive." When you're on the hamster wheel, every dollar spent functions like a commitment to spend more in the future-your body will eventually reject the modifications, often leaving you aesthetically "worse" than you started (think chipping gel polish and brittle nails underneath or brassy, grown-out highlights that must be corrected). As a former Hot Girl, I'm all too familiar with the financial trials and tribulations of attempting to maintain some semblance of an acceptable "feminine" appearance, and the most common iteration went a little something like this:

1. Feel bad about self for some generalized reason, then notice (in rapid, horrifying succession) that my roots were growing out, my ends were split, my gel nails were peeling, my legs were pale and hairy, and-oh yeah!-I was stressed.

2. Panic-schedule a full day of back-to-back primp appointments.

3. Attend said appointments in order: facial, eyebrow threading, cut and color, manicure/pedicure, spray tan and chill.

4. Feel increasingly uncomfortable calculating the accumulating 20 percent tips at each and every vendor (and swipe the AmEx with less and less enthusiasm).

5. Bask in glory of retaining Hot Girl status for another two to three weeks, and then quickly realize that not only do I feel no different, but it's already almost time to re-up.

I'm hyperbolizing, of course, but the general framework followed a predictable pattern. Perhaps the most unnerving part of this NASCAR-pit-stop-style tour of Dallas's beauty providers was the way in which these habits eventually became my baseline state: When I sensed I was deviating too far away from it, a crisis of confidence ensued, and the cycle would repeat anew.

When I annualized my spending and broke it down to monthly averages, I realized I was spending about $320 per month (*chokes* that's $3,840 per year) on being pretty. Depending on how much you earn, this number could be reasonable-but at the time, I was taking home about $1,500 every two weeks, which meant I worked for more than an entire month each year solely to maintain my Acceptable Feminine Appearance.

But while I was swiping, tapping, and inserting my chip card's merry way through the Tour de Texas Salons, there was something deeper at play. The women at my office had manicured nails. The women I spent time with on the weekends had full sets of lashes and highlights. In Dallas, most of the women I encountered on a daily basis were similarly pledging their time, energy, and money to keeping up appearances. Yet I didn't see my boyfriend at the time (now husband) traipsing to the salon every other month to get his color refreshed or schlepping to the pedicure chair biweekly to get his cuticles pushed back. Even before I learned about how beauty consumerism functions to keep women on the financial, metaphoric, and often literal treadmill, it always struck me as profoundly unfair that (what felt like) my default condition required so much more time, effort, and money than the men in my life spent on theirs.

When you itemize the expenses so plainly, it seems obvious that beauty consumerism's laser-like offensive on women's self-image will materially impact our financial outcomes. But when I was building my first budget, the topic was almost entirely absent from the instructional material I was mainlining. In her essay "In the Name of Beauty," Tressie McMillan Cottom summarizes this exchange of value perfectly: "If I believe that I can become beautiful, I become an economic subject. My desire becomes a market." If we want to make honest progress toward financial independence, that means taking a necessary hard look at how industries that exist to infiltrate our psyches (and checking accounts) are impacting our goals.

It's worth stating explicitly that these industries aren't the primary reason why many women don't make financial progress. A mani/pedi is expressly not to blame for wage stagnation or the shrinking middle class. But if you're a woman who suffers from money anxiety and has a self-care routine akin to 2018 Katie (who had a variety of acrylic products adhered to every surface of her body), I feel confident that your hard-earned income will serve you more powerfully from the safety of a Roth IRA than in a $50 vitamin C serum.

Calculating the true cost

For the sake of argument, let's return to my routine and pretend I had extended it over the course of my lifetime-or, at least, the next forty years. Tapping my trusty compounding returns calculator (a magical device that shows how your money can earn money over time), prepare to be horrified at the opportunity cost of a lifetime of "conventional" beauty, at a sticker price of $320 per month. Had that money been invested each month for forty years in a cheap total US stock market index fund like VTSAX, returning a historically average return of around 8 percent per year, the opportunity cost is $1,001,728.88.

One million dollars.

For some nauseating context, an investment portfolio worth $1,000,000 is enough to reliably produce a monthly income of approximately $3,333 in perpetuity. The median American aged sixty-five through seventy-four hits retirement with around $200,000 in savings, and gets an average of $1,907 per month from Social Security. These are not costs at the margins; these are retirement-supporting amounts.

It turns out my spending was pretty indicative of the national average for women who report regularly spending on their appearance: The average American woman spends $3,756 per year on beauty (the figure for men who reported regularly spending on their appearance was $2,928 per year, which surprised me, as the men in my life are the quintessential "7-in-1 body wash" consumers). If you assume the average American man is investing only the cost difference of $800 per year for forty years, they'd hit retirement with $206,606 more. Even if we're comfortable with that value exchange in our own lives, I'm not sure many of us are aware that's the trade-off we're making. I know I wasn't.

Frustratingly, any mention of these budgetary inclusions was mysteriously absent from most of the personal finance books and blogs I frequented. How come many of my favorite writers, like Brad and John and Brandon and Nick and Jack, weren't...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Portfolio
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593718860
• ISBN 13: 9780593718865
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Portfolio; https://www.wetones.co.uk/; ; 105 Golborne Rd; London; W10 5NL; Vereinigtes Königreich
• Verantwortliche Person: M.E.G Cards & Gifts; 443000000000; paula@megcards.com; ; 48 Cloyfin Road; Unit 4, 48 Cloyfin Road; Coleraine; Londonderry; BT52 2NY; Irland