Money Lessons with Andrew Temte, PhD, CFA

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy explains the two questions the law answers about every job before the first pay stub is printed: whether you're an employee or an independent contractor, and whether you're owed overtime.  He adds up what a business pays for an employee and not for a contractor, walks through the IRS test, the ABC test, and Wisconsin's own test, and clears up a common misunde...

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy takes up the three ways your pay grows — a raise, a promotion, and a new job — and the one lesson that runs through all three: starting pay is the base every raise after it is applied to.  He clears up the difference between a merit increase and a cost-of-living adjustment, explains why a promotion usually pays more than a raise, and puts numbers on changing...

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy treats a new skill the way he'd treat any other investment: what it costs, what it returns, and when to make it.  He defines skill gap, upskilling, and reskilling; explains why skills go stale, with the World Economic Forum's finding that workers can expect 39 percent of their skills to be transformed or outdated by 2030; and works through a $3,000 certificat...

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy asks whether the work you're paid for fits the purpose you have — and what it costs you when it doesn't.  He defines purpose, alignment, misalignment, and golden handcuffs, then prices misalignment three ways in dollars: disengagement that lets your skills fade, golden handcuffs that make leaving a calculation instead of a feeling, and drift that keeps your h...

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy turns from what you earn this year to what you can earn over a working life.  He defines human capital — the competence, experience, and health an employer or customer will pay for — and measures it against the asset most families count as their largest, home equity.  Drawing on the Federal Reserve's survey of family finances, Georgetown's lifetime-earnings e...

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy turns to the earners the pay stub episodes left out: the self-employed, the independent contractor, and the side gig.  He defines the five terms that matter — self-employed, the 1099, net earnings, self-employment tax, and estimated payments — and works through the tax bill on the same $50,000 last week's employee earned, so listeners hear what happens when b...

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy adds up what a job is worth beyond the salary: the employer's share of the health premium, the employer's half of Social Security and Medicare, and the retirement match.  He follows one employee earning $50,000 and shows that total compensation comes to $63,100, and $750 less when a default contribution rate leaves half the match uncollected. Along the way he...

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy explains how the federal income tax is calculated, starting with four definitions every taxpayer needs: taxable income, the tax bracket, the marginal rate, and the effective rate.  He works a single filer's 2026 tax one bracket at a time to show why someone in the 22 percent bracket pays about 13 percent, and why a raise never leaves you with less after tax. ...

In this special edition of Money Lessons, Andy takes the national debt's crossing of forty trillion dollars on August 18 and explains what the number is made of — the debt held by the public, and the money the federal government owes its own trust funds.  He shows why interest now takes eighteen and a half cents of every dollar the government collects, and why "we'll grow our way out" and "inflati...

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy reads a pay stub for the lines most people skip past.  He sorts every deduction into two types — the ones the law requires and the ones you elected, usually in the paperwork on your first day — and explains why a health premium, an HSA, and a retirement contribution come out of your pay before your taxes are figured, and why the federal taxes don't all treat...

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy supplies the vocabulary behind three weeks of teaching on habits, defaults, and friction.  Herbert Simon — who was never an economist — challenged his era's assumption that buyers decide with complete information, and won a Nobel Prize for finding those limits inside companies before anyone thought to look for them in customers.  Richard Thaler named the arra...

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy turns from the money machinery listeners build themselves to the machinery that gets installed before they arrive.  He starts with the default — what happens if you do nothing — and shows how much of a household's money moves according to settings that somebody at a company chose in advance.  The workplace retirement plan serves as the rare example of a defau...

In this special edition of Money Lessons, Andy takes on a question that sits underneath most of personal finance: why change is so hard.  A complaint about his band's setlist leads to the research on why musical taste is set around age fourteen — and to the study showing that appetite for financial risk locks in the same way, set by whatever the markets were doing when a person first had money in...

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy opens up the machinery that moves money out of a household without ever passing through a decision.  He starts with the narrow definition psychologists use for the word "habit" — a behavior repeated in the same surroundings until conscious decision-making drops out — and walks through the 2002 wristwatch studies that measured how often people's minds were som...

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy turns from the map of your personal economy to the thing that moves money across it — decisions.  He explains why good and bad decisions never arrive in the same size, and why one large mistake can undo a decade of quiet good ones.  The centerpiece is present bias, the mental shortcut that treats anything happening right now as far more important than the sam...

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy launches a brand-new series on personal financial management by drawing the map: the six jobs your money has — earn, spend, borrow, protect, grow, and give.  He explains why spending feels so effortless in a consumer-driven economy where household spending makes up about 68 percent of everything the U.S. produces in a year. Along the way, he introduces the id...

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy closes the series on equity by turning to the hardest part of owning stocks: holding on.  He explains why volatility is the price investors pay for the equity risk premium, and why the market's steepest falls and sharpest recoveries tend to arrive back to back — which is what makes market timing a losing game.  He looks at the evidence that the more investors...

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy makes the long-run case for owning stocks — why, over a lifetime, equities have rewarded the patient owner.  He unpacks the equity risk premium, the extra return stocks have paid over bonds and cash since 1928, and shows how compounding turns that yearly edge into life-changing wealth.  Andy closes with direct advice for young investors — start early, invest...

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy widens the map beyond American markets to make the case for owning international stocks.  He explains home-country bias — the natural pull to invest only in the companies of your own country — and points out that more than a third of the world's stock market value sits outside the United States.  Andy walks through the two practical ways an ordinary investor...

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy answers a question he has been holding since last year: if your stock trades are free, how does a broker make its money?  He explains payment for order flow — the arrangement where your broker sells your order to a wholesale market maker that fills it and pays for the privilege. Andy walks through why your everyday orders are so valuable, where the real confl...

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy explains the exchange-traded fund — the ETF — the vehicle most people now use to own a whole index in a single trade.  He traces it back to the first one, State Street's SPDR, launched in 1993 to track the S&P 500, and shows how an ETF differs from the index mutual fund Jack Bogle created in 1976: one trades all day on an exchange like a stock, the other...

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy tackles a phrase we lean on without ever defining it: "the market." He explains what a stock market index is, where the Dow, the S&P 500, and the Nasdaq-100 come from, and how each one measures the market differently — the Dow by share price, the others by company size. He unpacks the Dow's hidden divisor and the outsized power of a denominator, shows how...

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy uses the 2021 GameStop saga to reveal the hidden machinery that runs underneath every stock trade.  He explains how a struggling video-game retailer became the most heavily bet-against stock on Wall Street, why ordinary investors banded together to buy it, and how its price rocketed from about $17 to around $483 in a matter of weeks.  Then he answers the ques...

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy explores information asymmetry—the gap between what some market participants know and what others know—and the rules that try to keep that gap from getting too wide.  He walks through the structural advantages built into the architecture of the market itself, the meaningful distinction between buy-side and sell-side analysts that financial pundits throw aroun...

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy explores one of the most misunderstood practices in financial markets — short selling. He traces the origins of the practice to Isaac Le Maire and the Dutch East India Company in 1609, walks through the mechanics of borrowing shares to sell them, and explains the asymmetric risk that makes short positions fundamentally different from owning a stock.  He bring...