Women on the Verge of a Financial Breakthrough

Dave Ramsey and Suze Orman are the elephants in our podcasting Zoom room on this one. Also the trad wife Insta influencers that might con you into thinking buying chicken farming supplies instead of Thai takeout makes you a better person. Guest star Kacie Swartz from Blackbarn Financial has a money mindset water feature metaphor that splashes Caitlin right out of the…water feature. And Sara falls...

Just when you think finance talk can’t possibly get more boring…bring in the three i’s. But wait! There’s some stuff you should know, even if it’s not the breezy summer beach listen you were hoping for. Apparently there is a new normal when it comes to mortgage interest rates (sit down for that bitter medicine), which is actually the old normal that we forgot about. But Sara’s ears finally mildly...

Warning: There will be no champagne party in this episode. Last year it was the Bear Market, now it’s the Bull Market. The market goes down, the market comes back up. And no matter what, Sara says we have to be super chill and nonchalant-like, even when things are good. Also, Sara describes what an economist victory lap looks like (dorky, but kind of bad ass) and why we need to keep plugging away...

For our last episode of Season 2, we talk about, what else??: how index funds are the freaking work horses of building a financial future for good reason. Caitlin grills Sara about a financial column she read that says what Sara has already been saying for two seasons (and 10 years before that): it’s VERY VERY hard to beat the returns you can get over long periods of time when you invest in low-co...

How do you know what kind of insurance you need, when you need it and how much you should pay for it? We have no idea! So that’s why we invited certified financial planner Kacie Swartz back on the podcast to explain to us how to figure it all out. What does “term” mean? Should a young person get life insurance?? And are we supposed to get life insurance for our kids??? Kacie explains all of this,...

OK, so investment advisors are the people we go to to find out how to turn our money into more money, but how do they know??  Are they on a secret call at 5am telling them what stocks are hot? Do they spend hours on some mysterious software machine that spews out a bunch of recommendations? Do they have financial tarot cards?  On today’s episode, we find out what one financial expert doe...

How does a bank run out of money?? Isn’t a bank just a place where it’s safer to store your money than in an empty ice cream container in your freezer?? And why is everything in the finance world so freaking complicated??!? In this episode, Caitlin asks Sara a very simple question: What the fuck is a bank? And Sara answers with a way too complicated answer. AS USUAL. To make a long story short, ba...

This week, we’re rebroadcasting an episode we recorded at the end of last summer in the midst of what one hoped was a temporary bear market. The stock market keeps doing scary shit, however, so we decided it was worth a re-visit to remind ourselves, I mean our listeners, to keep our eyes on the prize and to not get spooked. Let Sara soothe you with her steely-eyed confidence that all will be well....

Taxes. Ugh. Whoops. I mean: What a great opportunity to save money and pay your fair share! Many of us never learned how to take advantage of different strategies to avoid paying overly high taxes because we started out not making enough to have any money to protect. But, we have to learn all this stuff to build our wealth and be smart with our income. No matter how painful it is. Oh, and what the...

The movies tell us one story about wealth and it looks a lot like white men playing golf and drinking single malt whiskey. But is that what we’re trying to build for our futures??? No thank you. So, what’s a more inclusive vision of wealth, and how do we find our own definition? Could wealth actually mean something that’s achievable for a normal person? Caitlin asks Sara what it is we’re actually...

What do you get when two women combine forces to figure out finance, share the mental load and build wealth together? Money sisters!! That’s what you get! In this episode, longtime friends Emily and Kelly (who happens to be our co-producer) share their long history of making financial decisions small and large, and their deep, abiding love for the Splitwise app. Most of us are used to the awkward...

So many of us want to invest in the stock market to make money for retirement, but feel pretty icky about where our money might be going. Do we just have to surrender to the greedy capitalists polluting our planet and perpetuating social inequities? Listen to this episode to find out! (Spoiler alert: NO) Sara and I grill sustainable investing expert Kacie Swartz about how to find funds that promot...

You can take that takeout pad thai out of my cold, dead hands. If budgeting means not being able to splurge on a stressful Tuesday anymore, then let’s go for broke. But we’re supposed to have a budget, right? How do we create budgets that take into account our mental health now and financial health later? We invited budget coach Kara Perez, founder of the finance education company Bravely Go to he...

Your credit score is one of those things that you don’t have to care about…until you really do. It’s a system that kind of makes sense, but also can be crazy unfair. In this episode Sara and Caitlin (but mostly Caitlin) grill Lending Tree credit expert Matt Schulz on how credit scores are calculated and what it actually means. Do they stay the same for all of our lives? Can we make them better? Do...

Do you have a 4-year-old daughter or 15-year-old niece that you hope to help pay for college, but also would still like to have money for other things like toilet paper and health insurance, but feel like the two things are mutually exclusive ? Stop freaking out - we just might be able to pull this off. We know - we already did an episode about saving for college last season. But this time we invi...

We’re back for the real Season 2! When you get a hot tip about individual stocks, can’t you just buy a bunch and get really rich and then laugh at all the people that weren’t as clever? But, wait, you have to sell them in order to get all those riches… So, can someone please just tell me when they’re about to go down so I can sell them then? No? Wait, what? In this episode, we discuss how Sara’s s...

This week Sara and I pepper student-loan specialist Danika Waddell with questions about two different student loan programs: the Biden $10,000 debt relief program, which you’ve probably heard of, AND the Public Student Loan Forgiveness program , which you might not have heard about. The Public Student Loan Forgiveness waiver is a temporary rule change for a program that lets people who have worked...

What do you do if you actually have money to invest in the stock market but the constantly sinking numbers are scaring the shit out of you? Are you really just supposed to pour perfectly good dollars into a sinking (market) ship? And what about that whole “buy low, sell high” thing?? Is now the low?? But can it go even lower?? And, and what the fuck are iBonds and why is everyone talking about the...

Are we really supposed to stay in the stock market even when it does a bunch of scary shit and our account balances are going down instead of up? Do we keep pouring more money into our retirement accounts when we’re not sure we’ll have rent money for the next six months? Can’t our precious investment money just take a little drama-free holiday in a savings account until the shitstorm is over? Sara...

Before the real Season 2 starts, Caitlin drills Sara about what the hell is going on in the economy and why the financial news just keeps getting worse. How many “all time” stock market lows can we hit until we should start squirreling away sea shells, Pop Tarts and collectible Beanie Babies? Will our retirement accounts vanish into thin air? Does the economy have Covid? Will it ever get better? S...

This is the last episode of Season 1, in which Caitlin asks Sara if gas will soon cost $15 a gallon, what is the point of anything ? Sara explains how inflation typically works in the US, and shares the bananas cure for high prices: EVEN HIGHER PRICES. How the F are we supposed to pretend we’re saving for our future if it seems like we’ll never be able to afford a hamburger again, much less retire...

Getting a whole pile of money is the dream, right? But what the hell are you supposed to do with it? What if you invest it all and the market goes down the next day? Freak out!! Or not. Sara shares a couple different approaches to investing windfalls for both the strong-willed and faint of heart. Also, we didn't come up with a Cosmo quiz for figuring out how "risk tolerant" you are, but we should...

How are parents supposed to prepare for their own future financial stability *and* save for their kids' college educations? There is so much conflicting information to navigate. You NEED to already have a 529. But also, DON'T start a 529 because then your kid won't qualify for financial aid. Sara shares some strategies for the near and medium term to help out your kids, without losing out on your...

Some debt is "good" and some debt is "bad", right? But how can we tell the difference? Sara walks us through how to think about debt, and how to decide if paying it off early fits into our financial planning strategy. (Spoiler alert: Not as often as you'd think.) Caitlin realizes (again) that banks don't always have our best interests in mind when it comes to lending us money and finally masters s...

Emergency savings accounts are super important, right? Sara agrees, but worries too many people over-emphasize their rainy day fund and under-emphasize their retirement savings. She tells us how to hit the balance between the two, and warns that we might have to start investing before we're psychologically ready. It's scary! Caitlin attempts a metaphor involving Wall Street "experts" and seating a...