Financial Feminist - Senator Elizabeth Warren on Childcare, Housing, and Inflation

Episode Date: October 30, 2024

Hey Financial Feminists! I'm so excited to bring you today's episode — I had the incredible honor of sitting down with Senator Elizabeth Warren! For those who don't know, she's a fearless advocate for middle-class families and a driving force behind the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. In this episode, we dive deep into pressing topics like affordable housing, universal childcare, and the systemic policies that shape our financial futures. We explore how the intersection of personal finance and government policy impacts each of us, and what steps we can take to make a difference. Trust me, this conversation is packed with insights, personal stories, and actionable advice you won't want to miss!  Resources mentioned in this episode: Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Are you registered to vote? https://vote.org/ Read transcripts, learn more about our guests and sponsors, and get more resources at https://herfirst100k.com/financial-feminist-show-notes/senator-elizabeth-warren-on-childcare-housing-and-inflation/ Not sure where to start on your financial journey? Take our FREE money personality quiz! https://herfirst100k.com/quiz Special thanks to our sponsors: Squarespace Go to www.squarespace.com/FFPOD to save 10% off your first website or domain purchase. Masterclass Get an additional 15% off any annual membership at masterclass.com/FFPOD. Rocket Money Stop wasting money on things you don’t use. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions by going to RocketMoney.com/FFPOD. Third Love It’s time to get your Bra-blems Solved™. Use code PODCAST15 for $15 off your order at ThirdLove.com. Netsuite Download the CFO’s Guide to AI and Machine Learning at NetSuite.com/FFPOD. Quince Get cozy in Quince's high-quality wardrobe essentials. Go to Quince.com/FFPOD for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Mint Mobile Cut your wireless bill to $15 a month at Mintmobile.com/ffpod.

We are a band of people who truly believe that we could put government on the side of people. Not billionaires, not giant corporations, not private equity guys with their computers to figure out, you know, how to suck up every house in a neighborhood, that we could actually make government work better for people, we can deliver on that. Not huge headline stuff, but important stuff to families and optimism for what we can do. Guys, we got Senator Warren. I'm so excited.

It was so nice. It was such a good interview. OK, so backstory. We were supposed to interview her when I was at the DNC and I was looking forward to it all week and I wasn't sleeping because I was too excited.

And then her team had to cancel. That's OK. That's OK. Shit happens. It's OK. I was like, okay, but maybe we can get her before the election happens. And then we're recording this October 28th. We're like, I don't know if that's gonna happen. It's like a week till the election. We got her. We got her. She is my favorite. I voted for her. And I told her this before we hopped on mic. I voted for her in every

primary I could. I love her work. I love her her and I told her this before we hopped on mic. I voted for her in every primary I could. I love her work, I love her policies, I love who she is as a person. I'm just Senator Warren. If you have no fans, I am dead. So we're just really excited to have her. We're talking today about, actually not really about the election,

but about policies specifically. So we're talking about affordable housing, we're talking about affordable healthcare and childcare and how expensive it is and what we can do about it. We're just really excited. I'm just thrilled to have her. This was just such a cool, this is my job, this is my work, this is my life day today.

I got to ask her a really off the cuff question, but something I've been wanting to ask her for a while about her moment at the DNC. And if you haven't seen it, go watch it. It is some of the most moving emotional stuff you'll see today. Okay, let's get into it. Elizabeth Warren, a fearless consumer advocate

who has made her life's work the fight for middle-class families, was elected to the United States Senate on November 6, 2012 by the people of Massachusetts. Elizabeth is recognized as one of the nation's top experts on bankruptcy and the financial pressures facing middle-class families. And the Boston Globe has called her, quote, the plain spoken voice of people getting crushed

by so many predatory lenders and under-regulated banks. She's widely credited for original thinking, political courage, and relentless persistence that led to the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. If you don't know what that is, look it up. I also mentioned it in my book. I didn't get a chance to tell her that, but that is a huge reason why she's just helping individuals be protected from a lot of the bullshit that happened in 2008. Her work with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is absolutely incredible.

Elizabeth learned firsthand about the economic pressures facing working families growing up in a family she says was on the ragged edge of the middle class. She got married at 19. Then after graduating from college, started teaching in elementary school. Her first baby, a daughter Amelia, was born when Elizabeth was 22. When Amelia was two, Elizabeth started law school. And shortly after she graduated, her son Alex was born. Elizabeth hung out a shingle and practiced law out of her living room, but soon she returned to teaching. She was a graduate at the University of Houston and Rutgers School of Law. She and her husband, Bruce Mann, have been married for 38 years and live in Cambridge, Massachusetts with their golden retriever, Bailey, and they have three grandchildren. We just have a really, really great interview

with the Senator and yeah, I've already cried too much today. So let's just get into the interview. But first, a word from our sponsors. We are so excited to have you Senator Warren. Thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to have you Senator Warren. Thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be with you. We couldn't start our discussion on financial feminists without talking about your history in the personal finance space. So you have two books you've written about personal finance. What for you is the impetus in writing those books and where does your love for personal

finance start? So for me, it's always been this intersection about how families, people, individuals do the best they can, given the set of rules out there to try to build security for themselves. But the rules matter too. And if the rules are loaded against you, then it's a lot harder uphill struggle. If they create

wind at your back, then it's going to be a lot better for building security and independence. So I think of it this way, I wrote those two books to say, hey look, it's a scary world out there, here are things you can do given that set of rules. And then I went to the United States Senate to try to change those rules to put more wind at people's backs. Yeah. I always say that personal finance is about 20% your personal choices, how well you know the personal finance basics, and 80% all of the systemic issues we're facing too. Yep. Bingo.

And you can't budget your way out of poverty as we know. So no, it's you know, this is where the policies have to come in. Yep. So did you find that your experience with personal finance now informs your work as a senator and in the legislation you try to support? Absolutely. And look, remember, I kind of got to Washington ahead of going to the Senate, and that was through the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. When we came out of the big crash in 2008, let's face it, 6 million people lost their homes,

and not because they made stupid decisions, but because they were in a world where it was possible to cheat them and then take away their houses. And so for me, I wanted that consumer agency to make sure that never happened again. And by the way, just to make this very contemporaneous, right in that time period is exactly when I met Kamala Harris. She was attorney general in California.

I had been called in. We had just gotten the consumer agency passed into law, and President Obama said, will you come to Washington and set it up? Make it work. You told us it was going to work. Make it happen. And I ended up meeting then Attorney General Harris in the fight to try to help as many families save their homes as possible.

And that's when I saw her as a fierce warrior on the side of the people, but most importantly, somebody with the courage to take on the big banks. And that's something I respect deeply. Yeah. Well, in a lot of your work with Vice President Harris, you worked together to address some of the challenges that renters face, particularly during the pandemic. What further protections do you believe are necessary? Can you talk to me a little bit about that work?

So we need two kinds of protections for renters. One of them is that private equity has moved into the renter space. And these guys are not only buying up much of the stock, they're then using some techniques that look a lot to me like price fixing, so that they're pushing the prices up, the rental costs up. So that's number one, is we gotta beat these Wall Street guys out of this space and let rents come back down.

But the second is Econ 101, it's supply. The way we're going to make housing more affordable in America is we just have to build more housing. And that means housing in big cities, it means housing in little towns, urban, rural, but particularly housing for first-time homebuyers as a wealth builder, but also investments in apartments because if you're spending so much money on rent it's hard to save up money to be able to buy that first house. Here's a space where the Vice President and I are very much aligned. We have a plan to build about 3 million new housing units all across America and that's both single-family houses, its condos, its

apartments, it's more, more, more housing because that's going to be the way to get down that price so that people will be able to buy a home, to buy a condo, to buy the place where they live and build wealth around that. Yeah. So when we talk about home buying, I live in Seattle, you know where the average home price is? 875, I think right now for a starter home. Crazy. When we're talking about the significant barriers to home ownership, obviously cost is one of them.

Availability is a huge one. What other barriers are we seeing, especially for folks who might be in marginalized groups? Well, so those are the first two. The third is access to capital. You got to be able to locate money. And that for many becomes a challenge, especially in marginalized groups. And the fourth, I'm going to go back to the point we made earlier just because we'll make sure it stays on the list, it's competing with Wall Street. You know, you may look today at the what look like entry-level homes in Seattle, and you

may think, well, I'm just out there competing against other folks in my circumstances, right? People who don't have a home. Maybe there are two of us, maybe there's only one of us, but I'm gonna try to make this happen. And it turns out you're competing with an investment group that comes in and offers all cash and then turns that cute little

two-bedroom, one-bath fixer-upper into rental property and just sucks one more and one more and one more house off the market so that there are fewer and fewer homes to be able to buy and more and more people who just have to stay in rental rental rental forever. So you know it goes back to where you and I started. The policies that right now give tax breaks to the private equity guys who are coming in and buying up those houses so that you can't buy one, so others in your circumstances can't buy one. We need to change those rules because changing those rules is a big part of what's going to put housing within reach of folks who want to live in it. Houses should be for people, not for corporations. And that's going to be a legal policy question.

And in effect, that's one of the things that's going to be on the ballot on November 5th. When we're talking about home buying, I have to touch on the economy as well. We, I mean, obviously, you know this, but we're hearing from our audience too. That's the number one issue that is of concern to people. So how does getting more homes available and this commitment to building 3 million homes,

how does that help our economy? Well, think of it this way. You can either decide that an economy is going to be run for a handful at the top, in which case you don't want to say, oh, we're going to tax those folks at the top and make investments in things like homes. Instead, you say, I know what we'll do. We'll give more tax breaks to those at the top and less regulation. And that means billionaires can be multi-multi-billionaires, right?

They just get richer and richer and richer because they have the capital already and they can come in and just extract more wealth from everybody else. I remember decades back when paying more than 28% of your income on housing was a big no-no. Don't do that. That means you're overspending on

housing and today we have a substantial number of people who are paying 50% of their income on housing because they don't have any choice. That's still kind of the rule with personal finance. Yeah, it's still kind of the rule that you shouldn't pay more than 20%. And I'm like, what city are you living in? Exactly. Yeah, where are you living? What planet are you living on? But again, it goes back to because of policy. So the Republicans, Donald Trump in particular, is saying he's going to help out those at

the top. He's going to give them some more tax breaks. And he's going to make sure they don't face any regulations. And believe me, that means there will be wealth. It's just all wealth at the top. The folks who are already wealthy will get wealthier. The idea behind what Harris is doing, what Democrats are doing in both what she will do as president, but also in these House and Senate races as well, is to say, wait a minute, let's put taxes on those at the top because

they haven't been paying a fair share. I just don't think it's right that Jeff Bezos, one of the richest people in the world, pays at a lower tax rate than a Boston public school teacher. Are you kidding me? So the idea is we increase taxes for those at the top, not crazy. They'll still believe me, they will still be able to buy all the things. They'll still be billionaires. They're going to be fine. That's right.

They're still going to be billionaires. They'll be fine. But then we take that money and we invest it. So for example, we invested in housing that you and I were just talking about to make sure the incentives are there to build more housing and to bring down the cost of that housing. But we invested in other things. We invested in childcare, universal childcare. Think how that brings down costs for mamas and daddies who want to work, right?

We have to start treating childcare like infrastructure. That's something I believe, that's something Kamala Harris believes, that's something the Democrats believe. When we make investments in bringing down the cost of health care, when we make investments in bringing down the cost of housing, bringing down the cost of child care, when we make those investments, now we've got a robust economy that is generating wealth, but it's generating wealth for working families. It's generating wealth in the middle and it's creating more opportunity for people who may be poor today, but there are more openings.

You know, there aren't a lot of openings at the billionaire level. And to the extent they are, you've got to start as a multi, multi, multi-millionaire, right? That's how you make it into that one. When you have a growing, expanding middle class, working class, you also are creating opportunities for folks straight out of school. You're creating opportunities for people who maybe don't have a lot of work experience, but an employer will take a chance on it because they need

that employee. So that's, it's two different visions of how you design the rules and that in turn will make a difference on how many people get to buy a home, get to have a decent job, and get to build a secure economic future. If you're trying to start a business you need a website. That was actually the first investment I ever made in her first 100K was buying a domain, getting a website, making sure that people could actually find me and my services.

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Visit thirdlove.com and get $15 off your order with code podcast 15. and get $15 off your order with code podcast 15. What legislation, affordable housing or otherwise, are you feeling particularly helpful about? The two right at the top of my list on the economic front are universal childcare and this big housing package. And I'll tell you why I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful in universal child care because we just, the Democrats, just made a big breakthrough

and made a big infrastructure investment after decades of under investment in infrastructure, roads, bridges, broadband. We finally said this is it, we're gonna make this big investment and by the way, as I like to point out, every bridge that gets built, the dollars don't stop at the bridge. Those are paychecks, those are other people who then have work, right, and it moves all the way through the community. So that's great. But my big pitch is that we make those investments

because it makes us all richer. Having an interstate highway system, right? Having those bridges, having broadband, because more people can participate in the economy. For mamas with babies, let's be clear, childcare is infrastructure. So I have been pounding on my colleagues in the United States Senate and the House,

and they just see me coming and say, okay, okay, I get it, childcare is infrastructure. But the point is, it's like changing the mindset. And when you ask me where I'm optimistic, I think we got our toes on the line on this. When we came close in 2022, then the Republicans took over. Nothing moved for two years. But if we get that trifecta, Kamala Harris in the White House, Democratic control of the House and Senate, we've got a real chance to do

not just a little bit on child care, but truly to say nobody in America spends more than 7% of their income on child care, no matter how many babies you've got, wherever your income is. If you're in a high-cost area, we're going to just cap it at 7% of your income, and the federal government is going to make sure we pay the rest of it, and we raise the wages of our child care workers. That's going to be key, and that's going to have an economic boost. So that was number one. Number two is this housing plan.

And the housing plan is the supply side plan. We're gonna build more housing, put money in to incentivize more housing being built. And it has the second part is we're gonna try to push these corporate private equity guys out of the housing market. So when you go to buy your first home, you're not competing with some Wall Street type for whom this is his fourth house purchase today, all in cash as he metaphorically rolls the bills off his

wad and lays them on the table. You're competing with other families, but that there will be more housing and fewer corporations. Senator, I would be remiss to ask you. I was lucky enough to be at the DNC and your speech was just so moving, but you also, you had this lovely moment of absolute vulnerability that I haven't seen in a long time, arguably ever, where the crowd was just so excited you were there and so in awe of you and you just took it all in and you were clearly emotional. What did that feel like?

Because clearly that hit you in a very emotional way. I get emotional when I think about that moment. as the fights we've been in together. And that we are, we are a band of people who truly believe that we could put government on the side of people, not billionaires, not giant corporations, not private equity guys with their computers to figure out how to suck up every house in a neighborhood, that we could actually make government work better for people.

We can deliver on that. And I felt this moment with all these people in this big arena, I felt this moment of people cheering both for some of what we've gotten done, like $35 insulin or getting rid of damn junk fees or breaking a hearing aid monopoly. Not huge headline stuff, but important stuff to families and optimism for what we can do. And that's what gets me up in the morning. My last question for you, if someone is listening to this before the election,

if someone's listening after the election, what can someone do to support the kind of policies we're talking about? Okay, so before the election. Vote can someone do to support the kind of policies we're talking about? Okay. So before the election, make sure you vote. Vote, vote, vote, vote, vote. And I really want to say vote democratic. I mean, I'm just, I'm sorry.

That's where the policies line up. So it's vote. If you could squeeze out an extra minute, an extra half hour, an extra hour, volunteer in one of the swing states. We've got seven states that are in play. Make phone calls. If it's possible in your circumstances, get in the car and drive there and spend next weekend knocking on doors. Send in 10 bucks to one of the Senate candidates that's running or to Kamala Harris, 10 bucks buys a pizza. Well, 20 maybe. Okay, buys a pizza for some volunteers who stay in and work on through

dinner. Do everything you can to help in this election. And then if you're listening to this post-election, please, please, please, let's all hope. We're talking about the things we can do because here's the deal. Even when we elect good people, they still need a push from all of us here in America to keep them moving in the right direction. And we need to get childcare done, we need to get housing done, we need to bring down the cost of healthcare

and make it more accessible. But it's going to take people, like the people who are listening to this podcast, who say, I'm going to give a shove and help make sure that happens. Thank you, Senator, so much for for your work and thanks for being here. Well, thank you for your work and let's do this again.

I would love that. Oh, that was great. Thank you. You bet. I know you have a bunch more of these to do. Thank you for your work and please take a nap when you're able. I will. All right.

Take care. Bye bye. Thank you so much to Senator Warren and her team for coming on the show. All right. Take care. Bye-bye. Thank you so much to Senator Warren and her team for coming on the show. I'm not going to be too heavy handed here. Please vote. Please volunteer where you're able. We got less than five days. So please get out, make your voices heard. We really appreciate it. Have a great rest of your day, Financial Feminist. Share the episode if you're able. Okay, bye. Thank you for listening to Financial Feminist, her first 100K podcast. Financial Feminist, share the episode if you're able. and Amanda LaFue. Special thanks to our team at Her First 100K. Kaylyn Sprinkle, Masha Bakhmakeva, Taylor Cho, Sasha Bonar, Rae Wong, Elizabeth McCumber, Claire Karonen, Darrell Ann Ingman, and Megan Walker.

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