Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin - How To Stop Doing "Invisible Work," with Eve Rodsky

Episode Date: August 27, 2023

Originally aired 1.26.22 Eve Rodsky (author of Fair Play and Find Your Unicorn Space) joins Nicole to talk about how the wage gap doesn’t stop at work; there’s unequal distribution at home, with women being the “she-fault” parent, taking on emotional labor and invisible work. Want to start investing, but don't know where to begin? Go to moneyassistant.com and meet Magnifi, your AI money assistant, designed to help you make a plan for your financial goals. Want one-on-one money coaching from Nicole? Book a meeting with her here: intro.co/moneynewsnetwork 

One of the most stressful periods of my life was when I was in credit card debt. I got to a point where I just knew that I had to get it under control for my financial future and also for my mental health. We've all hit a point where we've realized it was time to make some serious money moves. So take control of your finances by using a Chime checking account with features like no maintenance fees, fee-free overdraft up to $200, or getting paid up to two days early with direct deposit. Learn more at Chime.com slash MNN. When you check out Chime, you'll see that you can overdraft up to $200 with no fees. If you're an OG listener, you know about my infamous $35 overdraft fee that

I got from buying a $7 latte and how I am still very fired up about it. If I had Chime back then, that wouldn't even be a story. Make your fall finances a little greener by working toward your financial goals with Chime. Open your account in just two minutes at Chime.com slash MNN. That's Chime.com slash MNN. Chime. Feels like progress. Banking services and debit card provided by the Bancorp Bank N.A. or Stride Bank N.A. Members FDIC. SpotMe eligibility requirements and overdraft limits apply. Boosts are available to eligible Chime members enrolled in SpotMe and are subject to monthly limits. Terms and conditions apply. Go to Chime.com slash disclosures for details.

Hey guys, are you ready for some money rehab? Wall Street has been completely upended by an unlikely player game stop and should i have a 401k because you don't do it no i know you think the whole world revolves around you and your money well it doesn't charge for wasting our time i will take a check you recognize her from anchoring on CNN, CNBC, and Bloomberg. The only financial expert you don't need a dictionary to understand. Nicole Lappin.

Today I have a very special guest, Eve Rodsky. She is the author of the books Fair Play and Find Your Unicorn Space and host of the new iHeart podcast, Time Out. Let's get right into it. I want to bring on Eve, actually, to introduce today's topic. She is an expert on this subject and gets a little meta here. I just don't want to waste any time teeing up the topic because, as she and I both agree, time is your most valuable asset. It is such a pleasure for me to say, Eve, welcome to Money Rehab. Well, I'm really happy to be here since women's economic security

is what I think about when I wake up in the morning and when I go to sleep at night. So I'm really happy to be here. And you truly do. You put your money where your mouth is. You walk the walk. You're such an ultimate woman's woman. On the show, of course, we talk a lot about the wage gap. And the reality is, as you know, men are paid more than women for doing the very same work. But this discrepancy between men and women isn't just for the workplace. It's for the homestead, which you've shone some really important light on, which is what inspired your first book, Fair Play. So before we get into

that book, can you help our listeners fill in some of the blanks? I know the stories, but can we talk a little bit about what your life looked like pre-book, pre-books? Well, as you know well, Nicole, because you've been with me on this journey, my work is centered in what I now call my blueberries breakdown. But it really started 10 years ago when my husband, Seth sent me, you know, an infamous text. Now I'm surprised you didn't get blueberries in the midst of a very chaotic time in my life that I think a lot of people can relate to now, which was that feeling of complete

and total burnout and overwhelm. I had just had my second son, Ben. I have three children that I had been at the time and Zach was three. We had just recently moved to LA because I thought that burnout and overwhelm were because of New York, Nicole, not because of the fact that I was doing two thirds or more of what it took to run a home and family, a statistic. I was undeniably living at the time,

but I didn't even know about. And I'm surprised you didn't get blueberries. I'm texting and driving, getting this text from Seth sort of being defined as the fulfiller of his smoothie needs and so much pain as I have a breast pump and diaper bag in the passenger seat of my car, gifts for a newborn baby to return in the backseat of my car, a client contract in my lap, because an important part of your money rehab discussions, right, is this idea of agency. And a lot of women say, you know, we opted out of the traditional workforce. Well, I'm here to tell you, no one opts out. Anybody who was in the corporate workforce and is no longer there has been forced out for some reason. So I had been forced out. I had a client contract in my lap, marking it up, racing to get Zach, Nicole. And I just remember that day because this pen, I do think the analog was sort of in between

my legs and I would hit these stop signs as I was texting and driving. And it would sort of back up and stab me in the vagina. That's what I remember about that day, just being stabbed in the vagina by a pen. And I think what I was recognizing about my life was that, you know, I did everything people told me to do. I heard the messages of Gen X women that we could be anything we wanted to be. And it was all a lie. I was being defined as the fulfiller of my husband's smoothie needs. My name was totally erased. I was wearing mom as a necklace around my neck, sitting in preschool circles, being called Zach's mother.

I was gone. I was sort of a gray version of who I was in that 10 years. And so I like to say to younger women, right, you only have 10 years left to live. And I say that with a lot of humor, because I do my work so that nobody finds themselves sobbing on the side of the road, thinking they're divorcing their partner over off-season blueberries. You were raised by a single mom who I met who's adorable. I'm obsessed with your mother. I would like to be adopted. Yeah. Why do you think that happened? Why do you think women got erased as moms and truly like our maiden last names were relegated to being an emergency security question at your bank, right?

Correct, correct. Like what is your mother's maiden name? That's all we get? Absolutely. I think a lot of my work and your work too, I think centers on agency and decision-making, right? And there are short-term decisions, there's long-term decisions,

but the truth is that women have not been able to make their decisions for themselves in many different areas. You talk about in terms of money, whether it was being able to own property or own their own credit card. But in many areas, too, especially about our time, I'd say the biggest thing I see now is this time crisis. I see now is this time crisis. It's really a crisis of time choice where our male counterparts often have extreme time choice over how they use their day, how they organize their day, while still having a home and family. Whereas women, we're in service of our homes, regardless of whether we work outside the home and until our head hits the pillow. regardless of whether we work outside the home and until our head hits the pillow.

And I think it's that discrepancy that allows to erasure. Because if you're erased, our names are erased first. We're then put into these boxes of our identities, right? We're allowed to be parents. We're allowed to be partners. And now we're allowed to be professionals because of income inequality in this country. And you've talked about this. We need women's economic contributions to the home. So we can be parents and our partners and our professionals. But God forbid, Nicole, we try to use sustained attention for things outside of those roles. That permission to be unavailable from those roles, to me, is one of our big, big hurdles left and why I think it benefits society to keep us small and in those roles. Hold on to your wallets, boys and girls. Money rehab will be right back. One of the most stressful periods of my life was when I was in credit card debt. I got to a point where I just knew that I had to get it under control for my financial future

and also for my mental health. We've all hit a point where we've realized it was time to make some serious money moves. So take control of your finances by using a Chime checking account with features like no maintenance fees, fee-free overdraft up to $200, or getting paid up to two days early with direct deposit. Learn more at Chime.com slash MNN. When you check out Chime, you'll see that you can overdraft up to $200 with no fees. If you're an OG listener, you know about my infamous $35 overdraft fee that I got from buying a $7 latte and how I am still very fired up about it. If I had Chime

back then, that wouldn't even be a story. Make your fall finances a little greener by working toward your financial goals with Chime. Open your account in just two minutes at chime.com slash MNN. That's chime.com slash MNN. Chime feels like progress. Banking services and debit card provided by the Bank Corp Bank N.A. or Stride Bank N.A., members FDIC. Spot me eligibility requirements Now for some more money rehab. Well, you know a lot about time. I've always said that it's our most valuable asset. It's more valuable than money. And this is coming from a money lady. You went to Harvard Law School, casual. You know a lot about billable hours. How did you incorporate billable hours into the household? Can you define what invisible work is for us

and give us some examples? Absolutely. I think, well, as you said, to me, you know, I talk a lot about hours and the way I look at time should be straightforward, right? Time is time. It's 24 hours in the day, but we've actually really sort of been in a culture where time is money. And so if you look at time as just, you as just sort of billable hours that you get paid for, then we start to lose our humanity, Nicole. And really, the goal of my work is that an hour holding a child's hand in the pediatrician's

office becomes just as valuable as an hour in the boardroom. That's the society I want to live in. And we know now that we're starting to fight back. There's a great resignation going on, as you know. And, you know, why are 4.4 million and more people leaving or being forced out of sort of the capitalist, patriarchal workplaces that we've built. Well, it's because we can't fit into those systems. We've been begging for things like flexibility or recognition that you can be productive if you work anywhere other than a cubicle in eye distance of your boss. But this redefinition of work hasn't happened yet. And I

do think the pandemic is accelerating what a billable hour should be. And a billable hour to me is an hour of worth. And as we said, an hour of worth is taking your child to the pediatrician. An hour of work is using your time to go right now and log on to the COVID test website and order your free tests. A billable hour is spending time learning a new language, even if it has literally nothing to do with your daily quote-unquote productivity. Those are what makes us human, Nicole. And I'm hoping that we start to look at billable hours differently. And also the fact that there's a misconception that, you know, the time it takes you to go to soccer practice is just one thing. There's a lot of other elements to soccer practice. How did you, I love a process and a system. You are after

my own heart with this. How did you create this system that accounted for getting the soccer cleats, returning the soccer cleats if needed, cutting those little orange quarters or whatever you have to do, right? Well, I think you've always been so supportive because I think we both recognize two things. We both recognize that time is our most valuable currency and women are taught to give it away from birth for free. But we also understand the value in structured decision-making. There's a book called The End of Bias by Jess Nordell. And I love it so much because she sees

all these different bias interventions that work are based on these ideas of structured decision-making where you don't use assumptions. Oh, Nicole doesn't need pain medication because she looks like she's going to be someone who is going to give birth naturally, right? I don't know. We just make all these bizarre assumptions. Women were not getting blood clot treatments in hospitals, but men were because

we take men's pain more seriously. It's just, and you know, if you add race on top of that, the maternal mortality gets even worse. So I think it's really important to understand how important structured decision making is. And what was happening to me was, as I was sort of floundering after my blueberries breakdown, was I was trying to figure out how to make decisions in my home that weren't based on assumptions of gender. How are we going to make decisions? How are we going to make decisions for How are we going to make decisions for who stops their workday when the school calls and says Zach is sick? How are we going to make the

decision over who takes the garbage out and puts the liner back in? How are we going to make the decision over who commutes our kids to school? Because if you're not making structured decisions, what you're trading in are assumptions. And that's very dangerous for marginalized populations. And so the structured decision-making around fair play was just asking one question, which was, what would it look like if we treated our homes as our most important organizations? And I remember one man, when I asked him that question, what would it look like? And he's like, well, you mean like my home where we wait to decide who's taking the dog out, right? When it's about to take a piss on the rug. And I said, exactly that, but the opposite, whatever that is, I just want you to do the opposite. And so what I realized was that

when I start to ask serious questions, Nicole, about who takes the kids, who commutes the kids to school, who's in charge of garbage, who does school forms, you know, who hosts, the response that kept coming back over and over again is actually a very destructive response from an organizational management lens. And that answer was both. lens. And that answer was both. I don't want to go into the doctor and be like, Hey guys, so who's doing my surgery today? And then all jumping out and being like, we all are right. You want a doctor to come and say, I'm in charge of this. I'm the captain of this ship for this task. So the beauty of a structured decision-making is that you get to answer all those questions for your home before you have to make the decision. That's a system. But you get to make decisions.

Motion is low and cognition is high. That's what I want. Emotion is low and cognition is high. Because when you make those decisions in advance, that's a system. And that's the opposite of sort of drowning in decision fatigue, as many of us do. Or in the case of money, where we maybe believe in the life-changing magic of organizing our junk drawers, but we're not really thinking about the life-changing magic of long-term thinking. And so we're not making the right money decisions for ourselves if we looked at ourselves 10, 20, 30 years down the line.

Can you talk to us through what the system is like for divvying up responsibility? So you say, OK, when it's not heated, we're going to have this discussion. And then where do you start? The two most obvious would be cash and bills and money manager. Those are two different roles. money manager. Those are two different roles. The hard thing for me was to watch women take cash and bills where they would pay the bills, but men are still in charge of money manager and many heterosysgender relationships, which I highly don't recommend. You want to know what's happening with your finances, and that's why you listen here. But really the system is based on a secret

formula of boundaries, systems, and communication. So boundaries is what we just talked about. It's this idea that it's still subversive in our society for women to want more than just our roles. So this idea that a true boundary isn't taking a walk around the block, as some people are saying these days, or even grabbing a drink with a friend. It's really this idea that I deserve to be interested in my own life and setting up structures and systems to allow for that time where it's not last. So that's a true boundary. The systems and the communication are what we're just getting into. That if you live in a system where it's the opposite of that man who is saying he's waiting to decide he's taking his dog out when he's about to take a piss in the rug, the opposite

of that is an ownership mindset. So what Fair Play is, it's a metaphor. There's 100 cards. There's 60 if you don't have children because you want to get these systems down pat before that and 40 additional cards if you do have kids. So I think that's also important to recognize that the 60 cards in your life get harder and you add an additional potential 40 cards to your deck if you have children. And then what you do with those cards is you decide with, as we said, sort

of on this frequency and time and turf, you communicate about who is holding what card at what time. Now, if it was that easy, Nicole, then fair play would just be a card game next to Cards Against Humanity in the card section of Target. But it's not so easy because people like money say they don't communicate about domestic life. I could never start to have these conversations, Eve. They're too triggering. And so what I like to say as a mediator, because my day job is I work for families that look like the HBO show Succession. And you should feel bad for me, Nicole, right? Because those families have very complex decision-making structures.

What I learned mediating for those families is that so many times I would walk into a Succession meeting and a father, a patriarch who is my client would say to me, I can't communicate about money. You know, the foundation, my family business. Okay. We don't communicate. And then I'd watch and observe a meeting. And every time second son, Johnny would start speaking, dad walks out of the room for water, for a snack. I mean, so if you don't think that's communication, right? So that happens in the home too, where people would say to me, we don't communicate about domestic life. So in the beginning, Nicole, I would actually earnestly write that down. Doesn't communicate about domestic life

until the thousands person said to me, oh yeah, well, when my partner forgets to put the laundry in the dryer, I dump wet clothes on their pillow. So then I would cross out communicating about domestic life. So I think what I'm asking here for, and a lot of your other guests have, is this understanding that we're already communicating about money. We're already communicating about domestic life. We're already communicating about sex, these hard things. It's just, so I'm asking for a communication shift away from the passive aggressive, the boiling over, the tone issues, the verbal assassin problems, as my friend says, where she says things

in a really nice tone, but things like, you're the worst father that's ever existed. Did you know that was ever gonna happen to you? I'm so surprised. Away from that to communication that has effective means because people can listen. For today's tip, you can take straight to the bank. Work-life balance doesn't just mean keeping a balance between your work and your life. You should also be keeping your life-work balanced with whoever is sharing your home with you. This could be a friend, a romantic partner, a roommate, whoever fills that role for you.

To start conversations around leveling out the home court, I recommend what Eve did and creating a shit I do list that outlines all of the work you do at home. Then have your partner do this as well. You can share your lists with each other and comparing them will actually help visually identify where there are imbalances. Oftentimes, once you see the problem, it's easier to fix it. see the problem, it's easier to fix it. Money Rehab is a production of iHeartRadio. I'm your host, Nicole Lappin. Our producers are Morgan Lavoie and Mike Coscarelli. Executive producers are Nikki Etor and Will Pearson. Our mascots are Penny and Mimsy. Huge thanks to OG Money Rehab team Michelle Lanz for her development work, Catherine Law for her

production and writing magic, and Brandon Dickert for his editing, engineering, and sound design. And as always, thanks to you for finally investing in yourself so that you can get it together and get it all.