Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin - Lessons From T Swift on Building Your Net Worth

Episode Date: November 1, 2023

On this week's round-up of the biggest headlines and how they affect your wallet: Taylor Swift reaches billionaire status, how the autoworkers' strike will affect car prices, and Elon's next ambitious move. 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 

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every occasion, and every celebration. Be sure to check them out at justinwine.com and receive 20% off your order for a limited time. I'm Nicole Lappin, the only financial expert you don't need a dictionary to understand. It's time for some money rehab. This week and the events in Israel have me thinking a lot about my ancestors and lineage. It also has me thinking a lot about dark and light. During Halloween, we put up tombstones and skulls, but we sweeten it with candy and celebration. On this show, I want to be a source of light, someone you can trust to

guide you to a more positive financial future. But that also means talking about things that can be hard, like debt and financial trauma. With that sort of balance in mind, let's launch into a slightly tweaked version of our weekly money news wrap-up. As always, we'll start with the stories shaping today's financial markets and how they impact your wallet, and we'll end with a mini update on Israel, because Israel is part of my lineage, and talking about it is a way for me to honor that and my ancestors, even when it's hard to sit with the news and even when it's uncomfortable. In a world with more sources of information than ever before, it can

be hard to know what to believe and what to trust. So I would love to be the place for you to get updates from a trusted source. But before we get to all that, let's start with something fun that I haven't gotten to cover yet. The Ares Tour movie. Let's back up for a second. I was lucky enough to get tickets to the stadium show of the concert. Unfortunately, not everyone was. When the tickets went on sale first, 3.5 million people registered to attempt to buy them. Ultimately, Ticketmaster reports that roughly 2 million tickets were sold during the first round of sales, leaving a million and a half with no ticket to the big show. But that's just people who went through the difficulty of trying to register in the first place. Millions more looked at the cost and the logistics of attending and didn't even bother

trying. Taylor's not here to gatekeep, but she is here to be an absolute innovator when it comes to business deals. Now, we've talked about the writers and actors strikes before on the show. The writers strike has been resolved and the actors strike continues. One of the side effects of the strike is that actors can't promote their work. This has caused planned movie releases to be delayed since the cast can't do traditional publicity tours. All of that led to an opening that allowed Taylor Swift and her team to reach out directly to theaters to release her film, which means she was able to keep a large percentage of the profits. The Arras tour and the movie have been so successful that they have boosted her into the billionaire category, which is a rare feat for a recording artist, especially

one who has done so without a side hustle like a makeup line or a recording company. But part of the reason for her big valuation is the premium she places on herself. When her masters were sold without her permission, she had to, as she would say, rise from the dead, but she does it all the time. And she made sure in her future contracts she would own the rights to her work. That is what she's done with this movie, the current catalog, and re-releasing her old music. And that's something we can all duplicate in our own lives. Make sure you retain as much control as possible over your work, your assets, and your intellectual property. And wherever possible, negotiate directly with interested parties to get the best value for your work. In other celebrity financial news, the trial of SBF, Sam Bengben-Fried has heated up with the former CEO of FTX taking the stand

in his own defense. His defense seems to be that he is sort of a hapless nerd and he didn't mean for all of these terrible things to happen, which for him isn't a totally bad strategy. A big part of his brand was that he was a shambling man-child who didn't know how to tie a tie. Making the jump to being a shambling man-child who also couldn't do accounting isn't a huge leap in terms of branding. He has, though, cut his iconic Einstein-esque hair and is facing serious questioning from U.S. Assistant Attorney Danielle Sassoon. She was a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Scalia who taught her how to shoot a rifle, which is not relevant to the case about crypto, but since learning this fact, I felt very compelled to share it with you.

What is relevant is that any time you see a business growing in a way that does not make sense or doesn't look like anything else, it needs to be looked at as closely as possible before you invest in it. It could be the next big thing or it could be the next big scam. Now, if you remember, the whole FTX downfall was kicked off by a couple of tweets. And early this week, two big chunks of information about X and Elon Musk broke. The first is that Musk and the internal team at the company formerly known as Twitter placed the current value of the entire company at $19 billion, which is still a fortune. However, it is far less than the $44 billion Musk paid for it. While it is true that Musk has been actively changing the brand in ways that affect its profitability,

it's also true that he overpaid for it in the first place. The other new information is that Musk is moving forward with his Everything app, Plans for X, and he wants it to become a financial entity. He's thinking really big here. Recently released recordings from an all-hands call have Musk making it clear that he's thinking bigger than just a Venmo competitor. He even stated, quote, when I say payments, I actually mean someone's entire financial life. If it involves money, it will be on our platform. Money or securities or whatever. Or it's not just like send $20 to my friend. I'm talking about like you won't need a

bank account. End quote. That is a direct quote. It does seem like for $44 billion, Musk could have just designed an app that did that and skipped the whole part where he bought a social media company and then turned it into an online bank. Musk probably thinks so too, since he's spent months trying to back out of the deal to buy Twitter. This may be him doing the best he can with a company he didn't want in the first place. Much of Musk's worth is tied up with his companies, including Tesla, so much so that he lost $41 billion off his net worth as Tesla shares reach a five-month low point. Tesla isn't the only car company, though, on the struggle bus. The car industry has been in turmoil this fall, with the

United Auto Workers Union striking to get better pay. The union and the automotive industry have reached a tentative deal to end the strike. So far, there have been minimal disruptions in the supply of vehicles, but it does appear that as a result of the strike, the car companies involved, including General Motors and Ford, will have to raise their prices to stay competitive. The success of this deal has also emboldened the union to begin organizing at companies that have so far resisted their efforts, companies like Tesla. This time of year isn't just about frights and eating too much candy. It is also about earnings season, a time when companies announce how they've done in the last quarter. This week, we'll see numbers dropping from everyone from McDonald's

to Pinterest to Eli Lilly. The week started off in the black with investors responding well to the generally strong earnings numbers. This afternoon, there will be an announcement from the Federal Reserve Bank about their plans for interest rates. It's widely expected that they keep rates the same, which should help keep the market steady. Turning now to Israel. The early part of the week saw Israeli troops entering Gaza and a spike in anti-Semitic attacks around the world. The most egregious was the surrounding of a plane in Russia that was flying in from Israel with a mob jumping on the wings and even going so far as to search people in the airport for Israeli passports. But even here in the United States, it's not safe. Jewish student groups at

Columbia and Cornell were attacked with graphic threats of violence that included the address of Jewish groups on campus. Behind the scenes in the Middle East, the head of the Mossad, Israel's intelligence organization, visited Qatar as part of an ongoing negotiation to free the more than 200 men, women, and children still being held hostage by Hamas almost a month after they were first abducted. Bringing home loved ones and reuniting them with their families remains central to Israel's mission in Gaza. For today's tip, you can take straight to the bank. In the intro to this episode, I spoke about ancestry and lineage. Some of my earliest struggles with debt were a result of my bad money habits that I learned as a child.

So I would encourage you to take a moment to identify what things your family consciously or unconsciously taught you about money that are holding you back right now. Maybe you were taught to never talk about money or that only rich people invested, so it's not for you. Just identify one bad money habit or fear that your family taught you and figure out a plan to eradicate it yourself. Money Rehab is a production of Money News Network. I'm your host, Nicole Lappin. Money Rehab's executive producer is Morgan Lavoie. Our researcher is Emily Holmes. Do you need some money rehab? And let's be honest, we all do. So email us your money questions, moneyrehab at moneynewsnetwork.com to potentially have your questions answered on the show or even have a one-on-one intervention with me. And follow us on Instagram at Money News and TikTok at Money News Network for exclusive

video content. And lastly, thank you. No, seriously, thank you. Thank you for listening and for investing in yourself, which is the most important investment you can make.