More Money Podcast - The Queer Guide to Financial Freedom - Author of Money Proud and Finance Columnist for Out Magazine, Nick Wolny

Episode Date: November 19, 2025

Did you know that the LGBTQ wage gap means that queer people earn 90 cents on the dollar, with trans women earning 60 cents on the dollar? If you didn’t, that’s because the unique financial obstacles faced by the LGBTQ community rarely gets the attention they deserve. To bring more awareness to it, I’ve invited Nick Wolny on the podcast to speak about it. He’s a finance columnist for Out Magazine and the author of Money Proud: The Queer Guide to Generate Wealth, Slay Debt, and Build Good Habits to Secure Your Future.In this episode, Nick shares the systemic barriers many queer people face every day to build wealth, how the AIDS epidemic had a big impact on long-term financial planning in the community, and what we all can do as allies to make things more equitable in the future.For full episode show notes, visit jessicamoorhouse.com/444Follow meInstagram @jessicaimoorhouseThreads @jessicaimoorhouseTikTok @jessicaimoorhouseFacebook @jessicaimoorhouseYouTube @jessicamoorhouseLinkedIn - Jessica MoorhouseFinancial resourcesMy websiteMy bestselling book Everything but MoneyFree resource libraryBudget spreadsheetWealth Building Blueprint for Canadians course Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lou Lou, and welcome back to the more money podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Morehouse, and I'm so excited to share this episode with my next guest. I'm not joking halfway through recording. I was like, pat yourself on the back, Jessica, because this is a damn good episode. And I don't say that with all episodes. I've got Nick Wolney on the show. He's a speaker and finance columnist at Out Magazine and the author of his first book, Money Proud, The Queer Guide to Generate Wealth, Slay Debt. and build good habits to secure your future, which comes out December 30th, so make sure to go and pre-order it now. He also has a great email newsletter you can subscribe to you called Financiallicious, which you can find at nick woolney.com. Now, as you might guess, we are talking about money from the vantage point of the LGBTQ plus community, because they are often a segment of the population that just isn't talked about in the personal finance community, and we really need to. And as you'll find in this episode, part of it is because the data, just was not being collected, but it is now, there is data, and we need to put a spotlight on

the unique financial obstacles and life experiences the queer community faces and what they can do practically and behaviorally to achieve financial freedom and what we can do as allies to make things more equitable for everyone. Now, I know you're going to love this episode, so I'm going to stop talking. Let's get to that episode with Nick. Welcome Nick to the More Money podcast, so excited to have you on the show. Welcome. Thanks for having me. It's great. to be here. You're so welcome. So I'm very excited to have you on the show because I feel like this is a very important topic that, um, sadly I feel like when I was writing my book, I wanted to, you know, talk about money and the queer community because I think it's really important and doesn't get enough,

you know, limelight and doesn't get talked about. And it's a very important, um, aspect of, of personal finance in general. But, uh, there's only so much, there's just not enough room in all the, you know, all of the books. Um, there just wasn't, um, the kind of space. Um, there just wasn't, um, the kind of space. So I'm so glad that you have a whole book that's really through that lens, which I think is really important because as someone who's been in this space for over a decade, the most important thing I find is for more voices to be out there. So you as someone who wants to learn more about money can find someone who's really speaking to you in your experience. So so excited that your book, Money Proud, is coming out to kind of kick things off. Tell me, you know, it's in your

inter, but I really appreciated how you shared your journey and just how you weren't always, you know, perfect with money. It was a journey, a personal journey for yourself and you made a lot of mistakes along the way, which I think should give people some hope for themselves, being like, okay, great, we all start from somewhere and we can make mistakes and we can still move forward and we can fix those mistakes and make different choices. Tell me a little bit about how things got started from you, because you didn't always start in the personal finance world. You kind of did a bunch of different things to kind of land where you are today. Yeah, I stumbled into personal finance journalism. Before that, I stumbled into self-employment, like many people. You know, I became an online business owner. I became an online entrepreneur partially because my current work situation at the time was untenable. Prior to that, you know, I went to college for classical French horn. So talk about a niche. You know, I think there's a lot of talk about the usefulness of a college degree these days. You know, that's a career field where.

where a job only opens up when someone retires or dies. There are not more orchestras necessarily being created. So I needed to be nimble for a while all throughout my 20s and 30s anyway. And I think that's the lived experience for a lot of people in their 20s and 30s. And also even just throughout our lives, as the economy changes, as things evolve, there are strategies with online marketing and whatnot, as I'm sure you know, that worked like gangbusters 10 years ago that are completely antiquated now and they just don't work at all anymore. And so I think a lot of people, you know, I just wanted to share something

that I felt like was not as common in the personal finance authorship, which is that I didn't have a great upbringing regarding money and I was not good with money. And I, you know, my parents did not teach me anything about money growing up, and I just kind of had to learn along the way and learned it probably a bit later than I would have liked, and so that even that catch-22 of scrimping and saving, but then also not knowing much about how to save and invest money, so really not getting very far for being so clamped down and budgeting so tightly. So I just wanted to open the book with sharing that and creating a feeling of relatedness, even for people who are good with money, kind of experience.

Like, this is very much a behavioral finance book, right? This is a 101. This is a personality first book. I am slinging these gay jokes left and right in this book, you know, because it is a much, I'm aiming for a much broader appeal and trying to meet that new audience with something familiar in order to guide them towards something that's maybe less familiar, which is the nuts and bolts of personal finance. So yeah, I just kind of led with that. And I was like, well, you know, if people don't like that I wasn't good with money at one point in my life, then, you know, this might not be

the book for them. But yeah. No, well, I think most people will like that because most people, yeah, don't have like a head start. Don't learn about this when they're growing up and learn about it in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, you know, it just, it depends on kind of what happens in their lives. And I think what's really nice about your voice especially is, it's very relatable. There's no shame. You really do talk about the things that surround money and not just the money aspect, because, you know, as we all know, like the information's out there. You've been writing about this, you know, for a long time.

But there's a lot of things that are kind of left unsaid that are kind of like, well, that might actually be the difference of you actually taking action. or making a big lifelong change in your financial life. So, you know, first I wanted to kind of talk a little bit more specifically. You did talk about, you know, some really important aspects such as, you know, we need to acknowledge that, you know, it isn't equal for everybody. There are, you know, there is a big pay gap between people, you know, in the queer community and not. And no one's really talking about. We talk about the gender pay gap, but we don't really talk about that other pay gap, which is, you know, that makes a big difference. It's easier to build

wealth when you're earning more money. And it's harder to build wealth when you're not in, you're earning 60 cents on the dollar or 80 cents on the dollar. Do you want to kind of speak to some of the kind of maybe unspoken, you know, issues that people in the queer community face with their finances that don't really get the media attention or attention on social media because maybe people think it's too niche or it's not, you know, oh, well, this has nothing to do with me, but actually it affects everybody. Yeah. Well, I'm glad you spoke to it. earlier regarding just data about LGBTQ plus people and how that, you know, it seems harder to find.

It feels like it's a more shallow set of data. You know, in the U.S., queer people are largely not measured in the census, and whereas race and gender are measured in the census on a regular basis. And so just as a result of that, there's more robust data sets, there's more comparisons that are more easily able to be made and, as such, inform policy and whatnot. And so a few years ago, I met the editor-in-chief of Out Magazine here in Los Angeles, and I don't remember who pitched who, but we were like, we should do a finance column. We should do it.

Let's try it. And that process, the last few years now, has helped me discover a lot of the more private data sets that have been filling gaps in the last 20 or 30 years regarding LGBTQ people when it comes to how much money they're making, how they are saving, where they are not saving. The data sets often are privatized. They're often segmented and separated, and so you have to scavenge a bit here and there. It's a lot of nonprofit work. It's a lot of grant work.

The LGBTQ wage gap data point that I like is from the Human Rights Campaign from 2021. And the top line is that it is 90 cents on the dollar, but it varies widely for race and you know so for for Asian men for example it's it's a dollar flat for trans women it's 60 cents and so as you do all these different cross sections for people based on you know even within queer people based on whether they are cisgender or transgender um you know male or female and then race there are actually many different striations to that number so I don't love that number just a flat line it's 90 cents on the dollar it is very much about people's intersectional identity and how that ends up shaking out yeah yeah and why do you think that's so

important for people to really understand these numbers again like most people have no idea I certainly didn't know it was 60 cents on the dollar for for trans people because that's huge that's a big gap that is going to take you so much longer to get to the same place as like a cis white man basically and so why do you think it's so important that we need to acknowledge and talk about this, especially within like the personal finance community. Well, a lot of it is that some of our systems are set up as though queer people don't exist. One example, speaking to trans women, for example, or trans men, is in the job application process, if your paperwork, you know, your paperwork that indicates

your gender, if it's not aligned, then that's going to come up in a background check. And, you know, that is sort of an outing of a trans person that they may not have wanted to disclose in a job interview for fear of discrimination. And rightfully so, because we've got a long history as queer people of being discriminated against. That's kind of one of the reasons that Gabra Hoods really took off in the 1960s and 1970s is that queer people couldn't get jobs anywhere else because they were discriminated against. And so they would basically develop their own communities as a result. old. And so that longstanding history of discrimination combined with other factors to, you know, when it comes to homeless youth, 40% of homeless youth are LGBTQ. So that narrative of queer kids getting kicked out of the house for, you know, for coming out of the closet. That is definitely

still a thing in 2025 and beyond. And some of those other factors. I think it just helps people make, it helps make people aware of that lived queer experience. Because it is this more subtle nuanced thing, right? You can't really hide your gender. You can't really hide your race. But it invites the desire to pass or the desire to not necessarily disclose your sexuality or your gender identity for fear of discrimination in the workplace. And those things have a trickle-down effect that shows up in our earning potential.

The term for it in corporate America anyway is lavender ceiling asking the question of, you know, why aren't there more gay executives, queer executives? You know, we've got a couple at the top. We've got Tim Cook at Apple. We've got a couple of others. But largely, it's a similar conversation to, you know, why don't we have more female Fortune 500 CEOs? Why don't we have more, you know, black and brown people in those absolute top positions? And so it's looking at all of those different aspects.

Some of it's also self-inflicted. And that's why a lot of this book focused on behavioral finance, there are some studies. regarding queer people's adoption of things like retirement accounts and investing accounts. And it's a pretty wide gap. Investing accounts, for example, 13% from queer people compared to 56% for the general population, that's more than a little in terms of that difference. And I think that speaks to our identity and our culture. And sadly, an aspect of our culture is that sometimes we don't feel like we're going to be around

to live these long, happy lives. We have the HIV epidemic that just sort of put this cloud of mortality around a lot of queer culture and still persist today. And so what has sort of come out of that, and I think also just the general queer cultural sentiment to be really out and proud and expressive is a little bit more of a yolo energy and to spend it now and not worry about saving it for later across that bridge when you get there. And so I think the exploration of how do you do both is what is most interesting and what is the thesis of this book anyway. But I think many personal finance books as well, because if you clamp down too tight, even if you're very successful on paper numerically, you know, you look at your life and it's like, okay, where's the wealth and those other things?

domains of your life as well. Like you've stacked the cash, but at what cost? You have no personality, you know, so let's work on that. And so looking for that more holistic definition of wealth, I think, is one of the goals there. And just encouraging queer people now that we are being measured in things like this, and we can actually point to it objectively to encourage one another and allies as well to talk about it more and to destitute. stigmatize it and to encourage it because we are living long, happy, healthy lives,

you know, just like everyone else. Yeah, no, that part in your book really stuck out to me because I'd never really thought about it that way where a lot of people in the queer community may not plan for the future because they just never thought they could. And in the past, they couldn't. And I think that's such a like, wow, I can't, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. But I'm curious actually just from, you know, from the stability, like, I guess part of it comes from like there's been always a lack of stability because of, you know, politics and

things like that, where you just don't know where you stand or whether, you know, is this a safe place for me to continue to live? So why am I going to buy a house here when I may have to move states or move up to Canada or something like that? I'm, yeah, curious, like, especially just over the past, let's say, decade. It's been a roller coaster of a 10 years. How has this impact of the queer community in terms of like how they think about future planning, you know, because it does seem like how can we set roots when it seems like any year the rules can change for us and we may not have access to this or it may not be safe for us to live here. One is being aware of how those changes can affect someone, right, how those state laws and

local laws are changing and helping queer people be more aware of those things, like developing media literacy in terms of our own community. I think also something that's happening that's quite exciting, in my opinion, is that queer identification has picked up a lot in the last 15 years, and I believe that is the result of just lots of groundwork having been laid for destigmatization. The analogy I use when I speak is a left-handedness. So in the early 20th century, left-handedness was like one or two percent, you know, because we were like, oh, it's witchcraft.

left. You know, there was a... I'm a left hand. I'm a lefty. I'm a lefty too. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, so, okay, so we have to vibe on this for like two minutes. Yeah, I mean we liked each other for a reason. Yeah. So it was, you know, at its, um, at the bottom, it was like one or two percent in the early 20th century. And then the science came out. They were like, oops, it's genetic. And then what you see, it's a pretty, it's a pretty remarkable graph is that over the next 20 to 30 years, you see left-handedness steadily rise up to where it is now, plastic. towing at about 10%. And it's like, okay, well, there aren't more left-handed babies being born. So what else is, what's actually happening here? And it's just that people who were left-handed didn't force themselves to become right-handed or weren't, you know, abused for having variety with their left-hand or burned at the stake. That was more 1800s.

And before that. But that did happen, right, because it was associated with witchcraft. And so that steady destigmatization, as people came out in a sense, to be like, oh, yeah, I'm left-handed. Something similar is happening now with queer people, and one of the best data sets we have for it is the Gallup poll. And this poll, there's an LGBTQ identification poll. It was first done in 2012. It's been done almost every year since then. In 2012, LGBTQ identification in the U.S. was 3.5%. And in this most recent one, for 2024, it was 9.3%. And there are two main drivers to that. One is that young people, millennials, and particularly Gen Z, are identifying as

queer in much higher numbers. So in that most recent one, millennials came in at 14%. Yeah, yes. And then Gen Z, 23%, which compared to this, you know, even just 10-ish years ago, you know, a 3.5% average number that just sounds absurd. And then the other piece, the other driver that I want people to know about is that a lot of that growth is coming from more people saying that they're bisexual. And bisexual people are far less likely to be out of the closet than homosexual people. And so the destigmatization of bisexual people in particular. And also I think there has been power in this word queer as it's vague in a way that I think people like, people who have a more fluid sexuality. I think they like that not being put in a box, you know, and just a lot.

it and get to be a little bit more relaxed with it. And so we're seeing this big increase, and I think it's really exciting to imagine a future where 20 or 30 years from now, that 10 to 20% number is the norm. You know, like when Gen Z gets into their 40s and 50s and they're identifying as 23% queer, you know, and so we're somewhere in that, similar to that left-handedness rise, where it went from 1 to 10% over a period of, you know, 30 to 40 years. I feel that there is something similar happening for LGBTQ people. It is unique from the other decades of our culture and our existence where we've kind of

cracked something where people are young people in particular, people under 40 are more comfortable saying openly that they're LGBTQ in some capacity. And so with that measurement comes opportunities for more measurement, opportunities to look at, you know, how do we handle mortgages? Where is there mortgage discrimination? And where is there, you know, where are there, you know, other aspects of discriminatory behavior? People are more interested in studying us, more interested in doing scholarly research on us. There was, mortgages came to mind because there was one study that came out that, on average, we'll get quoted a higher interest rate on the mortgage.

Mm-hmm. All of the, you know, and of course, the lender won't necessarily say they're discriminatory. Yeah, like, no, it's beginning. And you're like, well, compared to this other couple or whatever. It doesn't look quite right. to FICO and black and brown people. Where, you know, it's like, the numbers are lower. And they're like, no, it's not discriminatory.

And it's like, well, we test it again and again. Like, and the numbers are lower. And like, that is an objective statement, you know, so like, what's really going on here? So I think all of that is really exciting. And I think there's also the power that comes with just size and interest in measurement is very exciting and very powerful because it can influence policy. but it can also influence media, which I think it's absolutely done. The joke among all queer people when COVID-19 arrived was that there were no live sports, but there was like 50 seasons of drag race and Housewives reruns playing at once

as people were stuck at home. It was just like, yes, score one for us. We win. Right? But beyond that, jokes aside, I think it's also just the results of even just things like social media, you know, allowing people to find those more niche forms of information. that's not necessarily being sent to us through a middleman or things like that. We also saw big spikes in identification from 2020 to 2021 as everyone sat home for a year

thinking about their mortality and thought about who they really were in life and how they really wanted to live their life move forward. And sure enough, that also showed up in the Gallup poll, a 2% spike year over year in that overall average. I think just when people were able to sit with themselves. Many people who are queer were ready to live that lifestyle and not be afraid of what might come along with that because their authenticity is more important. And so I believe that courage is going to continue to push forward, even in the face of political headwinds, you know, and it has us paying a lot more attention to what's happening and where our rights might be being stripped. there is same-sex marriage conversation happening in the U.S. right now at the time of this recording,

you know, things like that. And there are a lot more people who are either on our side or in our corner paying attention to what is happening with that and amplifying that. And I think that that is a net positive for, you know, for queer people in terms of even just, you know, our well-being in the long run. Yeah. I mean, I just think back to like when I was in high school, which is now a long time ago and I'm not going to say how long a long time ago and it is amazing just to see the transition like when I was in high school we actually were pretty um liberal and pretty open we did have like a group for LGBTQ called glow gay lesbian or whatever oh I love it yeah I know they were yeah they were like a half the times they really were actually and we were you know

it was a very supportive high school actually um in general for for that time back in like you know 2003, 2002, whatever. But still then you kind of get out of that little unit, then you go to university, and then you're like, oh, okay, there's still a lot of work to be done. So it's really nice for me, especially, you know, I've got family members, I've got friends who were in that community that, you know, it is becoming, it's getting better. It's getting better compared to, say, like, 100 years ago. But there's still such a long road ahead of us to really make things equitable and I love in your book that you know acknowledge these things and then talk about okay like what can we do there's a lot that is beyond our control and there's only so much we can

do as advocates for ourselves and our allies can do so what can we do moving forward and part of the solution is we need to build wealth because people listen when you have power and money and so we need that power and money so we need to get it so I love to how you really break things down I love that the seven word plan I'm like this is just a great way to explain it because I'm like, oh, yeah, I'm always, yeah, it's basically three things. Lower your expenses, increase earnings, invest the difference. How did you kind of come to this like really nice, easy phrase for everyone just to remember of like, these are the core essential things to build well. So we, again, we can kind of keep on moving forward and make sure everyone has, you know,

what they need. You know, yeah, where did you come up with that? I really loved that. It's just seven word plan. You can easily remember it forever, easily tell a friend. Yeah, yeah, a few years ago. So I worked as a finance editor for a brand called NextAdvisor. It was a partnership with time. It was fabulous. It eventually got shut down, as the partnership ended. But I was hired on that brand to launch a vertical called Financial Independence. And it focused on things like fire, creator economy, side hustles, you know, just most of the other verticals and most verticals in personal finance media in general.

talk about what to do with money when you have it, right? Yeah, exactly. You know, you're going to have a banking vertical. Of course, you're going to have a credit cards vertical because you can commission off of those new card opening, all that stuff, right? It's just the business of finance media is pretty cut and dry on that. And so they're like, you know, we've got all these kind of dialed in, but there's just, there's all this other energy happening, particularly with, you know, with side hustle territory.

And this was also 2021, 2022 when inflation was kind of routing everyone. And so we saw a side hustle adoption going up in surveys. And so I was hired to launch this, basically launch a vertical about fire, which was quite a niche white male Silicon Valley Reddit thing predominantly, right? And so to look at that, to socialize about that, and to just kind of bring it to people's attention what it was. And also to take something that is niche and middle class, upper middle class like that concept and democratize it for you know to make it appeal to a wide

audience back when i was a consultant what i liked to say was business's niche media is broad right with business you're trying to be very very specific you've got your little avatar you know janey she's 37 she drives a camera you know what i mean you're doing that whole you know target avatar thing um and with media So much of media is about broad appeal, broad adoption, you know, service journalism even. You know, how are we going to take this financial information and make it very, very easy to absorb so that someone with a fourth grade reading level can get through the entire article at a time when no one reads anything anymore ever, right? And so simplification is a big part of the job.

And it's like, all right, how are we going to explain fire number and all of the inflation run around that, you know, happens when you try to calculate those numbers and and package it in a way that, you know, the person making $50,000 a year or someone who's got three kids and they have to commute an hour each way on the train every day, you know, like how do we make this palatable and how do we kind of get people behind the idea of it? And much of the idea behind fire, much of the actual effort behind fire is about that seven-word plan, right? It's about doing the basics consistently and not being overly dramatic about it. I don't know about you, but the number one question I get asked from queer people is, what do you think of crypto?

And I'm just like, oh, God. That's my answer. And I'll counter with, well, what else do you have going on? Okay. You know, like, let's go back to the basics. Like, let's just go back to the yeah should we really start with crypto work on the basics you know but i can also understand where they and other people are coming from because yeah the the drama of that is what gets eyeballs we know that from media right we know that from various uh various temperatures of clickbait and just even the even the business of media i mean not so much now but when it was very much a traffic game you know in those peak buzzfeed days uh and you know what i mean it's It's just, it works in that it appeals to people.

It's being talked about. I think I say in the book, when I explain cryptocurrency, just like a quick little primer on it, it's like it's hard to wrap your head around because it's very overhyped and it's usually by extremely annoying people who are hyping it. And so there's the concept itself

and then there's the people, they're just kind of their vibe, just adding inertia to all of it. And so I think that, But guiding, my strategy with this book was charming people into getting excited about the basics again. And starting with that behavioral piece, the whole first part of the book, the first three chapters, are very focused on behavioral finance, really blending, you know, things like journaling and self-inquiry. This book's going to live in the self-help section of the bookstore. And when Harper Collins distinguished that early on in the book deal, I was like, oh, thank you for saying that so that I don't try to write a textbook or try to do what I'm doing in my media thing.

But I actually have this be a little bit more personality first and come to the conclusion that probably a lot of what's going on in your life financially is the result of your decisions, your thoughts, your thought patterns. And yes, that's not to diminish what's happening externally than all of the spooky things that come up with late stage capitalism and whatnot and politics and et cetera, et cetera. I'm not diminishing or diminuting any of those. But some of y'all haven't looked at your bank account in three weeks. And so I need you to do that. You know, I need you to don't worry about going to Mekanos, you know, to show off the speedo. it's okay you could go you could just go to the beach down the street and so kind of just guiding people

toward the getting excited about the basics again and then going into the process of like all right here's everything you need to know like okay we're we're going to do a budget now I want to make sure that you you create a budget that is sustainable um the budgeting exercise I call it the bedazzled budget um I'm a gay in marketing I have to come up with a fancy name for anything that's why I love to blow uh yeah there's like Yes, I would have totally joined that. It was a great name. I graduated no five. So I would have absolutely, my sophomore self would have absolutely joined that. But yeah, and it's just, it's line item in a budget, but doing some journaling with those expenses. So when you're looking through your past expenses, just being honest with yourself on like, okay, why did I spend money on this? Was it like an impulsive thing? Or is it actually something that adds a lot of value to my life? And for some people, like some of their expenses do add a lot of value to their life, even though. for larger expenses. And so if you can make it work and you enjoy doing that, then maybe you should actually spend more on that thing. So you can have more of that joy. We talk about

queer joy a lot. And I think that's just true for everyone in general. You want to make your budget diligent but also comfortable so that you're enjoying yourself because that's actually going to be one of the most important pieces of the puzzle in creating that sustainability that you're going to need to start building wealth over time. Yeah. And I actually really love that you focus so much on the behavior, the mindset aspect. I know you also talk about trauma, which I love because I talk about that in my book as well. And I'm loving seeing more people talk about the connection. Do you want to kind of speak to why that might be an element that most people wouldn't expect to read in a, you know, kind of money-focused book and why it's so essential to really, yeah,

get to know yourself and what happened to you and how that may, you know, have some answers for where you're at financially now and how you can kind of move forward with that better understanding. Yeah, a lot of those behaviors that end up being destructive for our money, as we both know, things like avoidance, numbing. And often that the origin point of that involves mental health regarding queer people and mental health. I believe the statistics is 40% of LGPTQ people report having a mental health disorder or illness. Yeah. And a factor to that is chronic stress.

Chronic stress changes the brain, you know. And so for anyone who's a minority in any capacity, you have minority stress anyway. I think I introduced that in the introduction because it's like, okay, this is actually one of the first things we need to talk about right now. Like, you're stressed. Here's why you're stressed, but here's how stress shows up. So if you're a tight stress ball through all of this, like we actually have. to learn where that's coming from and how to track it and how to unwind it and things you

can do to unwind it because otherwise it's going to be it's just going to be this brick wall that you're trying to push through and so the chronic stress it changes the brain over time like it's it's well documented that it does change the brain it can increase susceptibility to developing mental health disorder and as a result of that you know your your ability to regulate your behavior is going to become diminished, and quite a lot of what we're trying to do here to help you be financially secure and financially stable involves regulation of behavior in a sustainable way. So, you know, that is one of the first things to address. And, you know, I'm not a mental health professional. I don't claim to be one. But it's, I like how it has

become much more of a just a mainstream conversation. Yes. I will be at work and someone will be like, okay, you got to pop out for a long lunch today because I'm going to therapy. And I'm like, I just feel like that would not have been the Slack message 20 years ago, you know? No. Right?

It would have been like referral to HR 20 years ago, if you had said that. You know, can they do their job? And now it's working on your mental health is seen as, it's not even just seen. Like working on yourself. Yeah, exactly. Like making sure that you're in good health in general, right? Just talking about your health generally. And so I really, really appreciate that.

I like that that is more in our mainstream conversation. And yeah, and I think that that is, you know, that's a factor that I wanted to touch on with LGBTQ people in this book a lot because it is something that we experience. and it is often the thing that comes up as the reason not to work on money. You know, it's just like, well, I've just too overwhelmed or I've just got too much going on or just a kid, you know. So we actually do need to take care of some of that stuff first or to take care of it in tandem with some of this initial financial information. The other thing I talk about in the book is that if you're really stressed out all the time, you're not going to have the mental faculty to, learn or to absorb information. And we actually need you in that spot, ready to absorb information. You know, we need you to put down TikTok for 10 seconds so that you, you know,

and read three sentences in a row without stopping, because that's actually how you're going to acquire some of the most important information. You know, I say that in jest. I'm not calling anyone's dumb or stupid for using social media a lot. But as our media landscape has become more video and more short form and more, I think our media literacy has gone down. probably would be accurate to say that generally. You know, when there's valuable information in finance, but people have to sit in one place and spend some time absorbing it and internalizing it.

And if they're pulled in 10 different directions by the various other stimuli in their life, then they're actually not going to be able to do that. You know, well, we really need to land the plane with compound interest. We need to really land the plane with the automatic investments in the Roth, things like that. And that requires me maintaining your attention long enough. That's sort of the task that we are, or that's the thing that we are tasked with. The objective that we are tasked with is to deliver a level of engagement and a level of

quality that encourages people to slow down a little bit and pay attention and really absorb information. And I'm trying to do that personally with cryptocurrency and with some of these other, you know, just kind of technologies and then and things like, even SPACs and, you know, all this other stuff that's sort of like influencing our world of money and resisting the urge to just like completely write it off because I can't stand the person who is talking about it in that given moment, you know, but like to kind of, you know, fly up to 30,000 feet and just figure out like, okay, what is this, where is this? What, you know, where was crypto in 2018 compared to where it is now? What has gotten better? What has gotten worse? How is this sort of influencing, you know, and not even with crypto. I'm using that example a lot, but even look at things like meme stocks or even look at, you know,

at the time of this recording, you know, in the U.S., the S&P 500, is being very much driven by tech and very much driven by AI. I saw a number the other day that I think it's 20% of the market cap is only three companies. Microsoft, Apple, and Navidia, the three of them together, it's 20% of the market cap of the whole S&P 500, which is the 500 largest companies, right? So no matter what your opinion is of tech, we are imbalanced in that, you know,

and so I'm trying to take my own advice and, you know, get myself into that space where I don't have this fixed, you know, that I don't conclude too early what is true or what is not true about a given aspect of money. And I think that's something that we can all take on, regardless of where we are in our own personal finance journeys. And that's long term that is, you know, being that curious learner, it is going to, you know,

help you get a leg up in a number of ways. And you'll probably not be in this state of malaise and numbing out and things like that in the long run. Yeah. Sometimes I think about it was a lot easier to learn about these things, like anything with personal finance, because before, especially short form content, because you had to pay attention. You had to read the blog post. You had to read the article. You had to listen to the, or watch the 20 minute YouTube video. And now everything is so much shorter, but there's no kind of, you know, detail, you know, there's a lot of details missing.

Or even just like before this recording, I was on Instagram and I saw this video that came up. this person was saying it was definitely like a hook, a little clickbaity thing, saying something that if you didn't watch the full video, you would take that information as truth, but it's actually false. But he was saying something without, then he was revealing, oh, well, what I meant was, da, da, da, da. And you're like, if someone just watched the first five seconds, they would have misinformation. And this happens every day all the time. And that is kind of the scary thing is when it's learning about anything, but especially money, it is slow. and it can be, but you need the details.

You can't just, you know, the stuff that I see on social media, it really does, like, drive me bonkers because it's so, um, it's, it's digestible, but it's, it's misses so many other things. You know, I see everyone all the time on social media being like, just buy an S&P 500 index fund. And that's it. That's the message. And you're like, okay, well, actually, let's zoom out.

Because you should probably own more than just America. If you're, if you have a portfolio, you should probably own the rest of the world and maybe some other asset classes, maybe some, bonds. But that will not get a, you know, the clicks. But that's the important message. It's like diversification. Right. Let's not forget. Yeah. And I think also this interesting and kind of scary media landscape that we're in right now that I think is, you know, one aspect of it is this move toward short form and things like that. And I think the move toward fact and opinion becoming increasingly blurred. Yeah. And just the thing, the algorithm.

algorithmic challenge that has always been a challenge was that engagement creates distribution. And so you're incentivized to create something engaging more so than something factual, per se. And then we also have artificial intelligence. We have generative AI, which is creating kind of like a whole new interesting category of things in that it's particularly, you know, initially, I think the glue on pizza debacle with Google, you know, was a good example where it's like it'll take factual information and curate it, like, incorrectly, you know, to where it's no longer factual. And so that's sort of those of us who have factual information. I experienced that personally. I have, you know, I have some

past blogs on things like pink money, which is, you know, queer purchasing power. That's the term for it. And to see in the AI generated summary, being cited in the AI generated summary, that is incorrect. You know, so my correct information is being curated incorrectly. And so I do think that in that landscape, encouraging people, you know, to, I like to say that people, people like if you give that, like, if you're going to be marketing to someone, you have to do inception. You have to convince someone it was their idea to care about media literacy or to care about journalism or factual information. And then once they care about like, you're set. But I think that there will be more of a push from us as authors and creation.

Or really, or just more of a call to action for us to lead with that information and, you know, to figure out how to navigate that landscape and to present our fact-driven journalistic reporting in these different platforms and in these different ways that can appeal to people and help them shake loose. You know, I posted on TikTok a few days ago. just a really plain English explainer. No music, nothing, just sitting at my desk. I'm just like, hey, well, here's what's going on with same-sex marriage. And it did well. And I got some DMs from people just being like, thanks for being kind of boring while you were, you know, sharing. It was actually, it was actually kind of refreshing to just, you know, to just get the plain, plain straight.

Oh, I actually do. I completely know what they mean because I actually love following people that just tell me like it is. not, I don't need all these whooshes and sound effects and graphics and whatever. I'm like, just tell me what you're trying to say. My goodness, there's too much going on. Yeah, the chip on my shoulder is, you know, I feel like on TikTok, there's, there must be some marketing advice going around somewhere that you've got to do something visual in the first one or two seconds in order to retain people, right? Like, someone somewhere has said that repeatedly for us to be where we are now at this point. And the chip on my shoulder I have about that is like, well, if you feel like

you have to do that. Like, is what you're saying actually, you know, is that actually valuable in the first place? 100%. Like, there's some really beautiful, like, Instagrams and TikToks I've seen creators make. And at the end of it, I'm like, wait, what did they actually say? I was just focused on the visuals and how lovely and all the things going on. But I have no idea what they were trying to say.

And you're like, well, that's not helpful. Yeah. Well, and I think we're departing a little bit from, I know we're getting into a little bit of just like online entrepreneurship 101. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like there's, we've become increasingly indexed, especially with young people, that like influencer or creator is like the only model if you want to make money on the internet.

Yeah. How we've just been steadily going more and more in that direction. And so you have people, you can see it on all of these apps. They're absolutely trying to get more followers. They're doing anything they can to get more followers. But they're not sure why. They're like, oh, okay, so I can get a brand deal. Okay. Well, like, what, brand what are you offering them what result like why is the brand going to give you money what are they going to get in return okay exposure okay uh like measure that in what measurement is though you know is that exposure and things like that and just kind of those nuts and bolts of what we would do in business anyway with things like data and value proposition and whatnot um and you know you'll meet

someone now who uh they don't know what it was like to market without social media you know I've always been quite cool, cool meaning cold, towards social media, you know, quite a chill in my veins about social media. I was just like, I just feel like it's a little bit too superficial for me. Right. And so, yeah, so that, you know, that was interesting, too, with the book deal because I don't have a billion, trillion, gazillion followers. And so I really had to, in the proposal, I had to make the case that. that the audience is there. Like, even if I have not curated them,

the audience is just naturally there. That's why this should be in every bookstore in America. And so I used my one-two punch that you've now all listened to, which is the left-handedness. The left-handedness jab into the Gallup pull hook is kind of my go-to for just asserting that there is, you know, this is a fairly large market there. But even for publishers, you know, that as you know, like for newer authors, They're like, okay, step one, go get 200,000 followers.

Yeah. And it's because for them, it's becoming their secondary or even their primary selling mechanism is to sell through that author's own audience to begin with. So to get around that, for anyone listening, it was doable. You know, they bought the book. They bought the book off the proposal. I don't have big audiences. But I feel like I have engaged people, you know.

I have people who want to hear what I have to say. And in this increasingly... Well, I mean, I'm one of those. people. Right? When I got, it was your publisher who reached out to see if you wanted to be on the show. I'm like, absolutely, this is such an important thing. And I, you know, I've had, been doing a show 10 years. I don't think I've ever had a guest that's talked about this specifically. But I know in the world and the people that I know in my life, this is something that they want to hear. And whether it's like you're in the queer community or you know someone who is, this is

something that should be shared and should be talked about. And again, we need more voices that represent the people that actually exists in the world, not just like a certain kind of archetype of a, this is the money expert. And that's what they look like. And this is what they sound like, it's like, no, we need everybody. Yeah. And to like focus on inventing new types of distribution and visibility as well. You know, the other, the other sort of factor that I grapple with and that a lot of queer artists and creatives grapple with is that LGBTQ information is often throttled on these different platforms. So if we are increasingly moving toward a landscape where, you know, the only path to a book deal or the only path to a show

or whatever is to get a Jillian followers, you know, then that threatens the future of queer art and literature being in the mainstream zeitgeist. So trying to champion the, you know, when I was self-employed, my background was marketing and messaging and packaging and things like that. So it was like a welcome challenge to like put the proposal together and assert why like me having X number of followers was not necessary for this to be effective. And, and I think that'll just continue to happen, especially as AI begins to eat everything and turn everything on its head and for a lot of people, the thing that they've done for years and years, you know, these AI bots are crawling around all over the place. We kind of have to reinvent. We have to get back to the OG stuff,

you know, which is like win-win-win relationships, writing for humans, not robots, you know, speaking to humans, not robots, you know, not speaking to algorithms, speaking to people. And just getting back to that, and fortunately, that return to discernment, I think, will have some spillover into some other areas of, you know, of personal finance, of learning about different demographics, things like that, you know, and that's the, you know, with this book, it's a personal finance book, but it's also introducing people to the world of LGBTQ data collection. Did you know there are all these organizations doing this stuff and that they're doing it

with grant money and they're doing it with other things like that because there's an absence of it from a federal government perspective, but there's still, there's all these organizations that you may not have even heard about so that go educate yourself on different organizations and organizations for other marginalized groups while you're at it and really sort of recast your information diet, so to speak, so that you feel like you're getting really good information rather than just what the algorithms are feeding to you. Absolutely. And I know like one, you know, great place obviously to get this information, like the slow information so we can actually digest it and understand it are books. And your book is incredible. And I know we just

touched the surface of what's in your book. So I really encourage everyone to grab a copy. Tell me where can people find your book? Where can people find you on the social platforms for maybe slower-paced information with facts and figures and research behind it? Where can people find you? Yeah, yeah. You can pick up a copy of Money Proud

where you'd normally pick up books. You know, your local bookstore, bookshop, Amazon. I recorded the audiobook last week, so I apologize if I'm a little horse. But that's great. So the audiobook will be part of the launch. So if you prefer audiobook, that's available now, and I read it. It's also available on Kindle.

I'm on social, just at Nick Wollney. And if you prefer, my main focus is a newsletter. So you can go to Nickwolley.com. You can sign up for that. My newsletter is called Financialicious. And it is, yeah, it's commentary and essays and some curating of important information around the internet. And it goes out approximately whenever I feel like. like it, which right now is, you know, a few times a month, but certainly after the book launch

is over, picks up to usually about a weekly cadence. So a great way to stay in the know. Yeah. Well, Nick, honestly, I'm really excited that you were on the show and excited for your book to come out. I think it's going to help a lot of people and just, yeah, expand people's minds and get to know money in a bit of a different way from a different lens. And I'm just grateful that you were able to spend some time with me. So thank you so much. Likewise. This was great. thanks. And that was my episode with Nick Woolney. Make sure to pre-order his book Money Proud comes out on December 30th. Tell everyone you know, it is a really great book. And when it does come out, I will be giving away a copy to a lucky listener. So you can enter to win this book

and other books that are featured on this season of the show by going to Jessicamorehouse.com slash contest. Also, don't forget to check out his website and newsletter at nickwulney.com and follow him on Instagram at Nick Woolney or just check out the show notes for this episode where I'll link all of his social platform so you can make sure to give him a follow and you can check the description for this episode for the link to the show notes or if you ever want to find the show notes for any episode just go to Jessicamorehouse.com slash podcast. Now speaking of books, I also have a book called Everything But Money that touches on some of the topics we kind of discussed in this episode that you may want to grab a copy yourself. Go to Jessicamorehouse.com for all the links and all the information you can think of, but it's available at every major book retailer, Amazon, bookshop.org, uh, indigo, wherever you like, and lots of indie bookstores, which I'm always for supporting. So make sure to grab a copy. And if you do grab a copy and you give my book a rating or review, again, information at jessicamorehouse.com slash book, but you can access a bunch of free book extras, um, including videos, audio, workshees, a bunch of great

stuff. So make sure to check all that information out at jessicmorehouse.com slash book. Now, tomorrow I'm going to be sharing another episode from the archives, another re-listen episode to celebrate 10 years of the more money podcast. So stick around tomorrow or come back tomorrow to check out that episode. But thank you so much for listening and joining me and see you back here next Wednesday for another special episode of the More Money podcast. The More Money Podcast would not be possible without the amazing talents of video editor, Justice Carrar, and podcast producer Matt Rightout, who you can find at MRAVCanada.com.