Morning Brew Daily - 'Money With Katie' Gives Personal Finance Tips

Episode Date: June 19, 2023

Episode 84: On this episode of Morning Brew Daily, Katie Gatti Tassin from 'Money With Katie' joins the show and reflects on her journey as a personal finance creator. She also shares her best personal finance advice with Neal and Toby. Her wisdom includes: How to pick a high-yield savings account Is it possible to be saving too much? What is the best credit card for you? Is it more important to invest or save? How to maximize your money Listen to Money With Katie Here: https://link.chtbl.com/XytSlKpN Watch Money With Katie Here: https://www.youtube.com/@MoneywithKatie Follow Katie on Social Media: @MoneyWithKatie Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here: https://link.chtbl.com/MBD Watch Morning Brew Daily Here: https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow Learn more about Juneteenth: Juneteenth: The History of a Holiday - New York Times Juneteenth: Why financial literacy needs to be part of the holiday celebration - CNBC How to properly celebrate Juneteenth in the age of commercialization - NPR Juneteenth and its implications for the economy and generational wealth - ABC Juneteenth, a Day for Celebration and Frustration - Bloomberg Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Good morning brew daily show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell. and Neil, today's show is another special holiday episode. Yep, just like Memorial Day last month, we pre-recorded an episode that is a little different from our standard MBD news rundown. We actually have a special guest coming on the show from the Morning Brew Universe. We won't spoil it yet, but we're super excited to have her.

But before we jump into the meat of the show, Neil, by the time people listen to today's episode, it'll be June 10th. It's one of the newer federal holidays, so Neil give us a quick rundown. of why we're all hopefully not working today. Happy to. So this is the newest federal holiday, only two years old now, that celebrates the end of slavery in the U.S. There's an interesting backstory here.

Many people associate the end of slavery with the Emancipation Proclamation that was issued in 1863. But even after that proclamation, slavery didn't just magically disappear overnight. It was a gradual process. Juneteenth began in Texas as a celebration of the day that 2,000 Union soldiers arrived in Galveston a full two years after the Emancipation Proclamation and announced to the more than 250,000 enslaved people in this state that they were free.

So that day was June 19th, and that's where we get June 10th. Right. And despite being celebrated in Texas since way back when, it is now celebrated in all 50 states. That's because President Biden signed legislation back in 2021, establishing Juneteenth as a federal holiday. Fun fact, it's now the 12th federal holiday. But Biden put pen to paper to bring Juneteenth National in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests around the murder of George Floyd. And the goal of the holiday is to not only celebrate African Americans and reflect on the history of slavery in the U.S. But it's also just a time for all Americans to learn about and kind of check in on the progress that has and hasn't been made toward racial equality

in the U.S. Of course, that's just a very brief overview of Juneteenth and its history. So we'll provide some links in the description to this podcast to learn more about the holiday and dive deeper if you want to. But I hope you all are having a wonderful day whenever and wherever you're listening to this episode from. Now, Neil, tell us a little bit more about this episode we have coming up. Sure.

So as we mentioned, today's episode will be a little different than the standard morning brew daily. each time we're off, we plan to bring you something different, enjoyable, and interesting to consume. Today, we are interviewing another hardworking contributor to the Bruneverse Money with Katie. Let's ride. Katie, welcome to the show. We are super pumped to have you. Neil and I are huge fans, and we cannot wait to introduce you to the Morning Brew Daily audience.

Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. No, we're super pumped as well. We just want to give everyone a quick rundown of what to expect from today's special episode. First, Neil and I are going to get into the Money with Katie origin story. Then we'll ask Katie a couple of personal finance question we've always wanted to know the answers to before wrapping up with a couple of questions we sourced from our listeners over the last week or so. That sound good to everyone involved?

I'm game. I don't have to answer anything so that this is a delight. All right. I'm up first, Katie. You have had a crazy life and a crazy career so far. Your personal finance influencer, your Instagram account has 177,000 followers. Your podcast gets hundreds of thousands of listens every week. But five years ago, you had none of those things. That's right. Can you take us through the journey of how Katie Gaddi became money with Katie? Sure. Yeah. So I started learning about personal finance about five years ago. Got really into.

it. But it wasn't until 2020, shortly after the pandemic began and sent us all inside, that I started Money WithKatie.com just as a project to keep me busy. And I found pretty quickly that it was really the only thing I had ever done in my life where I would look up from the desk eight hours later and find that eight hours had passed and be like, oh, I didn't even notice all that time has passed. So it felt very compulsive and it was really easy to stick to it for that reason. But I kind of decided at the outset I'm going to write two blog posts a week for one year. And if nothing happens after the end of that year, if no one's reading it except for my mom and my next door neighbor, then I'll reassess. I'll double down on my career in

tech and try to kind of let this go. But that's not what happened about, I would say eight months. in, things really started to pick up steam. And by the time a year was up, there were solid sponsorships underway. The Instagram account had been started and was already growing at a pretty healthy clip. And I think what is increasingly clear to me in retrospect, because this is not my first rodeo content-wise, is that I think the secret ingredient to quote-unquote making it is just being very earnestly obsessed with whatever it is you are creating content about. So we interviewed Thomas Frank a couple weeks ago for The Money with Katie Show. And he makes $140,000 per month selling Notion templates that are just complimented by his YouTube channel,

which is highly specific to Notion tutorials. And in that interview, he said, I tinker around with Notion hacks on Saturday mornings for fun. It's like what I do at 9 a.m. on a Saturday just because I want to. And that really resonated with me. I think I do the same thing, but with all things, money. So I think now that I'm where I am, I do think that it would be difficult otherwise to turn content creation into a career unless you are just that obsessed with the craft. You said this wasn't your first content rodeo?

What was your first? I had a personal blog that I started in 2015. when I was in college and I would just publish on it whenever just random musings. And I did that one for four years, like longer than I've been doing money with Katie and it went absolutely nowhere. So I do think that, you know, sometimes the first time you strike, it doesn't really pan out. But I definitely think that has been the main differentiator is that this time it was the subject matter itself was so intriguing to me. Speaking of the subject matter, you are intentionally very very, very important.

open about your finances, you share your purchases and your income publicly on social media, which sounds very freaky to me. Like, what are you trying to achieve? Like, what is your strategy behind this radical financial transparency? And maybe talk about what you've learned from, you know, opening the books publicly on the internet. Yeah. When I started writing about money, I was making a median salary and I was ravenously pursuing

financial independence, which meant that I was making a lot of very creative financial decisions to try to save as much money as possible, which really lent itself to content. And I think everything in that fire world, the financial independence, retire early world, is backwards. So having stuff is not a status symbol. Having a high save rate is a status symbol. And part of the culture in that personal finance and financial. financial independence community at the time.

I would say it still is the culture, but especially back then, was openly talking about your numbers, how much you are making, how much you are spending, and what you are spending on, how much you are managing to save, what you are investing in. That level of openness was just very much part of the peer group that I was in when I started, and I really believe in that, because I think transparency does help everybody make better choices. if you and I are both earning $50,000 per year, and I tell you that my car payment is $150. And then you go to the dealership and they try to tell you

that you can afford a $400 per month car payment. If you know someone else that makes the same amount as you that spends less than half that, you're probably going to be reasonably skeptical about what they are trying to sell you on. So I think that all in all, it is a very useful benchmarking tool when you share your numbers openly

and we witness that same type of transparency. in other hobbyist groups, people that are like bodybuilders. They're talking very openly about how many calories they're taking in, what their macros are, what they are trying to achieve weight-wise. And so when you add real numbers to things, I think it helps everybody. And it was a fun way to just stay accountable, but also to celebrate each milestone. That said, as my personal financial situation evolved, as I began earning more, as my net worth grew, it began to cross into the territory of,

in my mind not being as helpful anymore, as well as potentially a legal liability. So I have not shared specific numbers around how much I earn or how much I have in over a year, really at this point, but I still share what I spend from time to time where it feels relevant, as well as business milestones, because the business's revenue is not the same thing as my personal take. So I think that type of growth journey is interesting to people. And I've really tried to extend that culture of transparency in the areas where it still makes sense to do so and doesn't open me up to legal risk. It's a totally different world than the one we exist. I guess it's a good, good problem to have.

Like, you're succeeding. And so therefore, you have to change kind of your playbook a little bit. But yeah, thanks for sharing that with us. All right. So Toby and I are people just like anyone else who have to figure out. out there finances and while we don't disclose it publicly, we still want, we still have some things to ask you. Kind of, yeah, we're not going to get into specifics, but just selfishly, before we get

to our audience questions, Toby and I have a few questions of our own around like the current personal finance environment and topics that we're thinking about. And to me, the thing that comes to tops of mind is that we're living in this so-called like golden age of cash where interest rates have led to savings accounts like apples that advertise yields as high as four or five percent. So I have a two-part question around these kind of accounts. Are there any green or red or beige flags I should be looking at when choosing between these accounts, these high-yield savings accounts or CDs as well? And how much should I be putting in these high-yield savings accounts as a share of my overall investing portfolio or

savings. Yeah, this is one of those decisions where I think most people probably spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about it and thinking about whether or not they should switch for the size of the payoff. So to calculate the value of this choice, I think a quick exercise is kind of illustrative. So let's say you're going to put $20,000 in a high yield savings account that has a 4% yield and a 5% yield option comes along. So, okay, that's a higher number. Should I be trying to make moves, right? In one year, the difference between those two is going to be about $200 before taxes or

about $16 a month. Interest is taxed like income every year. So after taxes are taken out, you're looking at probably keeping about 75% of that net. So my point is that it's not really a decision that I would be losing sleepover. I think getting the bigger things right, like what is your save rate? What percentage of your income are you saving for the future? That's going to tell you quickly whether or not you are set to become financially independent at a timeline that you're happy with or your asset allocation, making sure that

you're not too cash heavy or to bond heavy in your 20s and your 30s when you're theoretically in a position where you can be a little bit more aggressive with your long term timelines. Like those types of things are going to have a much larger impact on your long-term financial picture than your high-yield savings account provider or how much that account is paying, whether it be 2% or 5%, you know, not that it's insignificant if the amount that you're saving is super significant, but just that it is, to me, a question that you don't want to, you want to make sure you're devoting the appropriate amount of energy to a question like this one. So the answer to the second part of it is I think it really depends on both your age and what that cash is

So if you're not saving for anything specific, you're just storing an emergency fund. These are just your cash reserves. Roughly, we'll call it six months worth of expenses that might skew a little bit lower if you're a renter and you have no dependence. It might skew a little bit higher if you're a homeowner who has children. But typically six months is about the benchmark. But holding much beyond that in cash typically creates a lot of opportunity costs in the form of foregone gains. So a 5% APY on an emergency fund is fantastic, but it's not going to be the best use of your capital that could be put to more productive use via investment in things like the stock market or real estate or a small business or something else. So in that sense, I think about it as less about

the percentage of your overall portfolio that's in cash or cash equivalent and more about what is the end game for this money? And if it's money that I'm going to use for a down payment in two years, great. Like if it's money that you're hoping to save for retirement, that's 30 years away, well, now cash is likely not the asset class that's going to make sense for you. That sound you hear is me furiously scribbling notes down in the background because every sentence you say is just dropping gems. Okay, this is my turn, my question now. Hit me. I have Googled this a million times, but I simply cannot stomach another nerd wallet or points guy listical. I know those those sites are great.

but what is your favorite credit card or credit cards? Is it one that you really like, or do you have a combo platter that you use? And I totally realize that this is subjective and different cards work better for different people. But I guess I just kind of want to hear what your favorites are and some recommendations from you. The Morningbrook corporate card.

The card that I'm not paying for. Yeah, no, that's a great answer. That's good. No, so my favorite credit card is probably the platinum card from American Express because of the customer service, the purchase protection, the extended warranty benefits. It's a very diverse set of benefits, but it does come with a pretty steep price tag. So I think unless you are a frequent traveler who likes to stay in nice places, it is probably

not worthwhile. Like that is the profile of the person. Like look at the benefits. Make sure you are traveling a lot. Make sure that you like the types of places that it's going to help you stay in more cheaply or is going to give you more benefits if you stay there. If you're like, no, no, no, I'm trying to travel once a year and stay in an Airbnb, this is probably not the credit card for you. But I am a big fan of this one. And if you're just beginning a credit card journey and you're interested in getting into travel rewards and points, I would probably go for the Chase Sapphire preferred card because it's going to grant you access to this very lucrative Chase Ultimate Rewards portal. And you're going to get a great sign-up bonus that's very lucrative, but it has a very

low annual fee, relatively speaking. I'm grinning because I have one of those. I was just remembering a few years ago, the reserve card had the most ridiculous reward sign up. And do you remember that? It was like 100,000. 100,000. Like everyone was getting this reserve card a few years ago.

And they've obviously paired that back. But I was just remembering the golden age of the reserve card. The golden age of credit. Before all the banks got wise to the churning and were like, wait a second. I think the 100,000 point sign-up bonuses on Chase are unfortunately behind us now, but I do think that, like, as far as maximizing points go, my system is a little bit of overkill. Like, I would not recommend people lose sleep or spend a lot of energy on this unless they are just genuinely interested in it and have fun with it, which is me. Like, I have a lot of fun trying to

like, okay, I'm going to put food on the MX gold and I'm going to put this on that card. That's not, it's overkill. But I do think that my general recommendation is, If you do not have a history of credit card debt or reckless spending, you are going to benefit from spending on a credit card, both in the form of whether you choose cash back or points. You're going to benefit from getting some of that back, but you're also going to get increased security and fraud prevention, which I think is something that we don't often talk about in the credit card conversation.

My identity was stolen a few years ago because someone was able to skim the number off my debit card at some point of sale system. And it created this massive. massive headache because they effectively were able to circumvent the fraud prevention department and took like $8,000 out of my checking account in a span of a few hours. So I did end up getting it all back, but it was not an experience. I would wish on anyone. And I think that when you spend on a credit card, you just have an extra line of defense between your checking account and any point of sale system, swipe or chip insertion that you're going to be having when you're spending that just

can give you a little bit of extra piece of mind too. That was much better than a nerd, at Lyskles. So I thank you for that answer. You're so welcome. My criteria is what's the heaviest? Oh, my God. What makes the biggest clank when you drop it on the table? You know what?

Probably platinum. Or you know what? The black card. I've never, I've never even, like, held a black card, but I bet those are pretty happy. They don't let me in the room where they sell that. Yeah.

Me neither. All right, Katie, thank you so much for answering our questions. Now we want to move on to some of the listener questions we received. And we were honestly blown away by how many emails we got. Like we kept refreshing the inbox and people love you already because a lot of people listen to your show and listen to ours. So great questions from everyone. We pulled a couple for the show today that we'll ask you in order to kind of get your take much like we just did with our questions.

I'm up first and this question is about emergency savings and it comes from Brian. And this is Brian talking now. My wife and I have saved up around 20,000 in our emergency savings, which is, equates to six months of expenses, and we are currently investing 15% into our respective 401ks. My question is when we have to dip into our emergency savings for unforeseen issues, like surgery for a dog, a broken dishwasher, etc. Should we decrease our investing percentage or even stop it all together to quickly build up our emergency savings to that $20,000 amount? Yeah, I think this question ultimately comes.

comes down to cash flow. But I want to start by saying having six months of expenses and a 15% save rate is excellent. So well done, Brian. But I think that the urgency with which you replenish an emergency fund is probably going to depend on how much of it you're using. So if you were to totally wipe it out, you probably would want to act with more urgency, reprioritize accordingly to get back up to that three month mark as quickly as possible.

But if you were to shave, say, a month's worth of experience. expenses off. I don't necessarily think that would necessitate stopping the presses on all of your investment contributions. Ideally, in a perfect world, you could find other areas to cut back with your spending to build back up the savings, but I think if things are tight, that it's not always possible. But those 401K contributions are so valuable every year from both a tax advantage standpoint, lowering your taxable income, and the fact that you cannot retroactively contribute for years passed. So that $22,500 limit is use it or lose it. And so I would be loathe to stop contributing to that to try to quickly reach another goal if you don't have to. But that's how I would think

about it. I would let new cash flow slowly replenish the savings, but just try to avoid completely stopping your dollar cost averaging into your investments. Cool. All right. So now we have a question from Nathan that comes on the opposite side of the savings spectrum. He writes, and I currently have a lot of saving avenues, but I often wonder if we're saving too much, as it's causing our monthly budget to be very tight and sometimes stretching us too thin. For context, we send monthly and weekly savings into a long-term savings account for major purchases down the line. We have a short-term savings account for things like a new phone or tires. We save for our kids' future college. And lastly, we have non-monthly savings that we treat

as a self-escro account and put money into it for things that all. aren't due every month like annual vet visits and property taxes. Our bills are always paid and were able to make ends meet, but I know that we'd have a lot more flexibility if we were saving less. So here's my question. Is it possible to save too much? I love this question because I think what I want to commend, what I want to commend Nathan for here is that he's never going to be surprised.

Like there is no expense that is ever going to take this man by surprise because he has thought it all out, tires, phone, insurance. Like, that's fantastic. I do have a question. Is this a over-the-top savings apparatus? Is this one of the more extreme examples that you've seen? I wouldn't say it's over the top or extreme. I just think what I really keyed into with this question, and maybe he just didn't mention this part, but he's mentioning saving. I'm not hearing him use the word investing. like he's talking about the long term in saving for purchases, but I'm not hearing talk about investing, which makes me wonder particularly for those long-term things,

are you literally just putting money in a savings account or are you putting that money to more productive use in the stock market? Because I think, for example, they're talking about a kid's college education. I think in the full question, the kid is not even, they don't have a child yet. Like if you're talking about saving for a kid's college education, that child has not even been born,

you're looking at a minimum 20-year timeline. Like in no world should that money be in a savings account. Like that would be a prime example, prime candidate for you want to be investing that money, putting it to more productive use. So that would be my first call-up. But I think the heart of the question, though, comes down to, am I prioritizing my future too much at the expense of my present?

And I think that is definitely possible. It's just not a personal finance question that we hear about very often because most people have the opposite problem where they're prioritizing the present. But when you're first starting out, you're trying to get a cash savings bill. Obviously sacrifices are going to be necessary. But I do think this is something that you have to constantly recalibrate, right? And before Nathan and his spouse start thinking about saving money for a kid's education 20 years from now, they probably want to check back in with those goals and, hey, are we on track for our own retirement?

Like there are no student loans for retirement. So let's make sure that the money we're saving is going to the high. highest and best use. And one thing that I think makes sense is pushing yourself to the point where it starts to hurt, where it starts to feel tight. Okay, now you know you've gone slightly too far. You can taper back. I tend to think that once you get a save rate beyond like 40%, you're hitting the point of diminishing returns because going from 10 to 15%. That's going to shave years off your working timeline. The jump from 40 to 45 is barely going to move the needle. The more you save, the less incremental savings are going to make an impact.

Okay, so Nathan, sounds like you put a great structure in place, and it might be time to wonder whether you can pull back a little bit. Scale back a little bit. But good job. Yes, but overall, incredible work. Your savings plans are so intricate and are laudable. Now let's zoom out a little bit to the big picture. We have a question from Shalia.

I've been hoping to learn more about the Fed interest. rates and how they affect people of different tax brackets. I never fully understood how it helps or hurt the economy. I know it's kind of a broad topic, but as a middle class working citizen, I'd love to learn more about how the Fed interest rates trickle down and impact me and my family as well as others. Yeah, super curious question. I love that. And I think this is one of those things where like, there's probably a satisfactory surface level answer that will keep things tactical. But I want to acknowledge that you could devolve into an incredibly complicated discussion about this because monetary policy is one of those things where there are a lot of smart people who disagree about what the short

and long-term effects of these things are. So to keep it in the tactical realm, I think it's generally accepted conventional wisdom that a higher interest rate tends to hurt consumers in a couple of ways. Anything that you need to borrow money to buy will now be more expensive because borrowing money is more expensive. So this in practice tends to just mean that you can afford less. And I think in times of high inflation, that is actually expressly the point. They want people spending less. So inflation will slow down more on that in a second. But you'll see higher interest rates on mortgages, auto loans, your variable rate debt, debt will become more expensive. But the flip side of that is the higher yields that we were talking about earlier. So savings accounts, bonds, in the low

interest rate environment of the last 10 or so years, there was the saying, Tina, which stood for there is no alternative. If you wanted yield, you had to take on risk, you had to invest in equities. Bond yields, rates on CDs, savings accounts, it was all very low. So in that sense, can be very helpful. It's also one of the only levers that the Fed can pull to address inflation, but it is an imperfect solution that, like, arguably is not the right approach in all instances. But, but, But it's a rock and a hard place for them because inflation typically hurts wage earners the most, whose incomes no longer are going to go as far, but don't benefit from the asset inflation that people in higher income brackets or who have higher net worths are going to benefit from

where their stocks and their homes are now worth more. So I think in general, the way to sum it up is just to say that higher interest rates tends to slow things down, also tends to slow down hiring, suppress wages. But again, all of that is kind of part of what the Fed is actually trying to engineer. And now we're starting to veer into the theoretical territory. So I'll stop there. Now, that was, you definitely hit on some of the practical things. And yeah, I mean, we talk about it on Morning Brew Daily all the time from a very macro level.

So that is a good kind of zoom in into how it is affecting people personally. Yeah, I think mortgage rates is where you can really see it tangibly play out. They were, you know, 3.5%. I'm sorry, I'm just making that up. but it was very low during the pandemic. And now they've, I think at one point recently hit over 7%, which equates to hundreds of dollars more that you're paying each month on your mortgage. So this can have real effects just from what the Fed is doing and its little DC bunker pulling the strings, can have real effect on your wallet.

Here is our final question, final audience question from Dom. As the first person in my family to own a home and achieve a six-figure, salary, what sorts of things should I start looking into to maximize my earnings and set good financial habits? I have an employee sponsored 401k and an HSA, but what are some other ways to reduce my taxable income? That's like a multi-part question. For sure. Yeah, well, first of all, congratulations, Dom, because those are huge accomplishments, and I hope you feel very proud of yourself, especially to be the first person in your family. That is like generationally incredibly significant, so well done. There are a couple of questions.

in there, like you said. So how do I maximize earnings? How do I create good financial habits? How do I reduce taxable income? And they mentioned the 401k and the HSA. So I think when it comes to a W-2 job, you are unfortunately fairly limited in ways that you can reduce taxable income. I would say the main ways are those two that you've highlighted already. The pre-tax investment accounts like the 401K and HSA, I think those are excellent vehicles for writing off income that you are actually keeping as opposed to the way a business owner might write off taxable income that they are spending. So it's kind of a double whammy in that sense. And traditionally, there are a couple of more advanced ways to reduce taxable income as you earn more,

but they tend to go hand in hand with earning more because typically people do that in a variety of ways. So the first is self-employment investment vehicles. So if you are partially or fully self-employed, meaning if you have a side hustle, discounts. You can contribute to a solo 401k or a SEP IRA with that source of income. And they have different rules, but the headline is that you can put away up to $66,000 per year of pre-tax contributions into those types of accounts, which can really meaningfully lower your tax bill, like in some cases by tens of thousands of dollars. So I love that one. The other way that people will reduce taxable income is the real estate investing. So note that this is not the same thing.

is buying a primary residence that you're going to live in, but rather doing something called depreciation of a rental property. So if you have a large portfolio of properties or you are becoming a rental property investor, you can deduct the cost of those properties over a set period of time, while at the same time you're building equity in them and you potentially have cash flow, though that is harder today with the current rates and prices.

Only thing to note there is that it's not really a silver bullet because if you sell the property later at an appreciated, value, you now have to pay back that depreciation that was captured back to the government. And then finally, I think the best way to lower your taxable income, which is a little bit of a chicken or egg thing, is to be taking income from sources that are just taxed more favorably, like your capital gains. So, of course, that requires building up a nest egg. But in the long term, it's helpful to know that your investment income is going to be far more tax efficient than your earned income. But at the end of the day, you're going to get a ton of tax

efficiency, tax efficiency just from using those pre-tax qualified investment vehicles that your employer is providing to you. All right, Don, so your first step is to become Warren Buffett. That's all our steps. Step one. Acculate $10 million. Perfect. Well, thank you, Katie. I know our listeners are going to be pumped to listen to your advice. We have one final segment for you. We're calling it six questions with Katie. These are much more rapid fire real quick. Neil and I will bounce back and forth and ask you just quick answers off the top of the head. So Neil, you're up first. Take us away. All right. We want to know your best purchase that you've made that's under $50. Is it bad that I can't think of one? I'm like,

if you give me $100, my choice is my espresso machine. Actually, my cat was only $50. Okay, so he was my best purchase. He was $50 from the shelter. $50 flat? Okay. That's a great deal. Well, here, I'll give you a follow-up to that question. What is your best purchase over 50? Let's go over. We have to go over 150, I think. The goalposts have changed. Okay, $100.

Have you seen inflation? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, probably my eight sleep. It's like a temperature-controlled mattress. I was influenced by Tim Ferriss. I listened to that ad on his podcast so many times. I finally was like, okay, fine, I'll get the eight. It's like the best.

It makes sleep so much better. Love that. All right. Besides sleep, what is the one thing that you never regret spending money on? I think my friends, like I took my friends on a trip last year and it was easily the best money that I've ever spent. Where? Mexico. We went to Tulum. It was really fun. We got to get that invite, Neil. Come on.

Let's get on it. Do a couple more of these pods and I'll say. Yeah. All right. What is the one book you would recommend people read? I'll stick to the money theme and say quit like a millionaire. It is a super high value read. You will learn practically everything. you need to know just in that one book. Quit like a millionaire? Yeah, by Christy Shen. And then I have to ask you, what is your biggest personal finance pet peeve?

Oh, you know, this one has been really relevant recently. I really, it bothers me so much when people kind of misattribute the correlation and causation of rich people behavior. Like when we glorify rich people who do frugal things or we point to habits of a rich person and we're like, see, that's why they're rich. And it's like, no, that's just a habit of someone that already has money. That drives me crazy. You're telling me that ice bath aren't making every single person rich?

No. My whole life is a lie. All right. Final question. Who is your favorite host of Morning Brew Daily? Oh, no. Oh, my God. You do not have to answer that.

My favorite host is Toby's bleached blonde hair. I have been such a fan of the Bieber cut. I told you. So I guess her real favorite is actually hair and makeup. That is true. I mean, I can't compete with that hair. There you go. All right, Katie, that was the end of our rapid fire segment.

This was just an absolute treat. We learned so much, and I'm sure everyone listening and watching is also going to get as much value as we did. Honestly, we'd love to have you back. Yeah, you can be a recurring guess. I think that the platinum card is going to be sold out tomorrow. So absolutely no it was great talking to you Katie that was so fun thanks again Katie we will talk to you soon Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava theater stage on April 30th the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th

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