Jean Chatzky
speaker
96 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Jean Chatzky’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I got interested, quite honestly, because my own financial life was a bit of a mess. And simultaneously, the journalism job that I got was business adjacent. I started my career as an editorial assistant at a magazine that no longer exists called Working Woman. And got to report some stories on things like business and careers and management trends and investing.
And I was interested enough in them to try to get a job in personal finance, business journalism when I left that job, which turned out to be really, really difficult. Because all the big business magazines on the planet, I applied to all of them, thought Working Woman was a joke. And finally, I got a little bit of advice that what I needed was an MBA.
But I didn't have really any interest in going back to school at that point. So instead, I got a job on Wall Street. I worked in equity research for a couple of years. I learned investing inside and out. And when I came back out, I was able to reenter journalism, join Forbes, from there to Smart Money. And from there, I ended up on the Today Show for 25 years.
I was one of the original side giggers, right? I think I had a side hustle before it was called a side hustle. Pretty much always because journalists make very little money, or at least when you're starting out as a journalist, you make very little money. So originally my side hustle was teaching SATs. But as I started to become a stronger writer and a stronger content creator, I was able to
hustle in my own industry. So just by doing that, I picked up a lot of the adjacent skills that I then needed to launch this business. Once I was on the Today Show in particular, a lot of doors started to open. These were the days where everybody was watching the Today Show. And so I got a lot of offers to go out and speak, to write books, to consult for
different companies in the employee benefits departments where they were trying to improve the financial health of their employees. And I didn't become an entrepreneur until, a full-scale entrepreneur, until 20 years down the road when I left my last magazine job. I actually got fired from my last magazine job because I'd gotten a little too expensive for their payroll.
And I looked at all of the other things that I was doing. I was doing radio for Oprah over here and I was doing speaking here and I was on my 10th book over here and I had three other clients over here. And I thought, why am I getting another job? I have five other jobs. I just need to put them together. Her money as a company came along after her money as a podcast.
I was doing some work with Fidelity Investments. They were our original launch sponsor. The fabulous team there basically said, what else can we do together? And I was like, how about a podcast? So we launched and very quickly it became apparent to me that we were growing a community of like-minded women who wanted to learn about money. And Her Money, the company, launched around that.
Oh, it's a thing. It has budged, which is good. Over the last year and a half, it's moved up a smidge so that at this point, women earn 83 and a half cents to every dollar that a white man earns. But the American Association of University Women say we are going to be halfway through the next century before this gap actually closes. That's how slowly...
It's moving and it's worse for women of color. And the problem with the gender wage gap is that when you combine it with all of the other factors that women deal with in terms of earning money and growing money for retirement, they put us behind. Women are the ones to take breaks from work to care for kids and care for older parents.
We saw that in the pandemic in spades, but it's been true all along. Because we take those breaks, we have less money growing in those retirement accounts. We earn fewer social security credits. We get to the end of the line. We've got a smaller nest egg, and then we have to make the money last longer because we go and we outlive men by six, seven years. So
It's an uphill battle, but you're right in terms of the advice being gender neutral. There are not a ton of differences in the advice that somebody would give to a man versus a woman. Jane Bryant Quinn, who is one of my mentors and a leading personal finance journalist, just a trailblazer. She likes to say that stocks aren't pink or blue. Money's not pink or blue. It's green.
And she's 100% right about that. The problem is that women sometimes don't feel as safe as we need to feel to ask the questions that we need answered in order to get us to take the steps to start investing, to put our money to work, to ask for that raise.
And what I've found and the reason that I launched Her Money was that when I was in a room full of all women giving some sort of a talk and I would get to the Q&A section, the hands would just fly up in the air. And when I was in a mixed group, the response was a lot more muted. Women really held back and didn't want to share as much. And so what I set out to create was a safe space.
But am I going to tell women that they should buy Nvidia as we did for our investing club two years ago and tell men that they should not? No, absolutely not.
I think our responsibility is to level it and it has to come from the employers because if employers don't take a look at our payrolls, don't take a look at how we are treating our employees irrespective of gender, irrespective of race, these gaps are never gonna close. And so we have to get really honest about who's doing what work And how much are they being compensated for it?
And it's not a matter of need. It's a matter of the work that we need them to do, but it's not a matter of our perception of the money that they need to take home, which is how it used to work. Years back, you would hear conversations where a boss would tell a female employee, well, of course, John is going to get paid more than you do.
He's the breadwinner and he's got multiple mouths to feed at home. We're now in an era where more women are the breadwinners. And if you look ahead, if you look out to 2030 and into the 2030s, women are actually expected to control the lion's share of the wealth and the spending in this country and across the world. And it's because
of educational trends that are leading women to have more qualifications than men in many, many instances. And it's also because of the way that the transfer of wealth, the $41 trillion transfer of wealth that is going on as we speak is playing out. Women are inheriting twice.
And not because our parents prefer us to our brothers, but we're inheriting twice because if we have brothers, chances are we split the family pie with them. But then when our husbands die, we inherit that money as well.
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