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
She picked a guy that she knew was going to let her be her and let her do the work that she wanted to do and help them create a life where that was going to be possible. And that's what you need.
I think the way that you do it is by knowing yourself and knowing your partner and closing ranks. This is your business and it's your partner's business and it's not your mother's business or your mother-in-law's business or your friend's business. or Instagram's business, right? It is nobody's business but yours. And if it's working for the two of you, then who the hell cares, right?
What anybody else has to say. You just have to respect the boundaries that you've created with the two of you and what that allows you to do. Look, I'm the breadwinner in my marriage. I have been for many years. My husband is largely retired. He works about 15 hours a week these days. He's older than I am. And he had an incredibly successful career.
But the fact that I out-earn him, he could care less. He knows the value that he brings to our marriage. I certainly know the value that he brings to our marriage. And it's nobody else's business, really, despite the fact that I'm talking about it on your podcast.
Men have traditionally invested it and women traditionally have been slow to the party. If you, again, and you pulled out a whole bunch of statistics, I'm grateful for that. But one of my favorites is that women keep about 70% of our assets in cash. Men keep about 60%.
It's a really big and important difference because investing our money is the only way that we are going to make sure that it is working as hard as we are working ourselves. And so what we're starting to see is women investing
move into the ranks of being investors, wanting to be investors, wanting to learn about investors, whether you've got all your money in a 401k where you put it in a target date fund and you let that fund do its thing, or you're buying individual stocks. We want to learn. I was telling you about my investing club.
I run this investing club with Karen Feinerman, who is one of the panelists on Fast Money on CNBC. She's a hedge fund manager. You would love her. She's so brilliant. And we're teaching 300 women and growing how to invest every other Monday night on Zoom. And we pick stocks together and we talk about diversification and trends and everybody can ask their questions.
And investing is the kind of thing that is hard for women because there are no right or perfect answers. There's some parts of personal finance where if you ask me a question, I can give you an answer and I can be 100% right. What is the best cashback credit card? I can look at them all. I can run the numbers. I can give you an answer. I can know that I'm correct. What's the best stock?
Can't do it. Because no perfect answer exists because we have backward-looking information and not forward-looking information. And so we have to trust in the historical accuracy of what has come before. That is difficult for a large portion of women who like to know the answer to any question before we even ask that question.
We have to get comfortable and the way to get comfortable is by actually doing it. And one thing that has really, really helped when you look at Gen Z and millennials is that we're now being across the board automatically enrolled in these 401k and other retirement plans at work where we have them. The money's being automatically invested into a default, like a target date fund.
So you're investing whether or not you are doing the work of investing yourself in many cases. And if you can allow yourself to sit with that and get comfortable with the fact that you're not only doing it, but you're doing it pretty well, that helps people.
That's pretty much my definition too. It's just my definition I think extends for a longer period of time because of my age, right? So I look at this and I think I want all of that, but I want to be able at some point to just work when I want to work and know that those things will continue for as long as I live. So I think that's where the disparity in financial freedom comes in.
I think younger generations define it in terms for today and older generations define it in terms that include a retirement that might last for three decades.
like being a homeowner is a helpful way to save money over the long term. If you think about buying versus renting, month to month, right now, the costs are actually closer than they've ever been. But when you own, you are putting equity, you're building equity in this house. And that is a form of forced savings.
And what happens if you get to the end of the road, if you pay down a mortgage for a long enough period of time, or even if you swap out of it and out of a couple of homes, but you've built up some equity and then you build up some more, you end up with this cushion of cash. your standard of living. You can use it to pay for long-term care. You can use it to keep a roof over your head.
You can use it to sell and move to Costa Rica. You have choices because you have this additional cushion. And if you've rented your whole life, unless you took The difference between the renting cost and the buying cost, which is a lot slimmer than it used to be, and you put that away every single month, you don't have that additional sum of money.
So that's where being a homeowner, I think, is additive to your bottom line. There are other differences. We know in a whole bunch of different situations that autonomy is one of the things that make people happy.
You're happier at your job if you feel like you've got enough autonomy to rearrange the furniture or to put your own stuff up on the walls or to decide that you're going to come in at 9.30 rather than 9 o'clock. You're just happier. And you are happier where you live if you feel like you have enough autonomy to make the place what you want it to be.
And you're more likely to have that if you own rather than if you rent. But there are a lot of cases where you shouldn't own, right? If you're not going to be someplace for five years, I don't think you should buy. The cost of buying is just too steep. I don't think that mortgage rates at this level should stop people who want to be in a place for six, seven years and more.
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