As you know, many parts of Los Angeles were devastated by recent wildfires. Nicole is taking a deep breath, and sharing her story. All investing involves the risk of loss, including loss of principal. Brokerage services for US-listed, registered securities, options and bonds in a self-directed account are offered by Open to the Public Investing, member FINRA & SIPC. Public Investing offers a High-Yield Cash Account where funds from this account are automatically deposited into partner banks where they earn interest and are eligible for FDIC insurance; Public Investing is not a bank.
Chapter 1: Why does Nicole call herself the fee police?
You have probably heard me call myself the fee police because I hate, hate, hate fees. It makes it really hard to stay on budget, which then can delay our financial progress. When we're trying to make progress, life's curve balls often feel like taking one step forward and two steps back.
A time checking account makes financial progress easier with features like no maintenance fees and fee free overdraft up to 200 bucks or getting paid up to two days early with direct deposit. Learn more at Chime.com slash MNN. When you go to Chime.com slash MNN, you'll see all the reasons I love Chime. Like, did you hear me say that Chime allows you to overdraft up to $200 with no fees?
Chime also has no monthly fees or maintenance fees. And Chime has over 50,000 fee-free ATMs. So as the fee police myself, I approve. Make progress toward a better financial future with Chime. Open your account in just two minutes at Chime.com slash MNN. That's Chime.com slash MNN as in Money News Network. Chime feels like progress. It's me talking about public again, obviously. Are you surprised?
It is my favorite brokerage after all. By now you know Public is the only place I personally buy bonds. If you haven't heard my spiel, in the olden days, I would buy treasuries through the government website and it would always take forever. And also the branding was horrible. It kind of looked like the Toys R Us website back in the day. But with Public,
it's simple and easy to invest in treasuries right from your phone. There are literally thousands of bonds to choose from on public, not just government bonds, corporate bonds too. You can use public for more than just your bond investments, of course. On public, you can invest in stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, and they even have a high yield cash account where you can earn 4.1% APY on your cash.
And there's an exciting new offering on public that I cannot wait to tell you about. Now you can invest toward your future self through retirement accounts. On public, you can open a traditional IRA or a Roth IRA or both. I mean, why not? If you're looking for a simple yet sophisticated investing experience, head over to public.com slash money rehab.
One more time because trust you will thank me later. Public.com slash money rehab. This is a paid endorsement for public investing. Full disclosures and conditions can be found in the podcast description. I'm Nicole Lappin, the only financial expert you don't need a dictionary to understand. It's time for some money rehab. Oh man, money rehabbers, a lot has happened since I last talked to you.
Oh my gosh, I'm already crying. I said I wasn't going to. I haven't even started talking. Okay, so last time I spoke to you, I was nine months, ten months pregnant, wrapping my head around a sort of kind of maternity leave. Since then, I did have my baby, a girl. She is beautiful and healthy. And I knew this was going to be a big period of transition and change in my life.
I just did not know the extent of it because two weeks after we brought home our baby girl, we lost our home. Our house burned down in the LA fires in the Palisades. I thought, naively, I guess, in retrospect, that I'm pretty calm in a crisis. I've learned to catch many a curveball in a way that you only really can with practice. I mean, this wasn't my first disaster.
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Chapter 2: What are the benefits of using Chime for financial progress?
I was able to find a temporary rental quickly so my family has a roof over our heads, a place to live while we figure it all out. I have incredible, incredible friends. And now that includes people I didn't even know I could call friends who jumped into action to help me and my family with things big and small.
I have people who listen to the show who reached out to send me good thoughts and prayers and wishes. My loved ones set up GoFundMe, which we've been using to buy supplies for our daughter and basically everything we had in our brand new nursery, everything we got from our registry. I know that there are many people that haven't been as lucky. And so I have
been digging deep to try my best to do my part and share resources that I find helpful. Being useful, being of service has given me some sense of purpose and meaning through all of this chaos. But I hope I can be honest and vulnerable with you. This has been so hard. Losing my home and everything in it was never on my life bingo card.
If you would have asked me for the top one million things that could go wrong in postpartum, this would not have been it. And it wasn't just my home. It was my car and our brand new office and our BO box and our pediatrician. It was the whole town that I built my life around and that I loved. I've lived in 10 cities in 20 years, and this one was the first place that felt like home.
So all of this is like a surreal kind of grief. realizing that all of your things are gone in an instant. I keep realizing more and more every day, my night guard for grinding teeth that I have to get replaced, the driver's license, the passport. As I've learned, these things are really hard to replace, but they're replaceable. My dad's signature, the glass we broke on our wedding day.
Those are not. The crazy thing is that it almost feels like you don't know if you still exist, partly because the paperwork that proves you do exist is gone. My most recent bank statement online lists my old address, so do all of my bills. It's an address that doesn't have a house standing there anymore. But it is so much more than that, and it is so much heavier than that.
And the fire, I lost the memories that I had already planned on making with my daughter, what I thought would be, where I thought would be her first steps. Her first birthday, tucking her into her toddler bed that we kept the extension for in the attic when she was big enough. So in all of this, you lose the future that you had planned and also your past.
All of those irreplaceable things I mentioned, the poetry, the book, the treasures from our wedding. If you lose the artifacts from your past and the ideas from your future, What in the hell is tethering you to reality? I never thought I would tell this kind of story, let alone live it.
But here I am, even a month later, still delirious, still running on fumes, still constantly crying, hanging by a mental health thread. And here's the thing, this experience has forced me to face something that I have been avoiding for years.
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