Why Financial Independence Is the Ultimate Power Move

I am somebody who was so sick and tired of men I didn't respect telling me what to do. Like, I was sick of that. My first corporate job, I'm 22, and I'm like, is this what I'm doing for the next 35 years? Is making somebody I don't respect richer? No, thank you. Can you imagine being in a situation where you don't have access to money? You might not even make money. Your money's controlled. You get an allowance from your partner. When you have money, your entire life changes. What's up, Rich Friends? Welcome back to another episode of Net Worth and Chill with me, your host, Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF and your favorite Wall Street girly. And you know, when I first started Your Rich BFF back in 2021, I went on what I can only describe as a full-blown mission to stop the spread of absolutely horrific financial information and advice I was seeing plastered all over TikTok. And let me tell you, it was bad, bad, bad. We're talking about people promoting literal get-rich-quick schemes, suggesting you put your rent money into meme coins, and don't even get me started on the financial gurus telling college students to max out their credit cards to buy crypto. It was giving me actual shivers as someone who spent years on Wall Street watching real people lose money following terrible advice. But here's the I certainly wasn't the only one seeing this absolute carnage of misinformation floating around social media. While I was over here having daily panic attacks about the financial guru industrial complex destroying people's lives, there were other incredible creators out there fighting the good fight too. And that's exactly why I'm so excited about today's conversation. My guest today is a fellow content creator, author of the New York Times bestselling book Financial Feminist, and host of the Chart Topping Financial Feminist podcast. Everyone, please welcome Tori Dunlop. Hi. Happy to be here. Thank you so much for joining me. And before we get into everything, you are obviously a financial creator online and much like myself. I want to know, what is one bad financial habit you still have? For a lot of Americans, credit card debt feels like a fact of life. I think it's just important for people to understand how credit can work for you or against you. Why that little piece of plastic has so much power. That's this week on Explain It To Me. Find new episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, I'm at the point where I don't have to look at my money as much. And you get to that point when you have all of your ducks in a row and you have your plan in place and your automations. But there are some times where I find subscriptions six months after and I'm like, shit, I've been paying for that for how long? And so multimillionaires do it too, everybody. It's like I just I sometimes don't look. OK, so the pitfall is the subscriptions that you forget to cancel. Yes. But I want to watch Moulin Rouge. They make me sign up for Starz. I forget to cancel. I'm like, fuck. I don't have a DVD player anymore. Yeah. Who does? But I'm like, I have it on DVD. What is something you spend your money on now these days? as a millionaire that feels really worth it. Oh, I like a good hotel. I think you and I are probably similar in that. I am less of a designer girly than I think you are. Like I'm wearing a Chanel belt. It's one of three designer things I own. I find it, I'm so hard on my stuff that for me it doesn't feel worth it. But like somebody's gonna take care of me for a week and like clean up after me twice a day. Oh, it's like the height of luxury. It really is. I just like I want to be surrounded and down comforter cocoons. Yes. Big fan of that. I also love not just like a room, but like a standalone villa with a little pool. Sure. Little pool. Because you know what I like to do? This is like my secret. Do you go skinny dipping? At night. Great. I go skinny dipping at night when no one can see. Yes. Perfect. And it's literally the best. Yeah. That's incredible. And I love it when I even get to do it on credit card points. Because even sometimes I'll look and I'm like, you want $900 a night for me to sleep? and then I go to my credit card portal and I'm like, great, I can do this for free. I love that. But let's go back to the beginning now. Yes. Growing up, did your family talk about money? Was there a money doesn't grow on trees lecture that you got or we don't discuss finances at the dinner table? I was very unique in the fact that I had a great financial education for my parents where I had parents who educated me about money who sat down with me and they're like, here's how a credit card works and here's not how to not overspend. And if you want something, you have to save for it. And I thought that was normal. I thought, okay, everybody knows not to overspend and everybody knows how to save. And it was because my parents didn't grow up with a lot. And so they were like, we want the generational gap to be filled. We want to be able to provide her with good money knowledge. And then I graduated college or really got into college. Did you have siblings growing up? I mean, only. Me too. I know. I think the only child to influencer pipeline is strong. I need attention. Oh, my God. Nobody look at me. Don't make me sing. So I think that I got to college and started having conversations about money and how much college costs and all of those things. And I was like, oh, I know a lot more about money. And I just thought that was normal. And you and I are both the same age. I graduated college in 2016. I know you did, too. and you know I was coming into an America where we thought we'd have our first female president and of course that's not what happened and I was the friend all my friends were coming to for advice around money and I also realized in my own life when I had money I had options when I had money I had the ability to leave a bad job leave a toxic relationship donate to causes I believed in and I thought okay we don't have any sort of equality for any marginalized group until we of financial equality. So started Her First 100K on the side, went full time with it in 2019. And since then, we've taught 5 million women how to be better with money. And it's my favorite thing to do on this earth is fight for women's financial rights. I love it. And specifically, since you mentioned, your brand before Financial Feminist became a book and a podcast was called Her First 100K. And it still is. But yeah, the book and the pod are financial feminists. And you specifically saved $100,000 by age 25, which honestly sounds like fake news. And this economy. Can you break it down for us? What was your actual salary at the time? What sacrifices did you make? And what was that timeline like? And how'd you do it? Yeah. First of all, I like to acknowledge the privilege I had. I graduated college debt-free. And that was a combination of my parents having saved some money for me. But also I worked three jobs on campus. I worked a part-time job in the summers. So it was a collaborative effort to get me out of college debt-free. But that $100K wouldn't have happened as quickly as it did if I had a student loan payment. You got to start at the start line versus all the way back in the parking lot. Totally. Miles back. And I think it's important to acknowledge that before I'm like, here's all the other things you can do. But I automated my savings. So I was setting up an automatic transfer from my checking account to my savings account. And at the peak, I was saving 27% of my take-home pay. So all of that was going either into an emergency fund, into a high-yield savings account, or my second thing was I was investing really early. I was 22, opened up my first Roth IRA. My dad sat me down and he was like, here's how you buy VTI. And I was like, I don't know what this means. I'll figure it out. So it was investing my earnings and maximizing when I could my IRA or my 401k contributions. I was also really focused as well on value-based spending because I still wanted to travel. I still wanted to live in an expensive city. I live in Seattle. I didn't want to have six roommates if I didn't have to but I also had this goal of saving 100k so I developed the practice that I teach which is like your three value categories what are the three areas in your life where you get the most joy and then how do you spend unabashedly on those things and kind of leave the rest what are your three my three are travel food and nesting and really I mean plants because they're my babies and I love them plants just like making my house a home which includes plants and decor and like cute yeah yeah yeah homebody stuff yeah and I just bought my first house. So now I'm really, really in nesting mode. And then I negotiated my salary. So you asked my first job out of college, I was making $55,000 a year. That's pre-tax, obviously. I was doing social media management. That was my background. So I was a social media marketer. I was the only marketer at the security company of 5,000 people. And then as soon as I was like, this is a toxic place to work. I'm not going to be able to make the kind of money I want to make. I left and that was probably the best thing I did was I job hopped every two years and I never made at least with my nine to five I never made over 77k a year so I think a lot of people hear my 100k story and they like oh well that easy if you making like 150 dollars a year and I like no I was making like a moderate salary but then I was also making money with her first hundred K not in the first couple of years But then when it started getting traction I was like okay now I have another source of income to contribute So negotiating your salary and like job hopping, like I want people to quit their jobs. Like you have more negotiating power when you first start your job than you ever will again. And so if you're in a job where you know you're undercompensated, they are not interested in having conversations with you about compensation increases. I know the job market's rough right now, but there's other stuff out there. At least start looking, start networking, because I think job hopping gets such a negative reputation, but we all do it. As millennials, Gen Z, everybody's doing it, and I think it's actually a really smart career and financial move. I was just going to ask you, because you mentioned the job market's tough right now. It is. How do you think your advice changes for folks now, especially knowing with the rise of AI taking early stage entry level jobs with the fact that right now there aren't as many jobs being created. And people are actually seeing the gap between the amount of money you make job hopping versus job staying starting to converge. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's the issue I have is like so many women, especially who's my primary demo. Like we believe both because we were told by society and also because we've internalized it that like it's good enough right or like I should just be grateful that I have what I have and the answer is yes like practice gratitude but at the end of the day if you are putting up with poor behavior because you're like somebody's going to notice me they're not going to notice you they're not going to give you a raise there's some organizations that will and those are great jobs you should keep them but I think it is important to have your options open always there are workplaces out there that respect you that offer good benefits that will pay for your family leave. Like there are great organizations out there that respect you. And it's just a matter of finding those jobs. How do I make myself stand out? That's a great question. I think the biggest thing that I teach people, especially we see a lot of people who get a certain degree or in a certain job and they want to up level, but they don't have the resume for it, right? They don't have the specific things on their resume. So what I have people do is like look at a job description and go line by line when they're like, I don't know, shows up on time. I don't know. The specific things that you're going to have, the job requirements. You might not have like a definitive thing where I have done a hundred percent this, but you can say, oh, I did this at my previous job. So my friend Haley worked at PF Chang. She was like a maitre d'. Yeah. But she wanted to become a recruiter and she didn't have recruiting experience. Right. But it was like, you know, manages time and takes calls and, you know, is personable. And she could say, yeah, I managed it entire restaurant. I know how to talk to people. I know how to talk to people who are angry and really want a table, right? Like she had all of the stories that she could then say, not just like, yes, I can do the job, but I have been doing the job just not with a recruiting title. So anytime you can bridge those skills and look at the job description, because that's where we're pulling questions from, right? We're both hiring now. And like, we're pulling questions directly from like, What do I need you to do? I'm like, tell me about a situation, right? Like have those stories that you can point to that say, I might not have the direct thing you're looking for on paper, but I have all the bridge skills to show you I can do this job. Yeah. Do you have the reps, but maybe in a different language, maybe in a different flavor? Right, right. I think it's really important. And so, you know, fast forward, you have this toxic job you don't like, you quit, you continue to grow, you're growing her first 100K. I mean, her first 100K has grown into this behemoth media empire. That's how I feel about you. Thank you. Talk to me a little bit about, like, the business now. How has it changed from when you first started it to now? How has the income changed? Yeah. And if you're comfortable being transparent, what does the company make and what do you make? Yeah. Oh, Viv, it's very different, obviously. I mean, when you're first trying to start a business, it is scrappy as hell. Yeah. Right? You're glowing sticks together. It is you and maybe some help that is five hours a week because that's all you can afford. And especially when her first 100K was a side hustle in 2019, like we rebranded in February of 2019 and I quit my job six months later. Like it happened pretty fast. And then I remember thinking, OK, I'm making good money, but how am I going to support myself? And then I made $127,000 in the first quarter of 2020. And I was like, this is more money than I've ever had in my life. In my life. And I was like, let's go. We can do this. So yeah, 2020, I'm trying to remember. I think we made around $300,000 total. And that was our first year of full-time entrepreneurship, which was great. And our profit margin is like 80%, 90% because it's like- It's just you, your labor. It's me and like two contractors that are like 10 hours a week. And then as we started becoming more and more of like a capital B business, You start hiring lawyers and you start hiring accountants and then a second accounting firm. And you just like the expenses go up at the same time. Your growth does, too. But things just start getting more expensive. So my life changed pretty rapidly from 100K at 25 to I was a multimillionaire at 27. Like two years is not a long time. I spent three and a half years just saving my first 100K. And then it was like, OK, I have multiple hundred Ks now. And that would not have happened at a nine to five job. And this is the thing that is so hard about our work is I and you, we're really good at teaching people how to be better with money and how to negotiate and how to invest. And all of these things are great. They will get you where you want to be if you are consistent and you're making good money and you're making strategic decisions. But at the end of the day, when people look at my story or your story, the only reason we are where we are is entrepreneurship. Like that's – I could not invest my way to multi-millions in just two years. Right. Without, I guess, a shit ton of risk, right? So that's the thing where I love entrepreneurship as the gasoline on a fire of I was already doing the financially smart things. And then once the business starts making three, four, five plus million dollars, I'm like, okay, I get to not only give other people jobs. I get to throw money at causes I believe in. I get to afford a house, which most people is a massive privilege at this point. It's not a right anymore. All of that only happened because of entrepreneurship. Who do you think should and should not become an entrepreneur? Because not all of us can do it. I also agree with that. I think more people should be entrepreneurs than they think should be like okay explain that again I deal mostly with women and we have internalized like we can't do it like everybody looks at you or I and it's like they have something I don't have like they have some trait in their DNA and I'm like no we just went for it and like done is better than perfect and we I'm stupider than you that's why I didn't say I can guess myself no like legitimately and I think we're so focused as a culture and as women on being perfect. And you cannot, by definition, be a perfect entrepreneur. You cannot be a perfect author. You cannot be a perfect podcaster. I've fucked up three times already. But the proof, you have to do it anyway. And people actually love when you screw up because it means you're a real person. So I think people who shouldn't be entrepreneurs, that's a good question. I think if you are someone who has a lot of people dependent on them, Like I had the privilege of I don't have I have financially independent parents. I was not someone who had to send money home. Right. I did not have children. I was in my 20s. I was like, you know, in a big city, but was able to go to the networking events and was able to get on a plane to go do an interview. Like those things were more flexible because I was in charge of my own financial life. So somebody who is a mom who's, you know, also sending money home, that is immediately harder. Like you have a lot of barriers besides just what you want to do with your own time and your own money. So I think that's one. I don't know. What do you think? Who shouldn't be an entrepreneur? You know, I think there are some people who can't stomach the instability. Sure. Like there have been months where I'm like I am the richest woman on earth. Like I look at my bank account. And I'm like, hell yeah. Yep. And there's other times you're like. There's months that I haven't made a dollar. I have not made a dollar. Am I going to lay people off? Right. And I think that is something that becomes challenging, especially when there are people relying on you to eat. Yep totally That a really shitty feeling when you like ooh these numbers don look good But I think to your point there was a study done that basically found like the easiest way to become a millionaire is to do it the old way right Like you get a W-2 job, a corporate job, you, you know, job hop, you go up the ladder. You go up the ladder. It's almost guaranteed if you make the right decisions, if you are like consistent, if you are responsible. It's almost guaranteed that you can become a millionaire and there are no other like major confounding factors to your point of like needing to take care of parents and ailing sibling, like whatever. Recession. Yeah. Like assuming a normal timeline. Right. That's the easiest way to do it. But people don't want consistent or long. No. They want it fast. No. And they want it yesterday. And I will say I was willing to be consistent. Yeah. I think that is like I was not the person who was like this isn't happening quick enough. But I am somebody who was so sick and tired of men I didn't respect telling me what to do. Like I was sick of that. And I was sick of that like from jump. Like six months, my first corporate job, I'm 22. And I'm like, is this what I'm doing for the next 35 years? Is making somebody I don't respect richer? No, thank you. And even the way we run our company now I think is unfortunately very novel. Like I give a paid week off to our employees every quarter where the entire company shuts down. That's unfortunately pretty rare. But it's like I respect your rest. I respect your time with your family. Go on vacation. Go have fun. We do unlimited PTO and it's not like unlimited. It's like actually unlimited. And we give paid family leave and we do paid menstrual leave. And like I wanted to build the kind of workplace that I did not have. A type of place you wanted to work at. Yes. and a kind of place that I hoped other people wanted to work at too. And especially where we're an all-women team, where women felt not only like the work aligned with them and they felt passionate about it, but they actually felt like, cool, I want to show up to work today. Yeah, I love that. Let's talk a little bit about women since we're on the topic. Great. You wrote a New York Times bestselling book, Financial Feminist. What does being a financial feminist mean to you? Here at Gastropod, we ask the tough questions Like, what should go on top of a pancake? My mom always had peanut butter and brown sugar. She was not a syrup person. I am loathe to judge people's personal pancake pleasures, but that's a hard no. I'm on team maple syrup. But for a long time, for a lot of Americans, maple syrup was too expensive, so they used pancake syrup. But what is pancake syrup? I mean, like maple syrup, it's also kind of caramel color. This episode of Gastropod, we've got the answers to all your pancake questions, including what even is a pancake? And does a latke or a Dutch baby count as a pancake? To find out, find Gastropod and subscribe wherever you get your pancakes. I mean, podcasts. I think the best way to describe it is that when you have all you need, you build a longer table and not a higher fence. And I started and ended my book with that quote. and that money is our best form of protest like having a financial education having money and i'm not talking bezos money i don't want that i don't need that i'm just talking enough money to do what i want to do enough money not to have to like put food back at the grocery store yes and enough money to say yes when you want to say yes and no when you want to say no yeah and to say this situation doesn't respect me i'm out that is so incredible like imagine if every woman on the planet had that we live in a very different society we'd live in a very different world like 30 25 oh women who are uncontrollable are the patriarchy's worst nightmare and like i love being the patriarchy's worst nightmare i'm like let's go baby like i don't want to be forced in a situation that i can't get out of because i don't have enough money right and we get messages and i know you do too all the time from women dv survivors that have literally that that's the one And like I'm a cancer and I can't get through a goddamn interview without crying. But like those are the ones that just – I'm like can you imagine being in a situation – I mean you don't have to imagine it. Women are everywhere. Being in a situation where you don't have access to money. You don't have access to your own bank account. You might not even make money. Your money is controlled. You get an allowance from your partner. And on top of the financial abuse, he is verbally or physically abusing you. And you can't leave because you don't have money. like that is the perfect example of what i'm talking about when you have money your entire life changes and when we talk about the feminist part of this is that there are so many systemic barriers to somebody building wealth and you know there's plenty of people out there who are going to tell you if you just work hard everything will happen for you but that's so gas lady when you're like i've done all the right things and i still can't buy a house and i'm not spending the latte money but i still can't get ahead and i'm like that's why we have to acknowledge that there's a systemic part of this that has a much bigger influence on whether or not you're financially successful in addition to your hard work. So we work to control the things we can control. We show up. We take our financial education seriously. We listen to podcasts. We read books. We follow people we respect and whose values align with us. And then we work to change everything else. I love that. What's a money mistake that you have learned a lot from in your own personal life? That's a good question. I think that I have sometimes been hesitant to pay money investing in myself. Oh, give me an example. So most of us go to college and we spend an ungodly amount of money getting a degree. Right. And then we never really spend money on our education again. Like we might get a master's or we might get like a certification. but so many people like won't spend money to learn from you or I or won't buy a course that's really helpful or effective or even won't buy a $25 book but what if that $25 book could make you a hundred thousand dollars and I think that it was very easy for me to slip into that trap which is like oh I'll watch the YouTube video for free and I would get two minutes into the YouTube video especially like working out like that was something that was really uh I would do this all the time is I'm like well okay YouTube's free and I'll go on and all and then I would bail because there was no there was no accountability right no I can't work out with like a YouTube no because the workout was half hour I'd get 10 minutes in and be like that's good enough and that was not successful for me so I had to be like yeah I will pay $25 to go to this in-person fitness class or I will buy this book because I know I'll show up and read it or I will pay for a coach because I need that handholding and I need somebody being like, hey, have you done what you said you were going to do? And that accountability is so crucial when you have goals and you have ambitions that you want to hit. But so many of us pay $200,000 for a college degree, which, you know, we could debate the merits of that for a very long time. But then we never think to invest in ourselves again or invest in our knowledge or education again. I love that tip. On the flip side, what is the worst piece of financial advice you have seen circulating on the interwebs? How many, fuck, how much time do we have? There's so much bad shit out there. Like there's so many bad takes. One thing is that indexed universal life insurance is a replacement for your 401k. It's not. And I'm looking right down the barrel. It's not. I think it's a total scam. I think crypto is a kind of a scam. That's my hot take. Like I don't own any crypto. I don't think you need crypto to be. financially successful. If you want to invest in it, fine, but it should be no more than 5% of your total portfolio. Like we're not doing crypto to the moon. There's so much bad advice. I think one is like pay off all of your debt before you start investing. If you have student loans at four and a half percent interest, you're going to be paying those off until you're 50. And then you want to start investing for retirement at 50. Like you've just lost all of that time of compound interest when you could be making seven to 10% on the stock market. So that's my rule is Like, OK, 7 percent. If it's over, if your debt's over 7 percent, it's costing you more money. Credit cards, right? We need to pay off credit cards first. But if you have a mortgage or student loans that are typically under 7 percent, it's actually more advantageous to invest that money instead. So that's when I hear a lot, you know this, the latte, the avocado toast, the Taylor Swift tickets, all of it's so gendered. I don't hear it about that Xbox. I don't hear it about, I don't hear it about that new whatever, you know, you're getting like the NFL season tickets. Yeah, exactly. Golf clubs, video games. Yeah. No, that's I mean, I literally wrote a whole chapter in the book about it. But frivolous spending, and I'm putting that in quotes, is only stuff that is feminine. It is lattes. It's blowouts. It's because you have a shopping addiction But men are allowed to have hobbies like golfing But we not allowed to go see Taylor Swift because it the reason we not rich And by the way let say we stop spending money on those things Let say I don show up to this interview with makeup or like then I get told I look tired in the YouTube comments right Or then I get told you can't, you're not going to get that promotion because you don't look professional. So the very things we're being shamed for are also the things that we're seeing all these studies about like women who wear makeup make 20% more. And it's like, okay, So what do you want? Right. Which one do you want? Right. Because you can't have both. Because you can't have both. And speaking of women being placed in a box, you are a female CEO, female founder. I want to know, what is the toughest business decision you have had to make either with her first 100K or just, you know, one of your financial feminist brands? Yeah. What's just the hardest thing you've had to do? Firing people's the worst. Like, that's not a fun experience. I've only fired one person. it was very easy. Oh, yeah. That's not true. That's not true. You're right. You're right. Actually, one fire was very challenging. The other one was very easy. We've had to do quite a few. And I say fire as like ending a contract too. Right. But like also we've fired employees. That's a very hard thing, especially when you deeply care for that person. Yeah. And on the flip side, it's really hard when you don't care for that person anymore and you're like, I don't feel bad about this, but also I have to lawyer up or I have to make sure all my ducks are in a row. I mean, this is going to sound like, you know, small violin. But one of the things that is not talked about enough about being an entrepreneur is documentation. Like if you are firing somebody, you cannot just wake up and say, and nor should you. But if you've been dissatisfied with their work performance for months, but you have not documented that, you're in a world of hurt. So there were times early in our business where you're just so involved in making sure the business is running that you're like, yeah, that person's kind of half doing their job. But you're not writing things down. You're not sending things to emails to lawyers because you have other shit to do that's much more important until you realize, no, I probably need to let them go. But you have no documentation to support that. It's all in your brain, but it's not on paper. and that's a fun rude awakening when you're a business owner that there is so much red tape rightfully so but there's a lot of red tape there's a lot of you know legality to decisions especially when you're moving quick you're moving quick as a business owner you want to make sure that yes you know this is the right decision but you have to have all of the receipts to back that up i think the other hard decision that you have to make over and over as a business owner is no one hands us the playbook to our own businesses. No, you're one of one. No one is teaching you like, yeah, you can go get an MBA. But again, I can debate the laurels of an MBA all day. But no one is no one is coming in and being like, yes, you should make this decision. And I have to make 200 decisions a day. Same with you. I know it's just exhausted by the end. You're so tired and you will never know it's the right decision until you've done it. So just make the decision and then you'll figure it out if it's right or not. And then you'll tweak after that. But I think it's very easy to come to me and be like, Tori has all the answers. I'm like, no, I do not. Like I am making educated guesses just like you. And I think I'm right most of the time because I know how to run a smart business. I'm also wrong. And it's making sure that you are pivoting quick, that you know how to recover from that decision, and that it's not a big enough choice where it's devastated your entire livelihood. Right. We only have, you know, a couple minutes left. Yeah. But I do want to pivot to an incredibly light and not controversial topic at all. You know, you've seen the headlines. Sweeping tariffs. Yeah. We're currently, as this is being recorded in a government shutdown, maybe by the time this releases, the shutdown will be over, hopefully. Hopefully. There's a lot happening right now in this administration, this economy. I am trying to be very, very mindful about how I ask this, but it can almost feel overwhelming, like there's nothing we can do. What's your perspective on how we can continue to be smart with our money, with our finances, Yeah. Even across a lot of, you know, trials and tribulations. Let's be honest. Yeah. The first thing is to acknowledge that it does not feel great right now. No. And I know that sounds so obvious, but capitalism will convince you to just keep your head down and keep working really hard. And like it's very easy to lose your empathy and lose your humanity with everything because you're just like, I just got to get by. I just got to figure it out. So it's OK if you're like, this is all really bad. Like this is bad and this is hard. Again, we're the same age. So we've been through how many unprecedented life events? The whole thing has been unprecedented. Every five years? I'd like some precedented. Literally. Like 9-11, I think we were in second grade. Um, 2008 happened, not super far after that. Occupy Wall Street after that. Trump won COVID, Trump too. Like it's, there's a lot, there's a lot going on all the time. And so the first thing is like, if you're just trying to get by, you're doing a great job. It's not like Mr. Rogers or something, but like you are, like you're doing a great job. I think the second thing, take your financial education seriously. This is the time. Yeah. It is so easy to shut down, to tune it all out, to be like, there's nothing I can do because there's a lot we can't control. So show up for yourself. Listen to the podcast. Read the books. Do the things that you and I talk about. Don't just be a passive listener. Don't just be like, okay, I listened to the show. Don't watch it and save it. You got to do it. You got to do it. And you have more control than you think. There are so many systemic barriers, but there are also small steps that you can take every day that make you feel better because you're controlling the things you can control as opposed to just throwing up your hands and being like, what can I do? And I've seen it in my own life. You and I've both seen it in the millions of people we impact every day. When you do show up and take the shit seriously, it has the opportunity to change everything about your life, change every part about how you show up in your relationship. how you show up in your job, what behavior you will or won't accept. Because when you have money, you have options. And that's the biggest thing I can cling to right now is if you want an answer to how to navigate this, the goal is to get rich. The goal is to get rich. Now, not in an exploitative way, not in a way that makes other people feel worse, but in a way that's like, I want options. I want choices. And that's what I need everybody to do. if there is one money move that you recommend every single person who is currently listening to this or watching this make yeah what would it be automate your savings you can do this in two seconds set up an automatic transfer from your checking account to your savings account happens without you having to think about it and if you are somebody who does not make a lot of money right now twenty dollars a month is okay that's great because it'll compound without you having to think about it. And it builds the habit of saving. It builds the muscle. If you can manage $50,000, you can manage $500,000. Because if you're building those habits, you know that when you do start making more money, you know what to do. You've got it. You've already built that smart financial game plan. So automate your savings. Automate every part of your financial life. When you automate, it takes the emotion out of it. It really does. It makes it a lot easier. Yep. Thank you so much for joining me. It's been an absolute treat. And it's really nice to just get to get to see you because we're friends. Let everybody at home listening and watching know where we can find you. Yeah. So I am at HerFirst100K on all the socials. HerFirst100K.com slash quiz is a great resource to send people to. That is a free personalized money plan for wherever you're at in your financial journey. I'll ask you a few questions. You'll give me your email and send it straight to your inbox. And Financial Feminist is our book and podcast. And I would love to see you over there too. Perfect. Amazing. Thanks, Tori. Thanks for tuning into this week's episode of Net Worth and Chill, part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. If you liked the episode, make sure to leave a rating and review and subscribe so you never miss an episode. Got a burning financial question that you want covered in a future episode? Write to us via podcast at yourrichbff.com. Follow Net Worth and Chill Pod on Instagram to stay up to date on all podcast related news. And you can follow me at yourrichbff for even more financial know-how. See you next week. Bye.