After finding her corporate job unfulfilling, Katie Gatti Tassin learned how to retire early. Now, she’s sharing her strategy with her peers.
When Katie Gatti Tassin started her first job out of college, she was making good money and working with people she liked. By all traditional measures, she’d “made it.” But something didn’t sit right. Every two weeks, she was watching her paycheck land in her account and immediately vanish. That uncomfortable realization became the catalyst for Katie’s journey to figure out how to retire early.
Now, through her personal platform Money with Katie and her new book: “Rich Girl Nation: Taking Control of Our Financial Futures,” Katie is helping other women, especially Gen Z and young Millennials, take control of their money, their careers, and their lives. This week on the HerMoney podcast, Jean Chatzky sits down with Katie Gatti Tassin to dive into the cultural tropes that hold women back, how beauty standards drain our wallets, and why diversifying your investments (and your financial thinking) matters more than ever.
It’s Time To Get Off The Hot Girl Hamster Wheel
Jean Chatzky: Chapter one of your book is entitled The Hot Girl Hamster Wheel, and you describe it as this endless rotation of expenses: Botox, nails, hair, skincare, all in the name of staying presentable. What did your hot girl detox look like?
Katie Gatti Tassin: When I started really taking personal finance seriously, I sat down and did a personal finance audit of my life. I was spending around $300 a month [on beauty and personal care], and I ranked them in order of importance to me. And one by one, I just started removing them from my budget and from my schedule, I canceled the appointments, and I said, I’m just going to experiment. But I got rid of pretty much everything else and replaced it with at-home treatments or lower-expense alternatives.
The big takeaway for me is that yes, it certainly made a financial impact at the time when it was a pretty sizable part of my budget, but it was the time. I didn’t realize how much time and energy I had been devoting to this.
A New Generation, A New Retirement Playbook
Jean Chatzky: Do you think that you’re typical of your generation? This urge to not work 9 to 5, not follow the path, get off the treadmill, not retire at 65, take mini retirements along the way, do it in a way that feels more personal.
Katie Gatti Tassin: I do, and I think part of the reason it’s typical is because a lot of people in my generation feel that the social contract that worked for their parents and grandparents doesn’t quite work the same way anymore. And I’ll use my dad as an example. He worked for the same company for his entire career. He was able to retire in his early fifties because they saved diligently, but he also had a very generous pension. Pensions are pretty much an anachronism now. They’re basically a thing of the past.
And so that three-legged stool that we used to think about when saving for retirement, where you have your Social Security, you have your pension, and you have your personal savings, one of those legs has been almost completely kicked out from under you. The other who knows how that’s gonna look in 30 years from now? And so I think a lot of people recognize that they might have to think differently, and that just kind of following the path that’s laid out for them isn’t guaranteed.
How To Retire Early: First, Diversify Your Portfolio
Jean Chatzky: All right, investing. If somebody handed you a hundred dollars today and said, “Make this grow,” what’s your game plan?
Katie Gatti Tassin: So my game plan is twofold. Number one, I’m gonna make sure that I’m investing in a tax-advantaged account because I want to avoid taxation as much as I possibly can. And the second part is that I’m going to be diversified. I have never felt personally all that comfortable investing only in US equities. So, for me, I’m going to take that hundred dollars and I’m going to spread it out.
I’m going to buy large-cap US equities, but I’m also going to buy small-cap value. I’m also going to invest in developed markets because when Novo Nordisk invents Ozempic, I want to own that company. The same goes for the emerging markets because we don’t know what’s going to happen over the next 30 to 40 years and which countries and which economies are going to really take off. So I do want to invest in US companies because I believe that US companies will continue to do well, but I don’t want to only own US companies.
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