Is Homeownership Overrated? Smart Girl Dumb Questions with Nayeema Raza

We traveled to Florida pretty often to visit my in-laws.

And those trips are always such a nice reset for us.

I'm definitely a sunshine girl, so any chance to spend time by the water, whether it's at the beach or just sitting by the pool. Makes me so happy. Lately, I've been thinking about what it would be like to have a place closer to family, so we'd always have our own space when we visit.

And when we're back home, we could list the place in Florida on Airbnb instead of letting it sit empty. What makes that idea feel much more manageable now is the co-host network. You can connect with a local co-host who has hosting experience and can help take care of the important details.

A co-host can help create the listing, manage reservations, message guests, and help make sure everything runs smoothly for guests during their stay. Honestly, it just feels like a practical way to make better use of a place we'd already love spending time in. Also, bringing in a little extra cash from time to time, if you're interested in hosting

and want a little help getting started, find a co-host at Airbnb.com/host.

Hey, money rehabbers, let's chat about summer spending for a moment, because every year,

it feels like summer just happens to our bank accounts. One minute, it's Memorial Day, the next, it's August, and we're all wondering where our money went. This year, we're doing it differently. U.S. Bank is the teammate I want all of us to go into summer with.

With U.S. Bank, smartly checking and savings, we can track our spending, help support better financial habits, and feel more in control of how we're using our money.

“That's what having the right financial partner looks like, because honestly, why should”

we have to choose between having a great summer and being smart with our money? U.S. Bank can help to make both possible at the same time. Let's set this summer up right together at usbank.com. That's the power of us, member FDIC, trademark 2026 U.S. Bank. It can be really hard to know where to turn for news, especially news that doesn't make

you feel anxious. There's a new podcast from the Guardian that you should definitely know about, State Side with Kai and Carter. Three times a week, journalists, Kai, Wright, and Carter Sherman are trying to slow down the news, and wrestle with the questions we all have about what's happening in the world.

They craft their coverage using all the reporting resources that the Guardian has in the U.S. and around the world. It features the Guardian's entire range of global content across news, international coverage, climate, culture, sports, and wellness. As a media outlet, the Guardian is not billionaire owned, meaning they are free to report

the facts. So listen to State Side with Kai and Carter wherever you get your favorite podcasts or watch on YouTube. It sounds like I'm not going to buy a home anytime soon, although I do have to have a very naked fluorescent lunch with myself and figure out how much money I should be putting

in the market because I'm not buying a home. We can do that together. Yeah, it would help me do. I'll have, I'll have naked blends with you. If you think money to a cast to be boring, this episode will change your mind.

Today is all about financial moves that will make you grow wealth and it gets spicy. Today I'm talking to Naomi Marasa, journalist and host of the podcast Smart Girl, dumb questions. She asked me about some of my financial hot takes. I think this idea that home ownership is propaganda is not true, but the idea that it's

“the only way to build wealth is completely outdated.”

Smart strategies to grow well. You're borrowing at 3%, but you can make a 10% thing you're pocketing that spread. And she shares what she's learned from inner billionaires. I had this conversation with Mark Cuban too, like how much money is enough money. And he said, how much money is too much money.

You can just get caught in a trap of wanting more and more and more and more and like only make yourself feel poorer as you get richer, which I've certainly seen in some of the billionaires I've covered, too. I'm Nicole Lapin. The only financial expert you don't need a dictionary to understand.

It's time for some money rearing. Should I rent her by a home, spend or splurge on a wedding, and how late is too late to learn about money? This is Smart Girl, dumb questions. I'm Naomi Marasa, and today I'm joined by the money expert Nicole Lapin.

And you have the money news network.

You have an amazing podcast called Money Rehab, and your, I guess, is it self-taught?

Autodiedact. You were one of the youngest reporters at CMBC at CNN, and I just have so many questions for you. So I'm so grateful that you're making the time. Thank you.

Bring it all the questions. All the questions. And do I get to be the smart girl? Like a promotion. You're the island girl.

“And I'm the person whose name we don't know, because silver, that's what's happening on this”

episode. So here's the thing. I have an MBA. And yeah, I know. I know the smarter girl.

No, the smarter girl. I'm not saying that to show off. I'm saying that to, um, how much is your brain? How much is my brain? Yeah.

What does that mean? How much did you spend in your brain? Oh. Have you calculated? No, because see, this is my problem.

I don't like to think about money, but I would like to have more money. It's easier for me to talk about tariffs than it is to talk about my own bank account or

Is this a common problem?

It is. And there's often it just connect. And actually, people who are in financial services or have their MBA have some of the most shame around money because they think they should know. Great.

You spent. I'm guessing. Yeah, I went to 100,000 on room, board, tuition, 200,000 as an opportunity cost for those two years. I'm assuming more than.

I mean, like, 440,000 is on that. I have a, I actually have an MBA and an MBA, so it was a three year degree. Then I have four years in my undergrad.

“So you asked me the, how much is my brain question?”

And I'm trying to now do the math. If the present value of my brain for the dollars spent on it is more than my present net worth. It's a great question. Smart girl, dumb questions.

Typically, if you think about the ROI of an MBA, I like people to think about the opportunity cost of what that would be doing in the market. So if you took that $440,000, put it at regular market returns of 7 to 10% year over

year after 30 years, you'd have 7.6 million dollars.

After 30 years, 30 years. OK, so we're not there, obviously. But I also went to business school and then made the decision to come a documentary filmmaker after doing three years of grad school. And my Pakistani parents were so excited.

I'm all excited about this decision. They're like, oh, you'd like to make films about a band called Sublime. Great. Great. This is why we invested.

Our own education. Two in it. I think because I grew up with an older father, and I know we've both lost her dad. And it's like, I grew up with a sense of urgency and scarcity of time. So as a result, I haven't thought a lot about money.

And I think there's a luxury in that, right?

Like, I've been fine, and I know I can get a job, and all the things, but I've been able

to take creative risks, and I've prioritized for that value versus the financial value. And yet, I just think like many millennial women of my age, I'm like, well, should I have a house by now? I already have those things when it comes like getting married or having a kid, but I definitely have that anxiety around home ownership in general.

Why? Because every time you go to a wedding, it's like, some will tell you that, like, paying rent is a waste of money. And they're like, how, like, Pakistani people are nosy. They love talking about money.

They're like, how much do you spend on rent? And they're like, oh, that is a waste of money. Well, I think this idea that home ownership is propaganda is not true, but the idea that

“it's the only way to build wealth is completely outdated.”

And there's a lot of emotion wrapped up into home ownership and stability and safety. You know, I saw my house foreclosed on when I was the kids. And I think about that a lot. That's invaluable. But I like to go back to the numbers.

Listen, I was a poetry major. I did not get my MBA, so I am not a numbers girl in the traditional sense. But when you stick to the numbers in these types of conversations, it actually strips out a lot of the emotion. So there are a few things to think about that quantify this subject of renting versus

buying. One of them is the 5% rule. So the 5% rule says, take 5% of what that purchase price is and what goes into that would be everything you can't earn back. So everything you waste.

So 1% to maintenance, 1% to property taxes, 3% to the opportunity cost. Because if you look at apples to apples, you're actually needing to look at the full housing cost, not just rent versus mortgage. Because you're not taking into account, the stuff that you don't get back. The equity you will get back later.

“Everything else, like you're not getting your property taxes back, you're not getting”

the maintenance back. And you're not getting the opportunity cost of investing in the market, the investment opportunity. So it's like putting that same money into the stock market into like a whatever ETF, when it gets you.

As soon as you 500 in x fund, we'll get you 7 to 10% year over a year. Housing historically has yielded 3 to 5%. Is it negative in some markets? Like I was reading about how in Las Vegas, the price of the home has like fallen over time, and New York, I know so many people who bought homes, you know, when we're graduating

like a decade ago, and now their homes are not worth anymore. Well, the thing that you want to look at to equalize this is the price to income ratio. So this will tell you over time how much a house costs compared to your income. So in 1970, it was 2.2 times. Now it's about 5 times.

And in coastal cities like in Los Angeles, it's 12 and a half times in New York, it's 10 times in San Jose, it's 10 times. So the issue with home ownership right now is that prices are much higher than wages are growing. And so the opportunity cost is a much bigger factor in this whole equation.

So if you look at the 5% rule, so 5% of, let's say, a $500,000 home is 25 grand. You divide that by 12, so you get your monthly cost, that's 2,100 bucks. Okay. I'm falling in the math kind of this is smart math keep going. So 2,100 bucks is your threshold.

it's more advantageous to buy.

If you're looking at the cost only, again, this is stripping out what the Pakistani lady is saying at the wedding. This is stripping out all the food. Yeah, the Amazon side. So watching a foreclosure exactly, so even you growing up with that fear and seeing that foreclosure,

“you have not made the decision to buy a home, is that correct?”

Yeah, for me right now, it's more advantageous for my family and I to be very disciplined in taking what we would have put on the down payment and the difference between the cost of renting versus the overall cost of buying, including that 5%. Yeah. And being really disciplined about investing it.

So what I think is the strongest argument to home ownership is the forced savings vehicle component of it. It forces you to earn equity at the end of it. It also gives you a place to stay. I totally got it.

People come from me so hard. Yeah. It's a very controversial take. Totally. But I want to be really clear.

I really everywhere scandalized by your take. So I'm so standally. Yeah. And here I am just giving you the math. It's great.

But there's a real opportunity cost to that down payment. So again, easy math, a hundred thousand dollars as a down payment is not a hundred thousand dollars. It's in the stock market, your money will double after ten years. So that hundred thousand dollars after ten years becomes two hundred thousand dollars.

After twenty years, that becomes four hundred thousand dollars. That's not a guarantee, right? Historically, that's if we look at 50 years of the stock market, that's historically what it's going to yield. And so I want to look at that opportunity cost and truly understand that this math only

math, if you actually stay disciplined to investing. It doesn't work if you're just like cool cool. So I'm just going to use that delta or that extra money and spend it somewhere else.

“Or I know myself like you have to have true self awareness to know if your habits are”

going to stay true to what makes this math math. So what makes that actual down payment earn more money than if it was stock in housing, if you just look at the historic numbers, it's by putting that extra money to work for you in the stock market. If you're going to do that, it's a better overall investment to rent and then take that

extra money of the down payment and the extra that you're spending on the all of the things with the housing and invested in the stock market. You've just made it seem more complicated to not own a house than to own a house. Okay. And more excel sheets to not own a house because the discipline that it would require.

But it was so hard to tell that point. No, it really does require discipline. And if you know you're not going to do that, then home ownership is a great forced savings vehicle over time at the end you're going to make three to five percent. You're not going to make seven to ten percent typically speaking, do not come for me.

There are markets. There are things. I know. Yes. But I was just looking at the data.

Yeah, you're digging aggregate data. Interesting.

So this is like the third episode in the smart world.

I'm questions smart money series that I'm doing, which is sponsored by time. The first episode I talked to the divorce attorney and he talked about this idea of you have to have a naked lunch with yourself and really know your own finances and your own approach to money before you kind of pair up with someone.

“I would say something you should do individually is have what I would call a naked lunch.”

Like where you really look at what's at the end of your fork. Like like the most dangerous lies in relationship with a lie. You mentioned my head is so fucked up right now. I was imagining a naked person. A naked person.

I'm looking at a fork. Looking at the other fork. Okay. I'm not just whatever the metaphor does for you. That's fine.

It tells more about you than me. It says more about it. It's a Rorschach test. Exactly. Exactly.

I think what happens economically is the most dangerous lies are to lies we tell ourselves. Yeah. Totally. And I would even say because I talk about the idea of looking at your finances is like sitting in front of the mirror and night good eating, but also putting for us in lights on yourself.

You really, really honest. Nope. I don't want to have this meal with anybody maybe, although sounds a little bit like they guess. Okay.

The second episode was with Raj Chetty who has done a lot of work around the American

dream. So, it's a lot of debate nowadays about people renting versus buying. Yeah. One way you can actually get to the American dream is to rent a home in a neighborhood that offers better opportunities for kids, better schools, better pathways to jobs, etc.

From the perspective home ownership, I guess that's not achieving the American dream. From the broader perspective of achieving prosperity, that might actually be a smart thing to do. Your zip code matters more than your deed. Literally, exactly, whether you own a house or not.

And we talked about what is the best path to progress and what is not propaganda, but like is a law or a myth around progress and how ownership being part of the second category of like it's been this version, this temple of the American dream, a home you own, a white pick up fence, two and a half kids, whatever it is, and that's just, that's not getting

And I think that's definitely true in our generations. There are emotional factors to it, and if it makes you sleep better at night, then that's amazing. But just be really, really honest, that that's the reason. Yeah.

How not will eventually get over it? Money. Money. You did the math. The math got to.

Yeah.

“I think when you have a lot of these hard conversations and emotions swell up, and if you're working”

with a partner who also has emotions around it, I think if you go back to the numbers

for us, it was most important to optimize for net worth after 30 years.

Not right now. How do you look at homes that have renovations? Because I feel like a lot of people are buying like fixer offers nowadays, and then they're getting a couple of things. They're getting a roof over their heads.

They're getting some project that is either going to make or break their marriage together. They might be getting content, like they create channels where they're just like renovating these homes. But there's so much of like a renovation culture. Yeah.

That's not in my life. That scares the hell out of me. Well, that's been popularized, obviously, by HGTV, and you think you can flip. And that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about typically what you're going to be spending on those property taxes

is around, again, 1% every area is going to be different. And then whatever typical maintenance you're going to have, the roof needs fixing. The HVAC system goes out.

“I mean, you just need to remember that at that point when you become a homeowner, nobody”

is coming to fix that stuff. And that stuff is very, very expensive. And insurance costs don't even get me started. There's also home warranties and home insurance. It's like home warranty worth it.

It's worth it for the companies that sell it. Yeah. I mean, that's very telling. If you look at insurance, you want to ensure stuff that you cannot afford to lose your life, your health, your home, the other stuff like a warranty on a toaster, you know,

the extended cell phone coverage, all that stuff is being sold because it's very lucrative to the companies. In saying like, it's like the idea of like, when you buy an Amtrak ticket, they're like, do you want insurance for this ticket? It's like, no, like that's insane, buy a refundable ticket.

It's quite, it's incredibly, it doesn't work out well for the consumer. So you've obviously gone through a big shake up in your life in 18 months ago or so. The fire is in LA and you lost your home. Did that change your philosophy on all of this and on the idea of ownership in general? Yeah, it reminded me that, you know, systems, huge city systems, state systems can fail in

a way that felt very uncomfortable for me at the time. I was also two weeks postpartum. So I was extremely emotional, you know, we built on a nursery, we built out a home that I'm mostly more in the future of, not necessarily even the past of. And so I think that when that happened so quickly and so obviously unexpectedly, it made me

less attached to a physical home and that idea of stability that I glorified for so many years. And I thought, okay, well, when I become this, then I'll be happy, right?

We always play this game and we never get our brains to the other side of it because there's

always another there there, so when I got a home, when I got married, when I have a kid, then I'll be happy.

“And you know, the truth is wherever you go there, you are and there's always going to be maybe”

not to that extent. There's always going to be something that happens that's going to get in the way of what you imagined. Yeah. That time.

It was not the plan, but it also made me less attached to this idea of home ownership. I can't imagine, and I don't want to make you relive that very difficult experience. I, um, one of my closest friends lived in LA, how to home in the Palisade, her son is my god son and they lost their home and I'd seen her, like, really, you know, spent a lot of time and picking that lot, designing that home, like, it was a special place.

It was like, felt like my home in LA and, um, and so seeing that I totally understand what you're saying about losing confidence in the idea of stuff and the physical world, but also in some of the institutions that we're still finding out like why this happened and where, like, where the accountability lies and how to pursue that. I'm certainly seeing that in my friend's experience, but I remember leaving that day and just

thinking we would come back. I just left with the clothes on our back, we put the dog in the car in the baby and we're like, it's cool. We'll be back later. I'm going to go to a friend's house and then, you know, how could they let this burn down?

And also, my husband was like, yeah, and I just paid so much in taxes, like, turn the trucks around their way. Like, I paid for the fire hydrants, no, none of it was there. And so that's really unnerving on so many levels that the systems that you expect to be there when you need them the most aren't.

But yes, right, Chris, so it was our first guest here, which was felt very poetic and fitting

to rebuild the office in the studio and I'm sitting here in Nicole's beautiful studio

Thank you for letting us. Thank you here. And it's just, I mean, you've rebuilt a lot. Thank you. The idea of renting feels good to me on a financial and an emotional level because of that.

Yeah, I cannot compare with that experience, but I will just say, like, one of the reasons

I've always been a renter as because one, I've grew up in multiple continents.

Like I've always moved a lot, I've lived in a dozen cities in, like, as many years or in 15 years, I've lived in a dozen cities. And I like the idea that when the washing machine breaks, I call somebody. And I don't spend hours in my life on it. And there's a huge value of that to me that I cannot put in an, I could probably, like, figure

out the marginal utility calculation on it. But for me, it's just, it's liberating to not have to deal with those things. Yeah, if you're moving around, like, Jensian Millennials are, it is more advantageous to rent.

“I think the idea that there's so much shame, once you tease through some of these issues”

and you get to a point where this isn't intentional decision. I name up move around a lot. I name up, I'm being disciplined that I'm investing in the market, and I'm consciously choosing to rent so that I can free up more of my capital to grow faster for me. That's a different mindset than saying, like, oh, I'm such a loser.

I'm renting. I'm stuck at life. What am I going to do? The Pakistani ladies. That's the next.

The aunties. I'm telling you. The aunties. Nicole, I'm telling you.

It's about you getting good with that conversation with yourself.

We're going to take a quick break, and we'll be back with more with Nicole Lappin. I think of you as someone who's extremely resilient, not just because we're sitting in this beautiful office that you've rebuilt, but also because of the story that you have told around having been in debt and getting out of debt. And so before we move on totally from this home chapter, it's like one of the daunting

things to me about home ownership is the idea of debt, and even if you have a fixed interest mortgage, which I don't think they exist anymore, kind of, or they do, but they're at

“much higher interest rates than they were years ago, right?”

No. You can correct me. That's the whole idea. I'm allowed to be dumb at my show. Yeah.

Nicole's going to be a sad. Do you mean adjusted adjustable rate mortgage? There are adjustable rate mortgages, but they used to be much lower percentages. Yeah. The interest rate.

Yes. Exactly. When interest rates were lower. Yes. And now we're about six and a quarter percent, you know, obviously we were at rock bottom

interest rates around the pandemic, and when we saw financial Armageddon in 2008, but that was an emergency measure. So those rock bottom interest rates were what people got used to, but they're not typical. We're at more of a typical interest rate level right now. So given the choice, I know that you're not going to buy a home anytime soon, it sounds

like I'm not going to buy a home anytime soon, although I do have to have like a very naked fluorescent lunch with myself and figure out how much money I should be putting in the market because I'm not buying a home. That's my kind of work. We can do that.

Yeah. We can do that together. Yeah. It helped me do that. I'll have naked blunt with you.

Wow. I love it. It was just right. Yeah. That's great.

That would be amazing. It is so scary. It's my wife manager to like, because I'm just afraid to confront numbers and they're not bad. I'm pretty good at saving and I'm pretty good investing, but I just don't want to think

about it. Yeah. We make a lot of stories in our head that end up taking over and the best antidote for shame is truth and looking at it and realizing actually I suffered more in imagination than in reality.

That's like the stoicism vibe for you. Okay. All right. That's what I'm trying to do. If you were considering, you know, neither of us are buying the home, we're just having

naked lunch. Would you be less likely to take a fixed interest rate loan for mortgage right now? What would you advise people? Is there a hope that interest rates are going to come down? Do you have a theory on that?

I know you're not getting financial advice, all the disclosures, but is there a way to think about that? Yeah. We also do have these conversations at our wealth management for our private wealth collective. And this is truly a holistic approach.

So you can't really look at home ownership in a vacuum.

“You have to look at your entire financial picture, you know, people often say like can I”

buy a home?

It's like hold on a second.

I have a thousand other questions for you, like what other kinds of debt are you holding? Do you have student loans? Do you have credit card interest rate? What are your goals and all of those questions should be looked at together in a holistic

picture? And so not all debt is created equal. So I used to be so scared of any kind of debt. I'm first generation American, you know, grip immigrant household, like you buy something if you have the literal cash to pay for it, and that was the end, like period, end of

story. And so I thought of keeping people poor. So rich people have debt, but they call it leverage, the same concept, but they use it

between the percentage that you're borrowing money out and the percentage that you would make money out.

“So if you're borrowing at 3%, but you can make a 10% thing, you're pocketing that spread”

there are 7% for instance. And so, you know, good debt and bad debt, two different things. So good debt for your beautiful, beautiful brain, you know, in theory, that asset is going to earn more than the interest rate, right? Yes.

So that's good debt. So you're using that debt to buy assets that will appreciate. So a home. It's sort of, you know, where you're 6 and a quarter percent, again, that calculation that we did around the 5% is more like 6%, maybe 7% in today's interest rate environments.

And credit card debt, bad debt, right? Credit card debt that I got into was 24%. So right now, new credit issues are coming in at 22%, 24% you mispayments are up to 30%. And did you know that?

Like, had you read these, like, because I feel like there's always asterix on the star and

they have these other, like, insignia for the footnote, they'll come up with every care under the side. And if you don't know, you don't have perspective, 24% amazing compared to what you don't know. You don't know.

And it's always like hidden in these or it's just, like, lightly fine printed fees. I don't know. Yeah. So APR is the interest rate that you pay, APY is what you got at the bank. What you get at the bank typically is much lower than what you're paying on a credit card.

And that, that type of debt is what can snowball out of control. The biggest issue with that type of debt is the minimum payment. It's not even necessarily the rate. If you can understand what that rate is or pay it off on time, but the minimum payment thing is what's keeping a lot of people stuck.

It kept me stuck. I thought, okay, I'm paying the minimum payment. This is an option on the credit card portal.

I got into credit card debt when I finally got a credit card.

And I was rebelling it and, you know, not ever having one or stashing cash under the sink behind the maxi pads just in case that's just how I grew up. But using that type of, I think, predatory lending can get you really, really stuck. So $5,000 at 20%, which is not even the highest, by paying just the minimum, we'll take you 23 years to pay it off, and it was double what you're spending in interest.

“Well, so when you're thinking about debt, like you have to think about two different kinds”

of debt and what the percentages, and what you're doing with that, are you buying things? Are you buying a depreciating asset with it and you're using high interest credit card debt? Versus your brain. Yeah, hopefully interest rate outperforming inflation unless you decide to become a documentary filmmaker in which case, probably not, but that's fine.

It's psychic income. How much debt did you get into? I got into $5,000 of credit card debt originally. I broke that down by the day to get out of it. I didn't know at the time that I was doing the avalanche method.

Yes, there's two ways you talk about to get out of debt. Yeah, avalanche method and snowball method. So it doesn't really matter which one you choose as long as you choose one and stick to it. So avalanche? I'm telling you.

No, no. I want you to tell them. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

I'm like the sound terrible. Let's get inside. Yes.

So avalanche method is ranking your highest interest rate credit card debt first and paying

that off the first. Okay. So if you have a bill that comes in for $100 and that's at 5% let's say. And you have a bill that's for $50 and it's at 24% and you're like, "I have a magical $100 bill.

I'll just pay $100." Yeah. Right? 'Cause I'll rip it up ill because I thought it. But that's not the most avantages way.

I would put half of that toward paying off the higher interest rate credit card debt likely first because that's going to snowball fastest. Even though the snowball method is paying for the smallest bill first so you can have momentum to keep going. So it's like the psychological avalanche method is more efficient.

Yeah. And again, I give these choices because not every financial choice is a true number is choice. It's often an emotional choice.

“So whenever you're going to stick to, you're going to spend more over time, right?”

But as long as you stick to that and it works for you than I like that method for you. I like that too. But the one that's cheaper is the avalanche. The efficient one is the avalanche one. And I so agree with you on the emotionality of it, like Jim Sachsen and I were talking

about this with the divorce attorney and I.

You're dating their parents and grandparents approach to a money and all of the stuff

is so hard-coated in us that it's really hard to separate the emotionality and the finance. I love what you do because it's partly extremely practical and partly psychological. And thank you so much. But when I was in debt and I continued to, you know, be in debt and feel a lot of shame around that debt, especially when I was also a business reporter

and I was covering these macro economic things, but personally in my own micro economy, I couldn't get my own financial shit together. You know, I felt so much shame around that. I felt so much shame about the lineage too because I was like, well, I clearly deserve this.

I suck. I'm not a numbers person. I'm bad with money. Of course, this is going to happen

to me. And then these stories that continue to proliferate and that shame is not a good money management system because it keeps you avoided and it keeps you out of these conversations

“that really could be helping you. And so I think it's, it's a mistake to remove the idea”

that shame has a huge part in what's keeping people in a cycle of debt. It's so well put. I am now going to completely low-brow out your conversation about shame and pull out paddles, something else to do with that. I brought these paddles into Nicole Studio and she's terrified and confused as to why I have brought this. She thought we're going to be up to something sexier in the argument.

So, okay, I think I'm just making your what's happening.

No, no thinking. There's nothing you ashamed of. But I want to run through kind of big

outlays that people have in their finances. And I want your kind of redder green. Okay, these paddles have two sides. One is red and one is green. And you're going to tell me, is it worth going into debt for green or is it not worth going into debt for red? Number one, you have a very nice one and engagement ring. To go into debt for it. Yes, red. Hell no. Hell no. Hell no. Don't go into that. Should

you got a lab diamond. Get a lab diamond. Great. Green on lab diamond. Red on the difference. Yeah. Okay. A two-carot engagement ring. A natural diamond is 20 grand. A lab grown diamond is 2500 bucks. Invest the difference. 2500 world. After, you know, 30 years or whatever, it'll probably be 300 grand, better

than really a natural diamond. Yeah. The lab grown will be no, if you invest the difference. Oh, yes, sorry. If you invest like the 17,000 I'm a brand diamond like a wild appreciating

“asset. My god. I got to rename the podcast, dumb girls start. Okay. What about your wedding?”

Going into debt? Yeah. No, seems same situation. Like the average wedding cost is 35 grand. Yeah. Spend half of that invested difference. Again, you'll have 300 grand. Yeah. 30 years. We had a micro wedding. What's a micro wedding? Maybe wedding. Maybe wedding. I like the idea. I was also pregnant. I was shocked on wedding. I was shocked on wedding. I was shocked on wedding. I tried

wedding. That is what the aunties would say. Oh, it's a shosh on wedding. Anyway, it was the best wedding. Small. You know, we invested the rest that we didn't blow out. Yeah. I think one of the greatest things that the pandemic has done is like made more wedding weddings micro and like people are doing the city hall wedding or like a smaller wedding. And I'm like, I'm so down for that. Okay. Home ownership. Going into debt.

But just through a regular mortgage. Yeah. I think it depends. It depends. I'm going to agree. Sure. If it works for you. Yeah. If it works for you, I'm into it.

“But you have to answer all the questions and like check the boxes that we talked about.”

Okay. Homeowner. What's not going in blindly? Yeah. And thinking that that's the way to grow well. It's one way to grow well. Home renovation. Are you on HTTB? If you're on HTTB, it's great. If you're just a regular person. And if you're going to stay there forever and ever. And, you know, you can afford it in your overall financial picture. Great. Or you think you're going to recoup it somehow. You're going to drive up.

You're doubling the value of the home by doing this new kitchen splash. Totally. Some of that is speculative. Okay. It sounds like you're glad you're just giving your green to be generous. What about fertility? Okay. IVF, the journey. Oh. Going into debt for it? It's tricky. Yeah. Probably right. Yeah. I did. I did IVF. It's no fun. But I know how deeply personal that is. So if it's something that you want, feel like you need to do, then,

you know, there are a lot of ways to get out of debt. And it's a problem you can deal with later. And I count in that like egg freezing or fertility or adoption or surrogacy. All the things that people might be considering to be able to have a family. It seems like the kind of thing that, okay, feels like there's only so many choices. And it's a priority in a certain

that you spend money right on impressing other people, consumption, and experiences. And there's no greater experience, obviously, than having a family. And if that's deeply deeply personal to you, like who the hell am I to tell you to bad paddle. I was going to show you like we're going to get to some paddles where you actually want to do the green, not your resistant green for home ownership. Your education. I would say, I would say it's really

it depends if you do the math, if you know the opportunity cost, if you really think that it's

“going to yield a higher return over time. But likely not. I think that ten years ago, my answer”

on this might have been different. But I just feel like where we are with the principally, I and like I see so many people who have dropped out of college or like George Lucas built, you know, everything that he's built from having gone to community college. And I think there's a lot of routes and we kind of over emphasize prestige education. Yeah. So I'm probably going to be right on that. I don't know where people that have hired went to college. I don't think anyone

knows where I went to college or cares. Yeah. I mean, obviously, where I went, didn't help me. No, I mean, that's not my day. So I was so bad. But your kids education.

No, going into debt yourself. Always put your oxygen mask on first. They can get student loans.

You can't you can't get alone for your retirement. So when when parents will say, well, I'm, you know, saving for my kids education. And that's so lovely. And I get that as a parent. But only after you've taken care of yourself first. So if you're prioritizing their college and not your retirement and you are desolate when you're older and you're like, I've no place to live. I'm coming over to your house that I'm sleeping on the couch. I have no food. Like,

“that's not helping your kid. No. So you have to take care of your retirement first. You”

not go into debt for their education. I'm curious. Like, what's the best thing you invested in in your 20s and the worst thing you quote invested in in your 20s? Oh, man. I was not investing in my 20s. That's the problem. I think, you know, no one has ever in the history of the world said. I'm so glad I didn't invest earlier. Like, oh, my god, the reason that I do what I do every single day is because I'm like, please do not make the same mistakes. I did. Like, I wish. And I was

covering, by the way, on the floor of the stock exchange, like, I have, yeah, you know, of me saying,

like, Google just announced Gmail. You'll never have to delete a single email. Like, like, why

was I not buying Google stock? That was crazy. Or like, I have a video that shows me reporting on the launch of the iPod. Yeah. What was I doing? Like, what was I doing? Why was I buying clothes and shoes and whatever and why was I not buying stocks? I was buying too much stuff and not enough stocks. Totally agree. And I feel like I've constantly been in that situation where I remember my college boy from it's like buying noodles of Google and like all these stocks. And

and he was telling me about them. And I'm like, I don't know, that seems risky. Now I look at the fact that like Google has like gone up, I don't know, hundreds of acts. If Amazon has gone up, thousands of acts like 3,000 acts, it would have been smart to be buying that earlier in life.

“What about the worst thing you quote invested in even in your 30s? Like, something you thought”

was going to be an investment that paid off and didn't. Yeah. Yeah. I need like designer anything. I know this is cliche, but yes, I think we normalize giving gifts of stock. Yeah, not stuff to ourselves and to others. Yeah. Okay. So you're going to give your daughter stock? Yeah, of course. I'm sure he has stock. Yeah. She has more money. We were just looking at her portfolio. My daughter is richer than my husband and I were in our 20s and probably in our early 30s. Because what are

three things that people can do if they have a baby that they want to do? She has a 529, which is traditionally thought of as a college savings account, but it is much more flexible. She has a custodial or off IRA and she has a custodial brokerage. Got it. Yeah. Wow. She has a whole, like, your daughter's rich. My daughter is richer because you're not going to buy a sledge after that. Honestly, we can't. Yeah. It's a jail break that money. You're going to pay a lot of penalties.

Right? No, you know. Don't you? That's the, you're, Nicole is finally impressed by one piece of knowledge.

It's like our last five minutes of seeing the interview. I love it. Right? There's a lot of penalties. No. There are some penalties. There are some penalties. Yeah. But sometimes you can do it. Okay. What about health savings accounts? Are they, oh, there was worth it? For debt, no, we're done with the, we're done with the, what the, what the, yeah. I mean, there are a lot of tax advantage accounts that I would put my money in first and then go to

taxable accounts. So, like, if you look at HSAs, if you look at 401ks, IRAs or Roth or a backdoor Roth, you know, a year a person who's making 100, $300,000 can put about 35 grand into those

obviously free money. People half of people say no to 401k match, which is, like, saying no to a raise. Yeah. It's done. Yeah. But so do that at first and then, like, a taxable broker, your account, which is where you can go. Low cost doesn't be 500 index funds and the rest of it. And if you want passive income from that, then I like to think of like $50,000.

There's a year for every million-ish that you have. Yeah. So, without touching the principle,

what you can get as income to live on. It's a good rule of thumb as you're trying to think about passive income. Don't fall into the rabbit holes of the internet. That's like, you can do this passive thing. It's so simple and easy. It's not, no. One piece of data, by the way, when I was like looking through this that broke my mind, is there's a recent survey of 2,000 people who are either like recently engaged, married, or in relationships, and 78% of people surveyed

would rather start married life debt free than spend on an engagement ring. And I was like, what's up with the other 22% of people? But it sounds like most people wouldn't. Most people wouldn't, but the number goes down by generation, 70% of millennials that they wouldn't and 64% of Gen Z said they wouldn't go into debt. But it's still the majority, but it's, that's 40% of Gen Z, who might be far away from making that decision, thinking that they would

go into debt for a ring, Laugheron, Laugheron, investorist, investorist, I feel like I put out it on a T-shirt, bumper sticker, let's go. The last thing I want to ask you about is, when you sit down and you do this thing could lunch and you sit with yourself, how do you know if you're rich or

“poor? Like, what are the milestones that you should have in your mind to really measure that?”

Because there's the dollar value, but then I think there's like, we're living a world of vast comparison. Like, you're constantly comparing yourself to other people you're comparing yourself to where your parents were in the generation. How do you know if you're doing well, financially? If you answer the question really honestly with what do you want, financially? What's going to make you happy? And for everyone that's different, if you are going to be stoked in retirement,

living on a small piece of land with your long chair from Target, amazing. Let's stick to that, and not change the goal post on ourselves when we scroll on Instagram and we see our friends friend with a yacht and be like, oh my god, I suck at life. Because I think you can have it all, but only if you truly define what it all means and stop changing the definition on your self-made game. Because that's when it doesn't work. Because as you get more, you expand your possibility

“set of what you need. And I think that's why it's really important to work with any trusted”

wealth advisor that you have. We have these conversations all the time. It's nice to have an accountability partner and somebody who's going to keep you honest with what your goals are. People will call and say, well, I want to get this or that or whatever or why am I not getting this. It's like, hold on. We went through your whole goals and all of the breakdown of timeline here.

That's not what's on there. We can change that. You can always change that. But stay really true

and honest to what that looks like for you in your most honest quiet moment. Off social media. Yes, off social media. And just like kind of in your own room. Like I think my dad, when I was growing up, had this rule, which is like, I'm never going to say no to you, but don't ask me for something I should say no to, which was a good self-regulation for me and asking for things. And it wasn't mostly financial things. It was like sometimes time

things, help with something or whatever. It's like just kind of being self-aware in what I was

“expecting out of life. And I think sometimes we let go of that. And I had this conversation with”

Mark Cuban too. It's like, how much money is enough money? And he said, how much money is too much money. Like, it's like, you can just get caught in a trap of wanting more and more and more. And like, only make yourself feel poorer as you get richer, which I've certainly seen in some of the billionaires I've covered too. Yeah, I think having that framework around the passive income that you can make off a portfolio without touching that is a good benchmark to think about like the

4% rule or the 5% rule. So that would basically mean for $3 million that's kicking off 150

grand each year for you to live on. If that's, is that enough? I don't know. Like, I only you can answer those questions. Yeah. You know, if it's not, is it more? Is it less? Do you want to 50 grand? And then that's a million dollar portfolio that kicks off that income? A million dollars to get 50 grand a year. Yeah. Like, 800 to, you know, one and a half depending on like the interest rate that you're getting. Yeah. Okay. I'm going to keep working. I'm going to keep working with

there yet. I end every episode of "Smart Girl Time Questions" asking my much smarter gas. What are they dumb about? What is the question that you have that you've been embarrassed to ask out or you've with some shame? Ask your phone recently. Oh, what's in my, what's in my cloud log?

about, which is why is it taboo to ask what a person's salary is when it's not taboo to ask within

30 seconds of meeting them what they actually do because we're lying to ourselves that that question

“is not about what their salary is. Totally. It's completely, so it's where you live, where do you live?”

And, you know, people will have all these questions for trying to understand how much money you make. Okay. I love that. So just ask that. So who made that Emily post-type rule? Yes. Yeah.

When did that happen? And I don't like it. And also just asking what you do in the first 30 seconds.

I have this one anecdote in, in one of my books where I was at an event in New York and there was sort of a group at a financial services thing saying like, "Where are you from?" And I said,

“"Loss Angeles." And everybody laughed at me and they were like, "Where are you from?" Again, they asked.”

And I kind of got that what they were asking for was what firm am I from? And I was just like,

"Loss Angeles." Because, you know, let's have another conversation about actually getting to know

each other as humans. But anyway, I do address the biggest question that I have right now is, why do I viscerally, like, at my core? Okay. Want to eat my baby's leg? No, you do not. I want to eat her leg fat. Like, I just want to leave it, you're not for this guy. Carnivorous. You just think it's so cute. No, no, no, no, no. But there's this thing. Like, why do mothers want to eat their babies? No, I don't know. I have to get out of this. I would get out of this for my own life.

Some army hammer shit is going down. And the smell of the baby, like, what I want to just, like, not on her fat leg. And it's like that. It's just that. It's not her fat leg. It's mostly her fat leg.

“Her fat arm too. Like, I just, like, I truly, why do mothers want to bite on their children?”

What's the number for child protection? What's that? No, you love her so much. It is like, kids are so cute. And they're like, "Chubby, chubby, chubby cute." Here's a question I have. Do chubby kids become skinny adults and skinny kids become chubby adults? I have the theory, but I don't know if it's true. Well, I thought our daughter was getting too skinny because the leg fat roles were disappearing. Much of my sugar. And so I was like, we need to, we need to

fat in her up. Okay. Found her. She's already red. She can buy some food when you get her some food. So they're like food. She takes her height after her father. Things like that. She's lengthening out. The pediatrician was like her parents are not, don't have fat roles on their legs. It's like, fine, this should decide. He's like, "You know, give me back the fat roles." I lost eat. I didn't take fat role. I love it. I want to meet your daughter. I am not going to eat her,

but thank you so much for doing this. Thank you so much.