Katie Gatti (00:03:17):
And I would say that yeah, in that 6 to 12 month period, I kind of took a step back and was like, “All right, I think I need to start learning about this.” And for a long time, I always kind of blamed the fact that I’d studied communications in college. And I was like, “Well, I don’t understand money, I’m not good at math, I didn’t study business, I didn’t study finance.” Come to find out that the people that studied business and finance don’t understand it either in their own personal lives, they understand it at the corporate level. But just because you study finance in college does not mean that you’re going to be good at personal finance, so I think that that was an excuse.

Katie Gatti (00:03:50):
And interestingly, the more that I started to learn about it, the more I realized, “Oh my God, there’s so much out there.” Like, anything you could possibly want to know is available on the internet for free, so that was what kind of kicked off my love affair and obsession with financial independence, and the math that sets you free, and compounding, and exponential return. I mean, it just built on itself. And so after several years of that, finally in spring 2020, I’m sitting around, I have all this free time on my hands for reasons, we all had free time on our hands in April of 2020.

Katie Gatti (00:04:28):
And decided that I kind of wanted to add my voice and my perspective to that conversation, because most of the people that I was learning from didn’t really look or sound like me. And I figured, “Hey, there are experiences that I’m having and points of view that I have, that I’m not really seeing represented. And maybe there are other young women, like I was three years ago, that have no idea what they’re doing, but are interested in learning more.” So that’s kind of the how I got here.

Trey Lockerbie (00:04:57):
You mentioned finance and accounting and people not even knowing with those degrees. And I can relate because I have friends who studied finance and even accounting, and they don’t even know anything about the stock market, which I always found amazing. I was like, “You guys know all about this.”

Katie Gatti (00:05:10):
Same. Well, like, “What did you study?”.

Trey Lockerbie (00:05:10):
And they’re like, “I know nothing.” Yeah. So I’m kind of curious, when you finally sat down, you’re like, “I’m going to do this.” Where did you start? You mentioned going online and YouTube perhaps, but do you recall the first thing or first resource you found that you’re like, “Okay, this kind of makes sense”?

Katie Gatti (00:05:23):
Yeah. Yeah. So embarrassingly, the first thing I did was turn to all my guy friends and say, “Where do you guys learn about this? Because I hear y’all talking about money, I hear you talking about what you’re investing in.” And at the time they were all trading and not anything that I do, but one of them sent me an article about traditional versus Roth from Mad Fientist, who, full circle moment, had him on the show a couple months ago and it was really surreal, but so I would read Mad Fientist, I would listen to the Choose FI Podcast with Brad and Jonathan, so I kind of was getting it from all angles.

Katie Gatti (00:05:56):
It was the super nerdy, technical, math side, but also learning about kind of the philosophy around financial independence in general, the retire early movement in general, but also just like, “Hey, there’s a better way to go about life than what you’re probably doing, how you’re probably going about it now. And that if you just sleep walk through these decisions, you’re going to get really average or maybe even below average results, but with a little bit more effort, with a little bit more intention, with a little bit more proactivity, you can have a radically different trajectory in your financial life.” So I really do owe, I think, most, if not all, of my foundation and even beyond that foundation to guys like Brad and Jonathan, and Brandon from Mad Fientist.

Trey Lockerbie (00:06:50):
You know, you mentioned the retire early trend or moment were having. And what I find interesting about you is why you may have started to discover this in the last few years, you went down the very practical traditional road. You didn’t come across NFTs and start flipping monkey pictures. I mean, like a lot of people have been doing the last few years to quote, unquote, “Retire early.” So I’m kind of curious, is there something within you that is just more pragmatic that you find drew you to the more traditional way to study investing?

Katie Gatti (00:07:20):
Yeah, I think I’m pretty risk averse and I think my investing philosophy really hinges on things that I can understand. And for me, that usually means, can I point to underlying cash flows? Do I understand why this has value? Do I understand why this makes money? And with traditional equities and things like real estate and small businesses, it’s very obvious to me why those things are valuable, why they have money, how they create value. With the more speculative assets like cryptocurrency or NFTs or some of the more unorthodox things that have come onto the scene in the last decade, for me, there is a bit of a mental block there that despite the research that I’ve done, I can’t really overcome.

Katie Gatti (00:08:05):
And so I think for me, it was more so just like, “I know this traditional path works because it’s worked for millions of people, so I have a fair bit of confidence that it’s going to work for me and that there is the historical data there to back it up.” So I think that was really kind of why I did consider those things, but ultimately never very seriously and why the traditional path always felt like it made more sense for me.

Trey Lockerbie (00:08:32):
I’m curious about you digging into all this and not finding, like you said, your own voice or someone who had a voice similar to you or spoke to you. I’m generally curious about this. I mean, in the last year, I interviewed something like 80 people, I think, and only 5% were female. And that was with me actively seeking female guests, so it’s just becoming more apparent to me that there just aren’t enough women in the space that are studying this, or at least doing it professionally, shall we say? So when you were getting into this, is that the void you saw for yourself and you said, “Look, no one’s doing this”? And do you have any thesis as to why that is?

Katie Gatti (00:09:09):
Yeah, that’s a good question because there certainly were some at the time, and particularly because my preferred method of information gathering was books, and podcasts, and blogs. And so there are people like Paula Pant or Kristy Shen. There were some women that I would see, but by and large, it was majority male. And when I say I didn’t see and hear people like me, I partially do mean female, but on the other side of that coin, I think my approach is very irreverent and a little bit raunchy and I swear and use kind of explicit analogies. And it’s just because that’s what’s more fun for me, that is my personality. And I didn’t really come across many personal finance or investing podcasts or blogs that did that.

Katie Gatti (00:09:59):
And even today, we’ll get messages or emails like, “I really like your content, but you’re kind of unprofessional when you say the F-word.” I’m like, “Well, I might not be for you then.” But I mean, I think that is also what I mean, that very casual and kind of humorous angle. That was also, I felt like something that I didn’t see a ton of. There’s obviously some, but by and large, the stuff I would listen to is very serious, and very buttoned up, and very professional. And that’s just not how I learn best and I tend to get bored with that type of stuff if that’s the only thing that I’m listening to, so I figured that that might kind of apply to others.

Katie Gatti (00:10:40):
As far as why women aren’t as involved, I wonder if it does kind of stem from the fact that finance has traditionally been like a male dominated industry. I think you could probably say that about any industry until the last 20 or 30 years that it was male dominated. I think that that just takes time to break down those walls and I think if women have historically been excluded from something, they’re probably going to be less likely to be interested in it now, but that’s changing. It’s certainly changing. So I think with time, we’ll continue to see that shift, but good on you for specifically seeking out female voices. I do think that men and women approach investing and finance differently, like at an aggregate level. Obviously, there will be outliers within either side, but I think that it is interesting to hear from both sides.

Katie Gatti (00:11:32):
I was just listening to a Michael Lewis podcast last night, actually about that. And how women, compared to men in their investing styles, do tend to be more conservative and exhibit less hubris in stock picking, which tends to net better results. So I just think it’s kind of funny because we do tend to have gender differences in the way that we approach money. And yeah, I think we’ll see more women coming into the space and I think they have been, even since 2020, I’ve noticed more women coming in.

Trey Lockerbie (00:12:01):
Yeah. I mean, I think you’re doing a great service. And to your point about the voice that you’re putting, you’re presenting, my wife will listen to your show. She won’t listen to my show.

Katie Gatti (00:12:09):
Oh, wow. I’m so honored.

Trey Lockerbie (00:12:10):
So you’re doing a great service. And it’s no surprise that you’ve partnered now with Morning Brew. We know those guys well, they’ve been on the show, and Alex, and etc. And we’ve been big fans of them, and their voice, and the content they’ve been putting out. So I’m just kind of generally curious how that evolved and how you came to partner with Morning Brew.

Katie Gatti (00:12:26):
Yeah, totally. Well, weirdly enough, the way that I met Austin Rief, who’s the CEO, completely random. Couple years ago, I got a traffic citation because I was sitting at a red light reading Morning Brew. And so I tweeted Morning Brew and I was like, “I am so dedicated to this newsletter that I just got $150 citation for reading it at a red light.” And so then Austin DMs me from the Morning Brew account and is like, “Hey, we’re going to pay for the ticket. What’s your PayPal?” So then we started going back and forth. I realize, “Oh, this guy’s one of the founders, we follow each other on Twitter.” And just kind of had that periphery acquaintance situation on social media. Well, then years passed when I launched Money With Katie, he started following on Instagram, he subscribed to the newsletter. And then, last November. He reached out and said that they were thinking about expanding more into personal finance content and wanted to know if I’d be open to talking.

Katie Gatti (00:13:25):
And at the time, I thought he just wanted to set up a consulting call or like, “Hey, what are you learning? What are you noticing?” But then, by the end of the conversation, he’s like, “Well, we want to buy you.” And I was like, “Oh, that’s not where I thought this was going.” So yeah, a month of negotiations ensues, we talked through kind of technically what it looks like. It did end up being like an acqui-hire situation, so they hired me as an employee to run Money with Katie, but then acquired all of the intellectual property, and the brand, and all of that since it was already kind of an established business. So it’s been interesting.

Katie Gatti (00:13:59):
I think I was the first one that got brought on in that way, but yeah, it’s been great. The growth since joining has been explosive and the amount of resources, and even things like video editing. Like I’m not a video editor, but now we’re putting the show on YouTube because we have a team of video editors. So it’s been a really cool experience to get to plug to an already established kind of media enterprise and benefit from the resources that they have, and that broader mentorship that you just don’t really get when you’re doing it by yourself, so I’ve been really happy with how the relationship has kind of evolved.

Trey Lockerbie (00:14:38):
That’s really cool. All right, so shifting gears a little bit, I want to go into sort of the nuts and bolts of what you’ve been learning about and teaching people about personal finance. And I have this experience, and I don’t know if you can relate, but when people text me about, “Should I buy stocks now?” Or even worse, “Should I buy Company X now?” It’s always telling me that they haven’t done the first step of investing, which is in my opinion, determining what is quote, unquote, “Enough.”

Trey Lockerbie (00:15:05):
So for example, if we’re to use this very elegant wealth planning tool that you have on your website, we might find that based on the earnings we’re expecting to make and the spending estimates over, say the next 30 or 40 years, we may only need like a 7% annual return on our investments to get a comfortable retirement, or we might even, maybe on the other hand, we might need like 15%, but either way, it’s good to know, because that will dictate your investing. If you only need 7% index funds, great, that might be the best path forward. What are some of the key principles for setting up your own wealth plan that you’ve developed over time?

Katie Gatti (00:15:42):
Yeah. So I think it comes down to a few key variables and I’ve been surprised repeatedly how few people have really stopped to think about these things. And I guess it makes sense because before I kind of fell into this rabbit hole world of FI, I had never really thought about it, but I think what it boils down to is understanding both what you are spending now, so what’s your life costs now. And if that is the amount of money that you anticipate wanting to spend in the future. Like, is the amount of money I’m spending now sufficient for living the lifestyle that I want to continue to live or am I overshooting or undershooting that in any significant way? So because of the 4% rule research, and I know that there are people that say that, “Oh, it’s no longer valid.”

Katie Gatti (00:16:34):
We did a really big deep dive on the pod about this, about a few weeks ago, but even if you wanted to say, “Okay, I’m more comfortable with a 3% conservative withdrawal rate,” it’s very easy to take those withdrawal rate best practices, flip them on their head and say, “Okay. Well, if I know I’m spending X dollars per month, that’s X dollars per year, multiply by 12, then I’m going to multiply by between 25 and 33 to understand how big my portfolio needs to be in order to reliably spin off that 3% or 4% number per year represents the amount of money that I want to be spending.” And so what the tool that I built does is it basically asks you, “How much have you invested now? What do you have invested in the stock market right now? How much are you earning right now? And what type of raises are you anticipating getting, whether it’s 3% per year or 5% per year so you can kind of project out how that income is going to change?”

Katie Gatti (00:17:34):
And then really it’s just, what are you spending right now? What is your monthly spend? Do you want to pad it a little bit, assuming you might want to spend more in the future or are you maybe living the high life right now and you actually think once you’re retired, things are going to get tapered down a little bit? And then it uses those variables along with the average estimated return, which usually will use 7%. I like to do 7% before inflation, just so that we’re being super, super conservative and accounting for the fact that we may have higher medical expenses in retirement or something may come along and change, or it maybe inflation will be higher than we’re thinking it’s going to be, or returns are going to be lower.

Katie Gatti (00:18:12):
And then it projects out a timeline for you to say, based on what you currently have, what you’re currently earning, and what you’re currently spending, this is tentatively how many years away you are from having that critical mass invested to where you are now work optional, that you do not have to do work for money anymore, that you could feasibly live off of this investment portfolio and theoretically never run out of money. Obviously, there are myriad assumptions baked into that, like sequence of returns, risk is kind of ignored because you’re just assuming a flat 7% down the line. It’s also assuming that inflation stays relatively consistent and that the actual holdings that you have are invested in such a way that they will reliably produce 7% per year, which no one knows for sure, but we know what types of indices and decisions will get us closer to that than maybe yoloing everything into Tesla, like nobody knows how that’s going to pan out 40 years from now.

Katie Gatti (00:19:11):
But what it does, I think, is it gives you an estimate, it gives you a helpful ballpark. So even if I think I need $2.3 million, but what I actually need is $2.7, okay. But I’m still on the same planet, I’m still on the same universe of what I’m actually going to need. Whereas if I’ve never thought about this or never bothered to run the numbers for myself, I have no idea how much money I need to have invested, I don’t know how close I am, I don’t know how much longer I need to work.

Katie Gatti (00:19:39):
And I find that when we don’t know the answers to those questions, it’s very hard to make strategic decisions about your life and your lifestyle. Maybe I should scale up into a bigger home because maybe I’m five years away from FI and I have no intentions of stopping working and I’m making great money. Okay, well then maybe increasing the mortgage payment by $500 a month is truly not a big deal. But if you’re 20 years away and a higher mortgage payment is going to make it such that you are 30 years away, well that decision is going to look very different. So I find that it just gives you a really nice baseline that you can then tweak those variables and say, “Okay, if I spend more, I spend less, how does this timeline shift?” And it gives you, I would say, more evidence-based footing for making those types of decisions versus just being like, “I don’t know. I hope it works out maybe.”

Trey Lockerbie (00:20:32):
Yeah. What you’re saying there is making me recall an experience I had when I was just a musician and I couldn’t even fill out a retirement form because I was like, “I don’t know.” They were like, “How much money do you make?” I’m like, “Which month? What year?” So I know you speak to a lot of people who either have side hustles or they’re doing contract work. What’s your advice for them if they don’t have such a predictable source of income?

Katie Gatti (00:20:55):
For people that have variable income, I think you almost just have to walk it one step back and assess your lifestyle based on more stringent, fixed needs, versus discretionary spending. So obviously with your fixed expenses, those are bills that have to be paid every month. It’s not like you can scale up or down on how much rent you pay, depending on how much you’re earning. Like that is what it is. Whereas, you might have an amazing month and decide you’re going to go out to eat a little bit more. Well, that’s discretionary and you’re reacting to your income. So I think for people that have super variable income, I would recommend really having a solid grasp of what is the bare minimum you’re going to need every month to survive comfortably? And then making sure that you have a few multiples of that in a low month fund, separate from an emergency fund, but almost like a floater, if you will, where if you are having a lean month, income-wise, and you’re going to need a little bit more to make ends meet, you can pull from that kind of floater fund.

Katie Gatti (00:22:03):
Whereas if you’re having an amazing month and you’re crushing it, well, then that’s a month where you would maybe replenish what you took out the previous month where things were not as good. But I think ideally you want to get it to the point, I think, that your cash flow is predictable to the point that even in a lean month, you’re not going to have any trouble paying the bills. I think that’s obviously everybody’s hope is that they’re not having to dip into savings in a month where their income is maybe less than they were anticipating. And I think that that just speaks to truly living beneath your means and choosing fixed expenses that are not going to stretch you thin or require you to have a banner year in order to service those debts or service those payments.

Trey Lockerbie (00:22:47):
Yeah, the idea of an emergency fund is kind of an interesting topic and I know it’s so subjective, but I love that you highlighted this in one of your blog posts about, like this probably came from Dave Ramsey or something because there’s this idea that you…

Katie Gatti (00:23:00):
And then We all just blindly…

Trey Lockerbie (00:23:01):
Yeah, what you just said. Okay. Because there’s this idea out there that you need three to six months of cash and it depends on if you have kids or if you’re single and all of that good stuff, but in your experience, why have you found that might not be the right number?

Katie Gatti (00:23:13):
Yeah. Well, for one thing, I think you nailed it when you said it probably came from Dave Ramsey. I feel like it’s arbitrary. I found myself thinking about it one night and I was like, “What is the emergency fund really for? Why do we have a cash cushion like that?” And the reality is that it’s to prevent us from going into debt. If we need enough money in cash on the side to prevent us from going into debt, it probably makes sense to think about, “Well, what types of things could send us into debt?” And that is dependent on your lifestyle. If you are a childless renter, the extent of the emergencies that are going to impact you are probably different and smaller in scale than the extent of the emergency that’s going to impact the homeowner with four kids. So I think it’s worth thinking about on the personal basis, what really constitutes an emergency.

Katie Gatti (00:24:08):
And I find that when we talk about emergencies, we think about them in kind of two general camps. There’s the stuff like, “Oh, the tire, I ran over a couple nails and I had to replace two tires unexpectedly, or I need a new HVAC system because that broke.” Well, if you own a car and a home, chances are you know that at some point you’re going to need new tires, and a new roof, and a new HVAC system. Those are not unexpected emergencies, they’re actually quite predictable from the standpoint of, you know if you own those things, you’re going to have to pay for those things eventually. The timing might be unpredictable or a surprise, but hopefully we’re thinking about those things before they’re happening and planning for them.

Katie Gatti (00:24:54):
The other side of the stuff that usually gets brought up in this emergency fund discussion is something like job loss or total loss of income, whether that be through something as routine, as a layoff, or as extreme as you become disabled or something in your life majorly changes. And I found that when I was thinking through worst case scenarios, the worst case scenario, I think Tim Ferris calls it fear setting, like actually allowing your brain to go to the worst case scenario and then thinking, “Okay, well what would I do?” And I think in a total loss of income situation where all of our sources of income went away overnight, the first things that I start thinking about is, “Well, okay, that vacation that we planned to Scandinavia, probably not taking that, probably not booking the five star hotel, probably not going out to eat three times that week, probably not shopping for new clothes.”

Katie Gatti (00:25:48):
Very immediately, there are things that are baked into our regular budget that are most likely going to get slashed if we find ourselves in a position where the $10,000 we thought was coming in next month is no longer coming in anymore. I also think it’s worth thinking through, in those types of worst case scenarios, what other resources are available to you? If you are somebody that is married and both of you have good relationships with your parents and those parents are financially secure, you might actually be able to move home in a situation where something goes super awry long term, or you may be able to borrow money from those parents or go on unemployment. I think the worst case scenario for most people is a lot less extreme than we think.

Katie Gatti (00:26:34):
And sure, you probably don’t want to move home or borrow money from your parents, but if push came to shove, I think it’s worth acknowledging consciously that that is an option on the table and maybe I don’t need $100,000 in cash sitting in my savings account. So I tend to think that those are the types of things that we want to be asking on a personal basis to determine what is an appropriate amount of cash to have on hand. And the reason I think those questions are important is because I find that more often than not, a lot of the people that I talk to, they haven’t under saved, they have over saved. And that cash has become a bit of a security blanket for them and it’s preventing them from investing more aggressively because they have this notion in their head that it’s not safe for them to have less than $60,000 in cash in their savings account.

Katie Gatti (00:27:26):
When in reality, if I’m like, “What is going to happen to you that you’re going to need $60,000 on that short of notice?” And typically, people can’t think of an answer. It’s really just like a psychological barrier, so I think to avoid cash drag, especially when you’re young and to avoid that scenario where you are overs saving or way too cash heavy because of some nebulous, abstract emergency that could come up, I think it just is worth taking the time to define what emergency would actually mean for you and what other resources you would have available to you if that were to happen.

Trey Lockerbie (00:28:02):
Yeah, you can’t save your way to wealth. And so I’m curious if you came to this conclusion because as you kind of highlighted there, I think with cash drag, this idea of understanding compound interest and being like, “Oh, okay, well, every dollar I put into this machine is going to benefit and multiply over time, so therefore I want to put as much of this dollars into that machine as possible.” And so I can skim back on things that, as you mentioned, create a cash drag or something that takes away from that ultimate total return. So I’m kind of curious if you have an emergency fund, and it may be less than three or six months, and even if it is, I guess, where would be the best place to park it? Is it best sitting in cash or under your mattress, or are there vehicles you found that still generate some kind of yield, but are still liquid enough?

Katie Gatti (00:28:46):
Yeah, totally. Well, and I do think you want to have some cash, no doubt. The worst case scenario, I think, is finding yourself in a position where you’re strapped for cash and you’re having to sell equities at a loss. It’s like, “Well, you played yourself,” because now you’re locking in a loss as you wouldn’t have had to. So I definitely don’t think you should invest every single dollar, but for us personally, we don’t have kids and we do rent, so that does change our risk profile a little bit, but my preferred method is to just have two months worth of full expenses, so our normal budgeted expenses with nothing cut down in checking at all times. So we spend between $7,500 and $8,000 a month, just the two of us. So at any given time, I want to make sure we have $15,000 or $16,000 in that checking account.

Katie Gatti (00:29:43):
And then anything in excess of that comes in from income or from paychecks, I will just immediately move it into our investment accounts. So as long as there’s more money coming in every two weeks, that threshold should never really be breached even as we’re paying off bills or paying credit card bills that are coming in that may be $5,000, but as long as there’s more money coming in, it’s constantly being replenished. Beyond that, we tend to just treat our tax bill brokerage account as a backup emergency fund. Like if for some reason we needed more than $16,000 in one fell swoop immediately, we could tap that taxable account, but I tend to think, hopefully your emergency fund is not so large that you’re really giving up a ton of interest by having it just sitting in cash.

Katie Gatti (00:30:36):
I know some people don’t like to have it in checking because it’s tempting to spend it or it makes them feel like, “Oh, I have more money than I actually do or I actually want to spend.” But I think once you get to the point that you’ve mastered your cash flow enough and mastered your own kind of self-discipline around spending, and especially if you have multiple sources of income, I think it’s okay to just have it in a checking account, especially in today’s day and age where there’s no ostensible difference between your checking and savings account interest-wise, it’s not like you’re really going to get any benefit from putting it in savings, except for maybe that additional friction step of having to move the money over. But for us, it just is kind of the easiest path of least resistance to just have the cash that we’ve got sitting and checking. And if we need it, we need it. And if we don’t, we don’t, but we just try to keep it at/or right around that $15,000 or $16,000 mark, because that’s two months worth of expenses.

Trey Lockerbie (00:31:36):
Another thing that I think is sort of missing in this whole picture is the best way to budget. And what I mean by that is not the tactical… Well, I guess it is kind of tactical. I’m more talking about the tools required to budget properly, especially when you have a family or dual income and you have some complexity, so for example, my wife and I ended up just building a pretty robust proforma Excel sheet that’s broken down per month because each month is different, the kids might have an expense that’s different and it’s not every… So what have been the ways that you’ve solved for budgeting and what do you recommend to most people how to it get started?

Katie Gatti (00:32:13):
Yeah, so I kind of use a hybrid approach. I have a spreadsheet called a wealth planner that I use, but I also use an app because we’re into the credit card hacking, travel rewards, all of that, so we each have five or six credit cards that we’re going to be using for different things, depending on if we’re trying to hit a spend threshold to get a signup bonus, or we are buying something where it’s five X points versus two X points. And so I think once you get to the point that you’re dealing with 10 to 12 credit cards between two people, that’s a lot to keep track of manually and a lot of accounts to kind of be keeping tabs on, so I really like this app called Copilot. It was founded by an ex-Google software engineer and so the user experience is just amazing.

Katie Gatti (00:33:01):
It’s available in the US and on iOS systems, so not Android yet, but I do believe they’re working on it. And it’s like six or eight bucks a month. I mean, it does cost some money, but for me, the benefit of having all my credit cards, all of our cash accounts, like checking and savings accounts, all of our investment accounts aggregated in one spot where every transaction is neatly categorized automatically, has been such a game changer because I can go in and know that anything that happened in our financial universe is going to be cataloged in that app and I’m going to see it. So I’ll always joke, like my husband will buy lunch at work when I thought he was bringing his lunch, I’ll be like, “What was this $14 charge from this Mexican restaurant?” Like he calls—.

Trey Lockerbie (00:33:50):
Story of my life.

Katie Gatti (00:33:52):
Because I’m always like, “I just want to know where it’s going, what we’re spending, and to make sure that it’s actually you too,” because there have also been times where I’ll see a charge come in and I’ll be like, “That looks weird.” And it was fraudulent, so it’s helped me to catch that kind of stuff in a way that I absolutely would not have if it were on me to be logging into all 12 credit card accounts every day and keeping tabs and micromanaging every single little transaction. So anyway, I’ll use Copilot throughout the month to make sure all the spending is captured and daily go in, make sure things are being categorized correctly. And then at the end of the month, I’ll sit down with the wealth planner, I’ll plug in how much we earned, how that kind of tracked to what we thought we were going to earn, the final totals for every budget category to see how much we’ve actually spent.

Katie Gatti (00:34:39):
I had to add a new one this month because our wedding ceremony is in two weeks. And so we’ve been paying these $10,000, $15,000 invoices, so our budget looks ridiculous this month. And then, what we’ve saved and invested and where that money went. So just so we kind of have a track record of like, “Okay, we put in this much to our 401ks this month, we put this much in the taxable brokerage.” And then I really like the wealth planner, this is such a shameless plug because I built it, but I really like it because it does show you this bird’s eye view of throughout the year, you know what your overall save rate is, how you’re progressing towards your FI goal, your tax-advantaged investing versus your taxable investing.

Katie Gatti (00:35:23):
It’s very helpful at tax time when you’re trying to go back and confirm like, “Oh, I did put X amount of dollars into this solo 401k for my side hustle and that was an over contribution, so now I need to go take some out.” Like I love having everything in one place, so I kind of mix and match the automatic with the manual to have a system that works for us.

Trey Lockerbie (00:35:46):
Fantastic. And for those listening, all those resources, as we’re collecting them, we’ll put them in the show notes, so you guys can find them and find the links. You mentioned earlier a taxable brokerage account that you used and it seems like the most popular route to investing over the last couple years has been something like Robinhood. And you would think that people signing up with these taxable accounts are missing out on a bunch of tax savings, so. And my first question around this is related to the fact that a lot of listeners don’t make their primary income from investing, so what would be the optimal account types for those who are working off of W2s or even self-employment?

Katie Gatti (00:36:23):
Yeah, so I think Robinhood really is kind of a gateway drug, it was what got me into investing because I had a friend that… I wanted to start, I was very intimidated by the Vanguard website, the Fidelity website. I didn’t know how any of that worked. Robinhood was built by millennials for millennials. So I’m like, “Okay, cool. I’m going to go buy some ETFs.” So it’s not that I necessarily think there’s anything inherently wrong with it, just that I think we tend to underestimate the tax savings that we are giving up when we invest our investible dollars in a taxable account instead of a tax-advantaged account. And so for me, the big neon flashing light is like, if you have access to a 401k, whether that’s through your employer, maybe of a 403B or a 457, like there are plenty of different types depending on industry and whatnot.

Katie Gatti (00:37:18):
But if you have access to an account like that, where you can put in pre-tax dollars, and for the self-employed, this would be solo 401k, or SEP IRA, it is hard to overstate how valuable that upfront tax savings can be, particularly as you start to make more money. So for example, if I have, let’s say my investible funds this year comprised just that $20,500 amount that I could put into a 401k, that’s your maximum contribution for 2022. If I put it into a 401k pre-tax and I am in the 24% tax bracket, that is about $5,000 worth of tax savings that I’m getting, that’s money that stays in my pocket, that I no longer have to pay to the IRS this year because I put $20,500 into that 401k.

Katie Gatti (00:38:09):
If I were to take home that $20,500 and then invest it on my own in Robinhood, for example, or anywhere else, in a taxable brokerage account, now my tax bill is, I’m paying that full $5,000 in taxes, or I think it’s like $4,920 or something. I don’t remember exactly off the top of my head, but that just means that now whatever I invest in that taxable account has to make an extra $5,000 this year, just for me to break even with the tax savings that I gave up by not investing in that 401k.

Katie Gatti (00:38:42):
So I think for a lot of people, the reason that there may be a little bit hesitant about some of these tax-advantaged accounts is because on the surface, they are locking up your money, so to speak. Like, “Oh, I can’t access this until I’m 59 and a half. What if I need it earlier?” But that’s the beauty of all these nerds who read the IRS website for fun is that in the Financial Independence, Retire Early community, they’ve all figured out all the loopholes and all the tax footwork that you have to do to get out this money early with no penalty, and in some cases completely tax free.

Katie Gatti (00:39:17):
So once I learned about all of those loopholes and kind of how to enact them in my own life, I became infinitely more comfortable with the idea of locking up my money, because I knew it wasn’t truly locked up. And I knew that each year that I’m clocking in that $5,000-plus tax savings, that that is just bolstering my path forward and creating even more investible income that I can now turn around and put somewhere else. So I’m a huge proponent of pre-tax, I love traditional 401k, solo 401k, what have you.

Katie Gatti (00:39:50):
And then there’s obviously also the Roth options. You can do a Roth 401k, no upfront tax savings, but I think everyone probably listening to this understands the benefits there. You’ve got your Roth IRA, so there are plenty of different vehicles, but I do think that while that tax diversification is important and you probably want to have some money in a taxable account, I do think it’s silly to completely ignore something like the 401k or to not take any advantage of something where you’re going to be able to significantly reduce your tax bill. I think we reduced ours this year by like $30,000 or $40,000 by using solo 401k and 401ks.

Trey Lockerbie (00:40:30):
So when does a taxable account actually beat something like a Roth? Or how do you come to that conclusion to say, “Okay, in this instance, this makes more sense”?

Katie Gatti (00:40:41):
Yeah. So when we’re talking like pre-tax traditional stuff versus taxable accounts upfront, I think it’s pretty hard to make the argument for the taxable, but when we’re talking against something like Roth, particularly in the draw down phase, I think we don’t give the taxable account enough credit. And the reason I believe that is because the capital gains tax brackets are so favorable to investors as opposed to the way ordinary income is taxed, that I was just looking at this this morning. I’m pretty sure a married couple, like if you were a married couple in 2022 and you had no other ordinary earned income, like you were just retired living off of your assets, I’m pretty sure you could withdraw $109,250 from a taxable account this year and pay $0 in taxes because the first $83,350 of gains is taxed at 0%. And then you’ve still got a $25,900 standard deduction.

Katie Gatti (00:41:47):
So at that draw down period, as long as you’re not withdrawing hundreds of thousands of dollars, the chances that you’re going to pay nothing or next to nothing on those capital gains is pretty good. The only, I guess, caveat to that I would make is that the Roth is preferable from the standpoint of every single year that passes, it is tax-sheltered. So if you’re doing any rebalancing, you’re not going to pay taxes on gains that are realized, or if you have dividend income or interest income from bonds in a Roth IRA, you’re not going to pay any taxes on that every year, you’re paying it up front and then you’re done.

Katie Gatti (00:42:27):
But typically I think for most people, the dividend income and the bond interests that they’re paying taxes on as they’re accumulating wealth over time, is probably pretty insignificant compared to the overall amount in the account. And so I think in exchange for the level of flexibility you get with respect to no contribution limits, no penalties for early withdrawal, really no rules whatsoever, I think it’s a pretty fair trade. So I tend to put Roth and taxable on fairly equal footing. The Roth edges it out a little bit, but I do think that when you’re in that draw down period, the taxable is actually a pretty dang tax efficient means for living off your own wealth.

Trey Lockerbie (00:43:17):
So you and, I think, differ right about here as far as our focus. So for example, I got into sort of the personal finance side of things and then what really grabbed me was what I call sort of the art and science of picking stocks. So we talk on this show, for example, a lot about stocks, because to me it’s like a Rubik’s cube or something where you’re uncovering this value and finding something that’s underpriced in the market and it’s so rewarding when it pays off. And there’s some kind of game to that that I really like, so. But traditional advice would tell you to stay away from picking individual stocks and just to do something like an index fund, so I’m curious in your experience, have you come across this decision for yourself or what you recommend to other people? Is there a time where it makes sense to invest in singular stocks versus just putting something into an index fund if you’re not doing it professionally every day?

Katie Gatti (00:44:11):
Yeah. Well, for me the answer has been no. And the reason the answer is no for me personally is because I think there’s this guy named Jack Raines, he’s a great writer. And he wrote an article recently that I think encapsulated it perfectly where he basically talks about the true cost of alpha. And he’s like, “If you make a winning pick and let’s say it nets, just making this up, $10,000. Well, if it took you 50 hours to analyze that stock and to determine that that was going to be the one you wanted to buy, then that $10,000 was not free, it costed 50 hours of your time, so it’s like getting paid out $200 an hour.” Now, in some cases, that’s going to be a pretty good trade. I think $200 an hour is a great return. But in some cases, if you don’t have much to invest or even a 100% return on something is only going to net out to be a thousand bucks, it may not be worth your time.

Katie Gatti (00:45:13):
And so for me, I’ve found that A, I don’t trust myself enough with individual stock picking to take that risk, I think the risk reward analysis for me is a little bit lacking. Like sure, I could strike it rich and have it really pay off or I could totally blow my entire bet. And so for me, I think it comes down to that risk reward or I could just put it in an index fund where I’m fairly certain it’s going to do what I want it to do and it takes me no time to do that, I’ll take that bet all day long, but I know that that’s not how everyone’s brain works. I just think that, I know you’ve had Nick Maggiulli on before. I think his philosophy on this is probably the most persuasive, which is just that it’s very hard to know if you’re actually good at it.

Katie Gatti (00:45:59):
How many years are you going to allow yourself to lose money before you say, “Maybe I’m just not that good at this”? Or maybe you do really well for a year, but how are you going to know whether you’re actually good or you’re just lucky? It’s very challenging to make that distinction with any level of certainty. And I think when we’re talking about long-term wealth building and something as consequential as that, I would be very leery to put up too much of my net worth to that level of risk. My husband’s a little different, he does like to, I think like between 5% to 10% of his half of our net worth is allocated in individual stocks and bets that he’s making.

Katie Gatti (00:46:43):
But I don’t know, when I think about it practically, the amount of time and effort that I would have to spend analyzing fundamentals to find something, where I’m confident that it has not already been priced into the market, I think it would probably take me a pretty long time, so that’s how I personally think about it for myself. But I know that there are people like you who really enjoy it and get enjoyment from it. And in that case, it’s probably both the monetary return of when it really pays off and also the hobby aspect of it, so I don’t think it’s necessarily something that I’d say someone should never do, but I think if your ultimate goal is to have as much money as possible, then statistically speaking the way to do that is probably pretty clear.

Trey Lockerbie (00:47:28):
I just can’t help myself, that’s the problem. So anyway.

Katie Gatti (00:47:31):
Exactly. So I’m not going to tell you not to.

Trey Lockerbie (00:47:33):
So we could go out there and buy, say a total market fund and just set it and forget it, check back in 40 years, but even that might not be the most optimal allocation. So in fact, one of your recent blog posts, it stated that that might be the fifth best strategy based on your back test, so walk us through the results of this back test and what surprised you the most of these findings?

Katie Gatti (00:47:55):
Yeah, I think when I started learning about FI, it seemed like everyone was beating the drum of VTSAX. And it was almost like a foregone conclusion that just owning the total stock market, and not even the total global market, but just the total US market, that that was always going to be the best path forward and that that was totally diversified because you own everything. And the more that I learned about it, the more I realized that that level of diversification that you think you’re getting by owning the whole market, air quotes, is a little bit misleading because it’s still a cap weighted fund, so you’re still very overweight, large cap companies and in many cases, large cap growth. So the more that I kind of dug in, the more curious I got about, “Hey, it seems like we would be well served to include some small cap and to include some value, and maybe some emerging markets, and maybe some global index funds.”

Katie Gatti (00:49:00):
And what about bonds? Like there were just so many things that I felt like we were completely ignoring by saying that all you needed was VTSAX. So one day I just sat down with Portfolio Visualizer and I truly built random portfolios, like there was no research or rhyme or reason really that I diversified outside of the total stock market in these back tests, I just wanted to see to what degree do randomly assorted diversified portfolios underperform or outperform a 100% US total stock market portfolio? And I did a 25-year lookback because I felt like that was a little bit more in line with an average investing timeline. Would’ve gone back 40 years, but because of the way some of these tickers have changed and asset classes have changed over time, I felt like that maybe would’ve skewed a little bit.

Katie Gatti (00:49:56):
So in any case, I did 100% US total stock market as my baseline test, a 50% large cap growth, 50% small cap value, so polar opposites. A 90% US large cap growth, and then 10% total bond market, and then a 50-50 total stock market, total bond market, and then a really random grab bag, one that was 50% large cap growth, 10% emerging markets, 25% small cap value, 10% global stocks, whatever the allocation was in Portfolio Visualizer that it gives you for international, and then 5% bonds. So very random allocations. And then a 100% small cap value just to see what would happen, and it was interesting because the top performer was the 50% large cap growth, 50% small cap value. It had an average annualized return of 11% every year for that 25-year period, so that is compared to the 100% total stock market portfolio that had a 10% average annualized return.

Katie Gatti (00:51:01):
So you’ve got a full 1% higher return each year over those 25 years, which is a pretty substantial outperformance when you’re talking about something that’s compounding over time. And then, all of the other portfolios I tested outperformed the 100% total stock market portfolio, everything that had even a little bit of diversification outperformed, it was just a matter of to how much did it outperform. The only one that did not beat 100% total stock market was the 50-50 portfolio, and that got about 8%. So it didn’t even underperform as much as I would’ve expected it to.

Katie Gatti (00:51:41):
So yeah, I think it just speaks to the fact that you don’t have to be a day trader and you don’t have to add a ton of complexity to do a little bit better and to have a little bit of diversification that even just adding a few different indices will likely protect your downside, especially in periods like the 2000 to 2009 era where I’m pretty sure the S&P 500 was lower in 2009 than it was in 2000, but it’s hard to say. And I think especially with things like small cap value, the historical precedent is there, but I think since the ’90s, the value premium in the US has been not really observable. So I don’t know, I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, but I do think that there is a fairly compelling case to be made in the data that diversifying beyond the US total market is generally a good idea.

Trey Lockerbie (00:52:34):
So if we’re talking about building wealth, you get a lot of opinions out there saying that either real estate is actually the best way to build wealth or there’s people that say collecting small businesses is the best way to build wealth, things outside of the stock market. In fact, one of the books that made an impact on me early on was Rich Dad, Poor Dad. I don’t even think it talks about the stock market at all in that book. I mean, it’s like buying actual assets that produce cash flow. So I’m kind of curious, when does it make sense, in your opinion, to consider those kind of ways to diversify outside the stock market?

Katie Gatti (00:53:04):
Totally. Well, for one thing, I think we have a bit of a recency bias with these types of comments, like the last couple years, I mean, everything’s been going up until right about now. So yeah, if you were like, “Oh, real, estate’s the best investment possible.” If you said that in 2021, people are going to have a hard time disagreeing with you. You say that in 2009, people are going to call you a moron. So I do think that the recent history of what we’ve seen impacts kind of what camp gets an edge, but there are numbers that you can look at that will tell you that if you are a really good rental property investor, or you have a holding company that acquires small businesses and you’re pretty hands off, that yeah, those higher effort exploits are generally going to outperform just buying a broad-based index fund, but in exchange for that over performance, you are putting in a lot more legwork.

Katie Gatti (00:53:59):
It is much harder to find a real estate deal that is going to cash flow to rehab it appropriately, to find tenants, to get your property management in place, if you’re going to use property management, or on the small business example, to find the deal where even if things go sideways, you’re going to be okay liquidating what you’ve gotten, you’re going to be fine, you’ve got a good operator in place. Like you are paying a premium for that premium, and it’s typically coming at the cost of your own time and energy, so I think if you’re okay with that, and you’re interested in that, and you want to do that for the higher returns, then great, those are probably asset classes that make a lot of sense for you.

Katie Gatti (00:54:40):
I think if you’re somebody that has two kids and works full time and just wants to passively build wealth in the background, I think it’s probably hard to make an argument that just investing in passive index funds is not the best thing to do. I think that it’s probably pretty clear that’s going to be the easiest and best path forward, but I think it totally depends on your energy level and your comfort level with risk, because in both the small business space and the real estate rental property world, you’re dealing with leverage often in a way that you’re not dealing with when you’re talking about investing in index funds. Of course you can trade on margin, but that’s not super advisable because obviously leverage is going to magnify your gains and your losses.

Katie Gatti (00:55:22):
So I think for me personally, we’ve definitely, I mean our entire net worth is in the stock market, we don’t own any real estate, we don’t own any businesses despite my best efforts recently, so I think that it’s probably the best way for everybody to start. And then from there you can make that call about, “Do I want to invest in something that’s going to be higher risk, higher return, higher energy output, or am I making $500,000 a year as a partner at a tech company and I’m actually cool with just shoveling hundreds of thousands of dollars a year into the market and doing practically nothing for my returns?”

Katie Gatti (00:56:01):
So I think it depends on your circumstances quite a bit, especially I know people that got into rental property investing because they didn’t make much money and so it was a way for them to use leverage to their benefit and to kind of compensate for the fact that maybe their jobs are not as highly paid as they would’ve wanted, so I think that those are some other considerations that help determine whether something is best for you or not.

Trey Lockerbie (00:56:23):
I want to stick on this idea of time and energy, something you said a few moments ago stood out to me and it was around comparing indexing to just stock picking and the amount of time and energy that might go into that stock and the trade off of that. And this really is an interesting line to draw because when it comes to personal finance, you often see sort of this overuse of ideas of frugality, for example. So one of my favorites is it was in Carol Loomis’s book about Warren Buffett, Tap Dancing to Work. And there’s this story about them walking down the street and he had to make a call on a pay phone and he had a quarter, but it’s a 10-cent phone call, so he went into a store to break the quarter to like two dimes and a nickel, because he didn’t want to overspend on that 10 cents. I mean, the guy was a billionaire at this point, right?

Katie Gatti (00:57:09):
Yeah.

Trey Lockerbie (00:57:09):
So what’s funny is when you often get to these levels of wealth, you can’t turn off that frugality switch that kind of got you there in the first place. And Peter Mallouk, another guest previous on the show, talks about this a lot with his clients and he says that’s been the hardest thing for him to get his clients to do is turn off that switch, especially later in life and say, “Hey look, you made the money. Now enjoy it, now use the money for what it’s meant to be for.” So what is your typical advice about, once say we’ve gotten there, we’ve gotten to, I mean, neither of us have yet, but when we’ve gotten to that comfortable retirement stage, how is the brain supposed to shift at that point and how does your strategy shift from there?

Katie Gatti (00:57:46):
Well, and the one thing I want to say about Buffett is I hear stuff like that all the time, or like, “Oh, he still eats McDonald’s. Oh, he still lives in his same house in Omaha.” And it’s almost touted as like, “That’s what you have to do to be a billionaire.” It’s like the dude also has a private jet and we don’t talk about the jet very often, but frugality is not what got Warren Buffett to be a multi-billionaire, that was not the path forward. It’s not like he was buying generic brands at the store and woke up one day… So I think it’s… I always like to call that out when I see that, because I think it’s very misleading and it does put that unfair expectation on people that once you have wealth, you shouldn’t even enjoy it, because it almost makes it like a moralistic thing, like there’s something wrong with enjoying your money or that it’s irresponsible to spend your money.

Katie Gatti (00:58:34):
And I just don’t think that that’s true. I think when we talk about mindset shifts around that sort of thing, I kind of think about it in two different ways. A, it’s going to feel unnatural, I think, no matter what, if you’re someone that has been… Even if you’re not frugal, like I used to be very frugal, I would not describe myself as frugal anymore. My cleaning professionals are downstairs as we speak, we have food being delivered this afternoon for the week from the local chef service. We definitely pay a premium for convenience now and we do like to enjoy some of the money that we have, but I think even if you’re not frugal, that mindset switch from, “Okay, I’m working, I’m working, I’m earning, I’m earning, I’m saving, I’m saving, I’m saving. Now let me throw it, put it in park, throw it in reverse and just immediately start going backwards.” That’s going to feel crazy no matter who you are.

Katie Gatti (00:59:27):
So I think it’s something that I was talking to Chris Pederson from Paul Merriman’s Financial Education Foundation the other day, and he said that when they retired, it took them like three years of drawing down assets before they actually got comfortable. And we’re like, “Oh, it’s okay. We’re not going to run out of money, we’re going to be fine. Look, we have more money than when we started with.” And I think that that’s probably a realization that each person, while you can cognitively understand that, it’s almost like when the market goes down, you think you’re going to be fine, you think you’re going to hold, you don’t know what you’re going to do until you actually see that number on that screen going down.

Katie Gatti (01:00:01):
I think it’s the same thing. You don’t know how you’re going to react in retirement until you’re actually putting it in reverse for the first time. And if you got to go a little bit slow at first, I think that’s okay, but I think it’s something that we have to actually experience for ourselves that the world doesn’t end when we buy the appetizer or we select the more expensive option on the car, or we book the first class flight. Like, “Oh, what do you know? I didn’t bankrupt myself. Everything’s actually okay.” And I think within a reasonable parameter, as long as you’re actually calculating a safe withdrawal rate and have a solid plan in place and you are properly diversified, I think within those parameters, that you’re checking all those other boxes and you’re being responsible about the way that you’re approaching and stewarding your wealth, I think that most of us will come to the point where cutting those types of corners and being unnecessarily frugal will start to feel a little bit silly.

Trey Lockerbie (01:00:59):
Okay. I have a last question for you and there’s no wrong answer here. I’m just kind of generally interested in your opinion here. So essentially it’s around philanthropy. So I’ve heard this idea that money is just a magnifier, so if you’re a philanthropic person, you can make more money, you’re going to give more. If you’re a materialistic person, you’re just going to spend more. And there is also this idea of building your wealth to then give it away versus giving away as you go. So I’m kind of curious, Bill Gates, for example, he was so frugal or you could call him another name, but he waited till he was compounded as much as he possibly could. And then he flipped it in reverse, as you said, and said, “Okay, I’m giving this all away.”

Trey Lockerbie (01:01:40):
There’s that approach or there’s giving while you go. So where do you stand on this line? Not that there’s a wrong answer, but is there an approach that you found works best for you or that you’ve thought about, or that you maybe again, in the words of Peter Mallouk, he would say it’s better to give with a warm hand than a cold one, so. Which really stuck with me, but I’m just curious.

Katie Gatti (01:02:01):
That’s great.

Trey Lockerbie (01:02:01):
Yeah.

Katie Gatti (01:02:02):
Oh my God.

Trey Lockerbie (01:02:02):
I’m curious if you’ve given this any thought.

Katie Gatti (01:02:04):
Definitely. It’s funny timing that you ask this too, because recently we just did two kind of substantial fundraisers on Money with Katie Instagram. Instagram will allow you to attach a fundraiser to a post and raise money for things. So we just did one a couple weeks ago that raised, I think $21,000. We set the goal at $10,000, we did one last week that raised, last I checked, we hit our goal. We wanted to raise $5,000 for something. And it’s become more of a focus for me recently because I finally feel like I’m at the place where I can give generously without feeling like I am disadvantaging my own future by doing so. So I kind of think about it like the oxygen mask analogy on the plane. I wouldn’t recommend putting on someone else’s mask first, but if yours is on, then it’s probably okay to look around and see if other people need help.

Katie Gatti (01:03:00):
I’ve met people that were already kind of struggling that were still trying to tie and give away 10% of their income. And you kind of have to have that tough conversation of like, “Your heart is in the right place and I’m amazed by your selflessness, but you are never going to be able to retire if you keep doing this and you are going to eventually put that burden on someone else, whether it be the State, or your kids, or someone is going to have to fund your lifestyle when you can no longer work. And if it’s not going to be you, it’s going to be somebody else. So it’s good right now that you’re giving so much and it’s amazing that you’re so generous, but you want to make sure that you are protected and set up first.”

Katie Gatti (01:03:34):
So I think beyond that initial level of like, I am tracking toward my financial goals at an appropriate pace, I do think I am more in the camp of like, “I’d rather give it away as I go and allot it into the budget.” Like, “What is an appropriate amount of money that I feel comfortable giving away every month? And is there a particular cause that I can set up a recurring donation to?” Because I know that charity is really like that, because then they can budget for it and it helps their cash flow if they have the same amount coming in every month, as opposed to just waiting till the end of the year and then giving some big amount or waiting until the end of your life and giving some big amount.

Katie Gatti (01:04:12):
They’re obviously not going to turn that down, but from a planning perspective on your side, and from their side, I think it is preferable to have that recurring money coming in. So I think I’m more a proponent of that, but again, not until you are in a position where you are cruising altitude, we’ll put it that way, to extend our plane metaphor.

Trey Lockerbie (01:04:34):
I love it. And I think you’re right about that. I mean, it’s also assuming you live long enough to give it away too, right?

Katie Gatti (01:04:42):
Yeah, exactly.

Trey Lockerbie (01:04:42):
So you have to make that assumption. So anyways, Katie, this has been so much fun. I’ve learned a lot and I’ve really been enjoying the content you’re putting out. And thanks for coming on our show and sharing so much of it with us. And I know our audience is going to get a lot from it. So you’ve provided a ton of resources already, but before you go, I want to make sure you can hand off to our audience where they can learn more about you, and your blog, and your podcast, and anything else you want to share.

Katie Gatti (01:05:05):
Thank you so much. And likewise, I really enjoy your content as well. And I’m excited to have you on my podcast, shameless plug.

Trey Lockerbie (01:05:10):
Great.

Katie Gatti (01:05:11):
So yes, blog is at www.moneywithkatie.com. I publish every Monday, rain or shine, so there’s always a new blog post out on Mondays. Money with Katie’s show on Apple Podcast, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts. And we publish a new episode every Wednesday. If you’re listening to this right now, I assume you like podcasts. That’s probably a good fit. We cover all sorts of topics from the very technical to the very juicy, like this week’s episode is about prenups, so that should be fun. And then, Money with Katie on Instagram and Twitter. I’m trying to take a little bit of a social media break right now, which is kind of hard when you’re full job, full-time job is being a content creator, but trying to get a little bit of distance right now. So yes, Money with Katie on Instagram and Twitter is where you can find me. And we are posting every single day, whether I like it or not.

Trey Lockerbie (01:06:06):
Well, Katie, congratulations on all your success to date.

Katie Gatti (01:06:09):
Thanks.

Trey Lockerbie (01:06:09):
And I’m looking forward to follow along, so we’ll do it some time again soon. I appreciate the time.

Katie Gatti (01:06:14):
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much, Trey.

Trey Lockerbie (01:06:16):
All right, everybody, that’s all we had for you today. If you’re loving the show, don’t forget to follow us on your favorite podcast app. If you’re ready to start learning how to invest, be sure to check out the resources we have for you at theinvestorspodcast.com, or just Google TIP finance. And lastly, you can always reach out with feedback. You can find me on Twitter @TreyLockerbie. And with that, we’ll see you again next time.

Outro (01:06:36):
Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to subscribe to Millennial Investing by The Investor’s Podcast Network and learn how to achieve financial independence. To access our show notes, transcripts, or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decision, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by The Investor’s Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.