We live in a world full of personal finance tips, yet we know not all of them are created equal. Some come from TikTok influencers. Some are generated by chatbots. And yes, some are actually helpful.
But when it comes to the real stuff — how to talk about money, make values-based decisions, and prepare for a financially secure future — a lot of us are still stuck.
This week on the HerMoney Podcast, Jean Chatzky sits down with Carl Richards, CFP®, author, speaker, and creator of the beloved Sketch Guy column in The New York Times. His new book: “Your Money: Reimagining Wealth Through 101 Simple Sketches,” is designed to spark one million meaningful money conversations.
And in this conversation, we cover everything from emotional spending and investing anxiety to what it really means to have “enough.”
The Emotional Side of Money: Where Real Financial Planning Begins
Jean Chatzky: Why do you think there’s this disconnect between people who talk about money publicly and doing it privately?
Carl Richards: The problem is that if you were taught anything about money, you were taught that it was a math problem. It was a spreadsheet, a calculator, and that’s true money. Money does show up in math and formulas and spreadsheets, and calculators. But what didn’t match up with our experience was that math and spreadsheets are always rational, right? Two plus two always equals four. Two plus two never equals envy.
And I think what happened is the conversations we see in public are largely still this way. A lot about the math, the numbers, which budgeting app to use, and all of those things are really important. But then we go to have a conversation with a friend or a spouse or partner or a child, and we’re suddenly feeling all our feelings.
Personal Finance Tips for Investing in Uncertain Times
Jean Chatzky: Carl, can we dig into the stock market? The volatility is up. We’ve got simultaneously major banks sounding the alarm on the possibility of a recession in, if not this year, in fairly short order.
How do we deal with the ups and the downs and the rollercoasters and the emotion of it all?
Carl Richards: You don’t have to have a large exposure to the equity markets, and to be honest, you don’t have to have any, if you wanted to pull other levers. You save more, you retire differently. You can replicate some of the old-fashioned pension-style products.
Here’s the deal: it doesn’t matter if your plan says you need to be 70% in the equity markets as a 35-year-old, and that’s totally possible and maybe even a good idea. But you have proven that you cannot sleep at night despite all of the evidence that you should, and it still causes you massive anxiety. If you can’t stick with it, then there’s no sense in doing it.
Planning for the Future You Can’t Predict
Jean Chatzky: I want to talk about the concept of future blindness. You say that we underestimate the complexity of our future financial lives. What does that mean, and how should we be opening our eyes to the future?
Carl Richards: We’re notoriously pretty bad at relating to somebody 10, 20, 30 years in the future. And so that leads us to one part of future blindness, which is that we’re not very good at caring for that person because we don’t really relate to that person.
So, just checking in every once in a while. Start caring a bit about that person and build that into your plan. We don’t know what’s going to happen, but one thing that we can be hopeful about is that we may not be very good at anticipating future problems, but we’re actually pretty good at solving them when we’re in them.
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MORE ON HERMONEY:
- Psychology of Money Author Morgan Housel Shares How To Spend Your Money
- Wants vs. Needs in Retirement
- What Is A High-Yield Savings Account? What Is A High-Yield Checking Account?
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