The Hermoney.com founder discusses how caregiving and longevity affect women’s investing plans, the role of guaranteed income, and the importance of a long-term-care plan.
Today on the podcast, we welcome back Jean Chatzky. Jean is the CEO of HerMoney.com and host of the podcast, HerMoney with Jean Chatzky. She has served as the financial editor of NBC Today for 25 years and is the financial ambassador for AARP. She appears frequently on CNN, MSNBC, and was a recurring guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show. She has written several New York Times bestselling books. Her latest is Women with Money: The Judgment-Free Guide to Creating the Joyful, Less Stressed, Purposeful (and, Yes, Rich) Life You Deserve. Jean also appears in my book How to Retire, where she talks about retirement planning considerations for women.
Women With Money: The Judgment-Free Guide to Creating the Joyful, Less Stressed, Purposeful (and, Yes, Rich) Life You Deserve, by Jean Chatzky
“How to Choose a Financial Advisor,” video post by Jean Chatzky, Linkedin.com.
“Jean Chatzky on Women in Investing: Are You Taking Control of Your Money?” by Melissa Houston, forbes.com, April 21, 2022.
“The High Costs of Senior Caregiving,” by Ella Vincent, Kiplinger.com, Aug. 3, 2023.
“Long-Term Care Insurance Rate Increase Creates Big Headache,” by Jean Chatzky, aarp.com, Feb. 7, 2023.
“Are Annuities a Good Investment? What They Are and Why Women Should Consider Them,” HerMoney With Jean Chatzky, episode 433, hermoney.com, July 24, 2024.
“How to Retire Early Without Hating Your Life,” HerMoney With Jean Chatzky, episode 459, hermoney.com, Jan. 22, 2025.
“Jean Chatzky: ‘Financial Stress Is a Big Topic in Need of More Oxygen,’” The Long View podcast, Morningstar.com, Dec. 15, 2020.
How to Retire: 20 Lessons for a Happy, Successful, and Wealthy Retirement, by Christine Benz
Jean Chatzky The Today Show archives
Christine Benz: Hi, and welcome to The Long View. I’m Christine Benz, director of personal finance and retirement planning for Morningstar.
Amy Arnott: And I’m Amy Arnott, portfolio strategist with Morningstar.
Benz: Today on the podcast, we welcome back Jean Chatzky. Jean is the CEO of HerMoney.com and host of the podcast, HerMoney with Jean Chatzky. She has served as the financial editor of NBC Today for 25 years and is the financial ambassador for AARP. She appears frequently on CNN, MSNBC, and was a recurring guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show. She has written several New York Times bestselling books. Her latest is Women Eith Money: The Judgment-Free Guide to Creating the Joyful, Less Stressed, Purposeful (and, Yes, Rich) Life You Deserve. Jean also appears in my book How to Retire, where she talks about retirement planning considerations for women. Jean Chatzky, welcome back to The Long View.
Jean Chatzky: Thank you so much for having me.
Benz: Well thanks for being here. So we wanted to start by talking about your job today. You’re juggling a lot of different activities all the time, it seems. So what are the main initiatives that you’re involved in today, and how do you allocate your time?
Chatzky: Well, let me just start by saying I have a wonderful team. Sometimes I think when people talk to people like you and me who have a lot of different things on our plates, they think, oh my God, these people must be not sleeping at all. But most of us, many of us have incredible teams backing us up. My main initiative these days is my company, HerMoney, where we produce the HerMoney podcast. And we also have a couple of coaching programs. FinanceFixx is our budgeting cash management program. We just rolled out a preretirement version of FinanceFixx, which is geared for people about 10 years out to help them figure out if they’re really on track for the retirement that they want. And we’ve got our InvestingFixx program where Karen Finerman from CNBC and I are teaching investing to 500 and growing women every other Monday night on Zoom. So I’ve got that. I am on a PBS television show called Opportunity Knocks. I do some work with a number of corporate clients, and I’m starting to write a new book that I’m not quite ready to talk about yet, but I will be delighted to tell you about it when it takes more shape.
Arnott: So you’ve got a lot of different irons in the fire, but helping women do better with their money is a through line in a lot of the things that you’re doing. But earlier in your career, you started out as a journalist and also spent a couple of years working as an equity research analyst. Was there a main catalyst or light bulb moment when you decided to make women and money a key focus of your work?
Chatzky: The year I turned 40 was not a particularly good year for me. I got divorced. I lost my dad. I got fired, and I turned 40, which was not a high point in my life. And it was that year when I really took a step back in terms of my own finances and realized that I needed to not only do it by myself for myself, but that there were an awful lot of women who didn’t have the knowledge base that I did who needed to do the exact same thing. So I think that was the catalyst where I started to think more about the needs of women and how women are really different. And it’s not just the facts and figures. We talk a lot about how women still earn, frustratingly, less money than men do, how we spend fewer years in the workforce because we are the caregivers for kids and older parents, how that results in having less money for retirement when we get to the end of our working lives and how we have to make that money last longer because we outlive the men in our lives. It’s also the fact that we learn best when we are in an environment that makes it comfortable for us to learn. And I had seen that anecdotally as I went out and gave a lot of speeches. When I would speak to a group of women, they couldn’t wait to ask questions and tell stories and share what was going on in their lives.
When I would speak to a group of men and women, that just didn’t happen. And so when I launched HerMoney, my goal was to create a safe space where women felt comfortable learning about money. And I have to say—I taught my InvestingFixx class last night with Karen—and it’s just amazing how these women have…they’re listening to earnings calls, we’re picking stocks, we’re asking questions. It’s an incredibly supportive environment. And it’s exactly what I was hoping for.
Benz: You’ve probably had more conversations with women about money than anyone on the planet. Can you talk about what is your favorite way to break the ice? It sounds like when you get women in a group together, you don’t really need to break the ice. But how do you warm people up so that they feel comfortable talking about their own financial situations?
Chatzky: So when I get women in a group together, I party game it. I actually developed a deck of cards that has leading questions on it. And we go around, we pick a card, we answer questions, and we talk about things like what’s your biggest money fear and whether or not it’s OK to hide money from your significant other in your underwear drawer. I mean, we really get down and dirty. But when I’m talking with a woman or any person really one on one, I use the skills that I learned as a reporter. And that means you give a little to get a little. I share. I do this on my podcast too. I just talk about my life. I was an English major. I did not grow up knowing a lot about money or being particularly good with my money. In fact, I’ve had enough conversations with therapists over the years that I’m pretty convinced that I do this for a living because I was trying to fix this part of my own life.
And so there’s no shame in not knowing what you don’t know. I think if we are all willing to admit, “Yeah, I did that. I made that mistake. I came back from it. Here’s what I did to come back from it.” Then other people are going to be more willing to open up about their own lives. It’s no different than—the year after my mom died, I cooked the Thanksgiving turkey upside down. I just didn’t realize what was the breast and what was the not breast. And so it turned out all right. I flipped it eventually when my cousin came over and said, “Oh my God, the turkey’s upside down.” But I tell that story because who hasn’t really messed up Thanksgiving?
Arnott: Yeah. And this is kind of unrelated, but I’ve heard that there’s actually a technique where you can do that on purpose, and you do flip it over toward the end. So I’m guessing that a lot of listeners are male financial advisors who would like to do a better job connecting with their women clients. Do you have any tips to share there?
Chatzky: Oh boy. How much time do we have? Yeah. Tip number one, and I say this kindly, is shut up. And the barometer of a good financial advisor, male or female, is that you need to be more interested in the life of your client than you are in showing that client how brilliantly you could handle their financial life. And so ask more questions than you answer, be empathetic. Really care, or at least try to show that you care about the details about what’s going on in their lives. It’s their money. So it’s their goals. It’s their dreams. It’s their responsibilities. It’s their wishes. It’s your job to elicit all of those things so that you can help put together a plan to get from wherever they are today to wherever they’re going tomorrow. But it starts, it has to start with being curious enough to gather the information.
So that’s number one. Number two is the world of money has a language all its own. And if you are not, if you’re not comfortable speaking that language, then it becomes very difficult to hear and parse what’s being said. So leave a lot of time for questions. Try to get rid of the lingo as much as you possibly can. Take breaks and just ask, is that clear? Do we need to go over that again? How are you understanding what I just said? Ask for things to be repeated back to you so you can tell that people are actually getting them. And then three, if you’re dealing with a couple, make sure that you are paying as much attention to both members of that couple as you possibly can. You want it to be even. You want both people to be in the meetings. You want both people to be buying in to whatever vision or plan you’re laying out. Otherwise, you’re going to put yourself in the situation that research has pointed to where 70% of women leave the financial advisor after the husband dies. And I think that is, I know, that that is a huge fear of legacy financial advisors.
Benz: That’s helpful, Jean. I remember, I think it was Michael Kitces had some research that pointed to advisors who were monitored while they were talking to clients. They thought that they were listening much more than they actually were. That when they reviewed the tape, it was like, oh, the advisor is talking way, way more than he or she thought. So your first point about kind of stepping back and listening, I think, is borne out by some of the data. In terms of women’s main financial worries, you mentioned that’s one of the items in your party deck to get women warmed up. So what are the things that you hear women coming back to in terms of things that they’re worried about? And how might those differ from how men might be approaching their financial lives?
Chatzky: The biggest fear that we hear from women over and over again is the fear of running out of money before we run out of time. That we are just going to exhaust our resources before we die. And there are, I think, a lot of long-term-care fears and paying for long-term-care fears wrapped up in that. I don’t hear the long-term-care fears as much from men. I certainly don’t hear them as much from married men. I think the assumption is that their spouse will take care of them. And it’s borne out by the data, right? That if you are pricing out long-term-care insurance, then you can really only afford a policy for one spouse. You should definitely buy it for the woman. There are other fears that are tied into specific family dynamics. I think that many people these days are very afraid for the financial fortunes of their kids—men and women—that our kids are not going to be able to have the lives that we had, not be able to buy homes, not be able to afford retirement, those sorts of things. But if I had to come back to one, it’s this overwhelming fear of running out of money.
Arnott: So we wanted to follow up a little bit about long-term care. And as you said, that is a big worry for a lot of women. Do you have any general advice for how people should approach long-term care or finding a long-term-care insurance, which is difficult to find a policy that’s affordable?
Chatzky: I think there are two decisions that you have to make. The first is, are you going to try to buy some sort of long-term-care insurance? And I think long-term-care insurance makes sense for a pretty specific group of people. If you’ve got more than a handful of millions—a couple, three-ish million—you can invest your own money. You can pay for your own care. You’ll have the resources to be able to do that in most cases. If you have less than that, significantly less than that, like well under a million, you’re probably not going to be able to afford a long-term-care policy. And at the same time, if you were to need care over a significant period of time, you would exhaust your resources and likely qualify for Medicaid. It’s in the middle, as well as people with more resources who want to make sure that they leave those resources for the next generation, where a long-term-care policy makes sense.
We’ve seen a huge reduction in the number of carriers that are writing traditional long-term-care policies in recent years, as well as really big policy price hikes. People who’ve had legacy policies have started to get notices from their carriers that their premiums are going up by 10%, 20%, sometimes even more than that. And it happens year after year, which makes this market really, really difficult. Where I think we’re going with long-term care and where it seems to be making sense for most people who want it is with these newer hybrid policies that combine a long-term-care insurance policy with a life insurance policy or a long-term-care insurance policy with an annuity. What that does for people is it gets rid of the argument that, oh, I’m going to pay these premiums for years and what happens if I never need to use it.
Because there’s something else there where there would be additional value. This is actually what I bought. I bought a long-term-care life insurance policy where if I do need to use the benefits, then I’ll be able to use the benefits. And if I don’t need to use the benefits, then they will be available as life insurance to my kids when I die. So I think that’s where if you’re looking for insurance, you kind of want to focus your search. And the other thing to realize is you don’t have to cover your full need. This is a policy where if you buy some coverage that can get you through a couple of years of at-home care or care in a facility, generally, if you play the averages, about three years will be enough.
Benz: Jean, I wanted to follow up with a related question about long-term care, which is that adult daughters are often the caregivers for their elderly parents. You referenced that earlier. That’s one of the things that drags on lifetime income. You’ve examined the impact financial and otherwise for these adult daughters. I’m sure you’ve had plenty of conversations with women about this issue. Can you summarize the key impacts?
Chatzky: MetLife did a study a number of years ago, and I think they put the caregiving cost at about $340,000 in lost income for those who were taking on caregiving. It’s a huge impact. It’s not just lost income. It’s lost seniority at work. It’s lost social security credits. It can be very difficult if you take a step out to get back in. I was not a long-term caregiver for either of my parents, but I’ve seen a number of people go through this. Often, the question they asked themselves on the other side was, is there an alternative, would there have been an alternative? Sometimes, even if the cost of care is equal to what you’re earning, it can make sense to try to stay in the workforce and find some other way to pay for care out of your salary, out of your resources, rather than take yourself completely off track. When we think about the sandwich generation, there are so many challenges that are going on at the exact same time. We’re trying to save for our own retirements. We’re trying to save for and then pay for college for our kids, and we’re trying to help our older parents. When it’s our own retirement, we can delay it. We can just push it back a bit. When it’s college for our kids, we don’t like to borrow, but we often do, and those resources are certainly available. When it’s our parents, sometimes we don’t think that there are choices, but I think that there are more than we sometimes take the time to explore.
Arnott: You made the point that women whose parents need care should try to stay in the workforce if they possibly can. A related idea, even apart from long-term care, is that working longer can often be beneficial, not just financially, but in terms of having more social interaction, having a goal and purpose in life, staying active, and so on. If people are able to continue working longer and also maybe not save as much for retirement, but spend a bit more while they’re working so that they can travel and spend on things they enjoy, is that something that you encourage people to do?
Chatzky: Absolutely. The world of retirement, we need a new word. Many, many people are working. Many people are embarking on this idea of a phased retirement. Some people are dipping in and out, taking sabbaticals, taking adult gap years, whatever you want to call them. I think what we’re realizing in a number of ways is that life is just really long, much longer than it was when retirement was originally defined. That gives us so many choices about what we want to do in our third and fourth acts, whether we want to earn money, whether we want to start businesses, whether we want to volunteer, whether we want to travel. The one really common thread, I think, that we’re realizing is how important relationships are in all of this and that staying engaged with other people is what really keeps us happier and healthier and sharp mentally and on track to continue to live this longer, more vital life.
Benz: Jean, I wanted to ask about that idea of dipping in and out of work. For women who are thinking that they may want to pull back from work a little bit because they want to be really involved in raising young children, do you have any advice for women at that life stage to make sure that they are minimizing the financial impacts if their plan is to pull back from work during a period of time?
Chatzky: My strong bias and I say this knowing that my feelings about this cannot be separated from the fact that I got divorced is to try to maintain some sort of a foothold in the workforce. It can be part-time. It can be very part-time, but networks, skills, those sorts of things, once you let go of them, are really, really difficult to jump back into. And it’s a lot easier to scale back up if you’re even just working a little bit. Look, I know many women who took time off. It’s not off actually. That is a terrible, terrible way to put it. I know many women, because it’s not. I mean, I have two kids, and parenting is hard and important and a full-time job. But I always felt so grateful that I had continued to work because it gave me the ability to write my own financial ship after a divorce. And I hear from women all the time who are in relationships that they want to get out of, and they feel that they can’t because they don’t have earning power.
Arnott: Are there other steps that women should take to protect themselves?
Chatzky: Yes.
Arnott: Against the possibility of a divorce?
Chatzky: Well, there are other steps that women should take to protect themselves against the inevitability of at some point being alone. Men, its divorce, it’s death. It’s 90% of women will at some point be alone and be in the position of having to manage their money by themselves. You got to know how to do this before you’re thrust into the position where you have to do it in an emergency. And that means not delegating everything. And I’m not saying that every person in a relationship needs to be doing every job with the finances. If we don’t divide and conquer, there are so many things that are going to fall through the cracks. I’m just saying you have to know what’s up. You have to know what’s going on with your investments. You have to know what’s going on with your credit. You have to know what’s going on with your bank accounts, with your financial advisor.
And you don’t have to do it all the time, but you do have to pay enough attention so that if you had to pick it up, and this is true for men as well. My mother managed the investments. My father knew what was happening. She was better at it, so she did it. She enjoyed it more than he did, so she did it. But if he had been put into the position of having to pick it up, he could have done it. It’s these relationships where things are so separated, where one person could not, would just be at a total loss that I worry about.
Benz: Is that getting any better when you look at the data on how men and women handle finances in the household? Is there less of that utter delegation going on than was the case with perhaps our parents?
Chatzky: I think so. And I haven’t seen a study on the utter delegation of it all, although we should really look at that. But what I have seen—and I’m sure that you both have seen this as well—are the recent studies, particularly from Fidelity on women in investing, that have pointed to the fact that women are really leaning in and opening accounts outside of our retirement accounts. And I see it with my investing club as well, we are starting to own the fact that we’re investors. And that is a really positive sign.
Arnott: I think it can also be really helpful if there is one partner who’s less involved in the financial side to start going to meetings with a financial advisor together. And even if there’s one spouse who’s more involved in the finance to at least get the other person familiar with what’s going on with the portfolio, what are the main financial issues we need to be thinking about, things like that, so that if there is a divorce or a death, that they’re not starting from square one.
Chatzky: Yeah, and I think, I’ve heard a lot from spouses, particularly male spouses, who have said, my wife doesn’t want to go. My wife doesn’t want to go to the meeting with the financial advisor. I think the financial advisor should insist. The financial advisor has the ability to insist: “I need you both at this meeting.” And I think that that’s a perfectly acceptable, really kind thing to do.
Arnott: You mentioned that running out of assets later in life is a big fear for a lot of women. And you’ve also been a proponent of annuities, and you’ve had a long relationship with the Alliance for Lifetime Income. Can you talk a little bit more about how annuities can help?
Chatzky: Yes, and let’s unpack that a little bit. So when we talk about lifetime income, when we talk about the idea of an annuity, what we’re really talking about is replacing the pension that prior generations had. As we’ve made the shift from defined-benefit plans to defined-contribution plans, from pensions to 401(k)s and IRAs, and I put myself in this category. We as journalists and as financial educators, we did a great job at just banging the drum about the fact that people needed to max out, to pay themselves first, to contribute, contribute, contribute to their retirement accounts. And we got huge help from behavioral finance with auto-escalation and auto-enrollment and target-date funds to make sure that money was going in and was being invested. What we did not do, what we’re just starting to do, is to help people understand that they now have to reverse engineer the entire thing. They’ve got to take the money that they’ve accumulated, and they’ve got to figure out how to turn it into a stream of income that’s going to last as long as they do. And what we’re learning is that there’s a very, very big difference in how we perceive income versus assets. When we are receiving money—and I saw this with my mother—when we’re receiving money in the form of income, we spend it because we know that there’s another check coming.
When we have a pool of assets, we often are reluctant to spend it because we’ve been told for years that we shouldn’t dip into our principal, or because we’ve been accumulating for such a long time that we just don’t want to see our balances go down. So yeah, I am a big believer in a paycheck. I’m a big believer in guaranteed lifetime income. I don’t think that you should take all of your money and turn it into income using an annuity or another tool. And there are different things that you can use. You can use a bond ladder. You can use a TIPS ladder. They’re not as guaranteed as an annuity because you’ve got market risk and because interest rates go up and down, but you can do it. You can follow the guidelines that Morningstar puts out every year for what the new 4% rule is. All of those things work. They’re just not as guaranteed as using some sort of an insurance product to buy yourself a paycheck that is contractually going to last as long as you do. And so I think that we have just started to hear about these solutions as they make their way into retirement plans. And as you know, this is happening in real time. We’re going to hear more and more about them. And I think eventually everybody will start talking about income as a fourth asset class.
Benz: You mentioned, Jean, the 401(k) deficiency right now is the fact that you don’t have a turnkey solution to turn on your income for retirement. One of the Secure Acts included a provision that allowed, or made it easier, for 401(k) plans to embed an annuity within that 401(k) plan. It doesn’t seem like we’ve seen much uptake yet on that front. I’m wondering if you can talk about why that is and whether you expect to see more action there in the future.
Chatzky: Oh, why are we not seeing it so quickly? If you think back to how long, I’m not surprised that it’s taking a while because I was reporting on 401(k)s when they were just rolling out. And it just took a while. It took people a while to understand ETFs and to then gravitate to them. And now everybody is using them. I think there’s just a learning curve with these things, both from the development perspective and from uptake. And I think that employers who are really in the hot seat as far as making sure that they offer their workforce solutions that have a track record are reluctant to jump on any new innovation too quickly. But they’re coming, right? If you look at the work that BlackRock is doing, if you look at the work that the Fidelitys of the world are doing, they’re on their way.
Arnott: One topic we really haven’t touched on is the whole FIRE movement—financial independence, retire early—which I think is something that we hear a lot about from younger investors, including younger women. Do you have a take on that?
Chatzky: Lately I’m hearing more about the FI and less about the RE. Look, I think particularly following 2008 and then following the pandemic, there’s been this quest for financial autonomy, for financial independence, for the ability to really control your own financial life in this uncontrollable world. FIRE gives you that, right? You have to make a lot of compromises. The people who are going full FIRE are spending much less than they’re earning because they are trying to save and invest on a really, really aggressive schedule so that they can get to the point where they don’t have to work in jobs that they don’t like in order to sustain their lifestyles. But what I’m hearing more lately is that they’re not, not working, but they’re—as we were talking about before—dipping in and out of the workforce. They’re using the FIRE math to give them longer sabbaticals, the ability to travel the world or the ability to step out of a high-pressured career and into one that they feel truly passionate about, but perhaps doesn’t pay as much.
So I think what we’ve seen is that these FIRE proponents have just given us another way to look at running your financial life, if you choose to run it that way, knowing that our careers are longer than we ever expected them to be, that our lives are longer than they ever expected them to be, and that we’re going to have a lot of seasons where maybe we want to do different things.
Benz: Yeah, Jean, I have noticed that the FIRE community was originally dominated by men, but it does seem like more women are joining that movement with an eye toward some of the lifestyle changes that you’ve talked about where maybe they do want to focus on being a parent for a period of time and having really turbocharged their savings early on gives them that flexibility to make those choices.
Chatzky: Yeah, especially with women who are having children later in life. If you’ve turbocharged, if you got smart about saving in your 20s and you turbocharged your savings rate throughout your 30s and then you want to have a baby in your 40s and you’re so far ahead, I mean, that is a huge amount of freedom.
Benz: We wanted to ask about your advice for women. You’re a successful entrepreneur. Can you share one or two pieces of advice for women who are thinking about pursuing entrepreneurship in their own careers?
Chatzky: The first thing I would say is that you don’t have to quit your day job in order to pursue entrepreneurship. And I think it was Tina Brown who first said, we don’t have jobs anymore, we all have gigs. That entrepreneurship is, to me, a bit of an offshoot or it can be a bit of an offshoot of the gig economy that you can try doing other things while you still have a job that provides you with a stream of income. And by testing the waters in that way, you give yourself a chance to see whether what you want to start actually has legs. God, I’ve thrown so much spaghetti against the wall over the years and some things have stuck and some things haven’t, and some things have taken up so much more time to germinate than I thought they would. That I’m always glad that I’ve held on to a variety of streams of income. So I would say that that’s sort of my first piece of advice.
The second is that there are some things that are careers or businesses and there are some things that are hobbies. And sometimes we have a really difficult time telling the difference. So going back to the numbers, going back to the what’s coming in, what’s going out, what’s this truly costing me in terms of the amount of time and energy that I’m putting into it, not just the financial resources. Those are important things to keep looking at as you go along your entrepreneurial path because there are some things where you’ll eventually figure out, I love this, but it is just, it’s a hobby that maybe pays me a little bit of money from time to time.
Arnott: You’ve also built up a wonderful brand. What kind of advice do you have for women looking to build their own brands in the workplace? What should they be thinking about?
Chatzky: The most important thing to understand is what your brand is. I took a while actually to realize what mine was and the answers started to come to me from people that I would meet on the street or in the dressing room at Lowman’s after years on the Today Show where women would say to me I don’t get money, but you make it something that I can understand. And I realized that my brand is really explaining complicated things in plain English with a touch of empathy. When I get hired, that’s why I get hired. And it really hasn’t changed in three decades. And so I think that the most important thing that you have to understand is what is your brand? And if you can’t come to it yourself, you need to look to others who can tell you what you’re good at. And who can help you understand what your superpower actually is because we all have one. I mean, these days with social media, with so many different channels, if you want to grow a brand, if you want to gain attention for your brand, I think it’s a lot easier than it used to be just because the barriers to entry are not as high as they were when the only time you could get attention was if you could get on national TV. But you have to start with knowing what you are.
Benz: One dimension of that, Jean, is what if the thing that you’re really good at, maybe the thing that you get known for in your workplace is not something you love doing? I think that inevitably happens for some of us where you get competent or even get really good at something, but inside you’re like, ah, that is not my favorite thing. Any advice in those situations?
Chatzky: Yes. There’s this movement afoot, and I’ve had long discussions with my stepdaughter and her partner about this idea of the good-enough job. I was raised in an era where I think we felt like we really did have to be passionate about our jobs. That there was something wrong if we didn’t get satisfaction out of the work that we were doing every day. I think that’s changing. I think it’s changed, actually. I think that there are a lot of people who look elsewhere for their life satisfaction and have sort of come to terms with the fact that they go to work for a paycheck and that’s OK. They’re going to do it from nine to five, they’re going to leave, and then they’re going to do the thing that they love and enjoy or the things that they love and enjoy, and they’re not going to give their entire selves to work. It may be healthier. So I think either you embrace that concept and continue doing what you’re doing, or you decide that’s not how you want to live your life and you start looking for a different kind of work where you do get the sort of satisfaction out of it that you’re craving. I don’t know, what do you think?
Benz: I’m stumped, actually, because it’s something I’ve wrestled with, to be honest. There are things that I’m called upon to do that people are like, oh, you’re great at it, and that I find really exhausting. So yeah, it’s a work in progress, I guess.
Arnott: I think the positive thing is, once you get to a certain point in your career, I think you do have a lot more freedom to say no and to speak up about where you want to be spending your time.
Chatzky: Saying no is hard. I mean, saying no, I’m not particularly good at it. I try, and I get a lot of encouragement from my husband, but I do think that it’s a skill that you have to master.
Benz: Yeah, Jean, I would think in your position—sometimes in my position, I’m like, well, if I keep saying no, will they forget about me? Will they stop asking? Does that cross your mind, too?
Chatzky: 100%. Yeah, that resonates very, very clearly, but I also think about if I keep saying yes, what am I actually saying no to? My friend, Michael Bass, who was one of my early senior producers on The Today Show, once told me that you have to pick five things in your life that you say yes to and then say no to everything else. It’s a beautiful piece of advice that I have never been able to follow.
Arnott: So, you mentioned your kids and step kids, and we were just curious, not just for your family members, but maybe more broadly, what do you want your legacy to be?
Chatzky: I want for my children, for my family, I want them to live a healthy, happy, financially comfortable life where they’re not as stressed out as I think most people feel in the world today, whether that’s about finance or just about the world in general, I want for them an easier ride. Professionally, I don’t believe that managing your money should be rocket science. I think there is a finite skill set that we all need to have, that we all should be taught from an early age and continually, and I hope that I have made this part of life easier for people who have decided that they’re going to pay attention to and listen to me.
Benz: Well, Jean, as always, we’re listening. Thank you so much for taking the time to be with us. It’s been a real treat to talk with you today.
Chatzky: Thanks for having me.
Arnott: Thanks, Jean, this has been great.
Benz: Thank you for joining us on The Long View. If you could, please take a moment to subscribe to and rate the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can follow me on social media @Christine_Benz on X, or Christine Benz on LinkedIn.
Arnott: And at Amy Arnott on LinkedIn.
Benz: George Castady is our engineer for the podcast, and Kari Greczek produces the show notes each week. Finally, we’d love to get your feedback. If you have a comment or a guest idea, please email us at thelongview@morningstar.com. Until next time, thanks for joining us.
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