How to Build Wealth for your Future Rich Self

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:01]This is Financial Tea.

[00:00:06]What's up, sippers? Welcome back to Financial Tea, the podcast where I teach you how to build wealth with a side of market drama, money scandals, and of course, financial pop culture. And today is a very exciting day because we are going to cover the new rules of building wealth, which surprise is what my book is about. Yes, your girl is an author.

[00:00:30]It just came out. It is called Future Rich Person: The New Rules of Building Wealth, Even if you are broke, stuck, and that billionaire will not text you back. And I have been getting a lot of questions about what is actually inside.

[00:00:43]So today's episode is sort of like a TLDDR on the book, even though like obviously you should definitely read it too. Specifically, I wanted to review the money rules in it that I wish someone had taught me a long time ago.

[00:00:57]So, grab your pencils, ladies, cuz you might want to take some notes on this one. But first, let's get into the MDJ market report.

[00:01:06]Okay, sippers. Welcome back to the MDJ market report, where I cover the top stories you need to know to see where the money is moving this week. Okay, so first of all, spring has sprung. I don't know, maybe you have a little bit of a romantic pep in your step. And don't shoot the messenger, but I'm sorry to say that the data is in and it is telling us that dating is now a rich person's game. 86% of singles say that money concerns have led them to delay or skip dating entirely. The average all-in cost of a date is now $189, which is up 12.5% this year alone, significantly outpacing general inflation. Call it coping, call it dating app fatigue. But I want to be clear that this is not just a Gen Z phenomenon. Like we are seeing singles of all ages from Gen Z to millennial to Gen X opting out in the largest numbers.

[00:01:58]And so I wouldn't look at this as a social or generational issue. It really is an economic one and we need to start addressing it on these terms because we need people to date and get married and have kids in order for the population to grow. Well, you don't actually have to get married. I'm all about children out of wlock. That's sort of my vibe.

[00:02:14]In another corner of the romance economy, I'm sorry, there are just a lot of good stories in the romance space this week. We have our sugar babies who are struggling because of the Trump economy. So, the sugar daddies are usually low-level millionaires. Like, that's the demographic that makes up the largest portion of sugar daddies. And they are feeling the squeeze of tariffs and AI and not spending on the sugar babies the way they used to. So, one former sugar baby who used to pull in literally 20K a month called her sugar daddy this spring not for a trip but for stock tips and honestly he sort of ate it. He told her to like do lowcost index funds in a Schwab account. Like it sort of sounds like me. But I just have a feeling that these weren't always the conversations they were having. I'm sure they were at one point much sexier and like economically driven but you know the party's over a little bit for them.

[00:03:03]And finally, speaking of someone who needs to pump the brakes on dating and procreating, let's go there with Elon Musk because daddy's on trial.

[00:03:12]Basically, Elon is suing Sam Alman, claiming that Altman used his $ 38 million donation, which was made based on the understanding that Open AI was a nonprofit meant to develop artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity and not for private profit, and then abandoned that mission. Open AAI now has a significantly higher valuation at 730 billion. And on the stand this week, Altman actually admitted to telling Musk that he didn't think Open AAI would have happened without him, while at the same time allegedly planning moves to sideline him. Guys, it's honestly giving Alex versus Alex without the extensions.

[00:03:51]Like, I'm here for the beef. Thanks for being here for the market report. Now, let's get into the episode.

[00:03:57]Okay, so not to be absolutely a doomsday prepper, I've got on my tinfoil hat right here, but the real reason that I wrote future rich person is because, drum roll please, the American dream is dead. Yes, I said it. And by the way, the old money rules died with it. And I need you to really hear that before we get into anything else because think about it. This whole go to college, get a stable job, buy a house, save in a 401k, retire at 65 thing doesn't work anymore. That playbook was written for a completely different economy and really a completely different person. But like nobody ever told us it expired. So we've just like still been using those money rules and guess what? They're not working cuz cost of living is up 67% since 2000 and wages are up 7%. Student debt is crushing an entire generation.

[00:04:50]The housing market feels like a joke. AI is eating entry-level jobs before they even exist. And most financial advice is just still telling you to like skip the latte and the avocado toast. It just I can't. It's too much. But here's a thing that does not get talked about enough.

[00:05:07]We did not just inherit a broken economy here. We inherited a culture that glamorizes being bad with money. I'm going to name drop here. Carrie Bradshaw. Yeah, Carrie. She spent $40,000 on shoes and couldn't buy a house, had to be bailed out by her friends, and we thought she was goals.

[00:05:28]Like, we hated Miranda. We thought Carrie was the one to beat. An entire generation of women grew up watching Sex in the City and absorbed the message that like being well-dressed and financially clueless was a personality, a cute one, an aspirational one. And yeah, I'm sorry, Miranda. Like, you were financially responsible. we should have put you on a pedestal instead. It was basically a cautionary tale in a Manolo Blanik. But here's the thing about Carrie that I think about all the time though is like she had the raw material, you guys. Like she was a writer in New York. She was making money doing what she loved. She had the income. She just had absolutely no idea what to do with it. Like so she started to perform wealth instead of building it. Oh, and you know who else I think about? L Woods. So smart. also blonde, also fashionable. But in Legally Blonde, whenever she was upset, where would she go? To the nail salon. She processed her feelings through spending money. The little treat economy was basically birthed around the bend and snap. So then there was me, okay? I grew up on the upper east side with a Wall Street father, WSF, worshiping these women. And although I should have had every advantage, I still had absolutely no idea how money worked.

[00:06:47]I thought financial cluelessness was chic. I thought being bad with money was fun. I basically assumed someone else would eventually figure it out for me, like a partner or my dad, like whatever.

[00:06:58]I was basically just performing a version of wealth I did not have or earn and had absolutely no idea how to build.

[00:07:05]But then I had what I call my aha money moment. I was 25. I got my first real job working for Lauren Michaels and I showed up day one in like my best J Crew outfit thinking I'd finally made it. I was in Midtown getting off the subway with the rest of corporate America and HR had the audacity to ask me about health insurance and my 401k contributions. I had no idea what they were talking about. You guys, I thought a 401k was a road race. So, I went home like any self-respecting millennial would do, stress ordered Thai food, and tried to YouTube these terms from scratch. And what I found was either basically like finance bros who had never finished puberty explaining index funds on whiteboards like so confusingly or it was women telling me to be so frugal. Like literally, there was a woman who I looked at that night who told me to re-wash my paper towels. Oh, and she basically shamed me from buying pre-cut vegetables. I don't like cutting onions. Like, sorry, that couldn't work for me. None of these made building wealth like feel exciting or accessible or even just like human. I wanted to learn from someone who made it aspirational to be good with money. I wanted like the Beyonce of finance. And I couldn't find her. So, I just thought, okay, I guess I have to become her. And then basically eight years later, I wrote the book I needed and couldn't find. Future ass rich person. No, it's just future rich person, but the ass was just there for you guys to get how excited I am. So, let's go through some of the tips I teach in the book that will help you start building wealth immediately. There are so many more in there. I've got so many specific action items, celebrity stories, real case studies, concepts you've never heard anywhere else. It is a binge read that you're actually going to learn from.

[00:08:49]But, I wanted to give my sippers a taste of what is coming. So, here we go. Let's get in to the tea.

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[00:09:55]Use code T20 to save 20% off your first order. Okay, every single summer I go to Greece, it's like my favorite thing in the world, and I'm trying to plan my July trip right now, but travel is crazy right now. And you guys, like we have to be strategic about how we book it. So Monarch is the personal finance app that tracks everything, accounts, investments, saving goals, and spending.

[00:10:19]And you can get your first year of Monarch for half off, just $50 with promo code financial t. And Monarch is basically like having a financial adviser in your pocket. And I'm a very visual person, so Monarch is so good for me. They have diagrams and visualizations that make it easy to see patterns and detect spending associated with the dreaded lifestyle creep. They also help identify financial goals for you, which is huge because sometimes the problem is just like not knowing where to begin. And you can ask Monarch's AI assistant anything about your finances, like how much did I spend on travel last summer? Can I afford this vacation without touching my savings? And another cool feature is that you can split the check without the headache with Monarch's bill split. You literally just scan the receipt, everyone claims what they got, and then settles up without a separate app needed. So use code financial t at monarch.com to get your first year half off at just $50. That's 50% off your first year at monarch.com with code financial t. Okay, so the first tip from the book I really want to talk about is action money, which is a term I coined. And action money is the money left over after you subtract your expenses and your wants from your income. And this action money is what you actually use to grow wealth. You need action money to utilize or you're never going to become a future rich person cuz you can't save your way to rich. But here's the thing, you guys. It is very hard to get action money. I want to share a stat that is going to make you actually question everything. I'm sorry, but Goldman Sachs just released a report and found that nearly 40% of Americans earning over 300K a year say they are living paycheck to paycheck.

[00:12:07]Just to be clear, that is more than people earning 50 to 100K a year. Read that again. Someone making 400K is more likely to be living paycheck to paycheck than someone making 75K. How is that possible? Well, Goldman has a name for it. It's the lifestyle creep cliff and basically above 300k income is finally high enough where you start to justify like the 5k mortgage, the private school tuition, the two luxury car leases, maybe the second home, all of it locks in as like a fixed cost before you even realize what happened. Goldman actually calls it luxuries becoming necessities.

[00:12:45]And they are warning that by 2033, which is eight years from now, 55% of all US workers will be living paycheck to paycheck. And it hits women harder. 72% of women live paycheck to paycheck versus 50% of men. All this is to say that this is the actual money problem because most people look at that leftover money and think great, fun money, discretionary spending, the reward for getting through the month, treat yourself, you earned it. But that is the wrong frame. And that frame is keeping people broke at every income level. Your action money is the most powerful financial asset you have. It is the only variable in your entire financial equation that you actually control. You cannot control the housing market. You cannot control inflation.

[00:13:31]You cannot control whether your company does layoffs. But you can control what happens to your action money. The formula is simple. What you make minus what you spend equals action money. But what you do with it determines everything. And here's the thing about lifestyle creep. It is completely invisible while it's happening. You don't just like decide one day to upgrade your entire life. You just like say yes to one nicer thing and then another and then another and three years later you're making twice what you used to make and somehow you have less action money than before. And that is the cliff that Goldman is talking about. And once your lifestyle locks in as fixed cost, it's very hard to reverse. Now, I want to be real with you about the earning more side of the equation, too, because the personal finance industry loves to tell you to cut back, skip the latte, avocado toast, buy the whole onion, cut it yourself, the whole thing. But there really is a floor to how much you can cut, but there's no ceiling to how much you can make. Which is why I have a whole chapter in the book about securing the damn bag. Because your financial energy is a limited resource. We only have so many hours in the day. Like every hour you spend tracking your coffee spend is like an hour you didn't spend negotiating a raise. Every mental load you give to couponing is like a mental load you didn't give to your investment strategy. Your energy and time are the greatest resource you have.

[00:14:54]But they are finite. Use them wisely.

[00:14:57]But know that earning more alone does not solve the problem because lifestyle creep will absorb every raise you get if you let it. A person making 500k with 500k in lifestyle has zero action money.

[00:15:09]But a person making 80k who lives on 60k has 20k in action money working for them every year. So I mean you tell me but I think that we can both guess which of those people is actually building wealth. So the fix and this is the single most tactical thing I can tell you is automation. I would not be a millionaire without automation. You need to set up automatic transfers to your savings and investments before the money ever hits your checking account.

[00:15:34]Lifestyle creep really only works on money you can see. If it moves before you can touch it or you can see it, you can't creep into it. So pay your future rich person first every single month before your lifestyle has even a slight chance to absorb it. But by the way, this is why the money date is so essential. You've definitely heard me talk about money dates before and it's something that I get into in the book, but I am truly an evangelist of the money date. I do one once a month. By the way, I never want to do it. I always have to force myself, but it's worth it.

[00:16:03]You just take a night or a few hours of your day to review all your finances every month. Set aside some time, put it in your calendar. You can only cancel your money date if someone dies or Taylor Swift asks you to hang out. Those are the rules. And you're going to open your banking app, your investment accounts. Look at everything. Your zel, your Venmo, cancel your subscriptions.

[00:16:23]It's a moment for you to get real with your money. Cuz remember, money is a relationship. And if you were in a relationship and you never went on dates, it would be the worst relationship ever. So, how can you expect to ever become a future rich person if you never date your money? And by the way, if I can't convince you to have a money date and get educated about your finances, I do have someone who might be able to. Her name is Rihanna.

[00:16:44]Yeah, Rihanna. After the Good Girl Gone Bad tour, you guys, which was one of the most iconic tours in music history, our girl Riri was nearly broke. Her accountants were taking 23% of her earnings and she was only seeing 6%. And they hid the fact that her tour was losing money while telling her to buy a $7.5 million mansion. And she just trusted them completely. She didn't know better.

[00:17:12]She was like, you know, here to do music. She trusted her record label.

[00:17:16]They set her up with these people. She was like, great. I guess that they're going to do. So she never looked. And then she almost lost everything because of it. But then Rihanna got educated.

[00:17:26]She took control. She wrote [ __ ] Better Have My Money about those damn accountants and of course built Fenty into a billion-dollar empire, which we love. Happy ending, iconic. But here's the lesson. It's not that Briana's team was terrible. I mean, they were, but it's more that like she didn't know enough to catch it because she was never looking. And this is what I want to make super clear. And turn this up. Rewind this. Like listen to this on point five so it's slow in your ears.

[00:17:54]>> Nobody cares about your money more than you do.

[00:17:59]>> Not your accountant, not your manager, not your partner, you. Which is why the money date is the single most important habit I teach. And that's why so much of future rich person is about it. Just like building sustainable habits. And by the way, like I said, I never want to do the money date. You aren't either. But once you start, it'll go fast. So, you just have to get your ass in the chair and freaking log into all your accounts.

[00:18:22]But like, just treat it as an appointment with your future self because that's what it is. And the people who do this consistently catch problems early. They stay in control.

[00:18:30]They build wealth. But the people who don't end up like Rihanna before her pivot.

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[00:19:59]Okay, great. Now that we are clear that you need to be having money dates and that action money is so important and that Rihanna is obviously the queen, let's talk about a little concept I'm sure you've heard about before, which is the emergency fund. I know that everyone talks about these. They're like, you got to have 3 to 6 months of expenses saved, great, correct, fine, whatever. But like I just sort of feel like the emergency fund framing is so boring that nobody actually does it. So I want to reframe it for you. It is the money that gives you the right to leave any situation that's not serving you. A job, a relationship, an apartment. Without this freedom fund, you are stuck. But with it, you have options. And options are the closest thing to freedom. I know because I have to relate everything to pop culture. It is my disease. I do need to tell you about Kim Kardashian because people are not talking about the fact that our girl Kim was low-key married at 19. And the guy was not a good guy. He was very controlling financially about her life, everything. And she wanted out, but she couldn't leave because she had no financial independence. Like she was just like completely relying on him.

[00:21:05]So eventually she had to borrow 6K from Chloe out of a literal I can't make this up coke bottle-shaped piggy bank just to get her own apartment and get out. So she borrowed it, she left. Now she's a billionaire. She's obviously repaid Chloe. Great ending. But the point is, Kim couldn't leave until someone else funded her exit. She needed Khloe's Coke bottle. And I also have a woman in Future Rich Person in the book, and this is a real story, who was short on rent.

[00:21:35]So, she Airbnbed her apartment without an emergency fund, and she ended up with bed bugs. Then, she had to pay for the removal, ended up getting evicted. So, that one bad month turned into this whole financial catastrophe because there was no buffer. So the question is not do you need an emergency fund? Do you need a freedom fund? Yes, you do.

[00:21:57]The question is where should you put it?

[00:21:59]And the answer is not in your regular checking account where you're accidentally going to spend it on Uber Eats. Put it in a high yield savings account which is an HYSA. A traditional bank pays you about like 01 to 04% interest which is honestly pennies. But HSAs at banks like Marcus or Ally or SoFi are currently paying around 4 to 5%. Which is 100 times more interest just for moving your money to a different digital bucket. It is seriously the easiest raise that you're ever going to give yourself. Set up an automatic monthly transfer today. Even if it's just $50. Call it your freedom fund. Call it your [ __ ] you money. Call it whatever makes you want to protect it. Just make sure that you aren't relying on someone else's piggy bank when you need to walk away. Okay, now I need to say this clearly because it is like maybe the most misunderstood concept in personal finance and it is costing people decades of wealth building, but you can't save your way to rich, guys. Savings will protect you, but investing is what grows you and they're not the same thing. They're not interchangeable. And treating them like they are is the single most expensive mistake that I see people make. Like your savings account is paying you what, maybe like 0.04% 04% interest. Pop it in a high yield savings account, maybe you got 4 to 5% interest. But if you put it in the stock market, that's historically returned 8 to 10% annually and it's compounding. If you're actual money is just sitting in a checking account, you're not being responsible. You are falling behind inflation every single day. And here is the part that really gets me. You can be doing everything right, contributing every month, feeling responsible about it, and your money can still be going absolutely nowhere.

[00:23:42]Because opening an account and transferring money into it is not the same as investing it. Contributing is not the same as buying. If you never actually purchase anything, your money just sits there in cash losing value while you think you're building wealth.

[00:24:00]Like I've sat down with so many people who have been contributing to their IAS for years and then we log in together and it is 100% cash, no investments, like basically a perfectly curated outfit with no underwear. It looks responsible from the outside, but like it's not functional. You have to actually click the buttons. You have to place the trades. You have to actually buy something. But if you start at 35 with the same amount and the same return, you're going to get 398K.

[00:24:26]That is not a small difference. That is the difference between like financial freedom and financial stress in retirement. Every year your money sits in cash doing nothing is years of compound growth you will never get back.

[00:24:39]And this is why action money has one job not to sit in savings but to be invested to compound to grow. Savings are your foundation and your emergency fund and your like net. But everything above that baseline, that is your wealthb buildinging engine. And it only works if it is actually invested. That is the whole game. So please, as an action item, log into every account you have right now, your 401k, your IRA, your brokerage, and make sure that your money is actually invested and not just sitting in cash. And if you don't have a brokerage account, open one today.

[00:25:15]Fidelity, Vanguard, Charles Schwab, they're all great. Buy some lowcost index funds. I have a list on my website of the three I recommend. Set up an automatic monthly contribution and leave it alone. That's the whole strategy. And I just want to say, I know some of you are listening to this and thinking like, I'm doing my best, but the math is just not mathing. And you are right to feel that way. Like when I say the American dream is dead, I am talking about a system that was never designed for everyone to win. Like obviously we talk a lot about the pay gap, women making 84 cents on the dollar. While the pay gap is about what you've paid today, the wealth gap is about the total assets you own minus what you owe. And for women, that deck is stacked. And when you look at race and gender together, the numbers are an even bigger wakeup call. For every $1 of wealth owned by a single white man, a single white woman owns about 32 cents. And for a single black woman or Hispanic woman, that number drops to less than a penny. And by the way, that's not choice. That is the result of centuries of systemic exclusion. From, you know, redlinining to the lack of affordable child care to the fact that women are more likely to be the financial shock absorbers for their entire families. And this is honestly why action money and investing aren't just nice to haves. They are the only tools we have to narrow that gap.

[00:26:35]Like we are the first generation of women with this freedom. We couldn't have our own credit cards till 1974. We couldn't take out business loans till 1988. If you don't want to become a future rich person for yourself, do it for your grandma. She would be so jealous of you that you get to like live your damn life and do whatever the [ __ ] you want to do because you have your own money. But also, I want to be clear that when you're starting from behind, you really can't afford to play by these old rules. You have to be strategic. You have to be aggressive and more educated than the people that the system was actually built for. Like building wealth as a woman, specifically as a woman of color, is a radical act of reclamation.

[00:27:11]And it is how we build a floor beneath us that the system didn't provide and frankly will never provide. Oh my gosh.

[00:27:18]Like I need a sprite or something. That was a lot. But I hope this was helpful and that you are feeling more empowered to look at your bank account in the eye today just like Karly Claus looked camp in the eye at the Met Gala. And nearly everyone I talked to feels behind. And I felt behind and I grew up with every advantage. So, like, if you want the full road map, the specific buttons to click, the celebrity scandals, I couldn't fit into this episode because my producer said I was only allowed two, and the step-by-step guide to becoming the CEO of your own damn life. Please go order my book, Future Rich Person. It is officially out. It is the financial education we should have gotten in high school, but with better outfits and more tea. It's like spinach hidden in the brownie. Like, you're getting the nutrients, but it's basically a beach read. So, I wrote this for you, my sippers. Go get your copy, DM me, comment, let me know what you think. I'm so excited for you to read it. And yeah, have those money dates, protect your action money, and let's get that financial freedom, guys. Stay rich.