How to Get Off The Hot Girl Hamster Wheel with Katie Gatti Tassin

for your whole year. So planning out the activities you want to do with your family, the activities you want to do with self care, your travel, your travel rewards, credit cards, all of their benefits, Just planning all of the things for your finances in one spreadsheet with like twenty different tabs, So if you want to check out all the tabs that are available Frugal Friends, podcast, dot com, slash Planner, and it could be really beneficial to you. I know it has been for me, even maybe even

more than the budget because I use an app. But some people love their spreadsheets.

know that my sound hypocritical, but I don't. But I really do love hers, So I'm really excited to introduce you to her. If you've never heard her before, you're gonna love her.

spending more in the future. So I experienced this firsthand when I was in my early twenties and I was getting serious about my finances for the first time. And as you will know, The first thing that you do when you want to get better with money is you have to sit down. If you do an audit, you

have to understand where is my money going. Been warned by all of the male personal finance gurus that I was following and listening to every day that, oh, housing is a big problem for most people, transportation is a big problem for most people. You're gonna have to watch your restaurant spending. So I go in expecting to find high expenses or high percentages in those areas, and that

is not what I found. I lived with a roommate in an old building, I had a car that was pretty reasonably priced and within my means, and my restaurant spending was pretty average. But there was a section that really jumped out at me when I did this audit, and it was my personal care and beauty expenses. So I sit down and I start punching the numbers and the calculator on my phone and I'm like, that can't

be right. There's no way that that's right. And then I rerun all the numbers again and it was like, oh, nope, that that is correct. I am spending over three hundred dollars a month on beauty on average. Now at the time, I'm just represented almost ten percent of my take home pay. So I had this horrifying realization that I was working for almost an entire month every year just to be pretty basically, and I essentially realized at the time, this is not going to work. I can't keep doing this.

So I did the Hot Girl Detox. And now if somebody listening at home wants to do a Hot Girl detox, Basically, the steps that you take or you sit down, you list every single beauty or personal care expense that you have. You power rank them, so you're going to go, okay,

this is the most important thing to me. It's number one all the way down to like the nice to haves, and then little by little, one by one, starting at the bottom, you are going to pull them out of the budget and you're going to pull them off the calendar. And I bet what you will find is what I found, and that is that you are probably going to do this to try to get money back. But what you're going to find is that you're going to get a lot of time back to and that in some ways

can be just as valuable. So now you know five to seven years later, I have introduced a couple of the things back. I mean, I'll still get my hair cut and still get highlights sometimes or you know, every once in a while, but have to buy skincare or

new mas scara. But even now that I can afford those things, I didn't add them back in because doing that detox and experimenting with my spending in that way taught me that even though I thought I valued those things, I really didn't and my life wasn't any poorer without them.

that means you can't be investing it. So if you were to take over a forty year career the average monthly beauty spending of around three hundred dollars, and you were to invest that instead, you're going to retire with an extra million dollars. Now, that is not a cost at the margin. We're not talking about the latte. This

is a retirement supporting amount of money. And so I think it's important to get clear on the idea that we have become so comfortable and so adept at discussing beauty standards as psychologically oppressive forces in our lives, but we often don't think about them as economically oppressive forces.

So when we talk about, oh, it feels vulnerable or it feels risky to disengage or to divest from these systems, that's because you probably receive signals every single time that you leave your house that the way that you look matters. We know that people who are above average quote unquote attractiveness, and that's that's how they dictate it in the studies.

There's very bleak study methodology that I write about in the book, where they basically line up five thousand women and they go above average, average below average attractiveness, and then they track their their grades and in person classes over time. So we know that attractive people tend to have easier lives. Beauty is a real form of capital. It's social capital. We know that. So that's not to say that if it feels risky or vulnerable that it's

all in your head. But the problem with investing in beauty as capital is that, unlike real capital, it is a depreciating asset. It's an asset that is going to require more and more cash flow as you age to kind of preserve the same benefits. It's a master that will never be satisfied. So I think about that, and I go, that is not a good ROI and I am not interesting? Did in things that don't offer me a good ROI? Now? Am I going to get something

for looking a little bit nicer? Sure? But what I found when I talked to readers about the hut Girl Hmster Wheel, because this is something that I've been writing about for a long time, I hear interesting things. Some women who were formerly very high maintenance, maybe even more so than I was, and I almost very high maintenance. Don't get me wrong. What they'll tell me is not only did I get all this money back, but I noticed that my life actually didn't really change. I still

got promoted at work, my partner still loves me. The things that I feared really didn't come to pass. Or they'll tell me, yeah, I let my I'm not coloring my hair anymore, right like I let it go gray. And I actually feel more powerful now because I know that in that decision, not only am I prioritizing something about my future that is a little bit more substantial than like how I look in the moment, but I'm also no longer contributing to a system that is bad

for other women. And I think that's the really important thing when we talk about beauty standards that often get swept under the rug or kind of out of the way, which is that, yes, they are individual choices. Yes these things are up to you what you want to participate in, what you want to abstain from. But the way that beauty standards and beauty norms work is that the more people that try to embody them, the more expected they become.

There's a really great culture critic named Jessica Defino who writes about this, and she basically says, when we all strive to uphold these beauty standards, then that becomes the baseline for what is expected for women to treat them with basic human dignity. So I will hear from women who say, I'm not coloring my hair anymore. I stopped

getting botox, yet it's saving me money. But I also now know that when I walk down the street and another woman looks at me, she's not gonna go now feel like she needs to start coloring her hair or she needs to go get botox. So I really look at this topic as the intersection where individual choice and basically collective action kind of overlap in an interesting way.

And that's why I start the book talking about this, because I think it's a really underappreciated and underdiscussed element of women in their financial futures.

eyelashes done. And it was interesting because for me on my side of things, and maybe some of our listeners too, we are accustomed to going without and now that maybe we've understood money more and how we can earn more that then we are faced with what do I do with my money? And this is what society is telling

us to do? This is what maybe other women subconsciously or consciously are telling us to do that I have had the thought in the past, if I could I only afford it, I might get my lashes done, I might get my eyebrows one. I might be able to go get waxed every other month. And then to realize and hear from some of these people who have been there, done that saying, actually, I stop doing that, and I like how my eyes look more, and I like the

freedom that I'm experiencing by not doing this anymore. I think it works on both ways to help people detox from the things that they're already doing, but also inform those who might be earning more you don't have to get onto that rat race.

the time. All the marketing across the board is marketing to our insecurities, so it doesn't matter if it's like insecurity in features and maybe you're not even going to spend there, maybe you're going to spend somewhere else. So like, if I can't be beautiful, then I'll be smart and then you're going to spend money somewhere else, or I'm going to go out and spend money and you know, happy.

your regular eyelashes, your natural eyelashes look terrible because they get brittle and broken down. Anybody who's ever gotten acrylic

nails knows this game. You get acrylic nails, they look amazing for like two weeks, and then they grow out and you have to get them taken off, and the nails underneath your natural nails that before were probably perfectly suitable and beautiful are now yellowing and brittle and scratched, right, So oftentimes these procedures and these services have a tendency to leave you quote worse off than you even were when you started. And so it really does function in

many ways like a trap. And so that's why I think it's not that you should disengage with all of it. They're very well maybe things that you look at that realistically and you go, yes, and I can still afford and still want to do this one particular thing, but knowing the stakes of like Okay, well, what is really going to be the consequences of this, both financially and then like upkeep wise, that I think is something worth going into with eyes wide open.

beauty and personal care consumer industries. These are industries that exist almost solely to invent insecurities and then market ways to fix them to one half of the population. You also have to consider the fact that women now negotiate just as often as men do, but they are now fifteen percent less likely to get a raise when they ask for more money, and this is in part because a lot of negotiation advice focuses on teaching women to

be aggressive, demand your worth, ask for what you're worth. Well, that doesn't really work for women the same way it works for men. Because when women are seen as pursuing quote unquote masculine goods, power, money, status, these zero sum ideas that are considered to be inherently belonging to men and therefore could never rightfully belong to a woman, they

are more likely to face pushback. So something that I always like to note here too, though, is that this road does go both ways that when men pursue flexibility or other things that are kind of deemed as like feminine values, they will also face more pushback. So really we're all trapped in like the prison that is the gender binary. But for women it results in fewer resources, so over time we see the reality of the gender

wage gap worsen for women. This is true because when women become parents, when they become mothers, they are likely to kind of downshift at work. They're more likely to downshift at work than a male partner or parent would be. And this is true by the way, for like families, where like the man would like to be more involved or the man would like to be the one downshifting. Often the economics of the household are such that that

really doesn't make sense. So you have these systemic forces that are kind of in a i don't know, not necessarily malevolent, and you could even say it's in a benign way or kind of keying these structures in these norms in place. So it is true that women spend less time doing paid labor than men do, but it's because they're spending on average roughly twice as much time doing unpaid labor. So I really like the work of

Nobel Prize winning economist Claudia Golden. She found that this reality is the primary driver of the gender wage gap, this gap between paid and unpaid labor time effectively, and so if you look at somebody's entire lifetime and you compound those disparities, and then you consider the fact that

women are just going to frankly live longer. They have average lifespans that are six and a half percent longer, well statistically, now they're gonna be the ones who are going to bear the brunt of any poor long term financial planning. So we look at all these obstacles, we study them longitudinally over the lifetime, and then you can see in the data these discrepancies compound and women retire with about fifty seven percent as much money as men do.

So a big part of my work is looking at those realities, looking at that data head on, and going, Okay, we know, if we're being intellectually honest, that we're not going to fix these things in our own lives by

just like quote unquote, making different choices. Countries that are serious about fixing these problems address them with policy, but in the meantime, we are not without agency, and there are things that we can do, whether that's negotiating in a way that navigates gender bias successfully, whether that's saving for childcare before you have a baby, and getting really serious about having an egalitarian partnership and really ingesting the knowledge that you need to be in the driver's state

of your financial life, that all of these things really can make a difference. They do make a difference. So I try to marry those two realities in my work.

is so important. And knowing like even if you're the one making money and I'm the one staying home with the kids, you can't work without me staying home with the kids, or you will be putting this money into childcare. If I am not here, so value equaling, like valuing each other's work equally.

kind of uncomfortable, kind of inherently uncomfortable. And so often what they'll find in this research about gender bias and negotiation is that women will make the ask and then they will immediately begin negotiating against themselves and offering all the reasons why they totally understand if it's not doable right now, and I know the budgets are tight, so like, if it's not this time, then maybe you've probably heard this scene this and maybe even done this yourself. I

know that I have. So the advice is, once you make the ask, and in the book I outline the specific ways to like structure that ask for the best results, stop talking and allow the uncomfortable silence the other really critical thing to remember that I have found very useful in my own work and in my time in corporate settings is that workplaces are a little bit like glorified high school lunchrooms, and so in many ways, perception is reality.

So the best time to begin setting the groundwork for a negotiation is long before you are actually sitting down to have that conversation. There are a couple components of how you approach this. I generally bucket them into two main categories. The first is your perceived value in the company, and the second is your market rate. So, aside from upskilling, you have a lot less control over your market rate

than you do or perceived value. So there are a couple little tricks that I like to use for really disproportionately shaping that perceived value. Women are extremely hard workers, by and large. That is a generalization I'm very comfortable making. So my advice is, these are not ways to work harder, these are ways to work smarter. So the first is

socializing your wins. Oftentimes, popular negotiation advice will encourage you to keep a list of your accomplishments, and that is great, but it's actually way better if people know about those accomplishments as they are happening. So this is kind of an art and a science. There was one gal that I worked with at Southwest Airlines back in the day. She got promoted pretty much every time there was a promotion cycle, so I really studied her and what she

was doing differently, and she was excellent at this. She would communicate her team's wins and the initiatives that she was driving for them as part of like, oh, just sharing out learnings that others might find useful from this, you know, user experience testing session that we were working on. You know, if you'd like to talk more, I'm attaching a deck of findings. So you're really it's a slippery slope because you don't want it to be a bragging montage.

But the bottom line is that if you are doing impressive things, people need to know about it. The next is going the extra yard. So noe, we're not talking about the extra mile, just a yard. If your deadline for three factors that are impact and conversion is due on Friday, you're gonna hands it over on Thursday, and you're gonna throw in a fourth. If you are meeting with someone, particularly somebody who is above you and the organization. You're going to send an agenda ahead of time, and

you're going to manage up. I think that this is especially important if you are bringing an issue to a manager, because if you're setting up a meeting with somebody like a manager or a supervisor, and you are bringing an issue to them, you're dropping a problem in their lap.

unquote middle management. Oh my gosh. Moras with executing at a level that will allow the people that probably have a say over whether you are going to ascend higher giving them the impression that you are there to make their lives easier effectively, and that you are autonomous in your job. I think that that goes a really really long way. So my approach to negotiation, as you've probably gathered, is yes, specific, Yes, we're going to talk about the semantics.

Yes we're going to talk about how to structure you're asking your argument, but we should also widen the aperture and talk about how you're actually approaching the job so that when you sit down to have that conversation it's just smooth sailing.

we have to think this way. But this is the world we live in, and if you want to be recognized for the good work that you're doing, these are some ways to make sure that that happens.

bolstered chapter three, which is called Knowledge is Power. It's research from a bank called UBS, and every year they do something called the Own Your Worth Report, and what they find consistently is that even high earning millennial women, so we're talking a young women, and we're talking women that are making a lot of money in many cases,

are the breadwinners in their relationships. They're the primary primary, they are the primary financial providers in their homes still have a tendency to outsource their financial decision making to male partners. Something like seventy percent of men in the surveys will claim I am the financial decision maker in

this home. And there are a lot of reasons for this, I mean, a popular reason for this, to be honest, if we want to link this back to systemic forces, is that women today, even modern high income women, are very overburdened in their homes. To link it back to the time you study data, right, we know that women are within familial relationships probably spinning a lot more plates just on average. Now, if someone in your relationship is saying, don't worry babe, by God it, I'll take care of

the money. They're offering to take something off your plate, and maybe it's something that you don't feel very confident about anyway, you're like, great, Yeah, one less thing that I have to worry about. So it makes perfect sense

why we've gotten here. But what jumped out to me in this research is that a lot of women, what they say when asked why do you do this, is something to the effect of, well, financial decision making is just quote less natural for me, And that phrase jumped out at me immediately because I was like, natural, Well, nothing about managing money and thriving under capitalism is natural. I mean, everyone has to learn how to do that. No one comes out of the womb knowing how to

balance a checkbook or diversify a portfolio. So I thought, Okay, that's a really good insight. The idea that we feel as though this is something that should come naturally to us is something that we can affect right now, and that's why I called it Knowledge is Power. Chapter three, where we really get into some of the granularities around how to plan long term for your finances. But that's why I really wanted to lean into this idea that

we need to be unapologetic about this. We need to recognize that this is something that not only are we capable of doing, but we really ought to be doing it. We are the best people to be making these decisions about our future. No one is going to care more about it than we do, even our spouses, who we

may love very much. Eighty four percent of wado's in America are women, which means even women who are married to wonderful male partners who never get divorced will still need to know how to manage their money on their own. So I think getting out of the mentality that any of this should be coming naturally to you is probably the mindset shift that I would say somebody should start with.

and mastered far more complex topics than personal finance. As the two of you probably know, Like we're not talking about rocket scientists rocket science here. A lot of this stuff is pretty pretty manageable once you like pull back the curtain or lift up the hood. So that's that's probably where I would start.

we can appreciate that. We feel that so deeply well done for making this decision, and we are hopeful with you that it turns out yet.

at this you know, prestigious New York venue. And I am a kind of normal person from northern Kentucky who had never really set foot in a real city until she was an adult. So I definitely had a moment of Wow, I've really I've really come a long way.

just secondhand. So it feels so values aligned, but also you know extra like it's not fair minimum and it's giving to a friend and I just feel like a rich girl.

fun for me. And anytime we can push back on well established ideas and kind of saying, what about if we're a little subversive here, and are we sure that that's actually where we're spending the most money? And are we sure that we really need to cut our rent if we've already slashed it so far, there might be other areas that.

with this book. Jen and Jill offered tangible tips and a call to action at the end of every chapter that was important to us. I'm so glad we did that. I love their simple approach to managing spending and building a life that aligns with your values while still offering grace for our humanity and easy read and I'll be revisiting on a regular basis.