Wind Down with Janet Kramer and I'm Heeart Radio podcast.
This week's Thursday Therapy, we've got Vivian two. So she has a new book coming out. It's called Rich af The Winning Money Mindset that will Change your Life. I know we've had a lot of money people on here, but I have a feeling she's going to have a whole new twist on it. So you can pre order as available now. It's going to be released December twenty sixth, twenty twenty three. So she is basically a mentor. She gives no Bs advice on how to think like a
rich person and create smart money habits. So let's all think rich and get her on. Hey girl, Hey, I'm Jana.
It's so nice to meet you.
Janna, It's so nice to meet you too.
I'm excited to have you on on this week's Thursday Therapy because for me, honestly money, I've talked about it a lot, and I know people on this one are like, all right, you know, another money person, but I'm like, no, Like, I love what you do because you're definitely in more of like the gen Z world. You're on TikTok, You're doing all that and you know, we've had the older, wiser people come on that have been fantastic with you know,
with their their books and their money. But just reading your breakdown to You've got a new book coming out called Rich af The Winning Money Mindset that will Change your life. And again listeners have heard me say this on repeat. I have a very like scarcity mindset of money. I didn't grow up with it, and so I just I sometimes act as if I'm well, I'm always scared of losing it, right, because I'm like, well, maybe it'll never come back, And so I just I like kind
of like hoard at times too. And so when you know you were saying basically you know, tips to think rich, and I'm like, all right, let's.
Just go dive deep.
How like, how do you how do you do that when you're also scared of well, I don't know when where the money's coming in, when it's going to come in, if it's going to come in, and I have to pay for this, that like all the things. How do you think that when you already feel like you've got a pile of you know, rocks on your chest.
Yeah, I think it's two main things. And I'll explain them. First and foremost, it's automating your life so that your life can take care of you. And two, it's something that I had to learn in you know, my early twenties as a young woman, and it's that not everyone is out to get you, Like just because somebody else
succeeds does not mean you have lost. So to the point of automation, I think things become a lot less stressful when you know that you have a parachute or an eject button or something just to keep you safe. And I think that really starts with having an emergency fund. I say this not as someone who's just like theoretically talking about an emergency fund, but someone who's had to use one. When I was bright eyed and bushy tail, it was my second year in New York City. You know,
everything was going great. I was working on Wall Street. Me and my roommate had a great first year living together. So we decided to move out of that apartment but still together, into a new apartment. I had, you know, been dating this new guy. I was just really excited about life. And the very first weekend that I was in this apartment, I actually wasn't there because I was in Chicago. I went to the University of Chicago and it was I don't know, it's like not like alumni weekend. Yeah,
maybe like alumni weekend. And it was a reason why a bunch of people were going back to campus, and it was I was having so much fun and I get this text from my roommate, Hey, when you get back into town, we had to like sit down and have a conversation. And as a millennial, getting that text, let me just go ahead and tell you it ruined my weekend because I was anxious the whole time. And I'm like, are you mad at me? What's going on?
And she's like, no, it's nothing like that. She's like, come home and we'll talk.
I'm like, okay, I can just tell me, like like I don't like that, just just tell me, like are we good?
Like are we good?
And so I come back and it's like so ominous, and I'm like what, Like what's wrong? And she's like, so the very first night that I slept in our new apartment, you know, she's like, the lights were all off, but I was watching a little bit of like Netflix on my phone or whatever, and she's like and it was around midnight and I got up out of bed and I went to the bathroom to go to the bathroom, like to use the toilet right before I went to sleep, and I flipped on the light and I saw a
thousand little things scurry away. Yeah, and I am someone who like will put a cup over a bug and then the bug owns the apartment. Now, like I don't know where I have to go live somewhere else. And to hear that come out of her mouth, I would have rathered her tell me that she hated my guts or that we were having a big flight. I was like,
this is like worst possible case scenario. And as much as we tried to fight, we fought the property manager, our landlord, everything, we ended up paying two months of rent break our lease and that was eight thousand dollars. And it's not fair, not at all. But you know what, like we were young twenty somethings, both of us were working on Wall Street. Neither of us had the hour, like the hours, or the time or the energy to fight this in small claims court.
Right then you're going to lose money paying for lawyers, so then relate.
It's it's going to be a wash. So she and I decided to eat it. And it was four thousand dollars from her, four thousand dollars for me. And that was my entire emergency event. And that was a really scary moment because I didn't have much more than that. And to feel like I had worked an entire year on Wall Street, where I'm putting in these fourteen to sixteen hour days, to have absolutely nothing to show for it three hundred and sixty five days later was a
gut punch. And so I'll say that that moment sucked, but that moment would have sucked ten times more if we couldn't afford to break our lease, if we had to living in an apartment that was dangerous. There was literally like there were literally cockroaches dying in our ice tray, so like they were clearly getting into our fridge, into our food, into our dishwasher, into our clothes, like everything.
And it was not only scary and horrible for our emotional and mental health, but like physically like that that was like an actual like toxicity and like bacterial concern.
Well you can't sleep too, like you know what I mean. Like I remember one time when I was in La I put my foot into one of my little slide on shoes and it was there was a cockroach in there, and then I felt, I mean it climbed. I mean it's to this day it gives me, I'm like, oh, like and I couldn't sleep. And then because I'm like, is it going to show up next to my bed? Is it gonna you know? Is it gonna come in? Disgusting?
And when you find one, you know there's a bill in the wall. So it's just it was a horrible situation, but it's really important to automate your life so that you have a parachute that you can jump out of the plane and you'll be Okay. Did it suck to blow all of my money on breaking a lease of a horrible, terrible apartment? Yes? Did I feel an immense amount of relief after she and I vacuum sealed our clothes into a bag air tight for basically seven days,
moved into a new apartment and never saw a cockroache again? Yes, of course it put me in a much better place. And then two, I think something that a lot of regular people and particular women struggle with is we're haters and you don't have to be an out loud hater to be a hater. You don't have to be the troll commenting you're ugly on somebody's Instagram post to be a hater. It's when you see something good happen for someone else and you can't even be happy for them.
You feel like any sort of good thing happening for someone else takes away from the good things that can happen to you. That is being a hater. And let me tell I was the ultimate hater in my twenties. In my early twenties, I will say because one I worked in an incredibly competitive environment. There were very few women, and any time I would see someone else like buying for an opportunity, it felt like, you know, I needed to do the same thing, and if I didn't get it,
like that was bad. Like I think that was a creation of my environment. You know. I had to compete against two other interns for my full time seat and I beat them out for it, and I always felt like there was someone coming around the corner, like it was just like so scary for me, Like to constantly feel like the scarcity mindset. And as I've kind of grown up and grown into my own skin one, I find that I'm a lot more self assured. And it's
been proven to me time and time again. Just because one door closes doesn't mean that there won't be other doors down the road that another window won't open for you. And I think that's something that we just like need to emotionally train ourselves to understand better, because as the child of immigrants, it was really hard to feel that way for a very long time.
Yeah, I couldn't imagine that piece of it. I mean, I linly, this is not the same at all. I single mom, grown up, so it's like, yeah, not having like the money. So it's like my mom, you had to work a bunch of jobs, and like we couldn't do a lot of things we wanted to do because and we'd have you know, the I always said, it's too even in my twenties, like I'd frozen tiketos every day for a year, I'd steal toilet paper from a restaurant. Like it's just you know, it's like it's when you
kind of grow into that. It's like I feel like that stayed with me at least in my adulthood. So was that immigrant piece too, that does that still make you feel that way even now older.
Percent you know that there's like this research that basically shows that your brain after age seven is more of like a rock, but before age seven, your brain is a sponge. It just that's why it's so much easier to learn multiple different languages. And it's not strange to see some five year old speaking three different languages, like talking to his parents, talking to his grandparents, talking to a nanny, talking to the tutor like in a bunch
of different languages. And it's a lot harder to find an adult who can do the same in the same way. In the same vein, you develop a lot of your money habits young and I grew up the child of two my grandparents. I was born on US soil, so you know, I've got a blue pass support and I think in one way that has given me a lot of power and entitlement, but not in the bad way, in the way that I feel like I belong here. I deserve everything that I have worked hard for. There's
no one who can take that away from me. I deserve to be on the soil. But in the other vein, when my parents moved to the US, I was actually, you know, I was their first child, their only child, and I was basically sent back to China to live with my grandparents for two three years before coming back to live with my parents because they couldn't afford it.
They couldn't afford the child care, they could not afford, you know, frankly, to clothe or feed me in the right way, and they wanted to get their financial footing. And so I think, you know, growing up with your grandparents is amazing, but I think there is something to be said that, Like, I didn't live with my parents for the first two years of my life, and I think there's also something to be said about growing up
and feeling other. I would say that I grew up at the very beginning I would say lower middle class, and by high school I would say upper middle class. And I always felt like I needed to keep up with my predominantly white peers, and it made me very insecure because I would try to wear the same clothes and do the same activities, but I wasn't able to change the way I looked and because of that, I
think I used spending money as a way to compensate. So, you know, I was that girl who wanted to go to the mall every single weekend to get the newest T shirt, the newest dress, the new whatever. And the biggest fight my mom and I ever got into it was over a pair of Abercrombie and Fitch ripped jeans.
Who you wanted to fit in?
I wanted to fit in so bad? And I came home and my mom saw the receipt in the bag.
And back then too, like I wasn't alloted shop at amercram Base. I mean those are like fifty dollars pants, Like are you out of your mind?
Yeah?
Yeah, I want to say. This was like right around like nine, and obviously I was like young. I didn't understand it, Like.
The housing crisis was like happening, and my parents were more stressed about how they were going to pay their mortgage and like still safe for me to go to college than I really understood.
And I feel grateful that they like kind of held that from me for a little bit. But they were really honest. They were brutally honest. They were like I remember coming home with these jeans and my mom yelling at me and being like, you're so irresponsible. You don't understand the value of a dollar. And this is when
I knew I had like messed up. I said, well, the girl that I'd gone to the mall with my friend, I was like, well, her her parents are cool with her buying ripped jeans, and I think that really hurt my mom. And she I could see you, like tears like welling up in her eyes, and she said to me, She's like, well, her dad's a lawyer and we're not millionaires, and we can't do what they can for her for you.
And I think that was like the first real financial wake up call where I realized, like, people don't have the same finances even if they live in similar neighborhoods, a couple miles down the street from each other. And I ran up the stairs, slammed my door, you know, bawled my eyes out. And that was kind of the moment where I feel like I really made the decision. I was like, I want to be rich as fuck and I never ever want to worry about money ever again. I want to be able to buy whatever I want.
I want to be able to do whatever I want, and money can never be a limiting factor. Money can never make me cry like this ever again.
I get it.
I mean I want that say, and I want that piece for my kids, like I never want them to have to not have something.
Yeah.
Yeah, Now I'm going to make them work for it, like I have already my plan. I'm like, I'm not buying you a car. You will work for your car, and then I'm going to show you the reward at the end of it, which is what my grandpa did for my brother. And I love that because it showed work ethic. But it also shows that like if you, you know, pay your bills on time, like there is a you get, you get a little bonus.
Right.
I'm curious.
So in your journey to getting you know, and like you said in your book, like rich af like what is it?
Is it for you? Like what's the big thing?
Is it?
Investing? Is it? Like? Is it all?
Is it?
Mindset? Like what what? What are the main points like to get there?
Yeah? What I do in the book is basically show you how rich people think. Because it's not enough for me to sit here and say you should budget, you shouldn't negotiate for a raise, you should save, you should invest. You heard it a thousand times and if you still haven't done it, there's a reason why, because you don't understand why you need to be doing these things. And what is so important for you to understand is the mindset behind doing those actions. So I'll give a great example.
One of my favorites is that we think rich people are better than us. We think they're smarter, that they work harder, they're bigger, taller, stronger, better, and they're not. I'm here to tell you rich people are lazier than you and I. They are so much lazier. And you're probably thinking, like, that's not true. The guy I saw on the cover of Time magazine, he works so hard he owns his own company. Like, great, good for you.
But I'm telling you, first and foremost, no, rich people understand the value of labor and they are willing to work hard to an extent. But they also recognize that you have a human I have a human body. There are only so many hours in a day that you can work before your body gives out. You have a human brain. I have a human brain. There are only so many hours a day that your brain can be
actively functioning and function well. You know what can work twenty four to seven, doesn't need to go to the bathroom, doesn't need to take a lunch break, doesn't need to put on their makeup in the morning, doesn't need to commute to and fro your money, Your money can work hard for you twenty four to seven. I would say your brain and your body. You get about fourteen to sixteen hours a day. You'll be burnt out within six to twelve months. And there are certainly people who work
an entire lifetime working like that. There are certainly people who don't do that. But if you can make your money your partner, your two household income when you're single, they are your partner, your money can help you get to every single goal you have faster than you can do it alone.
So give us an example. How do we do that?
Yeah, so, I think you know, when you're talking about investing, people think it's de trading. They're like, Okay, I gotta put in tons of hours and research and I gotta buy like eighteen monitors and then I'm gonna pick the perfect stock and it's gonna go up and everything's gonna be amazing. Let me tell you, eighty five percent of day traders lose money over a past a year. Over a long term period, those stats are not good for you.
And as someone who has worked on Wall Street, I saw hedge funds blow up and they weren't even day trading, they were just making investment choices. I saw them blow up all the time. What I recommend for the average Joshmo who has maybe thirty minutes this weekend, maybe an hour every month to dedicate to investing, open up a tax advantaged investment account. So maybe that is a roth IRA or a traditional IRA. Maybe you already have one through your employer, like a four to oh one K
or even just like an individual brokerage account. You're not going to necessarily get any immediate tax benefits, but again, you pay fewer taxes on investments than you ever would on ordinary income as long as you are a long term investor. And what you can do is then you take cash from your checking in savings account, you put it into the investment account. And that's the problem. Everybody gets to that step. They're like, I'm done, I'm invested. I put money into the you know, wrath ira, I'm
good to go. No you're not. You're not even close to good to go. You need to take that money in your roth ira and then you need to buy stuff. You've never gone to the grocery store and walked around with your purse and then come home and then been surprised is that there's no food in your fridge. Like you have to buy you know, fruit, you have to buy veggies, you have to buy meats, cheeses, breads, whatever. And you have to do the same thing with your investing.
So you've got to open the account. It's just like a bag. You got to put cash in that bag. You got to go to a grocery store, which you know is any sort of brokerage that you're comfortable with, and then you have to buy investments. And people are like, what investments do I buy? I always say, just pick an index fund that tracks either the broader market or the S and P five hundred and this will be an ETF, this will be a ticker like a VOO or a VTI. You don't have to pick zillion things.
These will be diversified because they are baskets of investments. Or just pick a target date retirement fund and with that you're pretty much done and you just watch it over the long term. Because time in the market beats timing the market. Every single time, and it's very challenging to pick the perfect investment. As long as you are investing early and often you'll be in a pretty good spot when you're getting close to retirement.
I mean, yeah, that sounds. That sounds it sounds are you getting married? I think I saw that or heard that.
I am getting married next June. Planning a wedding is a nightmare.
So in the middle of it as well, And it's one of those things where I think we finally got into a place where again we just moved into a new house. So for me, it was I just I wanted this safe and this home. I've been you know, building for the last year. We finally moved in. But it's also scary because like interest rates are so high. So I'm like I'm really feeling myself like tight grip
the accounts and not and not spend literally anything. I'm like, all right, it's gonna like there's no Christmas presents, but I mean there'll be some, but I'm just saying like it's like it's just gonna be you know, I'm just I'm gripping really really tight now because it's just it's scary, right, And so when I'm thinking about the wedding. For me, it's like, all right, there's either an X or there's this one, or there's an ayre A and B. Right,
so we're like kind of splitting it in half. And to me, I'm like, Okay, we can either just not or right now, I'm stressed about money. But next year, hopefully there'll be hopefully more that will come in and I won't be as stressed and maybe things will change whatever.
But I don't want to not have something because I'm afraid to put the down positive, like the down payment on because I think I would regret not having Now we've decided that we're not going to do the big one and it's just going to be like super small and intimate, but it's still going to be a celebration. And I think that's where we've come to, where it's like, Okay, let's meet in the middle. Let's not just go to
the courthouse, let's have something. It's just going to be really small, but we're not blow you know, we're not spending a lot of money. And I think that's where we've gotten to. You know, obviously this being you know, this isn't our first time for both of us. So where are you on, like the kind of the money side of things with weddings.
Yeah, I'm very much in the same camp as you. I don't want to regret it, right, Like, I love my fiance. We want to have an amazing wedding. Shockingly enough, no one ever believes me when I say this, but like, I'm quite a private person and I have a pretty tight circle of friends and it's the same five friends that I've had since way back in the day. So we had initially wanted a really small wedding eighty people, and we had set aside, you know, I would say,
a pretty robust budget for the wedding. We we got engaged in Lake Como, and we thought, this is a huge mistake by the way. We got engaged in Lake Como, so it set this completely unrealistic expectation that I would get to be a Disney princess. And then I was like, oh my god, it wouldn't be so fun if we got married in Lake Homa, Like as if Lake Homa wasn't like one of the most expensive places on earth to get married. And the first venue that we saw
we fell in love with Jane. To take a guess, at how much this venue cost?
Oh man, I mean.
Just guess just the venue alone, just the venue, babes. Let's see, when I was planning Gretzki's helping her plan her wedding, was the met was about like one hundred, So I'm going to say like one fifty just for the venue.
Oh my god, you got it right on. Yeah, they they wanted one fifty and I was like, oh my god, that is a huge that's like that would be even like bath over half of our budget. And I was like, I can't spend more than half of our budget.
On just on the venue.
The venue.
And I was like, that's there's no food, there's no flowers, you deserve coming, nothing.
You have that you have a little building and like a nice view and that's about it. And I can't do that. Like did I want to get married at that venue so bad? Yes? Yeah, obviously I just couldn't rationalize it. And my fiance and I went back and forth and back and forth and we decided better not And did it suck in the moment, yes, But did we end up finding a similar venue for so much less?
We've actually locked in on it. We're getting married at villa Erba and it's this beautiful like castilee, like you know, house covered in ivy type of beat in lake Homo. Guess how much this venue was?
Thirty?
Okay, literally, you gotta stop stealing my thunder. I'm like really walking together.
But well, I just so in wedding planning motor now, so I'm like, okay, like from my searches, you're.
Too good, and so to compare, and certainly the one fifty was for a three day buyout, but like do we need that venue for three a? Certainly not. And so to compare one fifty versus thirty thirty feels so manageable and it is so amazing because now I'm like, all right, great, now we have so much more budget for the flowers, for the food, for the entertainment, for anything else that we want to do. And it really does feel like did I have to make a sacrifice?
Like sure, you can call it that, but I think it's just called being mindful with your money and how much value are you going to be able to squeeze out of a certain decision. The venue is important. I'm not gonna lie. I wouldn't get married at an ugly venue. But Am I going to be spending an arm and a leg on flowers? Probably not. Don't really care about flowers.
Girl, Let's call the win. I like to call that one a win. That's just the wine, yeah exactly, Like, yeah, sure, I wanted to be married at like freaking Orlando Disney World Princess the you know what I mean, Like, I'm like, that's that happening, But yeah, that's that's a win.
Yeah. And then you know, I think it's just really prioritizing what matters to you, Like, am I going to be spending a lot of flowers? Now? I don't really care about flowers. They die, They literally die. Do I want to spend as much as humanly possible on food? Yes, Because of every single wedding that I've been to, all but one of them had horrible food, and the one that had the best food, I tell that couple all the time, your wedding was the best wedding I've ever
been to. And it was because they got catering from local Brooklyn restaurants that are like impossible to get a reservation at. So it literally felt like I was getting like secret VIP service to like taste the special pizza and the special ice cream and the special pie or whatever. And I love food and it really is something that brings me a lot of happiness and value, and I know it does for my family and friends. So I think it's just spending money on things that matter to you.
I love that.
Well, I just I'm excited for you. I'm excited for your book. Where can our listeners find you and just like hear more about everything that you're doing.
Yeah, you can find me across social media as your rich BFF, and if you are interested in purchasing the book, you can go to richaf dot me. Yes, I know that you are a manifestation because I'm that kind of girl. But I really just like want people to use this as a resource to pick it up from page one to the very last page and be able to feel more financially stable, more financially confident, and empowered to like live their best life because money isn't holding them back.
Sure, absolutely, well, I love that so much. And good luck with your wedding. And that's not way to read the book. So thanks for coming on, Thank you so much. Okay, bye girl, Bye