It’s Pride Month! The most gayest time of the year! The month when corporations release rainbow-embossed merch and proclaim themselves Down With the Gayness. Yet here at Bitches Get Riches Incorporated, we’re not just LGBTQ+ community spokespeople… we’re also members!
And so it is with zero hypocrisy and a whole lot of enthusiasm that we come to you this week with a very special message. And that message is: personal finance media is gay as hell.
Ah, the liminal space between Christmas and New Year’s Day. Time to eat snacks, play video games, and read some books!
While we can’t feed you delectable morsels directly from our freshly manicured fingertips, nor beat Margit the Fell Omen in Elden Ring for you, we can help with the third one. For we Bitches are avid readers! Every year we scour the shelves for excellent books on money, glean their wisdom, and pass on the best ones to you.
Without further ado, here it is: The Bitches Get Riches guide to the best personal finance books of the year.
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During our reign as the overlords of Bitches Get Riches, Kitty and I have met a lot of interesting and successful people: millionaires, rich startup founders, wealthy media darlings, best-selling authors. But every once in a while we meet someone way more interesting.
The first time we were booked to speak at an event with Yanely Espinal, we did a collective double-take as soon as she started talking (and not just because of her delightful Brooklyn accent). Yanely was talking about strategies for breaking the cycles of generational poverty, how to make wealth-building accessible, and practical ways to motivate, educate, and inspire normal-ass humans to reach their money goals.
Most folks probably know her as MissBeHelpful on YouTube and Instagram. But Yanely has been making a name for herself all over the place as a storyteller who makes financial concepts straightforward and blessedly non-boring. The Brooklyn native also left her job as an elementary school teacher to direct general do-goodery at the educational outreach nonprofit Next Gen Personal Finance.
And naturally, we dig her with a real big shovel.
I caught up with Yanely to talk about her new book, Mind Your Money, and find out what she has against exorbitant credit card interest rates.
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Kitty will be speaking at the Plutus Impact Summit on September 21-22, 2023. Sign up to attend here!
I have a confession. Piggy and I have been doing a lot of speaking in the past year. But you haven’t seen it, because they’ve been private events and conferences. This reveals a hypocrisy at the core of Bitches Get Riches. We pretend to be women of integrity and bravery, and yap on and on about inclusivity n’ shit, but the cold facts are these:
But all of that is going to change! Because I’ll be speaking at the Plutus Impact Summit, and you can come too!*
It’s a virtual event running on the afternoons of Thursday and Friday, September 21 and 22. Tickets are dirt cheap, and the first 150 people to register will get a free copy of keynote speaker Farnoosh Torabi’s latest book, A Healthy State of Panic.
The Plutus Foundation is one of our very favorite organizations. They’re a nonprofit dedicated to the financial education of everyone—emphasis on the everyone. Honestly, they’ve done more than anyone we know to spotlight diverse new voices within the personal finance space. They’ve consistently rejected the traditional “suck it up, anyone can do it if they buy apartment buildings instead of food” bullshit we so loathe, and challenged the community to dig deeper and do better.
Given that, it’s no surprise they asked me to join a session called Burning the Bootstrap Mentality alongside Rich Jones and Kevin Payne. LORD, send us MILK, for this panel is going to be SPICY, and I cannot WAIT!
You can see the full agenda here. All of this year’s speakers are undeniably incredible. The lineup includes many of the people we love best and respect most. We’ll plant our lovely asses in the audience for every session. And if the topics interest you too, we hope you’ll join us!
*Tragically, because this is a virtual event, you will have to provide your own Heinekens and crudités + elegant tub of ranch dressing.
As promised, I’m back with an update about my early retirement. It’s been six months since I stopped working. As I alluded to in a recent article, shit kinda went off the rails for me since retiring early.
You know, I didn’t have a solid vision for what my first six months of being permanently funemployed would be like… but whatever I had in mind, it sure wasn’t this! Life is full of twists and turns, ain’t she?
Do I have extra juicy, highly personal anecdotes to share? WHY YES, I DO! Navel gazing of the highest degree—dead ahead!
Today’s article is published in collaboration with the Plutus Foundation’s Impact Series. Their theme for October is the financial independence movement. Seems like a fine opportunity to give everyone an update on how my own financial independence is going! If you don’t already follow them, please consider doing so. The Plutus Foundation has amplified a lot of amazing voices over the years—our own fried and scratchy drawls included! They share amazing content. We’re lucky to have them as a leader in the personal finance space.
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Much is made in personal finance circles about personal responsibility, attributing success and failure to a particular financial decision. Not in the weird, political, shaming-you-for-being-born-poor way, but in the here-is-how-you-game-the-system-to-get-ahead-now-don’t-we-all-feel-clever kind of way.
In many respects, it’s solid advice! We talk about how making decisions based on ethical consumption saves you money and the planet; how you should be mindful and careful of where your money goes, lest you waste it on shit you don’t actually like or need; how every day the choices you make affect your financial future in large and small ways!
For a bunch of money nerds, gamifying personal finance by connecting calculated decisions to building wealth is exciting stuff. I’m getting a little hot under the collar just thinking about it!
I’ve made some pretty big money decisions in my time. Some decisions were purely financial. Others were personal decisions with a big financial impact. Sometimes I chose right. Sometimes I really, really chose wrong.
Today I want to tell you about one of the biggest personal financial decisions I’ve ever made… and why I would never recommend it to anyone else.
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“What is a down payment?” In an ideal world, no one would need to ask themselves this question because no one would need one! Expensive things like cars and houses and college educations would be a lot more affordable. Enough so that we could pay for them with the money that we already have. And we’d all have mountains of it.
But unless you have a Scrooge McDuckian money vault at your disposal, buying a car or house or bachelor’s degree in cash is probably impossible. Down payments are necessary because of how our world works. Today we’re going to teach you what they are, when you need them, and how to use them to your advantage.
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Well, butter my bread and call me a biscuit! Bitches Get Riches just won the 11th Annual Plutus Award for Personal Finance Blog of the Year.
We’ve actually been up for this award every year since we launched this blog in 2017. But of course 2020 would be our year, wouldn’t it?!
I’ve decided I find it the ultimate compliment to be considered the best personal finance blog in 2020. This supremely wretched year has been packed with so much darkness and chaos. Maybe the traditional advice-dispensers—the people who really know what they’re doing, and have perfect faith in our world and its systems—found themselves as lost as everybody else.
Luckily, our tumultuous lives have trained Piggy and I in the crucial survival skill of making absolutely fucking everything up as we go along.
Perhaps we aren’t the noble lions of this world, but the crafty raccoons! We’re adept at digging through garbage with our creepy little trash!panda hands to find the next morsel of sanity and stability. And since there’s never been a year with more garbage to sort through, doesn’t it make sense that this was our time to shine?
I’m used to pretty Instagram people hawking all sorts of things that will never, ever make my face more symmetrical—but what’s the deal with the recent trend of influencers selling shady financial products?
This week’s question comes from Patreon Donor Mara. Their question prompted a lot of deep thought about the aspirational nature of wealth and our complicity in that paradigm. It’s self-recriminatory af. You’re gonna love it.
Mara writes…
Read MoreI’m writing to ask if you guys had any thoughts on all these Personal Finance Flavored MLMs that are popping up like crazy on social media.
I work in the entertainment industry. Recently I’ve noticed that a lot of young actors are selling “classes” and the like on their Instagram pages. It seems like they really target young artists/musicians/models and tell them that selling Forex or Bitcoin is the key to intergenerational wealth and stability.
It seems super sketchy and predatory to me, but I would love y’alls thoughts.
– Patron Mara
Self-care! It’s not just for rich white ladies with 100,000 Instagram followers!
Self-care is for you.
Yes you. As hard as it may be to believe when you’re at your worst and feeling low, you deserve a little care and maintenance now and again.
And we want you to have it. So here it is, children: the complete works of the Bitches on self-care, personal betterment, and making your life happier, healthier, and wealthier.
You’ve earned it.
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