Money Is A Tool That Serves You

• We’re running another The Blue Hour fall workshop in Paris. The inaugural session exceeded even our highest expectations, as the testimonials…testify to! If you’re interested, you can find all the info here. Early bird pricing in effect until July 1.

• Meanwhile, in New York: I’m doing another personal essay workshop session NEXT SATURDAY. Details on that here.

Money, money, money.

I heard from a lot of you following last week’s newsletter. Thank you! So many of us are having the same conversations about finances, if only with ourselves.

As promised, I figured out how to use the Substack video option, and sat down with my friend and brilliant financial person Jane Barratt, to talk retirement, real estate, savings and how Gen X will continue to lead the way.

Some highlights:

Statistically half the people on your train car, are feeling exactly as you feel right now. Something like 25%- 30% of people actively avoid engaging with their finances. The reality is the vast majority of this country live paycheck to paycheck. Feeling shame just leads to financial avoidance.

Money is a tool that serves you: This is the number one mindset shift because we are trained our whole damn life to chase the money.

Don’t Bitch, Just Switch! We need to have higher expectations of the companies that serve us. Stasis is what wins in this world.

The world is delicious and distracting. And humans aren't designed to withstand this level of distraction and temptation ($5 trillion was spent in e-commerce!)

You've got to know the system(s) that you're in. How to think about health care. There are no easy answers, but I found some of Jane’s suggestions intriguing. [The line about the “system” literally applies to everything.]

Broke is such a loaded word. It feels like a throwaway, but often it is applied to [situations like] I don't have much in savings or I'm living paycheck to paycheck or I've got again statistically credit card debt that I can't pay down. [AND YET] In the big scheme of history we're living better than any generation ever.

Gen X will be charting the path forward for Millennials and Gen Z [ed note: AS ALWAYS]. How to think about retirement…or more accurately, how to rethink it. The narratives we have around money and savings are outdated and only every applied to a tiny slice of population during an equally tiny slice of time. Florida and golf is not going to be statistically possible for the vast majority. There isn't actually a magical date and a magical number. The better questions: What does retirement mean to you, what are you working towards? [I actually found this reframing incredibly helpful!]

Jane is just so good at distilling ideas down into compelling, easy to understand phrases. More than once, I told her I would like an AI Jane avatar to greet me in the morning with some of her wisdom (don’t bitch, switch!)(think creatively!). She also says you should reach out on LinkedIn. Of every ten people she hears from, nine are dudes. Get in there ladies!

The full video is above. I hope you find it as helpful as I did. Shoutout to the handful of people who tuned in live at 8:50AM. I didn’t send out a subscriber alert because I was unsure it all would work. But I will next time.

Bonus: The lipstick I’m wearing is a new one! It’s Armani Lip Power - 400. I didn’t even know Armani did lipstick, but Dodai and I wandered into Bloomingdales after lunch the other day and we were immediately corralled by a very chic, over-seventy (see note above about re-thinking retirement), no-nonsense “global beauty ambassador” and promptly found ourselves getting a makeover. Real life shopping ftw.