Rich Girl Nation
By Katie Gatti Tassin.
This was not the book I was expecting to read to be frank with you! I picked it up from my local library because it was on the suggested books shelf and they have not led me astray yet so I thought it was worth a go even if it seemed a little… girl bossy at first glance.
I don’t know who Katie Gatti Tassin is although I found out through the book she’s got a successful financial blog and podcast. I haven’t read or listened to either. But when I clicked through to find the links for you, I realised we’ve chosen the same colour scheme for our websites. So for that reason, I give this book 5 stars.
Just kiddin’.
I’m not going to give it a star rating, because I’ve just tried to and it’s stressed me out but I will give you my:
Rich Girl Nation Book Review
And it’s a good one! I really enjoyed this book and took quite a bit from it. I thought it was a good blend of chatty, personal, essay style writing with solid links to interesting social, psychological, financial, legal and political research (there’s an in depth but not overwhelming bibliography at the back), some well laid out and thought out tables of info showing the effects of different approaches and some super solid suggestions about what to think about or do in your finances.
The US focus
It falls down a little bit for the audience here because it is very US focussed. A lot of the practical stuff is just totally how to make the most out of certain US-specific tax accounts and pensions and things. To get much out of that from the UK you’d have to be thinking pretty laterally and it does take up three chapters right in the middle of the book. I couldn’t mark the book down for that though, she’s not pretending this book is for everybody.
Who this book is (and isn’t) for
I appreciated that right at the top of the book she lays out that she’s aiming towards women who have a bit of their financial stuff together already, not people that are scratching around for coins to pay their rent and I think that’s fantastic. Not everything is for everybody, and we’re all at different stages - that’s not to say that it’s not worth reading if you’re scooching around down the back of the sofa.
It’s that revelation that led me to think about the grammar stuff I was talking about a little while ago - not everything is going to make sense right now, sometimes you need more information, more time, more confidence for something to sink in but what is really valuable about reaching a little further out is the idea that there is something to aim for.
For my money, financial independence or even stability, is just such a distant concept as to not exist for a lot of people. We can’t aim for something we’re not even aware exists. If all you’ve known is struggle, that rich people are bastards, never seen a woman take charge of her finances then - it’s just not in your wheelhouse.
My favourite takeaway
Without boring you with the full Rich Girl Nation table of contents, I really enjoyed the flow of the chapters.
After the intro she jumps straight into ‘The Hot Girl Hamster Wheel’ about how she realised the true costs of her beauty and self-care regime. I thought it was a nuanced take - she touches on racism, class, fatness, self-esteem - but I was kind of turned off by it because spending like that is so totally alien to me (I wrote a newsletter about it actually, celebrating how being part of the out-crowd frees us from certain expectations) until she was able to give a really practical insight into the opportunity costs.
She used a compound interest calculator (girl after my own heart…) to work out that with her beauty costs at $320 a month, if she instead invested that for 40 years in a cheap stock market index fund returning 8% (which is historically pretty average but obviously not guaranteed) she’d come out with £1,001,728.88. A million dollars.
And she takes it further, using the 4% rule that would be enough to reliably produce a monthly income of $3,333 in perpetuity.
(Just to exchange that into pounds for us UK peeps that’s: £236.62 invested every month for 40 years, ends up as £740,704.58 invested which is not quite a million… would give you a monthly income of £2,464.51).
I’ve never spent close to that amount on health and beauty but I would guess my spend on craft supplies, or back in the day clubbing and booze, wouldn’t have been far off.
Interesting to consider hey?
So to sum up
Throughout the book she offers these simple and practical illustrations of some pretty dry financial concepts, there was never a point at which I felt totally out of my depth but many points where I could almost feel my brain changing shape.
I loved her commitment to community and to bringing people along, her acknowledgement of how icky it can feel to be critical of financial systems but also know that you need to engage with them if you’re to live in the safety that you deserve and I loved this quote from right at the end:
To change, we must first be moved, and movement requires the collectively shared, profound revelation that the status quo is not acceptable, followed closely by the capacity to imagine something better.
What do you think? Have you read? Are you planning to?
If you’re going to buy it, can I suggest that you go to your fave local bookshop (or my fave not-so-local-anymore-book-shop, Five Leaves in Nottingham) or your local library.
Love Eleanor. xxx
