rich & REGULAR with Kiersten and Julien Saunders

Isn’t it funny how we’ll side-eye Netflix over a $2 price increase, but somehow let a credit card quietly charge us $500, $700, even $895 a year without asking nearly as many questions? This episode is about why we give those increases so much more grace, and whether we should.

Once you’ve convinced yourself you’re the kind of person who knows how to “maximize the benefits,” the annual fee can start feeling less like spending and more like proof that you’re good at money. So this week, we’re asking those cards to prove themselves.

We discuss: 

• why we scrutinize unused gym memberships but let credit cards ride on decisions we made years ago
• the difference between a perk being worth $600 on paper and being worth $600 to YOU
• how rewards programs turn into a part-time job of credits, portals, transfer partners, expiration dates, and rules
• why some of the fanciest benefits only make sense if your actual life matches the customer they were designed for
• what credit card companies know about breakage, unused rewards, and why making every benefit easy to redeem is not exactly the business model
• how nostalgia, status, and the feeling of being “financially savvy” can keep you paying for a card long after it stops fitting your life
• and the 3 choices you actually have before the annual fee renews

Links:

• Episode 5 - Credit Card Points hacking…is it worth it?
• Episode 180 - Decoding Consumerism with Dr. Marcus Collins
• Episode 32 - What’s new with credit 

 Connect with Julien and Kiersten on our website, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.

Join our email list to get updates from us, opportunities for discounts, freebies and a quick rundown on the relevant financial and career news impacting your life.

Get our book Cashing Out: Win the Wealth Game by Walking Away, named 2023 best overall book about investing by Business Insider and one of the best personal finance books by Forbes

If you would like to learn more about investing, check out our newest class, Making Money Grow

Groceries are expensive, eating out is expensive, and somehow the advice for spending less on food is still “make a list.”

Meanwhile, feeding yourself has gotten weirdly strategic these days. Between higher prices, smaller packages, busy schedules, food waste, and recalls, the smartest grocery strategy is simply getting better at buying for the life you actually live.

So in this episode, we’re sharing 5 questions to ask before you even head to the grocery store so you can spend less, waste less, and make eating at home feel a whole lot easier.

We get into:

• Why shopping hungry changes what “enough” looks like
• The pantry food you already paid for and why whatever keeps getting left behind is useful feedback
• How your freezer quietly becomes a graveyard for food waste
• Why a $20 frozen lasagna can be a better financial decision than buying all the ingredients from scratch
• What actually deserves “staple” status in your house
• How to build different levels of cooking into your routine so the only choices aren’t “make a whole meal” or “order $100 worth of takeout”
• And the bonus question we probably all need to start asking before we toss something in the cart: is this currently recalled?

Links: 

• 3 reasons your food doesn’t turn out the way you want
• Catch up on our Eat Better cooking series, then leave a comment with what you want Julien to tackle next. He’s open to anything from a technique or ingredient, to a meal, shortcut, or cooking problem you want help with 
• For the bigger picture behind what we eat and why, watch Taste the Impact, our mini doc on the food system itself

 Connect with Julien and Kiersten on our website, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.

Join our email list to get updates from us, opportunities for discounts, freebies and a quick rundown on the relevant financial and career news impacting your life.

Get our book Cashing Out: Win the Wealth Game by Walking Away, named 2023 best overall book about investing by Business Insider and one of the best personal finance books by Forbes

If you would like to learn more about investing, check out our newest class, Making Money Grow

Part 1 was Julien’s version of what happened, this is the part where I get to talk lol. Because apparently, one of the side effects of a family emergency is finding out exactly what you disagree about when everybody’s tired, somebody’s in pain, and your normal division of labor has completely fallen apart.

The injury may have been his, but the emergency affected all 3 of us, which meant we all had to adjust…and that’s where the conflict started. 

So instead of giving you a neat list of lessons from the last 5 months, we’re talking about what we actually argued about:

• whether expensive medical aids count as needs
• how much you can still expect from somebody who can’t walk
• what happens when their usual problems suddenly become YOUR problems
• how much pain and chaos your kid should have to see
• why “helping” can start to feel a lot like controlling
• and how a 9 year old watching his dad recover somehow became much better at roasting him

Most of these weren’t really arguments about the thing we were arguing about. They were arguments about capacity, control, care, and what happens when the way your family normally works suddenly doesn’t.

Turns out, “in sickness and in health” leaves out a lot of details..

Links: 

• Ep 222: Why we don’t share everything (and what we do instead) 
• Ep 245: The simplest way to talk about money without making it weird
• Ep 227: 10 years in | Money, marriage, and the lessons we didn’t see coming

 Connect with Julien and Kiersten on our website, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.

Join our email list to get updates from us, opportunities for discounts, freebies and a quick rundown on the relevant financial and career news impacting your life.

Get our book Cashing Out: Win the Wealth Game by Walking Away, named 2023 best overall book about investing by Business Insider and one of the best personal finance books by Forbes

If you would like to learn more about investing, check out our newest class, Making Money Grow

We’re back! We’ve been gone for months, and a lot of you have asked where we’ve been. The answer starts with a freak accident at Beau’s baseball practice, but that’s only the beginning. 

What followed was surgery, months without being able to walk, a crash course in pain management, caregiving, muscle loss, mental health, and learning the limits of “for better or worse.” 

Julien starts with his side of the story here. Kiersten joins him in Part 2. 

In this solo episode, he shares:

• what happened the day of the accident and why getting his pain under control was more complicated than expected
• how a problem with his IV changed his experience in the hospital
• what it felt like to suddenly depend on other people for everyday things
• how quickly his body changed after weeks of limited mobility
• what he learned about managing strong prescription pain medication during recovery
• the mental health side of recovery that he completely underestimated
• what it meant for Kiersten to become his caregiver while still holding everything else down
• why community support became such an important part of getting through it
• how different a medical emergency feels when you have the financial room to stop and heal
• what using an HSA during a real medical emergency taught him that years of talking about HSAs never could

This wasn’t the break we planned to take, but it gave us plenty to come back and talk about. 

 Connect with Julien and Kiersten on our website, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.

Join our email list to get updates from us, opportunities for discounts, freebies and a quick rundown on the relevant financial and career news impacting your life.

Get our book Cashing Out: Win the Wealth Game by Walking Away, named 2023 best overall book about investing by Business Insider and one of the best personal finance books by Forbes

If you would like to learn more about investing, check out our newest class, Making Money Grow

This week, we’re talking about what’s really going on in the AI layoff era, and why the way you interpret that moment matters almost as much as the layoff itself. 

If all you hear is “a robot replaced me,” it’s easy to spiral, panic pivot, and start solving the wrong problem. But if you know how to read the room, you can make smarter decisions about your career, your money, and where to go from here. 

Losing a job is already disruptive enough. The last thing you need is to turn it into a full-blown crisis about your worth. If this episode hit home, leave a review, share it with somebody who needs it, and subscribe so you don’t miss the next one. 

In this episode, we cover:

• Why “because AI” doesn’t always mean a robot directly replaced your job
• The 3 different things companies might mean when they blame AI
• How to tell the difference between an actual workflow change and plain old cost-cutting
• Why panic pivoting can get expensive fast
• What to look at first if you’ve been laid off 
• Why becoming AI-capable matters more than becoming an “AI expert”
• How to reposition your experience without throwing away your strengths
• Why “AI-first” language doesn’t always mean your job or industry is cooked
• Why layoffs hit your identity so hard, and how to stop making it worse

 Connect with Julien and Kiersten on our website, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.

Join our email list to get updates from us, opportunities for discounts, freebies and a quick rundown on the relevant financial and career news impacting your life.

Get our book Cashing Out: Win the Wealth Game by Walking Away, named 2023 best overall book about investing by Business Insider and one of the best personal finance books by Forbes

If you would like to learn more about investing, check out our newest class, Making Money Grow

We spent a week talking to hundreds of high school seniors about money, and they gave us more hope than we expected. Underneath the stereotypes about “kids these days,” we found a generation that already understands more than adults give them credit for, while still being dangerously underprepared for some of the biggest financial decisions of their lives.

So this week, we’re talking about what stood out after speaking to 400+ students across 5 high schools in the Chicago area and what parents, teachers, and honestly all of us should take from it. 

They knew saving mattered, they had opinions about frugality, and some were already working jobs. There were a few who were already gambling, and way too many were about to sign student loan paperwork without fully understanding what they were agreeing to.

If you’ve got a teenager, a future college student, or a young person in your life who thinks money talk is boring, this episode might help you reach them a little differently. This conversation isn’t just about teens. It’s about what happens when financial education is too late, too shallow, or too disconnected from real life.

In this episode, we get into:

• Why so many teenagers understand everyday saving but still don’t understand student loans
• The shocking number of students already seeing gambling as a real way to make money
• How “frugal” stopped being an insult and started sounding practical
• Why kids were more engaged than the grownups who usually sit through money talks
• What they got wrong about the biggest expenses in adult life and why that matters
• The difference between knowing stocks exist and actually understanding investing
• Why buy now, pay later needs to be explained as credit, not convenience
• What this experience taught us about Gen Z, money, and the adults responsible for filling in the gaps
• How parents can use AI to make money lessons click for kids who seem uninterested

Links: 

• Other experts mentioned in this episode: Chris Corinthian, Berna Anat, Yanely Espinal, Dr. Paris Woods 

 Connect with Julien and Kiersten on our website, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.

Join our email list to get updates from us, opportunities for discounts, freebies and a quick rundown on the relevant financial and career news impacting your life.

Get our book Cashing Out: Win the Wealth Game by Walking Away, named 2023 best overall book about investing by Business Insider and one of the best personal finance books by Forbes

If you would like to learn more about investing, check out our newest class, Making Money Grow

There’s a casino in everybody’s pocket now, and it’s wearing a jersey.

This week’s episode is about sports gambling, why it’s exploding right now, and the data that should make you pause before you normalize it in your house, your group chat, or your relationship.

We promise this isn’t an anti-fun sermon, it’s a reality check. If you’re someone who sports bets but has real limits in place…tell us what’s working. And if you’ve seen this start “small” and turn into something bigger in your life or somebody you love… drop a comment. People actually read them, and somebody needs that story.

We get into:

• Why “it’s just entertainment” doesn’t hold up 
• The fantasy sports gateway 
• The uncomfortable overlap between sports bettors, crypto people, and day traders 
• The stats that made us go: oh… this is a public health issue (debt, missed bills, payday loans, bankruptcy spikes)
• How this isn’t “just a men’s issue” anymore and why women’s growth in betting makes total sense
• The darker stuff no one wants to talk about: mental health, domestic violence spikes, and what happens after “a devastating loss”
• Why we think gambling needs to be part of modern financial literacy the same way drugs/alcohol were when we grew up
• What to do if you suspect it’s becoming a problem (and why the hotline is not the solution people think it is)

Links:

• Watch - VICE documentary: “The Sports Betting Boom” 
• Watch - Money on the Table - Season 3, Episode 3 - Luck is not a plan 
• Read - My Year as a Degenerate Sports Gambler 

 Connect with Julien and Kiersten on our website, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.

Join our email list to get updates from us, opportunities for discounts, freebies and a quick rundown on the relevant financial and career news impacting your life.

Get our book Cashing Out: Win the Wealth Game by Walking Away, named 2023 best overall book about investing by Business Insider and one of the best personal finance books by Forbes

If you would like to learn more about investing, check out our newest class, Making Money Grow

Most money advice for students is either condescending or delusional, and this episode is neither. This one is for the students…and for the parents, aunties, mentors, and big cousins trying to help without lecturing. 

Today I’m joined by Dr. Paris Woods, bestselling author of The Black Girl’s Guide to Financial Freedom and the new Student’s Guide to Financial Freedom. We talk about what she saw growing up in St. Louis, the “education is the ticket” promise, and why getting out of poverty isn’t the same as building wealth.

If you love a young person, send them this episode and then follow up with, ‘did you listen?’

We cover:

• The debt traps waiting for you the moment you turn 18
• The minimum payment trap and why “on-time payments” can still keep you stuck for years
• Why “adulting” starts with a credit limit — and how cards + BNPL get marketed like free money.
• Sticker price vs. net price: How to find your real college cost before you commit
• Creating a “gap plan” with scholarships + grants + schools that meet need + a realistic part-time job so loans aren’t the default
• Dreaming as a strategy and finding the answer to “what would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?”
• The importance of building a Freedom Fund so you can take the trip, start the business, or pivot without panicking

Links:

• Order The Student’s Guide to Financial Freedom
• Follow Dr. Paris Woods: @AuthorParisWoods + ParisWoods.com

 Connect with Julien and Kiersten on our website, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.

Join our email list to get updates from us, opportunities for discounts, freebies and a quick rundown on the relevant financial and career news impacting your life.

Get our book Cashing Out: Win the Wealth Game by Walking Away, named 2023 best overall book about investing by Business Insider and one of the best personal finance books by Forbes

If you would like to learn more about investing, check out our newest class, Making Money Grow

This week, we’re joined by Brenton Harrison, founder of New Money New Problems. Brenton is a financial advisor who works with first- and second-generation high earners. We’re talking about how to tell the difference between quality financial advice and misinformation/scammy advice, making sense of what you hear online, and why not all “good advice” is good for YOU. 

And because we live in the real world where creators and advisors both exist, we get into the relationship between financial influencers and financial advisors, where each one can actually help, where each one can fall short, and why it doesn’t have to be “versus”

We get into:

• The difference between first-generation wealth and first-generation high income (and why it matters)
• Why first/second-gen high earners can be underserved even when they’re making good money
• The #1 thing Brenton wishes high earners knew sooner
• Why financial literacy doesn’t automatically fix the emotional + social reality of money
• The disclaimer we wish more financial creators would use
• Why “tax hack” content is so seductive and why it can be flat-out dangerous
• Why market-timing myths survive
• What a strong advisor relationship should produce in the first 60–90 days, and what you should look for
• Why a bad experience with one advisor doesn’t mean you should quit the entire lane forever
• Brenton’s take on robo-advisors, AI, and how tech can help without replacing real planning 

Links: 

• Visit Brenton’s website and book an initial meeting
• Connect with him on Instagram or LinkedIn 
• Subscribe to his YouTube channel
• Listen to the New Money, New Problems podcast 

 Connect with Julien and Kiersten on our website, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.

Join our email list to get updates from us, opportunities for discounts, freebies and a quick rundown on the relevant financial and career news impacting your life.

Get our book Cashing Out: Win the Wealth Game by Walking Away, named 2023 best overall book about investing by Business Insider and one of the best personal finance books by Forbes

If you would like to learn more about investing, check out our newest class, Making Money Grow

There are two sentences that can ruin a perfectly normal evening – “We need to talk”, and its evil twin, “We need to talk about money.” Even if your relationship is good, that phrasing makes it feel like somebody’s about to get graded. 

Even when things are fine, nobody wants to be the person who turns a decent Tuesday night into a full relationship audit. So this week, we’re introducing a better way: small doors. These are quick, low-stakes, real-life openings that normalize money talk without turning it into a whole thing.

And the best part is, they’re not just for couples. Small doors can be used with parents, siblings, friends, or any relationship where money differences create distance

We get into:

• Why “we need to talk about money” is basically a panic alarm for most people, even if they’re in good relationships
• The difference between avoiding conflict and avoiding judgment, weirdness, and role shifts
• Why money conversations work better as appetizers than a full-day “financial summit”
• What “small doors” actually look like in real life (aka: our kid’s expensive cherry habit 😭)
• How tiny, specific moments create safer openings than “we need a budget”
• The 3 rules for small doors
• How to treat your partner’s first reaction as data, not a personal attack
• What to do when the issue isn’t the money, it’s the pattern of how you talk about money
• Why tone is basically the WiFi of the conversation
• Why you should practice the repair as much as the conversation

Links to helpful past episodes: 

• Episode 222 - Why we don't share everything (and what we do instead)
• Episode 207 - 3 practical tips for couples living on one income

 Connect with Julien and Kiersten on our website, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.

Join our email list to get updates from us, opportunities for discounts, freebies and a quick rundown on the relevant financial and career news impacting your life.

Get our book Cashing Out: Win the Wealth Game by Walking Away, named 2023 best overall book about investing by Business Insider and one of the best personal finance books by Forbes

If you would like to learn more about investing, check out our newest class, Making Money Grow