It feels like it’s been forever, and I guess it has been. In four years, I’ve never gone more than two weeks without writing to you. (This is starting to sound like Noah’s speech at the end of The Notebook.) We’ve got a lot to catch up on.
Money with Katie is officially under new ownership1, making this my first independent missive since 2021. To celebrate, over the next month I’ll be resharing some of my best work (as selected by my boss2), starting this weekend with a timely classic.
And while today’s issue is your standard charcuterie board of news and analysis, next week I’ll be sharing my intellectual property ownership story in more detail—Money with Katie (Katie’s Version), if you will.
Welcome back. I’m thrilled we’re here.
📈 Twenty-one out of 21 Wall Street analysts interviewed—yes, that’s every single one—predicted the S&P 500 bull run will continue in 2026, projecting a 9% annual return. In a somewhat ominous callback, “[t]he highest targets among the cohort, if they materialize, would also mark the first time the S&P has seen four years of double-digit returns since the dot-com bubble of the 1990s.” At this point, prolonged crashes seem politically untenable, since everything from the guaranteed inflows of retirement accounts to interest rate policy appears engineered to keep valuations high. (Bloomberg)
🧑💻 On that note, McKinsey is the latest prestigious employer to unleash a tidal wave of layoffs. You’d think an obviously deteriorating white-collar job market would spell bad news for the stock market, and you’d be…wrong. “Some market analysts expect a weaker jobs report could nevertheless power the stock market to fresh highs,” Catherine Baab reports, “because such data would increase the likelihood of further interest rate cuts.” I believe we call this the “Fed Put,” folks. (Quartz)
🥟 This Thai dumpling soup—made exclusively with things you can buy at Trader Joe’s—earned a spot in my Cheap Dank Eats hall of fame. I even saved the receipt because the yum-to-cost ratio was out of this world: $21.18 if you have to buy every ingredient from scratch, and we got three rounds of restaurant-quality Thai food for two people ($3.50 per serving). (Brocc Your Body)
💍 Prenups are now “easy, cheap, and statusy.” Millennials and Gen Z have expressed a particular interest in prenuptial agreements, which could be more about manifesting a future where there’s something worth splitting, Jennifer Wilson writes, rather than reflective of a reality where there’s presently much to divvy up. (You know what I think about this topic if you’ve read Chapter 4 of Rich Girl Nation.) The only qualm I’d raise here is that—based on the interviews I conducted for the book (coincidentally, two of my sources were also quoted in this piece)—you can’t really make rules about something that doesn’t exist. An interesting trend nonetheless. (New Yorker)
🍼 The art of marketing baby products is really the science of selling aspirational motherhood, a former advertising agency creative says. “Desires are about the things we want. Aspirations are about the things we fear. Ugliness, loneliness, poverty, difference. The job of turning products into solutions is easy because our fears are much more alike than our desires. We can forgive a certain flatness in the way those solutions look—the gently lit baby in the too clean living room—because of the safety they offer.” (Lux Magazine)
💳 Engaged couples gearing up to spend six figures on the most face-melting party of their lives are hiring “rewards consultants” to help them maximize points and miles on wedding spending. If you’re looking to score points yourself, one consultant recommends that you “[b]egin with where you want to go and which airlines fly there, then work backward.” This seems like a good time to plug my current travel rewards lineup, which can be summarized as follows: AmEx Gold for all food and dining, AmEx Platinum for most travel and anything I want to be able to easily replace if it’s lost or stolen (like my Ray-Bans, for which AmEx has reimbursed me thrice), and Chase Sapphire Preferred for just about everything else. (Wall Street Journal)
💕 Do you want to be a rich old lady some day? Then do I have the 2026 read for you. My friend (and past guest of the show!) Amanda Holden’s new book, How to Be a Rich Old Lady, comes out next week. It’s written for newer investors who want to understand their investment strategy deeply without feeling like they’re being cornered in a damp alley by a crypto bro hopped up on black-market Vyvanse. Folks who preorder from Bookshop will receive two bonus gifts, one of which involves book-clubbing it up with Amanda herself. (Bookshop)
🐳 How are you supposed to feel about a good job at a bad place, if it’s what allowed you to escape poverty? “Dissociating in a Whale Costume Under the Texas Sun” answers this question.
The whales, intelligent creatures meant to be in an endless ocean, should have never been imprisoned there in the first place. But I knew I might not have been able to get myself out of homelessness without my job that summer, without those glorious $10.25-an-hour paychecks.
Years later, while living in New York City, I told a friend about my time working at SeaWorld, and she reacted in horror. She had seen the documentary; she had even protested the park’s existence. She looked at me and said, “I’m sure you would have never worked there if you knew—if you had the chance to do it all over again.” (Dirt)
🏡 Today is the one-year anniversary of the devastating Los Angeles wildfires, and our current insurance paradigm is no more well-equipped now for crises of that magnitude than it was then. Last year, I said that the insurance industry would be where the climate crisis rubber met the economic road. In a world where you can’t buy a property without getting appropriately insured, the long-term implications for real estate values could be significant. (The Baffler)
I’ve been using Copilot Money to track my money since 2020 (so long that my app’s Dashboard told me the other day that I’ve categorized a stunning 7,121 transactions, an average of four per day). Unlike many of my other good habits and best intentions over the years, I’ve never fallen off the Copilot Money wagon.
It might seem superficial, but the personalization and ease of use is a gamechanger if you’re used to budgeting apps you have to wrestle into submission. Everything works the way you expect it to. (I’m not alone in this perspective: Copilot Money is the only personal finance app to win the prestigious Apple Editor’s Choice Award.) It’s shockingly intuitive, which is crucial for any product that facilitates something as painful for some folks as budgeting.
Regular use of this app is, put simply, a joy: You can see everything from your daily spending to investment performance to upcoming recurring transactions in one place, which means calm, clarity, and control.
Here’s why this matters: For the vast majority of us who don’t enjoy LARPing “personal accountant,” anything that removes friction between you and managing your money is valuable. And the payoff is worth it: Not just financially, but psychologically. Feeling in control of your finances is priceless.
Once you go through the seamless setup process and play around with customizing it, I’m confident you’ll see what I mean. Check out my updated Copilot Money in-depth review for a step-by-step setup guide, and to learn how I personally use the app to successfully implement my financial plan.
🤖 See how Copilot Money can help you get off on the right financial foot this year with an extended free trial. Use code KATIE2M at checkout to get two months free.
🎭 Last week was the end of an era on your favorite podcast app, and by that I mean it was the final episode of The Money with Katie Show (for now). The sound design Nick created for the introduction made me weep. I wanted to go out with a bang, so I invited back five all-time guests to, in a sense, say goodbye. I asked the one and only Grace Blakeley to diagnose our present economic circumstances:
From an economic perspective, we are living in a very fragile moment. We are obviously in the midst of a pretty significant bubble in technology, and AI in particular, but this hasn’t been much of a problem until now because it’s been mainly driven by stock markets, by soaring valuations for the big tech companies.
The issue we’re seeing now—and that’s only going to accelerate in the coming years—is debt [from private credit markets] coming into that scenario, which is actually quite dangerous. When you add debt to a financial bubble, things get difficult, because you’ve borrowed to invest in something. When the value of that thing falls, you end up in negative equity.
Sounds pretty gnarly, but Grace’s ultimate prognosis had a degree of hope: “For so many people, the response to economic insecurity is, It’s fine, I have my little pot of savings, and I’ll invest that, and then I’ll be okay. But if that promise breaks down and they’re being screwed over by saving and investing, those people get radicalized. If that can be mobilized for good, then that’s an opportunity.” (The Money with Katie Show)
🍪 On the same day the episode dropped, this 2026 prediction for “cash-strapped Oracle” was published. Borrowing money to buy more chips by putting up the chips you already own as collateral? That’s an awfully nice financialized scheme you’ve got there…would be a real shame if something happened to it. (The Information)
🛢️ A tweet I liked: “I feel like I haven’t even been sufficiently lied to about the purposes of this war.” We used to be a proper gangster capitalist state! With decorum! Where’s the high-minded rhetoric about democracy? The platitudes about women’s rights? Bombing another country and then being like, “Yeah, it’s about the oil,” is the American foreign policy equivalent of eschewing basic “Buy me a drink first” etiquette. “In the months leading up to the strikes, [Trump] seemingly heard of Venezuela’s 1976 nationalization of its petroleum assets for the first time, and in one of those feats of American solipsism that reminds us that he is the perfected embodiment of this country’s id, proclaimed Venezuelan oil was ‘stolen’ from the US.” (Welcome to Hell World)
✈️ Speaking of oil money, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia is offering all-expenses-paid luxury getaways to students enrolled at elite universities. It’s part of their Vision 2030 influence campaign, intended to assure westerners that beheading dissenting journalists is a small price to pay for the wonders of Riyadh’s five-star hotel amenities. It’s noteworthy to me that they’re focused on the opinions of upwardly mobile young people. I snorted at the attendee who said they enjoyed their trip but would never move there because it was “too hot in the summer.” (Air Mail)
⭐ How do you buy a Texas state representative? It’s easier than you’d think, according to Chris Tackett, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing for a recent episode. It goes something like this: Two West Texas oil billionaires fund a spray of (frequently shapeshifting) PACs, each with a nonthreatening name that implies its focus on a different right-wing priority (Texas Right to Life, Texas Home School Coalition, Texas Gun Rights, Defend Texas Liberty…you get the picture). The PACs then send out coordinated mailer campaigns backing billionaire-selected puppets Texas House Republican primary candidates. The result: Low-information voters receive mailers from seven supposedly different organizations endorsing the same person, creating an illusion of broad support. In 2022, the Disgusting Brothers got 12 of their 24 candidates elected. In 2024, they installed more than two dozen of their mercenaries in the House. It’s gotten so bad that even garden variety, ultra-conservative Texas Republicans are blowing the whistle. (Diabolical Lies)
🪮 It may be blasphemous to share a Hot Girl Recommendation given the Hamster Wheel of it all, but I was #influenced. Specifically, I was influenced to try this boar bristle brush from Y.S. Park featured in the most recent issue of New York. The writer said something about outrageously shiny hair and within four minutes it was in my cart. You can take the girl out of Dallas... I’m on day-three hair with less grease than usual, so consider it money well spent. (Note from my editor, Mallory: “Hot take: Expensive brushes and combs are some of the most worthwhile tiny luxuries.”) (The Strategist)
📓 This year-long diary about turning 100 years old from former New Yorker art critic Calvin Tomkins was strangely moving. So moving, in fact, that I’m bravely willing to overlook the cliché reality of his wife being something like 35 years younger than him. (New Yorker)
🗓️ In the name of “smarter, not harder,” the ideal work sprint is probably 90–120 minutes of uninterrupted focus time. For best results, follow this with 20–30 minutes of total rest, and schedule your most challenging push for the morning with meetings in the afternoons. In November, I started translating my to-do list into blocks of time on the calendar at the beginning of each week, and while I expected it to stress me out, it did the opposite. Still need to get better about putting the most challenging stuff first. (Psyche)
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Do I need to resubscribe to the news letter now that you got it back? I got the substack notification this morning but it did not show up in my email!