The methodical process of reading, writing, and researching for a new book proposal over the last few weeks reminded me so much of school nights spent studying that, for the first time in years, I decided to work from the wholesome quiet of a library.
As such, today’s issue is unofficially brought to you by the Denver library system’s finest—where I am presently camped out on the second floor next to an old man hunched over a textbook called RARE TREES—and this Marxist-ass headline in a free local newspaper:
🍎 Apple introduced a $599 MacBook called the “Neo,” which comes in a few fun colors that vaguely call to mind the jewel-toned boxy iMacs of the early 2000s. It’s the first Apple computer to run on a smartphone processor, as well as the company’s first venture into “low-end” computers. Perhaps another retail indicator of our K-shaped consumer market; an attempt to capture more price-sensitive users, as opposed to tempting existing ones to upgrade. “Apple is expecting an influx of new customers to its stores to try out the new offering [and] sees an opportunity to draw new customers into its product ecosystem.” (Bloomberg)
🫴 Depending on who you ask, celebrity GoFundMes either expose the underlying financial rot of disability and disease in the US, or serve as shameless proof that it’s remarkably easy to lose touch with reality when your social comparison set is other rich and famous people. Two recent high-profile celebrity deaths—Eric Dane (ALS) and James Van Der Beek (colorectal cancer)—have started a worthy discussion about whether it’s tone-deaf for the families of successful entertainers to hit up the public directly for money. My immediate thought: These folks almost certainly had life insurance, right? Regardless, successful GoFundMe campaigns require a baseline level of “audience” interest (or a story compelling enough to generate attention), but the ways in which disease, death, and disability routinely strain American families are typically banal, if tragic. Fame means you can skip the “compelling story” part. (The Cut)
🌴 What remote work offers in terms of lifestyle benefits, it costs in terms of professional and salary progression—that is, unless you work two at the same time. Overemployment is one of the job market’s best-kept secrets. Someday, when the mood is right, I’ll tell you my own story about this. In the meantime:
The truth about overemployment is that it works. The math is undeniable. If you can tolerate the stress, the logistics, the constant context switching, you can make an incredible amount of money very quickly. But it also has a way of quietly replacing the life you were trying to fund in the first place. (Liz Leatrice)
💰 Charging rich people who still “feel poor every day” more money for psychoanalysis is part of the treatment, says a Manhattan practitioner who earns $325,000 per year. Other worthwhile tidbits from this New York City salary roundup: A venture capitalist described his field as “a really terrible finance career path from a near-term cash perspective” because vesting schedules mean one must be “comfortable living off their base salary for a very long time.” The base salary in question: $1 million. Elsewhere, a home health aide with 10 years of experience describes caring for a patient for 48 hours at a time to earn $23,000 per year. Plus…
A sex worker earned $800,000 in 2024 and, the year before that, $1.2 million.
A Midtown pastor earned $67,200, but the salary was donated to the diocese in exchange for “room, board, insurance, and use of car as necessary.”
A ghostwriter earned $107,768 from writing celebrities’ Substacks. (Feel free to speculate in the comments.)
A consultant who allegedly earns nearly $10 million per year in fees said they “don’t believe in leaving [their] kids a crazy amount of money” since “everyone [they] know who has that is fucked up.”
Fun read, even if I don’t totally buy some of these self-reported figures. (Intelligencer)
🌯 Chipotle has raised its prices by 25% over the last four years—about 1.5x the grocery inflation rate over the same time period. The corporate slop bowl might be on its way out, as people grow tired of paying $18 for a “healthy-but-kinda-mushy” lunch (Chipotle, Cava, Sweetgreen, etc.). In college, it was customary to convert the prices of all discretionary purchases into the reserve currency known as “burrito bowls” (e.g., a $20 bar cover was, approximately, 2.5 burrito bowls). Sweetgreen is fighting back with “wraps,” a breakthrough innovation which involves swaddling the slop with a tortilla. The CEO recently told analysts he expects it will be a “huge moment” for the chain. What did I tell you about earnings calls? Late capitalism humiliation ritual. (New York Times)
🍪 In a particularly precocious display of understanding your target market, an enterprising New Jersey Girl Scout troop set up their cookie tables outside a popular marijuana dispensary. Every single one of these entrepreneurial mavericks has a job at Mouthy Media, LLC, should they want it. When asked for comment on the partnership, the dispensary owner simply said, “You use cannabis, you get the munchies.” (NJ.com)
Brought to You by Domain Money
Does your household earn over $250,000? The wrong tax strategy could be costing you thousands of dollars per year. You can file this one safely in the “Annals of Champagne Problems,” but problems nonetheless—particularly in high (or very high) cost-of-living areas, where state and local taxes are likely also a consideration in tax planning and high incomes don’t go as far.
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I recently got my plan updated for 2026 (just finished my final review call last week) and learned:
I should be using a line of credit—rather than cash flow—for a large upcoming project. This wasn’t on my radar at all, but the math checked out.
My business should be an S Corp, a switch which is anticipated to save at least $10,000 this year, but that I’d always put off because I didn’t think it would make a big difference.
Our investment portfolio (despite my best intentions to load up on international stocks) was still way overweight US equities. We did a bunch of rebalancing in our tax-advantaged accounts to address it without any tax implications.
…and more. It’s always humbling to have a true professional review your plan. And, as always, only for a flat fee—never a percentage of your assets.
➿ The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act bill, purportedly intended to block corporate landlords and investors from buying single-family homes, has three major loopholes that undermine its effectiveness. The Private Equity Stakeholder Project found that the bill includes exemptions for:
“Rent-to-own” programs, which allow investors to purchase single-family homes and rent them out, so long as they “offer tenants the opportunity to purchase.”
Programs that build new homes with the explicit intention of renting them out later.
Investors who buy single-family homes and make improvements “equal to at least 15% of the purchase price,” though no deadline for such improvements is specified.
“This ban might as well have been written by Wall Street,” the executive director of the PESP said. (Private Equity Stakeholder Project)
🪴 Millennial homeowners spent an average of $14,199 on home improvements last year, outspending all other groups despite not owning the majority of homes. If you saw my blurb last week about climbing HELOC balances, you know my theory: These are the people who bought their first (i.e., “starter”) homes in the years leading up to and immediately following the pandemic, a time longingly remembered by today’s aspiring owners as ZIRPtopia1 (patent pending), but are now locked, via 24K-gold handcuffs, to their low rate and exploded equity. Improving the house you’ve got looks like the path of least resistance. (New York Times)
That is, of course, unless you’d prefer to preserve the timeless texture of your popcorn ceiling:
Which current renovation trends do you think will age like popcorn ceilings and covering wood floors with linoleum? I shudder to think…
😷 Every measles case in the US last year added an average of $76,000 in health system costs. The Yale School of Public Health warns that declining measles vaccination rates will increase national healthcare spending by an estimated $1.5 billion per year. Can’t stop thinking about Liz Bruenig’s reported fiction about “how a child dies of measles.” (American Academy of Pediatrics)
📤 Three times as many workers took hardship withdrawals from their 401(k)s in 2025 as in the average prepandemic year, Vanguard says. The top two reasons: avoiding foreclosure or eviction and paying medical expenses. This makes sense. The S&P 500’s five-year return is 71.97%—which means, even absent additional contributions, you’ve probably seen your retirement balance (almost) double. Hardship withdrawals are preferable to, say, payday lending or other predatory loans. Speaking of medical expenses, our new puppy was recently hospitalized for treatment-resistant pneumonia and we, stupidly, hadn’t yet purchased pet insurance. About halfway through the week-long nightmare, I opened a new American Express card that offered 12 months of 0% APR to give us more time to pay off the (five-figure) hospital bills, choosing American Express because I knew they were most likely to approve my application immediately (I’ve used AmEx since 2019). They provided the new card number and security code on the approval screen, so I was able to use it to pay the final bill at discharge. Incidentally, this advice—to open a “12 months at 0%” card if you’re in a pinch, then make a plan to pay it off quickly—was something I had recommended years ago on a Rich Girl Roundup episode to someone in a similar situation.2 The better advice: Just get the damn pet insurance. (Wall Street Journal)
🪝 ChatGPT killed the relevance of a résumé. Instead, more recruiters are sourcing candidates on LinkedIn or from their own networks. Two of my three jobs in the corporate world, all pre-LLM dominance, were the result of inbound interest on LinkedIn. Another depressing piece of evidence that “socializing your wins” online and off (for more, see chapter 2 of Rich Girl Nation) can be a more lucrative use of your time than lobbing applications into the abyss. Embrace the aforementioned corporate humiliation ritual and approach your profile updates with all the braindead enthusiasm of the Sweetgreen CEO telling analysts the wrap will be a “huge moment.” It pays. (Business Insider)
“Growing up bourgeois confers some advantages—time to study, as well as exposure to the nature of power—often denied to people further down the social hierarchy.” It does the cause of equality no good, he implies, if these advantages are treated as incriminating evidence of a privilege that no one should enjoy rather than as signifiers of a well-being that one day will hopefully be available to any and all.
If privileged is understood as applicable to anyone who is not desperately needy, the word is leading us astray. It encourages us to measure economic inequality by the wrong yardstick. (The Baffler)
🚀 The “Golden Quarter,” or the last “true age of innovation,” ran from approximately 1945 to 1971. “Today, progress is defined almost entirely by consumer-driven, often banal improvements in information technology.” While it seems unlikely that the Golden Quarter’s strong public investment, rising wages, and high marginal tax rates were purely incidental, this science writer argues it’s the resultant shift in our collective attitude toward risk-taking that’s to blame for the stall since the 1980s. One complicating narrative thread is pulled at the last moment: While we may be short on transformative advancements in the 21st century, the broadening of public access to prior innovations is a form of progress. Air travel, for example, used to be reserved for the very rich. That one can now fly from New York to Europe for a few hundred dollars (albeit uncomfortably in Economy) is meaningful. (Aeon)
🎙️ I humbly present: 2.5 hours of Epstein analysis. “Jeffrey Epstein got away with it because he was richer than God. No—he got away with it because he had a rolodex filled with the most influential and powerful people on the planet. No—he got away with it because of his wiliness and preternatural charm.
All of these claims have been discussed to death in both mainstream and alternative media, and continue to serve as the prevailing theories for why this man was able to abuse young women at a terrifying scale for decades without suffering legal repercussions for it. Today, we discuss an alternative hypothesis.” Enjoy…?
See you next week.
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ZIRP = “zero interest rate phenomenon,” e.g., getting a nine-figure investment for your slop bowl startup by claiming it’s a tech company in a four-slide powerpoint presentation
theoretically, this is what an emergency fund is for—but (a) it was still unclear how much longer he’d be in the hospital when costs started to balloon, and (b) I didn’t want to take such a large chunk out of savings when the option to pay it down over several months interest-free was still on the table
Ok but can we please talk more about pet insurance! I recently got two kittens after my last cat passed. I did not have pet insurance when my old cat developed congestive heart failure and ended up paying some $10K and she ultimately had to be euthanized (RIP baby cat). But now, of course, I have been considering getting insurance for my new kittens. However, I've been advised that pet insurance is a scam because veterinary clinics jack up their rates, knowing people might have insurance. I'm skeptical of this take because 1) pet insurance does not work like human health insurance. Veterinary clinics don't know if you have pet insurance. 2) Rather, I think if vet costs are actually going up, it's due to corporate consolidation/private equity snapping up clinics. This is all speculation, but I'd love to see a breakdown on whether pet insurance is actually worth it. I think the best compromise is to get basic insurance that covers emergencies and unforeseen illness while putting away some extra $$ for your pet in your own savings account. I need Katie's thoughts on this!
ok the range in incomes in the NY Mag article is absolutely crazy and there's no more blatant statement of the kinds of work we value. I was happy to see sex work being so highly remunerated 🤣. But that home health aide. We should be collectively embarrassed about that.