Episode Summary:
We talk with Kiersten and Julien, the power couple behind Rich + Regular. They created Rich + Regular in 2017, and it has grown into an award-winning blog, social platform, media brand, and they are now in the process of writing a book with the world’s largest publisher, Penguin Random House. Their mission is to inspire better conversations about money, and so we do just that, we have a conversation about money. We discuss our experiences working in the same company in Corporate America, how race impacted those experiences, how we should consider changing the way we work, and what they’ve both learned since stepping out on their own.
Episode Notes:
Maggie first met Kiersten and Julien at work over 10 years ago, and Mike more recently met Kiersten when we did some shared personal finance talks at work. We start off by discussing our 36+ years of combined experience in Corporate America, and what it taught us, the good and the bad.
We discuss a number of topics with Kiersten and Julien:
- Their experience reflecting on their 20+ combined years in Corporate America, what they did and didn’t see coming, and the good and bad parts.
- The importance of having enough money saved to walk away when it’s time.
- How you can do your job better when you’re not focused on the financial aspect.
- How money shapes people’s truths.
- The concept of hiring smart people and letting them do their jobs.
- How incentives drive behavior at work.
- What people get from work other than an income; it can be people’s identity and what they take pride in.
- What is the acceptable length of a career?
- How we constrain everything else in our lives, but we don’t constrain work.
- Some of their observations on how race impacted their experience in Corporate America.
- How exhausting it feels having to constantly “perform,” and not perform as in doing a good job, but perform as in being someone other than your true self to try to fit in.
- There are few incentives for larger corporations to change.
- Accept things for what they are and chart your own path to freedom.
- Consider a parallel path developing your own income sources while working in Corporate America.
- Learning your full worth as you start to step out on your own.
- How work doesn’t have to be a lifetime endeavor.
- How it’s time to reevaluate the value of employee retention programs as a whole (e.g. forced fun). Imagine a world where we started to embrace the true nature of this relationship, which is a transaction, a price in exchange for my labor and contribution.
- A lot of people don’t need or want the fluff. Reappropriate the funding to other places.
- How to give people the capacity to create change.
- Loosening the chains of the standard workweek could dramatically change the way people work, and make them more effective.
- How we break down work to the bare essentials.
- What are the natural cycles of a modern knowledge worker?
- Removing the romance from traditional employment.
- How to meet people where they are.
Show references:
Money on the Table series on YouTube