The Invisible Coach

May 5, 2020

Credit card companies are making billions of dollars off of people who don’t understand the rules of the money game. Can a good coach help level the playing field? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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welcome to season 2 of against the rules I'm Michael Lewis before we get to where we're going I want to go back for a moment to where we've been a little backstory from season one

The Story involves a woman named Katie Highland she's in her late 30s a public school teacher wife mother of two small children her entire adult life she'd been made miserable by student loans she taken out when she was 18 years old I don't see any payoff and it just keeps getting harder and harder and that's soul-crushing her State of Mind

well even her children could see it wasn't good it might be actually kind of painful for her because all of this counts with a bill and getting something changed to another thing that's the same but changing to it I love you it feel well it does feel kind of painful right Mommy a lot of the papers yet there it's a lot of paperwork it's a lot of fun

and a lot of pains yeah full for doing it mmm

this killed me to hear but especially this next part

it is very good to be thoughtful for everybody but the person who's the most best person on earth is this lady right here this lady Jackson's mom Katie Highland shouldn't have owed anybody a dime that was the point of the story Katie had qualified years ago for a program that Congress created to forgive the student loans of public servants

but her student loan servicer made money off her only as long as he still owed the money and they had more or less tricked her to keep her in debt I like to try to always find the good in people and when you have experiences like my experience you get discouraged and you start to think that people aren't as good as you once thought they were

sometimes you stumble onto a story and you can't get it out of your head Katie Highland had played by the rules made all her loan payments thrown herself into being a good mother and a great teacher and she'd been abused by the company that was meant to help her navigate her finances and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau the One Financial referee that might have stepped in to help her was doing nothing to help

so we decided to help on the website GoFundMe to try to pay off Katie student loans

when I looked at the page and I think I saw at that time that it was like eleven thousand dollars I was completely blown away I was at my son's baseball game I remember I showed my mom we were like freaking out about it and just reading people's responses and the encouraging words and like where people were from there were people from Ireland there were people from England we started this campaign two months after the show originally aired so after most

I would listen to it even then it took you our listeners less than three months to pay off $50,000 and I think the last person that donated donated like enough to to like hit it and it was just so I was like oh my God Mom we like it happened we did it and I can't even tell you it's because you said to me in one e-mail like just pay it forward or just do it for someone else and every GoFundMe campaign that I see I make it a point to do the same even if it's 10 20 whatever I can do that don't

don't you dare go get into dead again

I thought that would be the end of the story but there was a lot more to it of course there was more to it I mean Katie had told us that Financial stress has caused her to grind her teeth at night and she started losing her teeth she used to smile all the time now she avoided smiling and along the way she'd picked up another debt problem alrighty I'm on a payment plan with a dentist like $500 a week I've spent like $30,000 I've lost a bunch of teeth through the

the grinding and all of that that part has been really difficult so I still have a lot you know remaining with that a still a lot to pay off so a lot of dental work to get done so you do have credit card debt I have yeah I have credit card to any big purchases that I've had to make I've put on credit cards unless you're a very lucky kind of America and you may recognize yourself here you try to do prudent things to save money like drop the vision coverage on your health insurance

then suddenly your daughter needs glasses that was the kind of thing that Katie and her husband did that wound up biting them they now have five credit cards between them all charging High interest rates even though their credit score is great personally I just want to not be scared to look at my bank account I don't think I've looked at my bank account in years to be honest I just yeah that's not a good I know that's not healthy but it I don't know why it's just like terrifies me I'm not I'm not sure

why the credit card industry already had her by the throat she was ashamed of it and she had no sense that anyone would help this time

well so here's my goal my goal season 1 the goal was to get rid of your student debt and season two is they restore your smile so that's what we're going to try to do all right okay thanks Michael I'm Michael Lewis and this is against the rules

last season was about referees the attack on our societies were f is obviously a big problem this season is about coaches yeah what are you doing and their rise in American life you need to stop being a lazy piece of shit and work for your picture or I'm going to kick your ass got it it wasn't that long ago that coaches were confined to sports now they're everywhere we're going to refocus like we're training a puppy we're gonna train your mind like we train a puppy

are people who call themselves life coaches and other people who call themselves death coaches I am here to guide you and making sure you grow as a person every big-time corporate boss has an executive coach but now soda new MBA starting out at Wall Street Banks and consulting firms these are super smart people who maybe just haven't heard the right strategies you can hire a coach to improve your online dating performance or your charisma there's a saying which is therapy is about the tears and coaching

is the path of laughter and that's all great the coaching is also becoming an odd source of unfairness just look around and ask yourselves who gets good coaching and who doesn't that guy would never have gotten to Yale but this guy who got all this coaching did get into Yale it just seems like anyone who can answer these questions has got to be coached oh my God we're losing this fucking team

price

money is a great place to ask this question about coaching and fairness But first you have to stop thinking of Finance as a business and start thinking of it as a competitive sport when 18 year-old Katie Highland took out her student loans and twenty something year old Katie started using credit cards she was basically walking into an arena alone with a Target on her back the giant company should be facing off against knew more about her game than she did that's how they made their money from her weaknesses are

can always make more money exploiting people's irrationalities then you can by fixing them Richard thaler winner of the Nobel prize in economics he spent his career trying to understand the ways that people don't act in their own self-interest and one big thing has worked suggest is that Ordinary People need coaching far more than they know let's think about the people who get the most coaching

well professional athletes would be one take Roger Federer he's probably got 10 guys coaches and physical trainers so here's Roger Federer one of the greatest athletes in the world and he has 10 coaches who else has actors Meryl Streep has a director helping her act now God knows and a voice coach yeah she doesn't need

right Brad Pitt you know does he really need help but the richest best-performing people in the world have the most coaching and who's coaching the Uber driver what hours to drive and when you should go to the airport and if you get a ride to the airport should you wait in line or immediately leave so

coaching just ends up making the rich richer yeah it's one of the many factors that contribute to this curve we've all seen about the one percent or the .01% share of the economy no one's coaching the tens of millions of Americans on the wrong end of Consumer Finance no one even seems interested I tried unsuccessfully to get somebody to create what I call the

good bank

what would this good bag look like well so it would warn you when you're about overdraw your credit card rather than wait until the end of the day when you've swiped five times and they charge you $25 penalty for each swipe 25 bucks a swipe it supposed to scare you from over drawing your account but you only get the warning after it's too late

I mean there's a reason for this it's a subtle form of coaching that makes the bank's a lot of money another problem is people pay bad coaches and not good coaches right right it's an odd thing and they pay because they don't see the charge right too bad coaching is never show the bill yeah exactly the problem with good coaching is you have to show the bill a man usually goes and goes something like this right so at the start of the month you're paid your paycheck this is Angela strange venture capitalist and connoisseur of how the financial

sector exploits human nature and so you send your rent check out and you don't see in your bank account that that check is cleared probably for a few days you pay a bunch of other bills you know that those are going to you know hit as costs in your bank account but that also hasn't cleared now you're like well can I pay this bill I think so but you're doing some Mental Math around the checks that you have in the air like you just don't have a sense of what is your real-time cash position and then oh by the way

you screw it up it's a $35 overdraft fee each time right there are thirty four billion dollars in overdraft fees paid last year again really fitting from people screwing up it's huge it's huge it's huge wait thirty four billion dollars in overdraft fees yep it's the typical penalty 35 bucks yeah it's kinda up it used to be 25 about 10 years ago so that means that there are a billion instances of this a year yes and they tend to be concentrated where the people that got hit with overdraft

get hit a lot thirty four billion dollars in overdraft fees is really just the start there's more than a hundred billion in credit card late payment fees and interest charged each year and then there's the entire credit card industry which thrives on the mistakes people make playing the money game there is now over one trillion dollars of credit card debt in the u.s. people have the stud it's been about 15 thousand dollars they tend to have it across three to four different cards so let's say you're like okay I don't

I want to be in credit card debt I need to get out of credit card debt just going through what is that process you have debt across three to four different cards they likely charge different rates they have different due dates so do you pay off the highest rate card first oh by the way like what is the highest rate card it's just it's just a very complicated mess to get your weight out of Angela wondered why no one had tried to help people who had gotten into this mess why no one had say tried to create a money coaching business

the same way that Richard thaler wondered why no one had even tried to create a good bank then she realized the sort of people with the ability to coach other people about money or to finance the company to coach other people about money those people already had money people who didn't have money we're like martians to them like your investment banker is not the person who grew up on food stamps right and he's not the person who's got five different credit cards maxed out and is paying thirty percent interest rate to some Bank

another problem Angela saw trust Americans had been screwed by Consumer Finance for so long that they were likely to be wary when some companies sprung up claiming it was actually going to be on their side like a takes time as an athlete or is anything to build trust with your coach until they'll start by making these suggestions and you might follow them you might not follow them and you know if they're good coach and they know you really well then you'll notice that over time as you take more of their suggestions you tend to perform better

the explosion of coaching it's related to the war on referees it's what happens when more and more of life feels like a brutal competitive sport the scarier it is to lose the more people scramble to find an edge that's what a coach offers an edge

Angela strange had noticed an absence just as Richard thaler had noticed an absence of a coach who really should exist in the middle of American Financial life both were waiting for whom or what they did not know

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in the year of Our Lord 1979 in the mountains of Colorado a woman gives birth out of wedlock to a boy Jason she names him the mom's name is Kristina Brown she's a fundamentalist Christian and takes the Bible as the literal truth she doesn't know how she's going to make ends meet but she knows what she wants for her child she wants him to be well educated to make sure that happens

she'll educate him yourself

when we were studying the health unit I had Jason clean the floor on his hands and knees with an extra 50 pound backpack on his back so that he would know what it would be like to be overweight that's Christina she didn't want her son to be taught what was taught in schools the theory of evolution for instance but mostly she just thought she could teach him better than any school could it was like hey Jason what do you want to learn the world is your classroom you can go learn anything you want that's Jason Brown all

up now and you know there's one time in particular I remember she's like what do you want to learn and I said I want to learn about Taxidermy and she said okay fine she goes through the Yellow Pages this was in the time where he had yellow pages and she calls all the taxidermist and convinces some guy who owns a taxidermy shop to let us go camp out and is workplace for a week and we would show up there and he would he would show us how he would take these animals and you know end up stopping them and turning them into things that could go on people's walls

walls and what was really cool is you know I learned about biology I learned about the anatomy of animals he taught us about the chemicals that were used and then I would ask a lot of questions about just the business of Taxidermy like how much do all these chemicals cost how much did you pay for this thing what do you sell it for the education of Jason Brown wasn't normal it was kinetic hands on his mother encouraged him to ask questions but at the same time he lived in a very small world it was just

him and his little brother maybe because he was so dependent on his mom he worried about her even as a little kid he could see that she was exposed and vulnerable especially when it came to money my money was in envelopes and each envelope had a different designation and when the money was gone it was gone would they have what we've been their envelopes designations okay the first envelope was my tithe then it was rent then it was groceries

miscellaneous electric gas

and you paid in that in that order hmm right that's right we literally and I'm not exaggerating ate beans and rice pretty much every day I ground my own wheat made my own whole wheat bread made my own tortillas made cereal in the Crock-Pot for breakfast and we had peanut butter on toast we ate very simply we shopped at Goodwill even for Christmas gifts birthday gifts sometimes Jason snuck a peek inside

the money envelopes a lot of the time they were totally empty yet even when she had no money his mother insisted on staying home and teaching him in his brother by the time he was 10 years old Jason was fully aware that his mother was running huge risks they were totally on their own there was no safety net the most trivial events could disrupt their lives so we had this friend his name was Donny he's a big kid and he came over to the house and like spent the weekend or something like that and

Donnie had a lot and he really really likes milk too and I remember specifically in the kitchen and Donnie was just pounding the milk and he finished the milk and I remember looking at my mom and she looked at me and I could just see the the dreaded fear on on her face because Donnie drank all the milk Daddy drank an envelope yeah he drank an envelope and and we just like because I knew that the envelope for food was already used up and

you know I could see in her eyes like hey what are we going to do like we can go and buy more milk like that's it

so they went without milk another memory is the day Jason's mom told him that she needed to take on a second job and have to go to a real school he was in the eighth grade the real school was hellish other kids made fun of him one day a kid just walked up to him and punched him in the face and no one did anything about it Jason felt totally loved by his mom and he loved her back she had given him real strengths he knew how to learn to teach himself

but she'd also left him with a fear of money of being one accident away from disaster his mother couldn't afford for him to fall off his bike and break his wrist much less pay for him to go to college he went to the University of Colorado any way to pay for it he took out student loans but the moment he did that he felt exposed and vulnerable like his mom he was 18 years old

I would drive home every single weekend starting in January and I would go home to my hometown where I grew up and it was about two two and a half hour drive and I would spend the weekend knocking on doors handing out flyers say hey would you hire me to paint your house Jason had never painted a house but then there was a time when he didn't know how to stuff an animal and it figured out how to do that and there's just you know they're six feet of snow outside in this kid is it trying to convince you to paint his house and and they're like number one come back

in the summer number two how many houses have you painted like I've never painted a house in my life but I promise I'm gonna hire people who do know how to paint their house maybe the oddest thing about Jason Brown is he found nothing odd about any of this an 18 year old convincing grown-ups in the snow to trust him with their homes so I brought snow shoes and I would have a pair for me in a pair for them and now it I knew as long as I could convince the homeowner to put on their shoes and coat and go around the house with me and snow she is that they would then by the end of that have a pretty good chance

s of hired me

he was still a kid but pretty soon this wasn't a kids business the crazy thing is by the end of the summer I had painted something like 40 or 50 homes and I had I think 15 or 20 employees and I actually put fifty thousand dollars in my pocket for one summer really you cleared $50,000 $150,000 a total revenue and it was fifty thousand dollars and that to me he wasn't done after Jason's first year in college he set out to grow his business rural Colorado

it wasn't a great Market there weren't that many houses the weather was hard on paint but not as hard as it was in other places he decided to find a better market and so I transferred to Boston University and by the time we're waiting you transferred to Boston University specifically to pursue the business of painting houses I did yes because you'd be so much money in painting houses I didn't I was like I was like you weren't even in the right place to paint out exactly the picture School based on where they're be the most houses to paint you've got it exactly

bu Jason ran his painting business from his laptop at the back of classrooms prepping for the big season in the summer when we were painting all the houses it was about 400 employees and I think in the year that I sold the company we were doing about three million dollars of total revenue I don't remember the exact amount that I made from all that a couple questions one are you at any point are you conscious that you're being driven by having grown up in an environment where money was so scared if I did so when I was I think I think I was probably about 10 I

beloved avocados and you know money was so tight in our household we go to the grocery store I'm like Mom can I have avocados she's like I'm sorry they're too expensive every now and then we would get when it was a treat and I remember just savoring every bite of that buttery avocado and I in my mind I commit I said I will be rich enough one day to meet as many avocados as I want and still to this day eat an avocado almost every single day and not a single time do I ever opened an avocado and not feel just immense gratitude

for being able to afford as many avocados even gotten used to avocados yet I've not gotten tired of them know Jason went to grad school in business at the University of Chicago pretty soon he knew rich people but they didn't seem nearly as admirable or hard-working as his mother he was coming to see money and the problems around money as its own thing as problems some people just had

Jason Brown started more companies and sold them the companies all had one thing in common they made it easy for people to do things they really should do one of his companies made it easy for people to get their home computers fix remotely Geek Squad before Geek Squad another made it easy for homeowners to switch to solar power and cut their electricity bills in half Jason was all about making it easy

we did not evolve to do multi-period Financial optimization right as hairless Apes we did not have this expectation that we're going to live 80 years and have be part of a global economy with all this complexity one day he was reading a book you've all Harari sapiens it was about how humans evolved and where the species might be heading Evolution was a new idea to Jason he thought it explained a lot almost out of corporate Evolution this entire industry the finance industry

she has evolved to exploit every single cognitive bias or every mistake that people make when they're thinking about money exactly every little bug we have in our brains that that you know served us well when we were on the savanna but now is not may be directly translatable to the kind of lives we live and every product they have every contract they make is designed to exploit these bugs in our brain getting people to do things they really shouldn't do yep

for Jason money wasn't just money at some point he realized that every time he thought about money he also thought about his mom and her three envelopes of cash for the month I actually need to tell you a little bit more about about my mom so my mom is so she's my hero and the reason she's my hero is she grew up in a pretty challenging childhood I'm not a lot of resources not very supportive she ended up having me when she was 21 or 22 just a high school

no higher education she had overcome all that and given him in his brother the most amazing education she is just the model of discipline I mean the woman she's a raw vegan and I'm so proud of that hard that's hard to be presumably it is it is and obviously it is very hard and she's 62 now 62 in most of her life she'd had to figure out everything on her own including money but like let's say say he graduates high school and there's like an accountant and a financial

visor they're just like we're going to do all your she had to coach coming out of high school if she had a coach coming out of high school I know she don't know home right now properly she'd have a nice little nest egg or retirement she would be in a good spot it definitely was possible but she didn't have that

Jason could take care of his mom and he did but what about all the other moms he decided to create a company specifically to help them he looked hard at the entire money game before he settled on Consumer Finance and especially credit cards because if Finance is a competitive sport the credit card companies are undefeated they've smashed together a payment tool and alone into one and they designed the payment tool to again exploit all these bugs in our brain so you get points for spending

if you get access to lounges it comes in different colors and metals you can even get your dog's picture printed on the card right so they create all of these things that you want to use it yeah exactly make you want to use it and make you when you go go get a credit card you're not thinking about oh I might I might end up getting charges interest down the road you're thinking about oh I'm gonna get these points and have access to these hotels whatever it is and that allows Banks to substantially overcharge everybody on the interest rate so it's they just distract you from the cost of the

exactly so there's no one out there competing by saying get our card and will give you a lower interest rate correct it because it's not even in the conversation

which is insane if you stop and think about it I mean our government hardly pays any interest on most of its debt really risky companies can borrow at 7% to think that millions of people are paying 19 to 30 percent interest on anything who other than the American Credit Card borrower pays so much and that's not even counting the billions in late fees once Jason honed in on this particular racket he noticed other things like the monthly statements these lenders send to people who owed the money

if you look at a credit card statement the thing with the biggest font it's like size 80 90 font is your minimum payment they're using something called the anchoring effect which show you a low number and gets you to pay relatively low amounts to the card which means that you have more debt and they charge you more money right the trying to encourage you to go into this so they're encouraging you to spend and encouraging you like bad coaching it is bad coaching right the more Jason Brown looked into the credit card industry the more he thought he might be able to get people out from under it with an

up so you think Financial behaviors can be changed I 100% believe Financial behaviors can be changed Jason created yet another company and called it tally he got the investor Angela strange to give him money and to join his board the ideas behind tally could be traced to a class that he had snuck into at the booth School of Business in Chicago taught by Richard thaler the biggest idea was it was very hard to change people's behavior unless you make it easy for people to change

make it feel to them like no more than a nudge we viewed nudges as an alternative to coach that's Richard thaler again you know we could try to teach people to sign up for the 401K plan where there's a company match and turning it down is free money and stupid right or we could just automatically enroll them right and we knew the ladder works really well and the former is

like pulling teeth right so so part of nudging is a response to a sense of the limits of coaching yeah that's the point right they say that if you if you really thought well we can we can coach all these people up and how not to get exploited by credit card companies you would coach them up the best thing is to make things automatic making good behaviors easy yeah the basis of Jason Browns businesses that class he took from you it's creating out decision environment where the way that people

naturally with least friction least amount of effort go is in their interest rather than against their interests so he picked that up it's a good lesson to have learned Taylor has not the first memory of Jason Brown in his class but Jason got the gist of sailors message he hired a bunch of Engineers to spend three and a half years building the company software so that it nudged people with credit card debt in ways that were good for them so if I have four different credit cards and four different banks on my visas

I do whatever I do but but you pay them off yeah so you and I pay you yeah so you're telling me what I exactly so you download the app for free you pass us off credit check and then we're saying hey Michael we're going to pay all these cards when they're due at the exact right time the exact right so we so the couple questions that naturally popped in mind you're going to charge me a much lower interest rate than the credit card companies how can you afford to do that if they were charging me the actual correct rate given

risk I present yes to them well here's the rub so coming back to this financial industry that is designed to make money off of Us credit card interest rates are astronomically high and they do not represent the rate that you should be paying you'd save a bunch of money just by not paying the high interest rate of course you could ruin yourself all over again by going out and buying stuff you shouldn't but Jason's hoping that he's nudged you into a different state of mind a state of mind in which you would make wiser decisions about

about money and what we've seen is that when people invest more in their debt they actually just tend to spend less mentally it kind of makes sense because you know if you go out and let's say that you eat out for lunch somebody be like well maybe I don't want to eat out for dinner because already I spent some money so the effect is I feel like I kind of spent money on my dad and now maybe I don't want to go out for lunch maybe I don't want to go out for dinner instead of giving people points for spending tally gives them points for saving instead of encouraging them to pay off the

they help them to figure out how to pay the maximum instead of trying to keep people acting on impulse it tries to get them to Think Twice The company took off but something was bothering Jason he thought a company needed both a vision and a mission a vision was where you were going a mission was why you were going there

Jason wanted to understand the deeper emotional consequences of debt and initially my thought was that most of the emotions would be around regret like hey I spent this money in the past and I regret having bought that right and and regret is from the sadness family so it's this sense of loss of something in the past he hired a team of researchers to test this idea they came back and told Jason that know this wasn't about sadness the emotions that were coming out wearing anxiety which is a fear emotion

and it's a feeling that there's a threat in the future that you don't have the capacity to handle a protect yourself Jason paid for another study one that tried to measure the stress levels of people with credit card debt we had found that two-thirds of individuals with card debt have medical levels of anxiety so it meaning you're in a doctor's office waiting for some important test results the same kind of anxiety that people fill their that's what people are feeling on a regular basis with our cards

millions of Americans are sick from this stress and their illness has all kinds of other effects oftentimes it's described as a weight on chest drowning not being able to breathe so a lot of people experience stress is actual constriction within the body and sensations of tightness or acid in the stomach you know grinding of teeth is really a common thing because it manifest oftentimes while people are sleeping at some point Jason

is that stress wasn't just a bug in the American Financial system it was a feature there's a lot of research that suggests that it also affects cognition so if you're like a Sinister credit card company and you're trying to keep people trapped in a dark Financial world the first thing you would do is stress about by definition the way that the credit card statements are made especially by store cards those cards that are associated with retailers the bank's behind those are some of the best

best and even they do things like make it so that even if you would want it to set up an auto-pay it's actually not a function that is available because they're hoping that people will have late fees and forget about balances and things like that

it took Jason three and a half years to create his app it took him two minutes to create his first logo it's a woman reclining in a chair her feet up on a table and a cup of coffee in her hand a woman like his mom but freed from anxiety with the help of a coach so if we were to use a sports analogy the coach has arranged for food and meals to be delivered so you get to eat the right thing they've set up the gym membership for you they've made it so that not only are you being led for how you can

at the outcome you want but also all the sources of interference as much as possible or being removed 99% of the people who sign up to use Jason's app have stayed with it and it's kind of incredible what happens to people when they're rewarded for behaving well instead of badly they can say oh you know I'd rather buy the coffee then have it be set aside but 90% of people are still letting us set money aside for them and I think it has very much to do with the fact that every time it happens you get points people would do the smart thing

thing for themselves if you made it easy for them to do the smart thing for themselves make it easy and people would create a buffer for themselves a margin of safety a thing Jason's mom had never had and then it kept him awake when he was a kid Jason had not set out to become a coach but he saw that a coach is exactly what he'd become the definition of a good coach is one who makes their players feel like they don't need the coach okay and the way I think you do that is first you take out all the

hard work and all the distractions second you make it easy to have good behaviors and third is you make people want to have good behaviors

and that's the thing about coaching that makes it so hard to pin down the best coaches don't leave you needing them you start with some fear or sense of inadequacy they help you get past it then they recede and in the future every single one of us is going to have this hyper smart service it's doing all these complex things in the background and nudging us and making us feel really good about you know eating our financial broccoli so to speak and we're going to feel great about it but we're not even going to see it it's an invisible coach

a coach that could maybe even help stop people from grinding their teeth at night

to be honest I think I said this to you on the phone I have no idea what's in my bank account last October we introduced Katie Highland to Jason's company tally she decided she needed a coach but her husband had to sign her up because he was the only one with the nerve to look at their bank account I make Stephen duckett and I asked him whether I'm good or not and he says yes and sometimes I believe him and sometimes I don't but as long as I don't get a phone call from the landlord that the rent didn't go through then I know that we're okay

so it scares the bejesus out of me to know what's in there because I don't think like we don't spend frivolously like we even where it said like dining out I put n/a like work meals and I like we don't do those things you can hear the anxiety in her voice right but that could change I'm betting it will change

because a good coach can change a lot

we gave Katie Highland sometime before we bother her again alright so I don't know how many months ago we spoke is a few months anyway but since then like we set you up with with Tally and just the idea of a financial coach so with Tally they've been amazing how long was it before we introduce the two of you before you said actually this is a good thing this is just humoring Michael and his podcast this is actually a good thing no immediately immediately

I think you know it was definitely overwhelming at first a sort of you know gather all of those documents and find out what my interest rates were and you know figure out what things I was paying every month and sort of get them together in one central location that was a bit overwhelming but I mean they walked me and talk to me through absolutely every step of the way and made sure that I understood what was going on I can remember you telling me that your view before was you didn't even want to look at your bank

accounts I knew you were going to bring that up and I have to tell you Michael I looked at my bank account for the first time about two days ago full on the computer screen in front of me and all its Glory I saw my balance and you know it wasn't as bad as I envisioned it wasn't as good as I wished it would be but it was an important step in handling my finances is like actually having a realistic picture of what's in there no server like if you're going to get in shape you need to have a scale to weigh yourself on hundred percent yeah it's going to help

just having the conversations like having a set time as a couple for myself and my husband to sit down and say okay where are we with finances what did we spend this month what unexpected things came up you know how are we looking for next month and what are we putting toward our you know our goals it's going to help just not are just not even like you know reach our goals but it's gonna help our relationship my husband and I because money is a definite you know source of stress I mean is there a couple

where that's not true no I

there's no need here to recount how many thousands of dollars she saved herself by having herself coached or how she's now paying 6% instead of 26 percent on her credit card debts or how she and her husband expect to be entirely debt-free inside of a year but let's just consider the broader effects this coach has had this person who's on her side encouraging her best self

has it changed the kind of tone of the conversation around money when you and your husband sit down and talk about it yeah it was all very emotionally charged before and now you know he's really taken to okay I'm laying everything out on a spreadsheet and I you know I put in all this and I did all this and come look and let me show you so we're much more of a team and much more on the same page and I think we're excited about the next couple of years

you can hear it too right the sound of a voice is changed all the other times I'd spoken with her I can almost hear her teeth grinding I could hear her stress and the way it was killing the pleasure she naturally took in life I didn't hear that anymore I found Katie Highland in quarantine in New Rochelle New York at the early Center of what was shaping up to be the greatest Calamity in modern American history

but she sounded almost hopeful

you know it's funny is that you are now sitting at like one of the hot spots of the American pandemic and you sound so much happier yeah then you did a year ago I know the irony and everything is you so happy well I feel confident you know I feel like wow like I can really start to do things and I can really to think that you know we set a goal of trying to buy a house by the summer of 2023 and that's

amazing

I'm Michael Lewis thanks for listening to against the rules against the rules is brought to you by Pushkin Industries the shows produced by Audrey dilling and Catherine Jurado with research assistance from Lydia Gene cot and zuy win our editor is Julia Barton Mia Lobel is our executive producer our theme was composed by Nick brittle with additional scoring by Stellwagen Symphony we got

checked by Beth Johnson our show was recorded by Topher Ruth and Trace Schultz at Northgate studios in Berkeley and James Ward at Live Oak Studio as always thanks to pushkin's Founders Jacob Weisberg and Malcolm Gladwell

how often do you going to go fund me and give money to strangers my wife and I were just driving down the road and it just seemed like the right thing to do but I don't typically go into GoFundMe and donate to strangers I think it's more when something speaks to me and it's something that you can you can easily cover you just go ahead and do it so is how I've been taught this is a meat car the guy who made the last donation to the fund that paid off Katie Highland student loans he turns out to be a real estate agent in Suburban DC

me wish I wanted to buy a house so whose idea was it yours or your wife's to go and find the GoFundMe page and finish off the campaign it was me but she obviously is used to me doing stuff like that and kind of cosines it but you know I almost as soon as it was over and and I heard about the GoFundMe I was intrigued to see where I was at and when I saw the level it was a no-brainer to finish it off