Show Notes
My guests this week, economic professors John Campbell and Tarun Ramadorai, argue that the financial system itself is a powerful contributor to wealth inequality, and that there are ways to improve it. Their new book, Fixed: Why Personal Finance Is Broken and How to Make It Work for Everyone (out October 21), addresses how the bulk of our financial issues are downstream of poor structural design, not personal shortcomings—and what we can do about it.
(00:00): Intro
(04:00): 🏁 How our financial system allows the upper middle class to pull away from the lower middle class, even if they start in relatively similar places
(26:55): 😈 Why financial firms aren’t incented to make better products, and how “competition” produces services that exploit the human tendency for bad decision making
(41:42) 🏡 The unique products in the mortgage market that might actually be underutilized (like ARMs and reverse mortgages)
(57:50): 🍼 What John and Tarun would include in a “personal finance starter kit” for every adult (like a Finnish baby box, but for when you’re a baby adult in a predatory system)
(01:08:50): 👊 Where the three of us disagreed about who should be providing said starter kit
Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and Katie Gatti Tassin, with our audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is President of Morning Brew content and additional fact checking comes from Scott Wilson.
Transcripts, show notes, resources, and credits will be available within a week at: https://moneywithkatie.com/personal-finance-broken.
—
Money with Katie’s mission is to be the intersection where the economic, cultural, and political meet the tactical, practical, personal finance education everyone needs.
Get your copy of Rich Girl Nation: https://moneywithkatie.com/rich-girl-nation Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.katiegattitassin.com
More from The Money with Katie Show
Well, here we are—for the last time, for now. A couple weeks ago, I wrote an end-of-year letter that functioned like a little “status update” on how I’m feeling moving into 2026. In this episode, I invite back five of my favorite guests for their own check-ins. We talk about:
Today’s guest won’t surprise you if you read the introduction to Rich Girl Nation, which recollected the 2018 event that made me think personal finance might not be solely for people with brown bananas and pocket protectors. Lindsey Stanberry, founding editor of Refinery29’s Money Diaries turned media entrepreneur, joins me for the penultimate episode to talk about:
Rebecca Herbst reached financial independence at age 32 during the tenuous early days of the pandemic, and volunteered shortly thereafter to be furloughed from her job in commercial real estate—and so began her (extremely) early retirement.
How do you solve a problem like the disconnect between “wages employers are willing to pay” and “wages employees need to survive”? If you’re my guest this week, the answer is: a wage subsidy.
Since I spent last week’s episode detailing the thrilling ins and outs of making your own 2026 financial plan for wealth-maxxing, today I’m taking a hard left turn and interviewing Andrew Hartman, a history professor and the author of Karl Marx in America, a 500-page tome about which he says, and here I quote directly, “My father-in-law told me that he likes the book even though he still doesn’t like Marx.” We talked about: