Financially Plan for 2026 with Katie: Self-Employment Tea & Contingency Planning

At this point, the annual “Plan with Me”-style episode feels like a sacred ritual. Sitting down to map out next year—my first time being fully self-employed—was the perfect opportunity to pull back the curtain during a particularly vulnerable transition. I cover:

• Thinking through major tax changes, including why I finally ponied up for a CPA and what they’ll be doing
• Estimating and planning with irregular income
• Identifying new retirement contribution targets
• Revisiting the slush fund concept for covering lean cash flow months
• Penciling out a realistic spending plan

…and more. I dedicate this episode to those who need inspiration to make their own course corrections—or are just feeling nosy.

Listen now to this quick, 30-minute financial bender.

On December 3 at 6 PM EST, I’ll be teaching a free, hour(ish)-long class about how to D.I.Y. a plan using the Wealth Planner. I’ll also be previewing its new features, like the Irregular Bills Planner and, by popular demand, the Expense Tracker (for those of you who take after my mother and prefer to manually track every single transaction that crosses your accounts). The Irregular Bills feature is fun (to the extent budgeting is fun) because it recommends a monthly savings goal for a large, irregular expense based on the next payment date, then adjusts in the monthly tabs to make said saving as painless and accurate as possible. Observe:

It’s the little things. And by little things, I mean elegant spreadsheet code.

“The inferiorized woman” is the “perfect consumer,” writes the pseudonymous Father Karine in this long read. American women account for up to 80% of consumer spending in the US in “several key categories,” earning the formidable distinction of “most powerful consumers on the planet,” according to the American Consumer Council. It was a distinct treat to read about Father Karine’s very own neighborhood medspa, the ominously named PLSTK: “‘PLSTK’ (an enterprise so evil vowels asked to be removed from it) specializes in facial harmonization procedures because, well, your natural face is a cacophony of SHIT.” This piece was technically about the soul-festering pursuit of aesthetic perfection, but in a larger sense investigated how we mere mortals cope with our existential dread, the “anguish of complete freedom,” and meaning-making. Be forewarned that “Trickle-Down SHEconomics” is now a phrase I will be casually slipping into conversation at every opportunity. (Father Karine)

This tweet, which singlehandedly bullied me into grocery shopping instead of getting takeout, reminded me to share this elevated ginger chicken noodle soup recipe with you. I substitute chicken broth where it uses water and add pulled rotisserie chicken, since it’s easier. If you’re fending off a winter perma-virus, look no further. (New York Times Cooking)

Verizon is the second major company I’ve seen in recent weeks reporting substantial downsizing efforts; this time, around 15,000 employees. (The Wall Street Journal)

Relatedly, expect to see the phrase “forever layoff”—or the trend toward smaller, rolling layoffs revealed in November Glassdoor data—seeping through the news cycle for the rest of the year. This tendency to make ongoing cuts that don’t trip the “newspaper headlines” wire is common in part, the report hypothesizes, to avoid the WARN Act, a federal law which requires most employers of a certain size to provide advance notice if more than 50 workers are going to be let go. (I found this database that appears to aggregate 2025 layoffs in one place—though strangely, I see nothing about Verizon.) The “forever layoff” strategy “creates cultures of anxiety, insecurity, and resentment,” as anyone who’s ever been party to rounds of layoffs could tell you. (Fast Company)

“Income largely shapes the aging experience,” Luona Lin and Juliana Menasce Horowitz report, challenging the stereotype of the rich but lonely elder. Upper-income people ages 65 and older are more likely to report spending time with friends, engaging in hobbies, and classifying their mental and physical health as “excellent” or “very good.” (“Upper income” in this study is defined by a household income greater than $155,600 per year.) This doesn’t surprise me as much as it makes me wonder how this information could influence intelligent policy design—Social Security reform, where art thou? (Pew Research Center)

If observable patterns are predictive, wealth inequality might be cyclical—which means we can guess what’s coming next. Much has been made of political violence in recent years (lone wolves targeting healthcare CEOs and politicians and right-wing pundits), but this passage about revolutionary fervor would suggest the mass violence of Gilded Ages past is still remote: “Although it started as a workers’ dispute, the [West Virginia] Mine War [of 1920–1921] eventually turned into the largest armed insurrection that the US has ever seen, the Civil War excepted. Between 10,000 and 15,000 miners armed with rifles battled against thousands of strikebreakers and sheriff deputies. The federal government eventually called in the US Army, the only time it has ever done so against its own people. … Quantitative data indicate that this period was the most violent in US history, second only to the Civil War. It was much, much worse than the 1960s.” Maybe today’s violent outbursts are calculated for the social media age, in which attacks are meant to disseminate virally rather than physically. (Aeon)

That said, there is no “social dynamite” like an “alienated educated elite,” a fact historically reliable enough to produce another useful generalization: “The higher the level of education of the unemployed or alienated person, the more extreme the destabilizing behavior that results.” You know where I’m going with this: AI’s potential to disrupt the white-collar workforce, covered recently with respect to Gen Z’s prospects in this series of harrowing vignettes for New York Magazine, could be an inciting factor. All I can think about when I read pieces like these is that soft competencies—candidly, being someone who other people want to be around—might become the most valuable skill in the job market. (Bloomberg)

Didn’t have “sharing an article that argued the benefits of temporary monopoly power” on the docket this week, but this piece—“The Progress Paradox”—challenged more than a few of my confident assumptions. “Markets are good at serving clear consumer demands, but advancing knowledge just isn’t what they do.” The TL;DR of Matt Prewitt’s argument is that it’s the potential for temporary monopoly power, or the promise that your benefit will be total and uncompromised, which drives companies to invest in developing new technology (a useful example: drug patents). (Noēma)