On Overvalued Stocks, Tithing & Mutual Aid, and Creating Enforceable Prenups

We covered more ground than usual in this Rich Girl Roundup, because a few themes dominated your feedback and questions. On today’s show:

• Plastic surgeons encouraging young women to set aside money in “face-lift funds” alongside 401(k)s and IRAs
• What real accountability for private financial firms might look like in our current political climate, and whether that’s an inherently naïve approach to the problem of for-profit predation
• How to think about investing amid headlines that stocks are overvalued (and a mini deep dive into P/E ratios!)
• The long-term economic implications of operating as a single-income family
• ‍🩹 Why the prominence of organized religion in the US can coexist with such confounding attitudes about generosity

Enjoy this Tilt-A-Whirl of a listen.

Yesterday, I got curious about how my food budget has changed since 2018, the year I first found solace in the comforting embrace of a spreadsheet. To normalize for inflation and marriage (my budget is now technically our budget), I plugged my 2018 numbers into an inflation calculator and halved our 2025 spending. To maximize accuracy, I went to my Wealth Planner’s Year in Review tab and pulled this year’s real monthly averages (harrowing). Drumroll, please: My grocery spending has increased in real terms by about 8% annually, on average, since 2018. Restaurant spending? 3.7% per year. Honestly, I’m surprised it’s not worse.

The youths have invented a new name for sucking it up and getting shit done: the “Great Lock In” challenge. This Gen Z-ification of the standard New Year’s Resolution preempts January 1 entirely by suggesting you spend the rest of 2025 “locking in” for a great 2026. (If your goal is financial stability, may I suggest my favorite starter exercise, money mapping?) Embarrassed to admit that this cheesy motivational energy is resonating with me right now.

The Prof G Markets newsletter highlighted three traits that’ll make you harder to replace with artificial intelligence (like if Black Mirror did career coaching, but useful nonetheless): curation, curiosity, and connectivity. Hiring for recent college graduates is down by 44% since 2022, and it’s unclear whether ChatGPT or generalized economic caution is to blame. I’ve been fixated on the curation element, “the difference between adding information and adding value.” For years, we thought the robots would come for blue-collar careers, not white-collar email jobs. Surprise! But while AI seems most adept (so far) at gathering, synthesizing, and analyzing information, it still doesn’t compare to human taste and discernment, which will carry a premium as AI becomes more ubiquitous. This was valuable for me as someone whose job can be summarized as “say interesting things,” but there are countless applications.

Prof G Markets publishes weekly insights about what’s moving markets.

Folks, the “It’s just going to ask you a few questions” iPad flip tipping discourse has reached the highest echelon of corporate power—and McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski demonstrated a rare moment of convergence between C-suite incentives and the broader public interest. Because its restaurants do not have tips (which the CEO described as “essentially getting the customer to pay for your labor”), McDonald’s and its workers don’t benefit from the OBBBA’s No Tax on (the first $25,000 of) Tips provision. Kempczinski said this creates an uneven playing field that favors those who pay the lower, sub-minimum tipped wage of $2.13 per hour, and suggested standardizing the minimum wage instead. My bold prophecy for how private health insurance will eventually meet its demise involves a similar realignment of corporate power: Large benefits departments will finally reach their breaking point with 10% year-over-year premium increases and go suit-to-suit with the lobbyists who represent UnitedHealth Group and CVS Health.

The top 10% of earners are driving nearly as much consumer spending as the bottom 90% combined, but you knew that already, because we talked about it back in March when this stat hit its previous all-time high. Consumer spending is 70% of GDP, so—math—this means one-third of total GDP is completely dependent on the consumption habits of those earning more than $250,000. Meagan Day calls this the split-screen economy, and the implications are as social as they are economic.

Six massive conglomerates control 90% of all media you see in the US, an 88% decrease in competition from 50 (!) companies just 30 years ago—and if Larry Ellison gets his way, this trend will continue. A critical yet underreported element of the Jimmy Kimmel suspension—which followed a thinly veiled threat from Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, that, “We [the FCC and ABC] can do this the easy way or the hard way”—is that Nexstar, which owns 200 ABC affiliates, is currently attempting a $6.2 billion merger with another media company called Tegna. This corporate marriage is, of course, subject to regulatory approval from...Brendan Carr’s FCC. In other words, as always, it’s about money. There are lots of smart people covering this story from the free speech angle; Matt Stoller applied the antitrust lens. When you consolidate power over information to this extent, you create an ecosystem that’s exceptionally vulnerable to political coercion. He says the answer is repealing the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Shawn Fain, the president of United Auto Workers, is a mythic figure in labor organizing for the way he revived the sclerotic UAW and started playing offense against the formerly impenetrable auto manufacturers in the South. He’s taken heat recently for supporting some of President Trump’s protectionist policies, but he clarified the union’s stance in Jacobin’s Fall 2025 issue: “We’re not backing Republicans. We’re not backing Democrats. We’re not loyal to any political party. We’re loyal to the working class.” Perhaps a lukewarm take, but this is a good thing. No political party should feel that working class support is a given. This story teases out some nuance in how we talk about things like tariffs: It’s tempting to reflexively oppose Trump’s policies, but a compelling vision for a better future must account for the bad economic decisions that got us here in the first place. Attempting to persuade people that “everything was fine before, actually” or that a singular bad actor is messing up an otherwise good system is a losing strategy. “The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) [was promised to] lift all boats and lead to greater prosperity for the working class in the United States and Mexico,” Fain said, but “[f]ree trade created the Rust Belt. It gutted communities, destroyed lives, and helped fuel the resentment and disaffection we see today. And in Mexico, the average autoworker makes only $3 an hour—even less than they were making before the passage of NAFTA, when taking inflation into account.”

A few months ago, I interviewed Ray Dalio about the deficit. Since then, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around its practical implications. Fortunately, someone in my building subscribes to Foreign Affairs and discarded the Fall 2025 issue in the lobby, free for the taking. This is how I came across a sobering piece called “America’s Coming Crash” by Kenneth Rogoff, professor of economics at Harvard and Chief Economist at the IMF from 2001 to 2003. He sees four possible paths forward from our mounting debt, assuming the administration’s magical growth projections are indeed a mirage: “default, austerity, inflation, and financial repression.” As you may have assumed from his role in the IMF, Rogoff has a clear distaste for populist politics on both the left and right. (I have a feeling he’s the type who would take the aforementioned, “Everything was fine before this mess,” tack.) Still, after reading his analysis, my prediction is the feds will inflate away the debt (“a few years of 1970s-style inflation,” i.e., inflation in the teens) by strong-arming the central bank into radically lowering interest rates. Which betting market will allow me to gamble on this outcome?

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