I Bought A House In The South Of France. Here's What I'm Doing With It.

I say it all the time, but I really want to repeat it.

The Financial Diet, which is now a company

that like employs seven women

and tons of other contractors

and has built this beautiful life,

and we have this four-day work week,

and we have this six weeks PTO, and all these other things.

I'm so proud and happy for what we've been able to do,

but none of that would have happened

if John and Hank Green didn't give us a $5,000 little check grant to

start the company when no one

when it wasn't a company.

And you know, my co-founder Lauren and I,

who's going to come visit the house this summer,

like we talk about that all the time.

But I'm so aware

that all of this good fortune is

because someone who had the means invested in us.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to this very special video here on The Financial Diet,

where we are going to talk about this,

the French country home that my husband and I purchased this year,

which is for those who do not know my lore, probably seems extremely random.

For those who do, perhaps seems a little less so,

but is nevertheless an extremely major financial decision both in terms of the actual

purchasing of it and in terms of what we plan to do with this

house.

And as someone who believes in financial transparency above all,

I really like to kind of break down all of my own financial milestones,

and I also like to demystify things.

A lot of times we see people doing stuff

that looks really cool on social media,

and the question is how do they afford that?

Now, I'll be honest, in a lot of cases,

people are just not disclosing for a huge variety of reasons.

I'm looking at you, nepo babies.

New York City is certainly full of them.

But also because a lot of people don't like talking about the nitty-gritty of

money or even logistics,

and I know that for a lot of people,

eventually doing something like owning a home in another country

or even in this country is something

that they would really like to have

and know more about how it actually gets done.

So, I want to both for practical reasons,

but also for all of the nosy in the comment section,

of which I am absolutely one.

I love being nosy about money.

I really wanted to break this down on the channel.

But I also wanted to break it down

because the home is not really just a home for us.

It's kind of my big life project going forward with my husband

that will exist very much in parallel with the work

that we do here at the financial diet,

but is where I really want to be moving

and putting my money for a variety of reasons

that will will talk about.

But before I get into all of the numbers,

what we're doing with the house, all of that,

I just want to really highlight that for those who don't know the channel,

I started it about 10 years ago

because I was in a truly catastrophically bad relationship with money.

I grew up in a lot of financial instability.

I don't have a college degree.

Um I used to have tons of credit card debt, ruined credit.

I'd been uh arrested

because when apparently when you don't pay uh your moving violations for a long

enough period of time,

they suspend your license, and if you keep driving on it,

they will in fact arrest you.

I was in a really really bad financial place

and had to do a lot of things

that I really did not want to do at

that time and uh had an extremely avoidant relationship to money

and just really felt

as if I would never have a financial future,

that I would never be in a financially secure enough place to I mean,

rent my own apartment, let alone to one day own two properties.

So, I really do want to highlight

that um this entire channel

and this business that we have here at TFD has kind of unintentionally been

a little bit of a long-term documentary on changing your relationship with money,

but I also wanted to be about what we do once we have

that money.

If you are privileged enough to have built wealth,

what do you do with it?

What's important to you?

What do you want uh to leave in the world.

And especially for those of us who don't plan to have children,

not only is that a lot of money freed up on the day-to-day.

I mean, I look at the child care costs

that my friends pay here in the city,

and I'm truly gobsmacked.

It is often literally more than my mortgage here in the city.

Not only does it free that up, it also frees up your future.

Like I don't have children

that I'm I'm to like pass an estate down to.

And obviously we could get into the estate tax and all of that.

Suffice to say, once you are freed up from the day-to-day struggle of not

having enough,

the question then becomes, well,

what do you do with the money that you have?

And so, for all of those reasons,

it's very important for me to discuss these things.

Um it's also important for me to highlight,

as those of you who watch the channel know,

we work with a very small number of partners

that we use to help support this company.

All products that we use uh and really vouch for personally,

um and without which it would not have been possible for me to to

make these huge financial moves,

let alone to run the company in the in the way that we do.

So, if you are interested in getting a good budgeting app,

that is probably the first thing

that completely transformed my relationship to money

and got me out of my avoidance cycle.

I highly recommend Monarch.

I've used it before we started working together.

Uh I check it every day multiple times a day.

It is really good for just the day-to-day management of money,

but it's also good for things like tracking your net worth,

really allocating your savings and your goals, and all of that.

It's also very good

if you live with other people

or you have a partner

and you want to split finances.

Um it's just to me a perfect budgeting app.

I was always on the hunt for a replacement for Mint once

that went away cuz I was a big Mint user.

Monarch was started by people who used to work at Mint.

Cannot say enough good things.

It is also they don't sell your There are no ads.

They don't sell your data to third parties.

Like, it's also a very ethical app in my view, and uh yeah,

if you use our link,

you get uh a huge discount on your first year,

and you get to do a free trial with them.

So, use that.

And also, a huge part of the wealth

that we built that allowed us to make this purchase was made through investing

in the stock market.

I don't know if you've read,

but there's been a couple good years in a row here

that we greatly benefited from.

If you have been thinking about getting invested,

want to do it in an easy kind of low-lift way,

are a little overwhelmed by the concept, I highly recommend Betterment.

A lot of us here at TFD use it.

Um it's a great investing app that you can just set up really quickly,

literally in minutes, and just start getting invested in a really broad, diversified,

safe way.

None of that like crazy individual stock picking.

Um because yeah, investing in the market, especially long-term,

is going to be one of the absolute keys to building wealth.

Now, obviously, my husband

and I are quite invested in real estate

as well between our apartment here in New York City

and now this home in France,

but all of that is to say those two things were absolutely key to

me uh getting here on my financial journey

and being able to do something like this.

To get to first and foremost the nitty-gritty of this house,

how much it cost, why we own it, all of that.

Uh for context, I did already share about this on my personal Instagram about

a month and a half ago,

so I a lot of you are probably already aware

if you follow me there.

I also wrote a full newsletter breaking down all of the finances of this,

which goes into a lot more detail than this video will,

so that's also linked below.

It's free.

Um you can go give

that a read if you want more kind of nitty-gritty.

But, to give some context, so why France is kind of a first question.

For those who don't know,

I started speaking French quite young um

and when I uh got out of community college

and was looking for the university I was going to go to,

I actually got accepted into many really good ones here in the US,

but didn't get much in the way of financial aid.

So, my decision was to move to France

so I could study there for basically the cost of community college um

because I could do it in French

and get a degree there.

I moved over there.

I was an au pair.

I was also a tutor

and I was going to school all at once

and that is where I met my now husband.

So, I have been with my husband for 15 years um

and we have lived in the US

and New York City primarily for the past 13 years.

So, we spent the first 2 years of our relationship over there

and then moved here.

Well, almost 13 years.

It'll be 13 years at the end of this year,

so let's say first 2 and 1/2 years we were over there.

Either way, so I have been with my husband again for 15 years,

been married for almost 8 years.

Uh so, I am a French citizen.

I think I've mentioned that before in other videos,

but I became a French citizen this year as well.

But, even prior to being a French citizen,

we have spent really significant portions of every year in France.

Uh obviously, all his whole family is there.

A huge amount of our friends are there.

We just have a lot of personal ties to France.

And one of the many,

many reasons why we knew it was not the right decision for us to

have children was because we wanted

that freedom to be able to spend large periods of time in France.

Um we've also gotten now into the habit of like last year I made

several videos about this over on my Tik Tok,

but we rented a large house for a month

so that all of our friends could come visit

and stay with us without having to worry about accommodations.

Basically, having that part of our life in France uh usually at least three

to let's say five months each year in France became a really important part

of our life and how we were able to sort of give back a

little bit to our friends

and family by offering them these beautiful places to stay.

And also really removing the burden from our family over there um in terms

of going to see them

and spending significant time with them.

So, that has really been a defining part of my life

and part of our budget.

Up until this year,

we were spending somewhere between like 20

and 30,000 dollars a year um on the France of it all.

So, although we are now spending more because of this home that we own,

it is not a jump from zero to what we are now paying.

It was a jump from 20 to 30,000 dollars a year between rentals

and traveling around within the country

and getting back and forth

and all of that um

and other incidentals,

renting cars, um you know, shuttling people around,

like all of the things that we would have to do while in France.

So, that was already a significant part of our discretionary budget.

We also for context, like don't travel that much elsewhere.

I don't know if any people watching this are from one country married to

a person from another country,

but when that is your case,

often your travel really just amounts to going back

and forth between the two countries

that you're both from.

And that's really our case.

So, we also comparatively don't have a very high sort of like vacation

or other travel budget.

That is really where our discretionary money has gone for the past several years.

I also want to give the context that our company,

so the channel you're watching is called The Financial Diet.

The Financial Diet is actually a company.

We do more than just YouTube.

We are entirely women owned and operated, seven employees,

plus we have um our our our founders and partners.

And we are lucky enough we did for a

while have an office

that we went to about 2 days a week post-pandemic,

but um we decided last year

that we were just going to go fully remote

because it worked better for everyone.

We even have some employees who don't

or didn't live in the New York City area,

so it was just a little bit more convenient for everyone.

And also it's just a really big big expense that we didn't need.

So, now we rent our studio space for filming things like our podcast

when we need to,

but otherwise we all kind of work from wherever we we want to.

We also are on a 4-day work week for 6 years now,

and we have 6 weeks PTO.

So, flexibility geographically and otherwise has always been a very important part of our

work culture.

We do a lot of content here about it on TFD

as you can see from this video we recently did about the return to

the return to office propaganda,

which I personally am extremely angry about.

And it's not just me, right?

Like I benefit hugely from it

because I live a a big part of each year in another country,

but also like for example,

we have multiple mothers including mothers of multiple children on the team.

And for them having flexibility over where

and when they work is of huge value not just in terms of their

daily schedules,

but also in terms of having to pay less for child care.

Um that's also something worth saying is

that part of the reason

that we have historically been able to dedicate this much of our budget toward

the time that we spend in France uh is

because we don't have any costs associated with child care.

But all of that is to say us being this sort of remote-first company

that operates in this way,

it hugely benefits me,

but it's also very beneficial for I mean really everyone on the team,

especially the the moms on our team.

And also shout out to I don't know if she'll watch this,

but one of our key team members is currently on her second maternity leave

with us.

So, hi Rachel, if you're watching this.

I hope your everything's going well

and can't wait to see you

when you get back.

So, we had known for a few years now

that owning a home in France would be a goal for us

because we were spending

so much money on on it already,

living in and out of rentals.

I have enormous beef with Airbnb like most of us do, hotels,

crashing with family, which is its own can of worms.

Maybe it saves you money, but at what cost?

So, we knew that this was something that we really wanted to do.

However, we are still primary residents of New York City.

We are fiscal residents of the United States.

My husband is a green card holder, so he is, you know,

on his track to citizenship, but not yet a citizen.

So, being in New York at least 6 months

and a day essentially per year is still of huge importance to us.

So, we knew that if we were going to have a home,

we wanted it to really serve a greater purpose than just being a place

for us to live

when we're there for the summer.

Now, both because I would be cancelled into the next dimension

if I suddenly became a landlord,

which I truly have no interest in doing.

I'm not running an Airbnb.

I will not ever do anything like that.

But also because I have literally no desire to do that.

I'm against it for a lot of personal and ethical reasons,

but I also do not have any desire to be a landlord.

I also do not have any desire to make money in that way.

That is not how I'm trying to make money is by charging people rent

to stay in the homes

that I live.

We knew that we wanted it to be a certain kind of house,

to be a larger home that could also serve kind of hospitality purposes,

both because we often have people who come stay with us.

We have a lot of friends and family.

I mean, just in a single month last year we hosted 26 people, including,

you know, families, including all different kind of configurations.

So, we knew we wanted that kind of big family country house,

but we also knew

that we wanted it to serve um a very specific purpose,

uh which we will get into shortly what the actual home is going to

serve for.

Um but first, for my nosey girls out there like myself,

girls after my own heart,

uh just to give you a quick rundown on the finances.

So, for context, we already own uh an apartment here in New York City

where I'm currently filming.

I did a whole video breaking down the finances of that,

but we were very,

very lucky to get our home at really a a a just an unprecedented

time in New York City real estate history where you were both having really,

really depressed home values.

We, for context, purchased our home in New York City for about $750,000,

which was drastically lower than it had been pre-COVID.

Almost every other housing market in the country really exploded during COVID

and went way up.

Ours actually went way down here in New York City, especially in Manhattan,

so we were able to really benefit from those lower costs.

And we were also able to benefit from COVID-era interest rates.

Our interest rate is 2.8%,

so we were really we got

that sort of double whammy

that kept our housing cost extremely low.

My mortgage here in New York City, which I pay every month myself,

is $2,195, which, for context,

if we were to rent this apartment as renters,

it would probably be in like the $4,000 to $4,300 range.

So, we massively lucked out.

We also brought a large down payment.

I'm not going to derail this video with all the finances of our New

York City apartment.

You can watch that at the link that I provided here.

Let suffice to say, we had very low housing costs comparatively,

so we were able to kind of take on these larger costs for our

our second property.

So, for context, our home in France, which is in the south of France,

it's in the Provence region, which is if you've ever if you've ever been,

you know, one of the most beautiful places in the world.

And I'm actually just going to read off of my notes

so that I don't get anything wrong here,

but we uh purchased the home for 862,000 euros,

uh which is significantly lower than asking cuz, you know, we love a deal.

And we brought a 262,000 euro down payment from our savings in France.

Um that roughly translates to just shy of a million dollars for the actual

home cost and then just around $300,000 for the down payment.

Our interest rate on the French home is just around 3%

and so our monthly total all-in cost is around $4,700 a month.

So, all-in, our total home costs between New York

and France are around $7,000 monthly,

which is a huge amount for some.

It is also drastically less than many people pay in New York City just

for their one mortgage

or for their rent.

So, it's relative, but it is absolutely extremely privileged and I'm outing myself here.

I'm a member of the bourgeoisie.

Um what can I say?

When the guillotines come out, I think I'll be in that line.

I It is what it is, but that's roughly the numbers we're talking about.

In terms of what I pay, so as I mentioned,

I pay for um 100% of our mortgage here in New York City.

I also currently outearn my husband.

Um he is not currently working full-time

and I currently earn a $108,000 salary from TFD plus uh somewhere around 100,000,

100 to let's say 150,000 dollars a year uh from my books

and from other freelance projects.

So, my take-home is close to the $250,000 mark

when everything's all tallied up,

but he uh has significant savings from his career.

He has been uh at a company he works in tech

and he's been through an IPO

and uh he's also worked in companies

that have sold.

Uh so, he has substantial savings.

So, he is able to offer more for the down payments

and then I take on the monthly payments

and that's just kind of how it's worked between us.

I am not currently paying all 12 months of our mortgage in France.

I'm currently at about nine months that I can afford to pay for,

but my goal is to get to a place where I can cover 100%

of it.

But so yeah, these about $7,000 a month of our costs are going into

homes now,

which again, it's all relative, but it is quite a lot of money.

Now, the real question then becomes, so if we live in this house now,

generally we're saying May to September is when we're in the home,

that roughly corresponds with the time

that we were already spending in France uh

as renters,

what do we do with our home uh in New York when we're gone,

and what do we do with the home in France when we're gone?

So, our home in New York,

what we have historically done is we just give it to friends

and family who are coming through New York.

Um for example, in for June and July, one of uh my dear friends,

her daughter is coming to New York um to do an internship,

and so she's going to live here um

so she doesn't have to pay for housing costs.

Uh we also have a lot of friends who come

and visit family who are in the New York City area,

and we leave them our home.

But so basically, we just leave it to people.

We have a friend who's moving

and needs a place to live between their old lease ending

and their new lease starting.

They're going to take it over for a few weeks.

Um but generally, we just leave it

as a place for people who need a place in New York City to

use.

That's kind of historically how it's been done.

We may change that in the future

and do something a little bit more formal with it,

like we are doing with the home in France, but we'll kind of see.

As to the house in France,

why we knew that we wanted to look for a very specific type of

property that checked a lot of boxes.

I'm not going to get too in-depth about all of the boxes it checked

because I don't want to accidentally dox myself.

But we knew we really wanted it to function

as a working um artist's residency,

as an artist studio.

So, one of the features

that this home has is a fully functioning artist workshop

that used to be owned by a local sculptor,

and is really kind of well set up for people to work on artistic

projects of really all scales.

Because what this home in France will serve

as for for the September to May season

when we're not there um is a grant-based artist residency for women.

Now, that's going to be a very flexible term, right?

So, that can mean someone who's working on a novel,

it can be a sculptor, it can be a painter.

We're going to keep a very sort of open mind about the artistic projects

that these women can be working on,

but we really just want to create a space where women can come,

enjoy the home, enjoy the studio, work on their projects,

and not have to worry about money.

So, in addition to being able to live there for free,

they will also be receiving a monthly stipend.

Initially, I will be covering all of these costs once we have sort of

created a proof of concept for uh the residency,

which will be registered as a nonprofit here in New York City,

and therefore governed with, you know,

a board and all of the other things

that nonprofits are required to have to be compliant,

and of course all of the finances of

that will be publicly available

as a result.

Once we've had a proof of concept,

I likely will fundraise to some extent uh to help uh essentially support more

women.

We're going to start with one woman at a time,

probably for a 6-week period.

We haven't finalized yet,

but one woman at a time coming to work on her project,

but it's a large home.

So, the goal is to have seasons where we have, let's say,

four women at a time who are not only working on their projects,

but also living together and all receiving their stipends as well.

Also, as a means for funding this,

we will be having a few paid retreats in the summer season

when I am there.

People will be staying off-site,

but a lot of the actual sort of retreat content will happen in the

home.

Workshops, classes, uh things like that will also be doing, you know,

art tours and wine tastings and, you know, food trips and all of that.

Um but I do plan to host retreats in the summer season

that will be paid for small groups of uh people,

probably 12 to 15 people at a time,

um that will help to support the overall initiatives of the home.

But for the majority of the year, it will be a nonprofit artists residency,

which is very important for me for a few reasons.

One, probably first and foremost, so I don't talk about this a ton,

but my father is uh an artist.

He's a career illustrator.

And I'm going to get emotional, but we're just going to say it anyway.

Um I know we've talked a lot about AI on the channel over the

past few months,

and it's a very hot topic,

and I have extremely complex feelings about it

that I'm not going to get into uh off you know,

I'm not going to derail this conversation with it.

You can watch my hour-long digression about this here if you're interested.

The way that AI in particular is coming for art is um just really,

really, really sad to me.

Even like my my cousin is an artist.

She illustrated my whole hosting book, and like I'm seeing my father,

who's an artist toward the latter part of his career, and seeing my cousin,

who is an artist toward the early part of her career,

seeing how both of them how AI is just making their lives harder every

single day,

and how much we are devaluing human creation,

and how much we are divesting from

that as as a

as a species is um just incredibly demoralizing,

incredibly demoralizing.

Like I feel so lucky to have been able to grow up in an

artistic environment,

um and to be an artist myself,

and AI is coming just as much for the written word.

The The CEO of Barnes & Noble the other day was literally talking about

how he's going to stock AI books on his shelf,

and I was like, "Cool.

Wasn't planning to have a good day today, but now I for sure won't."

So, being able to create a space for people to work on art for

art's sake,

and to not have to worry about money, is just really important to me.

I know that it is not a solution that will scale forever,

but I do think

that it is a little thing

that I can do

that you know,

it's just a little piece of the solution.

And we The culture of being a patron of the arts, I think,

used to be a much more present throughout um culture and throughout society,

and something that we really looked toward people who were privileged enough to to

have built wealth to really reinvest

that in all different things

and of course other philanthropic efforts are also very important to me

and we've talked about

that a lot on this channel with regards to charitable giving

and and volunteering and things like

that.

All of that is still important,

but I also really believe in the profound value of being a patron of

the arts.

So having that residency,

I think is in a small way a little middle finger toward the way

that we are devaluing art.

And again, this will be for all artistic creation.

It is not just limited to painters or sculptors or what have you,

but I do I want to make sure

that there's some emphasis on the visual arts also

because the area where this workshop is located is in a very in a

town with an extremely rich artistic history.

Van Gogh lived there and painted some of his master works there.

And you know, it is harder

and harder for young artists to find space to work,

space to show their art.

You know, one of the things I really look forward to doing in the

summer is hosting,

you know, shows for artists

and having them come bring their work

and and hosting free events for them

and you know,

doing everything I can to help support the culture of artistic creation with with

no cost associated and

and really provide that space for for the town

as well as for you know,

all of the people that you know,

follow me and even some

that don't and we'll just find about find out about this elsewhere.

So doing this is yes,

it is an investment in the home

that we will live in for part of the year

and have our friends

and family visit with us for part of the year.

Sure, and it's you know,

money that is now being invested in in real estate

that otherwise was just being spent on rentals every year.

As I said, it was a very substantial amount of money

that we were already spending.

But it is also an investment in really what I want the second half

of my life to look like especially coming like oh,

I'm going to get so emotional,

but if you come from not a lot financially and uh never really thought,

I mean especially like not having a college degree

and all of these things like I never ever dreamed

that having these things would be possible for me.

Like I feel that I've gotten

so lucky with everything in my life

but especially with this company

and like I say it all the time

but I really want to repeat it.

The Financial Diet which is now a company

that like employs seven women

and tons of other contractors

and has built this beautiful life

and we have this four-day work week

and all these other things

that I'm so and you know our benefits

and everything else like I'm

so proud and happy for what we've been able to do

but none of that would have happened

if John and Hank Green didn't give us a $5,000 little check grant to

start the company when no one

when it wasn't a company

and you know my co-founder Lauren

and I who's going to come visit the house this summer like we talk

about that all the time.

This company makes like seven figures a year

and it all exists

and it's all possible

because of you know people who had been lucky

and successful investing in us

and you know I think about for the second half of my life like

of course I'm extremely passionate about what we do here especially

because this channel has become

so much more political over the years

and so much more you know mission driven in terms of not just the

way finances are but how we want our economy to be.

I have so much privilege being a dual citizen of France

and the US you know even just for something

as simple as like

if I needed like

if I didn't have insurance I could go back there

and get treated medically for free

and I want so badly for us to be working within a better system

here in the US

and we can obviously afford it.

It's just a question of how we allocate it

and so I am very proud of the work

that we do here

and and the way

that we operate as a company

and I am so honored

and humbled to work with the women

that I work with every day.

Like I I know

that it gets called

when people are like we're a family here

but like many of the women at our company like we've worked together for

a decade plus.

Um you know one of our as I mentioned,

one of our employees is on her second maternity leave with us

and she lives right by me,

so I just got to meet her her her new daughter

and I just like,

I'm so grateful for all of that,

but I'm so aware

that all of this good fortune is

because someone who had the means invested in us.

In a small way, sure,

but also in a way

that completely changed how we thought about what was possible.

And so I think that, you know, in in doing this,

in creating this residency,

like I want to do give

that to so many other women throughout the years

and have them say,

you know, maybe I can do this full-time.

Or even if they don't,

like to just have six

or eight weeks or whatever to to just focus on their work on their

creative work and then really enjoy it

and just do art for art's sake.

You know, the other side of the coin is it's not just

that AI is coming for everything

and making it so much harder to make a living

as an artist,

it's also the fact that we live, especially on social media,

in an environment that absolutely crushes creative potential

because it makes everything into metrics

and a performance and views

and clicks and all of these things

and monetization and you start to obsess over,

you know, how something is received to the point

that you forget about the joy of creating it.

I say all of this to say like I do hope one day

that like,

you know, after ATFD is retired or passed on to someone else,

which is my ideal scenario,

someone young who's also figuring it out financially

and in a different place in their life.

I really just want to to create this space

and and spend more

and more of my time working on it

and investing in it from a non-profit perspective

so that more and more of those little seeds can be planted.

So, financially, as I said,

it is certainly a luxury

and something that we are heavily investing in compared to our overall finances,

It is definitely, I think, a financial advisor.

I mean, when we talked to our financial advisor about it, I was like,

"Mama, you sure?

Like, this is you guys are going to be happily invested in real estate

compared to everything else."

But, I I don't know.

I believe in the We got very lucky with our home in New York

getting such a great price on it

and such a great interest rate.

And we have made the choice that we don't want children of our own,

which frees up a lot financially, but also logistically,

and means that we can do something like this.

And I really, really just want to focus on what a life

that is about passing on the gift of creativity

and the and the space to do it

as much as possible.

Um I really want to focus on that,

and especially in our nepo baby era,

where it feels like the only people who ever have the freedom to try

anything or to make a mistake

or to have fun are people who come from great wealth.

It's a complete side note, but I saw a video on Tik Tok,

or no, on Instagram Reels,

cuz I'm like on a break from Tik Tok right now,

the other day about the What was it called?

Like, the wealthy gaze.

This was a French video, so I don't remember exactly what they called it,

but basically, they're like, "So much of our media, like especially film and television,

is automatically through an upper middle class or above perspective,

because no one who comes from less is ever telling stories.

And so often, the only stories you get about people who aren't upper middle

class or above are tragedies

or are struggle stories.

And it's like, people from all socioeconomic brackets have all kinds of experiences

and lives and stories to tell.

They also fall in love

and have fun and cry

and go to work

and do all these other things,

but we never, ever hear their stories

because they don't have the space to tell them.

So, also creating that space is really, really important to me.

And you know, I I know

if anyone's making it to the end of this video to be perfectly honest.

Maybe they'll just yell at me in the comments for, you know,

being a a rich to which I say, "Guilty as charged."

But, I do think that, you know, in the personal finance space in particular,

there's so much focus on making money, growing your net worth, retiring early,

all of this stuff.

But, I I think for me the existential question becomes,

if you have the money, if you have the flexibility,

if you have the time, what do you do with that wealth?

Where does it go?

Again, every good thing that's really ever happened in my life has been a

result of someone taking a chance on me,

or giving me a little startup cash,

or being willing to help me in some way.

And so, this will be a little space for that to happen,

and also for us to live for part of the year.

So, look out for on this channel,

I'll be talking about the residency as it builds.

Um I'm going through the process now of getting like all the nonprofit stuff

set up,

which is in and of itself a freaking masterclass.

Like, good lord, this is like involved.

Luckily, one of my best friends, this is what she does.

She's a nonprofit consultant who helps them, you know,

set up and be compliant and run and operate and all of that.

So, she's helping me, which is a huge burden lifted,

cuz it's so hard to even know where to start.

Um but, so I'll be documenting a lot of that on my newsletter,

and also here on the channel.

Um I will also, of course,

be sharing once applications are open for the first residencies.

As I said, we're going to start with one resident at a time,

but then we'll grow to to host multiple at a time.

I will also be sharing about the events

and retreats that we're doing here through the house,

and, you know, how how all of that will work,

uh cuz those will be really fun as well.

And yeah, overall, it is a very special time in my life.

I, as we've discussed many times, including in these this video,

I don't plan to have my own children,

and that means that I kind of have a blank slate in terms of

where a lot of my life

and time goes with my husband

and this feels in some ways just

as big of a life decision

as having kids and please don't come for me.

I know it's not as hard.

I know I don't have to get up in the middle of the >>

>> I don't have to get up in the middle of the night

and breastfeed the house.

Like I get it.

It's not as serious,

but it does feel like a major line in the sand

and one that I'm just

so excited and I will be sharing with you.

We will also continue to be doing all of the stuff

that we do on this channel.

My interviews with the women over 50, so many of them just getting good.

I've been crying like every single day in the studio

because these are such amazing stories from these women

and I love them.

They've like become my friends.

That podcast has changed my life.

Like I didn't even care I don't I don't care

if anyone watches it at this point.

Like it has been healing for me in ways

that I can't even explain to you on this video

and we will be having all of our beloved guest voices come on the

channel.

We will be doing more economic coverage,

more policy coverage leading up to the midterms.

We're going to get really locked the in to flip everything.

Everything with blue wave, blue wave.

Like we're going to be doing

so much of that on the channel

and I'll be documenting this whole process.

Sometimes you'll see me filming here.

Sometimes you'll see me filming from France

as I have historically been doing all the time on this channel,

but now it'll be in one place instead of a bunch of different rented

Airbnb's that I'm so excited to never have to go to again.

And yeah, I hope you will stick around for the journey.

Thank you so much to John

and Hank Green for

that initial $5,000 seed money without

which none of this would have been possible

and yeah,

I love you guys.

I feel really lucky.

I feel really excited and um yeah, have a good summer.

I know I will.

I'll see you on the channel.