Lauren Torres ("Kitty"), Author at Bitches Get Riches

Our (Ridiculously Simple) Method for Choosing the Right Healthcare Plan For You

April 16, 2024April 12, 2024 Lauren Torres ("Kitty") 4 Comments

Choosing the right healthcare plan can be intimidating, especially if you’re doing it for the first time. The stakes are high; the options are confusing; there’s often a small window during which you can make the choice before you lose your chance; and the whole thing highlights the merciless jank that is our healthcare system!

Luckily, there’s an incredibly easy, 100% foolproof way to make the decision. Here’s our secret to choosing the right healthcare plan:

First, you put it off until there’s only, like, two days left to pick. Then, you forward all your onboarding documents to your dad’s wife, Carol. She is the perfect person for the task, being both generous and detail-oriented in a way you will never understand. Finally, you pick whichever one she says, and never think about it again until your soul walks the halls of the Duat and Anubis weighs your heart against Ma’at’s Feather of Eternal Truth.

Choosing the right healthcare plan? You can do that in your jammies.

… What’s that?

You don’t have a Carol?! My, how awkward for you.

I suppose that means the task falls to me. Heavy is the head that wears the crown of reading fine print! Today I’ll explain a really easy method for choosing the right healthcare plan. If you’ve never chosen your own plan, or you’re faced with a bunch of new options, it’ll help you quickly identify the best one based on your specific healthcare needs.

Today’s article pertains to the American healthcare system. International readers, I’m releasing you early. Use this time to study up on equally important international adulting tasks: navigating Ryanair’s lost baggage policy, keeping poutine from getting soggy, etc.

A Hand-Holding Guide To Planning the End of Your Pet’s Life

March 26, 2024March 25, 2024 Lauren Torres ("Kitty") 24 Comments

Stop. I know you read this title and attempted to turn and flee back out the door. I anticipated this and caught you by the back of your shirt. We need to talk about this now.

If you’re reading this blog, you’re likely Millennial or Gen Z. They’re the largest pie slice of animal lovers—one in three owns a pet. And our attitudes about pets are really intense. Half of us describe loving them more than our own mothers. And all of those pets are doing the absolute worst thing any pet can do: getting old without us.

You likely won’t have experience with being solely, directly responsible for managing a living being’s decline and death. So we’re going to explain what’s gonna happen, and give you our very best insights.

OH, LIKE I DO? I didn't wake up eager to talk about the end of your pet's life but here I am...

I promise to make this discussion as brief, honest, and detached as possible. We’ve written maudlin tear-jerkers about pets before, and I swear this won’t be one of those. But this is a subject that’s sadly present for both of us right now. Life’s given us lemons recently; this guide will be the lemonade. We want to give some guidance to the people who will one day face the same challenge, so they can feel prepared. All of this advice comes straight from our hearts.

At the end, there’s a handy checklist for your convenience. If you do everything on it, you’ll be as ready as you can be for the end of your pet’s life. Many of them are actions you can start taking long before your pet gets grey around the muzzle, so don’t put off reading it.

It’s Not Your Imagination—Secondhand Stuff IS More Expensive Than Ever

December 11, 2023December 10, 2023 Lauren Torres ("Kitty") 23 Comments

Have you noticed that secondhand stuff is more expensive than it used to be? Because I absolutely have!

Since I retired, I’ve been on a bit of a secondhand shopping spree. You see, I inherited almost all of my current furniture. I acquired it randomly from old roommates, friends moving across the country, my grandparents’ downsizing, and the legendary Allston Christmas. Now that work isn’t gobbling up my best hours, I finally have the bandwidth to upgrade these pieces. That rickety side table I found on the side of the road can now be transformed, Cinderella-like, into a charming antique that some sucker let go of for $50!

… Yet I’ve noticed something disturbing. The suckers have grown few and far between.

Dummies selling solid oak headboards they found in Grandma’s attic for a sawbuck are like fireflies. I remember vast clouds of them in my childhood… but now, I’m thrilled if I see a dozen in a season. Where have they gone?

Today, I’m explaining my hypothesis for why secondhand stuff is more expensive than it used to be. I see a variety of factors that have far-reaching impacts on everything we buy and sell. We love noticing inflection points when traditional personal finance wisdom shifts from the “useful” column to the “ok thanks Grandpa” column—and this is definitely one of those moments. Let’s explore the answer together!

The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Salary

November 8, 2023November 8, 2023 Lauren Torres ("Kitty") 16 Comments

We’re Millennials. Which means we graduated from college in 2009, just in time for the Great Recession to really fuck with our job prospects and salary levels. Nevertheless, we persisted, managing to carve careers out of the bleak post-recession landscape, a feat that eventually led to us being amateur career advice-givers right here on the internet!

I lead with all this because circumstances are feeling… familiar. The COVID-19 pandemic has hammered Gen Z especially, just as they’re starting their careers and building independent lives. And no matter your age, the pandemic took a toll on a lot of folks’ livelihoods. They’re facing challenges like what we experienced, and we hate it. So our time has come! Learn from your slightly-elders, younglings!

Graduating in a recession leads to earnings losses of about 9% compared to those who graduate in balmier financial climates. The pay gap takes a full decade to become statistically insignificant. For the average worker, that amounts to five grand in a single year. The lost opportunities to invest some of that income—as well as the recession-graduate’s stymied options for other jobs—creates a staggering wealth gap.

Worst of all, it’s completely fucking unfair, because those affected were kids when this hot mess was cooked up, yet still the ones who have to eat it. You have every right to be salty about that.

So here’s what we suggest you do to get yourself back up to the level you deserve.

5 Horror Movies About Money to Terrify You This Spooktober

October 25, 2023October 25, 2023 Lauren Torres ("Kitty") 15 Comments

Just in time for Halloween, we’re here to pitch five of our favorite horror movies about money. We just noticed it’s been far too long since we wrote something unabashedly silly. Forgive us!

You may not know this about us, but we Bitches are high-key obsessed with scary movies. If we’re hanging out together, odds are high we’ll throw on something with ghosts, ghouls, werewolves, or axe-wielding serial killers. There are three main reasons this genre appeals to us:

Horror movies are creative. They often have tiny budgets, which forces filmmakers to work with what they have and hone in on what matters. Many household names got their start in the proving grounds of horror. It’s a chance to see fascinating examples of undiscovered genius.
Horror movies expose uncomfortable truths about life and society. All great spooky films are about something real. The surface-level scares of a zombie horde are symbolically linked to our deepest anxieties about other people. The vampire is the unknown outsider; the werewolf the uncontrollable id. The horror genre boldly leaps into subjects where comedies and dramas fear to tread.
Adrenaline is a helluva drug. We’re too old to know where to get good drugs. We have to make them the old fashioned way: by abusing our endocrine systems. With art!

And really, isn’t that what’s interesting about money, too? Our ~*whole deal*~ is trying to make the best, most values-aligned decisions we can with limited funds. This article is extremely on-brand and aligned with our core mission. DO NOT try to tell us otherwise!

Today, we’re plugging a few of our favorite horror movies with a financial twist. The terrifying root of each one is something related to money and the power it brings.

Life Insurance: Responsible Investment or Waste of Money?

September 27, 2023September 27, 2023 Lauren Torres ("Kitty") 6 Comments

I didn’t understand anything about life insurance until I was in my late twenties. I’d just started a small blog with a friend (you wouldn’t have heard of it), and it was unclear how many people were reading it. Until one day, when a shocking email arrived in our inbox. A company wanted to give us money to recommend a product.

The product was life insurance.

Jess (that’s Piggy to the uninitiated) and I regarded this offer with the confused-yet-intrigued energy of hungry fish watching a worm wriggle on a hook. Obviously we hadn’t had the audacity to make a preemptive affiliate marketing policy. Life insurance sounded like the kind of thing responsible adults should have, right? And it would be cool to offset the cost of running the site, wouldn’t it? We agreed to take a few days and devote our shower thoughts to the idea.

Like many a wise rainbow trout, we decided against the hook. No matter who you are, easy money is always a fat and juicy temptation. But we agreed we’d rather run the blog at a loss than sell random crap to our readers. Happy with this decision, we sat down to our inbox to find two more unsolicited affiliate offers.

These products were also life insurance.

In the years since, they’ve never stopped coming. We get a new one at least once a month. Now, we have the experience to understand why life insurance companies are so eager to pay bloggers to rep their stuff. Today, we’ll permanently burn that bridge by explaining how it works—and why we think most life insurance isn’t worth it for the majority of our readers.

If Your Employer Refuses To Negotiate Salary, Try These 11 Creative Counteroffers

August 30, 2023January 3, 2024 Lauren Torres ("Kitty") 5 Comments

Have you ever gotten yourself all hyped-up and battle-ready to ask for more money—only to learn your employer REFUSES to negotiate salary?

This happened to me when I was a young professional. I went for a role at a company that tied its job offers to intelligence test scores. (This is not a normal or cool thing to ask, by the way. It’s elitist, ableist, racist, irrelevant, and indicative of really bad leadership. Alas that I was young, dumb, and living on breadcrumb…s.) The recruiter warned me in advance that this employer refused to negotiate salary beyond their initial offer.

Now, the joke was on them! I’m one of those people who needs to make an L-shape with her fingers to tell left from right. And once hired, I’m about as biddable as Spirit, Stallion of the Cimarron. But if you put a test in front of me, I’m gonna destroy it. So by their own stupid system, they were forced to offer me an absurdly high sum. My salary doubled overnight. Although I hated that job and left after six months, it was the best job transition I’ve ever made.

All of which is to say: if a potential employer refuses to negotiate salary, it doesn’t mean that their offer is bad. Internal policies far more benign than the one I just described dictate salary offers. Some employers have a strict system for salaries based on tenure, experience, performance, or job title. Others must adhere to government guidelines or union rules regarding fair salaries.

It also doesn’t mean that the conversation is over. You can ask for so much more than money! When an employer refuses to negotiate salary, they’re giving you leverage to ask for other things. Today, I’ll give you a few ideas for creative counteroffers that will make your life better and sweeten any job transition. Even better, I’ll suggest some simple scripts you can follow to maximize your chances that they’ll say “yes.”

When It Comes to Salary Negotiations, Are You Asking for Enough?

August 22, 2023November 10, 2023 Lauren Torres ("Kitty") 10 Comments

“Oh god, oh god, the hiring manager just asked me about my salary requirements” is a text I’ve gotten a dozen times from friends and coworkers over the years. For a young professional, it’s usually the most fraught moment in the entire hiring process.

And for good reason! How you handle salary negotiations has enormous financial consequences. The right answer can catapult you forward… and the wrong one can set you back years.

How do you know that the number you’re asking for is within the right salary range? And how do you start off on the right foot while negotiate your starting salary? Fear not, my children, for we are here with some tips that will help you make sure you’re not selling yourself short.

Join Us for “Burning the Bootstrap Mentality” at the 2023 Plutus Impact Summit

August 16, 2023August 16, 2023 Lauren Torres ("Kitty") 3 Comments

Kitty will be speaking at the Plutus Impact Summit on September 21-22, 2023. Sign up to attend here!

I have a confession. Piggy and I have been doing a lot of speaking in the past year. But you haven’t seen it, because they’ve been private events and conferences. This reveals a hypocrisy at the core of Bitches Get Riches. We pretend to be women of integrity and bravery, and yap on and on about inclusivity n’ shit, but the cold facts are these:

We’re too cowardly to ask for a +10,000 on those invites.
We wanted to minimize competition over drink tickets and/or cheese boards. Excuse me. I woke up early and brushed my hair. Those Bud Lights and sweating cubes of cheddar on a toothpick are obviously MINE.

But all of that is going to change! Because I’ll be speaking at the Plutus Impact Summit, and you can come too!*

It’s a virtual event running on the afternoons of Thursday and Friday, September 21 and 22. Tickets are dirt cheap, and the first 150 people to register will get a free copy of keynote speaker Farnoosh Torabi’s latest book, A Healthy State of Panic.

The Plutus Foundation is one of our very favorite organizations. They’re a nonprofit dedicated to the financial education of everyone—emphasis on the everyone. Honestly, they’ve done more than anyone we know to spotlight diverse new voices within the personal finance space. They’ve consistently rejected the traditional “suck it up, anyone can do it if they buy apartment buildings instead of food” bullshit we so loathe, and challenged the community to dig deeper and do better.

Given that, it’s no surprise they asked me to join a session called Burning the Bootstrap Mentality alongside Rich Jones and Kevin Payne. LORD, send us MILK, for this panel is going to be SPICY, and I cannot WAIT!

You can see the full agenda here. All of this year’s speakers are undeniably incredible. The lineup includes many of the people we love best and respect most. We’ll plant our lovely asses in the audience for every session. And if the topics interest you too, we hope you’ll join us!

Join us at the 2023 Plutus Impact Summit

*Tragically, because this is a virtual event, you will have to provide your own Heinekens and crudités + elegant tub of ranch dressing.

How Abusive Workplaces Mirror Abusive Relationships

July 26, 2023March 28, 2024 Lauren Torres ("Kitty") 8 Comments

Note: Today’s discussion is about abusive workplaces, abusive relationships, and the common ground between the two. We will talk about high-control relationship models, power imbalances, and manipulation tactics. But we’re not telling any harrowing first-person stories, nor talking about physical or sexual violence. If those are topics you need help navigating, we have an article dedicated to workplace sexual harassment, and another on intimate partner financial abuse.

Earlier this year, Piggy and I delivered a speech on the subject of burnout. That there’s an appetite for advice on this subject among women’s professional associations will, perhaps, not shock you?

As I was researching the impact that burnout has on the body, I got an eerie feeling that the symptoms seemed familiar. I wondered if I’d already written something on this topic and forgotten. (We’ve written several hundred articles apiece, so it happens!)

But no! What was tripping my extremely faulty memory triggers wasn’t a past article about burnout.

It was a past article on domestic violence.

This really got me thinking about all the stories I’ve heard from you, our readers, about burnout. And I started noticing disturbing patterns in the ways those stories were told. As a result, I’ve come to a stronger opinion about the overlap between the psychology of abusive workplaces and abusive relationships.

… Which is that they’re functionally identical.