How I Built Belonging: with Jean Chatzky
Millie Arora and Tamara Moellenberg in conversation
with Jean Chatzky, CEO and co-founder of HerMoney
Jean Chatzky is the CEO and co-founder of HerMoney and the host of the HerMoney with Jean Chatzky podcast. Jean spent 25 years as the financial editor for NBC Today and was a regular contributor to CNN, MSNBC, and The Oprah Winfrey Show before she founded HerMoney, a digital media company that aims to improve women’s relationship to financial management, rooted in the idea that women have different needs and considerations around money. Beginning with the podcast, Jean has transformed HerMoney into an empowered, inclusive, and trusting on- and offline community through a network of digital offerings, coaching programmes, and in-person events, bringing thousands of people from all backgrounds together around the often difficult and charged topic of money. Here, as part of our How I Built Belonging interview series, she talks to Millie Arora and Tamara Moellenberg about creating judgment-free safe spaces, fostering belonging in digital communities, and the importance of leading with vulnerability and intimacy.
Tamara Moellenberg Jean, how did you get started with HerMoney?
Jean Chatzky I started her money after many years of giving speeches about personal finance in a lot of different rooms where all the women felt comfortable asking questions and telling their stories, but also being in rooms of men and women where that just didn’t happen as much. What was really apparent to me after decades of anecdotal research was that we needed a safe space where we could have these conversations. So when I had the opportunity to launch a podcast, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to have an ongoing conversation with women about money – and a community started to gather around that. We started a mailbag segment and got tons of questions. We still get tons of questions from women about their money, about their financial situations, about their life situations. Because of that experience, we decided to launch HerMoney as a company. We’re now a website, we produce newsletters, we offer coaching programmes, and we continue to be a safe space for women to come together and talk about money.
Tamara In our work, we see how valuable it is when organisations can help facilitate people connecting with each other. How have you been able to foster that interpersonal side of belonging?
Jean Pre-Covid, we gathered women together for what we called HerMoney Happy Hours. We created a deck of cards comprised of leading questions to get women talking about money. Those experiences are highly communal and the women who participate really enjoy them. Often they exchange phone numbers to meet up without me afterwards. Also in our coaching programmes we have built in an element of group work. We have two coaching programmes: one is called FinanceFixx, which is more about saving, smarter spending, debt repayment, budgeting, cash-flow management. Every week for eight weeks, they meet with their group and coach, and the group fosters camaraderie, accountability, shares tips, habits, hacks, wins, but also their frustrations – and that builds belonging. The other coaching programme is what we call InvestingFixx. It’s an investing club for women. Karen Finerman, who is a professional investor and appears on CNBC, and I teach investing twice a month on Zoom to a growing number of women who are voting on which investments get added to our group portfolio, which is, by the way, beating the market. We have a portal through which they can communicate when we’re not in session, a safe portal where people can ask questions, get answers, talk to each other. And finally, we have a private Facebook group, which is up to about 20,000 people where women come together, ask questions, help each other out. All of those things are going strong.
Tamara Safe spaces are so critical when it comes to a topic like managing your money because it’s so loaded for so many people. How have you gone about concretely creating those safe spaces?
Jean We’ve been overt from the very beginning that there’s no judgment. We all work really hard for whatever money we have. And we all have different lives with different needs and different wants – and wants are fine, right? There’s no reason for me to get judgmental about how you are using your resources. They’re your resources. It’s your choice. I just want you to have all of the information that you need in order to make the best possible decision for you and your family. We have been very upfront with our community that we’re not judging. If we see that people are getting judgmental or if they’re offering information that’s incorrect or damaging, we shut that down. But making somebody feel safe means making them feel seen and heard and doing that without allowing what you value to colour what you’re saying about what they value. I come to all this as an English major. I’m not an economist. I’m not a financial planner. I don’t have an MBA. I learned personal finance on the job, and I really believe that if I can understand it and figure it out, then you can understand it and figure it out. Because I’ve made all the mistakes, but also because it’s really not rocket science. It’s one of those fields that has been overly complicated thanks to people who are trying to sell you stuff. And so we just clear that out.
“Every week for eight weeks, they meet with their group and coach, and the group fosters camaraderie, accountability, shares tips, habits, hacks, wins, but also their frustrations – and that builds belonging.”
Tamara We’ve seen that online forms of connection for many people sometimes can stay at a very superficial level and don’t satisfy that deeper need to belong – to really feel a part of something. As a digital-first company, how have you been able to help your members find a more authentic connection, both with you, with the topics, but also with each other?
Jean Podcasts are incredibly intimate. You’ve got the host, the guest, the show. They’re in your ears. You’re walking your dog and they’re with you. You’re in your car and they’re with you. You’re having a restless night and you put them on and they’re with you. They’re part of your day-to-day existence in a way that the television show that you keep on in the background while you’re cooking dinner is not. I think that’s why our listeners feel like we are family and we feel the same way about them. We know this because of the letters that they write to us where they lay out their finances in detail, they tell me all about their lives and we try to help them with whatever it is they need help with. The same thing happens in our in-person groups and on Facebook. What I think is important to remember about the whole HerMoney universe is that there are some people who don’t listen to podcasts, who don’t go on Facebook, and there are some people who don’t want to meet a coach online. But by offering a lot of different points of entry, we’re meeting people where they are.
Millie Arora On that point of intimacy, I’m curious about the different ways that plays out between groups of women that maybe don’t know each other but also groups of women who do know each other – there are differences there in how you foster intimacy, vulnerability, and sharing your finances. Money can be so taboo, particularly with people you know socially.
Jean I’m a reporter, that’s what I’ve always done, and so I know how reporters work. You give a little to get a little. When I am facilitating a group, I talk about myself: I talk about my divorce, my mistakes, my kids, the ridiculous amount of money that I spent because my dog got an ear infection. I share. I know, you know, and my listeners know that I talk about my life. I think that helps; you can’t ask people to share with you unless you’re willing to share with them.
Millie On the topic of how different people respond, I remember hearing Sallie Krawcheck say that when she launched her investment company Ellevest, on the one hand she was overwhelmed by the number of women who were thrilled at what she was doing, but also shocked at the number of women who pushed back against the idea that women needed a women-only investment solution, suggesting a platform for women is an “inferior product”. I’m curious about your thoughts and reactions to that, and on identity-based or gender-based belonging more widely?
Jean I’ve had the same experience as Sally has. My friend Jane Bryant Quinn – who was a personal finance reporter for many years and maybe the best there ever was – likes to say that money isn’t pink or blue, it’s green. And she’s right. She’s 100% right about that. If Apple is a good stock for men, Apple is a good stock for women. But that’s not what we’re doing here. We are offering you a variety of places in which you might feel comfortable learning and asking you to come try it out. And the fact is, women need to know about money. The fact that women earn less, the fact that the gender gap is persistent and pervasive, the fact that women take breaks from the workforce to care for older parents, and the fact that women live longer – by putting that into the equation, you come out with the fact that we need to put away more for these lives that we’re going to have because we’re going to earn less and need to make it last a longer period of time. So I am a fan of what Sallie is doing. We are both very much on team woman.
“You give a little to get a little… you can’t ask people to share with you unless you’re willing to share with them.”
Tamara You’ve mentioned that in designing your podcasts and your newsletters, you’re always thinking about women from different backgrounds and different walks of life. One of the things that we’ve seen in our work is that many young people, often from minority backgrounds or people who’ve been felt excluded from the financial system, are increasingly drawn to TikTok or Finfluencers – these alternative spaces. How have you gone about bringing in people who are more in the margins?
Jean We’re very intentional about helping our whole community feel seen, so when it comes to booking guests on the podcast, we are always looking for diversity in genders, diversity in ethnicities, diversity in ages. But we don’t stop there. We do the same when we are hiring freelance writers; we do the same when we’re deciding who to quote in a story. It’s all the different ways that you – as a brand – show up. They all matter. And I am friendly with the other influencers in my space. I’ve mentored a lot of them, and a lot of them have worked for me. I am incredibly proud of the fact that I have brought a lot of women along in the personal finance arena – it’s something I feel really good about.
Tamara I’m hearing you describe it as instead of having a competitor mindset, you actually have a community mindset.
Jean Yes. I know I’m not everybody’s cup of tea. Not everybody is going to listen to me, but everybody needs to know about their money and they all need to find the person or the voice or the site or the podcast or the source that makes sense to them. And I want them to be able to do that. Being competitive when the topic is this important doesn’t make any sense to me.
Millie What were some of the lessons you learned as a self-taught personal finance reporter that you carry with you today?
Jean I think I’m a fairly typical woman when it comes to personal finance. My second to last book is called Women with Money. I went out and interviewed hundreds of women about what they want from their money. That was the first question that I asked them, “What do you want?” And I got a lot of answers. I want to buy a house. I want to buy a second house. I want to have enough money to retire. But overlaying all of these from the vast majority of women that I interviewed was this very overt need for safety and security. Women talked about wanting not to just own a home, but to own a home with a paid off mortgage; not just to own a car, but to own a car with backup cameras and blind spot indicators and every possible airbag and other safety feature. I realised in doing all of these interviews that I’m really typical. I got divorced at 40. I have a real bias toward safety and security that women like me have to watch out for, because it can get in the way of accomplishing the things that we need to accomplish with our money in order to amass enough to support ourselves through a comfortable retirement. We need to be investing, and that means taking risk. And for many of us, that is a hard thing to do. There’s a reason that behavioural finance has become a really popular and fascinating discipline, because even really smart people make really stupid moves with money because we’re human.
“Everybody needs to know about their money and they all need to find the source that makes sense to them… Being competitive when the topic is this important doesn’t make any sense to me.”
Tamara Are there any tips or principles that you could extract from your work that you’d want to share with leaders or organisations looking to help people find a deep sense of belonging with one another?
Jean I don’t know that these would blow off the roof, but I would say, know who your people are. You may be surprised. We survey our listeners and our community to figure out not only who they are, but what they want and how we can help them. Then I would say, just listen. A big part of my job is listening to the questions that people are asking. That gives me a huge window into what people actually need, where the pain points are. You can see a lot just in what people tell you about their own stories, their own lives, and if you start to pay attention, then you can discern patterns and figure out what people want from you.
Millie And finally, what are the challenges to scaling community?
Jean Finances, right? The challenge is resourcing. The challenge is figuring out which is exactly the best platform at exactly the best time with exactly the best message. And also, the fact that there’s so much information and so much noise.
Millie This is the challenge that many companies face; how to cut through the noise when trying to build community.
Millie Arora is a partner at ReD. Tamara Moellenberg is a senior manager.