This week, we’re bringing you a special crossover episode with Lucie Fink — podcast host, video producer, digital educator, and host of “The Real Stuff with Lucie Fink.” In this insightful conversation, Tori details her journey to becoming a multimillionaire, demystifying the concept of “coast FIRE” and the significance of reaching that initial $100,000 savings goal. Tori generously shares her knowledge on effective investment strategies and highlights the power of financial literacy. This discussion goes beyond building wealth — it’s a call to normalize conversations about money, societal norms, boundaries and navigating the balance between privacy and openness in our personal lives.
Key takeaways:
- Financial education and transparency are crucial. Tori emphasizes the importance of financial education from a young age. She attributes her financial success to the early financial education she received from her parents, who taught her how to save, use credit responsibly, and invest.
- Privilege and hard work both played roles in her financial success. While acknowledging her privilege, Tori highlights that her financial achievements are also a result of hard work, strategic financial decisions, and effective savings and investment habits. Her story is a blend of privilege and smart financial practices.
- Salary negotiation and job hopping are vital for income growth. Tori advocates for negotiating salaries and not being afraid to switch jobs to increase income. She believes that strategic job hopping and salary negotiations were key factors in her reaching her first $100K.
- Financial independence gives women options. Financial independence is portrayed as a form of empowerment, giving women the ability to make choices and avoid toxic situations. Tori shares that her financial stability allows her to live life on her own terms, whether in personal or professional relationships.
- Financial transparency presents both benefits and challenges. Tori discusses the double-edged sword of financial transparency, especially for women. While being open about finances can inspire others, it also invites scrutiny and potential safety risks. She balances transparency with the need for privacy and security.
- Prenuptial agreements are essential for financial protection. Tori emphasizes the importance of prenuptial agreements to ensure fair distribution of assets in case of divorce. She clarifies that everyone effectively has a prenup dictated by state laws, and creating a personalized agreement is a proactive step for financial protection.
Notable quotes
“The fucking coolest part about dating as a rich woman is that you make more than 99% of the men you’re going to go on dates with, and it’s so fucking fun. Any man I’m with is never going to have to question, “Is she only here because she can’t leave? Is she only here because she needs my money?” The answer’s never going to be yes.”
“Here’s the thing about prenups. Every single person that gets married has a prenup. If you are married right now, you have a prenup. Yes, you do, and it was the state. Wherever you got married, Washington State, New York, California, you have actually signed a prenup as part of your marriage license. You have said, “This is how my money is going to get distributed if we are to separate.”
“The expectation around motherhood, the identity around motherhood, is that once you become a mom, that’s your entire identity to the world. That would just be really difficult for me to feel like that’s all I’m good for in the world.”
Episode at-a-glance:
≫ 00:00 The power of financial stability and introduction to the show
≫ 07:16 From her first $100K to multi-millionaire
≫ 29:41 Navigating the challenges of financial transparency and safety
≫ 39:12 Authenticity, success, and mental health online
≫ 40:17 Addressing internet trolls and financial transparency
≫ 41:42 Navigating body image
≫ 47:50 Exploring confidence, pain, and self-care
≫ 50:07 Discussing future plans and personal growth
≫ 51:57 The realities of publishing and achieving milestones
≫ 54:39 Personal relationships and privacy boundaries
≫ 01:03:17 The importance of financial conversations in relationships
≫ 01:11:00 Understanding prenups and financial independence
Lucie’s links:
Linktree: https://lnk.to/TheRealStuffWithLucieFink
Social: Instagram, TikTok, YouTube
Podcast IG: The Real Stuff Podcast
Special thanks to our sponsors:
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Transcript:
Tori Dunlap:
You show up different in every aspect of your life when you are financially stable because you don’t have to put up with bullshit. You don’t have to put up with bullshit from anybody, not a man, not a boss, not a client, not your parents. There’s something so freeing about that, and that’s the feeling I want for every single woman on this planet.
Hi, Financial Feminists. Welcome to the show. I’m so excited to see you. This is a very, very fun episode today. We’re just going to dive right in because it’s a bit of a long one. I was lucky enough to be a guest on The Real Stuff Podcast hosted by my friend and someone that I’ve been looking up to for a very long time, Lucie Fink. You might know her from back in her Refinery 29 days where she hosted a video series called Try Living with Lucie. She now is a entrepreneur, self-employed in her own right, and runs an incredible company focused on vulnerability and focused on talking about real shit.
So I went on her podcast to not only talk about money and probably the most open I’ve been about my own personal finances, about what’s in my bank account, et cetera, but we also talked about dating. We talked about sex. We talked about a lot of stuff. Clearly, I can’t even say the word sex without my voice going up three octaves. So it was probably the most vulnerable conversation I’ve ever had in a public arena, and we’re really excited to share this episode with you, and we always love sharing episodes of shows that I’ve been on as a way of continuing to supplement our content that we’re producing.
If you are wondering where to get started with your money, you can go to herfirst100k.com/quiz, herfirst, so H-E-R-F-I-R-S-T-1-0-0-K dot com slash quiz. We’ll also link it down below to take our free money personality quiz. This is the easiest way to get a free personalized money plan, especially if you’re feeling overwhelmed about money. So if you came here wondering where to get started, go ahead and listen to the episode and maybe take the quiz at the same time. All right. Without further ado, let’s go ahead and get into it, but first, a word from our sponsors.
Lucie Fink:
I’m so excited that you’re here.
Tori Dunlap:
I’m excited to be here. How’s Milo doing?
Lucie Fink:
He’s great. We actually just had a crazy situation. He has this baby doll that was mine when I was little, and he’s fallen in love with it. He calls her baby. A couple hours ago, we’re about to put him down for a nap, and we can’t find baby anywhere. We’re digging through the couch cushions, we’re looking everywhere, and he’s hysterical, and we have to send him to sleep with it. My mom thankfully got multiple copies of the same doll, but he knows which one is his because it’s like hand is falling apart, and we sent him to bed without it. He was upset, but he went to bed, and then our nanny drove to his school and she pulled up in the parking lot where she took him out this morning, and baby was on the ground in the parking lot.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, my gosh.
Lucie Fink:
So we rescued her. Thank God.
Tori Dunlap:
I had a similar incident when I was seven or eight. He was Snuggy. He was literally … It’s so random. My parents and my grandparents, I’m sure, spent hundreds of dollars on toys for me. This was the Snuggle that came with the fabric softener, and I decided that that was mine when I was growing up.
Lucie Fink:
That is what you care about. Yes.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, I was probably like seven or eight, and I loved this thing. We were on a cruise and he was the same color as the sheets, so he got left behind. My mom was calling Royal Caribbean for a year after, bless her, and we never found Snuggy and I was-
Lucie Fink:
There’s no getting back things that are left on a cruise ship.
Tori Dunlap:
Devastated, utterly devastated. So I’m glad we found baby.
Lucie Fink:
Now that baby’s recovered, the world can move forward.
Tori Dunlap:
The world can move forward.
Lucie Fink:
Here we are. I’m so excited to have you, Tori, on The Real Stuff Podcast. We have a lot to dive into today, and I naturally thought of you as an early guest for this show because one of the main themes is money, and as anyone who follows you knows you are the Financial Feminist.
Tori Dunlap:
We are going to talk about money, yeah, 100%.
Lucie Fink:
We are going to talk about money, but we’re also going to talk about some other topics, and we’ll get into those. We’ll get into those down the line because we got interesting boundaries up that we want to uncover as well.
Tori Dunlap:
Totally. I am both nervous and excited to talk. So I’m so used to talking about money, which I think most people aren’t. That’s the one that I’m like, “Yeah, sure, ask me any financial question you want,” and then on our little intake forum, Lucie’s like, Can we talk about your sex life?” and I was like, “No, we can’t,” but I’m sure we’re going to get there.
Lucie Fink:
Well, listen, I’ll set up first and foremost, as I say with all my guests, any question I ask you, fair game for you to reject, wanting to answer.
Tori Dunlap:
Totally.
Lucie Fink:
I will not push you to answer anything you’re uncomfortable with. I purely will want to know if you can kind of articulate your discomfort and where the boundary lies.
Tori Dunlap:
Yup, I’m happy to do that. So yeah, thrilled to be here. I was telling you when we hopped on that I think the last time we spoke not over text or Instagram was Lucie taking some very kind time out of her day to do an informational interview with me when I was 22. I watched every single Try Living with Lucy on Refinery 29, was obsessed with her and was like, “Maybe she’ll take 20 minutes,” and you were so kind and it’s just very, very crazy to think about what’s happened since.
Lucie Fink:
At the time, you were just starting up your business.
Tori Dunlap:
I was a little, little baby.
Lucie Fink:
Now here you are in your later 20s. You are a multimillionaire as you share across social media. I want to know, I saw a post recently, how old are you right now?
Tori Dunlap:
I’m 29. I’ll be 30 in July.
Lucie Fink:
Okay. So I saw a post from probably a repost because it was a recent post, but it was saying that you were 27, and that you will have $30 million when you retire. What is the latest on this? You’re 29 and you will have how many million?
Tori Dunlap:
Actually, I could do that math really quick. You might want to cut this, hold on, because here’s the thing, and anybody could do this. The math is you take the number you have in investments, and then we know that roughly every 10 years it’s going to double. So give me one second. So you can actually figure out my net worth-
Lucie Fink:
Take your time.
Tori Dunlap:
… which I’ve never really said if we do this.
Lucie Fink:
That was one of my questions. We’ll see if we get to that.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and we can talk about why I don’t reveal that anymore. So it’s 39, 49, 59. Let’s call it, yeah, so at 59, I’ll have 32 million.
Lucie Fink:
At 59, you’ll 32 million.
Tori Dunlap:
If I never save another penny after today, which I will continue to do, that’s just based on what I have now, we call that in the personal finance community like coast fire, which is like you might not have enough to retire at this moment, which actually I do. I could stop working right now, but there are some people who are just like, “I have enough where I don’t have to save another penny and my earnings will make me enough to retire someday.” So yeah, it’s probably, it’s around 30 to 40 million if we just keep what we have in the account right now and allow it to grow.
Lucie Fink:
I want to dive into where we’re at today. I have some questions about your current investments and your financial situation right now, but I do think one thing that’s maybe less spoken about on your platforms that I want to go back to is your whole financial story and how you grew up with money. What kind of family did you come from and talk about that first 100K.
Tori Dunlap:
So I had parents who didn’t grow up with a lot themselves, and so their commitment when they decided to have kids and I’m an only child, it was like, “Okay. So we didn’t have a lot, we didn’t really grow up with a conversation about money, so we are going to do things differently.” We were having conversations about how to save, about how to use a credit card responsibly, and I just thought that was normal because that was my only experience is I was like, “Oh, everybody knows not to overspend on credit cards, and everybody knows how to navigate taking on debt.” Of course, I realized very quickly that wasn’t the case and that I was the friend all of my friends were coming to for advice and guidance.
So Her First $100K was kind of born both from me realizing that when I had money, I had options. When I had money, I was able to leave a bad or toxic situation. I was able to start a business. I was able to donate to causes I believed in. I was able to take a vacation. Also, I graduated college right around when Lucie and I talked the first time. I graduated in 2016, and Donald Trump got elected not soon after that. So I was coming into adulthood and really into womanhood in a very different country than I think a lot of us expected, expecting our first female president, instead we get Donald Trump.
So I was trying to figure out what kind of person do I want to be, what do I stand for, and the election really radicalized me in my early 20, and I was like, “Oh, I think that this is the answer to the equality picture.” I don’t think we have any sort of equality for any marginalized group until we have financial equality. So if I can get more money into more women’s hands, I’ve seen firsthand in my life how it’s made an impact.
So Her First $100K was born on the side of my 9:00 to 5:00 in marketing from that kind of belief. So Her First $100K’s origin story was me trying to save $100,000 at age 25. I joked that as long as I did it the day before I turned 26, it still counted. So I hit my goal. I was 25 years, and I think three months old, it was September of 2019 and I literally went to Europe to celebrate with my best friend. I got the call to be on Good Morning America in a pub London. I came home, did the interview and quit my job three weeks later, and then since then, Her First $100K has just grown to the incredible platform it is now. We have four million followers. We have a New York Times bestselling book called Financial Feminist. Financial Feminist, our podcast, is the number one money podcast for women in the world.
So it’s just been crazy how much both personally my personal finances have been impacted and how much has changed since that first 100K or really since the financial education I got from my parents, but also the impact we’ve been able to make for other women.
Lucie Fink:
Would you say that your parents growing up were in the middle class bracket or would you have classified them as poor or wealthy?
Tori Dunlap:
I would probably say middle class, maybe even upper middle class. This is the interesting thing where I actually don’t know my parents’ net worth. I am so-
Lucie Fink:
Did you know what their salaries were when you were growing up?
Tori Dunlap:
Not really, no. My mom was a non-compensated working parent, so she’s a stay-at-home mom, and my dad was the primary breadwinner. I still don’t know. I was actually just home a couple days ago and I was like, “Isn’t it ironic that I talk about money for a living and yet I still don’t know?” I don’t know the net worth and I probably won’t until they, knock on wood, die. I won’t know until they’re dead. So that even as something that I love what you’re doing with this show and what we’re trying to do at Her First $100K is there is a generational gap between how people feel comfortable talking about money or don’t feel comfortable talking about money.
So I had two parents who did a very radical thing and, unfortunately, a very rare thing, which was teach me about money, but they’re also extremely private people, and I don’t know how much they make. So I mean, I never wanted for anything. I am a cisgendered White woman. I have a lot of privilege in that. I went to good schools. I graduated debt-free from college, which was a combination of me working jobs and getting merit scholarships, and also my parents having saved since I was a kid.
So there was a lot of financial privilege, but it was definitely because my parents were really strategic. We never bought something we couldn’t afford. They didn’t live beyond to their means. They still live in the same house I grew up in. They’re still driving cars from the late ’90s, early 2000s. They’re very, very smart, strategic savvy people when it comes to money.
Lucie Fink:
It’s very interesting. I’m curious with your dad today, if you were to ask him, “Can you tell me what salary you made when I was growing up?” or is he still working today, “What are you making today?” would he flat out say, “No, I’m not comfortable sharing that with you”?
Tori Dunlap:
He would definitely say, “No, I’m not going to share it with you.”
Lucie Fink:
Wow.
Tori Dunlap:
Because I kind of did when I just saw them a couple days ago. I know he makes more than six figures, but that’s all I know. That’s all I know. We have had a conversation of like, “Are you taken care of for the rest of your life?” because we have so many community members, especially we see with women of color, with first gen, it’s like, “I am my parents’ retirement. They don’t have retirement savings. They don’t have a plan to stop working because they can’t afford it, so I am their retirement. I am their 401(k).”
One of the things I’ve sat down with my parents about is it’s like, “Do I need to take care of you? Are you okay?” and they’re like, “We’re okay. We’re good for the rest of our lives.” They have a binder of like here are the accounts, here’s where they live, here’s the login information, here’s who you need to talk to get to here, and they literally have told me, “Here’s where this is. Here’s where this binder is, and here’s all the information in there.”
So I think that it’s so important to talk about, one, end of life as hard as that can be like, do they have wills? Do they have money that’s somewhere? What happens if something happens? Then the second thing is, are they good for the rest of their lives? My parents are early 60s. Are they good for the rest of their lives?
Lucie Fink:
Yeah. Well, that’s a great thing to encourage people to talk about with family. I’m really intrigued by your journey from you graduated college in a very privileged way being debt-free, and here we are. Now you’re starting and you said you worked in marketing. What was your starting salary out of college?
Tori Dunlap:
Starting salary was $55,000, and I live in-
Lucie Fink:
Same.
Tori Dunlap:
Hey, look at that. So yeah, I live in Seattle, and that was where I started my career. So I graduated college in May of 2016 and got my first job in July. I actually already had a freelance side hustle client as well, so I was making money on the side of that too. So I had a little bit of income coming in. One of the common things that people who don’t really know my story will say when they hear, “Oh, 100K at 25,” is they’ll go, “oh, she lived at home.” I lived at home from May to October, so two months of not working or working freelance, this freelance gig that was definitely not a full-time job, And then a couple months of commuting in. my parents live in Tacoma, which is about an hour outside of Seattle, hour and a half with traffic. So I would commute in every day until it was very obvious to everybody that it was time to move out. So I only lived at home for a couple months, $55,000 in Seattle. I can walk you through my whole salary journey until HFK, if you want.
Lucie Fink:
Sure.
Tori Dunlap:
So 55K was my first salary. I was there for a year and got a raise to … Was it 20%? So it was $66,000. I infamously then took a job. I talk about this in the intro of my book, Financial Feminist, that was super toxic, but I negotiated $20,000 more than they wanted to pay me. So my salary was 80,000. So we took a jump from 66 to 80, but it was so toxic that I had to quit without another job lined up after about three months. So now we’re at January of 2018 and I’m unemployed. So I spent a couple months unemployed until I found my last corporate job, which was starting salary 70,000, and then after a year, I received a raise up to $77,000.
So that was my corporate life. I was never making over 100K, but I was making a pretty decent salary for someone just out of college. Also, there were times where I was getting some side hustle or some freelance income, and then there was other times I wasn’t receiving any of that income. So it kind of depended on seasonality and how the business was doing. 2019 was our most successful year because Her First $100K was starting to get off the ground, and that was one of the reasons I was able to hit that 100K as quickly as I did was I had my primary source of income where I was saving a percentage of that money, but then also putting some side hustle money into savings or investments.
Lucie Fink:
When you say first 100K, just to clarify for people, that means having $100,000 in either savings or investments or just somewhere you can access it.
Tori Dunlap:
You got it. That was my own 100K. Now, named the company Her First $100K, so it wasn’t her 100K saved. Your 100K can be whatever it looks like to you. Maybe that’s 100K net worth, maybe that’s 100K of debt paid off. For me, that was I have 100K in assets, meaning in my 401(k), in my Roth IRA, in my emergency fund. So yeah, I had $100,000 worth of money.
Lucie Fink:
That happened September 2019. Great year. That was my wedding month and year.
Tori Dunlap:
Love it.
Lucie Fink:
So here we are, I’m getting married, you have 100K now. What were some of the steps that you took to go from where you were post college? Which by the way, did you ever share when you came out of college, knowing that you didn’t have debt, did you already start with some sum of money that either your parents had gifted you or that you had saved yourself coming out of college?
Tori Dunlap:
I think I maybe had $2,000 that we didn’t end up spending on college, but no, I literally had a conversation senior year with my parents halfway through where they’re like, and that was every year, we sat down every single semester as a family and said, “What are you contributing? What do we have?” and that was a back and forth conversation. So I remember halfway through my senior year being like, “Can we do this without taking on debt?” and we just got through by the skin of our teeth without me having to take out a student loan.
Lucie Fink:
So to get from 2,000 to six figures in just a few years, was this primarily done through the stock market or through your 401(k)? What were the various modes?
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, great question. So the 100K was a couple different things. The first is that I negotiated my salary every single time I could. So I was not only negotiating my pay every time I got a new job, but I wasn’t afraid to job hop either. We were talking about the generational divide. That’s one of those things that I think to our parents’ generation, it’s like job hopping’s unprofessional. My dad’s been at his previous company for 13 years. My uncle literally did not leave one company. He started when he was 23 and left when he was like 70. It was the same company.
Lucie Fink:
Wow.
Tori Dunlap:
For me, every year and a half, two years I was like, “Okay. It’s time,” and I think that that’s actually one of the most advantageous things you can do is if you’re not happy or you don’t feel like the job is compensating you fairly anymore, it might be time to move on. The second thing I did was, like I said, saving a portion of my income, and I did that on autopilot. I mentioned in my book, Financial Feminist, how to do this, but if you can set up an automatic transfer from your checking account to your savings account, this is what we call in the personal finance industry paying yourself first. So it’s like you’re a bill, but before you even see a paycheck sometimes, your money’s already gone into savings so you don’t have to think about it. It’s just happening. So I was saving.
Lucie Fink:
How much exactly were you auto transferring at that point?
Tori Dunlap:
You got it. 27% of my take home pay was what I worked up to. It was not 27% the entire time. It was the number that I found, and I call it the sticky number. It was not me purchasing everything I wanted with my discretionary money, but it was not me feeling deprived either. It was like the number that felt challenging, but not like I couldn’t go out to eat or couldn’t do fun things. So I worked my way up to that percentage. I treated it like a game. I was like, “Let’s see how much we can save. Oh, no, that’s too much. Let’s take it down,” or, “Oh, I think I can actually go another 1 or 2%.”
Then everything I made on the side after taxes and expenses went into either savings or investments. Then that’s the last thing is what we see with women is that they either wait longer to invest compared to men or don’t invest at all. So through things like your 401(k) or your IRA, which are investment accounts for retirement, using the stock market for your own retirement, I was able to allow my money to grow for me in a way that I didn’t have. I wasn’t taking $100,000 of cash and saving it. It was if I had to guess probably like 88,000 or maybe 90,000, but that extra couple thousand dollars or even up to $10,000 was my investment gains working harder for me.
So anytime you’re trying to save for any goal, whether that’s retirement or your wedding or an emergency fund, using things like a high yield savings account for short-term goals, but an investing account for those longer term goals like retirement allows compound interest to work harder for you. So that’s one of the ways I hit that 100K so quickly is I started investing when I was 22, and I was allowing the stock market to work harder for me.
Now, if we would’ve had a recession when I was 23 in 2017, my 100K wouldn’t have happened as fast. If I would’ve had student loans, my 100K wouldn’t have happened as fast, right? There was a lot of different factors there, and privilege is 100% part of my story. It’s also hard work. It’s also smart financial decisions, but you can take parts of my story and apply them to your own life, whether that is automating your savings or negotiating your salary or, yeah, starting to invest if you haven’t invested before.
Lucie Fink:
At this point, were you making sure that once you moved out of your parents’ house in October, so now you’re living on your own, were you always making sure that the amount you were paying for rent, I’m assuming you were renting at that time, was a certain percentage of your take home as well to limit that?
Tori Dunlap:
Personal finance is personal. I always say that there’s not a magical percentage, but I was being strategic about where I was living, and that’s always what I encourage, especially women to do. Oh, my gosh. It’s like we are told as women that the reason we’re not rich is because we spend money, right? Scrimp, save, deprive yourself. The latte is the reason you’re not rich. First of all, no, it’s systemic oppression, and two, the things that we’re told as women that are frivolous, the reasons we’re not rich, they’re in stereotypically feminine. It’s not NFL season tickets or golf clubs. It’s lattes or manicures, but what do we tell men? We tell men to increase their income. We tell men to invest and to negotiate.
So that’s one of the things I figured out through trial and error is I’m like, “Okay. I can cut some expenses, that’s helpful,” but at the end of the day, there’s only so many things I can cut and there’s only so many things I want to cut in order to still have a good life where I still get to travel and I still get to go out to eat and do fun shit. So then it became, “Okay. How do I increase my income as opposed to decreasing my spending?”
Lucie Fink:
So after we get to this 100K point, what do you do now to increase that income? Is it about aggressively investing or did you go in another direction in terms of trying to get a higher salary?
Tori Dunlap:
I mean, for me, once I hit the 100K, I quit my job three weeks later, and for me, it was time to go all in on my business. That was kind of the promise I made to myself was the 100K was the ticket out of corporate was my, I don’t know if I want to call it allowance, but it was my permission slip to be able to say, “Okay. I have enough money in the bank to fall against if something happens or if I can’t make this work. I have a little bit of a runway and a leeway, and also, I have enough save for retirement to buy me some years where if I’m not contributing to my retirement savings, I’m still going to be okay.” So yeah, September 2019, hit my 100K goal. October, quit my job or put in my two weeks. By the first week of November, I was full-time entrepreneur.
Keep in mind, we’re in 2019. We don’t know what’s coming with COVID. I quit my job three months before global pandemic. It ended up really working out. We ended up actually blowing up in the pandemic. I was making, I remember still to this day, I think I made my entire yearly corporate salary in two months and I was like, “Oh, shit. Okay. This can work, and not only can this work, I think this can do really, really well.” So yeah, 2020 was a bad year personally for me and a rough year, I think, of course, for the world, but financially, we were cooking with gas at that point.
Lucie Fink:
So to dive into being an entrepreneur online, a lot of people in a lot of different fields want to make a career out of being online, and there are obviously endless ways to do it. In your case where you monetizing off of selling digital courses, selling physical products, what were you selling? Talk a little bit about how you just sort of learned how to do that because I feel like a lot of people that want to get into this space wind up getting sucked into buying all these courses of people who are trying to teach you how to sell a course and it can feel like crazy noise. So what did you do exactly to make that salary in two months?
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, I love this question. Her First $100K has multiple sources of income. They’ve changed over the years, so I can give you what we’re doing now and also what it was like in 2020. So we have digital downloads and courses. So you can buy our resume template. You can buy a course about how to pay off debt. You can also invest in, pun intended, our stock market school, which teaches you how to invest. It’s like an annual membership program. That’s more intense. I’m in there doing coaching. We have an actual technology through which you can invest through. So that’s technically even three sources of income, but kind of like our products, the things that we create that we sell. So that’s one source of income.
Second thing is straight up influencer partnerships like hashtag ad, I’m talking about this product on Instagram or TikTok, and we get compensated for discussing that product. The third way is kind of in conjunction with that influencer partnership, which is an affiliate deal. That means if I am working with a brand and somebody signs up for that brand or purchases that product, I get a percentage. So we’re no longer working on just a flat fee for posting. Instead, I get a commission, basically.
The fourth way we make money is through our podcast. So we have partnered with an ad partner to be able to run ads on the show, so we get compensated for the ads on the podcast. The fifth one is the book. Pretty obvious. If the book sells, we get royalties on that book, but it’s a very small percentage, and that’s a whole other conversation for another time about how I’ve never worked harder on anything in my goddamn life and seen less money. It’s like $2 a book and I put my entire heart and soul into that for like five years. So book is another way we make money.
I’m a speaker, I’m a public speaker, so I will speak at a conference or speak at a corporation to do a workshop or a women’s empowerment event. So I get compensated that way. That’s most of them. I’m trying to think if there’s anything else, but that’s the majority of how we make money.
In terms of what we were doing in 2020, I think the first time I was really making, I remember I made $20,000 off of course launch and then I split that with a friend of mine, and again, in 2020 that was more money than ever. I was like, “Oh, my god, this is crazy,” and that was off of us launching a course for a week and then closing it down.
Lucie Fink:
Are you comfortable sharing? Although I would love to get granular and go through each of those revenue streams and hear more about them, let’s just take 2023, last year. Full year, 365 days, what your full business’ gross revenue was from all of those streams of income.
Tori Dunlap:
So we did, I can pull it up. Give me one second. I want to get-
Lucie Fink:
Got to love a tracker.
Tori Dunlap:
We call it the BS. It’s the big spreadsheet, but also, we do it through more advanced means than this too. So we did a little under 4.1 million gross revenue last year.
Lucie Fink:
Are you comfortable sharing how much of that you had to then pay for whether it’s contractors or just to keep the business running?
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. The profit, we made a lot of investments in 2023. So we actually had a less profitable year than 2022 because we brought more people on and we were more strategic there. I don’t know right off the top of my head what that profit was, but it was at least 50% or maybe let’s say 1.8 million of that, and almost all of it is reinvested back into the business or is sitting as reserves in case we have a bad quarter or a bad year. This is the fun thing, and we can talk more about this, of me being financially independent is I pay myself a salary. I pay myself a little bit of money from the business, but at this point now, I’m pretty financially taken care of, at least at this point in my life.
I’m single. I don’t own property, I don’t have children, I have nobody, again, huge privilege, nobody financially dependent on me except me, well, and the 15 employees I pay, but now my job is to reinvest back into the business. My job is to make sure that the business and thus my employees and our team members are protected. So a lot of the work we’ve done in the past year or so is if we do make a profit, the profits sitting there waiting for us to reinvest it back into the business or sitting there in case we have something like a recession or we lose a massive client or something happens to the business.
Lucie Fink:
I’m sure I could backtrack and do the math with the formula you said before, but if you are saying that you in 30 so years will have, whatever you said, 30 to 40 million in investments, how much cash does that mean has been invested thus far?
Tori Dunlap:
That is one thing I am not comfortable talking about, but I will tell you why.
Lucie Fink:
Yes, please.
Tori Dunlap:
So my 100K at 25, I was literally screenshotting my bank account, no personal information, but you could see exactly how much I had. Then when we became more successful, and our social media followers increased, and my notoriety and I started becoming a public figure, a couple interesting things start to happen. One, as someone who believes in financial transparency, it kills me that I can’t do this anymore, but the reason I don’t feel comfortable anymore is when women have money, as a society we are extremely uncomfortable. We are extremely uncomfortable with women having money, with pursuing money, with wanting money, and it’s one of the narratives I talk about in my book that is so damaging to women because we weaponize women’s altruism, and we tell them that the pursuit of money is bad or gross or greedy. It’s not.
I want options for myself. I want options for our community. I want to be able to donate to causes I believe in and donate to policies I believe in and make the world a better place, and I want to make sure I’m protected. We absolutely worship men with wealth in this country, yet we are so uncomfortable. We’re just uncomfortable with women having money. So that’s the more minor version of this, and it shows up in social media comments, it shows up in just people’s overall perception of me, but more seriously, it shows up in death threats, in me feeling worried about my safety and about my family’s safety.
If I start posting screenshots about how much money I have, well, what happens when someone gets a hold? Lucy, I just said this and I don’t even like saying it out loud because maybe I’m giving somebody an idea, but if somebody finds my address, if somebody finds my family’s address, what does that mean? Oh, gosh, it’s going to make me a little emotional, but I literally had a conversation with our insurance agent two years ago of like, “Okay. I have business insurance. Do I need to take out what they call K&R insurance, which is kidnap and ransom insurance? Do I need to take out this insurance because this is a real thing?”
So this is the very whole mission of Her First $100K is it’s like the irony of when women hit a certain point of financial success, we start to call them greedy, we start to take them down, we start to realize that they’re uncontrollable, and so we try to control them or more seriously, there’s a significant threat to somebody’s safety and to somebody’s livelihood, and that’s a risk that for me is now beyond me. It’s about my partner, it’s about my family, it’s about my parents. So this was a conversation that we all had together.
So as much as I would love to sit here and tell you, “Here’s my net worth, here’s my screenshots, here’s everything,” even me saying multimillionaire makes my parents break out in hives. Even that is enough to make my parents lose sleep at night, but that is for me the happy medium of transparency with managing safety in regards to that too.
Lucie Fink:
Yeah. I mean, that is terrifying and thank you for sharing that.
Tori Dunlap:
We might have to cut that. I’m like I might message you after and be like, “Please cut,” because you don’t want to give anybody ideas. People are fucking nuts. The internet’s fucking crazy.
Lucie Fink:
Well, to be honest, I was going to say thank you for sharing that because I too, a lot of my biggest fears are things that I would be afraid to share, to say out loud, but I think you’re doing it right because sharing as you’ve just done your business’ revenue, as I’ve also done with my audience is a year in time, a year snapshot, but it’s terrifying that you have to think about that and thank you for sharing it.
Tori Dunlap:
I think that when we are transparent about money because we live in a society that is uncomfortable with that, especially women making money, the conversation then becomes, “Well, why are you charging for your services?” I hear that a lot. “If you really cared, you would just do this for free,” and I’m like, “You have never said to a doctor or a lawyer, especially a male doctor or a lawyer, ‘If you just loved this, you would do this for free.'” Again, it’s not just about me, and even if it was, I’m allowed to compensate people fairly for my services. That’s the first thing, but I have a team. I have salaries I pay. I have business expenses. So that’s the other, again, less egregious, more minor part of this is that when you do start talking openly about money, people start becoming entitled to tell you how you should run your business or they feel like they have reason to tell you, “Oh, well, this should be free,” or, “This shouldn’t be this expensive,” or, “Why aren’t you just doing this because you love it?”
So that’s the other part that I think is if you do have those, maybe you’re even listening to this and you’re listening to me and you’ve had some of those feelings, that’s the perfect opportunity to ask yourself, “What kind of internalized misogyny is going on inside of me where I don’t feel comfortable with women having money or with women charging what they’re worth or with businesses making money?” I’ve said so many times before and I’ll say it again, I don’t want to win capitalism. I don’t want to be a billionaire. That means I’ve probably exploited somebody. That’s not what I want. I also can’t lose capitalism either because I’m doing myself a disservice. That means deep suffering to myself and my family and my community. So what I’m trying to do and what I’m teaching other women to do is how do we survive capitalism, how do we navigate it to the best of our ability so that we’re doing the least amount of harm possible while making the biggest impact we can.
So if you do have that feeling either yourself of like, “I don’t deserve to make money. I don’t want to pursue wealth bad,” or if you’re looking at especially women online and going, “Well, why aren’t they just doing this for free or why are they charging that much?” they deserve to charge that much. They deserve to run their businesses just like we’d expect anybody else to run their businesses. I think that’s the other part that we need to talk about is when we are financially transparent, people have opinions, and they only have opinions about this one thing about somebody’s life or about somebody’s business, and they don’t know the whole picture. They’re not interested in knowing the whole picture. They’re just interested in yelling.
Lucie Fink:
I had a conversation with a creator. I actually mentioned this in the show’s first solo episode, where I was going to bring her on the show, and then she was uncomfortable. She told me upfront she’s uncomfortable talking about money on social media. She said that her main reason for it, which this is now the lighthearted version of the really scary things that could happen when you screenshot your bank account, she said she doesn’t want to share how much she’s making with her followers because she just thinks it’s going to make her followers like her less if they know that she’s doing well, which is such a sad reality. I think you are the polar opposite of that in that your actual whole platform is about talking about that, and I’m sure you do receive-
Tori Dunlap:
No, but I feel it. I feel it because-
Lucie Fink:
I’m sure you receive your fair share of hate from people because of that, but I do also find that because you are a creator in this niche, it’s almost like people have maybe put you into a separate category where they’re like, “Okay. I don’t want to hear that every influencer is successful, but this girl, Tori, it’s okay if she says she’s a millionaire because her whole platform’s about helping us become millionaires as well.” So it’s almost like a give back element.
Tori Dunlap:
I mean, I really hope that’s how people feel because that’s what I want is it’s like I hope that me showing up confident and talking transparently about money makes you feel like you can be confident and pursue money. That’s the whole goal, but I do think, I mean, this is a large conversation that I don’t even know if we want to open this can of worms, but what is authenticity on the internet? As much as people demand authenticity, everything is a performance at the end of the day.
To that person’s point of like, “Oh, if I post how much I make, basically, I’m no longer going to be relatable or authentic to people,” that’s real. Again, we have standards for people we’ve never met, and then when they fail to achieve those standards, we’re mad and we put people on pedestals and, of course, people fall from pedestals because people are real and human and are messy and are going to fuck up and also are not the entire version of what you believe them to be.
Then when they aren’t that version, you’re mad, you’re upset, but then do you not as a content creator actually showcase your life if it is yachts and designer purses, which my life is not, but do you no longer show that part of your life, but then it’s not authentic? So we’re in this weird authenticity performance, but also, everybody has different rules and expectations of what that should look like. So I don’t blame this person. The internet, again, is a scary place. I don’t blame this person at all for being like, “I can’t show up and talk about money because people are going to judge me for it.”
Lucie Fink:
I think that this conversation is inextricably linked to the conversation about mental health, specifically as a creator, because this is your job. You’re showing up every day. I’m sure that as much as you’re really happy with what you’re doing and you are showing up authentically, I’m sure that some of the shit that you see online written about you and publicized is just not ideal.
I want to get into, I actually was looking through a lot of your posts in anticipation of this podcast. I just truly saw how much the internet sucks in some of your comments, which perhaps were when a post goes on the wrong side of the internet.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, the wrong side, yeah.
Lucie Fink:
Many of your posts have made it on the wrong side. Many are on the right side. You can see a lot of people are commenting requesting your courses and requesting your content, but when it gets to the wrong side, let me tell you, it’s the wrong side. I saw this one post you made. It said, the text on it was, “Things men have said to me when they discover I’m a multimillionaire.” Many of the comments are nice, many are atrocious. Do you mind if I read a few that I saw?
Tori Dunlap:
You can go for it.
Lucie Fink:
Well, first one, this one wasn’t that bad, but it was a person quoting you saying, “I’m a multimillionaire,” and then saying, “Literally zero proof.” This gets back into our earlier conversation of you having a reason for not wanting to share that.
Tori Dunlap:
Also, I don’t need to prove jack shit to you. This is what it’s going to happen is, Lucie, you’re going to say one, and then I’m going to be like, “Here’s my side comment.”
Lucie Fink:
You’re going to retort it. Please give me the retort. Please, I want the retorts. The second one I wrote down is, “People who are worth millions don’t make videos about being worth millions. Wealth does not scream, but whispers.” What’s your retort?
Tori Dunlap:
In some aspects, yes, but also, again, this is the whole platform of what we’re trying to do is make financial conversations part of the norm, and also, yes, literally making videos makes me money, so fuck you. You know this person has three followers and it’s like User76809 or some shit.
Lucie Fink:
Also, my response to that question is we have to have people in our society who are talking about it because otherwise, they’re hoarding the information and no one else is going to get there.
Tori Dunlap:
Also, no one has ever commented that on Elon Musk or Bill Gates. It’s all sexist, and I know where we’re going here, so you got to keep going. Also, this is very therapeutic for me because these are the conversations. These are the retorts I practice as I’m falling asleep at night but can never say, so feel free. We know the fat comments are coming.
Lucie Fink:
I love this.
Tori Dunlap:
Here we go.
Lucie Fink:
Here’s my third one, which I only wrote three down. You know what I wrote.
Tori Dunlap:
Is this the McDonald’s comment?
Lucie Fink:
No, but it’s close.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, there’s the McDonald’s comment.
Lucie Fink:
It says, “All that money and no gym membership.” First of all, fuck you, whoever you are. Second of all, I have seen you post a handful of posts about an ex-boyfriend’s mom who made some comments about your body. Can we get into this?
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. We’re going to cry, but we can get into it. First of all, these are comments that actually don’t do much to me because they’re small, tiny men who, literally, I use their comments to make more posts and it makes me really happy.
Lucie Fink:
And it makes you more money.
Tori Dunlap:
Truly, and to your point about wrong side of the internet, I know my posts have actually gone really viral when they’ve gone outside of our sphere or our community and landed on some fuck boy’s FYP. That actually is great. So it’s actually not these comments that hurt me very much. It’s the comments from women. We all have internalized misogyny, and those are the ones that really devastate me, but we’ll stay on this for a second.
So I was lucky enough to not really have many problems with my body or with my own appearance. I had many friends growing up who either struggled with disordered eating or just didn’t like what they saw in the mirror. I think I truly had the version of body neutrality where I was like, “Yeah, there’s some stuff I want to probably change, but no, I really like myself,” and I don’t have a lot of negative feedback towards me.
I’ve told this story in many, many posts. First of all, I will couch this by saying that this person was struggling with a lot of things in their life that we only discovered later. Truly, hurt people hurt people and also their mother. His mother was struggling with a lot of things, I think, about herself and about liking herself. So I give so much grace to them understanding that they were going through some shit. They were going through their own shit, but-
Lucie Fink:
As most people are who are-
Tori Dunlap:
Truly, as most people are.
Lucie Fink:
… they’re like instigators of these types of things.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. So this was my first real love. This was the person that was my first real relationship. I thought I was getting married to this person. This was my first real boyfriend, and I was 20 when we met, and I think I would’ve been still 20 or maybe 21 by this time. We are on a beach in Hawaii. This is the first time I have met his family, met his parents. I just want to give 20-year-old me a big hug because she didn’t deserve this. My boyfriend, I’m in a swimming suit on the beach, and he says something to me like, “I think you should lose some weight.” This is someone who has loved me and called me beautiful and has desired me, and this is just so out of the blue.
I just look at him and I’m like, “What are you talking about?” and he’s like, “I just think you should lose some weight, I think,” and was clearly trying to say it but not say it. I have a different relationship with the word fat now. I think a lot of us do. Fat in my early 20s was a bad thing, and so I asked him like, “Do you think I’m fat?” and he goes, “A little bit.” I think there’s these moments in your life where I look back and I have so much grace for myself that I wanted to make a decision and I knew what the right decision was and I didn’t.
I was in Hawaii, and speaking of being financially stuck, I was in college. I couldn’t afford a flight home. I couldn’t afford to change my flight, but I was like, “I don’t want to be here anymore. I want to get out. This is awful. I just want to go home,” and I stayed. I stayed in that relationship for actually another almost two years. There were good parts of that relationship. There were many, many loving parts of that relationship, and there were also things that he was struggling with, but I asked him, “Where is this coming from?” and he said, this was the really devastating part, he said, “When my mom first met you a couple days ago, she told me that she thought you’d be skinnier.”
Let me tell you the fun thing about how brains work is that I can sit here and say to you and fully believe it that none of that was about me. None of that was about me. None of that’s true. That’s not how I feel, and yet that still fucks with me to this day. In addition, I don’t weigh myself anymore. If I had to guess, I am at least 50 pounds heavier than I was when he told me I needed to lose some weight. So imagine what he’d think now. So that was the first moment, honestly, and I was lucky it happened actually so late, but for me, that was the first moment where I thought maybe I need to hate my body.
Again, I fully knew that it was crazy and that I didn’t want to feel this way, and yet somebody who I loved and, again, who I wanted to desire me and who I felt safe with had just then said this thing about me and about my body, but really, the adult in the room, which was his mother, had implanted the idea to him, and then he had passed it along to me. So fucking nuts, fucking crazy.
So there is some version of that that gets a little, little bit triggered when I talk to random people on the internet and they tell me. I have the McDonald’s comment, which is another comment on that video, which is like, “Oh, your millions of dollars all got spent at McDonald’s.” It was not so much the comments that are made online. It was a comment from somebody I loved and trusted that I think was the most devastating thing for me.
Lucie Fink:
First of all, I’m so sorry that you had to hear that. I’m sorry someone that you loved and trusted said that to you, and I can only imagine how that would set you off on a negative thought spiral. Where are you now with your body? When you do see comments like the one I read or the McDonald’s comment, are you able to fully pull yourself out of it or do you find yourself spiraling back into negative thought patterns?
Tori Dunlap:
Those comments are not the ones that really trigger me. I have my own relationship with my body and my own struggles there. I’ve only just started to realize probably in the past six months to a year that I have chronic pain and that my body is in pain a lot and how that has shaped my relationship to it, and that I have very, very much put my physical health on hold so I could grow a business and write a book and launch it. So actually, this year my goal is to not get my body back because that’s so like fitness influencer bullshit, but just to be in a more consistent routine with how I’m taking care of myself, what I’m eating.
I’ve been traveling so much, and so as anybody who travels for work knows, one, somebody who has chronic pain, an airplane seat is the worst place to be, and then you’re not cooking for yourself. You’re eating out a lot. Again, if I’m going to Atlanta for a day, am I going to eat a salad in Atlanta? No, I’m going to eat some fucking fried chicken and Southern food. So I think that that’s part of it too.
Lucie Fink:
As you should.
Tori Dunlap:
As I should. So I think my relationship with my body is not really impacted by the trolls, but it’s a constant back and forth. There’s just this belief in society that unless you look a certain way, you are not deserving of love or you’re not deserving of respect. Then the funny thing is you realize … It’s kind of like the Barbie monologue. At a certain point is women like, “You’re never enough. You’re either too fat or you’re too skinny or you’re too made up or you don’t have enough makeup on,” and so it’s like you just have to be okay with you at the end of the day. Embroider it on a throw pillow, but truly, the only person I need to answer to about my own health and about my own relationship with myself is myself, and it’s definitely not the trolls on the internet.
Lucie Fink:
You have so many amazing insights for young women. Obviously, you have the financial stuff, but I do feel like just as a human with a lot of the stories you tell like this one, which is the furthest thing from being about money, but is really just about loving yourself and coming into yourself. Do you ever find yourself sort of wanting to migrate away from the money and to sort of just become a lifestyle personality?
Tori Dunlap:
Funny you say that, Lucy. I don’t think I ever want to do that, but actually, the next book I plan on writing is a book about confidence for women, and it’s not just about money confidence, but that’s the funny thing is other than financial questions, the number one question I get is, “How are you so confident?” which is very sweet and kind. When it comes to my own journey to my own confidence, it is financial confidence, it’s career confidence, it’s confidence in a relationship. I think a huge part of why I’m so confident is because I don’t have to financially put up with any bullshit from anybody. I don’t have to put up with any bullshit from anybody because I can pay my way out.
Client mistreats us, I don’t have to work with them anymore. I go out on a date with a boy and 10 minutes in it’s awful, I can throw a card down on a table and I can leave. There is so much flexibility when women have more money, and you show up different for yourself. You show up different in your relationships. You show up different in your career. So I don’t think a full pivot is planned, but I think it is a natural extension of our brand and what we discussed at Her First $100K to talk about just confidence in general. How do you show up as the fullest best version of yourself and money is one of the ways you can start to do that.
Lucie Fink:
I love that. I’m excited for your confidence book. On that note, I know we never really got into it. You were saying that the book industry and the publishing space is not where the money is. Can you share with us, if you’re comfortable, when you got your book deal for Financial Feminist, was that independently published or was there a publisher?
Tori Dunlap:
There was a publisher. I worked through Harper Collins.
Lucie Fink:
Are you comfortable sharing? Are you allowed to share what the advance was for the book?
Tori Dunlap:
I would love to share. I am legally not allowed to. There’s confidentiality agreements as part of that.
Lucie Fink:
Interesting.
Tori Dunlap:
I believe I could go check my contract, but I really don’t want to risk it. So yeah, I cannot discuss publicly how much I was compensated for that book, but it is way less than you think. Let’s put it that way.
Lucie Fink:
Now on the back end of it, are you allowed to share at all about becoming a New York Times bestseller? Is that lucrative? Is that helpful?
Tori Dunlap:
Again, fun thing about New York Times, we could spend a whole episode just talking about the publishing and how you market a book. New York Times bestseller, this is actually the same question my mom asked me. She calls me like four days after it happens and she goes, “So what now? What does that get you?” and I’m like, “Not really anything.” Okay. So what it does get you? One, I get to say I’m a New York Times bestselling author for the rest of my fucking life, and that’s amazing, and that’s one of the things-
Lucie Fink:
Yes, it is a resume point.
Tori Dunlap:
Right. That’s one of the things even beyond my resume that I’ve wanted. I wanted that very badly, and that’s a whole other conversation about how I was going to emotionally cope if I didn’t get a New York Times bestseller. So yeah, I get to say that for the rest of my life and I get to know that that’s something I did. Second thing is it does help in theory with sales as you … You get to put it on your Amazon profile, and you get the sticker on your book. So in theory, it does help with the notoriety of the book.
Also, again, in theory, it helps you book more things past the book, so speaking engagements. It’ll definitely help with your next book deal because it proves that you can sell a book. Beyond that, you don’t get paid by the New York Times or something. You don’t get anything concrete. It’s not like they send you a check. It’s not like there’s a secret society of New York Times bestselling authors that you get inducted into that meets bi-monthly. Nothing really happens. It’s a sticker. It’s a fun accolade. It in theory sets you up. It’s kind of like the Forbes 30 under 30, which I also was lucky enough to receive. It’s like, “Cool.” That’s it. It’s like, “That was fun. That was a cool little vanity metric.” It’s not much past that.
Lucie Fink:
Well, I love it. You got the talking point. You get to put it in your Instagram bio, gets to be-
Tori Dunlap:
Exactly.
Lucie Fink:
… hopefully a reason why your next advance is even bigger than the first. So kudos to you for that. That’s an amazing life milestone.
Tori Dunlap:
Thank you.
Lucie Fink:
You mentioned briefly a partner now. Are you currently in a relationship?
Tori Dunlap:
I am.
Lucie Fink:
That’s very exciting. I didn’t know that.
Tori Dunlap:
It is very exciting.
Lucie Fink:
How’s it going?
Tori Dunlap:
We have not talked about it. That was a decision that I made. Now, my previous partner I dated in 2020, and I was talking about that relationship publicly, and then when that ended, I’ve talked about it a little bit. It was the most devastating period of my entire life. It was like opening up a wound every time someone would message me and be like, “Where is he?” So for many, many reasons, yeah, I’ve decided to say I’m in a relationship, but give very, very little followup about who this person is or what they’re about. That’s something that was agreed upon by my partner when I met them and started realizing like, “Okay. I’m going to stop casually dating and we’re going to do this thing. We’re not going to discuss it publicly.”
Lucie Fink:
On the note of relationships, obviously that leads to sex. Just so everyone knows, when I emailed Tori about this podcast, I said, “Here’s our pillars. We’re going to talk about money, mental health, and sex,” and I got to reply back that Tori did not want to talk about sex. To which I said, “Okay. Totally acceptable.” So now here is your time on the show. I would love to hear why sex is a major boundary for you on the internet.
Tori Dunlap:
I just turned beet red if you’re watching on YouTube or releasing this clip. I’m like beet red, which I should be. We’ve partnered with sex toy companies on social media. It’s more a couple of things. One is that, honestly, I think part of it, if I had to psychoanalyze, I went to Catholic school. I signed a chastity card in high school. TLDR, I’ve broken it. That shouldn’t be shocking to anybody, but I think that I know that there’s some leftover Catholic guilt and shame. I know there is. Probably the biggest reason is that there are certain parts of my life that I have committed to keeping private because, honestly, the best way to figure out you have a boundary is you’ve accidentally crossed it and then realized, “Oh, shit, that didn’t feel right,” and that was to me talking about specific people, dating specific people, relationship and realizing like, “Oh, this doesn’t feel good anymore and people are weirdly intrusive.”
So I just decided that anything in regards to my relationship with somebody else I was going to keep private. Of course, we know that sex doesn’t have to be with one person or doesn’t have to be … It can be a solo activity or with many people if that’s what you’re into, but just for me, that felt like something that it’s a private thing for me. There’s also, again, with women, I think there’s a whole shitload of judgment on top of it. I’m already talking about the most controversial topic. I figure I’m pissing enough people off. I’m having enough transparent conversations. For me, the conversation around-
Lucie Fink:
You could view it that way or you could view it as what’s one more?
Tori Dunlap:
Let’s just sue all of them. Sure, sure, sure. I think that, yeah, again, if I had to psychoanalyze myself, I think it’s definitely, I realized it’s taboo and that the taboo shouldn’t be there, and yet I still feel it, and that’s my reality. So this is a list of a couple things that I just have decided to not discuss publicly and that feel like this is a personal thing either for me or between me and somebody else.
Lucie Fink:
Love it and I appreciate that. Do you envision having a family in the future?
Tori Dunlap:
I don’t know. That’s my honest answer. I don’t think I want children, but my current partner thinks he wants children, and that’s a conversation that we continue to have. We both agree now that we don’t want children right now, so we’re in agreement for now, but we are both open to the possibility of no children or children. I become pretty disenchanted every time one of my friends talks about how difficult motherhood is. I’ve joked many times before that if I could be a dad, I would do that tomorrow, but biologically, I cannot be a father, at least with my gender identity. I would be a mother. I would have to be a mother. So yeah, if I could be a dad, I’d do that in a second, but the expectation around motherhood, the identity around motherhood, this is something I would love to talk to you about too, is I feel like once you become a mom, that’s your entire identity to the world, and that would just be really difficult for me to feel like the world that that’s all I’m good for the world anymore.
Also, just the pressure for the emotional labor on women, even in an equitable partnership is just crazy. So yeah, it’s something that I’m open to. I’ve also just realized in my life in general is that every time I say, “I’m definitely not going to do something,” you grow and change as a human being. It doesn’t mean my values have changed, but I think that resolute opinions of like, “I will never do this,” or, “This is something I will always do,” I’ve changed my mind about things that I never thought I’d change my mind about. So who knows?
Lucie Fink:
So many thoughts on this topic, and we could obviously dive into it for hours. One thing I will say is when I went into motherhood, I remember feeling so resolutely that I will not let motherhood consume me, I will not become a mommy blogger, this will not become my personality. I remember having that thought so strongly, yet it almost being unavoidable, specifically from the start of pregnancy and then even more specifically into postpartum. It takes a really long damn time to disentangle who you actually are as a person from once you become a mom.
Even for me, even just in the pregnancy time period, it consumed me in a way that I did not anticipate that it would. I think part of it was during my first pregnancy, I felt very excited to get pregnant that I almost dove into everything about pregnancy probably in a deeper way than many pregnant people do. Every book I was reading was about pregnancy. Every podcast I was listening to was about pregnancy. Every piece of content on my for you page and explore page became about babies, and it just kind of consumed me in a way that it was not consuming my partner during my pregnancy.
Then going into postpartum, similarly, especially since I was nursing my first baby for nine months, I was really just sucked into this world that now going into, I don’t know if I told you I’m pregnant, but by the time this episode comes out, it will be out there, but I am pregnant with-
Tori Dunlap:
You kept saying first baby and I was like, “Wait, hold on.”
Lucie Fink:
I’m currently pregnant with a second.
Tori Dunlap:
Yay. Congratulations.
Lucie Fink:
Thank you, and I actually was now going into this second pregnancy. It’s less than I was surprised about this, but it was more of it being a conscious decision going into this pregnancy that I refuse to let it take over my thoughts, which is really hard because it’s taking over your body and your body controls your thoughts, but I just remember saying, “I won’t let it and I’m going to work as hard as I possibly can to not let the postpartum period consume me as much as it did the first time,” although it’s really hard. Once you get there, that is what’s happening in your life and there’s really nothing else to talk about, especially being a content creator. People want you to show up and just talk about the old stuff you talked about, and you don’t have the mental space to even be thinking about things that are not related to parenting. So it is difficult, and I respect that and appreciate you making that decision now, but yes, as you said, decisions can always change.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, and I just know I don’t want kids now because I’m not in the season of my life to even consider that. So it’s hard to say I definitely won’t have kids in five years. My life’s going to be different in five years, and I appreciate you sharing all of that. It’s so interesting. Again, a whole other series of podcast episodes about the demands of motherhood, both physical and emotional and mental and all of that. At this point, I don’t know if I’ll ever have it in me or ever want it. At this point, I definitely don’t.
Lucie Fink:
Last question on the note of you having a new partner. I’m curious how someone who has such financial stability goes into the process of finding a partner and how open you are upfront, how important your partner’s finances are for you to even consider them, if at all, and is going into a relationship with someone who does not have financial stability an absolute nonstarter for you?
Tori Dunlap:
The fucking coolest part about dating as a rich woman is that you make more than 99% of the men you’re going to go on dates with, and it’s so fucking fun. To our point about freedom earlier, any man I’m ever with again is never going to have to question, “Is she only here because she can’t leave? Is she only here because she needs my money?” The answer’s never going to be yes, which I think actually is a beautiful thing. It’s a beautiful thing that you know I’m in a relationship with you because I love you and because I want to be here.
My current partner and I literally talked about money probably second or third date. Even before I’ve told this story in another show before, but one of the earliest green flags for him, we were on our first date and the check came and he knows what I do, he’s Googled me. It’s not difficult to find out a lot of more information than you would have on somebody with an average Google, especially financially. He looked at the check and then he looked up at me and I just went, “What’s up?” and he goes, “I would really like to pay, but I don’t want to offend you.” It was just the most beautiful little chef’s kiss, which is like, “Here’s my intention, but basically, I know you’re a feminist and I don’t want this to be a thing,” and so he’s kind of sheepishly like, “I would like to pay if that’s okay, but I don’t want to offend you,” and I was like, “Oh, you can pay. That’s so sweet. Yes, go for it.”
Lucie Fink:
You’re like, “I don’t mind.”
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, truly, but I love that he asked. It was so lovely. That for me was a couple green flags of, one, he’s not going to be afraid to talk about something uncomfortable. Two, he’s not afraid to be vulnerable. We’ve had so many conversations. If you’re going to be friends with me, we’re going to talk about money. If you’re going to date me, it’s a requirement, we’re going to talk about money. We both know how much each other has. We both know how much each other makes. We both know how much each other pays in rent. We are very financially transparent. Again, that was kind of a requirement of dating somebody.
In terms of would I date somebody who is not as financially stable as me, again, 99% of people aren’t, so I am not really looking to date somebody who has more money than me. That’s not a requirement. The person that I’m with without revealing his career makes a fraction of what I make, makes very, very little compared to what I make. I think that one of the things that I do love is that he is a really smart saver. He doesn’t make a lot, but has managed to max out his Roth IRA every year. So he has the good financial habits. That is something that I look for.
It’s not necessarily like if I was still actively dating a hard no, but I do remember going out on a date with somebody who was like, “Oh, yeah, I just pour everything on a credit card and it doesn’t matter if I can afford it or not,” and I was like, “Oh, no. Big red flag.”
Lucie Fink:
You said that a major perk of dating as a rich woman is that the partner knows that you’re not there for their money because you have your own.
Tori Dunlap:
I know what you’re going to ask me. Go ahead. Go ahead. How do you know that your partner is not going to stay with you for money? Is that where you were going?
Lucie Fink:
Well, listen, I do want to know that, actually. Where I was going though was more so I just want to hear about how that feels showing up to a date as someone who’s so financially secure, do you feel like showing up and having the finances you have gives you this extra layer of confidence and self-worth that you maybe didn’t have before?
Tori Dunlap:
A thousand percent, a million percent. There have been so many instances. I was dating casually for about two years, and I lovingly call it my ho phase where I had men on every continent texting me, and it was so great. It was so fun, but there was this moment-
Lucie Fink:
Love a good ho phase.
Tori Dunlap:
Truly. If anybody gets the chance to do it once in their life, please do it.
Lucie Fink:
I missed my window. I would’ve had to be 16 to ho now, so I didn’t do it.
Tori Dunlap:
I was going to say Lucie both missed out and also has what all of us dream, which is a stable, steady partnership for her entire life. So no, for me, it was when I was casually dating and going on a lot of dates, there’s just something powerful, whether it’s dating or your career or running a business where, again, you’re not financially dependent on anybody, and you don’t have to stay in a situation just because you’re afraid of leaving financially. So that’s one massive thing is I am looking for somebody who I like and who I respect and who I can form an actual partnership with. I’m not looking for a benefactor, basically, or at least somebody to provide me security.
The second thing is I can leave that date whenever I want, and this has happened before. I actually have paid for way more dates than I think people would expect me to have paid. Actually, if I want a second date with you, actually I’m more likely to let you pay because there’s something for me that’s powerful about, “I’m done. I’m willing to pay. I’m not going to have you have any expectations of me,” and it’s just like the case closed, it’s over, it’s done as opposed to letting you pay or going Dutch on something allows me to be a little bit more like, “Oh, no, I want to see where this goes. I want to keep going.”
So there’s been many times where at the end of the date I just pull up my credit card and they’re like, “Oh,” and I’m like, “Yup, I’ve got it. Nice to meet you. Hope you have a great life and-“
Lucie Fink:
“Have a nice life.”
Tori Dunlap:
Right, “My credit card’s going down,” and I love fucking with men sometimes too. There’s something that is just so powerful about throwing down my credit card that is metal and hearing it clang on it and just kind of their look. I love that too. So yeah, there’s something so powerful about that. That’s my whole mission with Her First $100K is like you show up different in every aspect of your life when you are financially stable because you don’t have to put up with bullshit. You don’t have to put up with bullshit from anybody, not a man, not a boss, not a client, not your parents. There’s something so freeing about that, and that’s the feeling I want for every single woman on this planet.
Lucie Fink:
I would love the answer to that question that you brought up of how you know a partner is not taking advantage of you when you are so vocal about being a multimillionaire.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, I didn’t mean to cut you off. I was sure that’s where you were going and, of course, it wasn’t, which I love. Subverting my expectations. A couple things. One, it is a kind of a fear of mine, I’m not going to lie, and it’s something I sometimes vocalize with my partner of like … I very much love myself and feel very secure in myself, and I also am a little validation whore and want validation all the time. So there’s times where I’m just like, “I know you love me, but can you tell me you love me, please, and can you tell me I’m pretty, can you tell me that you’re here because you like me? And not just because you know how much money I have roughly?” That is something that I think is sometimes in the back of my mind. In the conversations about money, this is the more practical answer, is I’ve been very clear with him that if we get married, we’re signing a prenup. We are having a conversation.
Lucie Fink:
That was going to be my last question. I’m so glad you brought that up.
Tori Dunlap:
We are having a conversation. Now, I know everybody listening just heard prenup and they’re like, “Oh, so you think you’re getting divorced?” Here’s the thing about prenups that I need to tell you. I’m putting my financial educator hat back on. Every single person that gets married has a prenup. If you are married right now, you have a prenup. Yes, you do, and it was the state. Wherever you got married, Washington State, New York, California, you have actually signed a prenup as part of your marriage license. You have said, “This is how my money is going to get distributed if we are to separate,” because every state has their own laws.
So if you don’t like the state telling you what you’re going to do in your own relationship, and I know that I don’t, I want to be able to make choices with my partner, you need to create your own prenup. Now, prenups are not just for wealthy people. They’re not just for trust fund babies. They’re not just for Hugh Hefner. They’re for regular people just dictating exactly what should happen.
Now, we all don’t want to believe we’re going to get divorced. We hope we live happily ever after forever and ever and that you’re never going to separate with that person. However, you’re going into a business relationship with somebody. Yes, a marriage is hopefully about love, but the reason we … Plenty of people don’t get married. It’s not a business contract until it’s a marriage contract. It is a business agreement. It is a financial agreement. I know if I was going into business with somebody and I didn’t have a contract that I had approved, that’s a bad way of doing business.
So when it comes to you entering into any sort of relationship, romantic, legal relationship, you need to dictate what’s going to happen. So yes, very early on there was a conversation of, “No, we’re going to be signing a prenup that works for both of us and we’re going to navigate that. Should this happen?”
Lucie Fink:
Do you know off the top of your head if that standard state “prenup” that’s built into each marriage is just a standard 50/50 split of assets?
Tori Dunlap:
So it depends on the state. I’m in Washington State and. for example, it is a 50/50 split. So unless you dictate otherwise, it will be split right down the middle. Again, this can be about debt too. Say you come into the marriage with student loans, are both of you responsible for paying off that debt? Is one of you responsible for paying off that debt. Past just your own money if you get an inheritance, how does that inheritance gets split? So again, prenup, I think, is this thing that we associate with 82-year-old men marrying 25-year-old women. It’s so much deeper than that, and it’s one of the best things that you can do for a financially equitable relationship.
You notice, I didn’t say equal, I said equitable, and that equity looks like whatever it looks like for you and your partner, but yeah, it depends on the state. If you don’t know the current “prenup” you have, good thing to look into it.
Lucie Fink:
It is so interesting because I wonder if it’s the media. For me, my perception of a prenup came from the movie Liar, Liar and them talking about getting a prenuptial agreement and maybe not having one. It was always something in my mind that I thought of as older, wealthy men marrying younger women-
Tori Dunlap:
Gold digger.
Lucie Fink:
… and wanting to protect their money or even older women marrying younger men, just whoever had more money dictating that we’re signing this, and it’s just such an interesting conversation that the prenup conversation can be totally rebranded in society and modernized based on what it really is about and it not necessarily having to be this negative thing about someone trying to hide their money from the partner.
Tori Dunlap:
I know this is financial expert talking, so you’re going to roll your eyes, but it’s not really about money, actually. It’s about you making sure that both of you feel like you’re entering this partnership with all of your ducks in a row, and just like you would talk to your partner seemingly before you get married, “Do we want kids or not?” or, “What happens? Where are we going to live? How are we going to work? What’s going to happen there?” It’s just another part of that conversation.
Lucie Fink:
For someone like me who hasn’t signed a prenup in my marriage, I guess there’s always time for a postnup.
Tori Dunlap:
There is postnups. They’re not as powerful as prenups, but they’re way better than having nothing at all.
Lucie Fink:
Let me ask one more question on this note. Because we don’t have any agreement in place, we truly view everything that the other is doing as beneficial to us, and it’s all helping our family and everything’s going into “one place”. We have multiple accounts, but it’s all everyone’s. When I’m going to pay off a credit card, all of our accounts are linked on the account, and I can pay off my credit card with my husband’s checking account if there’s more cash sitting in that at the moment, and it’s just never a thought about who’s putting the credit card down for dinner. My husband does all of my businesses investing. He goes into my business account, takes out a set amount every month and invests it for me since he knows more about investing and feels more passionately about that.
I just wonder when you do have an agreement in place, maybe you don’t have the answer to this because you’re not married yet, but if you were in a marriage where a prenup was signed, how do you really feel like you guys are a team and, really, everything’s working for one common good versus you feeling like, “Oh, that’s going into my pot and yours is going into your pot”?
Tori Dunlap:
Two things. I’m not a lawyer and I’m also not married, so it’s going to depend, but truly, personal finance is personal. It depends on the relationship. Prenups do not have to be everything I enter into this marriage with I get at the end of the day or I get this percentage of the household income. It doesn’t have to be that. You get to figure that out what it looks like for you. I will say, this is one of my hard and fast, I always say personal finance is personal, but one of the only hard and fast rules I have is that even if you’re combining the majority of your money, each person in a partnership should at least have some of their own money.
Now, why do I say this? Couple things. One, let’s just talk about worst case scenario here, and I don’t want to target Michael, but let’s talk about the amount of emails we get every single week from women who say, “I cannot financially leave because he is abusing me.” Financial abuse happens in 99% of abusive relationships, so that’s the most dramatic part of it, but the more minor part is like, “Maybe I just don’t want to be in this relationship anymore. I love this person, but this isn’t for me anymore,” and you need some sort of money in order to sustain yourself.
The more happy version of this is that we want somebody to be able to purchase things that they love without having to consult the other person. My parents have almost completely combined their finances, but they have what they call their own fun money. My mom spends it on scrapbooking, my dad spends it on pickleball, but they don’t have to counsel each other. They don’t have to be like, “Hey, I’m about to go buy a new pickleball racket and it’s this much money.” That’s their own fun money, and I think that really helps the relationship.
What you’re talking about really is how do I manage the day-to-day finances versus what a prenup is, which is how do we determine the separation of assets should this relationship end. It’s like a version of that, but it’s slightly different. Truly, every couple is going to have their own version of this. Is the money I brought in from this inheritance when my uncle died both of our money or is it just my money? Is my student loans your student loans or is that my responsibility? When we purchase a vehicle, is it in both of our names, and if so, how does that work? So there’s so many things to talk about, but I think it’s about first having the conversation and being brave enough to even talk about it. We’ve seen from studies that money is the number one thing that causes marriages to end. So let’s start talking about money.
Lucie Fink:
Absolutely. I mean, it is shocking just how many couples have never spoken about money until after they’re married or they’re just about to get married and stuff comes out. So I mean, I listen to a lot of finance podcasts as well, and I am constantly shocked, specifically the podcasts that bring on real people who open up about their relationships and how money is a part of that. I am shocked by how little people are talking.
So Tori, you are doing the Lord’s work, teaching people how to talk about money, inspiring people to talk about it. I have loved following you. You’ve been such an inspiration. The internet needs more Tori. So can you tell people if they’re not following you already, where can they find you, what are you working on now. Feel free to plug anything you’re excited about.
Tori Dunlap:
Lucie, this is the coolest fucking show. Thanks for having me. I am at Her First $100K and all the socials, H-E-R-F-I-R-S-T-1-0-0-K, herfirst100K.com as well. My book, Financial Feminist, as well as my podcast, Financial Feminist, are wherever you get your books and wherever you listen to podcasts, and we would love to have you.
Lucie Fink:
Thank you so much for coming on. This was enlightening and the amount of epic sound bites you gave me, I could not thank you enough.
Tori Dunlap:
Truly the compliment that my little validation heart needed. I love the soundbites, so thank you.
Thank you to Lucie for having me on her show. We’re excited to have her eventually as a guest too, and you can find The Real Stuff Podcast wherever you’re listening right now to podcasts. Thank you so much for being here as always, Financial Feminists, and we’ll talk to you soon.
Thank you for listening to Financial Feminist, a Her First $100K podcast. Financial Feminist is hosted by me, Tori Dunlap, produced by Kristen Fields. Associate producer, Tamisha Grant. Research by Ariel Johnson. Audio and video engineering by Alyssa Medcalf. Marketing and operations by Karina Patel, Amanda Leffew, Elizabeth McCumber, Masha Bakhmetyeva, Taylor Chou, Kailyn Sprinkle, Sasha Bonar, Claire Kurronen, Darrell Ann Ingman, and Jenell Riesner. Promotional graphics by Mary Stratton. Photography by Sarah Wolfe, and theme music by Jonah Cohen Sound. A huge thanks to the entire Her First $100K team and community for supporting this show. For more information about Financial Feminist, Her First $100K, our guests and episode show notes, visit financialfeministpodcast.com.
Tori Dunlap
Tori Dunlap is an internationally-recognized money and career expert. After saving $100,000 at age 25, Tori quit her corporate job in marketing and founded Her First $100K to fight financial inequality by giving women actionable resources to better their money. She has helped over one million women negotiate salary, pay off debt, build savings, and invest.
Tori’s work has been featured on Good Morning America, the New York Times, BBC, TIME, PEOPLE, CNN, New York Magazine, Forbes, CNBC, BuzzFeed, and more.
With a dedicated following of almost 250,000 on Instagram and more than 1.6 million on TikTok —and multiple instances of her story going viral—Tori’s unique take on financial advice has made her the go-to voice for ambitious millennial women. CNBC called Tori “the voice of financial confidence for women.”
An honors graduate of the University of Portland, Tori currently lives in Seattle, where she enjoys eating fried chicken, going to barre classes, and attempting to naturally work John Mulaney bits into conversation.
