Mortgage or investments — which one actually gets you to freedom faster? What does retirement really look like the day you start pulling money out?
And if you’re still parked at Edward Jones, we need to talk.
Today I’m answering your biggest questions about investing, retirement, and what to do with your money when the headlines start screaming recession. I get these questions constantly in my DMs, so I’m pulling the most asked — mortgage payoff vs. investing, the actual logistics of retirement withdrawals, what to do with an old 401(k) you’ve been ignoring, and how to finally get out of Edward Jones — and giving you real answers. My advice doesn’t change based on who’s in office or what the market’s doing this week. It changes based on math, and I’m walking you through the math.
Key takeaways
Market volatility doesn’t change the plan
Whether the market is up or down, whether there’s a recession scare or a new administration, the fundamentals stay the same: build your emergency fund, pay off high-cost debt, and keep investing. The stock market from 2020 to 2025 was up 125% against a historical average of 7–8% a year, so a correction isn’t shocking — it’s expected. Investing is a decades-long play, not a days-or-weeks play, and reacting to headlines by pulling back is exactly the kind of financial paralysis that keeps people from building wealth.
Pay your mortgage on schedule and invest the rest
If your mortgage rate is in the 3-4% range and the stock market’s long-term average return is 7-8%, extra cash almost always does more for you in investments than it does knocking years off your mortgage. The math holds even when it doesn’t feel that way. The emotional pull to pay off a mortgage as fast as possible is often inherited from “all debt is evil” messaging (looking at you, Dave Ramsey) — but paying off a 30-year mortgage in 15 years just means you lost 15 years of compound growth you can’t get back. Time in the market matters more than the size of any one payment.
Retirement withdrawals are a slow taper, not a single withdrawal
You don’t wake up on your retirement date and cash everything out at once — that’s a tax nightmare and it kills the growth still available to money you don’t need yet. The move is to start pulling money out five to ten years before you actually need it, gradually, and park it somewhere lower-risk, like a CD ladder (several CDs with staggered maturity dates — think one maturing in 10 years, another in 8, another in 5, and so on) so cash becomes available exactly when you need it, insulated from a bad market at the exact wrong moment.
Roth IRA contributions can come out penalty-free before retirement age
If you’re strategizing an early retirement or helping someone plan theirs, know this: you can withdraw your Roth IRA contributions (not the earnings) at any time without a penalty. Earnings are penalty-free once you’re past 59½. This is part of how a slow, staged withdrawal strategy — like pulling contributions first while leaving earnings to keep growing — can work in the years leading up to retirement.
Never leave retirement money with an old employer
An old 401(k) or 403(b) sitting with a former employer is money you’ll eventually lose track of: logins get forgotten, providers change without you knowing, and managing accounts across multiple old jobs becomes a headache. Roll it into your new employer’s plan, or into an IRA you own directly (which gives you more control over how and where it’s invested). Rolling over does not count against your annual IRA contribution limit. A free tool called Capitalize can track down and roll over a lost or neglected 401(k) for you.
Get out of Edward Jones
Edward Jones charges fees at rates most other firms don’t come close to, and yes, they’ll charge you an exit fee (often around $95) just to close your account and transfer your money out. It’s worth paying to leave. From there, you have three paths: DIY investing on a low-fee platform (Fidelity, Charles Schwab, Vanguard) if you’re confident managing your own portfolio; a robo-advisor (Ellevest, Acorns, Wealthfront, Wealth Simple, Betterment, and others) that invests for you based on your goals and risk tolerance for a small fee; or a program that teaches you to actually manage your own money with support.
Notable quotes
“If you are currently investing in Edward Jones, of course this isn’t your fault. Nobody told you. But get the fuck out.”
“Leaving your money with an old employer is like leaving money with an ex-boyfriend. I don’t trust my ex-boyfriend with my money.”
“This narrative — that this person is mentioning that she feels this weird emotional pull to pay off your mortgage — that’s not a fucking accident. That’s like Dave Ramsey 101 shit, which is shaming you for having debt.”
Episode at-a-glance
00:00 Intro & Investing Mindset
04:41 Paying Off Your Mortgage vs. Investing
09:56 How to Withdraw Money in Retirement
16:51 Rolling Over Old Retirement Accounts
21:02 How to Leave Edward Jones
30:31 Wrap-Up & Credits
Thanks to Rocket Money for sponsoring this episode!
Thanks to BetterHelp for sponsoring this episode!
Additional resources:
How to Start Investing
What You Need to Know About Mortgages with NerdWallet’s Kate Wood
Learn the exact strategies to save money, pay off debt, improve your money mindset, and increase your net worth. Get your personalized plan: https://herfirst100k.com/ffpod.
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Transcript:
Tori Dunlap:
What are your biggest questions about investing, about retirement, about what the hell you’re supposed to do with your portfolio when the market gets weird and scary and every headline is telling you to panic? Because listen, I get these questions constantly in my DMs and in my comments. And honestly, I love that you’re asking because it means that you’re paying attention instead of just closing up a tab and hoping it works itself out. So today we are answering your questions. Mortgage versus investing, what retirement actually looks like logistically, what to do with an old 401(k) you’ve been ignoring since your last job.
And here’s the thing though, answering questions one time is great, but it is not the same as somebody sitting you down and teaching you how the whole thing works. And this is why I’m hosting two live stock market workshops for free. It is the class that I have now taught to over 100,000 women, and it’s the one that I wish somebody had handed me instead of some Wall Street guy in a bad suit talking down to me. We are talking about how to know you’re ready to start investing in plain English, why investing isn’t the same as gambling, no matter what your uncle says, and how to stop feeling like the stock market is a room you weren’t invited to.
One of the women who went through, Beverly, said it took the scary out of finance for her, and that is exactly what we’re trying to do. So every single person watching this, I expect you to be there. It is free, herfirst100k.com/ffpod to get signed up for this free investing workshop. All right, let’s get into it.
But first, a word from our sponsors. Today on Financial Feminist, I’m answering your biggest questions about retirement, investing, and what the fuck to do with your portfolio if a recession happens.
Hi, Financial Feminists. Welcome to the show. Very excited to see you as always. Thank you for being here. Thank you for supporting Feminist Media. My name is Tori. I’m a multimillionaire. I’m a money expert. I’m a New York Times bestselling author. I fight the patriarchy by making you rich. And if you’re an oldie but a goodie, you knew that already. This episode is value-packed with so much information about everything, investing, everything stock market.
Before we get into this episode, I want to highlight a couple things for you. When we talk about investing, when we talk about the stock market, when we talk about anything that’s going on, whether the stock market is performing well or underperforming, my advice doesn’t change. The common question I’m getting right now is, “Is there a recession coming? Is there a stock market crash coming? What the fuck is Trump doing and how is it going to affect my money? So should I do something different?”
Our advice here at Her First 100K, our advice at Financial Feminist is no different depending on who is president or what’s going on in the economy or what’s going on in the stock market. You need an emergency fund, whether the grass is green or it’s not so green. You need to have paid off your credit card debt or working to pay off your credit card debt no matter what’s going on financially. And with the stock market, it is always a good time to invest even when things feel volatile.
I’m going to keep bringing you this reminder because I know it’s going to keep coming up, but the stock market is a long-term play here. It is not over days, weeks, months, or even a year. This is over years, if not decades. So when we talk about the fears of stock market crashes or recessions, I am not changing my financial strategy at all. I am a multimillionaire with millions in the stock market. If anybody should be nervous about a market downturn, it’s me, right? I got a lot of skin in this game. But I don’t. And the reason I don’t is that this is to be expected. There are market downturns. And frankly, it’s been a long time since we’ve had a significant market downturn. The stock market from 2020 to 2025 has been up 125% when the average year to year that we can expect is 7 to 8%. So the market correction is not entirely surprising. We stay the course.
Now, the trump of it all is a whole different thing, right? This is why financial feminism cannot just be about our own personal choices, but also about the policies we support, how we protest, how we vote with our dollars, the activism we do outside of that. But if you’re concerned about your own money, which is probably why you’re here listening to this episode, you don’t do anything different. You keep saving your emergency fund. You keep making sure you’re investing, because the last thing we want is for you to put your financial progress on hold. That’s what Trump wants, right? He wants you to not be as financially stable. He wants you to not be as financially whole. I can’t have you making decisions about your money because you’re so afraid of Trump that only fuck you over.
We get a lot of questions about investing. So in this episode, I answer a few of them from our community, including questions about how to take your money out of the market when you’re ready to retire, which is a common question right now. “Okay, the stock market is volatile. If we’re coming up against a recession and I’m about to retire, what should I be doing?” We’re going to chat about whether I think you should invest or pay down debt first. And yes, there is a correct answer here, and it’s an answer that a lot of people get wrong, and my thoughts about rolling over retirement accounts when you move jobs.
And if you want more information, including a free workshop that I do about investing in the stock market, you can go to herfirst100k.com/secrets. It is the signature stock market workshop that I have given to over a hundred thousand people. So herfirst100k.com/secrets, it’s entirely free. There’s no reason not to sign up. It’s a nice compliment to this episode and it’s going to allow me to continue to assuage your fears about the stock market and give you some really, really important information that you need to know, especially right now.
Without further ado, let’s get into the episode.
Hi everybody. Welcome back to the show. My name is Tori. I host Financial Feminist, which is a show committed to talking about how money affects women differently and also how you can use money as a tool of protest in this bullshit capitalist society. If you’re an oldie goodie, welcome back. If you’re new to the show, welcome. Hope you stick around for a good time and a long time.
Let’s take our first question about investing, and this is from our Facebook community, so I’m going to go ahead and read it here. All right.
“Can we talk about paying down our mortgages versus investing? Recovering Dave Ramsey person here. I’m buying a home after selling a home from 10 years ago. It is quadrupled in equity. My new mortgage payments will be about $450 a month.” Oh my God, that sounds so nice. Sorry. $450 a month. I’m not sure where this person lives, but oh, I kind of wish I lived there. Gosh. “My new mortgage payments will be about $450 a month over 25 years, which is unbelievable.” Yes, it is. Okay. “I’ve done the math. Over 25 years with my current savings plus my new yearly savings, which is cutting out the commute and the equity built in my sold home, minus the mortgage interest I would pay over 25 years, it’s still a projected difference of $300,000 versus paying off my home in five years, which would be less mortgage interest paid, but also less money in long-term investments.”
So in case you’re wondering with all of that, basically she’s asking, again, “Do I pay down my mortgage quicker or do I invest?” She says, “Does anyone else feel a weird emotional pull to pay off your mortgage ASAP even when you’ve crunched the numbers? I hope all of this makes sense. So many thoughts flying around in my head right now. I would absolutely love Tori to talk about this on a podcast.”
I’m doing it. Dear listener, dear reader, I’m doing it. Okay, so let’s talk about this. This is a question we get all the time. Again, should I pay down my mortgage faster or should I invest instead? The quick and dirty answer is you should invest instead. I have an entire free investing workshop called Stock Market Secrets that we will link down below. And this is actually one of the myths I debunk, that all of your debt needs to be gone before you start investing.
Now, some of your debt needs to be gone. High cost debt like credit card debt should be gone before you prioritize investing. But with something like a mortgage where your interest rate is normally 3 to 4%, right now it’s not great, but it’s normally under that 7 to 8% that we could be expecting in the stock market, it’s actually more advantageous to put any additional money beyond your monthly mortgage payment towards your investing. Why? Because again, you could be making more money by investing. But also let’s say hypothetically you do wait until your mortgage is paid off. Well, if your mortgage is a 30-year mortgage and let’s say you do pay it off early, let’s say you even cut it in half, which is an incredible accomplishment, right, let’s say that you pay off your mortgage in 15 years and then you start investing. Well, guess what? You can’t get those 15 years back. And as we know from previous episodes of the show, time is way more important than the amount of money when it comes to investing.
So you’ve just waited 15 years to start allowing compound interest to work harder for you, right? And what happens with Dave Ramsey in particular and this mindset that all debt is bad and must be gone immediately and that you got to pay off your debt as quickly as possible is that it costs you actually a more fruitful, stable retirement. It costs you mental stability and peace of mind. This narrative, and this person is mentioning that she feels this weird emotional pull to pay off your mortgage, that’s not a fucking accident. That’s like Dave Ramsey 101 shit, which is shaming you for having debt and making it your number one priority in your mind as opposed to actually crunching the numbers and being realistic about how life works, right?
Let’s say you’re lucky enough to buy a house at 25 and then again, we pay off our mortgage 15 years early. Well, now we’re 40 years old before we even think about prioritizing investing. That’s not a great experience, right? And then let’s say that we prioritize investing after our 30-year mortgage. Let’s say that we’re not able to pay it off early. Well, then we’re looking at you being 55 by the time you’re saving, right?
The average retirement age in this country is 57 to 65, in that range. So we’ve literally done the math. We have a graph that I show you in the Stock Market Secrets workshop that demonstrates that the math works, the psychology works, you protecting yourself for retirement works. So yes, continue paying your monthly payments, right? We’re not defaulting on our payments to do this, but with your additional money as opposed to chipping away at your mortgage faster, it will probably mathematically make more sense for you to actually contribute towards your retirement towards investing instead. So to this person who’s asking, should I pay down my mortgage faster or should I invest? You know the answer. And even it sounds like in this post you know the answer, but the little Dave Ramsey devils on your shoulder being like, “Nah, you got to pay off your debt first.” So investing is the right move here.
All right, let’s take our second question. This is from our podcast community in a voicemail from Emily.
Audio: Emily:
Hi, Tori. Thank you guys so much for all you’re doing. I have a really possibly dumb question. What does retirement actually look like logistically when you’re trying to take the money when you’re at the stage of taking the money out of your IRA accounts? And are you having to sell all those stocks all at once and then you get that money, then you get it in distributions? Are you doing it a little bit at a time? And if that is the case, what if the market is really bad at the time that you’re retiring? Let’s say if somebody was trying to retire tomorrow and the market is super low and you have to sell all these stocks in there. So if you could provide a little bit more clarification on what the logistics look like post retirement and how you would actually pull your money out of those funds once they’ve grown and sat in those accounts for a while, that would be super awesome and helpful. Thank you so much.
Tori Dunlap:
I appreciate it with Emily’s voicemail, but I think we heard some wind chimes in the back and it was very ASMR soothing. I don’t know, I just really appreciated that.
Okay. Emily, this is a question we get a lot, a question that we have answered in a full workshop in Stock Market School. So I’ll give you the TL;DR. If you are anticipating retiring soon, this is not the time to start planning for how you’re actually going to use this money. What I mean is if you’re 64 and expecting to retire at 65 with some money in your retirement accounts, that’s not the time to start thinking about, “Oh, I’m going to need this money tomorrow.” We’re going to backtrack a little bit, and if you can, we’re going to start thinking about you needing this money five to 10 years before you actually need it.
I’ll give you the example of my parents. My parents are in their early 60s. And for the past couple years, what they’ve been doing is slowly taking out money from their retirement accounts and from their general brokerage account, which as a reminder is not a retirement-focused account but is an investing account, and they’ve been putting it in what’s called a CD ladder.
What is a CD ladder? It is various CDs with various terms like year amounts. So for instance, they might have one CD that matures, for instance, 10 years from now, and then they’ll have another CD that matures eight years from now, and then five and then four and then two and then one so that they’re slowly getting that money as they will need it. You are not taking all of your money out of your investing accounts for retirement at once. One, that’s going to be a tax nightmare. And two, the point is you want to allow your money to continue to grow the money you don’t need yet.
So if you spend, let’s say $50,000 a year, if your expenses every year are $50,000, maybe the time you’re thinking about retirement and those maybe five years before, you’re slowly starting to pull out that money. So you might take out, if we’re retiring at 65, at 58, you might take out 50K. And then when you’re 59, you might take out another 50K, and then another 50K, right? You’re not taking out this whole lump sum of money at one time, but you’re moving it instead to places where your money is safe and at a less high of a risk.
You mentioned in your voicemail like, “Oh my God, what if I am taking out my money for retirement, but the stock market isn’t performing well during that time?” This is why we’re slowly taking out our money in anticipation of needing it to protect it in places that aren’t the stock market, hence a CD. And again, as a reminder, a CD, we’ve talked about this before, is a certificate of deposit. It’s like a souped up savings account. It is holding your money for a period of time and in exchange for you not being able to access your money, you’re getting a higher percent interest rate. So that’s one strategy that you can employ. My parents have done that. Again, a CD ladder, and just being more strategic about when you’re taking out your money and how you’re using it.
So the biggest thing to think about to your question is one, no, you’re not taking out all of the money at one time. That again, would be a nightmare in terms of managing it, but two, you want your investments to continue to grow. As well as during retirement season, let’s call it, you don’t want to hypothetically start planning for your retirement six months before you’re set to retire. This is something we want to think about in anticipation of retiring. And this is the perfect time, just like any time, to sit down and make sure that you are setting yourself up for success, not just right now financially, but in the future. So this is why my parents have done something like slowly siphon their money out of retirement accounts in order to protect it in lower risk or really no risk savings accounts.
And the thing that they’ve done, because if you know a bit about retirement accounts, you might be asking yourself, “Well, how did they do that without paying a penalty?” How can you start withdrawing money out of a Roth IRA, for instance, without paying a penalty? Fun fact, you can take your Roth IRA contributions out penalty-free. So your $6,500 that you’ve contributed year-over-year, and it’s been different depending on the year, but that contribution that you’ve made, you can take out penalty free. So that’s part of what my parents have done, is take out their contributions, but not their earnings of their Roth IRA early so that they don’t have to take a penalty.
But it’s only if you’re under age 59 and a half that you have to pay a penalty for withdrawing your earnings. So if you’re over that age, my parents are now over that age, they can start taking even more money out of their Roth IRA, that might be an option for you.
This is all in the weeds, but if you are somebody who’s trying to plan for early retirement, you are somebody who’s trying to help an older family member, or you maybe are an older listener to this show, then this is a just general piece of potential guidance, but you got to figure out what’s right for you. You got to make sure that this works for you. And I’ll also say too, we have had so many conversations in Stock Market School about how do I stop working as soon as possible? And these are those kind of strategies that are more, again, slightly more complicated because they are more strategic. They’re kind of, in a positive way, gaming the system that exists so that you can say “fuck off” to your work life forever and retire. So yeah, that is my answer to that question. You’re not taking all the money out at once, you’re being more strategic about it. And if you can plan ahead, we’re talking years, if not a decade, that can be really, really helpful for you in strategizing your future retirement.
All right, let’s take our next question.
Audio: Victoria:
Hi, Tori. A few months ago, I quit an incredibly toxic job that was severely impacting my mental health and my wellbeing. And recently I got a new job, which has been such a welcome change in terms of work, culture, and having a kind and empathetic manager, and I even managed to negotiate my salary to get 3,000 more than the job offer. Now that I’ve settled in at my new job, I’m wondering what I should do with my old 403(b) retirement account from my former job. The account is currently managed by Vanguard. Should I leave those funds with my former employer, transfer it to a 403(b) account with my new employer, transfer it into a Roth IRA or something else? I don’t particularly like the idea of leaving that money with my former employer, but I want to figure out what would be most beneficial for those funds.
Thanks for all your help, Tori.
Tori Dunlap:
All right, first of all, congratulations are in order in two regards. One, you left that taxi job, baby. We got to love it. I just love that you decided, “I don’t want to do this anymore,” and then you negotiated and found yourself a better opportunity somewhere else. Double win for you of getting out of a bad situation and then putting yourself in a really good spot, so congratulations.
All right, let’s talk about rolling over your 401(k). You’re 100% right. Your impulse is 100% right. We are not leaving our money with an old employer. That is like leaving money with an ex-boyfriend. I don’t trust my ex-boyfriend with my money. No, thank you. I don’t know what he’s going to fucking do with it. No. The reason we don’t want that to happen is, I mean, many. One, we don’t know what the employer’s going to do with it. It’s your money, let me be clear, but they might switch 401(k) providers. And because you don’t work there anymore, of course, you might not know that they’re switching 401(k) providers. And then when you do go and try to find the money in a couple years, you’re like, “I don’t know where the fuck it is.” Two, it’s just you’re not going to remember your login. You’re going to have to manage a bunch of different accounts from a bunch of different past employers, and that’s going to be a headache.
And so we do want to consolidate. We do want to get your money out of your old employer. And we have two options, just like you said. We can either put it in our current retirement accounts offered by your employer. But if you don’t have a retirement account offered by your employer, you can roll it into a Roth IRA, and that does not count for your Roth IRA contributions for that year. So again, Roth IRA contributions for this year are $6,500. If you roll a 401(k) into that Roth IRA or into a general IRA, you are not contributing. That doesn’t count towards that $6,500 contribution.
I will shamelessly plug, we have a partner tool that we use and recommend and love called Capitalize. They will literally do this for you for free. So if you are the person that’s listening and going, “I forgot to do that,” or, “I have been meaning to do that, and I don’t remember my login, and I don’t even know where the 401(k) lives, and I’ve been stressed about it, but I have just not looked at it,” well, cool. Capitalize can help. We will put the link down below. Again, it’s entirely free. They will help you find your 401(k) if you’ve lost it, and then also help you roll it into an IRA.
So Victoria, you have two basic options, like I said before. The nice thing about rolling it over into a Roth IRA is you own the Roth IRA, right? You are the Roth IRA owner. It’s not associated with any employer, so you have more control over how you invest the money, where you invest the money. So that might be your better option. However, either option is great, just get it out of your ex-boyfriend’s house. Get it out of your ex-employer, make sure it doesn’t live there. And if you are somebody who’s listening, who’s been meaning to do that, Capitalize might be able to help if you, again, don’t know how to do that whole process. So yeah, don’t leave it with your former employer. Let’s roll it over either into an IRA that we have, that we own, or into our current employer-sponsored retirement account.
All right. We talked about this before, Edward Jones. They’re on my hit list. This is probably going to turn into a rant about Edward Jones, but this person is asking, “Hey, Tori, probably, I’ve heard your episode, How the fuck do I get out of this hellscape that is Edward Jones?” So let’s go ahead and take a listen.
Audio: Speaker 1:
Hi, Tori. I have bounced around from one financial advisor that was trying to sell me whole life insurance to a new one with Edward Jones, but recently I don’t really want to be with them either. How do I switch to more of a robo-based investing or investing on my own from my current investments? How do I get my money out of there? How do I leave them? Or do I just leave it there and start my own thing and stop giving them my money every month? I’d love to have direction.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh boy. Okay. I’m taking deep breaths here because I just fucking hate Edward Jones. Sure. I’m going to go on the rant first and then I’ll give you the advice.
Edward Jones is bad. In case you didn’t hear the previous episode where I was mad at them, they’re just a terrible company. They take so much of your hard-earned money and fees. All of these places have fees. Don’t get me wrong. It’s how they make money. It’s how they stay alive. That’s fine. But Edward Jones has the most ridiculous unfair fees at the highest percentages I think I’ve seen. It’s so much bullshit. It’s so much bullshit. And I am just going to tell you, if you are currently investing in Edward Jones, of course this isn’t your fault. Nobody told you it’s okay, but get the fuck out. Look at me. Get the fuck out. They are spending so much of your hard-earned money, not actually growing your wealth, but on making themselves money. Just get the hell out of there. They’re not good.
For comparison’s sake, I literally, in anticipation for this episode, I pulled up Edward Jones’s, what they call schedule of fees. This is easily Googleable. You can Google Edward Jones fees and find the same spreadsheets. They want to charge you for anything and everything. And it’s not like $2, it’s like 2%, which doesn’t sound like a lot, right? You’re thinking 2%, that’s not anything. One, no companies, other companies charge fucking 2% for this thing or for anything. And then the thing is, 2% of a million dollars, because we hope we’re all fucking millionaires, is a lot of money to just keep your account open. So I just implore you so strongly that if you inherited an Edward Jones account, if you’re at Edward Jones because somebody told you like, “Oh, this is the place to go,” just get the fuck out. And if you Google Edward Jones scam, you can get all this information as well. I’m not the only person saying this. Any good finance expert will also tell you the same thing.
Okay, let’s talk about how we actually get out. Fun fact, Edward Jones, because they have to squeeze the lemon that is you right before you leave, they’re like, “Let me get one little last drop out of this lemon,” they charge you a fucking closing fee. They charge you a fee for you to close your account. It’s a bullshit fee, but it’s worth paying so that we don’t have to deal with them anymore. You will pay a $95, most likely, $95 exit fee. That is that last little squeeze the lemon juice on your way out. This is a transfer of an account fee. So if you are trying to close out your account at Edward Jones and transfer it to somebody else, they’re going to get you on the way out.
Now, if I was in your shoes, I might tell you with any other place that you don’t like, “Yeah, it’s fine. Keep it open. Just start investing somewhere else and just leave that account for now.” Because it’s fucking Edward Jones, if I was you, I would pay the fee, call it a loss, and transfer my money over. You have three basic options for where you can start investing next, for where you can close your account and transfer your Roth IRA or your individual brokerage account. Your three options are as follows. One, you can DIY your own investments. We’ve talked about this on previous episodes, but DIY platforms include Fidelity, Charles Schwab, Vanguard. The pro to these platforms is that they’re way less in fees. All of these bullshit fees that Edward Jones charges you, any of those three companies that allow you to do it yourself are not charging you nearly as many fees and definitely not the bullshit fees. So that’s the pro.
The con is that just as the name suggests, DIY, you have to do it yourself. And for the average listener of this show, they don’t feel confident enough to do it for themselves, and that’s okay. If you’ve ever logged into one of these platforms and seen all the graphs and charts and tried to figure out how to actually invest and you’ve been like, “Holy shit, this is so confusing,” and then you’ve hit the bail button, you’ve just been like, “Bail, bail, bail, bail,” then you know what I mean. So DIY platforms are great because they’re low fee, but you have to know what you’re doing. You have to feel confident enough to manage your own investments and to make investment choices for yourself. I feel confident enough to do that. The average person completely understandably does not. So dear listener, that is probably not the best option for you.
You mentioned robo-advisors. That is the other option. That is option number two. The great thing about robo-advisors is that you hand them your money and they ask you some information, your demographic information, your risk tolerance, when you’re expected to retire, and then they make choices for you. They invest for you depending on your answers. So that’s a great thing, is you can get in and get investing quickly, even if you have no idea what the fuck is going on. Some platforms that are robo-advisors, this is not an exhaustive list, but Ellevest, Acorns, Wealthfront, Wealth Simple, Betterment, there’s a bunch of other ones out there, but that’s an example of some of the robo-advisors. So the pro is that you’re investing quickly because they’re investing for you.
The con, as you might imagine, is they’re going to take a small fee to do this. Now, it is not an Edward Jones massive fee, but it’s somewhere between typically… It’s under half a percent typically, which isn’t a lot, again, especially compared to Edward Jones, but that adds up.
In addition, the thing we hear from our community a lot is that they are fishing for you rather than teaching you to fish, right? So someone might invest through an Ellevest or an Acorns or a Betterment and they get cooking, which is great because we want to get started, but what happens is after a couple years, they’ll come to me and they’ll go, “Tori, I don’t understand what’s happening though. I don’t have any investing knowledge three years later than I did when I first got started. I don’t know why they’re choosing the things that they’re choosing. I don’t know what any of these terms means still, and it’s my hard-earned money that’s just kind of going into the ether and I’m crossing my fingers that people are making good choices with it.”
So the pro of the robo-advisor, again, is that they’re getting you started fast, but the con is that they’re doing it for you and they’re taking a fee and you’re kind of left going, “Wait, what the fuck is going on?” So call me the Hannah Montana of investing because I built you the best of both worlds. You get it? You get it? We built Stock Market School with you in mind. We literally teach you and guide you through DIY-ing your own investments in a safe place so that you can actually know what the hell is going on without the shame, without the jargon, and in a place where you can not only actually invest, but learn how to invest, get your questions answered, learn from me in coaching and in workshops and all of that.
All of the information can be found below, including pricing, including testimonials, FAQs, but we literally built Stock Market School with the Her First 100K community in mind because frankly, we didn’t like any of the options that were out there. You can manage your money yourself. We’ve talked about this before. You don’t need a Wall Street chat, and yes, this includes Edward Jones in this case to come and save you. You just need somebody to guide you and support you and give you the information that you need to make smart, educated choices.
So we would love to see you in Stock Market School if that’s of interest, but those are your options in terms of getting out of Edward Jones. Again, if I was you, I would suck it up and pay that fucking $95 fee to get out and then move my money to either a DIY platform if I feel confident enough to manage my own investments, to a robo-advisor if I want to get started, or to Stock Market School, and I would love to see you there. So those are your three basic options for actually moving that money out of Edward Jones.
I will round out this by saying again, if you are at Edward Jones, they are scamming you. They are taking your money for things and for fees that don’t exist at most other companies. They’re kind of just making them up, and that’s some bullshit. And we want your hard-earned money to actually go towards building your wealth, which is why the money’s there.
Thank you so much for all of your questions about investing. As always, we have both free and paid resources around learning to invest that we will link in the show notes if you want to take your investing education further past this episode. Thank you to everybody who submitted their questions. You can always leave us a voicemail and we might feature it in another Ask Tori in the future. We appreciate you being here. We’re so excited to watch you fucking build your wealth and grow it by investing. I hope you have a great rest of your week and we’ll talk to you soon.
Tori Dunlap:
Thank you for listening to Financial Feminists produced by Her First 100K. If you love the show and want to keep supporting feminist media, please subscribe or follow us on your preferred podcasting platform or on YouTube. Your support helps us continue to bring this content to you for free. If you’re looking for resources, tools, and education, including all of the resources mentioned in this episode, head to herfirst100k.com/ffpod.
Tori Dunlap:
Thank you for listening to Financial Feminists, produced by Her First $100K. If you love the show and want to keep supporting feminist media, please subscribe or follow us on your preferred podcasting platform or on YouTube. Your support helps us continue to bring this content to you for free. If you’re looking for resources, tools, and education, including all of the resources mentioned in this episode, head to http://herfirst100k.com/ffpod.
Financial Feminist is hosted by me, Tori Dunlap. Produced by Kristen Fields and Tamisha Grant. Research by Sarah Sciortino. Audio and video engineering by Alyssa Midcalf. Marketing and Operations by Karina Patel and Amanda Leffew. Special thanks to our team at Her First 100K, Kailyn Sprinkle, Masha Bakhmetyeva, Sasha Bonar, Rae Wong, Elizabeth McCumber, Daryl Ann Ingman, Shelby Duclos, Meghan Walker, and Jess Hawks. 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 community for supporting our show.
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 five million women negotiate salaries, 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 over 2.1 million on Instagram and 2.4 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.
