Recycling, Microplastics, and Green Money with Kara Perez

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Hello, and welcome to Bad With Money, a show about finances and feelings where we don't talk down to you. I'm your host, Gabe S. Dunn, and back, back, back again is Cara Perez. Do you want to tell my audience who you are and what you do?

I would love to do that. So yes, I'm Cara Perez. I'm a financial educator and author of the book, Green Money, Reduce Waste, Build Wealth, and Create a Better Future for All. And I'm just a big old money nerd who, you know, had a lot of financial anxiety, ADHD, hyper focused it into paying off all my debt and making financial education my life. And now here we are recording this book.

Yes. So you were not specifically environmentally focused if I recall about your work. Not at the beginning. Not at the beginning. Yeah. And I mean, it was about paying off debt to which we can go into a little bit. What was the debt and like how, what was your method, your hyper fixation method?

Yeah, come on a journey with me back to 2014. I'm living in Austin, Texas. I have three roommates for the best of friends. It really truly is like friends, but instead of a coffee shop, we're hanging out at this bar called Shangri-La. Shout out in Austin.

for $2 Tuesday and I am the only one of my housemates who has a debt and I had a bunch of student loan debt. I graduated in 2011 and I waited tables the first couple of years out of college and then I was a caterer and I was super low income, like 15k a year, 12k a year, I mean really low income.

And when I turned 25, I was like, well, guess fucking what? Having debt sucks. None of my friends have debt, and their lives are drastically different from mine. One of them bought a house when they were 25. They were investing. They were traveling. And I was like, I'm crying myself to sleep because of my debt and my low income.

So my ADHD hyper focus kicked in. I started reading all these personal finance blogs and realized, oh, debt can be a formula. Like if you can just make a little bit more money, decrease your spending, you can like make some payments. You know, you don't have to cry about this. And then I just went all in and I was extremely, extremely, extremely frugal. I put every single extra penny I earned towards my debt. I worked five different part time jobs. I mean hyper focused on it, but I paid it all off.

in about 10 months. And then I just switched to that hyper focus to saving and investing because you pay off debt and you're like, yeah, I don't have debt, but you don't have money. You don't have any savings or anything or at least I didn't. And so I lived like that for like three years basically to try and build a buffer is how I thought of it between myself and zero. And so that's kind of like my introduction to the world of personal finance.

Did you have setbacks where you were like, Oh, fuck. I owe $1,000. So fun fact. I graduated college 2011, got my first job waiting tables like June 2011, moved to Austin 2012, did not pay my 2012 taxes. I was like, please, I made $13,000 like US government. You don't care. The US government didn't really notice, but the Commonwealth of Massachusetts noticed.

And so they sent me a bill that was, I bet you owe us money. And I literally brought, I remember this so clearly, I had just paid off my debt when I got the letter. So it took them like two years to track me down. And I brought a shoebox, a literal shoebox full of like receipts and paperwork and stuff to a coffee shop where I met with an accountant. And he was like in a suit. And I had just taken a yoga class and was like, here's my box full of money paper.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is going to sue me or like arrest me. Can you make this go away? And he was like, yes, you need to get like a folder. Why is this an option? So that was probably the biggest setback in terms of money that I had, because I had just paid off my debt. But like I said, I didn't have any savings. And then I owed, I didn't owe that much, but I owed like $300 or something. And I had to like come up with that.

So I had to like hustle. I was like, yeah, you have debt free. Oh my gosh. I have to like cater my ass off to try and come up with an additional 300 bucks sucks. It was like a real gut punch. It was like, I'm on this high sucker punch. Yeah. Well, that's how the system is set up. Unfortunately, it's just random stuff all the time.

Mm hmm. So then, okay, so you said not at first. Sorry, we're not here to go to therapy about that. Although here I am. So when did you start getting interested in the environmental aspect of it all?

So have you ever been, this is going to sound like a dumb. Have you ever been on Reddit? Almost every day. I'm, I really, okay. So as a kid, I was low key obsessed with the rainforest. I was really concerned about deforestation in the rainforest. I feel like a lot of 90s kids were. It was kind of a big issue. And they talked to us constantly. And then all of a sudden we never heard about the rainforest again.

Yes, I just like fell off. I don't know, but I had a bunch of like save the rainforest t-shirts and I did a lot of like presentations on it in elementary school. So I feel like I've always been environmentally aware, like we've always recycled and like I'm a one car household with my partner and we just, I feel like I've always been somewhat environmentally aware, but in, and I talk about this in my book a little bit,

I kind of fell into a Reddit hole in like 2016. I got, which is a weird year to get really into Reddit, but I did. And I found this subreddit called fuck Nestle because Nestle obviously is this huge corporation and they have a ton of sub companies, but they have, they do plastic bottled water and they steal that water from municipalities and like different parts of Mexico and in the United States.

And all of the, I mean, there's thousands of people in the subreddit who hate Nestle and they, a common topic is how you can boycott Nestle and that kind of set off a light bulb in my head because I had done boycotts obviously in the past, but now here I am, you know, like,

Two years into my money journey, I've paid off my debt, I'm saving, I'm investing, I'm super excited about money. And then I find the subreddit and I'm like, oh my God, why am I using Bank of America, which I know is an environmental disaster. They blow the tops off mountains, they fund fossil fuel projects, like I'm fracking. Why am I keeping my money there? Why am I not using my money as a tool to align with my personal values? And it really, it just like that subreddit, I credit it.

It kind of blew my mind as you can use money for how you

to create a world you want to see, or you can use money to punish companies for behavior that you don't like. And so that's when I started really going down the environmental, like, oh, I'm going to take my money out of fossil fuels and the stock market. I'm going to try and shop at like locally owned small businesses instead of always buying a target. You know, like where is my money going when it leaves my wallet was kind of the refrain that kept echoing in my head.

So what was your first step? Let's say somebody, it's not you, it's somebody new, they've just found fuck Nestle. What do they do? So the first thing is try not to be overwhelmed, right? Like I think often when we think about sustainability or environmentalism,

People go way too big, way too fast. It's like, I have to give up meat. I have to only take public transportation. Everything in my house should be linen. Like we see this kind of Instagram defined definition of sustainability.

And that's not what I want people to do. I want people to kind of sit for a second and give themselves time to learn about like, what is sustainable money? What is sustainability and what makes sense for my life? And I talk about this all the time on my platforms, but like, I'm child free. I'm 36, child free. If you have three kids, our versions of sustainability are going to look very different.

like if you're a two-parent household with three kids, you probably need two cars or you would probably like two cars because that's going to make your life easier. I'm with my long-term partner, no kids. We can get by with one car because he can bike to work and I can walk to a grocery store and we can just trade off cars. So it's not that I want people to make the same sustainable living and sustainable money decisions I'm making. I want them to learn and

think about what decisions are realistic for their life and what decisions matter the most to them. So the first thing is like, get educated. Like learn about it. The second step is what are areas of my life that I can realistically make immediate changes in? And then the third step is what are areas of my life that it's going to take me a while, but that I know I can make changes in. And that's going to tend to be like bigger picture stuff.

So for, I know like I pulled things from Bank of America and I'd been a customer there for God, I don't know, 10, 12 years. And I pulled all of my stuff out of Bank of America right around when they were like being very shady about the Dakota pipeline. This was also 2016 probably. It felt scary to do it. Like it feels scary to move stuff when you've been complacent in a place or you don't think

Well, my thing's not going to matter, which is kind of interesting to talk about because it is election day as we record this. And the idea that my my thing isn't going to matter came to mind around election stuff, but it's also kind of interesting because you mentioned that fuck Nestle has thousands of people in it.

So you would have never known about that without the thousands of people in fuck Nestle. So it almost is like, to me and my mind, a counterpoint to, well, I don't matter, you know, because you're like, even the awareness of thousands of people, peak your interest.

Oh, yeah. It's very easy, I think, under capitalism to feel as if you and your actions and your decisions and your money and your power is nonexistent because we live in a world where maybe you have $10,000 to your name and Elon Musk has $210 billion. I don't even know how much money he has.

And he's not going to do anything. I mean, it's already. So this is interesting thing. We, the liberal talking point seems to be, well, big corporations, we should lobby big corporations for change and we should get Elon Musk to change and we should do all these things and take the, take the onus off of you. It's not your fault. You know, and it isn't your fault, but maybe I would push back on that your individual decisions don't matter at all.

It's hard, like, you know, the idea would be, well, go and lobby people to stop fracking. And it's like, look, even the Democratic candidate was like, fracking is good.

So if you're not going to lobby stuff or you feel like that is hopeless, it's not a individual, oh, I'm absolving my own conscience. I'm actually morally superior. It's this is where I do have power, the little place I do have power in my little life under capitalism.

Oh, completely. I firmly believe. And the book is firmly about your money has power. Whether that's $10, $1,000 or $10 million, money has power because under capitalism, which is our current economic system, money is the most important thing. It's what drives all business decisions. It's what drives our health care decisions. It drives how we make decisions.

as a country and as a world. So anything you do with your money matters, where you shop matters, where you bank matters. And I pulled my money out of Bank of America and put it in a credit union. And I've been at that credit union for 12 years.

And that credit union has an education focus, so they help put money into public schools. And I'm like, hell yeah, I'm helping do that, right? And so it's, again, it's very easy to look at the inequality, to look at the challenges and think,

nothing matters. And like, I certainly don't matter, but that's simply not true. And I actually think it's cool that we're recording on election day because think about the billions of dollars that have been poured into this race. It's because your vote does matter. And you look at the states that have flipped. Like, I mean, I'm 36. I never thought Georgia was going to be a purple state, let alone a blue state, right? And like, and I lived in Texas for 12 years. And the

Anti 11 years. I guess I lived in Texas, but like the fact that people are even talking about Texas, maybe being purple, you know, or like the momentum that, but Aurora had the momentum that Colin already has like that was unthinkable 15 years ago. And so to say that your vote doesn't matter, say that your dollar doesn't matter is simply untrue. It, it almost feels like

a salve because the problems are so big that you're like, oh, at least I can tell myself that nothing I do matters. But that's a lie. It's a lie that the corporations want you to believe. And so really what you have to do is say, like apathy is unacceptable. So what next? Like, okay, where do I bank if not bank of America, a credit union, a community bank, et cetera, et cetera? So it's first accepting, I absolutely do have power. And then the next step is how do I use that power?

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Yeah, so recycling is mostly not real. There are layers to that. Glass recycling is very real. Aluminum recycling is very real. It's plastic recycling that is often fake. So I don't want to turn people off from recycling, but I don't want you to think that's the most important thing. In the environmentalist movement, we have a saying reduce, reuse, recycle. Recycle is the third thing for a reason. You should be reducing first.

Maybe that's buying less. Maybe that's flying less. Maybe that is just eco-dumerisming less. But like reduce your impact, reuse and repair. And then it's recycled because the idea is that we live on a finite planet and we're trying to live infinitely. Like we are using things at a rate that we can't replace or replenish. So what we need to do is just pull back a little bit. Like you don't need to be on Amazon every day.

You don't need to be on she and every day and we don't need to be like deep sea fracking every day. Oh, we did an episode of just between us about deep sea fracking and it was like a suggestion from a listener and it was truly wild that I had never heard of this and that it was happening. It was like a let me see when we did the episode. It was so wild to not even know that these things were happening on our planet because it's just so normalized.

deep sea mining. So we did the episode with James Heetah, if anybody's interested in listening. It was in November of 2023. So wait, what do you mean about plastic specifically?

Yeah, so plastic A is made of oil. So when you think about the environmental impact of plastic, a lot of us don't know. And this kind of goes to your point about deep sea mining of like not being aware of things. We tend to be aware of something when it's right in front of our face as it is. And we don't think how did this get created? We just accept it as is. So plastic

comes from oil, which comes from the ground, and comes from mining, and comes from all of these garbage practices. And so the environmental impact of plastic is really twofold. It takes a ton of resources to create plastic, and it's basically impossible to reuse. And it's definitely impossible to reuse endlessly, where something like glass or aluminum, you can create something out of that, break it back down to its component parts, and create something out of it again and again and again.

You can't do that with plastic because the quality of it degrades. Add in on top of that, we make plastic in a bunch of different ways. And this is kind of the fault. Not the fault. This is kind of where a lot of people get hung up with recycling. There's different numbers on the bottom of plastic, right? Oh, this is a seven. This is a three. This doesn't have the recycling symbol. So like people get confused by how they even are supposed to recycle it because we've made these plastics in different ways, which again, takes a ton of energy.

So the kind of like myth of recycling is we use a ton of plastic. We have increased our plastic production over the last 50 years in a truly insane way. So now we have all this plastic that we've already created already used all those resources and we can't do anything with it.

Like we can't break it down. It just degrades into microplastics, which goes into the water systems and our bloodstreams. And it's a, it's a really a huge problem that also again, like sounds incredibly depressing when you talk about it and you're like, what can I do? But the, the issue comes back to again, reduce like we have to reduce how much plastic we're making and we have to move away from plastic as the default packaging and the default like,

Plastic is used a lot in healthcare, and I have Crohn's disease, which is this chronic incurable GI disease. So it's like, it's not just the like, you bought plastic, you're a bad person. It's like in these bigger systems, and that is something that we need to move away from.

Yeah, all of my testosterone equipment is plastic. The needles, the caps, everything involved with testosterone is plastic. And it makes sense from a medical point of view because a lot of that is designed to be single use. It's not healthy or safe to reuse a bunch of medical stuff.

But if we're constantly leaning on this thing that's permanent and we live again, like where are we supposed to put it? You know, like at this point, truly our only option is to like shoot it into space, which again is like, it's hard to shoot stuff into space. It's incredibly resource heavy to shoot stuff into space. And then there's always the risk that it's going to like fall back on us. Or the aliens get here and they're like, are you kidding me? You made a ring of, of garbage around your planet.

We don't even want to land here.

They're like, we're avoiding that. That's the street that we don't drive down, you know, just the planet we don't visit. Yeah, they don't, they don't street sweep that street. The microplastics of it all. They're just inside of us now. And that's just sort of what we have to just, I feel like that's going to be a thing like smoking where in like years, they're going to be like, what? We were all fine. Like asbestos was in the walls. Like we were all fine with this. Like I feel like that's coming.

Have you seen that meme that's like grandparents full of like, let yeah, parents full of, I can't remember what they're. Maybe. And then millennials full of like. Yes. That's what I think it is. Maybe that's why we're all so sleepy.

I am exhausted all the time. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe microplastics were the fuel that kept me so ambitious in my 20s and now they've decided to just degrade and I'm sleepy now. I don't know. But I, you know, it is.

It is hard to know what you're supposed to recycle. I always take now recycling or like using things for different purposes or I do clothing swaps. I haven't bought clothes in forever. I take clothes from other people all the time or someone will be like, now I think I've gained a reputation. Well, someone will say, I don't want this shirt. Do you want it? And I do want it.

I used to take Allison's clothes when I was a girl. I used to take Allison's clothes sometimes. And she's she comes from money. She'll be the first to tell you. And she would have these like dress these like, I don't know, I don't want to say a brand name, but like expensive dresses that she would be like, I never wore this. So then I had like better clothes.

because I would just like be like, okay, yeah, I'll take it. And it was like, even if it's not my style, sometimes I'll be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I can make this work. I can cut it. I can do something. I can make this work or like I can sell this low key. Yeah. Sometimes I think ugly stuff is funny. So like my friend had to meet like a minimum at Nike to get sneakers or something for like free shipping. And so he bought this like quote unquote ugly shirt.

And then he was like, I don't know, do you want it? And I was like, I actually think that that's the coolest shirt I've ever seen. So I actually love it unironically. It's not ironic. It has like a flaming horse on it. Anyway. Oh, yeah.

No, but you bring up I think a good point of kind of like upcycling or I think people hear the conversation about recycling and they're exclusively thinking like plastics or glass or something. And that's really not it. Like, yeah, I host a lot of clothing swaps. And in my book, I talk a lot about how like I tell a story of how I used to be really obsessed with plastic recycling in college. And then I was like, this is dumb. And this is a bad place to put my energy.

I'm going to shift that away. And so when people are kind of on their sustainable money journey or just sustainable living journey, I really, really want them to focus on what's realistic for their life and how they can get their needs met. So like hosting clothing swaps saves you money. Of course, keeps clothes out of the landfill. It's also community building and it puts you in touch with people. And if we're going to ever change anything, like what's that quote? It's like,

A small group of people is the only force that's ever changed the world. I'm paraphrasing someone fact check me, please. But in order to be a small group of people that changes the world, you need to know other people. You have to community build. And that's something else I talk about at length in the book.

how to community build, how to like solidarity builds. Because if we're going to make these big changes, we're going to need each other, babes. Yeah. Big tech has started freaking me out. I saw a video of a girl getting in a Waymo, which is those self-driving Ubers. It may be sad because one, not that I like always talk to my Uber driver because I feel like sometimes they're on the phone. They don't want to talk to me. But like,

That's like an interaction with a person or you're gonna get like a self-driving car to go to the airport and you're not gonna ask your friend or you're gonna get a self-driving car to like my sister works at bars and she works at two different bars and one of the bars had given her a bunch of stuff to bring to the other bar. And she was like, okay, so how am I gonna put all this in an Uber? Can you just come get me and we'll drive it to the, you know what I mean?

That's like a favor that we've done for each other. And it's like very, it builds little bits of trust and love. And the idea of getting in everybody, just never speaking to another person, just everybody, I just started envisioning a future of everyone getting into these self-driving cars and being on their phones. And yes, this is like I'm approaching boomer ideas, but like,

It just made me so sad envisioning a line of traffic where it's just all these individual people in self-driving cars. And I was like, what have we lost? Because it's interesting to be like, we build tech for people to have more time with each other. We build tech for people to be able to X, Y, and Z. But we also build tech to isolate ourselves.

And I mentioned that actually in the book. So there's a chapter called how to build a soup swap that's focusing on community building. And I mentioned we have lost or we are losing a lot of small social touch points. So like if you wear your headphones everywhere, you're not having small chat with people in the line in front of you at Trader Joe's or here in Massachusetts, Market Basket. Right. Or you can hear something over here stuff. That's interesting. Yeah.

So like you've lost that. And I mentioned transportation, like instead of being on a bus or on a subway where you're surrounded by other people who have to interact with other people, like being alone in your car isolates you from people. And now, yeah, being in self-driving cars, further isolation because there's not even that driver or a friend or something with you. But

I mentioned like we and this is very well documented right we have like a loneliness epidemic we have a loneliness crisis and here in the US people are more and more so questioning that I think and more and more so like what did happen to third places what why can't I hang out with my friends without spending a hundred dollars and so I moved from Austin Texas to Charlotte North Carolina in 2023 for my partner's job and

We lived in this four unit condo and our neighbors across the hall. We met once in the year that we lived there. I mean, they were never around. The neighbors upstairs were these terrible people. I want to find it in my heart to be nice, but they were awful. They harassed us. And then the neighbors diagonally upstairs were like some of our best friends. They were so cute and we had a soup swap with them. So hence the chapter title.

We're one time my partner, so they knocked on our door the day they were moving in. It was like 10 p.m. on a Sunday. And I'm there in my robe. Like I'm just in my robe lounging.

because it's 10 p.m. on a Sunday. And my partner is making himself a late night snack of ramen. And someone knocks on our door and I was like, it's 10 p.m. It's dark outside. Like, who is knocking on our door? Or I'm sorry, sorry. They're not, they don't knock on the door. There's this thunk coming from outside. They knock on the door later. They just thunk. It was like, something keeps falling. And so my partner pokes his head out and they're these two people struggling to get their couch up the stairs. They like, can't get it up. My partner who I call T-bone online was like, hey, you guys need some help? And they're like, yes.

There was not a like, oh, no, don't even worry about it. We got it. They're like, we cannot get this freaking couch. So my partner helps them 15 minutes later, he's like back inside, snacking on his ramen. Then like a week later, we get a knock on the door again. I'm in my robe and I'm like, I can't answer the door. I'm in my robe. And they had come to give us cookies. They're like, thank you so much for helping with the couch. And that like started this whole, hey, can I borrow? Hey, do you need help with? Can you drive me here? Can we do? And it just like back and forth, trading,

help, right? Trading small acts of service with each other. And it's that kind of thing that I really lean into heavy in the book. The book is basically just like, what if a leftist tried to do financial education?

thing to do with the book. And so like solidarity building and coalition building and community building is this huge thread throughout it. And when we're looking at a future of tech isolating us or like fear of the other growing, which is something that the right in the United States is like hammering heavily. Like you should fear the immigrant. You should fear, you know, the librarian. You should fear books. You have to start to build and a great way to build with other people is to say, Hey, can you help me?

Hey, can you help me with my couch? Hey, can I borrow a book? Hey, can you like, blah, blah, blah? And so that's a big thing I think we all need to start doing.

I think true crime has also warped us. Like I just watched, no hate to Anna Kendrick. I just watched Anna Kendrick's directorial debut, Woman of the Hour. And one of the things that happens in it, you're describing this. And literally one of the things that happens in it is one of the girls gets a bunch of furniture delivered and then the movers walk away. And she's like, well, what am I supposed to do? And there's a guy on the street and she's like, spoiler alert for women of the hour.

And she's like, hey, can you help me move this stuff? I'll give you a beer. And he's like, sure, a young guy. And he helps her move the stuff. And then he kills her. That's what I think we've ingrained in our minds and that you could listen to a lot of episodes of your rock about. And Sarah Marshall talks about this a lot about the idea of being scared of your neighbor because it's easier to do that than it is to think about how most women are murdered by their intimate partners.

But anyway, but yeah, so I feel like the fear of the neighbor is intertwined with, oh, don't worry, we have tech for that. And yes, and this is my like conspiracy, not conspiracy theory. It's just a theory I've been marinating on and thinking about a lot. So I wanted to ask a couple listener questions.

Great. So this is a question from Lizard Cookie. Is investing in the stock market being a shareholder ethical at all? There doesn't seem to be another way to keep up with economic inflation for retirement. Great question. I think there's two ways to look at this, and we do have a chapter on investing in the book, and I do invest in the stock market. I don't invest in fossil fuels. But to come back to your question, I think there's two ways of looking at it.

I would say this is sort of like you want to be a communist, but you live in America way of looking at it is you could see the stock market as a way of owning the means of production because when you are a shareholder of a company, you have power over how that company is.

Organized and dictate in what it does. Obviously, if you own one share of Google, you don't have a ton of say. They do send you the stuff and the more shares you acquire, the more say you have, right? So you could look at it that way. You could say, look, we live in a deeply flawed economic system. This is one path of power and control and impact on the world around me to invest in this.

Or, and I do interview someone in the book who doesn't invest in the stock market, you could say, it's too ethically compromised and I don't want to do this. And you could completely opt out. And I think there's a form of power in that. I don't think that's a realistic.

opportunity, I don't think that's a realistic path forward for anyone who isn't white and straight, frankly. I would never ask a black trans woman to give up the option of investing in the stock market because I think that's going to further marginalize her.

The person that I interviewed in the book who doesn't invest in the stock market is a straight white woman who owns her own house. And I was like, so you have other forms of kind of like traditional wealth building, right? You have real estate wealth and she invests and I like, I won't give too much because like get the book. She invests in her community in other ways. So she does like micro loans in her community. So she keeps her money hyper local. And I think that that is a way forward, but I think that you have to have other forms of privilege in order to completely eschew the stock market.

market. Or as this reader or this listener rather kind of points out, you have to be comfortable sacrificing the growth and the wealth that other people are going to build around you. And so like for me, like I'm a straight white woman who has brown family members. My dad was born and raised in Dominican Republic. My mom's white. I got the whiteness. I like, okay. Yeah.

I got the whiteness. I'm very privileged in a lot of ways, but I also have a lot of family that don't have as much privilege as me. I want to be very aware of the financial responsibilities that I may have to carry in the future. For me, not investing in the stock market is not an option. However, I'm privileged enough that I can take my money out of oil, coal, and gas 100% and I have and I feel really good about that. It's a complicated question. I hope that answer makes sense.

Yeah, it's also we did an episode about ESG's and I did like kind of a deep dive into them and it's very interesting. Oh, no, we didn't do an episode about it. I wrote, I wrote an article for auto straddle called I'm looking for a trans and finance. That was about trans people working in finance, the uptick of it.

Part of it was that a lot of them recommend ESGs, which are environmental, social, governor, ethical investments. And it's dubious because you can apply and you get labeled one by this thing, whatever. It's like a whole thing. But there's so much pushback against them in like mainstream financial media and by the government that they literally call it the ESG cartel.

Like they say there's an ESG cartel pushing ESGs on people. And it's like people who it's like, Oh, you're not making because so fiduciary duties. It's very broad. It requires you have to do what's the best interest of the client. Now, it's the best interest of the client making them more money or is the best interest of the client aligning with their values.

It's not defined. So a lot of fiduciaries don't recommend ESG's because if they don't make enough money for the client, and the client actually, even if the client's like, no, I want to do my values, but then they later are like, why did you lose me all this money? They could get in big trouble. So they don't recommend it. And then

Also, I think because it's not so like it is interesting because I always felt that fiduciary like, you know, the general sense is, oh, you got to make sure the person is a fiduciary who you're working with. But then they didn't quite realize that fiduciaries are under this increased scrutiny that makes them less likely to take risk, which is good. But what if the risk is something where you're like, I don't want to invest in fossil fuels and I don't want to invest in like the NRA? You know what I mean?

Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because I do feel like people in the financial world frame ESG investing or SRI socially responsible investing as like, well, you know, you're taking a huge risk by not investing in like Exxon because Exxon has great returns. And it's like,

You're also taking a huge risk, A, by investing in Exxon, like, C, climate disaster. But also, no one can guarantee you anything. And to your point, like, fiduciaries are kind of caught in this. I mean, any financial advisor, financial educator, fiduciary, is caught in this weird space of, like, how to quote unquote, best serve.

And then there's also just straight up scammers. There are in every industry. There are people who will take your money and give you nothing. And there are people who will put you in products that benefit them more than it benefits you. And so removing the ethical blends of something doesn't leave you with everything's better and going to make you richer.

Because you could get robbed by someone who puts you in oil and gas just as easily as you could not make as much money by avoiding oil and gas, right? Like it's, yeah, please. I mean, it's, it's scary, right? Like, so I've, I had a, I have a retirement account and I have had it for years with the same people.

And it never really moved. And I was like, so scared to move it. But my, my friend was like, you gotta, you gotta just move it to self-directed because like whatever, because this person's not doing anything and also like, why are you paying them? And like whatever. So we moved, so I was scared, but we moved it to self-directed at Vanguard. And it's all of a sudden gone up.

Like what the so I was like, what am I? It was like a ostrich head in the sand moment to then like take your head out and be like, wait a minute. What am I invested in? What are you doing? Like, are you necessary? What's happening? It's very scary. Moving over, you know,

hundreds of thousands of dollars was really terrifying. But yeah, I and also, by the way, I can't touch that money. I don't touch that money. I have put it in there. And I said, this money is invisible until I'm 66 years old. Or if I get really, really sick, I think is my mindset around that.

but it's not for everyday bailouts because and thank god yeah so i mean that was terrifying but in the end i didn't need that guy i knew in my head what i wanted to and i don't touch it but i knew like i wanted to be invested in things that made more sense to me and that i had more control over because it's often

men, these men who are saying it has to be this. But I didn't realize it's because they're under this very vague handcuffs. Mm hmm.

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So, okay, Rachel asks, how do you balance the fact that so many people's lives could be changed by a cash gift when I have a bit of extra cash, but I still need to house and feed myself first?

Ooh, Rachel, amazingly compassionate money question. I love this. A couple of things. It's a little cliche, but you have to put your own oxygen mask on first. Now, there's wiggle room within that. Do you need to have a million dollars before you can help somebody else? Probably not.

But like, do you want to pay next month's rent before you Venmo your friend $500? Maybe yes, so that you stay housed, right? So I would say this is why I love budgeting. I'm a huge fan of budgeting. I'm a huge proponent of it. And this is why I always say you have to know your numbers. So I would sit down and this can be very scary. So try and do this without judgment and without self blame.

And you can use an app. I like in power. It's free. You hook up all your bank accounts, your credit card, everything, and it spits out all your information on a dashboard. I like that because then you can see you can go into one specific category like rent. How much do I need? How much do I spend on rent per month and per year? How much have I spent on groceries so far this year? That gives you an understanding of what your bare minimum needs are.

So that you can say, okay, I have a little bit extra, you know, let's say I need $3,000 a month and I have $3,500 this month. So I have 500 air quotes extra. Then you get to make the call. I'm going to donate half of this. I'm going to pay my mom's light bill. And then I'm going to keep the other half, right? Like I'm going to save or invest the other half.

But I find having that the hard numbers, there's a JZ quote, men lie, women lie, numbers don't. They're having that hard number around. I need $3,000 every single month to pay my bills, to stay alive, to get my health care. And if someone else has a need, that doesn't mean I don't have a need.

But if I have extra after my needs are met, here's how I want to do that. And again, something else I talk about in the book and then I really believe I try to talk about this in my content a lot too is like, Ken needs get met without money, right? Like if your friend has

a job interview coming up and they need new clothes. Can we get the homies together and host a clothing swap? Does it need to be, let's hit up Banana Republic or is it Susie or like your Alison has a nice closet? Can I borrow something? I love the compassion of this question. Run your numbers and also explore creatively. How can we get needs met? How can we help the homies? How can we build the community without just relying on spending money?

Yes, agree. It's interesting, like the meal train idea, you know, and also when somebody has gone through a loss or things like that, they get the most help in the first month and then people sort of drop off. So don't feel like, oh, I missed my window if somebody's gone through something even a year later. This is not me like giving someone something of mine, but I do sometimes just send $5 to people and are like, get coffee. I'm sorry, today sucks. Yeah.

Wait, okay. So one of my most viral air quotes post 2020, obviously, like the world was low-key ending. And one of my oldest friends went through just like, oh, man, life like knocked her down month after month after month. It was bananas.

And so I did this thing, I opened a new savings account and I called it friend emergency fund. So I have my own emergency fund, but then I was like, when my friends are struggling, like I should be able to buy them pizza. And so I still have that account and I keep like 300, 500 bucks and there's not a lot of money, but that gives me, I can just Venmo a friend, $5, get a coffee, 20 bucks, get a pizza.

30 dollars pay your water bill, you know, like these small amounts of money. So Rachel, you could also maybe build a friend emergency fund into your budget. Yeah. I mean, I don't know if she would care if I talked about this, but there's something that happened for me recently where there was like a mix up with my electricity bill and ended up being like way more than I had thought it was going to be. And it was like through a fault of my landlord, but there's not really anything you can do about that. And Allison just paid it.

like, and I was like, what are you? Are you what? And she was like, yeah, pay me back whenever. But she's not gonna she's not gonna ask for it. But I was like,

I was in like, you know, maybe there, there's a world where she takes a little bit of money out of JBU, you know, whatever we make on it more than me for a little while. But she consistently will be like, if we make money on JBU every month, she'll, you know, if I'm like short or something, she'll be like, okay, you take an extra, you take an extra 600. And then the next month, I'll do it. That's kind of always been the thing because she comes from money and I don't.

And so when we first started the channel, a lot of stuff she paid for, we could not have kept doing the channel if she wasn't rich. Yeah. Well, and I've listened to the show for a long time. And I remember there's a lot of episodes where you talk about this kind of relationship between you and Allison. And I love it. And I think it's such a good example of financial privilege that's not like, and I bought you a house. I feel like a lot of times people think,

Kind acts are like paying it forward has to be these huge numbers or has to be like, I gave you a kidney. And it's like, actually, it can just be that like I paid your electric bill. And if you pay me back, you pay me back. Great. And if you don't like, that's, I'm still going to be fine. Cause I have financial privilege, right? Yeah. My ex who I'm still very close to, he works at Google. So he makes a lot of money. And I went out of town and my sister forgot to move my car. So I ended up getting a ticket.

And I was like, and she had already told me, oh, you got a ticket. Sorry. My ex went to my car, took a picture and was like, oh, you didn't get a ticket. Like, don't worry about it. I'm going to move your car. And I was like, Cheyenne already told me I got a ticket. And he was like, ah, fuck, I was just going to pay it.

And I was like, that's so sweet. He's like, I didn't want you to know you got a ticket. And I was like, that's really sweet. It would have shown up on my, you know, like, but I was like, but he was like, no, I was just going to pay it. So you would think you didn't get a ticket. And I was like, that's really sweet. What wonderful people you have around you that this is like, there's so many heartwarming stories you're sharing. Yeah. I mean, I think it's, I think a big part of it is being 36 and having done this show for so long. And

being okay with being vulnerable. There's still a lot of stuff. I don't. I mean, I work a part time job now. I got recognized at work yesterday and I wanted to throw up. There's still a lot that I am ashamed of. Oh, don't you worry. There's there's deep shame here.

seasons to come. Yeah. But I also really enjoy that job. And I have a good time there. And it's like a thing that I think is fun. So I don't know. I, but yeah, like I think a lot of it was this rugged American individualism that was like, I can't ask anyone for anything or being worried that someone is going to

But now it's like trades, like my friend went and picked up my medication for me before I had to go out of town. I bought him like pill pockets for his cats for like 10 bucks or whatever. And then we just traded. I think it's becoming in the age of 36, becoming more comfortable with that vulnerability and having so much lore with these friends.

like Alison and I, that's my longest relationship. We've been together 12 years. So like that, the lore there is so deep that she was like, of course, I'm going to pay the bill. You're my family. And I was like, are you in some sort of tailspin about your mom dying and you're just giving money away? But you know what?

No, she's thank you for being this. No, she she's she's just like genuinely a very grown in person who's, you know, I think I think queerness and straightness maybe touches on it a part of it, but she's like married and all her friends are having babies and stuff. And I'm just a little trans boy. So it's kind of we're in different stages.

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining the pod. Where can people find you and your book and find out more of what we can do to actually make a difference?

Oh my gosh. So the book is available. Target, Amazon, bookshop, Barnes and Noble, all the places. It's called green money. And my name is Cara Perez. So just Google some combo of that and you'll get it. And I'm on the internet way too much. I'm on TikTok and Instagram at we bravely go, which is a little tricky, but we bravely go again, just Google Cara Perez. And like I'm very Googleable. I'll come up.

But thank you for having me. This was great. And you made me think of something else too, which is your part-time job. And I've been a full-time entrepreneur for five years, and I'm looking for a part-time job. So I just wanted to destigmatize that real quick, because it's a grind. It is hard to get a job. I was looking around for, I think, sometimes wealthy people will say, why don't you just get a job? And I'm like, I would love for you to walk me through the steps of getting a job.

Where would you look for a job there? Oh, you walk by, you see help on the side. I'm like, no, I mean, sometimes that's not real. Sometimes, but walking it, but generally they'll have that and then they'll hire their friends. So like we don't know. But so I felt like extremely beaten down. And then when I did get a job, I was like really lucky. I felt really lucky to do it. And then it's also something that I think is fun. So.

But yeah, that was the first time that someone was like, hey, I know you. And I was like, I'm in about, I'm just have to go on my 10 and jump off a bridge. Yeah, like it's hard for sure. But it is also like the entrepreneurship grind is super hard because it's so inconsistent, right? You have amazing months, you have terrible months. And the mental load of being an entrepreneur, especially one that relies a lot on social media, which is like now you're fighting the algorithm and like misinformation every day.

And then you reach a certain level of success and people are like, what do you mean? You're like, I just applied for a job as like a receptionist. I just wanted a job where I can kind of like low key turn my brain off and just like point people in other directions. Like no one's.

that's what i'm doing but i feel a weird i feel people feeling weird about it and i think that and i spoke to some fans of mine like we were we were chatting about it on like a live stream and they were like that's just la like everyone or the industry you're in they were like we all have jobs like everyone i know has a job

And I was like, right, I'm so fucking warped. And like, I just have been around rich people for way too long that I, I'm like, Oh, if I have a job, I have to hide it, which I always do. Anytime I've had to get a little job in this whole journey of being quote unquote famous, I hide it. Even on my money podcast.

It's, but it's layers, man. And it's as you've brought up multiple times, like there's so much fear that is often wrapped into money into how we earn it, how we spend it, how we invest it and save it. There's also shame. There's also just anxiety and we live in this crazy like rugged individualist. Everything points towards quote unquote success and successes more and bigger and like more isolation.

You know, and so like if you are building community, if you are working for someone else, if you are asking for help or giving help, you're almost by default unsuccessful because that's not how we define success in the US. So it's just like, there's a lot of impact there and this could be a whole other podcast episode, but I just wanted to say like same.

Trying to get like me trying to get like you. Thank you. Yeah, like destigmatize, but I also do deeply feel people being weird. But you know what? My ex was like, if you get recognized at work and you just are really confident, then they'll just mirror that. And I was like, I love this autism on autism helpfulness.

100% though. Sometimes it's the finally in the bind, but other times we're sort of working it out. Well, thank you so much. Thanks for coming back on the show. Thank you for having me. Bad with money with Gabriel as done is a production of noted by sexual produced by Melissa D. Moss and diamond and print productions edited by Diane King post production sound by Coco Lorentz production assistance by Melanie D. Watson and music by Mike Kaplan, Zach Sherwin and Jack Doljan, sung by Sam Barbera. Thank you. Love you. Bye.