Deez Interviews: Amber Jamieson on turning her investing know-how into a newsletter + podcast gig, plus her recommended resources on getting started w/stoncks
Happy Friday, Deezers! Today’s interview is with Amber Jamieson, who is a BuzzFeed News reporter by day and personal finance fairy godmother by, well, other parts of the day. We talked about her investing-for-newbies newsletter, Better Have My Money; her Get Money podcast, which she co-hosts; and just generally how she does it all! Enjoy.
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You've been writing Better Have My Money for two years. What inspired you to start it?
I discovered that stocks are secretly a form of legal gambling and was like damn, I want to talk about this with all my friends!
In 2017, I had taken a voluntary buyout from The Guardian specifically because they were offering quite a few months of compensation for employees to leave and I knew that would never happen again in New York media. Which meant I suddenly had a little bit of savings — but not enough to like, buy a house — and wanted to invest it in the sharemarket because I had read that it was a good safe way to make money, but I had no idea how to do it.
I was literally googling "what is a stock," "how do I buy a stock," "how much money do I need to invest" etc and I couldn't figure out why it was so hard to get normal people information. After I bought a couple of shares, I found it to be such an adrenaline rush, and I was like "OK this is why white guys love the stock market so much!," but every time I would try and talk about it with my friends — all super intelligent professional creative women in their 20s and 30s — none of them had any investments or knew how to go about it.
One Monday I was texting my then-boyfriend like "oh no! Netflix is now up! I should have bought it on Friday!" because I was just so fascinated by how things would affect the market. And he replied like "maybe... you should start a newsletter about stocks?" aka “please stop texting me the daily play-by-play about the share price of a video streaming service.”
So I did it. I created a tinyletter, tweeted it out and within an hour I had over 100 subscribers. By the end of the day I had 400 subscribers. And I just knew, instantly, that there was clearly a readership for talking about investing and pop culture to a millennial, predominantly female, audience.
How much time do you spend every week managing your own investments?
I spend approx one minute a day checking all my investments, if that. It is not some big time-consuming thing I do; I just love to log in to my Robinhood and Ellevest and Acorns accounts and am like, "how are things!" I'm also not worried if things are terrible cause I know that eventually things will go back up again. It’s almost more like just checking that my tamagotchi is still alive.
You're also a full-time breaking news reporter, so between your job and the newsletter, your day to day sounds hectic. How do you deal with that??
It’s chaotic good, for the most part! I'm a Gemini, so I love having a million side projects in different topics and writing a wide range of stuff.
My day job at BuzzFeed News can be really intense. Sometimes I'm suddenly traveling somewhere random for work, or glued to the internet or responding to a horrendous mass shooting or interviewing traumatized witnesses. It’s really rewarding work, but sometimes my writing brain needs a rest from reporter mode.
Monday nights is Better Have My Money night. I try really, really hard to not schedule social events then, to really lock that space down to be newsletter time. Also, sometimes the newsletter is shit because I’m tired and that's OK! Done is better than perfect. I counted the other day that I'd written 58,000 words for the newsletter in two years. Probably a lot of those words were bad! Whatever, I wrote them anyway.
Money basically determines the kinds of lives that we lead, and I think we’re too hesitant to speak openly and honestly about it — and also to admit we maybe don’t know how to improve our long-term money situation through investing, if we didn’t automatically get that taught to us as kids. The emails I get in response to Better Have My Money make it super clear that financial literacy is desperately wanted.
And for a newsletter about investing, I also write a lot about feelings. What are your own personal ethics and how does that influence what companies you want to support? Can our planet really support capitalism these days? How do you feel about how much money CEOs earn? Does it make it better if it’s a female CEO? How much of your money should you donate? I don’t write about my feelings (thank god) in my day job, so it’s a nice change.
You also co-host a new podcast called Get Money. What was the process for launching that like, and is there anything about hosting a pod that surprises you?
OK first of all, it is really damn hard to sound natural. Even when you think you are being super cool and casual, your voice reveals when you’re not. And the amount of work that production people do! Audio people are angels, they hear things I cannot — they'll be like "you're cutting off the ends of your words,” when I am convinced I am delivering a line flawlessly.
For Get Money, I was approached by Gilded Audio a year ago after they read my newsletter. They were looking for a regular guest on another podcast, before deciding to create Get Money months later and reaching out to me again. Which is also a reminder that you never know what is going to work out and what won't.
It’s also been great working with other people! I am one of four co-hosts and unlike Better Have My Money, I am not the one people think is the expert! I get to just be the clueless reporter and host asking the money questions everyone is thinking, which is a lovely mish-mash of my normal professional life and my own newsletter. Having producers that prepare questions and research prep, having a whole team be involved and offer suggestions — in contrast to me writing the newsletter alone on my couch — is honestly a joy and makes a new side project feel sustainable.
Being surrounded by actual money experts — two of my co-hosts are certified financial planners, the third worked for years in finance — is also just great because I get to just drain their brains. Sometimes I straight up just ask questions to the certified financial planners that I’ve been wanting to know myself (such as, it turns out if you are not maxing out your 401(k), you should do that before opening an IRA), and having that sort of access for free is priceless.
Finally, in addition to your newsletter & podcast obvi, what are a few other go-to resources that you think any investing newbie should have?
I have a pile of investment books I have not opened or have skimmed (I sit next to the free books table at work). Motley Fool is the most normal person investing site. Investopedia is basically like a wikipedia for stocks terms. I also liked Gaby Dunn’s Bad with Money: The Imperfect Art of Getting Your Financial Sh*t Together, Erin Lowry’s Broke Millennial Takes on Investing and The Barefoot Investor, the book which first got me determined not to just have my money sitting in a savings account earning 1.7% every year.
But honestly you should start with the investing episode of Get Money, because it truly is the most straight-forward explanation of investing, and also I talk about Beyoncé.
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Don’t forget to subscribe to Better Have My Money, and maybe do your taxes this weekend??? Or not I mean live your life, invest in yourself, etc.
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