YouSaid · the spoken record

Carrie Joy Grimes

lines on the record: 39
first: 2026-05-28
most recent: 2026-05-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Nobody gets to tell you what matters. No one tells you what matters about your money. No one should tell you, you know, you're only successful if you buy a house, have a kid, 1.2 kids, whatever that is. Like the reason I called the book The Joy of Money is because the joy is what the money is for. And whatever that is for you, you know, maybe it's being a homeowner, maybe it's not. Maybe it's something entirely different and you can build wealth by investing. Just don't let other people tell you how you're supposed to do money. Like you get to decide. Don't give that power up to somebody else. There's less joy in it.”
2026-05-28 · Masters of Scale · How to get better at money, with Carrie Joy Grimes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Invest in things that will make you more than your credit cards are costing you. After you pay up your credit cards, you want to save up three to six months' worth of expenses. And then you're into investment and retirement. It's not that hard. The math is pretty clear on it. So the third thing I would say is this.”
2026-05-28 · Masters of Scale · How to get better at money, with Carrie Joy Grimes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A them problem. And the second is please max out your tax advantage retirement accounts before you go throwing money into some other investment. There is Very little. Everyday person can do that's going to make them more money than just maxing out their tax advantage retirement accounts. That's a 401k, that's a 403b, that's an IRA. Read the book. You can learn about Roth versus traditional. You can make your own choices. But there's all this sort of cowboy investment culture right now. Is it crypto? Is it housing? And should I be in which, how do I trade stocks? And look, no shade. My husband loves that stuff. He is good at it. He puts a lot of time into learning about crypto. He's a crypto person and figuring out how to maneuver inside the markets. And I ain't got time for that. And also, it takes a level of skill and it takes a level of knowledge in the industry that most people don't have. So the one piece of advice I wish everyone could hear me say is it's not complicated. Get yourself a thousand dollar emergency fund, pay off any credit card debt you have. You will not”
2026-05-28 · Masters of Scale · How to get better at money, with Carrie Joy Grimes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm torn. Okay. Okay. Okay. The first is anyone that makes you feel like crap about yourself or your choices, any advice that makes you feel bad about yourself, any shame-based bunny advice. Just walk away. And look, that's not just a moral thing, although it aggravates me morally. It's also short-termism. It won't actually fix the habits. Friend used to say, he was a baseball player used to say, there's always a guy eating a hot dog in the fourth row, yelling at you to hit the ball better. And it turns out that doesn't actually work to help people hit the ball better, you know? And so the first thing is just those shame messages, it can be really tempting. We have a lot of training to listen to them. Do what you can to ignore those people. I don't know who hurt them, but...”
2026-05-28 · Masters of Scale · How to get better at money, with Carrie Joy Grimes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Most people have saved 400 bucks or more. There's author bill negotiation services out there that we wanted to make one that everyone can trust. This is nonprofit-backed. We're not doing anything except literally trying to put money in people's pockets. And this is the first stage. I want to add a bunch more to it. I want to add healthcare bills. I want to add health insurance bills. I want to add car insurance and home insurance. tons of different things we could do once we get the negotiation team built out. And so right now we're starting with cable cell phone internet. People should get while the getting's good.”
2026-05-28 · Masters of Scale · How to get better at money, with Carrie Joy Grimes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not yet. That is on deck. But right now, we can negotiate to lower anybody's cable, internet, and cell phone bill. And so you go to it and upload a bill, we analyze it, and then our negotiators get to work, and we've saved so far an average of 400 bucks a pop.”
2026-05-28 · Masters of Scale · How to get better at money, with Carrie Joy Grimes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And your job as to represent all of us. And what we want from you is this and this. So I'm a very big fan of working in middle class people really flexing their power at the constituent level. I also think a lot about audience power. How do we decide what we listen to and what we make for ourselves? And so work money does a lot of that, like as part of what I talk about. We make content or we send out messaging around like, here's what this economic thing means for your wallet. So how do we know who to trust and who to follow? How do we make our own content? I also think a lot about entrepreneurial power and ideas and how do we make our own businesses how do we launch our own stuff that makes life better for us. And so we have a, it's not official yet, but”
2026-05-28 · Masters of Scale · How to get better at money, with Carrie Joy Grimes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. That's right. So when I say politics is an outcome, I mean the decisions that get made are the end result of a lot of stuff that happens. And so when I think about work money, I think about work money having power in five ways. I think about market power. That's like get together, bargain for cheaper stuff. I want to get so big. We can bargain around healthcare costs. It does not seem impossible. There's a bunch of things like that that we could bargain for cheaper on. I also think a lot about constituent power, right? Like everybody together telling politicians and regulators and you know elected leaders of both parties here's our expectation you have this job because we put you in it.”
2026-05-28 · Masters of Scale · How to get better at money, with Carrie Joy Grimes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think yes, I am very, very clear that if politicians could solve the problems of the American economy, they would have. And so I do not look to politics to fix anything. Politics is like an outcome. And I don't really think much about left or right. I think a lot about right and wrong.”
2026-05-28 · Masters of Scale · How to get better at money, with Carrie Joy Grimes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. And mostly what we do, so those are a bunch of different options. Mostly what we do right now is we're looking at the economy, we're really understanding where prices are at, we're understanding where things are going, and we give people a heads up. So for example, we read every word in the new tax bill and we said, okay, y'all, here's what the tax bill means. Here are the tax credits you should look out for. Here's what you should be mindful of. Here's the benefit of this. Here's where it's not going to do you as much good. And so we really help people parse what's happening in policy and in the economy. And then we also have the coupons, the discounts, the partnerships, because it's really a full stack thing. Money's individual. Make your good choices. Do what you can with it. Everyone should play the cards you're dealt. And there are things we can do that improve the odds that we can do better.”
2026-05-28 · Masters of Scale · How to get better at money, with Carrie Joy Grimes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're very eyes wide open about it. We say, okay, here you go. You can sign up for it. It might not be perfect for you, but here's a way in which you can use it, and here's how it does better for you and for your family.”
2026-05-28 · Masters of Scale · How to get better at money, with Carrie Joy Grimes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Here's a great example. There's an app called Upside. Upside is an app you can download it to your phone and you buy gas at a gas station and Upside will give you a discount per gallon. If you do it and use the code work money, you get an extra discount. And so I've saved myself 25 cents a gallon in some places. Now upside's not perfect. They track your data, you know, and also it's not the best deal in every single market, but it's like a way that somebody who's really thinking about gas can like save a little bit at the pump right now. And it's a good example because we look for partnerships that are going to add value, but we're very eyes wide open about it. You know, there's very few perfect things out there in the world. And I really like upside personally. And I like having cheaper gas, especially in this economy where gas is off the chain. And I think a lot of us could use a little bit of breathing room. And so one of the things that work when he does is we look for the highest, the best possible partner. And then we're”
2026-05-28 · Masters of Scale · How to get better at money, with Carrie Joy Grimes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and then deliver the best version of that. So we kind of broke some of the startupy rules where we didn't get really specific. We actually leaned way back. And so we have a bunch of partners now, and we think a lot about like how do we provide an individual person with the most help they can that does two things, immediately add some value, whether that's a dollar in your pocket or information you really needed, and then also To influence what happens in the economy more broadly.”
2026-05-28 · Masters of Scale · How to get better at money, with Carrie Joy Grimes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“High. We're going to focus on that. We're going to be really narrow. We're going to be like, okay, we're going to talk about car insurers and how they can do better. And we're going to deal with regulators on that and lower costs and we're going to cut a deal with some car insurance. So we thought about doing that, like picking one or two specific problems that could put dollars in people's pockets. What became really clear is that being able to scale fast meant how quickly could we talk to anyone and figure out what kind of money help they needed?”
2026-05-28 · Masters of Scale · How to get better at money, with Carrie Joy Grimes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It meant that also a lot of things I was doing were leaving my hands. And I'll just confess, like as a founder's founder, I really love solving hard problems all by myself. And I am very lucky to have an incredibly talented team that can do a lot of work, but also can give me some grace as I learned to let go. So me, I don't mean to make this about me, but me learning how to like let the team take things was great, was a moment. And then I'll say figuring out how to deliver dollars in people's pockets in a material way. And realizing that this is kind of antithetical to how some startups work, defining the problem in a very specific way where it's like one kind of problem. So for example, we could have decided, you know what, the problem we're going to tackle is car insurance, cost or two.”
2026-05-28 · Masters of Scale · How to get better at money, with Carrie Joy Grimes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We started in the pandemic, so we're fully remote, we're still fully remote. And that moment when you go from one Zoom screen to like two, do you know what I mean? Where you have to like hit the little arrow, that was a big deal because it meant that we had gone from like passionate generalists to passionate generalists and experts in some things. Yeah.”
2026-05-28 · Masters of Scale · How to get better at money, with Carrie Joy Grimes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In America, a place that anybody can go to get the individual information about money, how to save, how to invest, how to learn about buying a house or not, and then also how do we use our collective strength to bargain for better in the market, to make sure that decision makers who are politicians know what everybody wants. This isn't about political parties. It's about right and wrong. And how do we think about using all of our resources to build the businesses that we want? And I feel even more passionately now than I did during the pandemic that the problem isn't just a one-time crisis. You know, I mean, that was a particularly gnarly one. But there's a need to shift. How the economy works right now, and to make more success, more possible for more people.”
2026-05-28 · Masters of Scale · How to get better at money, with Carrie Joy Grimes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. That's right. Look, there's always going to be those of us who get Delta Hand and have a really hard time getting a financial security in the American economy. Like I'm very aware that that's been a story for some people perennially in the American economy. But the number of us who feel squeezed in today's economy, who make very good living, who are watching healthcare costs, education costs, housing costs, childcare costs go so up so much faster than our wages. It's staggering. And when the pandemic ended and our signups went just as fast, if not faster, and right now we're seeing a lot of signups, because middle class families are stretched. It was a real clarion call after the pandemic. It's like, okay, this really is about, for me, this is about how do we build a permanent civic institution.”
2026-05-28 · Masters of Scale · How to get better at money, with Carrie Joy Grimes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wanted to build something that would be sustainable, but I was aware that this was launching to solve an immediate problem. And I had been thinking about sort of the concept up till this point. Like I've been thinking about the concept of work money, but work money was really meant to patch a hole in the moment. And then the test for me was for all of us was, okay, once the pandemic is over, do we see traffic drop? Do we see sideumps drop? And it turns out no. Because the economy hasn't really gotten dramatically better for most of us.”
2026-05-28 · Masters of Scale · How to get better at money, with Carrie Joy Grimes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I thought when the pandemic was over or subsiding that we would see interest subside, that our signups would drop. This was meant to be like a, let's get us all through something hard and then let's see what happens. And it became, I mean, to be blunt, I'm also a person who believes in organization. And so of course.”
2026-05-28 · Masters of Scale · How to get better at money, with Carrie Joy Grimes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's nothing morally wrong with doing that. But I got really curious. I know I have a budget sun in there. Why did I? And for me, it would usually be I had a hard week. I felt like there's no joy in life. I just needed some. Of pleasure in my I would just not want to open the envelope or look at my bank account. It's like, I just don't need one more person telling me that I'm doing a bad job at something because there's a story in my head that runs pretty hard telling me you're doing a bad job. You're doing a bad job. This is obviously in the past. And so the feelings part, it's part of the book, the very first chapter is figuring out what your money story is and what you want it to be. Because that's the thing more than anything else I've seen make it hard for people to implement all the math.”
2026-05-28 · Masters of Scale · How to get better at money, with Carrie Joy Grimes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Math plus feelings equals money But having had thousands of conversations with individual people and having had the experience at work money of being in conversation over text, email, and phones with 9 million people all the time, one of the things that became very clear is that the thing that holds the most people back is the feelings part. You know, that's the part where you go to Target and you go in for like, I don't know, pick up a prescription and you walk out with like peanut butter pretzels and a throw pillow and that really cute little solar lantern that you're like, this is going to look perfect on my back porch, but it wasn't really in the budget. But you really wanted it and I'm just going to do it anyway.”
2026-05-28 · Masters of Scale · How to get better at money, with Carrie Joy Grimes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That or my husband, and also me. Like, I don't want to go through that, but I wanted to make sure that other people's moms and other people kind of maybe didn't get to the cheese and diet coke and crackers stage.”
2026-05-28 · Masters of Scale · How to get better at money, with Carrie Joy Grimes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so she fell. And then we moved her into rehab and then an independent living facility where she passed away pretty quickly after we moved her. And what I realized that my mom had been living this kind of pauper's existence and she had been afraid to go to the doctor. She hadn't been taking her medicine because she was afraid she couldn't afford more. And so the end of her life, her world got so small and she was so afraid that she wouldn't have enough that she did nothing. And I, to this day, I know that if like if my mom had called me 20 years ago or even 10 years ago, I could have sat down with her, looked at her money, figured out maybe some in-home help for her. We could have budgeted differently. I could have helped her think through what the end of her life could look like. It was hard in the moment. And then the reflections afterward were really like it was very like, I don't want my kid to go through.”
2026-05-28 · Masters of Scale · How to get better at money, with Carrie Joy Grimes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In really shocking conditions. By the time she'd passed away, she had been living on diet coke and cheese and crackers because she wasn't sure how much money she had. So she had been spending nothing. Like the barest of sustenance living. And her house was filthy, and everything she owned was set out at counter level because her health had deteriorated from her lack of nutrition and mobility, so she couldn't really bend up or down.”
2026-05-28 · Masters of Scale · How to get better at money, with Carrie Joy Grimes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, my mom bless her heart she died in twenty twenty two. I'm going to say some things that are a little hard about my mom. And just to pay for that a little bit, I'm going to say she was so smart. She was a card struck. She was a very Christian woman who believed it was her God-given right to cheat at cards and beat you any way she could. She was a huge Cubs fan than a Bears fan. And she lived long enough to see the Cubs when the World Series. And my mom died.”
2026-05-28 · Masters of Scale · How to get better at money, with Carrie Joy Grimes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a math problem. And in this economy and in our society, you play the hand of cards you're dealt no matter what they are. And I think holding both of those realities together is hard. And so I see this without judgment. I chose, for myself, say, I choose to do this. It is important to me to pay this guy back. So it took me longer than I would have liked to save up $100, but I did it. And the choose to, not have to thing was really helpful for me, but I also worried that I don't want people to weaponize it”
2026-05-28 · Masters of Scale · How to get better at money, with Carrie Joy Grimes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me be really clear. Most people, the problem they have is that they don't have enough money. I just want to say that plainly.”
2026-05-28 · Masters of Scale · How to get better at money, with Carrie Joy Grimes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Said, I'm bad at money. And the reality was when I thought I was bad at money, then I behaved like somebody who was bad at money and I kept behaving like somebody who was bad at money. And that moment where I paid this guy back and I felt like I'd really done something with my money. And I decided in that moment to change the way I thought about how I did money. And I thought, wow, I can be good at money. I really can. And then I was like, well, if that worked for that guy, I should pay down the credit card debt that I've got. I should save up an emergency fund and so on. And I did. And every time I found myself thinking I couldn't do it, I'd be like, of course you can be good at money.”
2026-05-28 · Masters of Scale · How to get better at money, with Carrie Joy Grimes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was my first real budget to this day, the way that I figured that out has become like my method for budgeting. It's not rocket surgery. It's like, here's what you got to spend and here's where the extra money can go. And so I paid him back and I just had this feeling of accomplishment. And this is the thing that I realized I had been. Telling myself I was terrible at money because I was poor. And I was working poor, and I was like, I couldn't keep it in my bank account. I was living paycheck to paycheck. I had had these moments, which some of us have had where you go to the store and you give them your card and you're like, oh, I hope it goes through. And I just assumed that all of that was evidence.”
2026-05-28 · Masters of Scale · How to get better at money, with Carrie Joy Grimes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, this is the question. This is part of why this book even exists is because look, I'd had, I tried budgeting here and there. We all had. I'd kind of like, I'd had a bit of an emergency fund and then I'd kind of spent it all on an emergency and then hadn't figured out how to fill it back up. And this was the first time I was so aggravated that I owed this man money. It just ate at me. So I did. I sat down in my Red Roof hotel room and I took out a pen and I wrote down all of the money I had to pay for things, how much I was going to make, and I was determined to pay him back.”
2026-05-28 · Masters of Scale · How to get better at money, with Carrie Joy Grimes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your shoes. I was so threadbare and I was so obviously extrapped for cash. He's like, I got you. And oh my God, I hated that. He was like, no, no, no, you got to come. And he couldn't say no. He was like, I really wanted to impress him. So we have dinner and he pays for my dinner. And then he gives me $100. And he says, here, buy some new shoes and like give yourself some cushion, basically, until the next page. Yeah.”
2026-05-28 · Masters of Scale · How to get better at money, with Carrie Joy Grimes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I wouldn't. When I moved out to Ohio, I had negative money. I mean, I really had no money. I had shoes, the holes in them, and I had my rust bucket of a car, which is literally what I call it in the book. Like, she barely got there. She had a name. Her name is Mo. I called her Mo. She barely got there. And it was like, please don't die on the road. I mean, we've all lived those years, or not all of us, but many of us have lived those years. If you know, you know. And I show up for my very first day at work and we're at this union hall office and we're doing a bunch of stuff. And then the organizing lead says, well, let's go out to dinner and we'll sort of finish up the night. And I didn't have any money. I was like going to go back to my red roof hotel and get some, you know, ramen noodles and watch law and order, which is the only thing on the television in hotels at that time of night. And the organizing lead was like, no, no, you got to come to dinner. And I was like, that's okay.”
2026-05-28 · Masters of Scale · How to get better at money, with Carrie Joy Grimes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was really hard, like really good organizing is listening. And I really liked to talk. And so I had to learn to listen first.”
2026-05-28 · Masters of Scale · How to get better at money, with Carrie Joy Grimes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I'm a pretty cantankerous person. I don't like it when people have a bad deal and they can't fix it. And, you know, I was in college, I was a history major and I went to Northern Illinois University, go huskies. And I got really into how we improved America over time. Like how did it get better? And it wasn't magic, wasn't nature people got up and decided to shift things over and over again. And I was lucky enough that somebody who I went to college with was like, you know, you might make a good union organizer. And I was like, unions, those old things that like people need when they work in a factory. And I was like, okay, you know, let's check it out. And so I moved out to Ohio where this local union was organizing workers. And I said, okay, I'll try and I hated it for the first 90 days.”
2026-05-28 · Masters of Scale · How to get better at money, with Carrie Joy Grimes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was a union organizer for just about 20 years, and I had this incredible gift of talking to working people at their homes, at their churches, at bars, in union halls, and just asking people about their money and their lives and figuring out how to help folks negotiate for higher pay, better benefits. So I got to see what happens when regular people kind of get together and they put their shoulder to the wheel of doing better. And there was a very obvious set of problems that emerged after thousands of conversations thing one was that most people didn't really have the money basics down. Like nobody sat me down and taught me how to do money. And then the other was most people felt like they were kind of in on all of it by themselves. Like they were just alone having to navigate it. And so when I put the website up, I had a really strong sense of what I needed, which was help with the basics of money. But then also...”
2026-05-28 · Masters of Scale · How to get better at money, with Carrie Joy Grimes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Brand person who you could really lean into who would give you the straight information. And that's why we are not done after COVID. That's why we're now 9 million people and we're growing pretty rapidly.”
2026-05-28 · Masters of Scale · How to get better at money, with Carrie Joy Grimes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Work money is the thing I wish existed when I was trying to figure out money. It is a nonprofit. We've got 9 million members and we help people figure out how to earn more and save more and spend less. And we do that through programs and services and coupons and discounts, kind of like the AARP. The other thing that WorkMoney does is we figure out how to use the power of 9 million people to bargain for cheaper stuff, to make sure that people understand how the economy works and what they can do to navigate it. And it started in COVID. You know, it was 2020 and everyone's money kind of got turned upside down. People were trying to figure out what are these stimulus checks, what's a PPP loan, what is unemployment. And I put up a website to answer all the questions that I was getting from people. And it just took off. And then after COVID, it became pretty clear that there wasn't one place, everyday Americans could go to figure out what to do with their money. Like not one trusted website.”
2026-05-28 · Masters of Scale · How to get better at money, with Carrie Joy Grimes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Money is math And feelings But having had thousands of conversations with individual people, And having had the experience at work money of being in conversation over text, email, and phones with 9 million people all the time, one of the things that became very clear is that the thing that holds the most people back is the feelings part.”
2026-05-28 · Masters of Scale · How to get better at money, with Carrie Joy Grimes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT