ICYMI... HIBT Lab! The Financial Diet: Chelsea Fagan

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.8 • 31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 5 January 2023

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Chelsea Fagan got her first credit card when she was a senior in high school. She quickly maxed it out, racking up debt that would burden her through her early twenties. Then, in 2014, Chelsea started a blog as a way to keep track of her spending habits and get her financial life back on track. She called it “The Financial Diet.”

This week on How I Built This Lab, Guy talks with Chelsea about how she turned that blog into the multimedia personal finance business it is today. Plus, Chelsea shares why she prioritizes employee satisfaction over growth and explains her judicious approach to brand partnerships.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Prime members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music.
0:07.0	Download the app today.
0:09.0	New years is here, and with it brings the possibility of change.
0:13.0	As one behavioral scientist put it, first starts are really powerful.
0:17.0	So as you head into 2023, LifeKit is a great resource to help you plan your life and tackle changes, both big and small.
0:24.0	Listen to the LifeKit podcast from NPR.
0:27.0	Hello, everybody. Happy holidays to you. This week our production team is taking a quick break, a much-deserved break, because we produce 88 episodes of this show every year.
0:37.0	And so they're taking a break to spend some time with their friends and families.
0:41.0	So this week on How I Built This Lab, we're going to bring you an episode from our archives at Aird back in July.
0:47.0	And since the new year is kind of a time for us to make resolutions, we thought, you know, why not some resolutions around money?
0:55.0	So we decided to re-air this interview with Chelsea Fagan of the Financial Diet.
0:59.0	Chelsea hit her financial rock bottom in her early 20s.
1:03.0	And so she resolved to kind of crawl out of it by tracking her personal spending and then writing a blog that eventually turned into a multi-million dollar media brand that now helps other people take control of their finances.
1:16.0	So if you want to learn more about your finances or you want to learn about how to build a business, here's the episode for you.
1:24.0	Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Ross.
1:28.0	The Financial Diet is a media company that offers up personal finance advice.
1:33.0	It started out as a blog back in 2014 when Chelsea Fagan was trying to get her own financial life back on track after racking up credit card debt and developing bad spending habits in her late teens and early 20s.
1:47.0	Eventually, her blog turned into a video blog, newsletter, a podcast, and live events.
1:54.0	And today, the Financial Diet or TFD for short is a multimedia business with more than 10 employees and multiple revenue streams.
2:03.0	But unlike many of her competitors in the space, Chelsea Fagan has some pretty firm rules.
2:09.0	She doesn't promote crypto and she's not obsessed with growing the company or even growing her audience.
2:17.0	Her goal to build a sustainable and manageable business.
	...

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