Money tips no one taught you

Life Kit

NPR

Kids & Family, Self-improvement, Business, Health & Fitness, Education

4.5 • 4.9K Ratings

🗓️ 3 February 2026

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

You have a budget and an emergency fund (or at least know you need both) - but you want to go deeper. What else do you need to know about managing your money? Ever heard of capturing the carry on your debt, for example? Finance experts share their top tips on handling debt, investing, taxes and more.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This message comes from How to Be a Better Human, a podcast from TED for the self-help skeptic.
0:06.0	Hear how you can laugh more in your everyday life, explained with science, insights, and hilarious stories.
0:11.8	Listen to How to Be a Better Human wherever you get your podcasts.
0:16.1	You're listening to Life Kit from NPR.
0:26.4	Hey, it's Mariel. Okay, some confessions. I didn't know how to light a match without burning my fingers until a few years ago. Also, I have never seen the
0:32.0	godfather. I still don't know how to pronounce the word feral. Is it feral or feral? And until recently, despite
0:40.0	being a financial journalist for many years, I didn't know or had never thought about some of
0:45.0	the tips in this episode. Like this tip about looking at the fees in your investments
0:51.5	from financial educator Amanda Holden.
1:01.6	If you're giving up 1% per year in a management fee, you're not giving up one piece of a 100 piece pie. You're giving up one piece of a six piece pie. Hands off my pie. By the way,
1:08.3	she's saying, yeah, the management fee is 1%, but that fee eats into your profits.
1:13.9	If you're earning 6% returns a year, you really don't want to lose 1% of those returns, or that pie.
1:21.2	We'll go into much more detail on this later, but my point is, most of us are doing our best, but we have gaps in our knowledge.
1:29.1	We don't know everything. We're busy, and nobody taught us the intricacies of things like
1:33.6	debt and investing and the tax code. So on this episode of Life Kit, money tips, nobody taught you.
1:40.9	If you know some of them, well, good for you. But listen to the whole episode,
1:44.6	and I think you will learn something. We talked to a bunch of financial experts and asked them
1:49.7	to share their top tips. I'm Anita Rao, host of Embodied, your source for intimate conversations about sex, relationships, and health.
2:08.2	Join me to meet people who will change the way you think about everything from disability to dating,
2:13.1	and who will take you into their own lived experiences of how things like being a truck driver
2:18.2	or dealing with chronic insomnia shape their identity and relationships.
2:23.1	Subscribe to the Embodied podcast from WUNC, part of the NPR Network.
	...

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