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slash setup welcome to the nerd wallet smart money podcast where we answer your

personal finance questions and help you feel a little smarter about

what you do with your money. I'm your host, Sean Piles. And I'm your other host, Liz Weston.

As always, be sure to send us your money questions. Call or text us on the nerd hotline at

901-7306373. That's 901-730 Nerd. Or email us at podcast at nerdwollet.com.

And while you're at it, please rate, review, and subscribe wherever you're getting this podcast.

This episode, Liz and I are talking with one of our student loan nerds about how to manage loan variable interest rates.

But first, in our this week and U.R. money segment, we're going to dig into the racial

wealth gap and what it means for opportunity in this country. The jumping off point for this

discussion was a recent piece in the New York Times. It's headlined the gap between white and

black America in charts. It's an interactive feature, which means you can put your city in and see the differences

in homeownership rates, incomes, life expectancy. The differences can be enormous. And I've

recently realized I've been looking at statistics like this for literally decades without knowing the

real why, why this is happening? How about you, Sean?

What did you think when you saw those numbers?

Yeah, well, it's interesting because we've seen these numbers for a long time now.

And for a while, I think there wasn't much discussion, at least in white America, of the why behind this, right?

...