Chelsea Fagan first started the Financial Diet as a personal blog to hold herself accountable for her own financial mistakes. She clearly struck a chord, because ten years later, TFD has grown into a cross-platform media company offering articles, videos, podcasts, workshops, a newsletter, and even office hours with Fagan herself. The mission: to fundamentally change and improve the way women talk about money. This week, Fagan joins host Samhita Mukhopadhyay, former Teen Vogue executive editor, current Cut contributor, and author of The Myth of Making It, on the In Her Shoes podcast to do just that. They discuss pay transparency and the four-day workweek, plus why she spent $50,000 of her own cash publishing a romance novel — and how she made it all back. To hear more, listen and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
On TFD’s “unorthodox” HR structure:
We have a four-day workweek. We do six weeks PTO. We have pretty aggressive maternity leave. We have a pay structure where most people are paid within a very narrow bandwidth. I think as of today, I’m the fourth- or the fifth-highest paid on the team [of eight]. I haven’t changed my salary in a while … Most of our team has been here for the better part of the decade. And I think we’re all in agreement that not working on Fridays is worth its weight in gold. There’s almost no amount of money that could replace that, especially for the moms on the team.
On self-publishing her first novel, A Perfect Vintage:
To be perfectly honest, the reason initially was purely financial. To just speak numbers for a second, I’ve sold somewhere around 400,000 copies of my books, the vast majority of that coming from my 2018 book, The Financial Diet. And I’m not gonna say we haven’t earned any money from it, but those royalties are not hitting the way you expect that they would be. When you publish traditionally, you earn a very small percentage of royalties on copies sold after you earn out your advance. It’s anywhere between 7. 5 percent of list price on paperbacks all the way up to 15 percent on a hardcover book. If you own the IP and you own the book, you typically will get between 40 and 70 percent of the list price.
On her approach to social media:
I don’t monetize my personal social media. It’s separate from the Financial Diet. It’s my space. I don’t do brand partnerships. I just want it to be my fun little zone. I wanted to not have the pressure of content creation in the same way that my professional platforms do.
