It’s a typical Wednesday night for Katie Gatti Tassin. Her blond hair is pulled back; light reflects off her oversized glasses. She’s spent all day working on her latest project: edits for her forthcoming book, Rich Girl Nation, which examines women’s relationship with money.
But she has just one more thing to get off her chest before she finishes her day. Gatti Tassin takes her plight to Instagram Stories, broadcasting to her more than 250,000 followers. This time, it’s a spiel on how “aesthetic capitalism co-opts things that are naturally healthy” to sell women more items, such as hyaluronic acid-infused eye patches, under the guise of wellness.
“This trend feels dark because of the cultural context that produced it,” Gatti Tassin writes. “One which is rarely concerned with the genuine well-being of women and girls, unless it’s a means of selling them something.”
What Makes Money with Katie Different From Other Finfluencers
This is where Gatti Tassin excels, and it’s what sets her apart from other “finfluencers,” or financial influencers.
Gatti Tassin, 30, heads Morning Brew’s podcast The Money with Katie Show (MwK), which has 9 million lifetime downloads and counting. She’s also created tangible resources for her audience, such as a free early retirement mini course and a wealth planner that helps users understand where they are on their financial journey. Gatti Tassin authors a prolific blog and an insightful weekly newsletter that has nearly 200,000 readers, while maintaining an engaging presence on social media.
Watching her Instagram stories is like FaceTiming with your most passionate—and smartest—friend. The cadence of her speech is quick, fervent and pointed—much like her innate ability to connect with her audience while providing accessible personal finance content that intersects popular culture.
“That gives me the opportunity to paint with a way broader brush,” Gatti Tassin says. “I can really talk about anything, because money touches everything.... Sometimes, I think people just want help making sense of the world around them.”
Her well-researched social-financial commentary has touched topics ranging from “trad wives” (married women who practice traditional gender roles in marriage) and overconsumption to gaining financial independence. She covers anything that intrigues her with thoughtfulness, insight and finesse.
Inside Rich Girl Nation
In her forthcoming book, Rich Girl Nation, Gatti Tassin dives into the six most pressing drivers of the wealth gap. She addresses how women approach money, taking readers through a woman’s lifelong financial journey, touching on marriage’s impact on women’s financial rights and, of course, childcare. But she starts with the “hot girl hamster wheel.”
When Megan Thee Stallion’s hit “Hot Girl Summer” came out in 2019, Gatti Tassin was in the process of “de-monetizing her appearance” after realizing how expensive her beauty regimen had become. (It totaled nearly 10% of her take-home pay at the time, she says.) Cutting back resulted in a stronger nest egg and increased income, allowing her to slowly add some of these services back into her routine.
“There are entire industries that only target women,” Gatti Tassin explains. “It is an attack at the very center of your identity because it preys on an insecurity that it is creating. It’s a… very sinister approach to consumerism because it makes you question your worth if you don’t have those things.”
How Katie Gatti Tassin Went From Side Hustle to Full-Time Creator
Gatti Tassin started documenting her own financial journey to “#RichGirl” status on her “side hustle” blog, Money with Katie, in 2020. She left her marketing job at Southwest Airlines in 2021 to pursue content creation full time. A year later, media company Morning Brew acquired the MwK brand, growing her audience and team from a literal one-woman show.
Gatti Tassin’s advice to aspiring entrepreneurs is concise: Move through the discomfort. “Just start doing it and get comfortable figuring it out as you go,” she says. “There’s no substitute for actually doing the thing that you want to do....”
One of Gatti Tassin’s biggest areas of growth has been critical thinking—and realizing that she can be whatever she wants to be. “I’m far less sheltered than I used to be,” she says. “Once I started to learn more about how things really work and how things really are, I just kind of couldn’t get enough.”
Why Women (and Men) of All Ages Listen to Money with Katie
Much of Gatti Tassin’s content focuses on women’s relationship with money. (“Finance bros are out, #RichGirls are in,” her podcast description reads.) But she’s piqued the interest of people of all genders, backgrounds and ages.
“I do have a lot of fun with trying to see if I can scratch at something beneath the surface,” she says. “Nothing feels better than when something like that resonates with people.”
And resonate, it does. What started as Gatti Tassin talking to her peers, fellow 20-something women navigating the financial ramifications of adulthood, has evolved into a larger conversation with a broader audience. One listener billed the show as “life-changing, hilarious, addicting.” Another says they feel “richer by association.”
Initially, when Gatti Tassin realized that people with “more life experience” were listening, it made her “a little bit self-conscious,” as she’d imagined her audience as similar to herself.
“Ultimately, I feel like if people who are in a different stage of life, or who have a completely different background than I do, still find something that I have to say interesting and valuable, then I am happy with that,” she says.
But she tries to stay in her “lane of either lived experience” or topics she feels strongly about “because I know enough about it to speak with authority.”
One of Gatti Tassin’s most popular topics has been childcare costs. She doesn’t have children, but that doesn’t stop her from tackling the topic in her signature way. She keeps it light, joking that “your favorite childless cat lady” is weighing in on parenting. (Her tabby cat, Sam, makes frequent appearances on MwK’s Instagram Stories.)
Gatti Tassin’s approach is ubiquitous. “A lot of this stuff is so universal, and I think people, regardless of age… feel and react to these same forces in many of the same ways.”
All photos by Gabby Marie Photography
This article was first published in the March/April 2025 issue of SUCCESS Magazine. Get your copy here.
