Money Lessons with Andrew Temte, PhD, CFA

Episodes

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  Purpose at Work: What a Job That Doesn't Fit Costs You 17.10.2026 12m

  In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy asks whether the work you're paid for fits the purpose you have — and what it costs you when it doesn't.  He defines purpose, alignment, misalignment, and golden handcuffs, then prices misalignment three ways in dollars: disengagement that lets your skills fade, golden handcuffs that make leaving a calculation instead of a feeling, and drift that keeps your human capital from growing.  Gallup's newest numbers are here, including the fun fact that low engagement cost the world economy about $10 trillion in 2025.  AndrewTemte.com
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  Human Capital: Your Earning Power Is Your Biggest Asset 10.10.2026 14m

  In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy turns from what you earn this year to what you can earn over a working life.  He defines human capital — the competence, experience, and health an employer or customer will pay for — and measures it against the asset most families count as their largest, home equity.  Drawing on the Federal Reserve's survey of family finances, Georgetown's lifetime-earnings estimates, and the World Bank's wealth accounts, he shows why earning power is the largest asset most people will ever own, even though it never appears on a personal balance sheet.  He explains why a raise compounds the way investment returns do, why that makes skills built early worth more, and why only skills that last keep compounding.  AndrewTemte.com
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  Self-Employment Tax, Estimated Payments, and the Side Gig 03.10.2026 15m

  In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy turns to the earners the pay stub episodes left out: the self-employed, the independent contractor, and the side gig.  He defines the five terms that matter — self-employed, the 1099, net earnings, self-employment tax, and estimated payments — and works through the tax bill on the same $50,000 last week's employee earned, so listeners hear what happens when both halves of Social Security and Medicare land on the self employed.  A trip back to 1943 explains why the self-employed still pay the way every American once did, and why the IRS wants four payments a year instead of one. The episode closes with Andy's rule for anyone earning without a pay stub: set the tax money aside the day the payment arrives, and put the four dates on the calendar. AndrewTemte.com
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  Benefits Are Pay: Total Compensation and the Employer Match 26.09.2026 13m

  In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy adds up what a job is worth beyond the salary: the employer's share of the health premium, the employer's half of Social Security and Medicare, and the retirement match.  He follows one employee earning $50,000 and shows that total compensation comes to $63,100, and $750 less when a default contribution rate leaves half the match uncollected. Along the way he defines vesting, points to the one line on a W-2 that shows what your health coverage costs, and shares the Bureau of Labor Statistics finding that benefits are 30 percent of what private employers spend on pay.  AndrewTemte.com
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  Your Income Tax: Brackets, Withholding, and Your Refund 19.09.2026 15m

  In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy explains how the federal income tax is calculated, starting with four definitions every taxpayer needs: taxable income, the tax bracket, the marginal rate, and the effective rate.  He works a single filer's 2026 tax one bracket at a time to show why someone in the 22 percent bracket pays about 13 percent, and why a raise never leaves you with less after tax.  From there he explains how an employer estimates withholding every payday, why a refund is your own money coming back without interest, and how the Form W-4 lets you change that estimate at any time.  AndrewTemte.com
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  Forty Trillion Dollars — What the National Debt Means for Your Household 14.09.2026 37m

  In this special edition of Money Lessons, Andy takes the national debt's crossing of forty trillion dollars on August 18 and explains what the number is made of — the debt held by the public, and the money the federal government owes its own trust funds.  He shows why interest now takes eighteen and a half cents of every dollar the government collects, and why "we'll grow our way out" and "inflation will take care of it" are the same answer.  Ray Dalio's three-percent deficit target anchors the arithmetic, and the 2026 Trustees Reports show where the pressure lands next.  Andy closes with what the debt means for your mortgage, your savings, and your benefits across three time horizons, and what you can do about it through three of the six jobs your money has. AndrewTemte.com
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  Anatomy of a Pay Stub: The Deductions You Chose, the Ones You Didn't, and the Pay You Never See 12.09.2026 14m

  In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy reads a pay stub for the lines most people skip past.  He sorts every deduction into two types — the ones the law requires and the ones you elected, usually in the paperwork on your first day — and explains why a health premium, an HSA, and a retirement contribution come out of your pay before your taxes are figured, and why the federal taxes don't all treat those deductions the same way.  Along the way he clears up the most common misunderstanding on the stub: the Social Security line is a tax paid to today's retirees, not a deposit into an account with your name on it, and the story of the first person ever to collect a monthly check shows why.  He closes on the pay that never appears on the stub at all — the employer's share of the premium and the retirement match — and why two jobs with the same salary can pay very different amounts. AndrewTemte.com
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  Nudge and Sludge: The Vocabulary of Everyday Money Decisions 05.09.2026 11m

  In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy supplies the vocabulary behind three weeks of teaching on habits, defaults, and friction.  Herbert Simon — who was never an economist — challenged his era's assumption that buyers decide with complete information, and won a Nobel Prize for finding those limits inside companies before anyone thought to look for them in customers.  Richard Thaler named the arrangement of options in front of you choice architecture, and a decade after publishing Nudge with Cass Sunstein, he coined sludge for friction pointed at the person who has to get through it.  AndrewTemte.com
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  The Money Machinery Someone Else Built for You 29.08.2026 11m

  In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy turns from the money machinery listeners build themselves to the machinery that gets installed before they arrive.  He starts with the default — what happens if you do nothing — and shows how much of a household's money moves according to settings that somebody at a company chose in advance.  The workplace retirement plan serves as the rare example of a default that works in the saver's favor, along with a caution that plenty of employers are still exempt from it.  From there he takes up friction, the effort standing between wanting something and having it, and traces how the same business will strip every step out of a purchase and then build steps into the exit.  AndrewTemte.com
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  The Same Old Songs: What Musical Taste Reveals About Financial Change 24.08.2026 20m

  In this special edition of Money Lessons, Andy takes on a question that sits underneath most of personal finance: why change is so hard.  A complaint about his band's setlist leads to the research on why musical taste is set around age fourteen — and to the study showing that appetite for financial risk locks in the same way, set by whatever the markets were doing when a person first had money in play.  Neither one was a decision. Both feel like one. AndrewTemte.com
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  Habits and Money: Why You Can't Remember What You Spend 22.08.2026 11m

  In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy opens up the machinery that moves money out of a household without ever passing through a decision.  He starts with the narrow definition psychologists use for the word "habit" — a behavior repeated in the same surroundings until conscious decision-making drops out — and walks through the 2002 wristwatch studies that measured how often people's minds were somewhere else while they acted.  He makes the case that habits are not a character defect but a feature that buys back mental energy, then shows why the same mechanism that makes a habit useful is what makes it nearly impossible to recall.  AndrewTemte.com
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  Present Bias: Why Your Future Self Keeps Losing the Argument 15.08.2026 13m

  In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy turns from the map of your personal economy to the thing that moves money across it — decisions.  He explains why good and bad decisions never arrive in the same size, and why one large mistake can undo a decade of quiet good ones.  The centerpiece is present bias, the mental shortcut that treats anything happening right now as far more important than the same thing months from now, illustrated by a study of 7,752 health club members who left roughly six hundred of every fourteen hundred dollars on the table.  Andy also revisits four biases from March 2025 that turn up constantly in money decisions, and hands listeners a question to carry through the rest of the series: what bias is this product designed to exploit? AndrewTemte.com
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  Your Personal Economy: The Six Jobs Your Money Has 08.08.2026 11m

  In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy launches a brand-new series on personal financial management by drawing the map: the six jobs your money has — earn, spend, borrow, protect, grow, and give.  He explains why spending feels so effortless in a consumer-driven economy where household spending makes up about 68 percent of everything the U.S. produces in a year. Along the way, he introduces the idea that will guide the entire series: managing your money is stewardship of your own small economy, held in trust for your future self and the people who count on you.  The episode closes with one simple assignment — watch the flow this week, and name the job each dollar is doing. New episodes every Saturday morning. AndrewTemte.com
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  Why Timing the Market Fails: The Discipline of Owning Stocks 01.08.2026 11m

  In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy closes the series on equity by turning to the hardest part of owning stocks: holding on.  He explains why volatility is the price investors pay for the equity risk premium, and why the market's steepest falls and sharpest recoveries tend to arrive back to back — which is what makes market timing a losing game.  He looks at the evidence that the more investors trade, the less they tend to keep, and at how modern trading apps are built to encourage the very activity that erodes long-run returns.  #financialliteracy #moneylessons #personalfinance #investing #stockmarket #markettiming #buyandhold #longterminvesting #volatility #compounding
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  Why Own Stocks? The Long-Run Case for Building Wealth 25.07.2026 13m

  In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy makes the long-run case for owning stocks — why, over a lifetime, equities have rewarded the patient owner.  He unpacks the equity risk premium, the extra return stocks have paid over bonds and cash since 1928, and shows how compounding turns that yearly edge into life-changing wealth.  Andy closes with direct advice for young investors — start early, invest steadily, and give compounding the decades it needs to build the wealth a last-minute scramble never can. It's a lesson about patience, access, and the quiet power of starting now. AndrewTemte.com
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  Why International Stocks Belong in Your Portfolio 18.07.2026 12m

  In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy widens the map beyond American markets to make the case for owning international stocks.  He explains home-country bias — the natural pull to invest only in the companies of your own country — and points out that more than a third of the world's stock market value sits outside the United States.  Andy walks through the two practical ways an ordinary investor can own foreign companies: broad international index funds and ETFs, and American Depositary Receipts, or ADRs, for a single overseas company.   AndrewTemte.com
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  Payment for Order Flow: Who Pays for Your Free Stock Trade? 11.07.2026 10m

  In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy answers a question he has been holding since last year: if your stock trades are free, how does a broker make its money?  He explains payment for order flow — the arrangement where your broker sells your order to a wholesale market maker that fills it and pays for the privilege. Andy walks through why your everyday orders are so valuable, where the real conflict of interest hides, and what the 2020 Robinhood settlement revealed about the true cost of "free."  The takeaway: free isn't free — and the cost that matters most is the one that tempts you to trade too often. AndrewTemte.com
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  The ETF: Trade It Like a Stock, Hold It Like an Index Fund 03.07.2026 12m

  In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy explains the exchange-traded fund — the ETF — the vehicle most people now use to own a whole index in a single trade.  He traces it back to the first one, State Street's SPDR, launched in 1993 to track the S&P 500, and shows how an ETF differs from the index mutual fund Jack Bogle created in 1976: one trades all day on an exchange like a stock, the other prices just once, after the close.  Andy pulls back the curtain on the creation-and-redemption process — the quiet arrangement with large firms that does the real index buying and keeps an ETF's price tied to the value of the stocks it holds. The takeaway: an ETF lets you trade like a stock, but the soundest way to own one is to hold it like a long-term investor. AndrewTemte.com
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  What Is "The Market"? The Dow, the S&P 500, and the Index Bet You Didn't Choose 27.06.2026 12m

  In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy tackles a phrase we lean on without ever defining it: "the market." He explains what a stock market index is, where the Dow, the S&P 500, and the Nasdaq-100 come from, and how each one measures the market differently — the Dow by share price, the others by company size. He unpacks the Dow's hidden divisor and the outsized power of a denominator, shows how a handful of giant companies can carry an entire index, and explains why SpaceX's arrival on the Nasdaq means millions of index-fund holders are about to own a stock they never picked. The lesson: an index is a set of choices, and a fund that tracks one hands you all of them.#financialliteracy #moneylessons #personalfinance #investing #stockmarket #SP500 #DowJones #Nasdaq #indexfunds #SpaceX AndrewTemte.com
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  GameStop and the Stock Market 20.06.2026 11m

  In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy uses the 2021 GameStop saga to reveal the hidden machinery that runs underneath every stock trade.  He explains how a struggling video-game retailer became the most heavily bet-against stock on Wall Street, why ordinary investors banded together to buy it, and how its price rocketed from about $17 to around $483 in a matter of weeks.  Then he answers the question that left millions of people furious: why did Robinhood suddenly stop letting them buy? The culprit turns out to be the market's plumbing — the two-day settlement delay, the clearinghouse that guarantees every trade, and the collateral deposit that exploded into the billions when prices swung wildly.  AndrewTemte.com