Bitches Get Riches Cuts Through the Clutter With Authentic Advice for Getting Your Finances On Track

In a Nutshell: Lauren Torres and Jess Fickett have dedicated their lives to breaking barriers around talking about money. They do it through Bitches Get Riches, a blog, podcast, and social media adventure where they shake off all things outmoded and counterproductive about traditional money advice to get to the heart of what it takes to stay sane and succeed in the modern world. In a way, Lauren and Jess write and speak to their dedicated audience like they once exchanged ideas as roommates. Join in if bankers in suits make your brain glaze over.

Was there ever a time when banking and financial advice didn’t come wrapped in a thick coat of walnut and brass? Look around, and we think you’ll agree that much of the financial services industry is stuck in the days of men wearing suits to ball games while their women stayed home to make jello molds.

That may be fine if you’re contemplating a graceful financial shuffle off this mortal coil. But if you’re still kicking and have questions, you may wonder if anybody out there can explain credit scores and compound interest in language that doesn’t sound like a funeral.

If that’s you, and you’re waging a battle with financial adulting in a world that seems to make less and less sense, get over to Bitches Get Riches now.

At Bitches Get Riches, Lauren Torres and Jess Fickett think it’s high time someone stepped up with a fresh focus on the challenges people face navigating today’s financial landscape. They call what they do “edutainment,” but there’s deep knowledge and experience behind every word they write and speak on their blog, podcast, YouTube channel, and social sites.

It’s just that they decided to be themselves while doing it.

Lauren told us she and Jess met as first-year college roommates. They lived with another girl who was a drag to be around (hope she doesn’t read this), so they bonded quickly and apparently permanently.

“We’ve been friends for many, many years, and we’ve gone through a lot of significant milestones kind of side by side with each other,” Lauren said. “If you want to forge a friendship that will last a lifetime, forge it in the fires of a bad roommate.”

So what is it they do? As they hit the books and bars through college, Lauren and Jess bonded over shared beliefs and challenges: beliefs about living in a patriarchal capitalist hellscape and challenges about getting good at their finances, careers, and personal lives.

Fueling their friendship was a disconnect whenever they asked a parent or grandparent for financial guidance.

“When it came to huge things like paying off student loan debt or buying a first home, their advice was well-intentioned, but it was just so bonkers out of step with our lived reality,” Lauren said.

Bitches Get Riches was the inevitable result: They say it’s like a beautiful test-tube baby whose ovum was harvested from the life experience of two financially solvent feminist killjoys.

The site is so rich with content that it’s hard to know where to begin. Articles cover all the things. Ask the Bitches is where mere mortals can write in for advice. (Here’s the link if you want to participate.)

Their podcast on YouTube and other platforms runs through four seasons. You’ll also find them on Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Threads (but not on the site formerly known as Twitter).

Signing up for their Patreon gets you a premium experience.

There’s nothing typical about what Lauren and Jess do, but The Financial Order of Operations is an article where their contrarian tendencies come to the fore. It’s about realistically prioritizing financial decision-making in a way that takes modern life into account.

“I was living off the stale bagels my boyfriend with a catering gig was bringing home, and my student loans had an 8% interest rate on them,” Lauren said. “Looking back, it’s so clear that by following what I had been told was the right thing to do, I was shooting myself in the foot financially. I could have accomplished my goals much faster if I’d done things in the order that made sense for me.”

As bloggers and podcasters, Lauren and Jess frequently get asked to do live speaking engagements, videos, podcasts, and guest articles.

They pick and choose engagements carefully, but a topic that often comes up in front of an audience is burnout: the chronic, life-sucking stress you feel when you drag yourself to an unrewarding job.

Lauren said all the research the Bitches have done, and all feedback they’ve gotten over the years from their many readers and listeners, indicates that burnout is a condition most people shrug off and accept as normal. That’s not how they see it.

“If you’re burnt out at work, it’s like a poison that spreads into the nonwork areas of your life,” Lauren said. “It’s really, really hard to be a happy and present and well-adjusted person if you’re spending a third of your life in a situation where you’re incredibly stressed out and unhappy.”

This idea of burnout jibes with Lauren’s personal experiences. She achieved financial independence at 35 partly because, as a moderately disabled person, she felt that what full-time wage labor asked of her was more than she could give in a sustainable way throughout her lifetime.

“I felt I couldn’t begin to live my life in a way that felt peaceful and sustainable and conducive to long-term joy if I gave my best eight hours to someone else every single day,” she said.

Avoiding burnout was a strong motivator to get her financial house in order. Selfless public servants that they are, Lauren and Jess have created a comprehensive online workshop to get people thinking the way they do about burnout and how to use the system to avoid or overcome it.

“Recognizing and mitigating the honestly horrifying effects of burnout has become a passion area for us,” Lauren said. “Chronic stress is physically and mentally one of the worst things you can do to your body.”

Lauren and Jess took time from their regular content responsibilities to produce the workshop because they realized that stress and burnout are increasingly unavoidable. When push comes to shove, people need to know how to press the right buttons and flip the right switches, they say.

Luckily for readers and listeners, they make these points in an extremely lighthearted way, but only because they’re serious.

“It feels like more and more the world is becoming a hostile place to make mistakes in,” Lauren said. “We learned by doing, but we recognize that’s a dangerous and increasingly untenable approach to improving your finances.”

Lauren said the margins for success for an average person have become so thin that crowdsourcing knowledge and experiences and guiding people to make the best possible choices, or at least avoid major pitfalls, is her and Jess’s calling.

So delve into credit scores and healthy credit strategies. Understand debt, saving, and investing. Learn about compound interest.

Put the puzzle pieces together to create a financially fit lifestyle and allow those habits to feed on and influence other positive aspects of your life. You’re in charge, but the Bitches are there with you because they’ve learned the same lessons.

You can count on Lauren and Jess to keep it real. They eschew dubious advertising partnerships that could make them bundles of cash in favor of an authentic relationship with their audience. And you can count on them to continue delivering “edutainment” that doesn’t shy away from hard truths about what it takes to get your money stuff straight.

“Even today, money is such a strangely taboo topic, and when people do talk about it, it’s often in this very dry and stale and unrelatable way,” Lauren said. “That’s why we pour our creativity into our work and have a lot of fun doing it.”