Tara Siegel Bernard Biography | Tara Siegel Bernard

Tara Siegel Bernard is a personal finance reporter for The New York Times. Before joining The Times in 2008, Ms. Siegel Bernard was deputy managing editor at FiLife, a personal finance Web site, and a news editor at CNBC.

She also spent a decade at Dow Jones, where she wrote a weekly personal finance column and was a regular contributor to The Wall Street Journal’s small-business and health costs columns.

Before writing about personal finance, she covered the banking and credit card industries. Ms. Siegel Bernard graduated from Hofstra University and lives with her family in Brooklyn.

Tara Siegel Bernard Age

Tara Siegel Bernard is a personal finance reporter for The New York Times. Before joining The Times in 2008, Ms. Siegel Bernard was deputy managing editor at FiLife, a personal finance Web site, and a news editor at CNBC.

Her pieces of information about the birth date, place of birth are unknown but stay ready for the update soon

Tara Siegel Bernard Husband, Interview

Tara Siegel Bernard, a personal finance reporter, recommends apps for budgeting, investments and helping little ones as young as 6 understand the value of money. Her husband, marriages are not yet revealed yet but stay ready for the update soon

How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? Tara Siegel Bernard, a personal finance reporter, discussed the tech she’s using.

What are your most important tech tools for tracking budgets?

This may sound strange coming from a personal finance reporter, but I’m not a big fan of traditional budgets — I don’t think they work. I try to keep my own spending in check by taking the reverse approach. Instead of tracking every dollar, I focus on what we need to save for: retirement, college or some other goal.

After you’ve automated your savings goals and created a bit of a cushion for emergencies, you’re freer to spend without thinking too hard or feeling too guilty. It’s an imperfect system, but it’s better than a failed budget.

That method won’t necessarily work in all situations, especially if you need to tackle debt or establish a stricter spending plan in retirement. And everyone can benefit from tracking personal spending, even if you do it only for a few months or check in only every quarter.

Mint has been around for a while, but it is still a solid way to take stock of where all of your money is going and whether your net worth is moving in the right direction.

It also allows you to create a budget and alerts you when you’ve spent too much. I use it infrequently, and there’s usually at least one kink I need to work out whenever I log in; most recently, it counted all of my retirement accounts twice, which was kind of cruel.

Personal Capital, an investment advisory service, also has a robust free tool that tracks your spending, cash flow and retirement goals all in one place with minimal effort.

For people who want a more proactive approach to spending and whittling down debt, there’s You Need a Budget. I’ve come across many people in my reporting who have attested that it’s life-changing.

Which basic tools would you recommend for people to increase their savings and investments?

It’s not so much a tool but a technology: automation. After you’ve settled on a low-cost investment provider such as Vanguard, automation is the surest way to set yourself up for success. Automate as much as you can — your Roth I.R.A. contributions, your kids’ 529 college savings accounts.

If you have an employer-provided retirement plan like a 401(k), see if it will allow you to automatically increase the percentage you’re saving each year. If not, set a date in your electronic calendar to remind you to revisit all of those amounts annually.

I also like the little revolution that the roboadvisers have started. They lean heavily on technology to help invest and manage your money, though more of them are increasingly integrating human advisers. Betterment and Wealthfront have free tools that will let you play with various goals and savings amounts to see how long it will take you to save what you need.

What money apps do you recommend for the younger set?

I have a 2-year-old daughter and a 6-year-old son, who recently started asking me questions about how credit cards work and how much money we earn. Another day, we were in a bookstore and he wanted me to buy four new Dog Man and Captain Underpants books. All of this happened within a couple of weeks, so I took that as a cue.

There are a ton of money apps for children and teenagers, but I was hoping to find something to help him focus on developing patience and delaying gratification. Today, bags of groceries magically appear on our doorstep without any visible transaction.

If we need something, we can just press a button — as adults, we’re a month removed from any consequences, and children are often completely unaware that there was an exchange at all. Stuff just arrives when you want it.

To help acquaint my son with the reality of how all of this works, I decided to pay him an allowance of $5 a week. Instead of putting it in physical “save, spend and give” jars, he’s tracking the same categories on an iPad. I scanned a few different apps, but the simplicity of PiggyBot seemed well suited for younger children. Read also about Mitch Carr

He immediately set a goal to buy two of those books — but he’s going to have to wait nine weeks to get them. (I also told him that we could just go to the library.)

Outside your job, what tech product are you currently obsessed with?

I live a pretty low-tech life. We listen to music through Sonos and watch television through a four-year-old Roku device, though we haven’t entirely cut the cord because my husband is a soccer fan. I did recently learn that we can hand in our cable box and pay a little less while keeping access to cable channels through Roku, though you lose the ability to record.

There are also several apps that I use daily or weekly. I always have roughly five dozen tabs open on my computer screen, as well as stories I come across on Twitter that I want to read later.

To minimize the clutter, I save everything to the Pocket app, which I’ll read on my commute. I also keep a to-do list on the iPhone “reminders” app.

I also love Ink and Postagram for turning my children’s photos into cards for relatives, all from my aging iPhone 6s, which has started to shut down in the cold.

I have a long wish list of apps, but I really want more sophisticated tools that would help us become smarter consumers. I want to enter a product name into an app so it can assure me that we’re not feeding our children weed killer in their oatmeal.

Lots of web writers talk about the so-called FIRE, which stands for “financial independence, retire early.” People are retiring as early as their 30s. What do you think about this movement?

We can all learn something from folks like Mr. Money Mustache, who is credited with popularizing the idea of hyper-frugal, anti-consumerist living and saving a significant chunk of your salary so you can either retire early or pursue more rewarding work.

But the movement started with a lot of technology workers — and it’s a lot easier to save half your salary when you’re a well-paid software engineer with health insurance and no debt.

Sure, these folks had to exercise discipline and restraint. But they had the luxury of exercising that discipline; there are so many people living on much less and struggling to pay for health insurance, rent, childcare, and student loans or to keep full-time jobs with chronic conditions.

It also raises a lot of questions: How do they pay for health care? Will the money really last as long as they need it? A lot of research shows a portfolio may last around 30 years if you withdraw 4 percent of the initial retirement portfolio balance, and then adjust that dollar amount for inflation annually.

So when you start looking at longer time horizons — or a 50-year or 60-year retirement — it’s increasingly possible to run out of money if you don’t make adjustments.

But it’s easy to see why so many people find the movement intriguing and why it has become such a popular storyline. You can’t help but wonder what it took to achieve financial security so early, so you click and hope to learn something.

Correction: March 13, 2019
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of a picture caption with this article misstated the name of an investment advisory service. It is Personal Capital, not Personal Finance.

Tara Siegel Bernard covers personal finance. Before joining The Times in 2008, she was deputy managing editor at FiLife, a personal finance website, and an editor at CNBC. She also worked at Dow Jones and contributed regularly to The Wall Street Journal.

When She Earns More: As Roles Shift, Old Ideas on Who Pays the Bills Persist

Gender dynamics have become much more egalitarian over the past half-century, but certain attitudes may endure when it comes to men, women, and money.

By Tara Siegel Bernard
July 6, 2018

For most of the 12 years of Nick and Natalie Foy’s marriage, Ms. Foy has been the primary breadwinner.

She started a career in banking right out of college. Mr. Foy took a more circuitous path, working as a youth pastor before deciding to get what he called a “real job.”

During the transition, he and his wife had intense conversations about whether he was trying hard enough to find work. “That nontraditional role added pressure that neither of us foresaw,” said Mr. Foy, 36, who now runs a financial planning practice in Charlotte, N.C.

Over the past half-century, gender roles in the United States have become much more egalitarian. Women now outnumber men in college and collect more degrees. A rising share of women earn more than their husbands, and men are taking on more responsibility at home.

What may come as a surprise — especially to those under 30 — is that despite these shifts, certain expectations persist when it comes to where men fit into the household dynamic.

“We have held on to that idea that men are supposed to provide, but have loosened up on the idea that women have to be homemakers,” said Alexandra Killewald, a Harvard sociology professor.

Today, nearly a third of women who are married to or living with a man contribute at least half of the couple’s total earnings, according to a Pew Research Center survey last year. By comparison, in 1980, just 13 percent of married women earned more than, or roughly the same as, their husbands.

But seven in 10 adults also told Pew that for a man to be a good husband or partner, it was “very important” that he be able to support his family. Only about three in 10 said the same about women.

The academic literature is mixed on how disparities in earnings affect marital relationships. A 2015 University of Chicago study found that opposite-sex couples in which women were the top earners reported greater relationship strife and were more likely to split up.

The study also suggested that women who earned more did more housework in order to make their husbands feel better about the situation.

More serious marital troubles may be tied to whether a husband simply has a job at all: Professor Killewald’s research, from 2016, found that when married heterosexual men weren’t employed full time, their risk of divorce was greater. But as long as they had full-time jobs, men who earned less weren’t at higher risk of divorce.

Professor Killewald knows from her own experience, however, that more traditional ideas can erupt when you least expect them to.

She and her boyfriend were in graduate school when they started to talk about getting married. At one point, her boyfriend, who later earned a Ph.D. in physics, blurted out: “But I can’t support you.”

Professor Killewald was completely perplexed. “‘What exactly do you think is going to happen when we get married?’” she recalled saying.

“He absolutely didn’t think I was going to quit grad school,” she added. “He’s totally a feminist, this feeling just came out of some deep place that one should be able to support a wife if one is going to be a husband.”

They got married anyway, and she still earns more than him.

Attitudes may be changing, if slowly. Another study, from 2016, detected a generational shift: Couples who married in the 1990s or later were at no greater risk of splitting up when a woman outearned her husband, compared with couples married in the 1960s and 1970s, when a higher-earning wife was more likely to lead to divorce.

Financial planners and therapists who specialize in financial issues have found that certain feelings and patterns recur among heterosexual couples with female breadwinners and that there are several ways to address them. (Most of the strategies apply to anyone with a partner, including same-sex couples or men who earn more than their wives.)

Set, and adjust expectations. Derek Tharp, who runs a financial planning firm in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, said he believed the assumptions that each partner brought to a relationship where the biggest potential sources of conflict.

“If they are open-minded and adjust their roles accordingly — e.g., he may pick up more household labor as her responsibilities in the labor market become more demanding — then things generally work out just fine,” Mr. Tharp said.

“But if either spouse is uncomfortable with the outcome — he may feel that he’s failing as a husband or she may feel that he’s not carrying his own weight — then the risk for conflict may be high.”

Lazetta Rainey Braxton, chief executive of the financial planning firm Financial Fountains, said she had seen earning-related stress arise later, when a woman wanted to relinquish her breadwinning role, often to spend time with children or change to a more flexible, and possibly less lucrative, career.

“It can put a great deal of pressure on men to step up and figure out the income differential,” she said. When such situations arise, she helps couples figure out how much flexibility they have to make adjustments — stretching out student loan payments, for example — that affect their current situation and long-term goals.

Divide and conquer. Research shows that men are handling more household responsibilities, but they still aren’t doing as much as their wives. When women feel they are doing more than their fair share, their relationships have been found to suffer.

It’s amazing what a little more help around the house can accomplish: Another study, from last year, found that women whose jobs gave them greater professional status than their husbands were more likely to feel resentful or embarrassed by their husbands’ lower position — but those feelings didn’t hurt their relationships when the men provided tangible support, like caring for children or older relatives.

“Make a list of whose responsibility it is to take out the trash, make sure the car insurance gets paid, decide how much to spend on groceries, etc.,” said Sonya Britt-Lutter, an associate professor of financial planning at Kansas State University, who recently developed a program to guide couples through financial conversations.

“Then,” she added, “discuss what happens if one person starts a new job or advances in their position to the point of requiring more time away from the home.”

She suggests revisiting the topic annually to see how each partner feels about her or his current “assignments” and to consider changes.

Share goals, with some independence. Research shows that heterosexual married women who are breadwinners tend to play down their status, but Carrie Gallaway, a financial planner in New York, has found that husbands of breadwinning wives are proud of their accomplishments.

But, as can happen no matter who the breadwinner is, conflict can arise when a wife makes more financial decisions without including her husband (and the same is true when the roles are reversed).

“It is a shift that, over time, can create resentment, and the nondominant money controller feels more anxiety because they don’t understand what is happening,” Ms. Gallaway said. “Part of it is just being heard.”

When a relationship has a dominant breadwinner, there are a few ways for partners to maintain some autonomy while still working together.

Some experts suggest setting a specific dollar threshold at which spending decisions require one partner to check in with the other.

Others suggest keeping a shared account for all joint savings and expenses, with what’s left going into individual accounts. Or an agreed-upon monthly sum can be set aside for each partner to spend without criticism, with the unspent money carrying over.

“Regardless of who earns more, each has an amount that they have exclusive control over,” said Barbara Ristow, a financial adviser in Fairfax, Va.

As for the Foys, Ms. Foy still provides a majority of the household’s income. They have found that keeping everything in a single pot works best for them, and Mr. Foy often advises his clients to do the same.

He said that a shared account helped them both see where their money went and it also let them work toward shared goals like saving for college tuition or a big trip. Tools like Betterment, a so-called roboadviser, work well for this, he added.

“I find when you are intentional about setting goals and then monitoring them together,” Mr. Foy said, “you end up with a joint focus that you wouldn’t necessarily have otherwise.”

And a joint focus, Ms. Foy said, keeps resentment about spending and income from festering. “Money,” she said, “isn’t the end goal.”

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