Carrie Joy Grimes (CJ)
Appearances
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
Yeah, we do. We were born when he was born out of the pandemic. You know, I was a union organizer for a couple of decades and I left the union maybe two and a half years before that. And I was kind of knocking around, working on getting jobs here and there. And then, you know, everyone's money kind of got turned inside out when we shut down. And I started fielding lots of questions for folks.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
I'd spent a lot of, I mean, I spent two decades working with people about, you know, how to improve their financial lives, like through union organizing. And so I got together with some friends from that world and we built this website and that kind of took off, you know?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
And so we were born digitally because there was no other option, you know, then there's no in-person anything at WorkMoney for two years, practically. And so we grew nationally immediately because we were just online. And now we're so big that we have enough members in a bunch of states that we're taking pretty seriously.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
What does it mean to be Work Money New York, Work Money Pennsylvania, Work Money Arkansas? Obviously, there's geographic differences, right? Like if you want to talk about changing, like bargaining for cheaper stuff in Arkansas, there's different companies there sometimes than there are in New York. sometimes there's the same companies.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
There's a, you know, sometimes you can bargain like with companies at the national level.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
That's a great example. Walmart really is, you know, like that's an excellent example. And then there's also like, you can do things at the city level and the state level, um, But what we find to be the most helpful is not even thinking geographically or even demographically. It's thinking about people who have like a similar set of problems.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
So this kind of person's financial security issue is that they haven't saved enough to retire. And they're between 40 and 60 in that age range. And they're trying to catch up, but their income is low. So what are the tools, resources, information we can help that person with? Or this person who's in the sandwich generation, like I was for a while, with a kid and a parent, both of whom need care.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
And I was a single mom. That's a different set of problems. Or someone who is... you know, in the thick of it as a parent, you know, I have a 17 year old daughter who's probably going off to college. I know she's going to go off to college in the fall in a year. It's wonderful. It's also like, what is going on with college tuition? Oh, my gosh.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
So that's like a whole separate, very intense problem that many of us go through for four years or more. So we think a lot about that. Like, what are the kitchen table problems and solutions that our members have? And we think more about groups in that way, historically, than we do about like, where do you live?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
Yeah. I have this vision of, you know, we're there for you when you get your first job and we're there for you when you transition into like real full retirement. You know, that like we help people understand and navigate.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
I think it's better for my funders who are very wealthy, who are in the 1 or 0.1%. That's who largely funds Work Money's work. I think they really understand that they are better off when everyday Americans are better off.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
That it doesn't work even for them in the long run if most of the country is hollowed out and can't afford to buy the products and services their companies make or use the products and services that their companies make. So I think that there's, I don't want to describe them all as self-interested. I mean, of course, it does feel good to them.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
I hope it should to invest in an organization that's really helping people achieve financial security. I think they get it. It's not just altruism. I think people are properly self-interested. America does not work if only a small number of people are reaping the economic benefits from our economy. Like it doesn't work in the long run. We won't be here, I would argue, in the long run.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
Yeah.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
Yeah.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
Oh, that's a great question. I don't get to think this way often enough. I think we would be with that kind of power. I will know that we have demonstrated the impact we want to have when we're seeing wages go up for working middle class folks. We're seeing debt go down for working middle class folks. We're seeing home ownership go up for working middle class folks.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
We're seeing, I don't know how to measure this one. So this, just give me a second to kind of say it a little sloppy, but there's a big question mark in a lot of folks, my members' minds about like the value of going to a four-year college and paying all that money, even with grants and still out of reach for a lot of people.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
There's a lot of like, I end up with all this debt and my salary doesn't quite make sense for a long time. Like how many people are in bondage to their student loans? I'll just put a, I just want to, you know, throw a little oar in the water here and say, we are desperately on, we don't have enough electricians and plumbers and, you know, skilled carpenters.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
Like we are missing a lot of important trades work that we need. I mean, the infrastructure in this country, woof. I mean, the amount of factories we need to build and roads we have to fix and bridges we have to build. And boy, wouldn't you love some high-speed railing? Who's going to do all that? You know, I think we really need to think more broadly about education.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
And then the last thing I'll say about how I'll know is that, you know, my little hobby horse I ride right now, like precarity. People will feel like they are financially stable. People will believe that, like what I believed when I was a kid. That I would have my version of my grandpa's, you know, like low-end Cadillac. That I could get the American dream.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
That I would be able to retire a life that I could afford where I could spend time with my family and my kid and my beloveds and, you know, be happy.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
That's right.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
Yeah. This is a conceptually difficult question to answer, meaning like, who should we all be partnering with? But I find that it gets really simple about when you tackle a specific problem. Hey, we don't have enough skilled electrical engineers to wire the stuff we need to wire to build all these factories that are coming home in the next decade or so.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
And so when we ask the question like that, it's amazing how business and labor and government can come together without flinching at each other, regardless of politics, regardless of ideology. And so when I think about that, I think about, okay, so work money is going to keep our eyes on what are the practical things that we can partner with folks on and things like that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
So for example, we have a lot of members in Pennsylvania. So we're going to be looking at what are the opportunities in Pennsylvania to give our members a chance to upskill into work we know is coming. So we'll be looking for actual material, like partnerships that are material, that make sense, or partnerships in California and Arizona where there's a desperate need for healthcare workers.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
And so do we have members who want to go into the... There are training programs that we can partner with to get our members in the door and learning those skills.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
We're torn between two things. I'll try to say them both quickly. You know, the first thing I would say is that it takes just as much time and effort to do big things as it does to do small things. The skills are often the same. And somebody told me that once, and it really changed my perspective. It's like, oh, I could do this in... a city or I could do this in a country.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
And the mechanics for me were largely the same. It takes more money, obviously, often to do things on a bigger field. So I would really encourage folks, if you want to think systemically, you probably have all the tools you need to do it. And whatever work you've done, you can take that and just like stretch it out and put it over a larger frame. And I bet you can think it through.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
And the second thing that I would say is, boy, do I listen. listening and listening and listening to our members, to partners, and to myself. I listened to people and that became the way that we work. It became the lifeblood of our organization. And so those are my two pieces.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
Thank you. It's always so fun to talk to you. And I just will say that I love this podcast. It's such a delight to have a space where people think about systems change. It's necessary and it helps me feel less alone. So thank you for your work.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
150 million American adults, which is over half of adults in this country, can't afford a thousand dollar emergency. There's a lot of reasons for that. You may get a bum deal. You may get dealt a bad hand of cards. It's still on us to figure out how we play them. No one's going to show up and say about us. We got to figure out how to get out of this hole ourselves.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
I say a lot that money is about math and feelings. And when we only think about the math part, you know, we might solve a problem, but we only solve half the problem. You know, people don't just want money for its own sake. They want money so that they can live their good life.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
Hi, Jeff. How are you?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
Jeff, you know my family's from Evansville?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
Oh, wow. First of all, nobody knows where Evansville, Indiana is. And it's a remarkably large town for nobody to know where it is. You know, it's like right at that apex of where Indiana meets Kentucky. And you can see right across the river to Kentucky. You know, I grew up in a very working class, middle class family, and my grandparents are hugely inspirational for me.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
My mom's parents, Charlie and Rachel Ashton, and neither of them graduated from the eighth grade. And my grandpa, Charlie, worked at the Whirlpool factory making refrigerators just down the way from the Sears and Roba where my grandma, Grandma Rachel, she ran the women's department. And they really elbow greased their way to like a good life.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
You know, they had two kids and they bought a house and one of their kids went to college. I mean, it was really kind of the way it's supposed to be. You know, you work hard and you get a good life out of it. And my grandpa, with his refrigerator factory job, saved up enough money to still retire. And in retirement, he bought himself a black Cadillac Eldorado with a red racing stripe.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
And every Sunday, my grandma and grandpa would go for a drive after church. And they would always have the same argument because my grandpa would roll the windows down because he wanted people to see that he was driving a Cadillac because it was a big deal for him. And my grandma would go, Charlie, roll the windows up because it was messing up her hair. And I just...
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
grew up believing that if you put the time in, if you work so, so hard, you can get that good life. My grandpa didn't have 10 Cadillacs. I mean, he was rich. And I just thought when I worked really hard in my life, I would be able to get whatever my Cadillac was, you know, whatever that is for me as an adult.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
And what I've seen happen over the last 30 years, it's gotten harder and harder for folks to have that moment. And I can't imagine a refrigerator factory worker saving up enough money over a 35, 40-year career to buy themselves a Cadillac.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
Well, it was. And it's funny because we need to update our website. We've grown to 8.1 million. We just keep growing so fast that I know we can't even, we can't keep the website updated.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
I think, you know, I spent a couple decades as a union organizer where I got to work with working and middle class folks, figuring out how they use their collective strength and numbers to improve their lives through union contracts. And I'm a proud pro-union person. But I don't do that work anymore because 6% of the private sector is unionized and 11%, 10% overall working folks.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
And you take public sector into account, which is great. I think unions are vital and important for a healthy democracy, healthy economy, a healthy society, like big, big union person. And I wanted to build something that could give both the benefit of a union, meaning like you get discounts and you make more money and you have access to more resources, a better life materially.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
And we can use, we the working middle classes can use our collective strength and numbers to help frame and shape an economy that works for us. We can use our strength to be a market and we can bargain for cheaper goods. We can make clear to either all political parties what we think is really important for working middle class folks.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
And so WorkMoney is the organization that kind of grew out of that idea that we can build a place where anybody can go, that they can trust to get real resources to help them with their money, both individually and collectively. I didn't know that we were going to build what became kind of a media company. I didn't know that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
I was asking for our members' phone numbers when people were joining so that I could call them because as a union organizer, that's how I knew to talk to people. I talked to them on the phone. It was my whole job for 20 years. And it turned out that People were like, well, just text me. I was like, oh, okay.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
And so work money for a long time, like the text and email and the communications, like the value that we actually provide people is information. We deliver information that they can trust from a source they can trust. We delivered over text and email and phones and now social media. And I listened to people and that became like the way that we work. It became the lifeblood of our organization.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, 150 million American adults, which is over half of adults in this country, can't afford a thousand dollar emergency. And, you know, there's a lot of reasons for that. It may be... You may get a bum deal. You may get dealt a bad hand of cards. It's still on us to figure out how we play them. No one's going to show up and save us.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
We got to figure out how to get out of this hole ourselves. And it's also not that 150 million individual people are screwed up. You know, like there's clearly something wrong with the system overall. Wages aren't keeping up with costs. Things cost too much. And there are ways that we can use our strength as a large organization to build an economy that works for us too.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
I say a lot that money is about math and feelings. And when we only think about the math part, you know, we might solve a problem, but we only solve half the problem. You know, people don't just want money for its own sake. They want money so that they can live their good life. They can spend time with their family. They can have the bandwidth to, I don't know, my good life is something simple.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
It's like, I want to be able to watch the Cubs and the Bears and the Trailblazers. You know, I would like to have enough time and money to go to the gym. You sometimes have one or the other, but generally not both. I'd love to buy my teenage daughter one of the million things she says she desperately needs and not feel like I'm robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
You know, I'd love to take my husband out to eat seafood because when he cooks it in the house, it's disgusting and I hate the smell. And so like, you know, it's like, that's, it's like, that's the, it's, I don't even mean by good life. I'm not even trying to say I want like five yachts and 10, you know, fancy cars.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
And I think that when I think about financial security, it's really to me for me about my relationships, you know, my relationship with myself, my relationship with my kid and my husband. And I think that that's ultimately what we want people to have.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
Yeah, that's right.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, we are 100% always, always, always on our members' side. They know that they can count on us, that we have no other angle. We have no other reason for being other than to raise people's incomes and lower their costs. And I think it's an unusual thing for there to be an organization or a person that you know is always, always on your side.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
And it's because we are them. You know what I mean? Like we're not some other outside force. We are an organization of working middle class people who have come together to take responsibility and make it better for all of us.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
Yeah, that's exactly right. And I text my members, you know, at least, you know, usually once a week or so. We call, we have a whole phone bank program where we call our members constantly, just checking in, seeing how people are doing, asking lots of questions, listening. We do a lot of listening at WorkMoney.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
And that might be a thing that kind of sets us apart too, is we really spend time listening. And it's incredible. Like our members are incredible. They have, you know, over a quarter of them have... have texted, called, emailed us over 10 times, which means we have a lot of information and understanding about what people want and what they would find valuable and useful.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
That's a great question. Yeah, in smaller groups, we have a lot of member leaders. We bring people together around specific things. So, for example, we have a group of members that's been working to raise the overtime threshold. And so they get to know each other really well and they cross paths. politics, they cross age, they cross gender, they cross all the rural, urban.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
And then we found this really interesting thing happening where as we have more social media content, there's a lot of stuff that happens in the comments on some of our YouTube videos and in our Instagram and Facebook Reels where people interact together about how they solve problems around how to shop and save at the store. We have a lot of members who are interested in things like...
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
Dinner for four on 20 bucks. People share lots of ideas back and forth. And we've done some real life events. We'll do a swing through a state and we'll have like an event or a tabling event and people can come and sort of chat with each other. In this next year, I expect we're going to be doing a lot more work in people's physical communities because it's time. You know, we got pretty big.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Carrie Joy Grimes on How to Break Free from Financial Insecurity | EP 585
And so where we'd be moving into a couple of places and working with our members on the ground. I'm really excited for what that will look and feel like. I think that's the next chapter for WorkMoney. When I think about WorkMoney in its most mature, I imagine WorkMoney being physically present in, you know, thousands of communities on the ground in states all across the country.