Never date a "broke dude" — but don't let one with money control you, either

For Pattie Ehsaei, a banker who shares her financial wisdom on her popular TikTok account, her relationship with money has always been personal.

As an Iranian-American child of first-generation immigrants, she witnessed the financial control her father exerted over his family. And as a young adult, she saw the unfathomable: a murder-suicide involving her parents.

The dark history is retold in a book with a much lighter title: “Never Date a Broke Dude: The Financial Freedom Playbook.” Dedicated to Ehsaei’s mother, it advises readers to avoid a partner who is not pulling their own financial weight and to maintain their own financial independence.

This premise presents a few issues: First, many women already avoid broke dudes — resulting in fewer dating options. And avoiding broke dudes is clearly not the best strategy for everyone, as Michelle Obama recently reminded us.

“Uh, I married one,” she bluntly replied when asked on her podcast about dating someone “not financially sound.”

More compelling than the book’s dating advice is the number of great characters and stories who illustrate the importance of women’s financial freedom regardless of whether they’re single or coupled up.

One who resonated with me is Evelyn, a 95-year old grandmother who had saved $1.4 million but thought her warped drink coasters were just fine. “It still works,” Evelyn told Ehsaei.

While walking through the aisles of Target the next day after reading that chapter, I thought about Evelyn. And I bought less stuff. My total bill was actually about half of the typical amount I spend there.

Evelyn died in 2012, but her story and resolve to save has stayed with me. She reminded me of my own grandmother, the family’s chief accountant, who managed to save no matter how much money was coming in or how hard times were.

“I used to think that you need a lot of money to invest, but you don’t,” Ehsaei said, noting this view is the biggest obstacle to investing for a lot of people. “What you have to do is, you need to put aside just a little bit of money every single month.”

If you still don’t feel that you have any money left over to invest, Ehsaei recommends a “side hustle” or a temporary job, like driving an Uber, where you can put away $100 a month, or just $25 a week.

The advice she dispenses in her book is the result of years of financial lessons and experiences she’s been sharing on TikTok, where she has a “rich Persian auntie” persona and has amassed a million followers. Long before retail boycotts organized this year, Eshaei was giving dating advice and encouraging her followers to stop spending money on Amazon, Sephora packages and other “s*** that you don’t need” and invest it instead.

“The point is just to put something away and do it consistently, which has a snowball effect because of compound interest,” she said. “I think everyone can scrape together $100 a month, and as long as you can do that you can build for your future.”