👋 Welcome back to Just Read Hannah, episode 3! I’m playing around with different formats, and this week I was inspired by the comments from my “5 Things Worth The Money (personal finance edition)” video, where lots of folks asked for a deeper explanation behind the picks.
I was going to make an explainer video, but I figured I would give my die-hard besties (aka newsletter subscribers) the early look.
So without further ado, the full break-down behind my top 5 picks, including my reasoning, the math (yay math!), and links to check them out yourselves.
💳 1. The Amex Platinum ($895/year)
I know. $895 for a credit card sounds unhinged. That's why every year, when the fee hits, I do a fresh keep-or-cancel analysis (I made a whole video on this year's math if you want the full play-by-play; it’s currently pinned to my profile).
My rule: I don't count the face value of the perks, because that number is honestly a little misleading. A credit you never use is worth zero. So I score every perk by what it's actually worth to me:
Digital entertainment ($25/month): I spend more than that on streaming alone. Full value → $300
Lululemon ($75/quarter): tennis and gym clothes, so yes, full value. (Pro tip: you can always grab a gift card in store and save it for a bigger purchase later.) → $300
Resy ($100/quarter): I live in LA, there are a million eligible restaurants. Full value → $400
Equinox ($300/year): already a member, so this is automatic. Full value → $300
Uber Cash ($15/month + $20 in December): I use it most months between rides and takeout, but not all. 50% → $100
Hotel credit ($300 twice a year): comes with perks like free breakfast and late checkout, but not every hotel qualifies and it takes some fiddling. 50% → $300
Centurion lounge access: even one visit a year is a really nice perk → $75
My conservative, real-world total: $1,775 against an $895 fee. That's nearly $1,000 ahead, covering the fee twice over. And that's giving zero value to a whole pile of other credits: $200 airline fee credit, $209 CLEAR membership, $200 Oura Ring, $120 Uber One, Gold status at Marriott and Hilton, and random retailer offers all year.
The honest caveat: those credits only count if you'd spend the money anyway. If a card makes you buy things you weren't going to buy, that's not a rewards program, that's a coupon trap with an $895 cover charge. For me, it's spending I was already doing. Run your numbers before you apply - that's the entire game with premium cards.
Consider applying here. They offer different sign-up bonuses throughout the year - I wouldn’t recommend signing up until you can get one of the big ones (100k+ amex points, sometimes as high as 175k).
🏆 2. Robinhood Gold ($50/year)
For whatever reason, this one is almost never talked about in the personal finance social media world, but every time I run the math it seems undeniable:
Gold costs $5/month, or $50/year if you pay annually (do the annual, that's a free $10). Here's what you get:
$1,000 interest-free loan to invest. Gold includes your first $1,000 of margin with zero interest (basically a free loan). Most people ignore this. I don’t. You can put that $1,000 into Treasury bills (e.g. SGOV, CLIP) and just... collect the yield. At current short-term Treasury rates (~3.5%-4.0%), that's about $35-40/year of essentially free money. Your membership is nearly paid for, and we haven't even gotten to the good part.
The 3% IRA match. Robinhood matches 3% of your IRA/Roth IRA contributions if you're a Gold member. The 2026 IRA contribution limit is $7,500, so maxing it out gets you a $225 match. That's a 350% return on the $50 membership before we count anything else. 🤯
Access to the Robinhood Gold Card. My favorite cash back card, full stop. 3% back on everything, no annual fee, no category games, no rotating quarters to memorize. Most "good" flat cash back cards top out at 2%. That extra 1% on every single purchase adds up fast, and Gold membership is the way in.
Add it up: ~$40 in T-bill yield + $225 IRA match + the best flat cash back card on the market. For fifty dollars. Feels like a no-brainer to me (but let me know if you disagree!)
Check it out here.
📰 3. A Wall Street Journal subscription
This one is less about ROI and more about how I think.
I believe professional journalism is worth paying for, whether via old-school journalism like the WSJ or new mediums like Substack. Real reporting costs real time and money, and I want at least one serious paid source in my life. My pick is the WSJ, and here's my logic: I want the information coming into my brain - the top of my funnel - to be as unbiased as possible, so I can form my own opinions. Do I personally have strong views? Absolutely. But I don't want my news pre-spun for me. And I find business-focused reporting tends to be more objective than political coverage, because it's tied to markets, and markets don’t care about political affiliation, they care about truth.
One big asterisk: I completely ignore the WSJ editorial/opinion section, which has a very strong skew. The reporting side and the opinion side are run separately, and it shows. I read the reporting, I skip the opinions, and I'd suggest that approach with most mainstream outlets.
💡 Deal alert! before you pay for anything, check your local library! Lots of libraries offer free digital access to the WSJ and other major papers with just a library card. If not, never pay full price. There are often promotional offers (e.g. $1/week for a certain period), and even after, if you go to cancel they will typically offer you a huge discount to stay (I pay $8/month and I believe the standard price is multiple times that).
Sponsored by
Bad news is good business. We never bought in.
Every morning, financial news follows the same script. Headlines panic, coverage catastrophises, and somewhere inside the noise is the story that actually matters — the one that tells you where the opportunity sits, not just where the fear is pointing.
Most sources have stopped looking. The alarm is easier to sell.
The Daily Upside was created by Wall Street insiders for readers who crave real insight over recycled anxiety. Five minutes of global business and finance, before the noise sets the agenda — just the facts, context, and analysis your decisions need.
Join 1M readers — including managing directors and principals at some of Wall Street’s largest institutions — who trust The Daily Upside to filter through the chaos.
The upsides are always there. We’ll find them before breakfast.
📱 4. Copilot Money (~$95/year)
When people ask me for personal finance advice, one of the first things out of my mouth is: build an emergency fund with 3 to 6 months of expenses.
And then I ask what their monthly expenses are... and I get a blank stare. 😶
Here's the thing: you cannot build a 3-to-6-month cushion if you don't know what a month costs you. That number is the foundation of basically every other financial decision, and most people are guessing.
That's what Copilot is for. Yes, it's a budgeting app if you want budgeting. But even if you never set a single budget, it connects your accounts and shows you what you actually spend per month, by category, on average. For a lot of people, seeing that number for the first time is genuinely clarifying.
It also does net worth and asset tracking, so "checking my finances" goes from a chore across five apps to one pretty screen. About $95/year to permanently know where your money goes? Worth it. I have been meaning to check out Monarch, which people seem to like, but haven’t had a chance yet. Let me know if you use it!
For Copilot, if you use my referral code TGQFGY you can get 2 months free to check it out.
📈 5. Vanguard index funds
If you've seen basically any of my videos, you knew this was coming. 😌
This is where most of my money actually lives. Index funds’ cost is the expense ratio, a percentage each year - and Vanguard's are consistently among the lowest in the industry (sometimes as low as $0.30 for every $1,000 invested)
That's not an accident. Vanguard basically invented the index fund for regular people. Its founder, Jack Bogle, spent his entire career arguing that fees quietly eat investors alive, and that everyday people deserve a way to invest in a low-cost way. The company is literally structured to be owned by its funds' investors, which is why the fee-cutting never stopped.
Are there other great low-cost providers? For sure - iShares / BlackRock comes to mind. But Vanguard has spent decades dragging fees down for the entire industry, and I trust the brand. Jack was pretty iconic.
The theme, if you missed it: I take “worth it” pretty literally. Every single one either pays for itself in cold hard math (Amex, Robinhood Gold), makes you smarter with money (WSJ, Copilot), or quietly compounds for decades (Vanguard).
What should I break down next? Reply to this email and tell me. I read everything!
Until next time,
xx
Hannah
P.S.: you may have noticed my first-ever ad in this issue. I'm experimenting with monetization, and because you know I’m a transparent girly, I'll share the actual math on what it earned in a future edition 🫶🏻
Fine print: this is not financial advice and I'm not your advisor, just a person with opinions and a spreadsheet. For actual money decisions, please talk to a licensed professional who knows your full picture.