ZiZi Zhang, a Harvard-educated former Wall Street banker, is better known to thousands of people on Instagram as “Ratz-Carlton” – where she offers smart, scrappy personal finance tips for living a full life within your budget.
Zhang, 29, is originally from San Francisco but moved to New York to work in finance and venture capital after graduating with a computer-science degree.
She started Ratz-Carlton as a creative outlet and to share thoughts on financial wellness. Or, in her words, how to enjoy a “Ritz-Carlton” life of luxury but minus the unchecked spending, aka staying “ratty.”
Zhang earns a low six-figure salary, but growing up as one of four daughters of first-generation Chinese immigrants made her cost-conscious and focused on squeezing the value out of every dollar. As an adult, she still heeds some of her parents’ wisdom – but has discarded other beliefs – to come up with a strategy for financial success.
The interview below has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Education, education, education
My parents immigrated to the U.S. from China in the Nineties. They came here for graduate school in Oklahoma, where I was born. By the time I was five in 2001, we had moved to the South Bay area of San Francisco, California. By then, we were a family of six living on only my dad’s income as a quality control employee at a pharmaceutical firm.
Our parents made us recognize that our financial resources were scarce and limited, and, as kids, that shaped how we viewed spending and being frugal. My parents did an incredible job with what they had; they were able to save up enough money to send me to college.
Education, financial stability, going to a great school and getting a great job were the top-tier priorities in our family. To accomplish those things, we really had to fight through life in survival mode. Part of that survival mentality was saving money at all costs to achieve financial stability.
Investing in me
My upbringing really instilled in me values of investing in myself through a good education, professional development, and even therapy. I think about therapy as an investment in more deeply understanding myself and my upbringing.
Therapy can be expensive, but it’s one of those things that you can’t really put a dollar value on. Self-knowledge serves me in my personal and professional life, and in all my relationships, all of which are more valuable than money.
In my career, I’ve given myself stability and financial security – two things my parents really valued – by choosing safer jobs.
Lessons from mom and dad
As I decided whether to adopt the financial habits I learned from my parents, I asked myself two questions:
- Does this serve the reality I live in now?
- Is this a conscious choice of how I want to live, or is this ingrained subconsciously because of how I was raised?
There’s always that tension between ingrained learning and how I choose to live my life now. For example, I’ve very consciously tried to unlearn a major theme from my upbringing: the scarcity mindset (the idea that money is limited, influencing buying decisions and financial planning, and often leading to stress and anxiety).
In fact, I switched my view from money being limited, to time being limited. I take advantage of the time I spend with my family, friends and partner. That’s something that I can’t pay any amount of money to get back. I’d rather spend my money to buy time back – that’s a very different mentality from how I was raised.
Making that mental change has a lot to do with the fact that I’m privileged now to be in a position where money isn’t as scarce as it was. I’m able to make financial decisions based on multiple options. When you’re focused on survival and providing for a household of six, that’s not even a consideration.
In that sense, it was a privilege to grow up in a family that was fighting to survive financially as opposed to something that I look down on or wish my parents had done differently.
Value propositions
There are other lessons that I learned from my parents that I’ve kept with me and use all the time, and they’ve contributed to the “Ratz-Carlton” mindset.
One of those lessons is having a very clear sense of the value of what it is I’m buying. For example, a basket of strawberries that’s $3 in one store might be $7 in a different store. For me, it’s about the effort and thought to intentionally go to the place where I know that it’s going to be half the cost. That’s something that I retained from my parents and continue to live by to this day.
The lessons from my parents about value play out in many ways. I’m always talking to my [Instagram] followers about cost-per-use and how much quality an item provides compared to its price.
Having that mentality drives me to shop resale stores for new-with-tags, high-end items. I never pay the regular price for designer items. For household items and makeup, I use them until they’re empty or gone, and then replace them.
If I’m splurging, I’m buying expensive jewelry that I know I’ll wear daily instead of a piece of clothing I may only wear once or twice a year.
The comparison trap
When I showed up at Harvard, I think that was the first time I had been exposed to such generational wealth and privilege.
I developed this consciousness of, ‘Wow, there are really different ways that people live and exist, and it’s shaped so much by their upbringing.’
My upbringing has deeply shaped who I am, and other people’s upbringings have deeply shaped who they are. In light of that, I focused on how to communicate across those varying backgrounds.
No one chooses the financial situation that they come into this earth with. Knowing that, I tried to focus on what I could control, not compare myself to the things that are out of my control.
It definitely is a daily practice, because I think it’s just human nature and almost biologically ingrained in us to compare.
Release from the rat race
New York is a pretty open city about keeping up with the Joneses and putting what you have on display.
Something that I realized early on, when I was working on Wall Street and surrounded by high earners, is that just because you earn a lot and work in finance doesn’t mean you’re automatically good with money.
Many people in finance that you would think have a huge safety net are living paycheck to paycheck. A lot of that is because of wanting to keep up with your peers and colleagues. That may have been me if I hadn’t grown up learning what I did from my parents.
At the same time, I think having a deep sense of who I am, where I came from and what my values are helps me step out of the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses mindset.
Time > money
One of my main values is that time is more important than money. I’ve taken my sisters on vacation to show them that time together is important, and that, despite the scarcity mentality we all grew up with, you can spend money on what matters and enjoy it without feeling guilty over how much you spend, provided it’s within your means.
I’m very willing to spend on relationships and invest in them. I’m not as willing to spend on things that would only serve myself, such as buying a coffee, matcha or smoothie, for example.
I would rather save that money, not because I can’t afford those things, but because it’s not necessarily in line with my values of how I want to allocate the resources that I do have.
What matters to you?
Get really clear on your personal values and make them tangible. I started with these questions:
- What do I get energy and joy out of?
- What is not important to me?
- What are my non-negotiables?
- What is a need versus what’s nice to have?
Writing down the answers is super helpful because I can always go back and look at them. Sometimes it’s hard to remember those values and opt for the path of least resistance or what’s most convenient.
But having it documented brings this level of foresight, intentionality and planning into my life. It helps me spend based on those values versus going with the flow and reacting to what happens.
