Haley Sacks says renting an apartment will make you richer than buying a house.

The American dream has a script, and it ends with a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage. But Haley Sacks, the financial influencer known as Mrs. Dow Jones, thinks the traditional housing ladder is a trap. If you actually want to get rich, she says, you should keep renting and put your down payment in the stock market instead.

Sacks built a massive following on Instagram and TikTok by translating Wall Street concepts into pop-culture gossip. She recently stopped by Young and Profiting to deconstruct legacy money advice. When host Hala Taha floated the classic Dave Ramsey-era rule that buying a home is always smarter than renting, Sacks did not hesitate.

Disagree. I’m a millionaire. I rent. I think that it’s very dependent on your financial situation and also where you’re going to buy. So like in a place like Manhattan, if I rent an apartment and I invest that down payment money in the stock market, I’m going to make much more.

The hidden costs of the white picket fence

The math checks out, especially in high-cost coastal cities. The cultural obsession with real estate treats primary residences like foolproof ATMs. But that ignores the brutal, unglamorous carrying costs of owning property. Sacks points out that homeowners consistently underestimate how much cash they bleed out to local contractors and hardware stores.

By the time that you take out the dishwasher that you had to replace and the HVAC and all the maintenance and the decorating and the renovation and the this and the that, when you actually sell the place, it’s not much money left over.

She has a point. Once you deduct property taxes, mortgage interest, closing costs, and a new roof, the compound annual growth rate of residential real estate rarely beats an S&P 500 index fund. Renting buys you flexibility. It caps your housing liability at the monthly rent check. A broken boiler is your landlord’s financial crisis, not yours.

Rejecting the feminization of being stupid

This pragmatic, math-first approach extends to how Sacks views internet culture. She has zero patience for social media trends that frame women as financially incompetent. She actively pushes back against “girl math”, the viral joke where women justify frivolous purchases through creative, faulty accounting.

Because it kind of makes like financial irresponsibility like um cute, you know, and like like it’s not a big deal to be dumb with your money… But it also is this feminization of being stupid.

Sacks views these trends as a distraction. The same applies to the booming “tradwife” aesthetic. While followers see idyllic homemaking, Sacks sees a highly monetized production. The women baking bread from scratch on your feed are running lucrative media companies. They are getting paid. The viewers attempting to replicate it for free are just giving up their financial autonomy.

Wealth is not about looking the part. It is not about buying the right house, carrying the right bag, or performing the right aesthetic online. Wealth is having enough liquid capital to walk away from a bad situation whenever you want. And you cannot do that if all your cash is trapped in a broken HVAC system.