In a city as notoriously expensive as New York, it’s common to see people in their late 20s and early 30s living with roommates to help manage the high cost of living.

But Ishan Abeysekera has taken that to the next level with his current living situation in Brooklyn: a communal building that he shares with a whopping 23 other people.

“When I say I have 23 housemates, people are like ‘What? That sounds wild,’” Abeysekera tells CNBC Make It. “But actually, it’s quite nice.”

The 33-year-old engineer lives in a space operated by Cohabs, a company that offers fully furnished bedrooms and communal living spaces for stays as short as 6 months or as long as a year or more. In addition to locations in Manhattan and Brooklyn, Cohabs has properties scattered across European cities including Madrid, Paris, London and Milan.

Abeysekera actually didn’t set out to have so many roommates — or any roommates at all. When he first moved to New York City from London in late 2022 for work, his job put him up in a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan’s Financial District.

When he set out to find his own apartment, he looked all over the city for a one-bedroom that would fit into his monthly rent budget of $2,000 to $3,000. On a whim, he looked up communal living in Brooklyn and came across Cohabs.

When he went to tour the available room in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, he was immediately sold seeing some of the residents having dinner together in the dining area.

“How do you really meet people when you’re new to a city? This seemed like a great way to do that,” he says.

As a result, Abeysekera put pen to paper and moved in. He currently pays $2,100 a month for his room. His monthly payment also covers WiFi, utilities, household supplies, a weekly cleaning service and monthly communal breakfast.

He initially had a smaller room for which he paid $1,850 per month — along with $1,850 due up front for his security deposit — but upgraded to his current space when the larger room became available.

The four-floor, 24-bedroom building’s tenants range in age from 21 to 36. Each person has their own locker in the communal living area, and the six refrigerators have enough space for each tenant to have their own shelf for their groceries.

“Sharing a kitchen with so many people is completely fine,” he says. “You have your own cupboard to leave your stuff in.”

The building is complete with coworking spaces, an outdoor patio and a finished basement with a massive couch that can fit all the residents at once. There’s even some gym equipment and number of ongoing building-wide exercise challenges.

“There’s so much shared amenities and space that you’re never really in each other’s way,” Abeysekera says. “And everyone has their own space in terms of their own room.”

Still, he admits that his current setup has “a lot of similarities” to living in a college dorm. But, he says, there’s one key difference: “Everyone’s a lot more respectful because they’re more of an adult and more mature.”

And just like some people you dorm with in college become friends for life, Abeysekera says he’s formed strong relationships with people he has met through Cohabs.

“Being here has really helped me build a community and make friends,” he says. “It’s really enriched my life.”

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Growing up in Nara, Japan, surrounded by tea fields, matcha has always been a part of my life. The full aroma and the deep bitter and sweet umami taste of this vivid green tea evokes so much nostalgia for me. 

When I was in high school, I started taking formal tea ceremony lessons. It was a highlight of my week. Our tea master would always give my classmates and me delicious, seasonal Japanese wagashi (sweets) and flowers, and she invited us to watch and help during her tea ceremony at a prestigious temple in Kyoto. 

I still regularly perform Chado, the traditional Japanese tea ceremony for preparing green tea. I stopped for a time when I moved to the United States, but resuming the practice here in New York has provided a valuable sense of community for me. 

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More than anything, I associate matcha with the wisdom of my elders. My 99-year-old aunt and my 98-year-old mentor, who I call Papa-san, have been making their own matcha for most of their lives. I’ve even inherited some of their matcha bowls and utensils.

Matcha is my No. 1 beverage for boosting longevity, and I drink it every day.

Matcha contains key nutrients like vitamins A, C and K; fiber; protein and the amino acid l-theanine, which has been shown to help improve sleep, reduce stress and boost cognitive function. 

It also has polyphenols like epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG). Polyphenols are naturally occurring compounds in plants that are high in antioxidants and can help fight illness and inflammation. 

Studies have also shown that matcha can reduce the risk of cardiovascular diseases and can improve your gut health as well. 

There are so many ways to consume matcha, including sweet treats like cake, cookies, chia pudding and mochi. 

If you ever have the opportunity to attend a Chakai (tea gathering) or be served in a formal setting, there are several rules to follow — these are some key ones.

When you are served, say “Okemae chodai Itashimasu,” which means ”Thank you for serving tea to me.” Then pick up the bowl, hold it with both hands, take a moment to look at the color and enjoy. 

After you finish, once again, look at the bowl and carefully hold it in both hands. Then return it back to the place where you were served.

The most important thing is to express your appreciation, relax and embrace the moment. 

My day starts with offering a prayer and a bowl of matcha to my ancestors. Then I make a bowl for myself and one for my son before he goes to work as a physical therapist. This daily ritual for performing Chado fills me with such a sense of peace. 

Here are the steps I take:

1. I boil approximately two ounces of water.
2. I place half a cup of hot water into my bowl and with my chasen (bamboo tea whisk), I swirl the water several times to purify my tools. Takayama, a village in my home of Nara, is famous for making chasen.
3. I drain the water and then wipe everything with a clean cloth or paper towel.
4. With my chashaku (traditional bamboo tea scoop), I measure out two grams of green matcha powder and place it on the bottom of the bowl.
5. I slowly pour approximately 60 ml of hot water over the powder and enjoy the emerging aroma.
6. I hold the bowl carefully with my left hand and whisk, making sure to hold the chasen vertically, for about 20 seconds. I call this my “gift of Zen moment.”

During the summer, I will sometimes transfer the prepared tea into a portable thermos and add about half a cup of crushed ice for a refreshing and cool to-go treat. 

One of my favorite makers of matcha is the Ippodo Tea Company. It is based in Kyoto, and has been operational since the 1700s. I also recommend using bamboo tea whisks, which you can often find in Asian grocery stores or online.

If you’re just getting started, you can always use a small kitchen hand whisk or even a mason jar with a lid — but no blender, please, the matcha powder is so delicate. 

After I complete this meditative routine, I always feel a little lighter. Simply put, it is healing. 

Michiko Tomioka, MBA, RDN, is a certified nutritionist and longevity expert. Born and raised in Nara, Japan, her approach focuses on a plant-based diet. She has worked in nutritional roles at substance recovery centers, charter schools and food banks. Follow her on Instagram @michian_rd. 

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Figuring out how much money you’ll need in retirement can be tricky. After all, while some factors are in your control — such as what sort of lifestyle you plan to lead in retirement — others, like your life expectancy, are nigh impossible to predict.

Researchers at Morningstar are trying to narrow down how things will play out for most Americans. The investing research firm recently released an updated model of U.S. retirement outcomes based on spending, investing and life expectancy data, among a litany of other factors.

Morningstar’s model — which assumes a hardly guaranteed status quo for Social Security benefits in the future — predicts that 45% of U.S. households will run short of money in retirement. For a large chunk of Americans, that could mean returning to work, going into debt or drastically reducing costs to make ends meet.

But if it’s still relatively early in your retirement savings journey, there are two major levers you can pull that drastically increase the chances you’ll have enough money to live on in retirement and even pass along to your loved ones.

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One is investing in a workplace retirement account. Morningstar found that 79% of Americans who have at least 20 years of future participation in a defined-contribution plan, such as a 401(k) or 403(b), will have enough money to sustain their expenses in retirement.

The other is getting the timing of your retirement right — and the longer you wait, the better. Morningstar projects that 45% of households will fall short in retirement with a retirement age of 65. That figure falls to 28% for households who delay retirement until age 70.

When it comes to setting yourself up for a sustainable retirement, it’s very clear what tends to trip people up, says Jack VanDerhei, director of retirement studies at Morningstar Retirement and one of the study’s co-authors: “Spending longer and saving less.”

Indeed, the less money you have saved and the longer you need to make it last in retirement, the higher the chances that your coffers will run dry.

If you follow a common model, you save throughout your life in a tax-advantaged retirement account, and once you stop working, you replace your salary with a combination of Social Security and pension income (the latter is rarer these days) along with periodic withdrawals from your portfolio.

Your chances of your income lasting throughout your retirement, then, rely on maximizing your Social Security benefits and building a large enough portfolio to withdraw from indefinitely.

Here’s how to skew the odds in your favor.

Save in a workplace retirement account

It’s not hard to see why saving in a workplace retirement account tends to boost the odds of a successful retirement. By enrolling in a 401(k), for instance, you sign up to have money diverted from your paycheck directly into your portfolio, which drastically decreases the chances that you’ll spend it.

You also potentially earn a matching contribution from your employer, a benefit that financial planners often call “free money.”

By consistently investing over at least two decades — ideally more — you allow the power of compounding interest to drastically up the value of your portfolio.

“The main takeaway for young people — or at least a really important thing to highlight — is that if you have access to a plan but don’t participate, we definitely encourage you to participate,” says Spencer Look, associate director of retirement studies at Morningstar Retirement and the study’s co-author. “Just saving something is better than nothing.”

If you don’t have access to a workplace retirement plan, “saving outside of one, in an IRA, is really important,” says Look. “If you mimic [contributing to a workplace retirement account] outside of the plan, you’re still setting yourself up for retirement.”

Delay retirement if you can

Not everyone has the ability to keep working until they’re 70. But if you can, delaying retirement as long as possible has a positive “two-pronged effect” on your retirement sustainability, says Look.

For one, you shorten the amount of time you need your money to last, reducing the amount you theoretically need to have at retirement.

For another, you boost another source of income: Social Security. For anyone born after 1960, full Social Security benefits kick in at age 67. You can claim Social Security as early as age 62, but will receive a reduced benefit. Conversely, the Social Security Administration will boost your benefit by 8% per year for each year beyond full retirement that you delay claiming, up to age 70.

It’s easy to see, then, why those who retire at 70 have so much more success in Morningstar’s model. And even if you can’t delay that long, it’s likely wise to work as long as you’re able, says Look.

“It can be pretty dramatic for people. You see the results retiring at 70. It’s not possible for everyone,” he says. “But even working a little bit part time if you don’t have enough savings is something that could be helpful.”

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This story is part of CNBC Make It’s The Moment series, where highly successful people reveal the critical moment that changed the trajectory of their lives and careers, discussing what drove them to make the leap into the unknown.

Emery Wells put himself on the path to a dream career by recklessly buying a $17,500 camera that he definitely couldn’t afford.

Wells, 42, is the CEO of Frame.io, a video collaboration software business he co-founded in 2014 and sold to Adobe for $1.275 billion in 2021.

Nearly two decades ago, he was a 25-year-old freelance video editor who’d recently quit bartending in New York to pursue a full-time film career. At an industry trade show in 2006, he watched a startup called Red Digital Cinema announce its intention to build a digital camera high-quality enough for big-budget Hollywood productions.

Without hesitating, a colleague put down a $1,000 deposit to get on the product’s waitlist. “I was shocked,” Wells tells CNBC Make It. “And out of, really, just jealousy, I said: ‘Well, I’m signing up [too].’”

The deposit nearly maxed out his credit card’s $1,200 limit, he recalls: “I was already in debt … and I think I may have had a few hundred dollars in my bank account at the time.” When his Red One camera shipped a couple years later, he found a way to scrounge up the rest of its cost.

Being among the few people in New York to own one altered the trajectory of Wells’ career, he says. Suddenly, he was in high demand. By 2014, his post-production company Katabatic Digital brought in more than $1 million in annual revenue from clients like Coca-Cola and Pfizer.

But the real money, it turns out, was in a piece of software built by Wells and Katabatic engineer John Traver — a platform for people to collaboratively give feedback on videos throughout the post-production process. When they launched Frame.io as a standalone tool, more than 15,000 clients signed up.

Wells faced a decision: Focus on the established, stable business or dedicate himself to a hot, but unproven, startup? He opted for the latter, shuttering Katabatic to focus on Frame.io full-time.

The startup raised more than $80 million in funding over the next five years, and as Wells and Traver weighed an IPO, Adobe made them a billion-dollar offer they couldn’t refuse.

Here, Wells discusses the risks of giving up a sure thing to take a chance on a bigger opportunity and the reckless purchase that made it all possible.

CNBC Make It: You built Katabatic Digital into a successful business. What made you start thinking about sacrificing it for something bigger?

Wells: Post-production is client service work. Sometimes you have clients. Sometimes you don’t, and there’s nothing to do.

I hired John Traver to do post-production stuff, but he had a minor in computer science. We started tinkering on software ideas over the course of several months. I don’t think there was a super serious goal of creating a software company, because we didn’t know that we could.

We said, “Why don’t we spend some time building something that we know really, really well, that we know there’s a market for, we know we can solve the problem better, and we know we could make some money doing it?”

When did you realize Frame.io might be big enough that you’d have to shift your focus away from Katabatic? How did you make that decision?

In 2014, we were trying to raise money for Frame.io. One serial entrepreneur told us, “I would never give you $1, and nor would any other investor, until you’re all in. Not 99%. You cannot have this other thing. I’m not giving you money to do a side project.”

It really resonated with me. I was like, “Oh, gosh. Do I have to shut down? What do I do?”

As we got closer to the launch, where people could pay for Frame.io and use it, my time naturally shifted towards it. I started turning down work from clients, because we were spending all of our time trying to get this thing ready.

I think it was starting to form in my mind: If we’re going to really go for this, we have to really go for it.

Did it feel like a major risk to abandon Katabatic for something much less certain?

I’d spent almost a decade building this post-production company from scratch. I probably had a few hundred thousand dollars in savings, and I spent a lot of that money on Frame.io. So, yeah, it was definitely a huge risk.

But it was a calculated one, and I was getting signals on the success of Frame.io along the way [from customers and investors] that encouraged me to take more risk and more risk and more risk. In the first 90 days after we publicly launched, we were doing $30,000 of monthly recurring revenue. We raised a $2 million seed round from Accel.

That was the moment I was like, “OK.” I don’t think I ever personally took another post-production job at that point.

Did you always think Frame.io could become a billion-dollar company? Was it a big, “swing for the fences” idea?

Frame.io is the idea that became bigger and bigger and bigger the more time we spent thinking about it. When we launched, I wouldn’t say I had conviction that it was going to be a billion-dollar business.

I think that’s true for a lot of founders. Not to compare myself to Mark Zuckerberg, but there’s these fun interviews of Mark from the early days talking about how big Facebook was going to get. He’s like, “I don’t think we’re ever going to [grow beyond college students].”

It just happens. You go from $1 million in revenue to $3 million to $6 million. Then you’re pitching how you’re going to get to $10 million, $20 million and beyond. And I’m like, “Are we? I don’t know if we’re really going to get there.”

Every single fundraising round, you have to sell that pitch to every investor you talk to — but if I’m being honest, I [didn’t] know.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Annie, 39, and her husband, Emery, 43, earn a healthy $223,200 together.

On paper, they seem to be living well. They own their home as well as two rental properties, have over $236,000 invested and recently traveled to Lisbon, Portugal, to see Taylor Swift, they told self-made millionaire and money expert Ramit Sethi on a recent episode of his “I Will Teach You to be Rich” podcast.

The problem is, Annie, who’s an accountant, brings home $187,200 on her own — over 80% of the household’s earnings and five times what Emery makes working in video production. Their last names were not used.

“The difference in income has been a challenge,” Annie said on the podcast. “It’s definitely been challenging for me knowing that I am the sole person providing for the family, and I really wish that Emery could as well. I know he does it in other ways, but not financially.”

On top of that, Sethi found a deeper issue at play. Annie is an “optimizer,” he said. She wants to optimize everything, from maximizing the credit card points they earn to investing every extra dollar they have to keeping their rental properties, even though they’re adding to the stress. 

“Your actual behavior with money is actually causing you negative ramifications,” Sethi told her. “I just don’t think you’re making the connection.” 

Here’s Sethi’s perspective on their situation and how he suggested they reconfigure.

Sethi encourages every couple that comes on his podcast to know their numbers when it comes to their earning, spending and saving, so they can get an accurate idea of how well they’re doing or whether they need to make changes.

There’s no doubt Annie knew her and Emery’s numbers, but Sethi learned she obsesses about them to an unhealthy extent. For instance, she wants to keep an investment property that has required a lot of costly regular maintenance and doesn’t net the couple a profit, and uses the stock market as a “modified savings account” to try to get more out of the money she puts aside for big purchases.

She puts pressure on Emery as well, and wants his business be more consistent or see him increase his income by getting a regular salaried job.

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On their own, none of these behaviors are particularly problematic. But combined, they’re all contributing to stress in Annie and Emery’s relationship that doesn’t need to be there, Sethi said.

“At a certain point it actually becomes dysfunctional,” Sethi said, because they’re spending more time worrying about what could go wrong in the future than enjoying the life they’ve built. “You are so driven by optimizing everything, you’re going to optimize yourself into total unhappiness.”

Annie revealed that her family history may contribute to fears around money that lead her to over-optimize in an effort to stay in control. Her dad got sick and was unable to enjoy his retirement, which makes her eager to both spend money on fun things now, but also make sure she’s prepared if her health requires her to stop working, she told Sethi.

Annie also realized her income disparity with Emery frustrates her because it’s out of her control.

“I can’t control how much he makes. I just have to let him do his thing,” she said. “I hate the fact that I can’t do anything about it.”

Emery has been trying to get his business off the ground. But having to take time away from his work to do maintenance on their rental properties or care for their children has made it difficult. “Over the [past] few years, every time I tried to get something going, something that looked like momentum, I just felt like I had the rug pulled out from underneath me left and right,” he said.

At the end of the day, Annie has work to do on her relationship with money, she and Sethi agreed. Emery could triple his income next week, but it may never be enough to quell her worries.

As Sethi frequently says on the podcast, “The way that we feel about money is highly uncorrelated to the amount you have in your bank account,” he told them. 

In terms of the couple’s ability to save for the future and still enjoy life today, “you already have it,” Sethi said. “You have $223,000 a year in income. In your area, with your expenses, that is more than enough money. You’re on track to be multi, multi multimillionaires.” 

Check out their full episode here.

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