How I Saved $100,000 by Age 25

September 2020

Phew. Writing that title felt both exhilarating and terrifying.

Revealing how much you’ve saved feels boastful and, simultaneously, vulnerable—I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wavered between, “This is a huge milestone and you’re proof that ‘slow and steady’ works!” and, “What if this isn’t that big of a deal and you look stupid?”

Luckily, I don’t care much about looking stupid anymore—not if it’ll help someone.

In this post, I plan to do a few things:

• Highlight my advantages with flagrant transparency to make it clear where privilege played a direct role

• Note things that disadvantaged me (but weren’t enough to stop the climb to $100,000!)

• Explain the tactics I’ve used and the main drivers of growth

I intend to share things that could reasonably be replicated by someone else to do the same thing and to be candid about the advantages I stumbled into, because being coy or lying by omission would be worse than unhelpful.

It would defeat the purpose. Transparency is helpful!

Everyone knows the frustration of clicking on an article like this one and reading, three paragraphs in, that the writer inherited $50,000 when their grandma died. (Luckily, my grandma is very much alive and I inherited nothing but work ethic and IBS from my parents, so no worries there.)

And of course, I would be remiss not to acknowledge that a lot of the fundamental advantages I had (societally, structurally, etc.) were the direct result of the innate privilege of being a white, straight, cisgendered, middle-class person in the United States of America in a suburb with married, college-educated parents and access to my own good education.

I know that, in a lot of ways, I was born on third base. My journey to home plate was a lot shorter and easier than it could’ve been, but I think there’s still something to learn from it.

Disclaimers aside, let’s jump in.

Things outside of my control that helped me

As a Millennial living in the midst of the biggest education bubble in history, the appropriate place to begin the conversation about what helped me is talking about student loans.

I chose to attend a public state university, to which I received a full-ride scholarship for grades and ACT scores (thank you, obsessive-compulsive addiction to validating my existence via my GPA—you’ve served me well!).

The safety net was there, though: My parents had been saving for my college education since I was little. Growing up, they’d encourage me by saying I could go anywhere I wanted (“Katie! You can go to Harvard! We’re putting the money aside!”)—which, for starters, is an enormous blessing, but also a delusional one. This girl wasn’t getting into Harvard.

But then 2008 happened, and the fixed income departments of Wall Street banks plunged our economy into a free fall. Most of my college fund evaporated. (“Katie! You can go to a state school! With a scholarship!”)

Because I was 14, I didn’t understand (or care) what a stock market was or how the recession was going to impact my college education (at 14, college was still eons away).

By the time I got the full ride, they had built up more savings. They used some of it to pay for my living expenses and sorority (both of which were a financial burden that they covered so I didn’t have to), but because all of my tuition was paid for by the scholarship, they had some money left over by the time I wrapped up my four-year chaos tour in Tuscaloosa.

Right around the time I graduated, my car stopped working. They agreed to cover the first few years of a lease as a graduation gift, using the savings left over in my college fund. They had promised me this carrot in exchange for graduating with a 4.0 back when I was a hapless freshman, and I think on some level they thought their bet was hedged by the aforementioned “chaos tour” and they wouldn’t have to make good on it. Not so. I’ve always been very easily bribed—so one 4.0 and diploma later, we leased a car.

I realize that up until this point you’re probably like, Sounds like you were cruising down privilege street, sis. And you’re not wrong! The combination of my scholarship and my parents’ financial responsibility helped pay for my college education. The car was icing on the advantage cake. I never claimed to overcome the world’s hardest circumstances, but the parental interference ends there.

I used to look at friends in their late twenties whose parents still paid for their rent and groceries, despite the fact they had jobs and were perfectly capable of doing so, and feel intense resentment that I didn’t have the same advantages.

I used to look at friends who had to buy their own cars at 16 and put themselves through school by working long hours and taking out loans and feel intense shame that they didn’t have the same advantages.

(If it makes you feel any better, though, a quick survey of my friend landscape reveals that the friends who had to put themselves through school and do it on their own ended up in higher-paying jobs with stronger financial positions today than those who received the most help. Maybe coincidence, maybe not, but I really admire my friends who were thrust into adulthood early and crushed it.)

Some people move back home after graduation to save money. Some people receive financial help from their parents for years to come. Some people start working and supporting themselves when they’re 15. We can’t always control the hand we were dealt, but we can learn to play the hand we have.

So let’s recap:

I didn’t have any student loans. This was a tremendous head-start that cannot be overstated, especially because higher education has become so prohibitively expensive. Moreover, rather than recouping the money they set aside, my parents chose to help me by covering the cost of a lease for the first three years out of college.

Rest assured, however, that moving forward in this article, the car was the only thing my parents helped pay for after I graduated, and when the lease ended, I bought a used car. (Edit from the future: I have since sold that car; here’s a post with the math that convinced me it was not a necessary expense for me.)

My expenses come out of my pocket—there’s no steady tributary pumping my checking account with kickbacks from mom and dad. Cell phone bills, car insurance, you name it—they were generous my entire life, but once the University of Alabama deemed me an adult capable of generating income, I was booted from the family payroll.

The saving and investing habits and momentum described below were empowered completely by full-time and part-time jobs that someone could ostensibly imitate.

Things somewhat in my control that helped me

I chose to work for an employer that offers a generous 401(k) match and profit-sharing bonus (the profit-sharing, unfortunately, is probably gone for the next few years since, in order to share profits, you have to be profitable, and no airline is right now).

Having a near-10% dollar-for-dollar 401(k) match has been substantial for me, and I started contributing 10% of my salary from day 1 and increased it from there. (Edit from the future: I have since switched my 401(k) from Roth to Traditional after more research and projections.)

The timing and immediacy of this decision may not seem all that consequential, but starting early was my strongest ally. While you’ll read below about my wheels-off spending habits, the head-first swan dive into the 401(k) created momentum in a powerful account early.

Think about it like a snowball rolling down a hill. If you pack a lot of snow into the ball high up on the hill as fast as you can, it’ll pick up more speed and weight earlier, creating more momentum. (It’s been 9 years since I took physics; please respect my intellectual boundaries in this sloppy analogy.)

The takeaway? When you’re interviewing and considering where you want to work, don’t overlook things like 401(k) matches.

Even having access to a 401(k) through your employer can be a huge advantage from an investing standpoint, so neglecting to use it is like turning down free money (or, at the very least, tax-free investment gains).

Things that hindered me

My dumb ass chose a major where the average starting salary is $35,000.

And while I kick myself every day that I didn’t study computer science or software engineering or whatever major allows 23-year-olds to become consultants to Fortune 100 companies, I was fortunate that I was able to make more than the average salary for my field. But let me stress this: It was about as textbook “average” as it gets, at $52,000. Not amazing, but not bad, either. I wasn’t one of those kids who got the $75,000+ starter job and steadily climbed my way to a six-figure income in a few years (I’m still nowhere near it, frankly). (Edit from the future: Now I am! Keep going!)

All that to say: I didn’t save $100,000 because my salary is $100,000/year (not yet, at least—holding out hope I’ll get there one day).

There’s another panel of less-than-stellar choices I had working against me in the beginning, including but not limited to:

• I didn’t start saving until I started working. Seriously. I had less than $1,000 to my name when I graduated college. That’s why I think my approach is more feasible than some of the stories I’ve read in the past in which the author founded their first company at age 11 and had $30,000 in savings and access to venture capital by the time they graduated high school. I used to read stuff like that and think, Well, I’m 22, and I don’t think I can make up for the last 11 years of lost time, so screw it, why try? I didn’t start until I was 23, so hopefully that’s a slightly more realistic time to get your shit together than at the 6th grade science fair.

• I didn’t budget or manage my money at all for the first 9-12 months I worked. It was a takeout-frenzied, online shopping-fueled free-for-all for at least a year before I saw the light, swore off fast fashion, and got it together. And even then, when I say I “got it together,” I’m using the term loosely—I would say my financial planning and aggressive goals began in earnest in mid-2018, about 18 months after I got out of school.

How I finally kickstarted my financial future and accumulated more than $100,000 in about two years

If I had to sum up this entire section in one word, it would be “consistency.” (Sexy!) These are the primary decisions to which I attribute reaching this goal I set for myself in early 2019. I’ll plug other articles throughout this section that dive deeper into the topics mentioned below in case one piques your interest, but just know the high points are all here.

Always having a side hustle.

Cognizant that I frequently vacillate between extolling the virtues of working 14 jobs and complaining about how stressful it is, I have to include this: Always having at least one side hustle helped me supplement my full-time income a ton. There’s something to be said for hobbies that make you money, and while hobbies that you haven’t monetized are equally important, this is simply a powerful way to (a) make yourself more marketable and versatile in your career and (b) always have a steady cash flow outside of your regular income. Especially when your monthly take-home pay is relatively low early in your career (mine was around $2,700 at the time), an extra hundred bucks or so each month actually went a pretty long way.

My original side hustle (teaching yoga) wasn’t all that lucrative: It ended up saving me more in membership fees than it earned me in side income. The important takeaway from the O.G. side hustle was that it opened doors to a much higher-paying teaching gig and gave me the experience I needed to secure said higher-paying gig.

You can think of side hustles in the same sense you think of full-time jobs: Nobody’s going to hire you to play in the Major Leagues without Minor League experience, and Minor League experience doesn’t pay that well. That’s okay. Do it anyway, at least for a little bit, but trust yourself to know when it’s time to move on and upgrade.

Figuring out how much my life costs (then trimming back!), then automating my investment contributions.

In what I refer to as the 1970s of my personal financial life (free love approach to buying whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted), I’d spend on my credit card (paid off every month with my checking account) and, after a few months, I’d move whatever leftover amount had accumulated there after several paychecks and credit card statement cycles into savings. There was no rhyme or reason.

I lacked a methodical approach, and my results spoke for themselves. My growth was unpredictable, unstable, and not guaranteed.

Once I sat down and figured out exactly how much my life costs (related post here), I determined the maximum percentage I could be contributing to my various investment accounts. Then, I automated biweekly contributions for those amounts. That way, regardless of what I did, I knew for sure that somewhere around $1,100 would be invested every month in accounts outside my 401(k), at a minimum. (Edit from the future: Are you curious about how to structure your investments for tax optimization? This post digs into it a little bit, though you could devote an entire website to the topic.)

Every few months, I’d revisit my checking account and see: Is there money inexplicably left over? Am I under budget or over budget on a consistent basis? Can I increase my automatic contributions?

At one point, I realized I was low-balling my take-home pay because I liked being able to spend my (more unpredictable) side hustle income with reckless abandon, beholden to no automatic contributions and virtually unaccounted for on the Books of KG.

Then, my side hustle income became more predictable, and I realized I was basically cheating myself out of further #gains—so I quit my creative accounting and bumped up the automated transfers. I was living on around $2,000 per month at this point, made possible by being a single, childless woman living in an apartment that was a little shittier than I would’ve liked (with a roommate) and being embarrassingly committed to frugality. I lived beneath my means.

Actually exercising self-control by using transparency & awareness.

This one feels ridiculous to type, because I’m not and have never been the poster child for self-control: But when it comes to money, I held myself fairly stringently to the overall monthly spending allowance that I determined to be reasonable.

One tactic that I’ve found to be super helpful in holding yourself accountable is forced awareness.

Going over-budget is easiest when you avoid your budget like it’s 2020 and your budget is coughing and has lost its sense of smell.

You’d be surprised how your behavior will change by simply staying close to your expenditures in the beginning of your financial journey. Turning a blind eye is your worst enemy when it comes to money.

I would interact with my Mint budgets every day. If I was under-budget, I knew, and I could splurge a little. If I had splurged too much already and needed to rein it in, I’d turn down invitations to expensive happy hours or window shopping and save myself the misery of picking the cheapest drink on the menu that I thought would tighten my already-lean cash flow the least. I was able to keep myself (mostly) out of situations where I was set up to fail by maintaining an honest and fairly disciplined relationship with my financial behavior.

I even updated, optimized, and fleshed out my own planning tool so I could sell it as a template on this site—it’s called the Wealth Planner, and it provides the framework for all the same tracking I do.

The ironic thing is that the lifestyle described by the paragraphs above sounds about as exciting and sexy as marrying into the Duggar family, changing your name to Jessa JoyAnna, and replacing your wardrobe with a dizzying constellation of burlap and denim.

But—and I can’t emphasize this enough—I feel better, have more fun, spend more, and do more than I did before my financial existential reckoning because I finally reached a point where I was controlling my finances, not the other way around. Truly: I used to say ‘yes’ to everything and experience an undercurrent of anxiety at every dinner out and during every purchase because I wasn’t entirely sure whether I could (or should) be doing it.

When I spend now, I do it guiltlessly. I order appetizers! I pay $23 for dry shampoo! I splurge for upgrades! Extra legroom? Yes, please.

The power and certainty that you reclaim when you methodically rearrange your financial life and install boundaries is just that: powerful and certain.

Figuring out how to budget for your discretionary expenses can be a game of tug-of-war with your sensibilities. Here’s a post that provides guardrails so you don’t have to guess.

Taking advantage of loopholes, like travel credit cards.

And I promise I’m not just using this as a means of hocking my referral links (but also, use them!).

The cumulative value of the vacations I’ve been on over the last two years has easily cleared between $10,000 and $15,000 by now, and I’ve done most (if not all) of it by using the travel rewards strategies outlined on this site. (This is where you can find my holy grail breakdown; here’s a version that adapts it for couples.)

I’m a big believer in not paying for shit if you don’t have to. Travel is one of the most expensive things we do (aside from pay for rent and our cars), so if you can mostly eliminate that line item from your budget (or, at the very least, dramatically reduce it), you’ll be able to experience incredible things without signing over the naming rights to your firstborn child (Jebediah, is that you?).

Looking back

When I reverse-engineer the path that got me here and think through the math, I realize that I started in May 2018 with around $15,000 of savings that had been accumulated by accident over my first year of working (as in, when money was left over in checking and I transferred it to savings). By September 2020, I’m clocking in around $115,000.

This means that in 28 months (a little more than two years), my net worth grew by roughly $100,000. That feels impossible, even to me, so I wanted to break down the #facts:

• About $10,400 per year going into the 401(k) between my contributions and the employer match (this happened for three years; you’ll remember I began contributing 10% right away), accounting for $31,200 of the contributions

• About $5,000 per year going into a profit-sharing account (this happened twice), accounting for $10,000 of the contributions

• About $1,100 saved or invested per month in a Roth IRA, a savings account, and a General Investing account (for more information about what I used to invest, here’s my review of Betterment) for about 28 months, accounting for $30,800 of the contributions

And of course, almost everything listed above is invested, which means every dollar is generating returns that’ll compound over time. That’s why the totals above don’t add up to $100,000, and why saving $100,000 in 28 months is easier than it sounds—you don’t have to bring in $100,000 in 28 months to end up with that amount. I think I probably saved and invested closer to $72,000, give or take, and the rest was growth. (Edit from the future: The bull market helped a lot, if you recall what the market was doing during this time.)

As you can probably imagine, I feel pretty satisfied that I’ve been able to do this—but if you read last week’s post, you know net worth goals are slippery, moving targets. Take these tips and tricks as proof that a slow and steady approach to building wealth does work, no six-figure income or $20,000 signing bonus required. The good news? Once you hit the first $100,000, I’m told the compounding really begins to work in your favor. After all, a 10% return on $100,000 is another $10,000—just by having the money invested in low-cost, diversified index funds and letting it Netflix & Chill.

If my 22-year-old self who ate $20 lunches at gourmet taco shops every day and only saved when she felt like it was able to get her shit together, I promise you can, too.