How I Learned To Slow Down And How To Know When You Have Enough Money

Family is still my biggest priority

I’m a child of immigrants. My parents raised me with an emphasis on education and a deep appreciation for family. They saw education as the greatest investment you can make to open up the best opportunities throughout your life.

Family is still my biggest priority. I have two daughters – a 1-year-old and a 3-year-old, and a husband who is my best friend. 

We love taking our girls outside (blows off toddler energy!), reading with them, and eating together as a family. I end up reading a combo of books at the same time. I am reading The Psychology of Money, It Goes So Fast, as well as a lot (…a lot!!) of Little Blue Truck with my kids. 

My favorite book about money for beginners is The Simple Path to Wealth, written as a series of letters from a father to his teenage daughter. 

My guilty pleasure is listening to Ramit Sethi’s podcast, I Will Teach You To Be Rich. Despite the title, he gets to the heart of personal finance, which is often more about psychology than anything else, when he interviews couples about money. There are always juicy tidbits.

My parents raised me with an emphasis on education and a deep appreciation for family. They saw education as the greatest investment you can make to open up the best opportunities throughout your life.

How did you get to where you are now?

Through a path that sounds more planned than it was. Coming out of college, I had the immigrant mindset programmed in me to find that job that was hard to get. I joined McKinsey and Company as a management consultant.

I worked in NYC, where financial services were our bread and butter. Companies kept asking questions about how to use technology better. Then, we didn’t always have a good answer. 

I wanted to be at the cutting edge, so I joined Facebook in 2012. It had just gone public and was focused on turning a popular site into a business that could sustain itself. If you can believe it, we spent a lot of time then trying to figure out how to get Facebook out of “social media jail.” Back in 2012, companies spent less than ~5-10% of their marketing budget on social media. 

I worked in the very bluntly named monetization group. It was wild to see that we were using way better tech to sell toilet paper with online ads than what financial service companies were using to help people figure out what to do with their entire nest egg. I wanted to help people make better money decisions.

I wanted to help people make better money decisions.

So I went to Harvard Business School and returned to McKinsey after. I saw two troubling trends time and time again:

 

1. 1. Investing options and tax law were getting more and more complicated and

1. 1. Many families were stuck in no man’s land between “doing it yourself” and expensive wealth advisors. There was a pressing need for simple, affordable, and complete financial advice for families.

Multiple wake-up calls forced me to slow down and think deeply about these two trends. 

In 2019, when my father was diagnosed with lung cancer, I saw my mother (a capable physician) struggle to navigate their finances. Turns out she had company. So many of my Harvard friends, even those “in finance,” had the same questions. Worse, they felt ashamed to admit it. 

It felt too late to turn the clock back for my mom, who was nearing 70, but not so for families in their 30s-50s who had decades to massively shift the needle on their finances. 

I also had a miscarriage as my husband and I were trying to build a family. It knocked me off my feet physically and emotionally. I was forced to take time off to recover. Instead of working 80-90 hour weeks, I had time on my hands to reflect on what really mattered to me. 

I decided to leave McKinsey and switch my focus to families. I trained as an ultra-high-net-worth wealth advisor. With that foundation, I started Steward to bring the wealth strategies of the 1% to many more families. 

My mom and dad suffered significant mental and physical health consequences from “the 9 am to 9 pm work grind.” I wanted to help more families in their shoes – first-generation high-income earners – make the most of their money, take care of their families, and live on their own terms. 

I trained as an ultra-high-net-worth wealth advisor. With that foundation, I started Steward to bring the wealth strategies of the 1% to many more families.

What’s your relationship with money

Money is like fire. An incredibly useful tool as a means to an end, but high risk of getting out of control if handled poorly. It’s also just as emotional as it is 1’s and 0’s. Tailoring what financial strategies will work best for you is always a combo of the quantitative (former mathlete!) and the psychological.

People think money is rational, primarily a numbers-oriented topic. But it’s hugely emotional. It is hardwired into our sense of survival.

Growing up, was money a source of status in your home? Or was it a source of anxiety? Did your parents talk about it openly? What did they teach you about it?

Your earliest memories around money fundamentally shape how you approach money today. . . for better or worse. We carry these early lessons and messages with us as adults, following them without thinking about it.

People think money is rational, primarily a numbers-oriented topic. But it’s hugely emotional. It is hardwired into our sense of survival.

People often fall into one of four “money types” (I’m a “beaver” and a former “ostrich”). Unearthing your type can help you figure out what traps you are most prone to and also help you discuss money more easily with a partner. Our suggestion to families we serve is to plan for who you already are rather than who you want to be.

What does financial success look like for you?

Financial success is taking care of my family and many other families while living on my own terms. I like having time to read, travel and play with my daughters.

It is not having to worry about money. I have a framed copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s poem in honor of his friend Joseph Heller:

Joe Heller 

True story, Word of Honor: 

Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer 

now dead, 

and I were at a party given by a billionaire 

on Shelter Island.

I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel 

to know that our host only yesterday 

may have made more money 

than your novel ‘Catch-22’ 

has earned in its entire history?” 

And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.” 

And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?” 

And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.” 

Not bad! Rest in peace!

My husband and I talk about this a lot – the concept of enough. We pay attention to our financial future but constantly have to check ourselves on not letting money be the end goal. The comparison game is the worst. “There’s always a bigger boat!” 

My parents taught me “work is worship,” but I’m now intentionally trying to adjust that pace of life so I can spend more time with my husband and our daughters. 

A really simple way to calculate your enough number? We multiplied our annual expenses by 33 to reach our ideal net worth (or you can divide your annual expenses by 3% – you’ll get about the same number). 

This is based on several assumptions – one, we leave the money we invest to grow for decades, and two, when we retire, we draw down 3% of our nest egg per year to cover our expenses. This is the same math a university endowment does to draw down on its endowment without “killing the goose that lays the golden egg.”

This rough calculation gives you a sense of your retirement needs and helps you set an initial goal. To be more exact, you will need to also factor in inflation, investment returns, and how your spending will change in retirement. But this rough “farmer’s math” gets you started! 

My favorite analysis to do with families is to model this out further and “try on different futures” – what if you bought a larger house, had another kid, moved to a different state, or took a sabbatical – how far would that push out your “enough” date. 

That helps take a lot of the scary grey nebulous money worry and guilt out of life decision-making. If my parents could have run that math in their 30s, I always think about what different lives they could have led and how much better their physical and mental health could have been as a result. 

A really simple way to calculate your enough number? Either multiply your annual expenses by 33 or divide them by 3% to get your ideal net worth.

What do you do with your money?

My husband and I work, and we combine our income for our family’s needs. We use Elizabeth Warren’s 50/30/20 budget principle. It is from her 2005 book, All Your Worth which she co-wrote with her daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi.

The 50/30/20 principle says you should allocate your after-tax income into three categories: 50% to needs, 30% to wants, and 20% to savings or debt repayment. Needs are essential expenses like rent or mortgage, utilities, food, and transportation, while wants are expenses for enjoyment like dining out or hobbies. 

We’re both “beavers,” so we try to save and invest more than 20% of our pre-tax income (we use our pre-tax instead of after-tax income, so we save more). Costs are like nails; they keep growing! So every year or so, we check our spending to ensure it’s lined up with our values. Family and education are big for us, so our “splurge” categories are childcare and schooling. In contrast, we’re still driving a used Honda Sedan from decades back. 

Another check we run for ourselves is if our spending is for ourselves (go for it!) vs. to impress others. Lifestyle creep is so tempting. It’s a major reason people are stuck in jobs they hate! 

We try to save and invest more than 20% of our pre-tax income… every year or so, we check our spending to ensure it’s lined up with our values.

What advice do you have for beginner investors?

I would bring it down to five big things:

 

1. 1. Your money can earn more than you can: My immigrant parents taught me to just put my head down and work. But a crucial concept the 1% in this county realizes that others don’t is that your money can earn way more over the course of your life than you can… even if you’re a super hard-working high earner. To get that money to work, you must have some left over after spending. That means living within your means and then taking the “last step” to put that money to work for you vs. letting it pile up in a bank account. 

1. 1. Get in the market, and stay in your seat: Automatically invest a set amount every month. It can be $10, $100, $1000, or more. The key is to automate your investing. It’s the most powerful thing you can do for your financial future. At Facebook, we used to say, “If you have to do anything more than 10 times…you should automate it”. This definitely applies to putting your money to work for you! The impulse to invest can come and go if you only invest manually. You get a hodge-podge “bandaid” solution. When you automate your investing, you get rewarded for being “blazy” = busy + lazy since you have a well-oiled machine doing the work for you. The staying in your seat part is tough! Your amygdala lights up like you’re in mortal danger when the market takes a hit. But investing is like building a house in California – you’re 100% expecting earthquakes – it’s a matter of when not if. It’s tough to prevent yourself from feeling tempted to sell when markets are down. But if you’ve invested in stable or diversified assets, the best way to resist this feeling is to zoom out and remind yourself your “use by” date for the money is decades out! Warren Buffett famously said, “The stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient.”

1. 1. Focus on what you can control: I think of a Venn diagram of (a) things that matter and (b) things you can control. I focus on the intersection. For investing, that’s minimizing fees and transaction costs + controlling your own emotions. It’s also ignoring the “crisis of the day.”

1. 1. Become the “house” vs. the casino player: Using a globally diversified portfolio of low-fee passive funds vs. trying to pick winners helps you be the “house” vs. someone at the slot machine! Super powerful and under-appreciated since cherry-picking individual stocks can feel sexier and also makes for better “lottery winner” style stories. If you want to invest in individual stocks – use a “Vegas” budget. You decide how much you will invest in individual stocks before you start (e.g., no more than 5% of your investable assets) and give yourself a line in the sand. Remember, the house plays the long game and always wins. 

1. 1. Taxes matter. A lot: Coordinate investment and tax strategies. Maximize after-tax returns. People have incredibly heated debates over ~1% of market returns, while taxes can swing you by ~20-40%! There are so many effective strategies to take advantage of our country’s admittedly arcane tax law that’s trying to incentivize good financial behaviors like saving for retirement or your kids’ college. This stuff is my favorite to focus on!