Before increasing your investment contributions, it’s important to understand how your investments fit into your overall financial well-being.
Here are my five key steps based on the acronym CRUSH to re-evaluate your investing strategy. These helped me become a debt-free millionaire in my 30s.
C Stands For Curate Your Accounts
A study commissioned by Chase found 55% of Americans with recurring payments don’t know exactly how much money is automatically taken out of their account each month. In particular, consider these scenarios that I see most often with my financial education students:
- Consolidating investment accounts such as old 401(k)s into one individual retirement account;
- Rolling over old 401(k)s into your current 401(k) for simplicity;
- Reviewing the expense ratios and fees of your investment accounts;
- Closing brokerage accounts if you’re not fulling maximizing tax-advantaged accounts to their IRS limits; and
- Recovering forgotten investment accounts.
I also commonly see students using brokerage accounts to invest in the same things they could do with an account like a Roth IRA and save more on taxes.
By curating accounts down to the ones you can increase your focus on, it becomes less overwhelming to grow the amount of money you invest.
R Is To Reverse Into Your Independence Number
The FIRE movement can help you clarify how much you need to invest, and provide tangible steps to move forward, even if it’s a little at a time.
Your FIRE number is calculated based on two retirement strategies used by traditional financial planners: the 25x Rule and the 4% Rule.
When my students first calculate this number, they can get overwhelmed because it’s likely in the millions if you are living even a modest lifestyle in the United States.
The goal of FIRE is to have 25 times your annual expenses in investments, where you only withdraw 4% of the total each year. While you take out your living expenses, the investments are also replenishing that money through compound interest or growing in value or dividends.
The point of the number is not to discourage you. It’s to help give you a general direction of how aggressive you want to be with your approach, and to identify the gap you need to fill between where you are now, and where you want to aim.
U Is To Understand Your Net Worth
I’ve taught thousands of students since starting my financial education company in 2020, and the vast majority could not answer this question: What is your net worth?
Your net worth is calculated by taking the monetary value of everything that you own and subtracting out the monetary value of everything that you owe, including credit card debt, car loans, mortgages, student loans and other forms of debt. I teach all of my students to track all of their finances in one system, such as Mint, to reduce the busywork of updating manual spreadsheets.
In very simplistic terms, your new investment plan starts by closing the gap between your FIRE number and what your current net worth is. For example, if your FIRE number is $1.2 million and your current net worth is $200,000, the idea is you will need to move toward building investments of $1 million.
Having this general idea of where I was financially helped me take steps forward to increase my overall net worth like:
- Paying off my car;
- Refinancing my mortgage to a lower term from 30 years to 15 years;
- Closing any savings accounts that weren’t a high-yield savings account; and
- Paying off credit card balances under $1,000 and limiting my credit cards down to two.
Understanding your net worth may also help you identify areas where you can save money now to lower the amount you need to invest in the long term.
S Reminds You To Spend Intentionally
If you want to catch up on your investments, decide ahead of time how much you will invest each month, and put it at the top of your budget, versus putting it last on your priority list.
According to a 2022 survey of Americans by Credit.com, 27% of Americans don’t think they need a budget, and 24% don’t think they’ll stick to it.
Until I learned how to do a zero-based budget, I thought leftover money was a good thing. But people often plan for the expenses they have, thinking they’ll send any additional funds to their investments. The intention is great, but when you take that approach, you usually get to the end of the month without any funds left over.
Getting on a consistent budget every month helped me and my husband free up more cash flow to maximize our 401(k) contributions and IRA contributions annually. We now contribute more than $50,000 a year when we were contributing closer to $6,000 before budgeting.
Rather than waiting for possible leftovers, allocate all the money you have coming in, including the amount you want to invest before the month even begins. If you’re doing your budget correctly, you should have no leftover money in your plan, with every dollar being allocated to an intentional line item.
H Is To Heal Your Money Wounds
As a financial coach, I learned most people don’t invest not for lack of knowledge, but because of the fear of losing money. And that fear is not irrational; it’s often based on past traumatic experiences with finances like:
- losing money in past investments;
- getting fired or laid off;
- going through a tough divorce;
- having a medical emergency that caused financial stress; and
- growing up in a family with financial challenges.
I also grew up in a household where money was always a cause of arguments and truthfully, my family never taught me how to invest. The emphasis was on having a high salary and a good job title.
I was also worried to invest more toward independence at first because I started my career during the financial crisis in 2008 as a human resources professional in the banking industry in New York City. I saw firsthand how people lost their sense of financial security.
I started going to therapy consistently each month at the same time I started my FIRE journey, and I would argue it’s been the best investment I’ve made into my financial future.
Investing has inherent risks, and I only started investing more aggressively when I felt emotionally and mentally prepared for any potential losses. By talking to a licensed professional about the past experiences that formed the fears I had around money, it helped me learn to move past them and take more risk over time.
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