The Truth about hitting your first $100k Saved | Reaction with @PersonalFinancewithLeila

Let's take out— let's check out another one.

First $100,000 is extremely hard. It's actually harder than getting to your first $1 million. Everyone talks about it, but no one really understands why. Let me explain it for you. When you're trying to save that first $100K, every single dollar matters. Budgeting, skipping nights out, trying to save a few hundred bucks. It is painfully slow. And by the time you hit the first $100K, probably about 80% of that is your contribution and only 20% is growth. This is the point where you're learning discipline, how money works, how to invest, and just how to avoid dumb mistakes. But once you hit that first $100,000, the game changes forever. Now your money starts working for you at a rate that is beyond human comprehension. Compounding interest starts snowballing your portfolio and growing it faster than your paycheck ever could. If you can reach this point in your late 20s or even early 30s, you could stop investing right now and you would be a millionaire in retirement. To put it into perspective, if you saved $10,000 a year from zero To 100K, it'd take you about 7.5 years. If you already had 900K to get to the million, which is 100K, it'd only take you 1 year. And that's why the rich get richer and it's more expensive to be poor. The goal is to take the next few years and just grind out as much as possible— side hustles, different sources of income, cutting down your lifestyle— and get to that first 100K. And at that point, compounding takes over and you are set for the rest of your life. Saving your first—

yeah. I like that. Very simple, straightforward.

I don't know about you, for— I say this a lot on my channel, especially when I do these— this topic. Um, I, I reached $100K in, I want to say, early 2023, and it has been very slow for me actually after $100K. I found it much— a couple of things. So I found it much more difficult to go from negative $82,000 in debt to zero. That took 5 years. Going from a net worth of zero to $100K took me about 2 years and a couple months. So it was easier to go from zero to $100K. Debt slows you down because the interest is working against you and it's just like digging out of a hole. But after hitting $100K, I'm still in the $100Ks about 3 years later. Part of it was because I quit my job and made a little bit less money, investing less money. But sometimes people, I think, put too much emphasis on like, oh, $100K, then your money explodes. For me, that has not been the case. It did not explode. It's still not exploding. My net worth still goes down quite a bit fairly often. I mean, that's for anybody, but like this last month, because the market's down, my net worth went down like $5K. So it's like still a lot of work to put in even once you get to $100K. I think for most people, once you get to like $300K, $400K, that's when it like really works on its own.

I appreciate the transparency there. Yeah.

Yeah, of course. Yeah.

I would, I would agree with that, especially for the vast majority of people that are not savvy investors. Like if you don't really know what you're investing in and say you're doing something simple, a mix of index funds, dividend-paying stocks, like you're not really spending hours and hours on trading or options trading or forex trading or anything that would exaggerate your, your gains. If it's just a buy and hold and wait kind of a strategy, then I would, I would agree with that. Going from 0 to 100 is quite difficult. And then once you get to $100K, it's not like you just let off the gas. You still need to put in that work. And I would definitely agree with the notion, like, once you get to the mid-3s, 4s, that a 4% growth on $300K looks really nice. So if you're getting 8, if you're getting 10, you're really starting to see that Flow plus contributions. So if you got $300K, you grow by 10%, plus you added $10,000 into the account or $20,000, whatever that, whatever your contribution is, you're looking at within just 1 year you go from $300K to probably $375K, right? So then it only takes like maybe 4 or 5 more years to hit that million once you're in the 3s. If you're just consistently contributing, and granted, your ups and downs and whatnot. So yeah, I appreciate that transparency, sharing that. That's very helpful because I do believe that the hype of getting to $100K, I would reduce the temperature on that for folks because you don't want to set that expectation so high someone gets there and they're like, oh shoot, I'm back down at $90K because the market just adjusted.

Oh my God.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

You're definitely playing a longer game here. And especially if you're doing the buy and hold strategy, the idea is to buy and hold and let it do its— let it do its job. Continue to— continue to increase your skills in the marketplace so that you can make more money and continue to contribute more. You see, when you contribute more after $100K, I think that's where you start to see the, the explosive growth. But if you get to $100K, lower your contribution because the influencers online are saying, you know, your wealth's going to explode to $1 million, it might be setting a little bit too high of a bar there, in my opinion.

Yeah, it is true, though, that you'll, you'll hit $1 million by retirement age, like traditional retirement age if you just let it chill there.

Like if you stop.

Yeah. You should get to over $1 million. But obviously, I know for myself, I would like more than a million by the time I'm 60-something.

So especially us, the way we're seeing taxes, the way we're seeing inflation, cost of living just go sporadic the last 5 years after COVID revealed that, yeah, a million-dollar retirement portfolio is not enough. $2 million is not enough. $3 million is not enough. I think minimum people our age need to be planning for $5 million and up.

Minimum. Yeah.

Because of the trajectory that we're going in, it's just that I bet people 40 years ago would never imagine a gallon of milk being what it is today, or a dozen eggs. You know, like even as a 6-figure earner, I think in the like 2, 3 years into COVID, I think a dozen eggs especially if you got the cage-free ones or the grass-fed ones, was like $12. It was like a dollar an egg. I was like, this had me second-guessing. I was like, do I need to buy Eggland's Best for the $6.99? I was like, oh my God, babe, like, yeah, we have a nice lifestyle, but I might have to forego the pasture-raised eggs here. This is crazy. So I can imagine.

Yeah.

Family of 5 having to make that decision on the spot right there.

Yeah.

You know, not pretty. So yeah, you don't want to just stop. You're in your 30s, take advantage of that. You're in your 20s, take advantage of that. And then keep that lifestyle going because it will reward you greatly, and it may even put you in a position where you hit a certain number at 45 Now you're retiring, say, 15 years much sooner, or at least having the option, because you might love your job and you're 45 years old and say you love your job, you keep working if you love it, but you have the option to stop at any time if you get laid off, if there's a recession, if XYZ company goes out of business. Like, you're creating a lot of security for yourself.

Yeah, definitely.

This is cool. So shout out to Professor Mike Finance. He's got 44,000 followers, so he's, you know, a money coach, probably a financial coach just like us. And so he's, he's making money, he's teaching, he's educating, giving his journey. Love it. Love to see that.

Mm-hmm.

More of you watching need to jump in the game here. It's extremely fun when you get on the contribution side of things, when you become a creator. and a consumer, right? Because you're still going to consume your whole entire life, but most people never create anything.

Yeah.

And creating is extremely exciting, very rewarding, very fulfilling. And that word accountability— if you put out on the internet, I'm gonna get out of debt, now you have people commenting, liking, sharing, supporting your journey, and maybe, maybe even taking the extra mile and sending you money.

Mm-hmm.

You, you put all that together, oh my goodness, that's a recipe for success. Well, I appreciate your time here today, us doing some reactions. This was like my, my first time, and I'll probably get better at it over— I'm gonna keep watching your reaction videos. Those of you that are looking for financial coaching one-on-one, Leila does that. She has a— you have a long-term coaching program You do consultations by the hour. You have spreadsheets, you have trackers, you have tools that you yourself use, and you provide that to your clients.

Yes.

And those of you that are looking to, to see her entire journey, you can go to her channel. I'll have the links below and in the description, in the comment section for you to check that out anytime. Highly recommend her. And yeah, we wish you a great rest of your day. Thank you for your time.

Thank you.

Bye now.