This content was created by Lewis Howes. This content was uploaded by Lewis Howes. This is a YouTube video titled "The STRIP Method of Finance" created on November 8, 2025, featuring Vivian Tu explaining her financial strategy called the STRIP method, which includes steps for savings, debt management, and retirement planning, in a conversational format with another speaker.
Chapters
This is my you're rich BFF strip method.
Ooh, strip it up.
S stands for savings. It's so important to get that emergency fund first. You break your leg, some bad happens to you, you're going to need it.
Yeah.
And if you don't have it, you're going to get worse into debt. If you are a singleton who rents three to six months is totally fine. If you got a family, you got a mortgage, are a little higher, you probably want to be closer to nine to 12.
Okay, cool.
T stands for total debt. And I say total debt because people think about debt as this evil thing. Not all debt is created equal. And debt with higher interest rates, things like credit card debt, when you're looking at a 22 to 25% interest rate is a lot dicier than something like federal student loan debt. You might have like a 3% interest rate on that. Like those two do not compound at the same rate. It's just math. So what you do is you rank your debt from highest to lowest interest rate and you pay it down in that order. You pay off the minimum balance of every single account on the higher one first. So you pay off the minimum balance on everything.
Okay, gotcha.
But any money you have left over to pay down debt, you put towards the highest interest rate.
The highest first.
Yes. R stands for retirement, Credit, Karma, Retail. Did a survey and over a quarter of people over the age of 59 have not a dollar saved for retirement. Come on. This is my favorite part because I love tax bennies. Bennies being benefits, you know, tax benefits, saving for retirement, investing for retirement. You can get tax benefits.
That's true.
I moving on from retirement is the part that everybody misses. Everybody puts their cash into those retirement accounts, into their brokerage accounts, and they're like, doing a great job. I'm done. That's it. But no, no, no. Investing is not putting cash into those accounts. It's actually buying stuff with that money. People will make comments when I make content about Roth IRAs or 401ks, and they're like, well, I don't know what you're doing, but my money hasn't grown. I'm like, did you invest it? And they were like, yeah, I put it in the Roth ira. And I'm like, no, no, no, no. Did you go and buy index funds? Did you go and buy a mutual fund? Did you put your money into a target day retirement fund? NP stands for my favorite part. You got a plan. You do not get to have your happily ever after. You don't get to ride off into the sunset if you don't have a plan. You got a plan for your party?
