Financial Feminist - How to Save Your First $100K (Best Of)

Episode Date: December 23, 2025

Ever wondered if saving your first $100K is actually doable—or just another financial fairy tale? I’m Tori Dunlap, founder of Her First $100K and host of the Financial Feminist podcast, and in this special replay episode, I’m pulling back the curtain on real-world steps for building tangible wealth and saving money on everything—starting with building an emergency fund, to paying off debt, investing, and automation. We also get into why your mindset matters just as much as the numbers, and how a supportive community can make or break your progress toward that six-figure milestone. Tune in to learn how to get YOUR first $100K in 2026. Visit https://herfirst100k.com/ffpod to stay up to date and find any resources mentioned on our show! 00:00 Intro & Welcome02:15 What is “Your First $100K”?05:07 Personal Finance is Personal07:49 Step 1: Build an Emergency Fund11:19 Step 2: Pay Off High-Interest Debt15:11 Step 3: Let Your Money Work for You19:40 Step 4: Automate Your Savings22:30 Step 5: Don’t Do It Alone24:53 Final Motivation & Takeaways Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, financial feminists. I hope you're having a lovely holiday so far and spending it with loved ones and you're eating lots of great food and just enjoying the holidays. This week and next, we are bringing you our most popular episodes of 2025. And today we're rewinded it all the way back to January of this past year. But this is relevant for every single new year. This is one of our most downloaded episodes and it is so helpful for you getting your first 100K in 2026. Step by step guidance around how to save, invest, earn your first 100K into this year. So let's get into it. But first, a word from our sponsors. If you love financial feminist and you're listening, so I hope you do. We've got something to take your learning even deeper from the podcast, especially if you've ever felt like personal finance is a confusing maze. My book, Financial Feminist, Overcome the Patriarchy's bullshit to Master Your Money and Build a Life you love, is out now. It is a New York Times bestseller that has sold nearly 300,000 copies, and it is not just another financial guide. It's everything you need to get better.

with money step by step, but through the signature feminist lens that you know and love here at her first 100K. There is so much in the book that we've never discussed on the podcast. There are homework assignments. There are deep dive lessons and there's even more information that you've never heard it here on the show. You can get a copy of financial feminist wherever you get your books. And if you're listening on Spotify right now and are a premium member, you can get the audiobook read by me for free. You can get signed copies and learn where it's sold at her first 100k.com This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one website platform, to help you stand out and succeed online.

So whether you're just starting out or scaling your business, Squarespace gives you everything you need to claim your domain, showcase your offerings with a professional website, grow your brand, and get paid all in one place. From their drag-and-drop templates to their email campaign tools to the ability to accept payments, you can do all of this right in Squarespace. Head on over to Squarespace.com for a free trial,

and when you're ready to launch, go to Squarespace.com slash ffod to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Hello, financial feminists. It's 2025. I'm both excited and nervous. And I think that's how a lot of us feel. I am both ready and raring to go. And also like, well, we'll fucking see. we're going to fucking see what this year holds. So I'm just excited to see you. As we've talked about many a time since November, community and women-focused spaces are so important. And getting financially educated and taking our financial education seriously so that we have options and choices in power is incredibly important more than ever right now. And so you're in the right place. You're

in the right place to do that. If you're an oldie but a goodie, welcome back. And if you're new, my name is Tori. I am the founder of her first 100K, which is a money and career platform for women. I believe I was put on this earth to fight for your financial rights. My work has been featured on Good Morning America, the New York Times, BBC. I've spoken at the UN. I've spoken at Microsoft and Shopify and Forbes 30 under 30. And we've helped five million women save money, pay off debt, start investing, start businesses, and feel financially confident. I have a New York Times bestselling book, also by the same name, Financial Feminist, and this podcast you're listening to right now is the number one money podcast for women in the world. So wherever you're listening, welcome. Happy 2025 with the biggest asteris of, and I'm just really excited to see you. This episode is going to be some actionable steps that you can use to get your first 100K in 2025. If you are new to this show, you might not know that her first 100K, which is the company I, founded and that produces this podcast was a combination of me trying to progress towards my own

100K goal while also helping other women achieve theirs. So my first 100K was me attempting to save $100,000 at the age of 25. I am 30 now. I'll bury the lead for you. I did it. I successfully achieved that goal. I saved my first 100K at 25. And we have a in time. other episode that talks in specifics about how I did that. But a lot of what we're going to talk about today is the ways that I saved my first 100K, but also the ways that we have helped literally tens of thousands of other women also get their first 100K to. When I named the company her first 100K, we did a couple of things with that. One, it's her. We're mostly geared towards women plus. The second thing is that it's first. It's not your first million. It's not your first

billion. It's your first 100K, right? It is the first big, huge milestone when it comes to building long-term wealth. And I also didn't name the company her first 100K saved or her first 100K earned because your first 100K is whatever you want it to be. Your first 100K debt paid off. Your first 100K of your net worth, your first 100K saved, your first 100K invested, your first 100K salary. So whatever your 100K goal is, that's where we're going to start. That's my first piece of actionable advice for you, is decide what that first 100K is going to be for you. Is that $100,000 a debt paid off?

Is that $100,000 net worth? That one is probably the next most achievable, or probably the most achievable. Maybe it's 100K saved. maybe it's $100k earned. Maybe you're trying to negotiate your salary and earn more money this year. So first of all, decide what that first $100K goal is going to be. And we know we have a year to do it, right? This episode is titled, Your First 100K in 2025.

So her first $100K, the company was titled that way to give you some flexibility and to remind you that while your first 100K is a really fucking big goal, it is also the best tool that you have, the first like huge milestone market. worker in terms of building long-term wealth. And I want it to be adaptable to your life. Personal finances, personal. So let's talk about how we can actually achieve whatever 100K goal you have this year. The first thing to understand is that with that 100K, you're also really thinking about what you want your life to look like. We've spoken many times on this show that personal finance is not really about math. It's not really about numbers. It's not how good you are at math, right? It is about what you

want out of life and your psychology and how do you use money as a tool in order to build the life that you want. So I need you to do an audit of your life and your kind of bigger life goals that maybe you don't have anything to do with money on the surface. Do you want to be able to purchase a home eventually? Maybe not even this year, but in the next couple years. Maybe you want to retire early. maybe you don't want to work until you're 65 plus. Maybe you want to move to a new city. Maybe you want to start a business. These are the kinds of big life events where money can be used as a tool in order to achieve them. So your big goals help determine which 100K is most advantageous for you. So when we're thinking about setting that 100K goal, again, net worth, debt paid off, saved, earned, we want to think

about what other life goals, big life goals am I thinking about? And how can I use that 100K goal in order to fuel my life goals? For me, my first 100K, the 100K I saved at 25, that was the permissions that I needed to quit corporate and go all in on my business full time. And the reason I think, one of the biggest reasons, my 100K happened, my 100K goal was achieved, was because I gave it emotional weight. It wasn't just seeing $100,000 in my bank account, although that was fucking dope. It was more about how I could make sure that I was saving that $100,000 for a particular reason. I could like taste how good it felt to be a full-time entrepreneur. I could taste how good it felt to not have to work for somebody I didn't respect. And that was the thing that motivated me.

So when you're determining what that 100K goal is going to be, right? And hopefully you already have some idea. You can ground it and really decide and focus on that 100K based on the other things you're trying to do in your life, based on your other big life goals and the other things you're trying to achieve. This independent podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. You know me. I've used in love Squarespace for a very long time. And one of my favorite things about Squarespace is it makes it so easy to build a website. I recently helped my partner launch a business and we literally built his entire website on Squarespace using one of their beautiful templates in a weekend.

Like we dreamt up the business on a Friday and he was launched by Monday. So whether you're just starting out or scaling your business, Squarespace gives you everything you need to claim your domain, showcase your offerings with a professional website, grow your brand and get paid all in one place. One of the best things about Squarespace is those easy to use templates, their drag and drop, and also any customers that come to his website can check out through Squarespace. You don't need like another third party platform. And especially for him, he's starting a business on a budget, loves that he doesn't have to use like another platform to do payment processing. There's also an email campaign tool with Squarespace.

So again, saving you money, you don't have to use yet another email campaign tool. All of it's happening inside Squarespace. Head on over to Squarespace.com slash FFPod. And when you're ready to launch your brand new website, use code FF Pod to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Our first step towards any sort of financial goal, including your first 100K, is saving an emergency fund. An emergency fund should be at least three months of living expenses in a high-yield savings account.

Now, even if you have debt, even if you have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, we are saving the emergency fund first. Why? Well, first of all, I don't want you going into debt trying to pay for an emergency because one inevitably happens, right? You get laid off, your dog gets sick, you have a home repair, all of these things inevitably happen. And they also seem to happen when you don't have that emergency fund set up. So we're going to set the emergency fund first to be able to cover ourselves for emergencies and so we don't have to go into either more debt or debt at all to try to pay for it. Two, we really prioritize mental health at her first 100K. We really prioritize making sure that you are mentally well and that your mental health

is good. And let me tell you there's something so nice about laying your head on the pillow at night and knowing that you're financially covered should something happen. You're not as stressed about money. You're not as anxious because you are okay. You know that you can get through whatever emergency comes your way. And finally, the really important one for everyone listening, you need a fuck-off fund. You need enough money to leave a situation that feels unsafe, that feels toxic, that doesn't feel healthy anymore. Whether that is a relationship or a job or a shitty apartment, you need enough money to get out of bad situations. As we know, money equals options. It equals choices and flexibility. And anytime, but especially right now, I need you to have enough money

to make choices that benefit you, that make choices that allow you to live a healthy, safe, comfortable life. So we save that emergency fund first to prioritize our own safety, our own security, and to make sure that we're not going into debt to try to pay for that emergency. Now, three months is the goal here. Three months of living a expenses in that high yield savings account. And if you don't have a high yield savings account, that is the first thing that you can do to really immediately better fit your money that take no additional effort. I signed up for my high yield savings account, and it's the one I recommend to you. It took me less than 10 minutes, and I was immediately making more money. Because a high

yield savings account is just like an everyday savings account, except it's earning you more in interest. So there's a link down below to the one we recommend. You can also go to her first hundredk.com tools to find the one that we like. So three months is a great place to start building that emergency fund. But if we can also get it up to six, if you already have that three month emergency fund, you've been listening to me for a while. Maybe you have saved that three months of living expenses. Building to six is not a bad idea, especially with Trump and the whole unknown of it all for these next couple years. So three months of living expenses is your starter goal here. Our second step after that emergency fund, we want to avoid debt, especially credit card

debt at all costs. But debt is also a way that we leverage our lives, is a way that we uplevel our lives, right? And I am not the personal finance expert, Dave Ramsey, who's going to tell you that debt is bad, that all debt is bad and that you are a shitty person if you took on debt and shame, shame, shame, absolutely not. We don't do shame here at her first 100K. We don't do shame on the Financial Feminist podcast ever. We want to avoid credit card debt, though, if we can, just because it is really costly. It's really expensive and it's really hard to get out of. But if you do have credit card debt, that's okay. We now want to focus on paying that credit card debt off. Credit card debt is anywhere from 15 to 30 percent interest. That is really

expensive. It also compounds daily, which means that the interest, gets worse every single day. So we prioritize that emergency fund first, and then once that emergency fund is done, we work to pay off our credit card debt. We have an entire episode about how to pay off credit card debt in more detail. It is the Financial Foundation episode number four. We're paying off that credit card debt next because it's most expensive. Please, please, please prioritize paying off your debt and also staying out of debt if you can while you're paying that off. It's a very hard to dig yourself out of a hole if you have sand that keeps falling into. The reason both of these steps are so powerful, the pay enough debt, but also saving that emergency fund, is because

in our goal, our 100K goal, getting to that 100K goal, if you are in expensive debt, a portion of your money every single month is going to paying that debt off. And it's not going to saving money, right? Or it's not going to paying off other kinds of. of debt, or it's not going to your high-yield savings account to earn you more money. And it's also getting worse because every day you're in debt, your interest rate makes your debt higher. And the next day, your interest rate makes your debt even higher because it's counting from the interest yesterday, too, right?

It's a very slippery slope. So if we can pay off our credit card debt, we can get to our 100K goal much faster. And if we have that emergency fund, we've given ourselves a leg up to provide. prevent any sort of slippage later, right, going into Morzat trying to pay for an emergency and getting further away from our 100K goal. But also, if you've chosen a goal like net worth or savings, well, cool, your emergency fund counts towards that. It counts towards that 100K goal. So this is the power of those first two steps of making sure you're financially secure with your emergency fund, making sure that you have less to stress about when it comes to money with that

emergency fund and then paying off your credit card debt allows you to level up your life because you get a huge chunk of your money back. When it comes to paying off debt, I always recommend prioritizing the debt with the highest interest rate. So paying that debt off first. So if you have two credit cards with debt on them and one is 25% interest and one is 18% interest, work to pay off the one with 25% interest because it's costing you the most. I see a lot of people try to split their between those two. They split their energy between the 25% credit card and the 18% credit card. And what happens is you're trying to do too many things at once, right? It's a Ron Swanson thing. I need you to whole ass one thing rather than half-assing two things. So those are our first two

steps, the emergency fund and then paying off our credit cards. Now, this is where a lot of people after those two steps start having some questions. So one of my favorite hacks to getting to your first 100K quicker, it's easy to look at that 100. thousand dollar goal and think holy fuck that's a huge mountain how am i going to climb that thing right and to think to yourself well i have to like take dollar bills and count them out to get to a hundred thousand dollars you know like that is the money i actually have to save myself that's going to take me a really long time this is my favorite thing about a lot of resources that are at our disposal that so many people don't take advantage of there are accounts

that allow your money to make money. There are so many places where you can let your money work as hard, if not harder than you do, to be able to earn you more money by you doing literally nothing at all. You're not like getting a second job. You're not like taking on a side hustle. You are allowing the money you already have to work harder for you to get you to that 100K goal fast. this is the reason that I was able to save it as quickly as I did as someone who graduated college technically at 21 but then got my first job at 22 and then had my first 100K at 25 so little over three years this is why I was able to get there so quickly is because I used the resources at my disposal to not only save the money I was earning myself but to allow my money to work harder for me

So there are accounts that allow compound interest to do some of the heavy lifting for you, right? I was talking about compound interest when it comes to debt before and about how damaging it is because your interest earns interest earns interest and that is money you now owe. But imagine if that same principle was applied in a way that benefits you where your interest earns interest earns interest, right? That is the power of bank accounts, especially high-yield savings. accounts, it's the power of investing accounts. These are the types of accounts that we want to be putting our money into in order to better our money, just period, but also to get to our

$100,000 goal or to get to any financial goal we have. So this is why when we talk about emergency funds, this is why I harp on it so much. If you've been following me for a while, I'm sorry, yes, take a shot every time I say high yield savings account and you're passed out drunk on the floor. I know. But high-yield savings accounts are offering you 10, 20, 30 times your national interest rate at your, like, everyday bank. So I'm going to call out banks by name, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank, your local bank that you had a bank account when your dad or your mom opened the one when you're 14 and you haven't moved your money. These are the bank accounts that are earning you. I'm not exaggerating, pennies in interest, pennies.

So if you are still banking with these banks, especially as like where your emergency fund is, you are losing money. So we're going to take the money for our emergency fund. We're going to take the money for our other savings goals and put it in what's called a high yield savings account instead. We see high yield savings accounts with three, four percent interest as opposed to like 0.3 percent or less, which is the national average. So we're using the power of high-yield savings accounts to help us get to our 100K goal faster.

This is what I did. You use the power of your investing accounts, like a 401K, which is a employer-sponsored retirement program, your IRA, which is an individual retirement account. These are both investing accounts using the power of those investing accounts to invest, to put money in the stock market where you can earn 7 to 10% interest on average year over year, that's the other reason how I was able to get to my 100K so quickly. I wasn't just putting money into a checking account. I wasn't putting $100,000 under a mattress.

I was putting it in these types of accounts that allowed me to grow my money and allowed me to make money on my money in a way that didn't allow me or didn't force me to do any more work. So one of my biggest tips for you, beyond what to do in what order, beyond, you know, setting goals is use the tools at your disposal to make your life easier. A lot of people ask me about being an entrepreneur and the stress that comes with it. And I think one of the most stressful things about being an entrepreneur is trying to predict the future. No one's handing me a guidebook. No one is telling me exactly how to run this particular.

business at this particular time. And this is why NetSuite by Oracle exists. Over 43,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle. It is the number one AI cloud ERP, and it brings accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into all one fluid platform. This is a one united business management suite. So there is one source of truth so you can get the visibility and control you need to make quick decisions, especially with how quickly the world's moving right now. And if your company's earning millions, this is a resource for you. It can help you respond to immediate challenges and seize your biggest opportunities. And it's something we're definitely going to use as her first 100K continues to grow and change. Download the CFO's guide

to AI and machine learning for free at net suite.com slash ff pod. That's net suite.com slash ff pod. I think we often believe that we get like a gold star for making personal finance harder than it has to be. Like I do this shit all the time. Well, I don't anymore because I realized this was so harmful. I thought I should just remember things. I don't, I don't, if you ever experienced this where I'm just like, oh, I should remember to do that thing tomorrow and I'm not going to write it down. And then I wouldn't remember and then I would feel like shit anyway. Like it was like a weird pride thing of like, oh, I should remember to do this. So I'm going to write it down. It's the same thing with money where like you think, oh, I will just

white knuckle my way through personal finance and I'm going to make this harder than it has to be. So then I feel like I've earned it. No, use the resources at your disposal. Use the resources at your disposal. Use these accounts. Listen to this podcast. We have another dozen episodes about investing and about saving. We'll link them down below. Like use the tools at your disposal to make your life easier to get yourself to your goals quicker. My final tip for you, automate everything you possibly can. This is one of the crucial steps I took to saving my own 100K and the step that I see so many people in our community take that transforms everything about their money. When we're talking about saving that emergency fund, when we're talking about investing, set up an automatic transfer

from your checking account to your savings account. Maybe that's once a month. Maybe that's every time you get paid. And maybe it's just $20. Maybe that's all you've got right now is $20 a month. Okay, great, no worries. Set up an automatic transfer from your checking account to your savings account. So we do what's called paying yourself first. If you wait to the end of the month to start saving, if you wait to the end of the month to prioritize your financial goals, two things happen. One, there's no money left over. You've spent it all. There's no money left over. And two, your emotional response to that is, shit, I'm a failure.

Then you feel bad because you've spent all of your money and didn't prioritize your own savings. As you know from listening to the show, spending money is not a bad thing. We don't villainize spending. I spend my money all the time. But I spend after I have automatically saved because then that allows me to spend money in a way that doesn't feel guilty, right? is guilt-free because I have prioritized myself. And it also is the balance. We can't just save all our money because that's not sustainable. And we also can't just spend all of our money because that's not sustainable either. So when we automate our savings, we're using those tools

at our disposal, right? We're making personal finance easier for us and sending up that automatic transfer. So it happens without us having to think about it. It happens on autopilot. It's like future us is another bill that we're paying. So when we're talking about what to do and what order, when we're talking about setting goals, when we're talking about using accounts and compound interest as a tool, if you take one thing from this episode, automate your savings, just like you have automated bill pay set up somewhere else. Automate your savings. Set up those automatic transfers of, again, maybe it's a little amount of money and that's all you can do right now. Great. You're building it. It's going to continue compounding and you're also building

the habit of saving money so that when you do have more money, you already know how to do this. If you can manage saving $20 a month, you can manage saving $2,000 a month or $20,000 a month. The principles are no different. So we're building those smart financial habits. We're using the tools at our disposal to be able to get one step closer to our first $100K. My final tip for you, do not do this alone. Please do not try to set this big, brave, audacious, but, doable goal and think you can do it alone. I couldn't. I had so many friends challenging me and

encouraging me and reminding me what was important when shit got tough when I was trying to save my first 100K. I announced it publicly, which I don't necessarily recommend you do if you don't want to, but I announced that goal publicly and there's a reason now we have a community of 5 million women. It started with me being transparent around that 100K goal. I had so many people cheering me on. I had so many people encouraging me. But I had also the accountability of knowing that someone else knew about it. Right. So someone was going to ask me occasionally, hey, how's that thing going? And I wanted to be able to respond, it's going really well. I'm doing really well. Or, you know, I had this step back, but I'm trying to make the most of it.

Like, it's so important. And there is so much data and studies around how goals that are set that you never speak aloud, that you never tell anybody about, those goals are not likely to be achieved. Let this be the year you actually invest in yourself. Because the last thing I want is for you to look back at the end of this year and realize that nothing's changed. And what you are not changing, you are choosing. And we know because of personal finance that there's so many systemic barriers

that we have no control over. This entire show and our work is talking about all of the things that relate to personal finance that are bigger than us. racism, sexism, abelism, homophobia, a trillion-dollar student debt crisis, stagnating minimum wages, lack of paid family leave federally in the United States. Like all of these things are stacked against us. So we have to control what we can control. We have to take our personal finance education seriously. We can do that. We can 100% be an ownership of that. And I want this to be

the year that you look back on and you're like, how fucking yes, I did that. Or, I got halfway to this really big audacious goal that I set, but it's halfway that I wasn't at last year. Thank you, as always, for being here, financial feminists. We really, really appreciate it. I hope you have a kick-ass start to 2025. Please take care of yourselves in all regards, but especially right now. And I'm just really excited to be able to champion you. Thank you for being here. And we'll see you back here very soon. Bye. Thank you for listening to Financial Feminist, produced by her first 100K. If you love this show and want to keep supporting feminist media, please subscribe and follow us on your preferred podcasting platform or on YouTube.

Your support helps us continue to bring this content to you for free. If you're looking for resources, tools, and education, including all of the resources mentioned in this episode, head to herfirst00k.com slash sspod.