Ever wondered if saving your first $100K is actually doable—or just another financial fairy tale?
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.
Key takeaways:
Define your specific $100K goal to give it emotional weight.
Decide whether your first $100K is about paying off debt, growing your net worth, or earning a certain salary, and then tie that goal to a meaningful life change.
Establish an emergency fund.
Prioritize saving at least three months of living expenses in a high-yield savings account before tackling other goals.
Use a high-yield savings account.
Put your money into a high-yield account to earn higher interest and let your savings grow faster.
Pay off your high interest credit card debt.
Focus on eliminating credit card balances as quickly as possible to stop losing money on high interest.
Leverage compound interest through investments.
Contribute to an investing account like a 401(k) and IRA to let your money grow exponentially over time.
Automate your savings and investments.
Set up automatic transfers from checking to savings and investing accounts so that saving becomes a hands-off, consistent habit.
Set a clear financial goal and give it emotional weight.
Identify concrete milestones & tie them to something that holds emotional weight (like being able to leave your job or starting your own business).
Seek out support and accountability.
Build and lean on a supportive community—friends, followers, and fellow money-minded individuals—to share wins, ask questions, and stay on track.
Notable quotes
“Money equals options. It equals choices and flexibility.”
“We don’t do shame here at Her First $100K… personal finance is personal.”
“If you can manage saving 20 bucks a month, you can manage saving $2,000 a month—the principles don’t change.”
“What you are not changing, you are choosing.”
Episode at-a-glance
00:00 Intro & Welcome
02:15 What is “Your First $100K”?
05:07 Personal Finance is Personal
07:49 Step 1: Build an Emergency Fund
11:19 Step 2: Pay Off High-Interest Debt
15:11 Step 3: Let Your Money Work for You
19:40 Step 4: Automate Your Savings
22:30 Step 5: Don’t Do It Alone
24:53 Final Motivation & Takeaways
Visit https://herfirst100k.com/ffpod to stay up to date and find any resources mentioned on our show!
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Transcript:
Tori Dunlap:
Hi, Financial Feminist. 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 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.
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 and 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 5 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 asterisk of, “Meh.” 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 lede for you. I did it. I successfully achieved that goal. I saved my first 100K at 25, and we have an entire 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 too. When I named the company Her First $100K, we did a couple 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 of debt paid off? Is that a $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 huge milestone marker in terms of building long-term wealth. And I want it to be adaptable to your life. Personal finance is 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 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 permission slip 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 can make sure that I was saving that $100,000 for a particular reason.
I could 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, 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.
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 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 benefit 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 herfirst100k.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% 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 very hard to dig yourself out of a hole if you have sand that keeps falling in too. The reason both of these steps are so powerful, the paying off 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, or it’s not going to paying off other kinds 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 prevent any sort of slippage later, going into more debt 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 energy 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 $100,000 goal and think, “Holy fuck, that’s a huge amount, and how am I going to climb that thing?” Right?
And to think to yourself, “Well, I have to take dollar bills and count them out to get to $100,000.” 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 getting a second job. You’re not 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 faster. 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, 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 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 and your mom opened the one when you were 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 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 3, 4% interest as opposed to 0.3% 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 401(k), 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 setting goals, is use the tools at your disposal to make your life easier.
I think we often believe that we get a gold star for making personal finance harder than it has to be. 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. Kristen, have 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.
It was like a weird pride thing of like, “Oh, I should remember to do this so I’m not going to write it down.” It’s the same thing with money, where 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. 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 bucks 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 till the end of the month to start saving, if you wait till 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? It 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 setting 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 in 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 bucks 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 “I had this setback, but I’m trying to make the most of it.” It’s so important, and there’s 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 are 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, ableism, homophobia, trillion-dollar student debt crisis, stagnating minimum wages, lack of paid family leave federally in the United States. 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 in ownership of that, and I want this to be the year that you look back on and you’re like, “Hell 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 a Her First $100K podcast. For more information about Financial Feminist, Her First $100K, our guests and episode show notes, visit financialfeministpodcast.com. If you’re confused about your personal finances and you’re wondering where to start, go to herfirst100k.com/quiz for a free personalized money plan.
Financial Feminist is hosted by me, Tori Dunlap. Produced by Kristen Fields and Tamisha Grant. Research by Sarah Sciortino. Audio and video engineering by Alyssa Midcalf. Marketing and Operations by Karina Patel and Amanda Leffew. Special thanks to our team at Her First 100K, Kailyn Sprinkle, Masha Bakhmetyeva, Sasha Bonar, Rae Wong, Elizabeth McCumber, Daryl Ann Ingman, Shelby Duclos, Meghan Walker, and Jess Hawks. Promotional graphics by Mary Stratton, photography by Sarah Wolfe, and theme music by Jonah Cohen Sound. A huge thanks to the entire Her First 100K community for supporting our show.
Tori Dunlap
Tori Dunlap is an internationally-recognized money and career expert. After saving $100,000 at age 25, Tori quit her corporate job in marketing and founded Her First $100K to fight financial inequality by giving women actionable resources to better their money. She has helped over five million women negotiate salaries, pay off debt, build savings, and invest.
Tori’s work has been featured on Good Morning America, the New York Times, BBC, TIME, PEOPLE, CNN, New York Magazine, Forbes, CNBC, BuzzFeed, and more.
With a dedicated following of over 2.1 million on Instagram and 2.4 million on TikTok —and multiple instances of her story going viral—Tori’s unique take on financial advice has made her the go-to voice for ambitious millennial women. CNBC called Tori “the voice of financial confidence for women.”
An honors graduate of the University of Portland, Tori currently lives in Seattle, where she enjoys eating fried chicken, going to barre classes, and attempting to naturally work John Mulaney bits into conversation.
