Vivian Tu is the young founder of Your Rich BFF, who faced her fair share of challenges on her journey to wealth-building. Like every other woman trying to climb the career ladder, Tu had the odds stoked up against her. Despite constantly improving her professional qualifications, Tu found that she always had to settle for lower pay relative to her male colleagues.
However, Tu was lucky to chance upon a mentor who encouraged and walked her through the wealth-building journey. This mentor helped Tu see wealth accumulation from an entirely different viewpoint, and she is today a self-made millionaire.
While attending a Women & Wealth event in the first week of March, Tu explained how she learned very early in her career how to budget and save and eventually proceeded to start a business of her own. However, Tu explained that before the mind shift that opened her eyes, she was living like a miser, all in a bid to attain financial freedom.
On the contrary, Tu now favors investing as opposed to denying herself the basic necessities of life through aggressive saving. While she has not stopped saving, Tu clarifies that she now balances investing and saving.
While working at her low-paying job on Wall Street, Tu’s mentor walked her through some healthy money habits that revolutionized her financial life. The new habits she learned prompted her to live below her means and invest the surplus.
By the time Tu got a high-paying job in the tech industry, she did not stop her money habits and was able to scale her wealth faster. She also asked for raises at every opportunity.
Tu mentioned that she is out to help other women by passing on the lessons that prompted her mindset shift. She clarifies the reason for her focus on women as the passion to eliminate the odds stacked against them in the arena of career fulfilment.
Catherine Valega, the founder of Green Bee Advisory, reinforced Tu’s submission about the importance of lifelong investment and saving. According to Valega, women are disproportionately short of time, which they could otherwise use to study the market and make breathtaking investments.
Valega implies that the very fact that women have to sacrifice some of their time to man the home front and take care of the kids drastically reduces their earnings.
In a 2022 report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, 14% of women between the ages of 25 and 54 are out of jobs and taking on full-time caregiver responsibilities. On the contrary, that figure falls to 1.5% for men. It is bad enough that women have to lose the leverage of a steady income, but even worse, they are unable to pursue a career in active investment.
To this end, Valega advises women to increase their 401K savings and push all of their loose cash in that direction. Furthermore, they should avoid tying down the funds in some savings accounts. Instead, she advises such women to invest in “higher stock market fund allocations, depending on risk tolerance.”