5 Decisions to Grow Your Net Worth

Everyone wants to have a high net worth. Well, today I’m sharing with you 5 decisions Andrew and I made that helped us grow our net worth to SEVEN FIGURES! So pay attention and take notes! Some of these might be specific to our life but most of them can be tailored to fit your specific life circumstances. 

Let’s jump in….

Work in a Hardship Location Overseas

At the time of applying for an overseas job we didn’t realize how lucrative it could be. We were just following our dream of living overseas and at the time, we felt called to Luanda, Angola. But apparently we were kinda solo on that calling. Turns out not a lot of people are willing to go overseas, much less to a hardship living location. So the uplift the company provided to people willing to go to that location (and several others) was a lot of extra money in our pockets. 

Along with the uplift and other allowances the company provided, we also had reduced living expenses during that time since we were living in a company compound. And the best part of all this was that we had the extra income so early in our lives, ages 29-34. Which means that money will have decades to grow before we need to access it. Living in Angola was hard quite often but it was 1000% worth it for the life experiences, travel and financial resources we gained during that time. 

If you work for a large multinational company and are willing to live overseas, chances are there are jobs that you can apply for that will help you get to your financial goals faster, just by moving out of your comfort zone. 

Max Out 401k Savings in Your 20’s

Andrew was maxing out his 401k long before I met him but I’ll be honest here, I wasn’t. In my early to mid twenties I naively thought I couldn’t “afford” to set aside money each paycheck for my retirement savings. I didn’t realize that the truth was, I couldn’t NOT afford to save and that the amount of time I had back then to grow my money was incredible. 

When I met Andrew I was beginning a new and improved money journey and I was setting money aside in my 401k each month but not reaching the maximum (~15k at that time). It wasn’t until we were married and with the second salary I felt comfortable enough to max out each year. But, better late than never. And that’s true for you too….maybe you can’t afford to max out your 401k but really you should take a long hard look to see what expenses you can cut out to maximize your savings rate. Any small increase as often as possible will reap huge benefits in the future. Would you rather have the new color changing cups this year or have that money growing in your retirement account? Think long term….

By maxing out your 401k early in your life, it gives your money 3+ decades to grow before you can touch it (without a penalty). 

Decide to live like many people don’t want to right now so that you will have a financially secure future

If you are Dave Ramsey fans, you’ve heard this one before. Well I think everyone in the FI community talks about it. Basically this comes down to deferred gratification. Everyone wants the latest and greatest gadgets or the name brand clothes or a luxury vehicle but you don’t need those things. This saying and way of life states that we will live right now the way most people don’t want to - under budget, not buying fancy things and not using credit so that in the future, when everyone else is paying off debt and still living paycheck to paycheck, we can live abundantly because our money has grown to a high net worth. 

A recent example of this in our lives is that we wanted to go back to Houston (and Andrew actually accepted a job in Houston) after our Angola assignment but we decided to go on a second expat assignment to help save more money. Andrew’s company contacted him a few days after we returned to Houston to see if he wanted a position in Argentina. But I had already picked out my future car, we were looking at homes in our dream neighborhood and I had been sending out my resume all over Houston. We both wanted that “easy” life we remembered. No more electricity outages or cold bucket showers. We had saved a bunch of money in Angola and we thought with two incomes living in Houston we would just dial it back and live on easy street for a while. Well, that all sounded good but when they contacted him, the new challenge tugged at us. And there was also the money. By then we obviously knew expat assignments were lucrative and we thought we would take advantage of that for a couple more years. So, we could have played it easy in Houston but we chose the hard route and went to Buenos Aires. While here, we’ve been to a bunch of new places and our net worth has grown by $600k. 

It’s not always easy to choose the hard route and save for the future. But if you want to become financially free one day, you must take calculated risks and save hard. 

Track Your Money Constantly

About 6 years ago we realized we needed to track and watch our money closely to help get the most out of it. This can go for anything in life - growing your net worth, losing weight or learning a new skill. There is a saying - that what gets measured gets improved.  

We started the practice back in 2014 where we compiled all our information into Mint.com. It is a great tool to see all your money buckets at once - checking, savings, credit cards and loans. A few years later, we started using Personal Capital and that is the software we still use now. 

To track our money, we decided we would have a formal meeting just the two of us - Andrew and me. We get out our laptops and ipads and pull up all our accounts and our tracking software - Personal Capital. I’m planning to do another blog post specifically on how we “conduct” each money meeting...so subscribe to our email list to know when that post comes out. 

At first, we did a monthly money meeting but now we do it every two weeks or the weekend after a payday.

And to be fully transparent here, we had a year - 2018 where we broke even. When we looked at all our income and how much our net worth grew, we realized between all our travel and purchasing that year we did not grow positively. Right then in January 2019, we decided to increase the money meetings to twice a month to really get a better handle because we had slacked in 2019 and clearly the numbers were showing it. I never want to have another “break even” or negative year like 2018 again. 

These meetings have been instrumental in helping us keep track of the money we have coming in, where we are allocating it and it also helps keep us on the same page as a couple. By allocating money into specific buckets, it forces us to communicate and discuss our future and what our short term and longer term goals are with our money. We aren’t just saving for the heck of it, we have very specific goals we are trying to reach.

Let me know down in the comments if you’re also checking your net worth and how you’re doing it. I always love to hear how people track their money. 

Change Your Money Mindset

This sounds the most simple but it can actually be difficult. And I also think it’s the most important decision we’ve made in terms of our finances. Growing up, we all hear a “money story” from our families. Whether that story is negative or positive differs for everyone. But the money story I was raised with was that money was scarce, we never had enough of it, we should be grateful for what we had and most importantly, don’t ask or discuss money - it’s bad manners. Some of these themes may ring true for you too. Now don’t get me wrong, I had a great childhood but these are the things I remember about money, the concepts that have stuck with me into adulthood. I never thought I could possibly become a millionaire. I thought only “rich people” were millionaires and I was in the middle somewhere. It wasn’t until I began a journey into financial independence with Suze Orman that I even realized with a lot of hard work and saving I could use the stock market and other investments to grow my money to become a millionaire. When we realized this, we declared and got excited for becoming millionaires - long before we have our first $100k. 

A few years later, I read the book, “You Are a Badass at Making Money” and the book forces you to look inward at all the stories you’ve been telling yourself about money and to flip the script. After reading that book, I decided I would be a multi-millionaire. Plain and simple, no ifs, ands or buts. Andrew and I have put that goal and dream out into the universe and now we are working to manifest it. Whether it’s tracking our money each month, maxing out savings vehicles, or taking calculated risks in life. If you claim what you want from your financial life, your actions will subconsciously lead you towards saving and taking care of your money so it will take care of you in the future. 

Making any of these decisions is the easy part; the hard part comes with the discipline to follow through with your decisions. You have to create habits that will get you to your goals. Remember, small steps in the right direction will get you where you want to go. Pick some of these decisions to make in your own life and get on your way to becoming a millionaire.