Last Updated: January 2nd, 2022

Hello! A couple of days ago on Instagram, I asked my followers what they’re changing or what’s been working for their own financial systems to get some inspiration as I was looking to change up my own system. This led to many of my friends asked me to share what I was personally doing so I thought I would write it out to share more easily. I also got a ton of recommendations that I’ll be testing out in the upcoming months. Let me know if you’d like to hear my thoughts on those! I hope to keep this doc updated as I make changes + learn new things this year.

<aside> ‼️ Disclaimer: This is not financial advice and I am not a financial planner - this is just what has personally been working for me over the past 3 years. Personal finances are truly personal so please do what works best for you!

I also am fully aware of the privilege I hold having a stable job in tech and being able to invest, save and spend without worrying about large debts. Regardless of the situation you are in, I hope that some of this doc is helpful for you!

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💡 Methodology

Before we dive in, I wanted to share broadly how I think about my finances in the first place. The basis of all financial systems is how you want to approach budgeting your money. There are many different systems for budgeting (which I won’t jump into or bore you with) but the one I personally subscribe to is “automate investing and saving, and the rest is for you to spend”.

I do not like to set specific amounts of money to different categories as this personally feels too restrictive. Since I automate all of my investments and saving goals, I don’t have to worry about spending too much in a specific category. However, I track my spending at a pretty granular level since this helps me track where my money is going - more on this below.

I am a spreadsheet gal through and through 😃 I have tried a bunch of different apps and haven’t found anything that was customizable as a spreadsheet.

<aside> 💡 Currently testing out Copilot and Truebill based on recs from friends so fingers crossed one of those works for me! Till then, I’ll be sticking to my spreadsheet.

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⚙️ My System

There are two parts to my current system:

1. Automating all of the investments and savings.
2. Tracking spending in my spreadsheet.

Automating Investing & Saving

It took a few hours when I first started to set up the following accounts and set up automated transfers in all of these apps but it has made my life sooo much easier. Definitely do your research to figure out what tools are best for you but these ones have been highly rated and are used by a lot of people I know. I’ve included referral links below to the different tools and apps I use, would appreciate it if you used my links so we can both benefit!

Investments

• Retirement Investments
  • Wealthfront - I have my Roth IRA set up here so that $125 is invested each week so that I can hit the $6,000 max for each calendar year.
• Personal Investments
  • Fidelity - I have this set up so that money is transferred into my Fidelity account 2x per month. I then go in each week on Wednesday morning and invest my money into a handful of ETFs.
  • Stash - This is new for 2022 - I set this up to automatically invest $X into a couple of different ETFs and stocks each week to take advantage of dollar-cost averaging. If this works well I’ll probably transfer over everything from Fidelity into Stash Invest.
    • I’m currently on their $1 a month plan which just allows for a personal portfolio.
  • Robinhood - Automating weekly crypto investments.

<aside> ‼️ You can also have your personal investments automated through Wealthfront or another robo-advisor, I choose to use Fidelity/Stash since I wanted to invest in ETFs/stocks I pick rather than what Wealthfront picks for me.

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