How much money do you have in your bank account?
Not trying to be undercover IRS agent or anything but I read 38% of Americans have less than $1,000 in their bank account.
Wonder how you young studs compare.
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13k in my checking account. 6k in a Robinhood account. 15k in Roth IRA. Incoming FT. Haven’t gotten signing bonus.
Damn how so much already?
dude I really want to know how. Please give investing/ financial planning tips for college students
The honest truth is I'm super fortunate and don't really spend any money. I'm also frugal and like to only buy things in cash. Parents pay my phone bill, car insurance + gas (I don't have a car, I use my parents), for food when I'm home, my tuition, airfare to college, etc. Didn't have to pay rent this summer. When I graduated hs I had $1000 in cash from odd jobs and birthday money. Never had a job in hs because my parents feared it would screw up my prep school financial aid.
Summer before freshmen year: Made 4.5k working a retail job (Walmart/Target). $11/hr. 35hr/week Mid-may to the end of august.
Freshman year: Made $1400 washing dishes and tutoring. 11/hr, 7hr/week. Put 2000 into an ira.
Freshman summer: Made 7k working the same retail job. $13/hr 40hr/week
Sophomore year: Made $1600 tutoring and other on-campus jobs
Sophomore summer: Back to the retail job. Worked fewer hours, 13/hr, ~25hr/week. Don't know exactly how much I made but remember being worried about not making enough to max my ira. I'd guess 6k.
Junior Year: Made $1500 at my cushy on campus job.
Junior Summer: Made about 10k doing IB SA (85k prorated. Was supposed to be like $1600 a week but I only got $1200/week so I think I'll see a good tax return). Finally quit my retail job lol
Senior year: I'm a grader and TA. 6hr/week I think 13hr. Also back to my retail job because of distance learning. I work about 20hr/week. $15hr. Neither are included in the total above cuz I've not cashed my paychecks.
Add in another 3k from working over winter break for 3 years and other under the table jobs.
I've maxed out my ira the last 2 years (~11k) and it's grown a bit (I put in 3k in March). I have an advisor that takes care of it. I'll max out being able to put any money in here soon but I'll have 25k that will compound for 50 years. Even at a 5% return I'll have 200k for retirement. . My future self will be happy if banking doesn't workout for me.
My robinhood hasn't made any money. I made tons of mistakes at the beginning. However, it's been a great learning experience so it's all good. I started it my freshman summer and added money until the end of my sophomore summer.
My numbers are estimates. Probably only spent 5k over the last 3 years. Most of it in the past 18 months. Truth is I don't spend money, that's why it looks like I have a ton. I was planning on blowing all my SA savings during a semester abroad but then covid :( Last thing I bought was an $18 burger for 2 weeks ago lol. I find pdfs of all my textbooks and always order water. My (sports) team is pretty strict about alcohol and we are almost always in season so I don't spend much on booze and I don't drink coffee/go to starbucks.
The answer you’ll get from people in IB is going to be very different than average. Of course there are the college students and they won’t have much, but most people in finance will have a fair bit more (just look at starting salaries). I personally keep a fair bit in my checking account, but not a huge amount of my total assets.
$1,000 wouldn’t even cover the credit card bill each month for most working professionals so that’s not accurate for people with white collar jobs
I agree with you, but that is what living paycheck to paycheck is. You may have a higher CC bill, but if your expenses = income then it is hard to have your bank account grow.
Just got $114 million from the SEC Whistleblower Program, so my checking will be looking pretty thicc once the wire hits. Who's down for a weekend bender in Thailand???
In my checking specifically I only keep $1-3k, I have auto investing set up for most my accounts so I’m relatively cash light since it makes more sense to put the money to work imo.
I try to keep around $10k in my checking, given that my total monthly spend is around $5k. I'm fighting to get my savings to $100k, though I don't think I'll be there until this year's bonus. No debts, and a healthy amount in retirement savings that I'm not touching for several decades. AM is just very uncertain these days, and I feel like I need to be very liquid.
~$375K
Why? Surely that should be invested or at least be in a money market fund or something. Are you buying a property?
In my checking? It fluctuates all the time because I'm always moving money around to various accounts and paying off bills. At its low, probably around $300. At its high, several thousand.
Are we talking start of the month or end of the month cos 2 very different pictures. YOLO =p
I have a savings account with around 5k in it. I don't save much of my monthly income, but I have an automatic withdrawal for 100 bucks each week that goes into that account, and whenever I check it I deposit some of my cash into funds. I think I have about 80k in index funds and stocks.
delete
$44k
I’m 26 - 150k in company allowed investments, 100k in brokerage account.
And in your bank account as OP asks? Think checking (JPM, BofA, HSBC)
$36k
This is answering a different question than what I think you intended, but I think people's personal liquidity strategies are interesting, so I'll take a slightly different direction. Also keep in mind that I'm at a different career stage than most of you (principal-level, wife, kids).
The answer to your original question - how much is in my bank account - I'll take to mean my checking account. I keep as much in there as I think I would ever need in an immediate liquidity situation - as in, how big of a check do I want the ability to write at a moment's notice. We keep about $25k at that level and fund our living expenses out of that. If it gets a little low because of some big purchases I'll move money in from the next "liquidity tier," and if it builds too high then I'll sweep some out. This is minimal interest-bearing, so in a sense it costs me to have capital this liquid, so while I'm conservative about it I don't want cash to pile up indeterminately.
The next level of liquidity is where we keep our emergency fund. We keep a year's worth of expenses in cash-equivalents that have no market exposure. For us that means an online savings account (like Ally or Marcus) that earns at least a little bit of interest and takes a day or two to access. A year is a lot - I think most advice is for 6 months of expenses at a reduced spending rate - but we like the idea that if one of us gets hit by a bus then there's a year of runway to figure things out, and that nest egg is riskless.
Beyond that gets into our "portfolio," which has a variety of asset classes and liquidity. We used to keep more lower-risk shorter-horizon investments, as we had things we were planning for (buying a house, babies, cars, etc.) and we didn't want to be left in a crunch because the market took a spin. But at this point, we've made a lot of those major purchases and the next savings goals are farther off (college, retirement) so we are okay with higher near-term volatility with an eye toward longer-term return.
If we never contributed another dollar to our long-term savings, but we also didn't draw from it (and lived off our monthly income), we'd be fine. That gives us the flexibility to take our savings rate and point it to other uses, like high-risk low-liquidity business investments, or charity (I think of charity as a super long-horizon investment in society). Doesn't do us much good to keep aggregating cash or an index fund portfolio, so we've gotten more creative over time.
I'd be interested to hear how other mid-level folks think about their own savings & investment strategies. Mine is admittedly extremely conservative.
Mine is similar to yours, although even more conservative. Also mid/senior level (10-15 yrs experience)
Immediately available (checking): ~$250-300k
Liquid available: 18-24 months of expenses
Savings outside of that: I have the very conservative (playing off mortgage to be debt free) that gets 50% of the savings annually, medium risk (just mutual funds/few private investment vehicles) 50%, and high risk (invested with firm, high risk because of overlap with my career, this is separate from the % above as it is part of my compensation).
Curious why your checking balance is so high, even with 1/5 of that it should cover expenses until you can move money from elsewhere (CD, muni fund, etc.) if shit hits the fan.
Layne, I think that you're reading this right. I won't disclose my net worth, but I'll happily talk about my liquidity provisions. Personally, I don't like to keep too much in my checking, since that could get cleared out by using a sketchy bodega ATM. (It's happened to a friend of mine) That can take several weeks to get cleared up. I also keep my savings account at the same bank as my checking, and transfers are generally less than a day for me, which is beneficial. Yes, I may be losing out on ~1% in interest, but that is not the point of any of this.
Honestly, I may be able to stretch my savings to two years without dipping into my investments, but I've survived quite a bit of uncertainty at work, and seen quite a few coworkers let go. Yes the liquidity has a cost. I'm probably returning about -1% in real terms after accounting for inflation, while my investments are earning 5%+ on average, but the peace of mind is worth quite a bit.
I just like knowing that if my car got totaled and I needed one tomorrow, I could write a check without moving money around. Or if my house burned down and we had a lot of short-term expenses to float before insurance kicked in, we could cover them. Or any number of disaster scenarios that we'd need immediate liquidity for.
As my net worth has gone up, I've become interested in earning a higher return on my investments... but I've also become interested in locking in a risk floor. I've probably pushed to either side of the risk spectrum to a "barbell" approach instead of a smooth sampling of everything along the way.
3 years out of undergrad
Cash + easy to liquidate assets: ~450K
Long-term stock holds: ~ 200K
House: ~700k equity
Debt: ~1 mil all in the Condo
How
1 year IB at top BB
Met some institutional clients, left afterwards. Now run 2 companies, that i'm 75-100% owner of in advisory space + telecoms.
Uhhh so what do you do?
I'm in down stream semi's equipment manufacturing (search fund acquisition , now operate) + HNW advisory
First year analyst. ~$5k in my checking, I stick the rest in my investment accounts (~50K)
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~$110k.
I happen to be one of those 38%
~$6k in checking for monthly expenses and rent and keep $60k+ in my Marcus account. Don’t really have any other liquid cash, everything else is long term savings.
Starting FT in IB next year as well. About 6k in my literal checking/savings accounts, but have about 20k in Roth IRA/general investments. Hoping after the tax refund and signing bonus it'll be closer to 40k overall when I start. Want to get around 100k in assets in two years. Grew up lower-middle class and school is covered by financial aid, so trying to start as strongly as I can to hopefully never have to stress over money or have any issues due to (the lack of) money when im in my 30s and give back to my parents who gave me the opportunity to be leaps above where they were at 21.
Just started FT IB BB (85 base 10 sign)
checking 3k
savings 65k (had to sell stocks and moved $ to this for compliance. Plan on buying spy with most of it)
ira 1k
401k 2k
brokerage acct 22k
You have 90k already? Was that through work/internships through school and prior or something else?
Saved about $10k from my internships. Flipped shoes in high school and made maybe $10k from that. Honestly my parents paid for my school and I naturally like to work hard so I had 3 jobs throughout college. Also flipped a skydweller and made 9k. Saved al my money so far from my job along with good ol capita gains. Probably forgetting somethings
Do you not qualify for IRA? Why so low there when brokerage and savings are so high? Just curious as I'm trying to learn more myself the best way to strategize.
31 years old, total net worth hovering around $700K. I keep around ~$30K in my checking account for fun money.
wyd with the rest lol
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