I Was Investing While Quietly Losing Money

After finishing my master's and getting a stable job, I started putting money into Vanguard ETFs. That's what everyone says to do, right? Invest on the side and it'll pay off over time.

And I believed it. I was budgeting, I was tracking my expenses, I felt like I was doing things right. But I still had BNPL accounts open. Zip, specifically. And those accounts were accumulating monthly fees. BNPL plans market themselves as "no interest," but the monthly account fee is interest by another name. On a small balance, the effective rate is often well above the 7% threshold where debt costs more than investing earns. It just doesn't look that way on paper.

So I was investing with one hand and leaking money with the other. I just didn't see it as a problem because the two felt like separate things. Investing was "building wealth." The BNPL fees were small, easy to ignore, just a few dollars here and there.

Then an Emergency Hit

My mom had an issue that needed financial help. I won't get into the details, but the amount was more than I had sitting in my regular accounts. So I withdrew the Vanguard investments.

And just like that, I was back at the start. The investments I'd been building were gone. The BNPL debt was still there. The emergency fund I should have had? Didn't exist.

If I'd followed the Leak Ladder order, I would have built a starter emergency fund first (Rung 2), then cleared the BNPL debt (Rung 4), then built a full emergency fund (Rung 5), and only then started investing (Rung 9). Instead I skipped straight to the top, and the first real emergency pulled the whole thing down.

The Hardest Part Was the Emergency Fund

Here's what I didn't want to admit at the time. Even when I was budgeting, the hardest part was setting aside money for an emergency fund. Because it has to be intentional, and I was always thinking emergencies hardly happen.

But that is the point of the word. They're unexpected and you should prepare for them.

Setting money aside for "just in case" felt like saving for nothing. No visible progress. No dopamine hit of watching investments grow. Just money sitting in an account doing apparently nothing. Until the emergency came, and it turned out to be the most important money I didn't have.

This Is Different From the General Advice

There's already a lot of content out there about whether you should invest while carrying debt. Most of it frames it as a math problem: if your debt costs 18% and your investments return 7%, the math is obvious.

That's true, and it's a useful way to think about it. But my story isn't about the math. It's about what actually happened when I tried to do things out of order. The math was always there. I just thought I was the exception.

I wasn't.

Wondering whether you might be doing things out of order too? The Know Your Digits quiz takes about three minutes and shows you which leaks you have and where they sit on the ladder. The Leak Ladder guide explains the full priority order and why each rung exists.

For more on how tracking reveals non-financial problems, read What Your Spending Reveals About the Rest of Your Life. For the general "invest or pay off debt" breakdown, see Why 'Invest Early' Is Incomplete Advice.