When I heard the question, "How much money is enough to make you feel safe?" on Open Account, SuChin Pak's podcast about money and life, it made me wonder how much that number was for my parents, who used to switch to Vietnamese when talking about overdue bills in front of their English-speaking kids. When I then saw a Quora answer advising a new graduate making $100,000 to sock away half their income or more to be financially independent, I thought about what that answer would be for me at this point in my life.

I'm in my mid-20s and living in Brooklyn, after moving from Chicago in 2013. In New York, as Heidi N. Moore so succinctly put it, money seems to fly away if you don't keep an eye on it: a Metrocard here, a coffee and breakfast sandwich there, and you've spent $20 within the first few minutes of the day just to get to the subway.

For the first year, I hemorrhaged money from my front door all the way to my first contractor job in Chelsea and back, every day. There were many days I'd check my balances until my sessions timed out, look at my Excel sheet of job applications, and resist calling home to ask if I can come back to figure out my next step, feeling embarrassed after striking out on my own and failing so quickly at real life. I had enough to rent a $675/month room in Ridgewood (the most I had ever paid in rent at the time), and could only focus on paying back the credit card collections which I owed from college.

The future in 2013 felt like an ocean I'd been thrown into and struggled to float long enough to find the right direction to swim towards. I had no other goals besides finding stability.

Almost three years later, I'm surprised and happy to find myself still in New York, although next year I'm leaving to travel for a few months and move to DC to live with my partner. I'm finally making more than what I owe to Sallie Mae and the government, which is roughly $50,000 for undergrad. It took a long time to face my initial $65,000 in student loans after graduating college, and even longer to stop applying for forbearance to avoid the dread of an extra $470 per month leaving my paltry checking account.

Now the future I want is retiring early, traveling cheaply and often, supporting charitable causes, and taking care of my parents in their delayed retirement. Setting aside the anxiety-inducing number I would need for my own retirement, the number I'd want in the bank to feel safe in my present life would be the same as my debt: $50,000.

For me, that would be a lot of money to sit on without throwing into my future (retirement) or at my past (student loans). It already takes active control to sit on more than a few hundred dollars in checking without giving it to Sallie Mae and making adjustments in spreadsheets to see how much that moves my payoff date, then feeling too much month at the end of my money.