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In 2010, Kiana Danial was living her dream life in New York. She moved to the US from Japan and landed a job working on Wall Street as a financial public relations associate. She then got the perfect apartment on the Upper East Side. And for a little over a year, it was all looking up for her.
"I got fired. I was not expecting it. I thought I was rocking it," Danial told Insider. "So I was absolutely blindsided. And of course, my boyfriend then broke up with me a week later. And then, I didn't have money to pay the rent on my dream apartment."
She thought she had enough of an emergency fund to pay her rent while she found her next job. But she quickly realized that the money she'd invested for emergencies wasn't accessible without a large penalty.
At first, she was shocked. But after looking into the details of her investments, she realized she didn't know enough about her own finances.
"That motivated me to, first of all, learn how to invest on my own, and also motivated me to share my journey with other women who may be in the same position," Danial said.
Today, at 37, Danial has over $2 million in her investment portfolio, according to records viewed by Insider, and is also the founder and CEO of Invest Diva, a platform that helps women take control of their financial futures and make their money work for them. She has written multiple books, most recently co-authoring her fourth book, "Million Dollar Moms."
She shared with Insider the three key habits that helped her build her net worth.
1. She invested in herself firstInvesting in herself meant different things at different times. If she didn't have access to funds, then she had to become resourceful by putting in the time to learn something new. This often came in the form of taking unpaid internships, which she did after losing her job. If she wanted a specific job, she would focus her efforts on learning the new skills she needed to prepare herself for it.
"Instead of saying 'I can't do it,' I would ask, 'How can I do it? How can I make this happen?'" Danial said.
As her income increased, she was able to invest in herself by spending money to take personal finance courses, programs that taught her how to trade, or hiring a coach that would help her take her business to the next level. Even after reaching a point in her life where she feels financially secure, she still invests a good amount of money in building herself to get to the next level.
"You always have problems, but there are different kinds of problems and different levels of problems. As your business scales and grows, you're going to find yourself with challenges and there are always others that know better than you. And you can take their experiences and take a shortcut through learning from their experiences," Danial said.
2. She focused on increasing her incomeThe more skills Danial picked up, the more she found ways of increasing her own income. She started hustling her way through life, taking small jobs and gigs that would pay her bills. Some she did well, and others, she got fired from.
Since she spoke Japanese, she taught English to Japanese students. She also learned to read from a teleprompter, and to make her own videos. This allowed her to create content for companies that required it.
"I tell my students, 'Just look at your skills, there's always things that you think other people know and can do easily, but it's something that others don't know,'" Danial told Insider. "I chose to teach Japanese students because I know Japanese and even though my English wasn't good at the time, it was enough. Everyone is different. This is just a step you're taking with the end goal in mind that you are doing this temporarily because you have this goal you want to achieve and this is the path to get there."
Finding different ways to make money taught her to be resourceful. Today, she's built multiple streams of income and many of them are passive. She collects money from affiliate marketing, royalties from her books, speaking engagements, consulting and coaching fees, as well as dividends and growth from her investments.
"In order to actually have financial freedom, you need to have multiple revenue streams. So, when I lost my job, it was a rude awakening that I was relying on one source of income and that was reliant on my boss not getting me fired," Danial said.
3. She made her money work for herDanial was always enthusiastic about investing her money. But her strategy changed along the way. At first, she was trading on the foreign exchange market (Forex) but she quickly realized it was too risky for her. After learning more about how to build long-term wealth, she began to change her strategy. Every time she made money, she would put some aside to invest it.
Although she acknowledges she took more risk in the beginning, she was young and had time on her side to ride out market volatility.
"What I want to really point out here is that personal finance is personal," Danial told Insider. "You need to do your own personal finance and you need to do it often, every time your financial situation changes, because that allows you to adjust your investment strategy to your current risk tolerance and to your financial goals."
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