Sallie Krawcheck on Surviving Getting Fired From Citi, Bank of America

Sallie Krawcheck is the co-founder of women’s investment platform Ellevest. She was fired as CFO of Citigroup in 2008 and in 2011, as head of Merrill Lynch’s global wealth management division.

I got booted twice. The first one, at Citi in 2008, was a long time coming. You could just watch it steamrolling down the street.

At Bank of America, where I was hired in 2009, my charge had been to turn around Merrill Lynch after Bank of America bought it during the subprime crisis. And we did! I put in a new team, and the business in almost every metric was healthy and performing and improving, gaining share, and beating the plan.

So, in 2011, when I was called in and told, thanks for the reorg, we’re going to give it to another person now that you’ve turned it around for us, I was shocked.

I’ve worked in places where I was wired in. But I wasn’t in the crowd at Bank of America. The CEO never stopped by my office, sat in a chair, put his feet up on my desk, and said, “Can we brainstorm this?” But the overachieving little girl in me was like, “But I was getting A’s! I did what I was supposed to do!” I was stunned. When he said, “You’ll be let go,” I think I literally said, “Who, me?!”

When I left Citi, the only surprise was how I found out about it. I was alone in my office, and those Wall Street offices always had CNBC playing in the background. I was at my desk, and I turned and saw a woman on the screen wearing what I thought was a pretty terrific-looking suit. It said she was leaving her company. I looked at it and thought, “Great suit, tough day . . . OH MY GOD, IT’S ME!” Then the phone and emails lit up. And they hadn’t told me yet.

A similar thing happened at Bank of America, where they let me know and then told the media within 15 minutes. It was terrible. My dad was at the gym and saw it on the TV before I could call him.

At Bank of America, after the CEO told me about the “restructuring,” I thought, “Do I shake his hand?” He didn’t move to shake, so I just sort of wandered out of his office. That one stays with me — that he didn’t shake my hand. That was weird.

The other thing is that they had scheduled a dinner for my direct reports that night. The whole thing was orchestrated. So, I walked out with my bag… and there’s everybody going to dinner.

Maybe it’s typical Wall Street protocol, but there is a certain level of cruelty to it.

I called my husband and said, “Keep the kids away from the TV. Here we go, again…” Years later, I found out he told them, “Be nice to your mom tonight.” When I got home, I went straight to the library, sat down, and started drinking. What is there to do? Cry?

Too many people told me, “You have to do something fast because the opportunities come right at the beginning.” Then they degrade pretty quickly. That’s terrifying advice.

How do you engage? When will you engage? How will you stay top of mind for people so that when something comes along, they will think of you?

Another big one for me was, how do I introduce myself at a cocktail party? “I used to run…” “I’m between successes…” I decided to just be honest and forthright about it, and find the good things in it.

It was a few years from the “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out” moment to when we launched Ellevest in 2014 (Krawcheck’s investment platform focuses on the unique financial circumstances of women — from career breaks when having children and income gaps with men to planning for retirement), but I was busy the whole time.

If I’m being honest, what took me so long to land on a (female finance) direction was partly due to internalized sexism. People would say, you should start an investing firm for women. But my immediate reaction was, for women?! That’s very junior varsity and I’m in the big leagues — I’m with the guys. I had these patriarchal layers that I had to go through to get to Ellevest.

My best career advice is to invest. A big difference between men and women is the gender pay gap, but it really is the gender wealth gap driven by the gender investing gap. That’s a lot of gaps!

When you’re in a job, I’d start with a 401(k) and see what you need to invest to get the employer match. If you can only afford to contribute 1 percent, do 1 percent. If you can do up to 10 percent, do up to 10 percent, and get those recurring deposits into an investment fund so that money works for you. And if you do that, on the day you get fired, you’ll end up a lot more confident.

You may want to negotiate your package. Even women, we’re still taught this is it. But is there more money on the table? Is there more health care that you can get? Really think about negotiating every step of the way.

At the end of the day, nobody else cares. Nobody’s talking about you.

We’re more resilient than we give ourselves credit for. Fortunately, I knew there was going to be dinner on the table. I knew the kids were going to go to school the next day; I knew we weren’t going to lose the house. I was in a privileged set of circumstances.

I’ve said to my fired self: It’s going to be OK; it’s going to be a lot of work. But there are many different ways to be successful.

At the end of the day, nobody else cares. Nobody’s talking about you. Did they talk about you when they heard it? Sura. Were they on to the next thing immediately? Absolutely. People care about themselves. They don’t remember. Just let it go.

Excerpted from: ALL THE COOL GIRLS GET FIRED: HOW TO LET GO OF BEING LET GO AND COME BACK ON TOP by Laura Brown & Kristina O’Neill. Copyright © 2025 Reprinted by permission of Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LCC.