I Went from a Median Earner to $250,000—Here’s What I Learned

“I work for my parents and they gave me a fat raise!” Just kidding. But wouldn’t that be funny?

But luckily for you (and maybe unluckily for me), this isn’t an article on CNBC – so there’s no nepotism at play here.

And truthfully, the intent of this article isn’t to provide some presumably magic pathway to a higher income. I’ll touch on it here for context, but what I’d really like to talk about today is what I learned when I went from a regular income to an objectively high one.

(I know there’s some investment banking professional reading this who’s sneering at $250,000 per year, but hey, I think it’s a lot for a 26-year-old woman with a communications degree and no advanced education!)

So let’s get to it: *Cue Rick & Morty “Hooooowwww did I get here?” montage*

I was always a little preoccupied with side hustles (well, since entering the workforce — I was decidedly not interested in working more than I needed to in college).

My starting salary was $52,000 in 2017. Soon after, I started teaching fitness, which added roughly another $6,000–$12,000 to the picture each year. 

How I started earning more

Things went on more or less like this for a few years; in 2020, two major seeds got planted and things started shifting:

After earning a series of promotions and raises with my first employer, I switched industries and got a substantial pay raise. (For anyone reading this who wishes they could run me over with their Prius, you heard it here first: The tech industry is very lucrative. My former compensation was roughly doubled by the move.)

I also started this blog in my free time because the bossy 5th grader inside me needed an arena where she felt like she was calling the shots, and she wanted a way to tell people how to leverage an HSA. Shockingly, it’s become a great source of income for me.

So there you have it: The Cliff’s Notes version of my trajectory from average earner to six-figure stardom and full-time impostor syndrome (yay!).

The important thing worth noting here about how that second piece of the puzzle fell into place: I followed something I was innately interested in and drawn to. I didn’t force it. I think there’s something to be said for alignment in the side hustles you pursue and their ability to generate income.

What I’ve learned from more than tripling my income in 12 months

#1: Because I’m chronically obsessed with saving money, the more I made, the more competitive I felt about earning more.

It sounds ridiculous, but earning more only made me want more. 

If you would’ve told me this time last year that my income would be pushing $300,000 today, I would’ve thrown up and passed out. I couldn’t have fathomed it.

But since it happened gradually (think “frog in boiling water”), each little bump just made me feel more and more obsessed with getting more. I’m pretty sure I think about money and my income more now than I ever have, even when (hell, especially when) I was making $50,000 to $60,000 per year.

Granted, I wasn’t as obsessed with FI at that point in time — but the point stands that, for some reason, the result of getting more money was wanting more money. 

I can only imagine how brutal it is for people who allow their spending to rise in proportion with their income. While mine went up a little bit, it didn’t rise in proportion to the income increase.

And I’m not sure if it can be related to that experiment with rats where the rat is perfectly happy eating their bland-ass rat food, until the experimenter starts pumping small hits of sugar into the water — before long, the rat just stands in front of the water tube frantically pressing the “sugar” button with its tiny rat hand. A rat possessed.

Do you see the metaphor? I am the rat. And also the frog. 

I went from working a (relatively) casual 9-5 to stuffing as much work as possible into the waking hours of each day, and I often found it hard to turn my brain off at night. I didn’t sleep very well. I’m getting better at finding the balance, but the point is:

Once I got my first taste of it, it was really easy to obsess.

I’ve spent a lot of time wondering if it’s all a bit of a trap – another benefit, in my opinion, of having an inexpensive lifestyle and reaching financial independence: It’s only a trap if your lifestyle expands proportionally.

#2: The online personal finance community spends a lot of time focused on how to spend less, but it doesn’t spend nearly as much time urging people to earn more.

And hell, maybe that’s because people would be insulted if you told them the answer was simply making more money. But when considered mathematically, it’s just as viable a solution to increasing the one thing that matters: Your margin.

Your margin is the difference between your income and your expenses, therefore representing the amount you can save (read: invest).

There’s a lot of shame-y language around spending less — and sure, I’ve seen some budgets in the past where the amount of money being (relatively carelessly) spent made me blush, but it feels weird that we focus so much on ways to save $100 instead of ways to increase our income by $1,000.

I mean, it makes sense, right?

Depending on who you work for, it’s probably easier for them to float you an extra $1,000 per month (in proportion to their revenue) than it is for you to cut back $100 (in proportion to your existing income). 

While cutting back on your spending is something you can do immediately and is certainly necessary and in your control, totally ignoring your own potential to earn more leaves a lot of opportunity on the table.

To be clear: I think it’s absolutely essential to get your spending in check BEFORE you start earning more (so your margin doesn’t get eaten up by lifestyle creep), but focusing relentlessly on cutting back instead of earning more has diminishing returns. 

I still track my spending (and quite closely).

I use (and highly recommend) the app Copilot – for $13/month, it makes it incredibly easy to track each individual transaction across my 6 credit cards, 2 checking accounts, 1 savings account, and 21 (yes, 21) investment accounts.

#3: Earning more does make it a hell of a lot easier, but I was surprised by how little my life actually changed.

This might be my biggest takeaway. Sure, I still stress about money and get irritated with myself if I go over budget, but it’s undeniable that earning more money makes life less stressful. 

I can’t tell you how many situations I’ve been in recently where I felt comforted by my own ability to “pay my way out of it” if things became uncomfortable or inconvenient. Flight canceled last-minute? No worries, just book a room. Too tired to make lunch? Have something delivered.

But aside from the addition of being able to spend on convenience and comfort, having a higher income hasn’t really changed my life all that much. From the outside looking in, it probably doesn’t seem all that different.

The only real difference, emotionally, is that things that would’ve been extremely stressful for me in 2019 became minor nuisances thanks to my newfound income. 

I still remember a trip I took to Las Vegas in 2016 – I was an intern making $12/hour. I had $200 in a checking account, no credit cards, and no other money to speak of. I was broke in every sense of the word.

We slept 6 interns in a 2-person hotel room off the strip that cost $54 per night and walked to McDonald’s because we couldn’t afford the Uber. 

(Poor girl hadn’t discovered travel credit card rewards yet, obviously.)

I put a quarter in a slot machine, pulled the handle, and hit triple 7s – a ticket for $56 came out of the machine. It sounds like a pittance, but think about it this way: That one quarter gamble increased my net worth by 25% that night.

It feels almost unbelievable that that was only 5 years ago. 

And frankly, I wish more people talked about this:

Money doesn’t really make you happier, but it makes your life a lot easier. 

And most of us are capable of either securing a pay raise by switching companies, negotiating a raise with our current company, starting a digital business, or buying a low-money-down rental property/house-hack. 

Considerations for increasing your income

Maybe we don’t talk about it explicitly because it feels unattainable or morally questionable to want to earn more money, but it feels counterintuitive to spend a lot of time and energy on finding areas to spend less without devoting an equal amount of time and energy to earning more — the piece that arguably makes a larger impact.

After all, the most I was ever able to shave from my budget (by really cutting back) was about $500 per month, or the equivalent of $6,000 per year. That’s the income equivalent of making about $7,500 more per year (because #taxes).

I have negotiated raises of more than $7,500 before within a company, and I think those series of conversations were less painful and time-consuming than cutting $500 off my budget each month and all the relative sacrifices that came along with it for an entire year.

In the world of NFTs and TikTok fame, it seems like there aren’t rules anymore. That’s scary and exciting for regular people like you and me.

Creativity and initiative can be incredibly lucrative; for proof, just look at any YouTuber with a substantial following. Just last week, I saw a Business Insider report that analysts from JP Morgan were leaving their $150,000 salaries to be finance YouTubers because it was “so much more lucrative.”

You don’t need a degree, you just need to be interested in sharing something with others. Many bloggers (and hell, even NFT artists) are anonymous, so you don’t necessarily have to make it all about you if you’re uncomfortable with that (clearly Money with Katie didn’t suffer the same modesty).

How to set your sights on a new income

I want to leave you with a comforting notion: There are more opportunities in your path than you’re likely aware of today. 

I didn’t land here because of some grand plan, but I did know I wanted to make more money — couple that intentionality with a genuine interest in a topic and willingness to put some time and effort into a blog, and here I am. 

I’d recommend you do one exercise, if nothing else:

Think about what number would make you feel really secure and write for 5 minutes about what it is and why. 

It sounds stupid, but I did two major goal-setting workshops that I believe shifted things for me simply because they forced me to quantify what I wanted.

One took place in late 2019, and at the end of the workshop, I had written, “I will double my corporate compensation through purpose-driven work by March 2021.”

Money with Katie didn’t come into existence for about 7 more months, but planting the seed was crucial. And it didn’t happen by March, but it happened.

Another was in a separate goal-setting workshop where I remember writing down, “I would like to make $10,000 per month from my full-time job. That would make me motivated and secure.”

Again, that was about 7 or 8 months ago, and today, it’s true. 

(Does it sound like I’m about to pitch you a magic show or some manifestation course? I promise I’m not. These are #FreeTips, baby.)

You don’t have to be superstitious for this to be applicable. It’s simply clarifying for you what it is you really want. Your subconscious will get to work! 

I bet you didn’t think the parting advice for a blog with this title would be “trust your instincts,” but it’s true:

Get clarity on those few things and then trust yourself in the months that follow.