Making 6 figures ruined my relationship with money

Writer Lia Jane shares a meditation on money, marriages that end and how our mindset about self-worth gets set in motion during childhood

“We’re going to become millionaires in our sleep,” my then husband with a taste for The Apprentice’s Donald Trump whispered as he gripped the steering wheel of our moving truck.

In the early aughts, I met a fast-talking New Yorker who owned a moving company. Tall, dark, and handsome, 10 years my senior. After his brief stint in jail for using counterfeit money and my half-hearted breakup attempt, we found ourselves re-launching the moving company from scratch while living on my $30,000 retail manager salary. We managed to build a steady business by renting U-Haul moving trucks, and we celebrated the first month we hit $1,700 in revenue from our scrappy start-up with a $10 pizza and orgasms.

A year later, the mid-2000s housing boom kept our moving company in constant demand. By then we’d bought our first moving truck. My husband’s ambitions soared through the roof.

When we met, I was a 24-year-old suburban Black girlie from Texas. I had never been courted by such a dashing man who wore confidence like he wore BOSS cologne. He propped up the tenets of the Law of Attraction years before every “Life Coach” on Instagram crammed it down our throats.

“I can do bad all myself.” That was a common retort from my mom after every piss poor exchange with my dad when I was a kid. For a solid three years before she served him divorce papers, she would stand tall in her 4’11” frame and red lips and tell me that on a regular basis.

By the time I was 10, my tiny head and heart saw men as a source of turmoil and fun times, but never stability. Truthfully, when I was a child, I never understood why my mom stuck it out with my dad as long as she did. She was the breadwinner and college graduate with a thriving career in the insurance industry, and he was plagued with a constant inability to stay employed and out of the arms of other women.

My mom was a corporate baddie, as the Gen Zers say. I craved a lawyer or doctor for a dad.

Even as my mother made a very upper-middle-class living, she was always stressed out about money. Growing up, she was the one who “made it” in her family. As a college graduate, she was one of the first beneficiaries of the promises of affirmative action. Without that federal mandate, coming from an impoverished background, the doors that opened to her may not have been, despite her being an A+ All-Star student in high school.

She was the family ATM as her siblings battled addictions, housing instability, job insecurity and bad breakups. I never got to see my mom get a break.

In my relationship with my ex-husband, I began to understand why my mother stayed with my father for close to a decade. The idea of a man contributing financially to your life can be thrilling.

At least on the surface.

By 2006 our moving company was making between $50,000 to $60,000 a month. It became routine for my ex-husband to repeat, “I am a millionaire” affirmations before going to bed.

As the money rolled in, slowly so did my belief that money, and lots of it, would always flow into my life. I wasn’t the penny pincher my mom was. I reveled in being able to have three cars and a McMansion. My husband’s brash confidence and “buying out the bar” when we would party with friends enamored me.

Then, in 2008, I asked him for a divorce.

After years of emotional and verbal abuse and manipulation, I was a shell of the woman I’d been before meeting him, and nowhere close to being the woman I wanted to be.

More than 15 years later, I’ve never made more than $50,000 a year on my own. In the years since my divorce, I’ve been a schoolteacher making $44,000 a year, then moved on to freelancing part-time and working in retail full-time. In 2020 I decided to give full-time freelancing a shot. My highest earning month was $7,400 as a freelance content writer. I remember feeling overwhelmed by the amount of writing I had to do to hit that. Perhaps that’s why I’ve never repeated that income.

I feel deep shame that I’ve never come close to earning six figures on my own.

Why can’t I “Girl Boss” myself there?

Intuitively, I feel that we take on the beliefs we saw modeled to us as children. Our actions can either run in the same direction or the opposite.

When I was with my ex-husband, I believed I was getting the break my mom never got.

Now, I feel like it’s impossible to make more than $4,500-ish a month, for more than two months in a row. I worry I don’t feel worthy of making more than that. I also harbor fears that maybe I believe I can’t make more than that as a single woman. As if I need a partner to finally hit six figures. That freaks out the feminist in me.

When women get divorced, we experience an average 30% decline in our standard of living,  while it shoots up 10% for men. When you factor in that I’m a Black woman and must contend with race and gender inequities in the job market (including freelancing), I feel as if I will never thrive. That I will be my mom but making significantly less than she did.

Making over half a million a year those last couple of years with my husband broke my brain.

I don’t need half a million dollars a year in income as a single child-free woman in her mid-40s. But I do want more than $50,000 a year.

It’s OK to want to get ahead. To have more time for hobbies. To have more money to put into your Roth IRA and a travel fund and to buy overpriced but delicious croissants from Whole Foods without guilt. To not be your stressed-out mom, who deserved so much better.

Men are often socialized to aim higher, no matter what it takes. They believe they are owed a good life. It’s no wonder that my ex-husband genuinely believed we were going to become millionaires in our sleep and came quite close to that reality.

Far too many women are socialized to believe success is either luck or comes in the form of a man.

I’m not ending this essay with some profound insights into how to earn more money. My only game plan is to get a job on top of my freelancing (I’ve been looking for a 9-to-5 for a year). Essentially, to work harder and longer.

Yes, I’ll be exhausted. But as a single woman, it’s the only loophole my brain can conceive of for even coming close to squeaking past $50,000 a year.

At least if I do, I can finally request some paid time off and have enough money in my bank account to take a wellness trip to Costa Rica to commune with hypnotists and shamans. Getting their help with my money mindset has been on my bucket list for 15 years.

Lia Jane

is a freelance writer who primarily focuses on health and the environment. She is a proud plant mom and is a bookworm and artist in her spare time.

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