Money doesn’t always have to grow
My financial rollercoaster, returning to employment and never expecting growth
A couple of years into my four-year stint at a digital media startup, around 2017, I remember becoming skeptical of the push for constant growth.
When I started, hire No. 8 of what would become more than 100 employees in a few years, growth was inevitable and exciting. We rode the wave of the boom in personal finance media and fintech and doubled revenue year after year. The work was fun — we forged deep friendships, laughed through hours-long headline brainstorms, did literal cartwheels around the office and, one time, for some reason, hung out with a Harlem Globetrotter (or maybe a Washington General? Would that also be cool..?).
Then Facebook pulled a bunch of levers that upended the digital media boom, and growth got harder. It became something we had to think about, strive for, lie awake at night worrying over.
And I wondered, Aren’t we big enough?
Things seemed to be going well. Dozens of workers did good work, enjoyed our days and supported our families on the money we brought in. The company was bootstrapped, so no one was wringing their hands trying to get a return on investment. I was ready to enjoy the work we’d done and the processes we’d built and ride out the job for a while.
But, apparently, I was not correct.
When I raised the point — yes, I did, in fact, ask the leaders of a fast-growing startup if maybe we’d grown enough and could just chill for a bit — I was basically told that’s not how things work. If we stopped growing, everyone else would keep growing around us. And they’d be bigger than us.
So. There?
It didn’t convince me, but I figured there was something that made them right that I wasn’t understanding. When growth stagnated anyway and half the company was laid off about 18 months later, I thought maybe they hadn’t been so right.
Money doesn’t always have to grow
It’s a terrible disease of capitalism that we always expect money to grow. Whether it’s business revenues, personal incomes or market prices, growth is treated as normal. A business with stable incomes year over year might as well be bankrupt. A worker earning the same amount of money for years on end is not sufficiently driven. A stagnant GDP is a death knell for a country.
Setting aside the fact that our economy doesn’t even work this way — recessions consistently snap us back to reality — it’s just kind of silly. Why have we built a culture around constant striving? Why can’t we do good enough, be still and enjoy some peace after a while?
I’ve written before about how I built my freelance writing career — struggling for years, getting my first full-time job, developing a niche and finally building the once-coveted six-figure business.
I recently wrote about how getting laid off from a full-time job was my nudge to return to freelancing and what it taught me that I can apply now that I’ve re-returned to employment.
In response,
asked a really important question in the comments:Having once earned $163k, how have you also allowed yourself the space to let that income drop back down, rather than struggling (internally and externally) to always have to then meet or exceed it?
They raise such a good point, especially calling out “internally or externally.” Because, yes, fluctuations in income can be tough to swing when you have bills to pay. But that’s actually the easier part to address: Keep costs low, even when income goes up. The harder part to deal with is the emotional side of advancing through a career, building a business, garnering accolades and developing expertise — and seeing income go up and down even as, by every other measure, you seem to advance in your field.
I deal with that, basically, with the attitude I wished my old employer had had about revenue: I don’t expect constant growth.
My financial rollercoaster
My work as a writer has had major ebbs and flows and taken me on quite the financial journey — and it hasn’t always been upward. I’ve let opportunities take me where I need to go and not let so-called lifestyle inflation trap me into jobs based solely on income.
I started my writing career earning about $12,000 a year (in the early 2010s) from freelancing and occasional stints in food service. I started my first full-time job at the aforementioned startup in 2015 earning $42,000 and was earning $67,000 by the time I left four years later.
For those four years, I savored the upward trajectory. I’d gone from poverty to comfort to what felt like absolute riches. I was living in a city, traveling, buying new furniture, eating out, qualifying for credit cards, repaying debts. I’d made it; the years I’d spent struggling as a freelancer had paid off and earned me this career.
I was recruited away from that job at a time when I was eager for a change. The interview was brief, and I got excited about the new job. Then the offer came — $60,000 a year. I was devastated. Embarrassed to have gotten so excited. Terrified to be stuck in a job I was ready to leave. Worried about providing for my household.
But I talked through it with my partner, and we decided to accept the cut in income.
This was the first setback in my heretofore meteoric rise as a full-time writer, and it was the hardest to stomach.
I’d gotten used to growth — fast growth. After years of sacrificing comfort to find my own way, I thought I’d finally stepped onto an ever-ascending path. Accepting lower pay in my second-ever writing job was a destabilizing gut punch.
Still, it was the right move for me, one of many I’ve made over the years that prioritized my wellbeing or my interests over my income.
Of course, that company’s ability to destabilize me was only just beginning. Ten weeks after luring me away from a better-paying job, they laid me off. A real dick move.
I went into 2020 without a job and quickly picked up freelance gigs to get by. I thought I’d look for another full-time job, but I was too busy with clients to mount a search. I started to like freelancing. I learned how to grow my income quickly and replace my old salary. That year, I surpassed my full-time income and earned $72,000 freelancing.
Personal finance media and fintech were still booming, and the pandemic only helped our industry. Clients were scrambling for content to help readers weather layoffs, understand emergency benefits and make the most of stimulus checks. Plus, remember how crypto took off for a couple of years there? Everyone was scrambling for brand-new content about it, and I became a quick study in blockchain. Being laid off less than three months after being hired was a real drag, but it turned out to be fantastic timing for me to try my hand at self-employment again.
I thrived for the next few years, but still didn’t see constant growth. In 2021, I operated agency-style and subcontracted some big editorial projects. My business brought in $163,000 in revenue that year ($105,000 for me after paying writers and other expenses). But I quickly realized an agency wasn’t for me; I pulled back on subcontracting in 2022 and earned about $100,000 on my own that year.
Deciding not to grow as an agency was the next setback in what I was now realizing would never be a meteoric rise.
In two years, I’d built my freelance career from the dust of a layoff and grown a legitimate content agency, with a network of contractors and five-figure contracts with clients. I was editing, project managing, hiring — being a boss. Running a company.
But I didn’t like it. It seemed unfair to insert myself between my contractors and my clients instead of just making referrals. I also didn’t like holding writers’ fates in my hands; if I fired a client, it lost work for them. Committing the team to client deadlines meant stressing over writers who needed flexibility for their mental health or their families or something else.
So I finished up a few big projects, introduced contractors to clients I didn’t want to keep and went back to operating solo, save for contributors to Healthy Rich (which I’d started mid-2021). My household income didn’t take a hit that year, as I’d set myself up with a regular paycheck, but my business experienced the dreaded “negative growth.”
I didn’t feel any way about the money. But I had to work through shame about, as I saw it, not being able to grow a business the right way. I was able to do it — good at editing, good at project management, good at people management, good at attracting clients — so not growing my business seemed lazy. Thanks for installing that damage, capitalism.
But, again, it was the right move for me.
Reverting to solo freelancing helped me not only to relax but also to direct energy toward developing Healthy Rich and what would become You Don’t Need a Budget.
The book marked the most precipitous drop in the meteoric rise of my finances. (If you haven’t already heard it a thousand times: Books don’t make authors money.)
I had a little money saved in my business, I got a small advance and my partner agreed to be the primary earner for our household while I wrote the book. I shed my freelance clients and made Healthy Rich and writing YDNAB my only jobs for much of 2023. Those jobs didn’t pay well.
This step back was one of the easiest to make, but it feels the most financially catastrophic.
It was an easy decision, because I was committed to giving everything I had to the book. I was delighted to devote myself to investigating and debunking budget culture, rather than making a living writing for publications that perpetuated it.
It felt catastrophic because my income as a freelancer never really recovered.
I’d retreated from and re-engaged with clients over my years freelancing: I whipped up a living after my layoff. I’d once been close to taking a full-time job with a client before deciding to stick with self-employment, and my other clients had been happy to take me back. I’d taken breaks to pursue various projects and recovered without a hitch. But by the time I returned to freelancing in mid-2024, the personal finance space was experiencing a bust.
I’d been largely without freelance income for about a year, and now the work I picked up was sporadic and short-lived. I’d get an enthusiastic client and feel confident I could make it work, and they’d change their strategy six weeks later and peter out — or fully disengage their freelancers. I was earning much more than my early $12,000 a year freelance days, but I was feeling a precarity I hadn’t experienced since then.
All told, I made about $70,000 last year between the second half of my book advance, freelance writing and working part-time in my partner’s business. That’s a far cry from the six-figure business I’d left behind — even farther when you factor in the rising cost of living of the past few years.
Returning, cautiously, to traditional employment
Last spring, an old client reached out cold to offer me a full-time remote writing job.
I’d toyed with going back to employment during those rocky freelancing months. I was back to being my household’s primary earner, and the hustle required to earn enough was stressing me out.
But the job search was disheartening. I interviewed for one job I was overqualified for and never heard back. I made it through the full gauntlet of interviews for another and had a call scheduled with the recruiter to receive an offer, only to find out that same day the company had been acquired and they were putting hiring on hold. Womp womp. The hiring process is absolutely humiliating for workers. I decided to focus on freelancing as long as I could.
Then this company came to me with an offer — no application, no stupid cover letter, no 87 interviews with 12-person panels. They knew my work and wanted me to do it in house full time.
The job isn’t perfect.
They weren’t hiring me for my brilliant (if I do say so myself) stance on budget culture; they were hiring me for my SEO-writing skills. It’s a traditional financial brand, the kind I critique in my book. It means putting all of my eggs in one company’s basket and risking the next media-industry layoff.
But they agreed to pay me $80,000, the salary I’d been eking out for myself. A paycheck twice a month without hustling to find its source.
With Healthy Rich now earning around $1,000 a month after fees, that salary boosts my income and gives me the breathing room I didn’t have while freelancing.
In my entire career, this is the first writing job I’ve taken primarily for the paycheck. In every other case, I’ve been willing to sacrifice income for something that felt nobler: passion, integrity, learning opportunities, personal growth, flexibility, autonomy.
It’s made me tired.
This year — with its fascism and recession fears and firehose of news — has made me tired.
This job gives me peace. And it marks a turning point in how I see my career. I’ve never expected constant growth in my salary or my business, but I did once expect my work to follow some kind of logical trajectory. I don’t expect that anymore.
I was a freelancer. Then a lead editor. Then a staff writer. Then a freelancer. Then an agency owner. Then an author. Then a newsletter writer. Then a freelancer. And again a staff writer.
In the midst of that, I’ve also been a barista, political campaign manager, bookkeeper and operations manager.
Hannah, I don’t know if this answers your question, but here’s where this reflection has led me: This career doesn’t have a clear trajectory because I don’t require my income to always grow. I choose the work I need for now, whether that’s for pay or passion or something else.
That often involves compromises, because workers are forced to work for a living. I never can that go too far, though — I just don’t have the constitution for work I hate. I do what I have to to get by, to find comfort and peace. I take risks when it strikes my fancy. Mostly, I’m noticing, I take opportunities as they come. Instead of plotting a path and forging ahead, I grew a freelance business with clients knocking on my door, I wrote a book when a publisher approached me and I started jobs when I got recruited.
Maybe this is a lazy way of getting by? Maybe I’m giving up too much agency? I’m not sure, and I’m not sure I care. I like to think of it as letting the universe (or whatever) guide me to the next right thing.
It’s been working fine so far.
💖 Want a new relationship with money?
My class Dealing with Debt without Shame introduces you to a new way of understanding debt. You’ll explore how to grapple with debt emotionally without the shame our culture puts on it, and you’ll learn how various financial products work so you can make a plan to deal with any debt you hold. Paid subscribers have full access to this and all Healthy Rich classes.
