Hi, I’m Krista.

For a long time, I thought I had done everything right.

By 30, I had built what I thought was my dream life: three kids, a husband, a beautiful home, a great career, and a successful agency I helped build.

From the outside, it looked pretty damn good. For a long time, I thought it was too.

Then somewhere in my 30s, I started asking myself a question I couldn’t shake:

Is this it?

Somehow, this is exactly what I want had become this is no longer what I want.

That was terrifying to admit, because the hardest lives to leave aren’t always the obviously terrible ones. Sometimes they’re the ones everyone else thinks you’d be crazy to walk away from.

The good salary. The impressive title. The beautiful house. The successful business. The marriage. The life you worked incredibly hard to build.

Golden handcuffs can still be golden handcuffs, even when they look beautiful from the outside.

And in my mid-30s, I blew up my life.

I got divorced, sold my shares in the agency, we sold the house, I liquidated assets, and our family became two households. I walked away from much of the life I had spent years building.

I’m not a role model, and I’m definitely not advising anyone to follow the path I took. I’m just a regular woman telling you what actually happened.

Because real life is messy. It isn’t linear. We change, and what we want changes too.

Sometimes the life you worked incredibly hard to build becomes the life you no longer want.

I believe you’re allowed to change your mind about what a good life looks like, as many times as it takes. There is no paycheck high enough, title impressive enough, or life enviable enough from the outside to make staying somewhere you desperately don’t want to be worth it.

A bad marriage. A stressful job. A business you’ve outgrown. Or simply a life that no longer feels like yours.

Leaving was only the beginning

I wish I could tell you I walked away, bravely followed my heart, and immediately entered some glorious new chapter.

What actually happened was that at 38, I found myself unemployable.

I had more than 20 years of experience, had been a CMO, and had helped build an eight-figure agency. I hired career coaches, rewrote my résumé, worked my network, and applied to more than 200 jobs over two years.

Nobody hired me.

Meanwhile, the financial security I had spent years building was disappearing. Savings became debt, and the professional identity I thought I owned suddenly didn’t seem to mean very much without the company and title attached to it.

Eventually, I stopped waiting for someone else to decide whether I was employable.

I was done leaving my future in someone else’s hands.

So I went all in on entrepreneurship. Not because it was my dream, but because I needed to make money.

In early 2020, after several brutal years, I left California with three bags, my toddler, and a one-way ticket to France. I thought I was going for a month.

A few days later, France went into lockdown. Then my dad got COVID and died very quickly.

Suddenly I was living in an old wooden cabin in the French Alps with a toddler, very little money, three older children back in the United States, and absolutely no idea what came next.

There was no glamorous laptop-lifestyle moment. I needed money for groceries.

So I started with what I had: more than 20 years of marketing experience, a laptop, an internet connection, and a fairly strong refusal to give up.

Over the last eight years, I’ve tried 12 different income streams and pivoted six times. Some worked. Some failed. A few made good money and still turned out to be things I didn’t want to keep doing.

I’ve made money, lost money, burned myself out, changed my mind, and started again. I’ve failed, I’ve effed up, and I’ve got the battle scars and receipts to prove it.

Which brings me to FU Money

Today, I’m not trying to rebuild the life I had before.

I’m trying to build enough FU Money that I never again have to stay somewhere simply because I can’t afford to leave.

That’s what FU Money means to me.

I’m not trying to never work again. I actually love working, creating, building businesses, and making money.

What I don’t love is being trapped.

I don’t want one employer deciding whether I have an income, one client capable of blowing a hole through my finances, or one offer, platform, algorithm, or business model holding up my entire life.

I want enough money, independent income, and things that I own that when something no longer works for me, I have options.

I want to be able to change my mind.

To me, that’s FU Money.

And right now, I’m figuring out how to build enough of it while working roughly 20 hours a week, because I don’t want to achieve financial freedom by working my life away.

That seems to defeat the point.

Welcome to my FU Money Plan

This publication is where I build it in public.

I share the experiments, numbers, decisions, pivots, failures, launches, revenue streams, and occasional expensive mistakes behind trying to make real money outside a traditional job.

I write about money, business models, marketing, creator businesses, professional reinvention, AI, and the changing world of work. But underneath all of it, I’m really interested in what happens when money, work, identity, and life collide.

I also want the part people usually leave out.

If someone built a seven-figure business, I want to know how much they kept, how many hours they work, what it cost to build, whether everything collapses if they stop working, and whether I’d actually want the life required to maintain it.

Those questions interest me much more than another impressive revenue screenshot.

For context, I’ve spent more than 20 years in marketing and entrepreneurship. Earlier in my career, I was CMO and co-owner of an eight-figure agency and worked with brands including Apple, HP, Google, Samsung, Sephora, and REI.

Since rebuilding my career, I’ve helped more than 250 founders and independent professionals, built an audience of 78,000+ on LinkedIn, and grown an email audience of more than 37,000.

But I don’t think my résumé is the most useful thing I bring here.

I’ve had to start over. More than once.

And I know what it feels like when the life you thought was secure suddenly isn’t.

Free subscribers get the stories. Paid subscribers get the receipts.

I don’t gatekeep what I learn.

Free subscribers get my essays, stories, observations, ideas, and selected experiments. Paid subscribers get the actual numbers, deeper revenue breakdowns, what I’m testing, what I spent, what worked, what flopped, and what I’d do differently.

If I learn something useful, I’ll tell you. If I screw something up, I’ll tell you that too.

You’ll probably like it here if you’ve ever looked at your career, business, or life and thought:

There has to be another way to do this.

Maybe you have a great job but want something that belongs to you too. Maybe you run a business and have realized you accidentally created another job. Maybe your golden handcuffs are starting to feel a little tight. Maybe something you once desperately wanted simply doesn’t fit anymore.

Or maybe everything is perfectly fine.

You just want enough money and independence to know that if “fine” ever stops being fine, you have options.

I’m 49, and I’m still experimenting, building, and figuring out what I want the next chapter to look like.

The difference is that this time, I’m trying to build enough FU Money to make sure I get to choose it.

This is my FU Money Plan. If you’re building yours too, you’re in the right place.