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There’s a stage in almost every business when doing your own design makes perfect sense.

You’re figuring things out. You don’t know whether the business will work yet. You open Canva, make a banner, pick a couple of colors, throw together a logo and get on with your life.

Fine.

But eventually something changes.

Your experience gets better. Your offer gets stronger. You start charging more. Maybe you’re trying to win consulting work, attract clients, sell a product, get booked to speak, build a newsletter or find a better job.

Meanwhile, your LinkedIn profile still looks like something you cobbled together on a Sunday afternoon three years ago.

That’s when DIY starts getting expensive.

Because if you’re highly credible at what you do, but your profile makes you look amateur, people have to get past the presentation before they can discover the expertise underneath it.

I recently talked about this with graphic designer , who has been designing professionally since 2010 and says he has completed more than 10,000 projects through freelance platforms alone. He spent more than a decade specializing in infographics before noticing a shift in 2024: clients kept asking him to fix their LinkedIn banners, then their profiles, then their entire LinkedIn visual presence. Eventually LinkedIn rebrands became a bigger part of his work than infographics.

And the people coming to him usually aren’t beginners. They often have years of experience, plenty of proof and expensive offers. Their profiles just don’t look like it.

Your profile shouldn’t make people work this hard

Hristo described something I see constantly in marketing audits.

He lands on someone’s LinkedIn profile and has to inspect the banner, headline, About section and Featured section before he can figure out what the person actually does.

His clients often have the experience and the offer. What’s missing is clarity. The profile doesn’t communicate the level they’re operating at.

And yes, during our conversation I said that if you’re an experienced professional selling high-ticket work, you probably don’t want to show up with a design that looks like your six-year-old made it.

I stand by that. 😂

This is where I think people misunderstand professional design. They assume the purpose is to make everything prettier.

Pretty is nice. Pretty doesn’t pay the mortgage.

The job is to make what people see match the quality of what you actually do.

If I’m considering hiring you for a $10,000 engagement, your profile is giving me information before I ever read your case studies. I’m forming an opinion about how established you are, how much attention you pay to detail, whether you understand your own market and whether your business feels like something I can trust.

That may be unfair.

It’s also how humans work.

Give your banner three seconds

Hristo has a very simple rule for LinkedIn banners:

Someone should be able to understand what you do within about three seconds.

His advice is to stop trying so hard to sound clever. The banner should make it easy to understand what you do, who you do it for, what outcome you create and what the visitor should do next. He also recommends a clear call to action.

I’d add one more question:

Why you?

That’s where a lot of beautifully designed profiles still fall apart.

You can spend thousands on photography, fonts, brand colors and a gorgeous banner and then plaster this across the top:

Helping ambitious leaders unlock their potential.

Okay.

You and approximately 47,000 other people.

The designer can make a weak message look expensive. It’s still a weak message.

Hristo actually refuses to start designing a LinkedIn profile until the messaging is clear. He sends clients a questionnaire first so he understands their brand, goal, ideal customer and positioning. Only then does he start working on the visuals.

A branding problem is sometimes a design problem. Sometimes your design is accurately presenting a business nobody understands.

Fix that first.

Your LinkedIn profile actually has two jobs

One of the most useful things Hristo said during our conversation was that a LinkedIn profile works in two stages.

The first happens before anyone visits your profile.

They encounter you somewhere in the feed — perhaps through a post or a comment — and see a tiny profile picture and the beginning of your headline.

That’s it.

In stage one, the challenge is that photo and mini-headline should make them interested enough to click.

Then they enter stage two. Now they see your banner, complete headline, About section, Featured section and everything else you’ve built around the profile.

Now the challenge is to make them understand it in 3 seconds and like it enough to follow you.

Your branding doesn’t begin when somebody lands on your profile.

Your little round headshot is wandering around LinkedIn without you.

Every time you comment on someone else’s post, there it is.

This is one reason Hristo often puts a contrasting color behind a client’s profile photo and coordinates it with the banner. He considers the photo and banner parts of the same visual system, and the contrast helps the image stand out.

I’ve seen this myself. When you’re scrolling through a long discussion and nearly every headshot has a gray, white or neutral background, a bright orange or yellow background jumps out.

You’ve bought yourself a fraction of a second of attention.

Sometimes that’s enough.

Your face is part of the trust equation

I asked Hristo why he often puts another photograph of the person inside the banner when LinkedIn already has a profile photo.

His answer was that he doesn’t do it every time, but faces naturally pull our attention. The person becomes a visual hook before we begin reading the text.

I think there’s another reason this is becoming more important.

We are operating in a growing trust deficit online.

AI can produce the headshot, article, infographic, comment, testimonial-looking graphic and polished company copy. It can make a one-person operation look like a multinational corporation before breakfast.

People are getting more suspicious about what’s real.

So I’m increasingly interested in human signals.

Show your face. Look like yourself. Smile. Let people see your eyes. Give them some indication that there is an actual person behind the business.

Hristo told me he recently changed his own LinkedIn photo from a more serious pose to one where he was smiling because he wanted to appear more approachable and easier to work with.

That sounds like a tiny decision.

For a service business, “Would I want to spend an hour on Zoom with this person?” is a perfectly legitimate part of the buying decision.

Treat your Featured section like a storefront, not a trophy cabinet

Then we got to one of my LinkedIn pet peeves: the Featured section.

People tell me they want clients.

I open their LinkedIn profile.

Their Featured section is empty.

Or it contains a post from 2024 that got 1,700 likes.

The featured section should tell the visitor: What exactly am I supposed to do next?

Hristo describes the Featured section as his “online store.” His recommendation is to keep it focused — generally no more than three important destinations — and use it for things that can actually move someone forward to connect with you off of LinkedIn:

a website,

offer,

booking link,

newsletter or,

for someone job hunting, a CV.

I love that framing.

Someone discovers you in the feed. They click your profile. They like what they see.

Now what?

Because their phone rings. Their kid needs something. A Slack message pops up. They close LinkedIn.

Tomorrow they vaguely remember that they saw “some interesting woman who did something with marketing.”

Fantastic.

Give people somewhere to go while you still have their attention.

I’d also account for different levels of buying intent. Someone who met you 90 seconds ago may not be ready to book a €5,000 engagement. That’s where a useful newsletter, assessment or quiz can earn the next interaction.

Personally, I’m much less excited about another downloadable PDF called 17 Secrets to Whatever. We’ve all downloaded enough PDFs to populate a small digital landfill.

I’d rather give someone something interactive that produces an immediate result.

The point is to continue the relationship outside your profile.

Make LinkedIn and Substack one engine

Hristo’s experience with Substack will probably sound familiar to anyone trying to use more than one platform.

He joined, started posting regularly, got some traction, then stopped. Between LinkedIn, client work and everything else going on in his life, Substack had started to feel like another job.

When he came back, he approached it differently. His goal now is to make LinkedIn and Substack work as “one engine” instead of running two separate content operations.

I’m doing the same thing.

I have zero interest in doubling my workload because I happen to use two platforms.

A LinkedIn post can become the starting point for a deeper Substack article. A Substack article can turn into LinkedIn posts, Notes, clips and comments. This live ran on both platforms. Now the same conversation is becoming a video, this article and several shorter pieces.

LinkedIn also gives you an obvious bridge between the two: your Featured section.

Put your Substack publication there with a strong thumbnail. Someone discovers you through a post or comment, checks your profile, then has an easy way to join your newsletter. The traffic can move the other way too. I’m already getting LinkedIn connection requests from people who tell me they found me on Substack.

This is why I’m not very interested in debates about whether LinkedIn or Substack is the better platform.

They are different yet complimentary.

LinkedIn is very good at discovery. Substack gives people somewhere to spend more time with your ideas and, importantly, gives you a direct relationship with readers through email.

Use them together and reuse the work.

The article you’re reading is a pretty good example. It will live on both LinkedIn and Substack, came from one live conversation, and will produce several more pieces of content before I’m finished with it.

One conversation. Maximum mileage.

AI made mediocre design incredibly cheap

This part of the conversation became especially interesting because Hristo has watched AI affect his own profession.

His old infographic niche has been heavily disrupted. Ten years ago, if you wanted certain kinds of graphics, you needed someone who knew how to design them. Today you can generate piles of graphics almost instantly.

And for plenty of situations, “good enough” really is good enough.

The problem comes when everybody uses the same tools to produce the same look.

Hristo described AI-generated images as “the new stock images.”

He’s seeing the same fatigue with AI graphics that we’re already seeing with generic AI writing.

I think he’s right.

LinkedIn right now can look like Las Vegas met Los Angeles and they decided to build a Canva template together.

Too many fonts. Too many colors. Too many icons. Every centimeter fighting for your attention. Apparently white space has committed a crime and is no longer allowed.

Hristo pointed out that premium brands tend to go in the opposite direction: cleaner design, more restraint, more space.

That’s where professional design becomes more valuable, not less.

The availability of cheap design doesn’t eliminate the premium end of the market.

It makes the difference easier to see.

Good design is an amplifier

This was probably my favorite way Hristo described his work.

Good design is an amplifier.

A redesigned LinkedIn profile isn’t going to rescue a bad offer.

You cannot redo your banner, disappear for twelve months and then complain that LinkedIn failed to send clients.

Hristo was very clear about that. If you already have experience, an offer, a product, leads and activity behind the profile, stronger design can amplify what’s already there. Consistent colors and fonts also build recognition over time; he’s deliberately kept his own visual identity consistent so people can recognize his content while scrolling.

I’ve seen businesses spend enormous amounts on visual identity systems while ignoring the fact that their positioning is boring, interchangeable or confusing.

A beautiful beige website cannot save you from sounding exactly like everyone else.

Design and positioning have to work together.

So when should you stop DIYing?

I wouldn’t tell a brand-new freelancer with no customers to spend thousands on a giant brand package before they’ve proved anyone wants what they sell.

Use Canva. Test things. Change your mind. Make some ugly stuff.

But keep an eye on the point where your business has moved forward and your presentation hasn’t.

If you have real expertise, a defined offer, proof that you can deliver, and you’re asking people to trust you with meaningful amounts of money, DIY starts getting expensive when it makes your business look amateur.

That cost won’t arrive as an invoice.

It shows up in the person who clicks your profile and leaves.

The prospect who can’t immediately figure out what you do.

The potential client comparing you with someone whose business looks substantially more established.

The visitor who likes your work but has nowhere obvious to click next.

The years you spend becoming excellent at something while your public presence continues underselling you.

You’ve already done the hard part.

Make sure people can see it.

Watch the full conversation with Hristo Butchvarov

Stay In Touch

Follow Hristo:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hristo-butchvarov

Substack: https://substack.com/@hristobutchvarov

Website:

https://hristobutchvarov.vercel.app/#Hero

Follow Krista / FU Money Plan:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristamollion

Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/unignorablebrands

FU Money Plan: https://unignorablebrands.co/start-here

If you’re building a personal brand, growing on LinkedIn, selling expertise, or trying to make your online presence match the quality of your actual work, this conversation is for you.

Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed this conversation.

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The internet is full of books, courses, templates, apps, and now AI tools promising to help you “10x your productivity” and get more done. You can build an elaborate Notion dashboard, color-code your calendar, automate your task list, and have AI plan your entire week. None of it helps very much if you are getting extremely efficient at doing work that should not be taking up your time in the first place.

You can be incredibly organized and still get very little return on your time. You can finish twenty things in a day and have almost nothing meaningful to show for it. You can even become more productive and accidentally create more capacity for work you never needed to be doing.

That is why I think most time-management advice starts in the wrong place. The first question should not be, How do I get more done? It should be: Who owns your time?

What Are All Those Hours Building?

Because the problem usually isn’t that you can’t fit enough into the day. It’s that work has quietly expanded to take more of your life than you realize.

If you work eight hours a day, work already takes roughly half of your waking hours. And that’s assuming it actually stops at eight. It doesn’t include checking email after dinner, thinking about a client while you’re making coffee, commuting, preparing for tomorrow, Slack, DMs, admin, or the twenty-minute task that somehow ate ninety.

All of that counts.

So before you try to squeeze more productivity out of those hours, I think there is a much more useful question:

What are all of those hours actually building?

If your job disappeared tomorrow, what would still belong to you? If your biggest client walked away, what would remain? If you stopped working for a month, would everything stop earning too?

That’s where time management becomes an FU Money problem.

So I Wrote a Book About It

If this were an easy problem to solve, and I’d already found a system that solved it, I probably wouldn’t have written an entire book about it, would I?

I’ve read the big productivity and time-management books. I’ve tried the systems, the tools, the apps, the templates. And I still hadn’t found anything that really addressed the problem I kept running into: how do you decide what is actually worth doing when nobody else is structuring your time for you?

Nine years as a solopreneur — especially one with ADHD — and a mother of four forced me to completely rethink how I work.

When you have a 9-to-5, a lot of the structure is built for you. Someone decides when you work, where you work, what your priorities are, which meetings you attend, what deadlines you have, and usually what success looks like.

Once you work for yourself, all of that disappears.

Now you have to decide what to work on, when to work on it, what not to work on, how much time something deserves, when something is finished, and whether any of it is actually moving the business forward.

Add to that a family, a life outside of work, house to take care of, meals to cook, homework to help the kids with, and a spouse to spend quality time with, and time gets stretched real thin real fast.

After managing a team and consulting for a large part of the past nine years, I’ve seen the same problem over and over again. Time management is an issue. No one is sitting around wondering what they should do. They usually know.

Actually getting the right things done is the hard part.

So I wrote the book I couldn’t find.

Not a short one, either. 125 pages.

The Time Is Money System is my attempt to rethink productivity and time management for people who have to create the structure themselves — entrepreneurs, consultants, freelancers, and anyone building something outside a traditional job.

The Time Is Money System — Book 2 in the FU Money Plan series

GET BOOK 2

What’s Actually Inside the Book?

This is not a book about waking up at 5 a.m., taking a sauna and a cold plunge, drinking wheatgrass juice, and meditating before the rest of the world wakes up. If that’s your thing, fantastic.

This book is about what happens after you sit down to work.

It’s about figuring out what your time is actually worth — and then using it accordingly.

I start with the idea that time is capital. You only get so much of it, so the question isn’t simply whether you were productive today. It’s whether the hours you spent are building anything that makes your future easier, more profitable, or less dependent on your continued labor.

From there, I get very practical.

Inside the book, I walk through:

• the five jobs your work can have: Earn, Sell, Build, Operate, and Learn

• how to tell whether your work is actually compounding into income, assets, reputation, relationships, or future opportunities

• why making good money can still leave you completely dependent on your time

• how perfectionism, DIY syndrome, constant restarting, endless learning, and disguised busywork quietly eat enormous amounts of your life

• how to look at your work mix and decide whether your time is going where you actually want it to go

• why time, energy, and focus have to be managed together

• how to protect the parts of your life that work is not allowed to consume

• how to find your time leaks and decide what deserves space on your calendar

• when to delegate, automate, eliminate, or simply pay someone else

• how to start building revenue that can grow without requiring an equal increase in your hours

And at the end, you build your own FU Time Plan around the life, work, and income you’re actually trying to create.

Because the goal isn’t to become better at cramming more work into every available hour.

It’s to get much more deliberate about what gets your hours in the first place.

If You Want To Stop Feeling Behind or Stretched Thin, Get the Book

You do not need another productivity app.

You probably don’t need another prettier calendar, either.

You need to get much clearer about what deserves your time, what doesn’t, and what all those hours are actually building.

That’s what The Time Is Money System is for.

GET THE TIME IS MONEY SYSTEM

Paid FU Money Plan subscribers get $10 off.

Want to See the System First?

I originally created a 20-minute version of this training as a bonus for the founding FU Money Plan cohort.

It walks through some of the core ideas from the book, including the five jobs your work can have — Earn, Sell, Build, Operate, and Learn — and how I think about allocating time when nobody else is structuring the workday for you.

Paid subscribers can watch the full training below. 👇

Approx. 20 minutes

Read more

I spent 18 years working in B2B tech in Silicon Valley, from 2000 to 2018.

I loved the work. I was ambitious, competitive and wanted to move up. But becoming a mother changed the way I was treated at work in ways I hadn’t fully expected.

The strange thing was that having children seemed to work in opposite directions for men and women. A man became a father and could look more stable, responsible and established. A woman became a mother and suddenly people started wondering whether she was still serious about her career.

I saw that difference up close.

Despite being married, I was afraid to tell my boss I was pregnant because I didn’t want it to negatively impact my career. So I didn’t say anything until I was five months along.

When I finally told my boss

The company had more than 7,000 employees at the time, and I found out there wasn’t even an official maternity leave policy in place.

When I asked HR why not, they said:

“Well, we haven’t really needed one yet.”

That was 2002.

When I finally told my boss I was pregnant, she gave me a tight-lipped smile and said:

“I thought you wanted me to help fast-track you for management, but looks like your plans have changed. Congratulations.”

The irony was that, at more than seven months pregnant, I pulled an all-nighter at work because a new software build had run into serious technical problems.

I eventually went home, slept for a couple of hours, and came straight back.

Whatever anyone thought about my pregnancy, I definitely wasn’t slacking on the job.

The thing is, I actually liked my boss.

She was a nice person and, for the most part, a good manager. I don’t think she was trying to make my life difficult. Looking back, I think she simply had no idea how to handle a situation like this.

And honestly, I’m not sure the company gave her much help.

This was a company with more than 7,000 employees that didn’t even have an official maternity leave policy. So what kind of training were managers getting on pregnancy, maternity leave, breastfeeding, sick children, or helping someone return to work after having a baby?

Probably not much.

That’s what makes this bigger than one manager. She was trying to manage a situation the company itself didn’t seem prepared for.

Returning to work

After my short, unpaid California maternity leave, I came back to work determined to prove that nothing had changed.

Almost immediately, I was told not to expect any “special favors.”

If my child was sick, I needed to take the entire day off. Working from home next to a sick child was considered “vacation time.”

I was also breastfeeding, which meant I needed to pump during the workday.

I was told I could use a utility closet.

My boss would regularly circle around my cubicle while I was gone. I can only assume she was making sure I hadn’t decided to disappear in there for a luxurious nap.

So I rushed.

Pump. Clean everything up. Get back to my desk.

A lot of days I barely ate lunch because pumping had essentially become my break.

I remember one day heading toward the elevator when my boss stopped me and asked why I was going home so early.

I said, “I’m not going home. I just need to get outside for ten minutes. I haven’t had fresh air or a real lunch break in months.”

There were physical realities too

Coming back to work also meant dealing with things that had nothing to do with how ambitious or committed I was.

I was exhausted because I had been up with the baby all night.

I kept extra clothes at work because sometimes I leaked through my shirt.

Pregnancy and breastfeeding had changed my body dramatically, and I dealt with men staring at my chest even though I was wearing completely normal clothes.

Sometimes simply thinking about my baby could trigger my milk to let down.

A father could sit at his desk and miss his child.

My body could physically remind me that mine needed me.

And then I still had to clean myself up, walk into the next meeting and perform my job exactly as expected.

That’s the part I think a lot of workplace conversations missed. Having a baby didn’t just add something to my calendar. My body had gone through a massive physical change, I was caring for a newborn at night, and then I was expected to walk back into work as though none of that existed.

The same family looked different on a man

My boss’s boss was a friendly man who took an interest in mentoring me.

When he saw me after maternity leave, he joked:

“I’m so glad you came back.”

I think he meant it warmly. He liked working with me and wanted me there.

But just imagine: would he ever have said that to a man who had just had a baby?

His office was filled with photos of his five children and his stay-at-home wife.

He could have five children and keep climbing.

I had one child, and suddenly it felt like management was questioning whether I even wanted a career anymore.

That contrast stayed with me because you saw versions of it everywhere.

Men talked openly about their children. They kept framed photos on their desks. Becoming a father could make a man look more stable, more responsible, even more established. He had a family to support.

Motherhood often triggered a completely different set of assumptions.

Will she need more flexibility?

Will she be distracted?

Will she turn down the promotion?

Will she eventually leave?

And those assumptions affect careers. They influence who gets mentored, who gets trusted, who gets stretched, who gets promoted, and who gets watched more closely.

That was the real double standard. The same life event could strengthen a man’s professional image and weaken a woman’s.

There was a networking cost too

Being a woman also changed how I built relationships at work.

If a male executive wanted to mentor me, or I was working closely with a male client, I had to think about things men working with other men probably never had to consider.

Are we going to end up alone somewhere late at night?

Is the office door closed?

Is this dinner getting too late?

Is he interpreting this relationship differently than I am?

At conferences, it could get even more awkward.

I was hit on. I was propositioned. I was invited into situations that had absolutely nothing to do with business.

Meanwhile, the men could go out drinking together, keep talking shop, and build relationships.

Sometimes I went back to my hotel room instead.

And that has a career cost.

From 9 to 5 to 24/7

The other thing nobody really acknowledged was that my life had essentially doubled.

At work, I was still expected to show up as the same employee I had been nine months earlier. Same energy. Same output. Same availability.

But my day looked nothing like it had before.

I was usually up between 5:00 and 5:30 in the morning to feed the baby. If he went back to sleep, I’d use that little window to exercise in the living room, do my Kegels and try to rebuild a body that had just gone through pregnancy and childbirth.

Then shower. Get dressed for work. Pack my breast pump, bottles and cooling bags. Pack the diaper bag. Make sure the baby had everything he needed for daycare. Get my own food together.

All of that happened before about 7:30 in the morning.

I had used public transportation before having a baby, but suddenly I needed a car because now I was commuting with a baby, a car seat, daycare supplies and pumping equipment.

Funny story: a single male colleague ended up carpooling with me and the baby. We used to laugh about the baby seat permanently installed in his car and what his friends must think. He got half the gas money, I got help with the commute, and we actually had a lot of fun driving together.

Then I’d drop the baby at daycare and go do a full workday.

At the end of that workday, the second one started.

Pick up the baby. Drive home. Take him for a walk. Dinner. Bath. Story. Bedtime.

Then I’d often open the company laptop again and finish whatever I hadn’t managed to get done during the day.

And, yes, I still had a husband in all of this. If we were lucky, there was a little bit of time left for each other before bed.

Then repeat.

There was food to prepare too. Breastfeeding made me ravenously hungry, while at the same time I felt enormous pressure to lose the baby weight. So I was batch cooking, packing lunches and making salads late at night, constantly caught between wanting to eat everything in sight and wanting my old body back.

And the next morning, 5:00 or 5:30, it started again.

What I find strange looking back is how little acknowledgment there was that anything had changed.

At work, you were just supposed to carry on. Be the same person. Keep up. Don’t ask for too much flexibility. Don’t look tired. Don’t let motherhood interfere.

Except you weren’t the same person.

You were somebody’s mother now.

Your body had changed. Your sleep had changed. Your mornings had changed. Your evenings had disappeared. Your relationship had changed. There was another human being whose survival literally depended on you.

And there wasn’t much space to talk about any of it.

The other working mothers were mostly doing exactly what I was doing: trying to get through the day.

And I often found it difficult to relate to stay-at-home mothers because our days looked so completely different.

Maybe the stay-at-home moms had more opportunity to support one another.

The working moms were just too damn tired.

Mostly, we shuffled along and figured it out ourselves.

The women who stay play by the rules

I watched talented women make very different choices once marriage and children entered the picture.

Some got married and left the workforce as soon as they could. Others stayed, but many became incredibly tough.

Some of the hardest managers I ever worked for were women. At the time, I often experienced that as coldness.

Now I think it was something different.

It was survival.

Because the women who stay learn very quickly what the workplace rewards.

Don’t show too much emotion. Don’t ask for too much flexibility. Don’t look overwhelmed. Don’t let family interfere. And never give anyone a reason to question whether you’re committed.

Femininity can be useful strategically. Charm helps. Looking attractive can help. A little warmth can go a long way politically.

In the workplaces I knew, the traits rewarded at the top were still largely the ones traditionally coded as masculine: toughness, control, detachment, decisiveness, the ability to make difficult calls without appearing affected by them.

Look feminine.

Act like one of the boys.

That’s the game.

And if that’s how you learned to survive and move up, of course you’re more likely to expect the women coming behind you to play by the same rules.

We were all women, but we weren’t necessarily having the same experience.

I don’t remember much sisterly solidarity in those environments. Everyone was dealing with her own version of the problem.

Working mothers were exhausted. Women without children were busy proving themselves. Women who had already made it into management had often done so by adapting to a workplace that wasn’t particularly interested in making room for caregiving.

So women make different choices.

Some leave. Some reduce their hours. Some change careers. Some decide they’d rather work for themselves.

And the women who stay?

They learn the rules. And they play by them.

Eventually, I left too

By the time I was pregnant with my second child, I sat down and did the math.

And the math just didn’t math.

Daycare for two kids. The commute. My salary. The constant logistics required just to get everyone where they needed to be every day.

And I knew it was only going to get more complicated. School schedules. Activities. Doctor appointments. Sick days. Holidays. Pickups. Somebody had to manage all of that.

Then I looked at what moving up in my career would require.

More responsibility meant more hours. More hours meant less time with my kids.

And I remember thinking: then why the hell did I have them?

But I didn’t want to stop working.

I didn’t become a stay-at-home mom.

I left corporate. I didn’t leave my career.

I joined a B2B agency working with tech companies in Silicon Valley. I was still doing serious work, still earning money and still building my career. I was just looking for a way to do it that gave me more control over my life.

That eventually led me further into entrepreneurship.

I could work from home when I needed to. I could research, make sales calls, do cold outreach and build something from my computer. I could arrange childcare when I needed to pitch a client or attend a networking event instead of handing over most of my week by default.

Eventually I had an office and employees, but I still controlled my time. I could pick up my kids, go to school events, volunteer in the middle of the day, and rearrange things when one of them needed me.

It wasn’t perfect. Running a business while raising children came with an entirely different set of headaches.

But it worked.

And more importantly, it gave me control.

I didn’t call it an FU Money Plan then

I didn’t have a name for any of this at the time.

I just knew I needed more control.

I still wanted to earn money. I still wanted a career. I still wanted to be ambitious. But I didn’t want one employer or one rigid way of working to decide how much of my children’s lives I was allowed to be part of.

Looking back, that was probably my first FU Money decision.

FU Money, at least the way I think about it now, isn’t about becoming rich enough to never work again. It’s about having enough income, skills and options that you can look at a situation that no longer works for you and say, I need another way.

That’s what I did.

I left corporate, but I didn’t leave my career. I kept working in B2B tech, eventually built my own company, and created a way of working that gave me considerably more control over my time.

Thank God it worked.

I also know entrepreneurship isn’t an answer for everyone. Women shouldn’t have to start businesses just to make motherhood and meaningful work coexist.

But that experience is a big part of why I care about FU Money today.

I know what it feels like when the math stops working and you realize you need more options.

This is part of why women leave

I’m not telling this story because I’m bitter. I had a good career, worked with some wonderful people and had opportunities I’m genuinely grateful for.

I’m telling it because I think we still underestimate what happens when women eventually sit down and calculate whether the whole setup makes sense.

That’s what I did when I was pregnant with my second child.

Two kids in daycare. The commute. My salary. The logistics. And if I wanted to keep climbing, I would need to work even more hours and spend even less time with my children.

At some point, the math just stopped working.

I didn’t stop caring about my career. I left corporate and kept working in B2B tech. Eventually, I built my own company and created a way of working that gave me more control over my time.

Looking back, that was probably the beginning of what I now call FU Money Plan.

I didn’t need enough money to never work again. I needed skills, income and options so that when one way of working stopped making sense, I could choose another.

A lot of women eventually make some version of that calculation. Money matters, but so do childcare, time, flexibility, career upside and how much of your children’s lives you’re willing to miss to keep moving up.

So before we ask why women leave, I think we should ask a better question:

What made staying stop making sense?

Maybe the least we can do is stop treating motherhood as evidence that a woman is less serious about her career.

The truth is, the name I had in the back of my mind all along was FU Money Plan. I hesitated because I worried people would focus on the name instead of the idea. Eventually I decided to stop tiptoeing around it and just use the name I actually wanted.

At first, I planned to keep FU Money Plan separate from my existing business. Then last week I changed my LinkedIn profile completely and went all in.

Scary? A little. Exciting? Very.

From the outside, it probably looked like a sudden pivot. It wasn’t. This has really been nine years in the making.

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At 38, I found myself unemployable.

I had spent years in marketing, become CMO and co-owner of an eight-figure agency, and worked with brands including Apple, HP, Google, Samsung, and Sephora.

Then my life changed. I got divorced, sold my shares in the agency, and decided the responsible thing was to find a full-time job.

I took the search seriously. I hired three career coaches, rewrote my résumé, learned LinkedIn, networked constantly, went to events and coffee meetings, and submitted more than 200 applications.

I still couldn’t get hired.

That period did a number on my confidence, but it taught me something I hadn’t understood before: a surprising amount of my professional reputation had been attached to my title, my agency and the companies I worked with.

I was reminded of that recently when I wrote about a moment six weeks after leaving my CMO title, when someone who used to take my calls immediately didn’t even recognize my name. That was when I started to understand how much visibility had belonged to the title rather than to me.

When your title disappears, you find out very quickly how much of your professional value actually belongs to you—and for many people, the uncomfortable answer is very little: no IP, no audience, no independent income, nothing that can leave with you.

I had to figure out how to replace my income outside a 9-to-5. Over the years I tested 12 income streams and made six business pivots across consulting, products, courses, communities, fractional work and other experiments.

Some worked. Some were terrible ideas.

An expensive education, basically.

I found my way through it, but I never really stopped thinking about the 38-year-old version of me who had absolutely no idea how any of this was going to work. A mother of four, trying to get through one day at a time. Too young to retire, too many responsibilities to simply stop, and nobody else financially responsible for getting me through it.

And I know I’m not some bizarre edge case.

People hit their own version of that moment every day: a layoff, divorce, burnout, a baby, a major client disappearing, a business changing, a career that felt secure right up until it wasn’t.

The advice I received during those years wasn’t especially useful either:

“Get another job.” “Get remarried.” “Get a real estate license.” “Open an Airbnb.”

Most of us don’t think seriously about having options until we need them immediately. We were raised to believe that the stable paycheck was the safety plan.

Right up until somebody else turns it off.

The Person I Think About Most

Whenever I think about why I’m building FU Money Plan, I think about my mom.

She was a brilliant academic and a world traveler. She wanted to teach English abroad and write children’s books that would be translated into other languages. But eventually she came home, took a job at the post office, and kept telling herself, “One day.”

One day she would travel again. One day she would write the books. One day she would do the things she really wanted to do.

That day never came.

And I was her daughter, watching it happen.

I wrote about her recently on LinkedIn because she is still one of the people I think about most when I think about FU Money. Read the post about my mom. ❤️

She didn’t need some fantasy version of wealth. She needed more choices. More room to say, I’m going to do this now instead of someday.

As a kid, it broke my heart watching her work that hard and still have so few choices. I think that stayed with me more than I realized.

Going back to a full-time job after having a baby because you want to is one thing. Having to go back because there is no financially viable alternative is very different. The same goes for staying in a job you hate, keeping a client you can’t stand, or postponing something you care about because you simply don’t have enough options yet.

That is why FU Money Plan is so personal for me.

I want people—and especially women—to have more ways to earn, more things they own, and more room to make decisions without one paycheck deciding everything.

What FU Money Actually Means

Let me clear up one misconception early.

FU Money does not mean becoming so rich that you never have to work again while you sit on a beach congratulating yourself.

It also doesn’t mean building 11 income streams and somehow working twice as much as you did when you had one job.

And it definitely doesn’t mean rage quitting on Friday and hoping you figure out the money part on Monday.

None of those sound particularly free to me.

My definition is much simpler:

You may still have a job. You may consult. You may have active income and work very hard at something you genuinely enjoy.

The important part is that you have other ways forward.

If the job disappears, you’re not starting from zero. If a client becomes unbearable, losing them doesn’t wreck your finances. If you want to pause, change direction or say no to something, you have enough room to make that decision based on what you want rather than what you desperately need to do for money.

That’s FU Money.

The Most Dangerous Career Number Is One

You can earn $200,000 a year and still be in a surprisingly fragile position if all of it comes from one employer, one major client, one paycheck or one platform.

The more useful question is: what happens if that income disappears tomorrow?

Would it be inconvenient, or would it immediately change every financial decision you make?

We spend a lot of time thinking about how much we earn and not nearly enough thinking about how dependent we are on where it comes from. I wrote a full piece about this recently — The Problem With Building Your Entire Financial Life Around One Job — because a paycheck can look stable right up until the day it isn’t.

And the problem doesn’t magically disappear when you become self-employed. You can leave one employer, start consulting and still be just as exposed if one or two clients account for most of your revenue. Build an online business almost entirely on one platform and you’ve recreated the same risk with a different logo.

The goal of FU Money isn’t necessarily to quit your job or stop doing client work.

The goal is to make sure no single source has too much power over your life.

That’s what I mean by reducing the risk of one.

This is where the idea of a portfolio career becomes useful. I don’t mean collecting five jobs. I mean building a working life around a mix of expertise, reputation, relationships, owned assets, outside opportunities and income, so your livelihood doesn’t rest entirely on one institution.

I wrote much more about this in The New Job Security Is a Career Portfolio. The New Job Security: The Career Portfolio.

You Probably Already Have More Value Than You Think

If you’ve been working for 5, 10, or even 30 years, you’ve probably built up a lot more value than your résumé shows.

I mean the problems you know how to solve, the mistakes you can spot before they happen, and the decisions you can make quickly because you’ve already seen some version of the situation ten times before.

You probably have processes you don’t even think of as processes anymore. Ways of working that feel obvious to you because you’ve been doing them for years.

That’s career capital.

The problem is that most of us build it inside somebody else’s business. We bring our experience, judgment, ideas and relationships to the job, help build the product, team, processes, client relationships or brand, and when we leave, most of what we helped create stays there.

That’s when a lot of senior people have a pretty uncomfortable realization:

I know a hell of a lot. But what, exactly, do I own?

Take the title away and now you have to figure out what people would pay you for outside that company.

For most experienced professionals, there is plenty. Maybe it’s deep knowledge of a market. Maybe you’re unusually good at fixing one very specific problem. Maybe you’ve developed a way of making decisions that saves companies months of trial and error.

Sometimes the valuable part is narrow. Sometimes it’s the weird combination of several things you’ve learned over the years.

Find the part that travels with you.

But there’s another problem: having expertise doesn’t automatically mean the market knows you have it.

I built one of my businesses, The Recognized Founder, around exactly this problem. I call the distance between the reputation you’ve earned and the reputation the market actually sees your Recognition Gap.

That’s also why visibility and demand are part of the FU Money Plan. Once you know what you want to earn, what you want to sell and how you want to work, people still have to know you exist—and understand what they can hire, buy or refer you for.

I wrote much more about that in The Recognition Gap: Why Credible Founders Stay Invisible. The Recognition Gap: Why Credible Founders Stay Invisible.

So What Can You Build That Stays With You?

At first, you’ll probably still need active income. That might come from a job, consulting, advisory work, client projects or some combination of those things.

Active work does two useful jobs: it pays you now, and it shows you what may be worth turning into something you own later.

Because the work is often where your best ideas come from.

You start noticing the same questions people ask you. The same problems you solve. The same process you keep using. The same advice you give over and over. The same things people are willing to pay you for.

Some of those things can eventually become what I call authority assets: things built from your expertise that belong to you and can keep creating value beyond the original piece of work.

A framework. A diagnostic. A methodology. A workshop. A newsletter. A book. A course. A template. A tool. A community. Even a body of ideas people begin associating with your name.

They usually don’t begin as beautifully packaged intellectual property. They grow out of doing the work, noticing what repeats, and gradually turning that knowledge into something you can use more than once.

The Awkward Question: Will Anybody Pay?

Eventually every idea has to survive one fairly brutal test:

Will somebody pay for it?

I recently asked both my LinkedIn and Substack audiences what they were struggling with most, and the same answer came up in both places: finding people who will actually pay.

During the live, people were basically saying, Okay, Krista, enough theory. Where do I find the clients?

Fair question.

But I think people jump to client acquisition too quickly.

Before worrying about where to find buyers, you need to know exactly who needs what you do and what is happening when they finally decide the problem is worth paying to solve.

“Business owners” is too broad. So is “executives” or “women over 40.”

I want to know what’s going wrong, what they’ve already tried, how long they’ve been putting up with it, and why they would spend money on this now instead of six months from now.

Once you know that, marketing gets easier. You’re no longer staring at everyone wondering whether they could somehow become a client.

Your content gets easier too because you can stop trying to be vaguely useful to everybody.

That’s when someone reads something you wrote and thinks, Yes. This is exactly where I am.

I also think people wait far too long to test whether there’s real demand. They build the offer, website, course and funnel first, then finally start talking to buyers.

I’d rather know much earlier.

Maybe the problem isn’t urgent enough. Maybe you’re talking to the wrong person. Maybe they want the result but hate the way you packaged it.

All of that is useful information before you spend six months building.

And a big audience doesn’t automatically fix this. People can follow you, like your posts, subscribe to your newsletter and still never buy anything.

Attention is useful. Demand pays the bills.

At some point, you need evidence that your expertise solves a problem someone cares enough about to spend money on.

What Will It Cost You in Time?

Finding something people will pay for solves one problem. It can create another one pretty quickly.

I’ve seen experienced professionals leave demanding jobs because they want more control, then recreate almost exactly the same situation with clients. Now they have sales calls, delivery calls, proposals, revisions, follow-ups, admin, content and several people who all think their project should come first.

On paper, they have more income streams.

In reality, they’ve built themselves several jobs.

That’s exactly what I don’t want FU Money to become.

If you’re already working hard in a full-time job, I’m not going to tell you to go home and spend every evening building another full-time business.

This is also why I’m cautious about the phrase passive income. A lot of passive income is remarkably active while you’re building it. Sometimes afterward too.

I’m much more interested in leverage: gradually separating at least some of your income from the number of hours you personally have available.

You can still have a job. You can consult. You can do hands-on work you enjoy and get paid well for it.

I just don’t want every new dollar to require another completely new chunk of your time.

Because if building more income takes every evening, every weekend and all of your mental space, I’m not convinced you’ve improved your life very much.

More money at the expense of your entire life is a lousy FU Money Plan.

That’s FU Money

The name is cheeky. The idea behind it is practical.

You may stay in your job because you like it. You may leave. You may turn down the client who looks like trouble, take a break, change direction or give yourself time to work out what comes next.

Savings and investments matter. So does income. But I don’t think FU Money is simply a magic number sitting in an account somewhere.

I want to know that if one source disappears, I have another way to earn. That I know what people will pay me for. That I’ve built some things I can take with me. And that not every new dollar requires another hour of my life.

Most of us spend decades creating value for companies and clients.

Eventually it’s worth asking:

How much of what I’m building actually stays with me?

FU Money means having more than one way forward—and enough control that one job, client, platform or paycheck doesn’t get to make every decision for you.

And yes, someday it may give you the ability to tell someone to F off.

Hopefully you won’t need to use it very often.

Prefer to watch?

I recently went live for about 25 minutes to explain what I mean by FU Money, why depending on one source of income is so risky, and how I think about turning what you already know into income and assets without creating another job for yourself.

If you’d rather hear me talk it through, watch the full conversation here. 👇

How Much FU Money Do You Actually Have?

If you’re reading this wondering where you stand, take the free FU Money Assessment.

It will show you where you’re most dependent today and what you may want to strengthen first.

TAKE THE FREE FU MONEY ASSESSMENT →

https://unignorablebrands.co/assessment-signup

Want Help Building Your FU Money Plan?

This is the problem I built the FU Money Plan cohort to solve.

Over four weeks, we’ll look at what you already know, where you’re too dependent, what people may actually pay you for, and which income or business models fit the way you want to work.

I deliberately kept it practical. No library of 47 videos. No pile of worksheets you feel guilty about falling behind on. Just 4 steps.

Each week has one main question to work through, followed by a live session where we make decisions and keep moving.

By the end, you should have a clear plan for the next 12 months: what to monetize, who it’s for, what kind of offer or asset makes sense, and what you can safely stop wasting time on.

Find out more at FUMoneyPlan.com.

If you’ve spent years building expertise and know there’s more you could do with it, but you don’t want to lose another year building the wrong thing, that’s exactly the problem we’ll work through.

I want you to make more money without giving up more of your life.

Otherwise, we’ve just created another job.

About Krista

Krista Mollion is the founder of FU Money Plan. She’s a former CMO and co-owner of an eight-figure agency who has spent more than 20 years building brands and businesses, working with companies including Apple, HP, Sephora and Samsung.

She has tested 12 income streams and made six business pivots across consulting, services, products, courses, communities and fractional work. FU Money Plan grew out of what she learned along the way: how to turn experience into income, IP and assets you own without simply building yourself another job.

Follow Krista on LinkedIn and subscribe to FU Money Plan on Substack for more on building income, ownership and options without giving up your life to do it.

Questions? Send me a DM or email to hello (at)unignorablebrands.co

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Personal finance loves a clean formula.

Earn money. Spend less than you earn. Pay off expensive debt. Save three to six months of expenses. Automatically invest part of every paycheck. Keep doing that for a few decades and let compounding take care of the rest.

There is a lot of good advice in there.

I save. I invest. I think having cash available for emergencies is incredibly important. I don’t have some new theory in which compound interest has suddenly stopped working.

But there is one line missing from the top of the spreadsheet:

Keep the income coming in.

I started thinking about this after seeing two financial posts within a few hours of each other.

One said that a person earning $100,000 and spending $95,000 could remain broke, while someone earning $70,000 and spending $45,000 could build wealth.

Another described financial freedom as paid-off credit cards, six months of expenses in the bank, automatic investing and enough savings to leave a job you hate.

I understand both arguments.

My immediate reaction was still: And then what happens?

Because all of this works beautifully while the income continues arriving.

Life has a fairly irritating habit of getting involved.

We’ve been giving people versions of the same advice for a very long time

This isn’t some new TikTok trend.

A Richest Man in Babylon was telling people a century ago to keep a portion of what they earned and put it to work. The famous principle was essentially: save part of your earnings, then make those savings earn more money.

Fast-forward to today and the language changes more than the underlying mechanics.

Dave Ramsey’s Baby Steps tell people to eliminate debt, build an emergency fund covering three to six months of expenses and then invest 15% of household income for retirement. Ramsey Solutions explicitly calls income your “best wealth-building tool.”

Ramit Sethi’s Conscious Spending Plan is considerably less obsessed with deprivation, but it still begins with take-home pay. The plan allocates that money among fixed costs, investments, savings and guilt-free spending.

Tori Dunlap’s Her First $100k teaches women to build an emergency fund, manage debt and invest. She has talked openly about automatically transferring a percentage of each paycheck into savings while building her first $100,000.

These aren’t identical philosophies. Some of these people also talk about earning more, negotiating, entrepreneurship and other ways to increase income.

And I’m not arguing that their basic financial advice is bad.

I’m arguing that most of our personal-finance machinery still starts at roughly the same place:

Money comes in first. Then we decide what to do with it.

That’s completely logical.

It also means there is a part of wealth building we don’t discuss nearly enough: what happens during the years when less money comes in—or none does.

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The gap isn’t wealth

Let’s go back to that $100,000 example.

If I earn $100,000 and spend $70,000, I’ve created $30,000 of surplus capital.

That is useful. Very useful.

But the $30,000 gap itself isn’t wealth creation.

If I leave it sitting in cash indefinitely, I’ve accumulated savings. If I use some of it to buy or build assets that can appreciate or produce income, now I’ve begun using that surplus to build wealth.

Traditional investing advice understands this perfectly well. “Invest the rest” is basically the point.

The vulnerability appears on the way there.

You need enough income above your current expenses to generate surplus capital. Then you need enough uninterrupted time for those contributions and their returns to become substantial.

And a lot can happen between age 25 and age 65.

Money is boring. Life isn’t.

Imagine you’ve done everything properly.

You paid off the credit card.

You have six months of expenses in savings.

Your investment contributions happen automatically.

Then you’re fired or laid off.

In August 2026, the median duration of unemployment in the United States was 11.4 weeks. But almost 1.93 million unemployed people had already been out of work for at least 27 weeks—roughly six months or longer. That represented 27% of unemployed people.

Six months is not some bizarre disaster scenario.

And if your emergency fund contains six months of expenses and your job search lasts seven, eight or nine months, something fairly predictable starts happening.

First your investment contributions stop.

Then your savings stop growing.

Eventually you begin spending the savings.

Maybe the credit card comes back out.

The wealth-building machine hasn’t merely slowed down. Depending on how long the interruption lasts, it can start running backward.

And layoffs are only one way this happens.

You have a baby and decide to stay home for a while.

You have a baby and discover that childcare costs make staying home the only sensible option.

You get sick.

Your spouse gets sick.

One of your children needs additional care.

Your father has a stroke.

Your mother develops dementia.

You decide at 35 that you hate the career you chose at 21 and go back to school.

You burn out.

You move countries.

You start over after a divorce.

You leave employment to try self-employment and discover that revenue takes considerably longer to arrive than the people on Instagram suggested.

None of these situations is particularly exotic.

Apparently the spreadsheet has never met a toddler, a corporate restructuring or an American insurance company.

Women run into this problem earlier and more often

This is where the clean version of wealth-building starts bothering me.

Because interruptions are not distributed equally.

In 2025, 68% of mothers with children under six participated in the U.S. labor force. Among fathers with children under six, the rate was 95.3%.

For a lot of mothers, the math stops working

Women are already starting from behind financially.

Among full-time, year-round U.S. workers, women’s median earnings were 80.9% of men’s in 2024, down from 82.7% in 2023. That was the second consecutive year the female-to-male earnings ratio declined after decades of gradual improvement.

Then you have a child.

Now add childcare. The national average price of childcare reached $13,184 per child in 2025. For two children in center-based care, the cost was higher than median rent in every one of the 47 states with available data, and higher than typical mortgage payments in 39 of them.

And childcare is only part of the equation. Going back to an office can mean commuting, gas, parking, work clothes, lunches, backup care when a child is sick, after-school care, summer care and all the logistical gymnastics required to make a traditional workday fit around a school day that ends several hours earlier.

Then there is flexibility. Research consistently finds that it matters enormously to mothers with young children. In one large workplace study, 38% of mothers with young children said they would have had to leave their company or reduce their hours without workplace flexibility. BLS research has also found a strong relationship between remote or hybrid work arrangements and mothers remaining employed.

So imagine a two-income household where the woman earns less, which is still statistically common. She returns to work, but a substantial portion of that second paycheck now goes toward childcare and the costs of enabling her to work in the first place.

With two young children, the calculation can become brutal.

From a short-term household-budget perspective, somebody looks at the spreadsheet and says: Why are we doing this?

And because the woman is more often the lower earner, she is more likely to be the person whose job gets treated as optional.

There is a cruel financial irony here. Leaving work may make perfect sense for the household today, while making the woman—and the household—more financially vulnerable over time.

She loses current income, retirement contributions, raises, promotions and years of compounding. Re-entering later can be difficult. Research on the motherhood penalty finds that women’s earnings and employment can fall substantially after childbirth, while fathers’ earnings trajectories do not show the same pattern.

And now the family has gone from two paychecks to one.

Four people may suddenly be depending on one employer continuing to employ one person.

Which takes us straight back to the problem at the center of this article: we’ve built a wealth model that becomes more fragile precisely when life becomes more complicated.

That last part is the payoff. It connects this section directly back to your thesis instead of turning it into a separate essay about gender inequality.

Whatever somebody’s individual reasons for leaving or reducing work—and they vary enormously—that gap has financial consequences.

Every year outside the workforce can mean less current income, fewer retirement contributions, less employer matching, fewer raises and fewer years for invested money to compound.

Then caregiving enters the picture.

AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving estimate that 63 million Americans are family caregivers—about one in four adults. Nearly half reported at least one major financial effect from caregiving, such as taking on debt, stopping savings or struggling with basic expenses.

The newer numbers on the sandwich generation are even more interesting. Nearly 17 million Americans are simultaneously raising children and caring for an adult with a serious medical condition or disability. Sixty-seven percent reported some form of work disruption because of caregiving.

These aren’t people who forgot to automate their Roth IRA.

Their lives changed.

Some people also start with much less room between income and expenses

There is another problem with making “the gap” the hero of the wealth story.

Not everyone has the same ability to create one.

Among full-time U.S. wage and salary workers in the second quarter of 2026, women’s median weekly earnings were $1,131 compared with $1,380 for men. Median weekly earnings were $1,029 for Black workers, $997 for Hispanic workers, $1,268 for White workers and $1,713 for Asian workers. Those figures describe medians; they don’t explain the causes behind the differences. But they do show that people enter the save-and-invest equation with very different amounts of income.

Employment risk isn’t distributed evenly either. In August 2026, the unemployment rate was 3.7% for White Americans, 6.0% for Black Americans and 4.8% for Hispanic Americans.

People with disabilities face an even larger divide. In 2025, their unemployment rate was 8.3%, compared with 4.1% for people without disabilities. Employment rates differ sharply too, partly because the disabled population is older, although BLS reports that people with disabilities were less likely to be employed across all age groups.

So when we hand everybody the same formula—

earn, save, invest, repeat—

we shouldn’t be surprised that people have very different experiences following it.

Someone earning less has less surplus to invest.

Someone leaving the workforce for two years loses two years of contributions.

Someone repeatedly moving in and out of employment may have to spend the emergency fund they just finished building.

Someone caring for a parent may be choosing between maximizing a 401(k) and reducing their work hours because Dad cannot get himself into the shower anymore.

“Just keep investing 15%” becomes considerably less useful advice at that point.

The traditional plan covers part of the problem

I still want the emergency fund, the retirement account, and the diversified investments compounding quietly in the background.

Please don’t read this article, cancel your 401(k) and launch a Canva template shop.

What I want is more than one mechanism supporting my financial future.

Because if the entire accumulation phase depends on my ability to sell my labor to one employer for the next few decades, I have a major point of failure. Losing that job doesn’t just interrupt the plan. It can send your entire financial life into a black hole.

The career ladder wasn’t entirely imaginary

We tend to romanticize the old working world as if everyone joined IBM at 22, got a gold watch at 65 and never changed employers. That wasn’t really true. Late baby boomers born between 1957 and 1964 held an average of 12.9 jobs between ages 18 and 58, although nearly half of those jobs were concentrated in their early working years.

What was different was what happened once people got established. Long tenure with one employer was much more common among older workers, particularly men. In 1983, the typical employed man aged 55–64 had been with his current employer for 15.3 years. By 2000 that had fallen to 10.2 years. Among men aged 45–54, median tenure fell from 12.8 years to 9.5 years over the same period. In 2024, median tenure for men aged 45–54 was down to 7.5 years.

The financial system was also built to reward staying put. In 1975, about 39% of private wage and salary workers were covered by a primary defined-benefit pension, the old-fashioned pension where the employer promised a retirement benefit based partly on salary and years of service. Only about 6% were primarily covered by a defined-contribution plan. By 2024, only 15% of private-industry workers had access to a defined-benefit plan, while 70% had access to a defined-contribution plan such as a 401(k).

So the old career ladder wasn’t simply about people being more loyal. The system itself gave them more reasons to stay. Longer tenure could mean promotions, salary progression and a pension whose value increased with years of service. The employer wasn’t just where your paycheck came from. It was often where a large chunk of your long-term financial security lived too.

That model has been eroding for decades. The career ladder hasn’t disappeared entirely, but it no longer describes the way a huge number of people actually work.

Maybe you spend five years in a full-time job, freelance for a while, step away to have a child, return in a different industry, consult, take another salaried role, get laid off, and eventually build something of your own.

That’s less of a career ladder and more of a career jungle gym.

In August 2026, nearly one in five Americans ages 25 to 54 wasn’t employed at all. About 4.1 million were unemployed and looking for work, while another 21.8 million were outside the labor force. That second group includes all kinds of lives that don’t fit neatly into a retirement calculator: parents, caregivers, students, people dealing with illness, people taking career breaks and people who have temporarily stopped looking for work.

Even among people who are working, the standard full-time employee model isn’t universal. The Bureau of Labor Statistics found that roughly 10% of employed Americans had an alternative work arrangement as their main job, including nearly 12 million independent contractors, consultants and freelancers.

And our careers themselves aren’t particularly linear. Americans born in the early 1980s had already held an average of 9.4 jobs by age 38.

So when we build an entire theory of wealth around decades of uninterrupted paychecks, we’re designing for a version of working life that a huge number of people simply don’t have.

Maybe you spend five years in a full-time job, freelance for a while, step away to have a child, return in a different industry, consult, take another salaried role, get laid off, and eventually build something of your own.

That doesn’t look like the tidy career ladder many of us were taught to expect.

It looks a lot more like modern life.

So I think our wealth-building model needs to catch up.

I want to decentralize the paycheck

This is a big part of what FU Money Plan means to me.

I don’t want one paycheck carrying the entire load.

I want cash available when things go wrong. I want investments working in the background. I want my fixed expenses low enough that I have room to move. I want skills that remain valuable if an employer stops valuing them.

And I want at least some income to come from things I own.

That last part is where my own thinking has changed the most.

For decades, many professionals spend their working lives building things for somebody else.

We develop frameworks, solve difficult problems, learn an industry, build relationships, understand customers, create processes, write, teach, present, manage and make decisions.

There is often a surprising amount of economic value inside that knowledge.

Yet plenty of people reach 35, 45 or 55 having never asked:

Could any of this earn money without my employer in the middle?

That doesn’t mean everyone should quit and become an entrepreneur.

You don’t need a personal brand with 200,000 followers.

You don’t need to become a seven-figure course creator.

You may not even know what kind of business you’d want yet.

Your first experiment could be considerably smaller.

Maybe somebody pays you $300 to help solve a problem you already know how to solve.

Maybe that becomes a workshop.

Maybe the workshop turns into a repeatable service.

Maybe the service produces a framework.

Maybe the framework eventually becomes a product, book, licensing model, newsletter, software tool or something else entirely.

The first goal isn’t “build a company.”

It’s proving that your paycheck is not the only place money can come from.

For somebody who has spent their entire career receiving money from one employer, that first $500 earned independently can change the way they see their own options.

This is why I’m interested in intellectual property

I have a particular bias toward intellectual property because it lets people turn knowledge they already have into something they can own.

But IP gets romanticized too.

A course nobody buys is not financial freedom.

A PDF sitting in Dropbox is not an asset.

A newsletter nobody reads doesn’t magically compound because you called it a media company.

And replacing dependence on one employer with dependence on one client or one social-media platform isn’t much of an upgrade.

Useful IP needs demand. It needs distribution. It needs some mechanism for turning value into revenue.

Once those pieces exist, though, something interesting happens.

Your work is no longer limited entirely to time spent working today = money received today.

A book can sell more than once. A workshop can be rerun. A framework can be licensed. A product can keep earning without you recreating it every time. Add an audience, a business, and traditional investments, and suddenly your financial life isn’t resting on one source anymore.

My own career cured me of believing the straight line

I didn’t arrive at this because my career went according to plan.

There was a point in my life when I had the kind of résumé I thought should have made employment relatively straightforward.

Then I spent roughly two years trying to get hired.

That was extreme. I’m not suggesting everyone who loses a job will be unemployed for two years.

But it taught me something I haven’t been able to unsee since.

A successful past doesn’t guarantee access to your next paycheck.

Neither does working hard.

Neither does being smart.

Neither does having a good title.

There are parts of our financial lives we control and parts we absolutely do not.

I became much more interested in building the things I could control: the skills and knowledge I carried with me, the relationships and reputation I had built, the audience I could reach, the IP and products I owned, and the investments I was making.

Because if one source of income disappeared, I wanted to know I could create another.

That’s where FU Money Plan came from.

We need a wealth model for people with unpredictable lives

I don’t want to throw out traditional personal-finance advice.

Keep the good stuff.

Pay off expensive debt.

Have cash available.

Invest.

Take the employer match.

Don’t increase your lifestyle every single time your salary goes up.

All sensible.

I simply don’t think that’s enough anymore.

We also need financial planning for the person who takes two years out with a baby.

For the 32-year-old who has been laid off twice in four years.

For the freelancer whose income arrives in strange lumps.

For the person caring for an aging parent.

For somebody managing a disability or chronic illness.

For the employee who wants to retrain.

For the person who knows they need another source of income but has absolutely no idea what they could sell.

For the person who has done everything “right” and discovers that their employer can still eliminate their job on a Tuesday morning.

Those people shouldn’t be excluded from wealth building because their lives don’t fit neatly inside an automatic transfer schedule.

They need a plan that expects change.

That’s how I think about FU Money Plan.

I don’t know what will happen to me ten years from now.

I don’t particularly trust anyone who claims they do.

What I can do is make sure fewer pieces of my financial life depend on any one company, client, platform, investment or source of income continuing to behave exactly as I hoped.

I can keep building assets.

I can keep increasing the number of ways I’m capable of earning.

I can keep turning some of today’s work into things I will still own tomorrow.

And I can keep enough room in my financial life to change direction when actual life requires it.

Because money is boring.

Life isn’t.

Our wealth-building plans should probably account for that.

Thank you for reading.

About Krista

I’ve spent more than 20 years in business and marketing, including building and co-owning an eight-figure agency. Then my career stopped following anything resembling a straight line.

Since then, I’ve gone through six business and career pivots and experimented with roughly 12 different income streams while figuring out a question I became increasingly obsessed with: How do you build a financial life that doesn’t depend on one paycheck?

That work eventually became FU Money Plan.

Today, I write about turning the expertise, experience and career capital you already have into income, intellectual property and assets you own. I recently released The 30-Day FU Money Plan, Book 1, and I’m running the first FU Money Plan cohort, where we’re building 12-month plans for creating more income, ownership and options without simply creating another full-time job for ourselves.

I’m building this in public as I go—the experiments, the numbers, what works, what doesn’t and the occasional expensive mistake.

If that sounds useful, subscribe. Most articles are free.

Subscribe now

I wanted to have him on because his story is a pretty extraordinary example of what can happen when you figure out what you’re good at and turn it into revenue.

FROM $147 TO $10K MONTHS

In his mid-20s, Ayo was a college dropout with a felony conviction, working 12-hour shifts at an electronics factory for about $10 an hour.

He quit after six weeks. Around that period, he has said he was flat broke with just $147 to his name.

He eventually got a job managing a video store, moved into marketing and started writing online.

And then he kept writing.

That decision eventually led him to Medium, where he became the highest-earning writer on the platform for six months in a row and earned at least $10,000 a month for 19 consecutive months.

What makes his story especially interesting to me is what he did next.

He used the audience and expertise he built through writing to create books, courses, a writing community, consulting, coaching and other offers.

Those businesses went on to generate hundreds of thousands of dollars beyond what he earned directly from writing. He eventually left his job to write full-time and says the business he built from his skills and interests has now generated more than $2 million.

Today he writes Monetize Your Mind on Substack and teaches other people how to turn what they know into income.

So when Ayo talks about whether you can actually make money writing online, he has quite a bit of evidence.

FROM AN EIGHT-FIGURE BUSINESS TO STARTING OVER

My story starts at almost the opposite place.

By 30, I had pretty much everything I thought I was supposed to want. I was CMO and co-owner of an eight-figure creative agency, married with three kids, living in San Francisco and making very good money. I’d been working in marketing since I was 20 and assumed I had my career pretty well figured out.

Then at 38, my life blew up.

I got divorced, sold my shares in the agency and liquidated assets. Suddenly I had to figure out how to support myself and my family again, so I did the obvious thing: I tried to get a job.

I hired three career coaches, rewrote my résumé, fixed my LinkedIn profile, networked constantly and applied for more than 200 jobs over two years.

Nobody hired me.

Meanwhile, I was raising four kids, watching my savings disappear and eventually accumulating debt.

So I started making money with what I already knew how to do.

Over the next several years, I tried consulting, services, coaching, courses, communities, digital products and content. I’ve tried 12 different revenue streams and made six pretty major pivots.

Some made a lot of money. Some were complete duds. A few taught me that making good money from something doesn’t mean you want to spend your life doing it.

That’s really where FU Money came from.

I know what it feels like to make a lot of money and still have a life that depends on continuing to work a certain way. I also know what it feels like to suddenly lose most of your financial options.

Now I’m much more interested in helping people build income they have more control over: more than one way to earn, things they own, and assets that can keep producing value after the original work is done.

Which is one reason I wanted to talk to Ayo.

Our stories started in very different places and eventually led us to something similar: figuring out how to take a skill we were good at and build a profitable business around it.

WHEN YOUR MAIN PLATFORM CHANGES THE RULES

Ayo and I had something else in common.

We both spent years putting most of our time and effort into one platform, got very good at it, built large audiences and were rewarded for it.

For Ayo, that platform was Medium.

At his peak, he was the highest-earning writer on Medium for six months straight and getting between 500,000 and one million views a month. For 19 consecutive months, he earned at least $10,000 a month directly from the platform.

He eventually grew to around 120,000 followers and says he made close to $500,000 from Medium altogether.

But Ayo did something smart while all of this was working.

He started building an email list early.

While Medium was sending him traffic, he was also using lead magnets to move readers onto a list he owned. Eventually that list grew into the tens of thousands. He was also writing books and starting to build products.

That turned out to be pretty good timing.

Medium changed how stories were distributed and how writers were paid. Ayo eventually saw his Medium income drop by about 80%.

By then, he had other things to sell and an audience he could reach somewhere else.

My main platform was LinkedIn.

I was part of LinkedIn’s creator program and was named a LinkedIn Top Voice three years in a row. That brought more visibility, credibility and opportunities. I grew my audience to more than 77,000 followers, and at my peak it wasn’t unusual for a post to reach 50,000 to 100,000 people.

That visibility turned into money too. It helped lead to six-figure brand deals, clients and other business opportunities.

So focusing heavily on one platform worked extremely well for both of us.

Then LinkedIn changed too.

Back in 2018, LinkedIn openly said its biggest creators were getting a disproportionate share of attention. It changed the feed and shifted about 8% of the engagement going to the top 0.1% of creators toward the bottom 98%.

And the feed has kept changing ever since.

By 2025, the drop in reach was hard to miss. An analysis of 3 million LinkedIn posts found that median reach had fallen by more than 47% in a single year.

I eventually did my own deep dive into LinkedIn’s newer algorithm because I wanted to understand what had changed.

DIFFERENT ORIGINS, SAME DESTINATION: SUBSTACK

That’s part of what brought me to Substack.

LinkedIn had been very good to me. I built a large audience there, found clients, landed opportunities and saw firsthand how much writing online could change a business.

I had no intention of leaving. I still don’t.

But I had become very aware of how much of my visibility and business depended on decisions I had absolutely no control over.

One week a post could reach 50,000 or 100,000 people. The next week, something just as good could reach a fraction of that.

I didn’t want so much riding on one platform.

So I started exploring Substack.

Part of the appeal was simple: if someone subscribed, I had a much better chance of reaching them again.

I also wanted to see what would happen if writing became part of the business itself instead of mainly being how I marketed everything else.

Ayo had already gone through his own version of this with Medium.

Medium didn’t disappear. LinkedIn didn’t suddenly become useless. We had both simply reached the point where it made sense to build beyond the platform that helped us get there.

When too much of your income, audience or business depends on one company deciding to keep showing your work, you have less control than you think.

If you’re trying to build more income and become less dependent on one employer, client or platform, that’s exactly what I write about here.

Subscribe now

THE 33,000-SUBSCRIBER PROBLEM

Despite coming from different worlds and different platforms, there’s one thing Ayo and I agree on 100%.

If your goal is to build a profitable solo business, relying on Substack subscriptions alone is a very hard way to do it.

Ayo explained it in terms of volume.

Say you charge $10 a month and want to make $10,000 a month. You need 1,000 paying subscribers.

Using Ayo’s assumption of a 3% free-to-paid conversion rate, you’d need roughly 33,000 free subscribers to get there.

That is a hell of a lot of people.

And first you have to find them.

You have to write consistently, publish Notes, promote your work, collaborate, build relationships and keep growing month after month.

Can it work? Obviously. There are people making very good money from paid subscriptions.

Ayo’s point, and mine, is that people seriously underestimate the volume required.

He told me he’s seen Substack accounts with 30,000 subscribers and massively viral posts making around $1,000 a month.

His description of what went wrong was perfect:

They built the attention infrastructure without the business infrastructure underneath it.

And before the diehard writers come for us, neither of us is saying you shouldn’t have a paid tier.

Ayo literally said, “Keep your paid tier. It’s fine.”

If your dream is to write all day and you’re delighted that people will pay you to do it, fantastic. Life does not have to be one giant ROI calculation.

But if you came here because you want to build a serious source of income, you should understand the math before deciding subscriptions are going to get you there.

YOU DON’T NEED 30,000 SUBSCRIBERS. YOU NEED AN OFFER.

Ayo told me about a woman with just 67 Substack subscribers.

She had a higher-priced offer. She networked, collaborated, sent DMs and actually talked to people.

She signed clients.

Meanwhile, someone else can spend years building an audience of 30,000 people and still struggle to turn all that attention into meaningful income.

I think a lot of creators have the order backwards. They assume they need to build the audience first and figure out the business later.

So they keep writing, posting Notes and celebrating every new subscriber, while the question of what anyone might eventually pay them for gets pushed further down the road.

Ayo has spent years working with creators and sees this repeatedly. Growing the audience won’t magically tell you whether you have something people will buy.

His advice is to test much earlier.

He has created programs by writing the sales page before building the program. If enough people were willing to put down a deposit, he built it.

You don’t have to start with a $3,000 or $5,000 offer either.

Offer a consulting call. Put together a workshop. Create a small product around something people already ask you about. Describe it, put a price on it and see what happens.

You’ll learn a lot faster from someone pulling out a credit card than from another thousand people clicking Subscribe.

And please don’t sit around waiting for people to magically reach out and ask how they can give you money.

If you want to build a business, eventually you have to make an offer.

SO, CAN YOU ACTUALLY MAKE MONEY WRITING ONLINE?

Absolutely.

Ayo found writing almost by accident, went all in on Medium and eventually became the highest-earning writer on the platform.

I spent decades in marketing, built my audience on LinkedIn and came to Substack much later because I wanted writing itself to become a bigger part of my business.

We arrived here through completely different routes and ended up agreeing on quite a lot.

Writing can create attention, credibility, relationships and opportunities. A platform can completely change your career. Ayo is living proof of that.

But a large audience on its own can still make very little money.

Ayo earned hundreds of thousands of dollars directly from Medium and still kept building. He created an email list, books, courses, a community, coaching and consulting. So when Medium changed, he still had a business.

That’s probably the biggest thing I took away from our conversation.

Take advantage of the platform while it’s working. Become excellent at it. Build the audience and enjoy the opportunities that come with it.

Then build something you control around that attention.

Because 30,000 subscribers who never buy anything can be worth considerably less to your business than 67 people who actually need what you know.

Ayo’s story obviously doesn’t mean everyone who starts writing with $147 in the bank is going to build a $2 million business.

It does show what can happen when you find a skill that fits you, get very good at it, and then figure out more than one way to make money from it.

WANT MORE?

If you want to read more from Ayodeji, go find Monetize Your Mind on Substack.

I especially recommend his story about going from $147 in his bank account to building a business that has generated more than $2 million. There’s a lot more to his story than we could possibly cover here.

And thanks to everyone who joined us live. This conversation could easily have gone another hour.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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I used to think the hard part of FU Money was making enough money.

I’m less sure of that now.

Because once you start making good money, life has a tendency to grow around the income. The house, the bills, the holidays, the schools, the expectations. Things that once felt expensive eventually just feel normal.

Then the job you might want to leave is paying for a life you’re afraid to change.

In the Federal Reserve’s 2025 survey of U.S. households, 55% of adults said they had enough savings to cover three months of expenses. As you’d expect, the number was much higher among people with family incomes of $100,000 or more.

It was 75%.

Which also means one in four higher-income households did not have three months of expenses set aside.

That’s why I don’t think salary tells us nearly as much about financial freedom as we assume it does.

Someone making $250,000 can be completely dependent on the next paycheck. Someone making half as much may have a year of runway, low fixed expenses, several ways to earn, and no particular panic about what happens if one source of income disappears.

The numbers matter.

But there’s another layer to this that I think we talk about far less.

What emotional job have you hired money to do?

We ask money to do some very strange jobs

Obviously money has practical uses. It keeps a roof over your head, pays for food, healthcare, education and retirement, and apparently allows airports to charge €17 for a sandwich without anyone calling the police.

But money also gets mixed up with how we feel about ourselves.

For some people it means safety. For others, status. It can become proof that your hard work paid off or that you belong at a certain level. Some people spend when they feel miserable because buying something provides a temporary lift. Others interpret an expensive gift as evidence of how much someone values them.

Financial psychologists have used the term money scripts to describe beliefs people develop around money, including avoidance, status, worship and vigilance. I wouldn’t take the labels too literally. A 2025 study of 2,686 people testing a revised version of the Money Script Inventory found problems with how well the four-factor model held up across a more diverse sample.

Human beings are probably a little too complicated to sort into four neat money personalities.

But the underlying idea is useful: our financial decisions are influenced by beliefs and emotions as well as arithmetic.

Research on compulsive buying has also linked it to negative emotional states and stress.That’s obviously the far end of a spectrum, and most people who occasionally cheer themselves up with a new pair of shoes do not have a psychological disorder.

Sometimes you want the thing.

Sometimes you want the feeling you get from buying the thing.

And sometimes the thing is supposed to say something about you.

That last one gets particularly interesting once you’ve spent twenty or thirty years building a successful career.

When your income starts telling you who you are

Imagine someone who worked for years to get to $300,000.

They earned the promotion, became an executive, made partner, built the reputation. Reaching that income probably felt like an achievement because it was one.

Then they decide they want something different.

Maybe they want to consult. Start a company. Go fractional. Write. Teach. Join a smaller business. Work four days a week. Spend more time with their children.

They leave and eventually build something that earns $180,000 a year.

They control their calendar. They choose their clients. They own what they are building. Their income comes from several places instead of one employer. They have more time and substantially fewer meetings involving thirteen people and a PowerPoint deck.

Are they less successful?

Financially, they are earning $120,000 less.

That number can be surprisingly difficult to ignore once compensation has become part of how you measure your own progress.

I’ve seen the reverse problem when people start working for themselves too. Someone can happily accept a $200,000 salary from a company and then feel deeply uncomfortable asking a client to pay $10,000 directly for their expertise.

Suddenly charging well feels greedy.

They don’t want to sell too hard. They don’t want to become “one of those people.” They tell themselves they care more about helping than money, then wonder why the economics of the business don’t work.

Money avoidance is one of the beliefs financial psychologists have studied. You don’t have to believe the whole framework to recognize the contradiction.

We can feel perfectly comfortable being well paid by someone else and strangely guilty about paying ourselves well.

There’s another version of this.

A large income can become the golden ticket I wrote about in the first article in this series.

Not because the income itself is a problem. I am very much in favor of making money.

But life expands.

Maybe you buy the bigger house because you can afford it. The holidays get nicer. You join the club. You upgrade the car. Your children go to a more expensive school. Your social circle has certain norms.

Ten years later, you’re thinking about changing careers and calculate that the new thing would have to generate $300,000 almost immediately.

So you don’t do it.

This is where I think some expenses become identity expenses.

They aren’t necessarily stupid purchases. They might be things you genuinely enjoy.

The question is whether giving them up would reduce your quality of life or whether it would mostly make you feel like the kind of person who used to be more successful.

Those are different costs.

Before obsessing over how to replace an old salary, I’d want to know what that salary is actually buying.

How much does the life you genuinely want cost?

The cost of freedom

Someone who needs $20,000 every month to maintain their life requires much more money to feel financially independent than someone who can happily live on $6,000.

There is no virtue attached to either number.

If you love your house and can afford it, keep it. If travel is one of the great joys of your life, spend money on it. I have no desire to turn FU Money into another lecture about making coffee at home and never ordering dessert.

But every fixed expense does have a consequence.

It increases the amount of income you need before saying no becomes financially comfortable.

That’s one reason the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s research on financial well-being caught my attention.

They spent years studying how consumers themselves described financial well-being. Their definition doesn’t rest on a particular salary, net worth or credit score. They describe it in terms of financial security and freedom of choice, including the ability to absorb a financial shock and make choices that allow you to enjoy life.

They also explicitly point out that people with the same income can have very different levels of financial well-being.

That sounds a lot like FU Money to me.

Morgan Housel makes a similar point in The Psychology of Money, one of my favorite books:

“The highest form of wealth is the ability to wake up every morning and say, ‘I can do whatever I want today.’”

I don’t take that literally. Most of us have children, responsibilities, appointments and people who would object if we decided to spend Tuesday in bed watching Netflix.

But I agree completely with the principle.

The value of money is partly what it lets you buy.

A much less visible part is what it lets you refuse.

I think that part gets underestimated because nobody can see it.

You can see the Porsche.

You can’t see the six months of expenses sitting untouched in an account.

You can see the beautiful house.

You can’t see someone turning down a terrible client because they don’t need the money badly enough.

And this is where being financially cautious can become complicated too.

Saving gives you options. But someone can have more than enough money and still remain terrified of spending any of it, leaving a job, taking time off or turning down another opportunity to earn.

At some point, accumulating money because you are frightened of ever having less is not quite the same thing as freedom.

Entrepreneurship can recreate the same trap

There is a very seductive idea that if employment creates dependence, entrepreneurship creates freedom.

Sometimes.

You can also quit one boss and accidentally acquire seven.

You can build a business where one client accounts for 60% of your income. You can become afraid to take a holiday because nobody else can run things. You can say yes to miserable projects because next month’s revenue is uncertain.

The logo changed. The dependence didn’t necessarily disappear.

The OECD published a useful analysis of self-employment across Europe in 2025. Self-employed people continued to have an advantage in work autonomy, but the research also found that gaps in job security and financial well-being between the self-employed and employees had widened over time. Solo self-employed workers were particularly exposed to financial and job-security challenges.

I think this is something the entrepreneurship industry glosses over far too often.

Owning a business can give you extraordinary control over your work. It can also create a very fragile financial structure.

Whether you earn your money from an employer or your own company almost feels secondary if one person can still pull the plug on most of your income.

This was the point of my previous article, FU Money Has Two Sides.

Savings are only one side of FU Money.

The other side is your ability to make more.

I don’t think financial capital is built in isolation. It’s usually the result of other forms of capital compounding over time:

• Expertise capital — from what you know and can do.

• Reputation capital — from what people believe about you and your work.

• Relationship capital — from the people who know you, trust you, and will open doors for you.

• Intellectual property capital — from the ideas, frameworks, content, products, and assets you own.

Your personal brand sits largely inside reputation capital because it helps make that value visible and transferable.

The stronger these forms of capital become, the more ways you have to turn them into income.

Money is often the output, not the starting point.

For me, optionality means having enough alternatives that one employer, client, relationship or bad turn of events doesn’t get to decide everything else for you.

So what is the money for?

I don’t think a healthy relationship with money can be measured by how little you spend.

I also don’t think it can be measured by how much you make.

What interests me now is whether the money is helping you build a life you want or whether maintaining the money has quietly become the life.

Because FU Money is useful when you can actually use the freedom it creates.

Maybe that means leaving, or staying in a job you genuinely like because you know you don’t have to stay. It could mean earning less for a while, taking a risk, turning down a lucrative opportunity because you no longer want the life attached to it, or spending a ridiculous amount on something you love because you’ve consciously decided it’s worth it.

I’m less interested these days in asking, “How much money is enough?”

I think I’d rather know:

What do I want my money to make possible?

The number comes after that.

If this made you rethink what financial freedom means, subscribe for the rest of the FU Money series.

I’m exploring how to build enough financial independence, earning power, and optionality that your next decision doesn’t have to be dictated by a paycheck, client, employer, or anyone else.

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What money buys before a crisis: time, leverage, and a real ability to say no.

If you want more control over your work, income, and next move, subscribe to FU Money Plan where I write about how to build financial leverage before you urgently need it.

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The Trap of Feel-Good Money

Feel-good money is a trap.

Your business or job is working, your lifestyle is covered, and you’re generally happy.

Until something changes.

Your company restructures. A major client leaves. Your business partner quits. The market shifts. Or something in your personal life suddenly has a massive financial impact you never saw coming. Divorce. Loss. A lawsuit. A health issue. A family emergency.

And then you realize that while you were smugly sitting back thinking, “Ah, I’m doing great. I’ve got feel-good money,” most of that security depended on everything outside your control continuing to go right.

Now it’s gone.

Feel-good money is good while it lasts.

But now you really wish you had FU money.

One of the most expensive career mistakes is assuming a company will be as loyal to you as you are to it.

They’re running a business.

You should be running your career the same way.

The more dangerous period is when everything is going well.

You have the salary. The title. The full calendar. Clients keep coming. Your company is growing. People inside your industry know who you are.

So you relax.

You stop networking because you don’t need anything. Your LinkedIn profile gets stale. You lose touch with people you used to know well. You stop putting yourself out there because you already have more work than you can handle.

Maybe you stop developing other ways to earn because the current one is working so well.

Busyness starts to feel like security.

I’ve done versions of this myself. When there is plenty of work in front of you, maintaining relationships and visibility outside your immediate bubble feels much less urgent than whatever is due by Friday.

Years can pass like that.

Then something changes and you discover that the worst possible time to rebuild your network, reputation, visibility, or other sources of income is when you suddenly need them.

There is research behind the networking part.

A 2022 study published in Science used experiments involving more than 20 million LinkedIn users over five years. During that period, participants created about two billion new connections and 600,000 jobs were traced through the platform. The researchers found causal evidence that weaker professional ties, particularly moderately weak ties, increased job mobility.

In plain English, people outside your closest professional circle matter.

That former colleague you haven’t spoken to in two years matters. So does the person who reads your work occasionally, the acquaintance at another company, the client from three projects ago, and the person who knows your name even though the two of you aren’t close.

You don’t build that network effectively three days after being laid off.

And if your professional reputation only exists inside your current employer, you own less of it than you probably think.

Recognition is part of financial resilience too.

The Three Types of FU Money

I think there are three kinds of FU money.

1. Escape money. I need enough money to get out of a bad job, a bad marriage, crushing debt, or some other situation I can’t afford to leave.

2. Prove-them-wrong money. I want to make so much money that everyone who doubted me can kiss my ass.

3. Optionality money. I don’t want to stop working forever. I want to know I could stop.

I want enough money, income, assets, and options that I’m never forced to keep a job, client, business, relationship, or situation purely because I need the money.

Escape Money: The ability to walk away

There’s a basic concept in negotiation called BATNA: Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement.

Basically, what happens if you don’t take the deal?

Harvard’s Program on Negotiation describes a strong BATNA as one of the primary sources of negotiating power. A good outside alternative gives you the ability to walk away from terms that don’t work for you.

That sounds obvious until you think about how often we negotiate without a real alternative.

Take two people with comparable experience negotiating the same job offer.

One needs a paycheck next month and has very little saved.

The other has eight months of expenses available, a small amount of consulting income and two other conversations underway.

Same employer. Same position. Same salary discussion.

Their negotiating positions are completely different.

The second person can ask for more money, challenge the terms, delay the start date or decline the offer.

They can survive no.

That ability has measurable economic value.

An NBER study examined states that permanently reduced unemployment insurance benefits by 23% to 50%. After the reductions, starting salaries were 1.8% to 7.2% lower, and posted salaries for the same jobs fell 1.4% to 5.5%. The researchers found a substantial decline in both worker bargaining power and job-match quality.

People had less financial room to wait.

Employers gained leverage.

Unemployment insurance is obviously different from building your own FU Money, but the underlying economics are useful. The amount of financial breathing room you have can change the deal you are willing to accept.

Money For Optionality: The Power to Negotiate

One of my favorite books on negotiation is Chris Voss’s Never Split the Difference.

Voss spent years negotiating hostage situations for the FBI before teaching those principles in business. One of the lines associated with his approach is wonderfully simple:

“No deal is better than a bad deal.”

Sure.

Unless you desperately need the deal.

Knowing how to negotiate helps. Voss teaches tactical empathy, calibrated questions, mirroring and a long list of other useful techniques.

But none of those techniques eliminate the fact that you need to make your mortgage payment.

A consultant who has enough runway to lose a prospective client can negotiate differently from one who needs the deposit to pay bills next week.

The rate becomes easier to defend.

So does the scope.

So do payment terms and boundaries.

The same applies to salary negotiations. It is much easier to push back when you are currently employed or have enough savings to keep looking.

Financial desperation may never appear in the meeting, but it is still sitting at the table.

You know what happens if the other person walks away.

That changes how hard you are willing to push.

FU Money gives you a credible alternative.

Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power is a much more ruthless book.

I don’t subscribe to every law in it, and I have no desire to spend my days plotting how to dominate the people around me.

But Greene understands something important about power: dependence matters.

If someone controls something you cannot afford to lose, the balance of power changes.

A boss controlling your entire income has leverage.

A client responsible for 70% of your revenue has leverage.

An investor whose next check determines whether your company survives has leverage.

The relationship can be friendly, generous and mutually beneficial. The dependency still exists.

Greene explored this from another angle in The 50th Law, written with 50 Cent. Self-reliance, mobility and the ability to adapt are major themes throughout the book. Its description talks about learning to move freely and “never stay locked in the same position.”

Financial dependence locks people into positions all the time.

You know you should leave the client, but you can’t replace the revenue.

You know you have outgrown the job, but your expenses require the salary.

You know you should push back, but you cannot risk being considered difficult.

You know you want to try something else, but you have no room to be wrong.

The decision has effectively been made before you ever make it.

That is the part of FU Money I find most important.

Having enough control over your finances changes how much power somebody else has over your next move.

Financial pressure changes decisions

A lot of choices we describe as career or business decisions are financial decisions underneath.

People stay with terrible clients because they need the revenue.

They accept jobs they already suspect are wrong because they need the paycheck.

Consultants agree to rates they know are too low.

Founders chase whatever will generate money fastest even when it pulls the company away from what they intended to build.

Sometimes you need the money. There’s nothing philosophical about an electric bill.

But urgency has consequences.

When you need a client badly enough, the scope becomes flexible. The rate becomes flexible. Payment terms become flexible. Your availability becomes remarkably flexible.

By the seventeenth “quick additional request,” you may have negotiated away most of the reasons the project looked attractive in the first place.

Financial pressure also shortens the amount of time you can give a decision.

There’s another NBER study that looked at unemployment benefits and subsequent job quality. More generous benefits were associated with higher wages after re-employment, partly because workers had enough liquidity to search longer and find better employers and better job matches. The effect was stronger among people more likely to be financially constrained.

Again, the interesting part is the breathing room.

If you have three months to find another job, you make one set of decisions.

If you have three weeks, you make another.

Savings buys you time, FU Money buys back your life

We tend to judge money by the visible things it buys.

Homes, cars, holidays, education, restaurants, clothes.

Some of its most valuable purchases are invisible.

Three months to find the right position.

Six months to test a consulting business.

A year to retrain.

Time to recover after something major happens before deciding what comes next.

Enough runway to turn down a client who will consume half your week.

Enough cash to give a new offer time to work before declaring it a failure.

That matters in entrepreneurship in particular.

Imagine two people trying exactly the same business idea.

One has twelve months of runway.

The other needs the business to cover the mortgage within eight weeks.

They may start with the same strategy and end up building completely different businesses.

The person under immediate financial pressure starts chasing whatever will pay now. They take custom projects that have nothing to do with the original offer. They lower the price. They change direction because something isn’t working quickly enough.

Sometimes those are good decisions.

Sometimes they are simply the decisions that cash flow forced them to make.

Having runway doesn’t make you smarter. It gives you more time to find out whether you were right.

You can be secure and still prepare

FU money isn’t a retirement plan.

It’s not about deciding what you want 20 or 30 years from now.

It’s about building enough runway for what you need next.

Not forever. Next.

Because life changes. What you want changes. Sometimes the world around you changes first.

A divorce. A layoff. A loss. A completely different season of life.

F-you money gives you room to respond without feeling trapped.

It’s not financial freedom.

It’s financial optionality.

There is another reason I think everyone needs FU Money.

Preparing for change does not mean expecting disaster.

You can love your job and keep your résumé current.

You can have a packed client roster and continue meeting new people.

You can work for a fantastic company and still build recognition attached to your own name.

You can have a healthy relationship and understand every part of your financial life.

You can make excellent money and still build another way to earn.

None of those things are betrayals of what you already have.

They are maintenance.

We do this in almost every other part of life.

We insure homes we hope never burn down.

We back up files we hope never disappear.

We service cars that currently work.

Yet people will spend twenty years building a career and do almost nothing to maintain the assets they would need if the current version of that career suddenly changed.

Your network needs maintenance.

So does your reputation.

So does your earning capacity.

So does your cash position.

And visibility matters before you need something from people.

The time to make sure people know who you are is while everything is going well.

How much FU Money do you need?

There is no universal FU Money number.

Your expenses matter. Your responsibilities matter. Your earning ability matters. So does how quickly you could realistically recover if one source of income disappeared.

Someone with a large family and $15,000 in monthly obligations needs a different cushion from someone who can comfortably live on $4,000.

The calculation also changes when you have more than one realistic way to earn.

Imagine someone with $150,000 saved whose income depends entirely on one specialized role.

Now imagine someone with $75,000 saved who has a strong professional network, visible expertise, consulting experience, a small source of recurring income and several skills people already pay them for.

The bank balance alone doesn’t tell me which person has more freedom.

That’s where the next article in this series, FU Money Has Two Sides, picks up.

Money you already control is one side.

Your ability to create more when circumstances change is the other.

Both are easier to build before you need them.

And that is the dangerous thing about a successful period in your career.

Nothing feels urgent.

The paycheck arrives. The clients renew. Your calendar is full.

It is very easy to assume that the life working today will still be working five years from now.

Use the good years.

Keep the relationships alive. Keep your name visible. Keep learning. Keep some of what you earn. Build assets that belong to you. Know how you would make money if the current source disappeared.

FU Money gives you something far more useful than a dramatic exit.

It keeps another person’s no from automatically becoming yours.

If this made you think differently about job security, leverage, or how prepared you really are for change, subscribe to FU Money Plan.

I write about building enough financial control, earning power, recognition, and optionality that one employer, client, or bad turn of events doesn’t get to decide what happens next. Paid subscribers get the receipts and tools.

Subscribe now

If you’re figuring out how to turn what you know into more income, recognition, and career options, subscribe to FU Money Plan

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For years, newsletters were mostly treated as something for writers, journalists and media companies.

I think that view is badly outdated.

If you want to become known for what you know, a newsletter may be one of the most valuable professional assets you can build, whether you’re happily employed, building something on the side, running your own business or already well established in your field.

It gives you something social media alone rarely does: a body of work people can find, spend real time with, subscribe to, and come back to long after you published it.

I started thinking much more seriously about this because of what has been happening on LinkedIn.

People are frustrated. Organic reach has fallen, the feed has changed, and plenty of professionals are wondering whether the time they’ve invested there still produces the same return.

I’m one of them. My own LinkedIn reach has changed, the feed has changed, and there are days when another batch of suspiciously polished AI wisdom makes me want to close the app too.

And I’m not imagining the decline in reach. One major independent LinkedIn study found organic reach on personal profiles dropped 47% in just seven months.

Why newsletters are my favorite way to build both a personal brand and a business

If you think newsletters are dying because everybody is making video now, the numbers suggest otherwise.

Substack crossed 5 million paid subscriptions last year. On beehiiv, paid-subscription revenue grew 138% in 2025. These are obviously individual platform numbers, not the entire newsletter industry, but this is not a format quietly disappearing.

And if your goal is to become known for what you know, I think newsletters have some advantages that are difficult to beat.

First, serious buyers actually read this stuff. The latest Edelman–LinkedIn research found that roughly two-thirds of management-level buyers spend more than an hour a week consuming thought leadership, and more than half use it when evaluating vendors.

That matters to me. Short-form video can be fantastic for attention, but if someone is considering hiring you, promoting you, referring you, or trusting you with a substantial piece of business, an article gives you room to show how you actually think.

Second, good long-form content can keep working for years. I still get found through articles I wrote years ago. And now there’s AI search on top of traditional search. One large 2026 study found LinkedIn among the most frequently cited domains in its AI-search dataset, with long-form LinkedIn articles accounting for the largest share of LinkedIn content cited.

Third, you’re accumulating intellectual property. Article by article, you’re building a body of work that can eventually become a framework, keynote, workshop, product, or even a book. Newsletter-led businesses themselves have sold for tens of millions, and there are writers who have had agents and publishers discover book ideas through their newsletters.

And finally, I can turn one substantial article into LinkedIn posts, Notes, carousels, video scripts, Reels or podcast topics. I’d much rather start with the deepest version of an idea and work backwards.

I’ve never had someone tell me, “I found that 60-second video you made six years ago and now I want to hire you.”

I have had that happen with old articles.

So when my LinkedIn reach started dropping, I already knew I wanted another newsletter.

The question was where to build it.

And that’s what sent me back to Substack.

Why I gave Substack another look

I’ve invested eight years into LinkedIn, building more than 78,000 followers and 38,000+ newsletter subscribers. So when my reach drops, I pay attention.

Since I rely heavily on LinkedIn for client acquisition for my business, Unignorable Brands, the LinkedIn reach decline has pushed me to rethink my strategy here and also to say I need to diversify my marketing channels more.

So I decided to give Substack a try. This is my second time. Last year, I set up a publication but left because I didn’t see the economical value. Honestly, it felt like a writer’s platform, not a business one.

But helping an energy executive build a newsletter there earlier this year changed my mind. So in August, I returned and spent a month actively publishing on Substack.

I expected to study the platform. I didn’t expect to like it this much.

Within a month, I’d had more than 50 one-on-one conversations. People were unusually accessible. I was meeting writers, consultants and professionals I almost certainly wouldn’t have met otherwise, and frankly, I was having a ridiculous amount of fun.

I’m very glad I came to Substack.

LinkedIn helps people find you. Substack helps them know you.

I think people are making a category mistake. LinkedIn and Substack increasingly look like competitors. Both have feeds. Both have long-form publishing. Both have video, comments, followers and some version of a creator economy. But they came from completely different places.

LinkedIn is a professional networking site that expanded into media. Substack started as a publishing platform and has since added Notes, video, Chat, recommendations, communities and other social features.

There’s overlap, obviously. But people still use them for very different reasons.

LinkedIn is where people look for jobs, employees, clients, consultants, vendors, speakers, partners and professional opportunities.

Substack is built much more around writers, readers, subscribers, publications and direct relationships with an audience.

So when someone says they’re leaving LinkedIn for Substack because their reach dropped, I’m not convinced they’re replacing one platform with another. They may be giving up one useful tool because another one currently feels better.

As one woman put it while preparing her return to LinkedIn:

“Substack is nice and cozy, but I need both.”

After a month of using both seriously, that’s where I’m landing too.

I don’t think I need to choose between them, because I’m asking them to do different jobs.

And once I started looking at newsletters that way, I realized Substack and LinkedIn are only part of a much bigger story. Medium, Kit, beehiiv, Ghost and others have all built different versions of the same basic opportunity: helping people publish, build an audience and potentially make money from it.

So before getting into the actual economics, it’s worth looking at what each of these platforms is really built to do.

Different newsletter platforms for different problems

Before Substack, there was Medium.

Medium launched in 2012 and introduced its Partner Program in 2017, the same year Substack was founded. But the two went in very different directions.

Medium pays writers from its overall membership model based on how paying members interact with their work. Substack made the relationship much more direct: readers subscribe to an individual publication, the creator sets the price, and the subscriber list can be exported.

Since then, the category has gotten a lot more crowded.

LinkedIn layered newsletters onto an enormous professional network.

Kit grew from email marketing into a much broader creator-business platform.

beehiiv has leaned heavily into newsletter growth and monetization.

Ghost has focused more on independent publishing, ownership and control.

They all involve newsletters, but they’re not really built for the same job.

And that matters, because choosing where to publish depends a lot less on which platform is “best” and a lot more on what you actually want your newsletter to do.

I don’t think most people need to choose one platform and swear allegiance to it. If professional discovery matters, LinkedIn is hard to ignore. If you want a deeper publishing relationship and direct subscriber emails, Substack becomes much more interesting. And if you’re running a business, an email platform such as Kit can sit underneath both.

The right question isn’t “Which platform wins?” It’s “What job do I need each platform to do?”

What Substack gets very right.

Before I get into the economics, I want to give Substack a lot of credit.

The platform itself is extremely well designed.

I’m fairly technical, so your mileage may vary, but I found the backend easy to figure out. I could realistically start from nothing and have a personalized publication up and running in about an hour, with branding, navigation, email delivery, subscriber management and payments already built in.

The reporting is also much more substantial than I expected. You can track subscribers, paid subscribers, revenue and individual post performance, and connect Google Analytics if you want deeper traffic and conversion data.

And the barrier to entry is remarkably low. Substack is free to start and run; it makes its money when you turn on paid subscriptions and takes 10% of that revenue.

But the biggest positive surprise for me wasn’t the technology.

It was how social the place is.

Publishing and distribution live together. There are long-form posts, Notes, comments, restacks, recommendations, messaging and collaborations, so you’re not necessarily publishing an article and then leaving the platform to figure out how anybody will find it.

That isn’t just my impression. Substack says more than 30% of paid subscriptions now originate within its network, and more than one million posts are discovered by potential subscribers in the app every day.

In my first month, I’ve also had more than 50 one-on-one conversations with people I probably wouldn’t have met otherwise. People have been remarkably accessible.

And then there’s the feature I probably value most:

I can export my subscriber email list.

That may sound boring compared with Notes and paid subscriptions, but from a business perspective it’s huge. Substack lets publishers download their subscriber data as a CSV, including email addresses, That gives you a much more portable subscriber relationship than you get from most social-platform followers..

I’ve spent years building audiences where an algorithm still determines whether I can reach the people who chose to follow me. An exportable email list gives me something much more portable.

So yes, I understand why people love Substack.

I’m very glad I came back.

What I became skeptical about wasn’t the newsletter or even the platform.

It was the economics of making the paid subscription itself the business.

And that’s where I started doing the math.

Same content. Wildly different economics.

This was the part I really wanted to understand when I came back to Substack.

Because the paid newsletter model sounds pretty great.

You write. People pay you to read it. Enough people pay, and suddenly you’ve created recurring revenue around your ideas.

Substack’s default pledge pricing is $8 a month or $80 a year, so rather than cherry-picking an unusually low price, I’m going to use $8 as our baseline. (Substack FAQ)

Start with one $8 monthly subscriber.

Substack takes 10% of every paid transaction. For a standard credit-card payment, Stripe currently charges 2.9% plus 30 cents, plus a 0.5% recurring billing fee. (Substack)

That leaves roughly $6.63 from an $8 subscription, before taxes, refunds, currency conversion or anything else.

So roughly:

At 1,000 paying subscribers, that’s real money.

But the number I became much more interested in was how many people you need before you ever get to 1,000 paying subscribers.

Substack says it typically sees somewhere around 5–10% of free subscribers convert to paid, with 10% being a good target.

So 100 paid subscribers may mean building an audience of roughly 1,000–2,000 free subscribers first.

500 paid may mean 5,000–10,000.

And 1,000 paid may mean 10,000–20,000.

That’s when I stopped looking at the $8 subscription and started looking at the acquisition.

Because convincing someone to pay $8 is only one part of the job.

First you have to find thousands of people.

And once I started asking successful Substack writers how long that part had actually taken, the economics got a lot more interesting.

The hidden cost of doing business on Substack

The fees surprised me.

The time surprised me much more.

When I asked successful Substack writers how many hours they spent running and growing their publications each week, several had to stop and think about what I meant.

Did I mean the writing?

What about Notes, comments, DMs, restacks, communities, calls and collaborations?

A lot of that apparently didn’t count.

Several essentially told me, “I don’t count that. That’s leisure time.”

I found that fascinating because I would count it.

Writing the newsletter itself is only one part of running a publication. There’s the research, drafting and editing, but also the work involved in getting discovered, talking to readers, collaborating with other writers and keeping people interested once they subscribe.

So I started asking another question:

How long did it actually take you to build the audience?

Among the writers I spoke with, the answer was consistently measured in years.

Some had built their audiences largely on Substack.

Others had arrived with years of work behind them already: blogs, Medium, Twitter, ghostwriting, professional writing, existing email lists or audiences built somewhere else.

Which means a Substack publication may be two years old while the audience, reputation and writing experience behind it are much older.

I started noticing the same thing in the growth articles I saw.

One of the most common customer-acquisition posts here is some version of:

“How I grew my Substack to X subscribers in X months.”

Usually with a very impressive screenshot.

I understand why. If you sell growth advice, demonstrating growth is excellent marketing.

But in every example I personally checked, there was a story before Substack.

Maybe the publication really did reach 10,000 subscribers in 18 months. But the writer may also have entered those 18 months with years of writing experience, an existing email list, a network, an audience or all four.

The number can be accurate while still leaving a brand-new creator with the wrong impression about what starting from zero actually looks like.

So what does that do to the math?

Take 100 paid subscribers at $8 a month.

After the basic Substack and Stripe fees we calculated earlier, that produces roughly $7,954 a year before taxes and other expenses.

Now suppose running and growing the publication takes 20 hours a week.

If you attribute those hours to the publication, that’s about $7.65 an hour in revenue after the basic platform and payment fees.

At 30 hours a week, it’s about $5.10.

At 40 hours, about $3.82.

And even that calculation leaves out whatever acquisition work happened before those 100 paid subscribers existed.

For perspective, 20 hours a week for three years is 3,120 hours.

Thirty hours is 4,680.

I’m not suggesting every successful Substack writer spends that amount of time, or that every hour someone spent building an audience years ago should now be charged against their Substack income.

But time is still an input, and I was surprised by how rarely it appeared in conversations about revenue.

The economics also improve substantially at scale.

At 500 paid subscribers at the same $8 price, you’re around $39,768 a year after those same basic fees.

At 1,000, around $79,536.

That’s real money.

What became clear to me was that I was evaluating the business differently from many of the people I was talking to.

I was asking: What did this earn relative to the time required to build and run it?

Some of them were asking something closer to: Am I getting paid to spend my time doing something I genuinely enjoy?

Those are not the same calculation.

When the subscription model makes perfect sense

The business math I just laid out doesn’t apply equally to everyone on Substack.

For some people, writing is the business.

They’re full-time writers, journalists, authors, or people who genuinely want to spend most of their working life writing and interacting with readers. Several of the people I spoke with basically told me, “I could do this all day.” They love the writing, the conversations and the community, and they don’t even count much of that time as work.

In that case, calculating every hour the way I did above may not be especially useful.

If subscriptions allow you to make a living doing exactly what you want to spend your days doing, fantastic. The publication is the product.

But for most of us, the newsletter is doing a different job.

If you’re employed, consulting, coaching, running a company, or building something on the side, you probably don’t want your newsletter to become another 20-hour-a-week job. You’re using it to build visibility and credibility, yes, but ultimately those things should lead somewhere.

Maybe that’s a better job, promotion or speaking opportunity.

But for most of the people I work with, and in the way I teach newsletters, the bigger goal is to create a gateway into the rest of your business.

Consulting. Coaching. Cohorts. Digital products. Books. Workshops. Advisory work. Whatever sits behind the newsletter.

The newsletter helps the right people discover you, understand what you know, trust your thinking and eventually move toward something else you offer.

That changes the math considerably.

If a newsletter takes 20 hours a week and generates $500 a month in subscription revenue, a professional writer may be perfectly happy with that because they love spending those 20 hours writing.

But if you’re a consultant, those same hours need to help create business beyond the subscription itself.

One $5,000 consulting engagement generated by an article may be worth roughly the same revenue as 63 people paying $8 a month for a year after the basic fees we calculated earlier.

So for most non-writers, I don’t think the question should be:

How many paid subscribers can I get?

It should be:

What is this newsletter helping me build, sell or become known for?

If writing is the product, subscriptions can make perfect sense.

If your expertise, career or business is the product, the newsletter is usually more valuable as the gateway to everything else.

One cultural difference between Substack and LinkedIn

If you’re coming to Substack from LinkedIn or a traditional B2B environment, selling feels very different here.

On LinkedIn, content routinely leads to consulting, coaching, software, services and other relatively high-value purchases.

On Substack, the native transaction is much smaller. An $8 monthly subscription is normal. Free is even more normal.

I’ve met people who proudly told me they’d been reading newsletters for years without ever paying for one. One woman said she read the same publication for several years before finally deciding to “take the plunge” and upgrade. Now that she’d paid for the year, she considered herself pretty much set.

That took some getting used to. 😂

I also got an interesting data point from one of the publications I paid for myself. The publisher had around 120 paid subscribers, roughly 80 of them annual. He told me I was only about the fifth annual subscriber who had purchased without interacting with him first. For most of the others, he estimated it took three to six months of engagement before they upgraded.

That’s one publication, not a study. But it lined up with what I was seeing elsewhere: people here can be very cautious buyers, even at fairly low price points.

Substack’s own rules reinforce the culture. Its Content Guidelines say the platform is intended for editorial content rather than conventional email marketing, and publications can’t exist primarily to advertise outside products or push promotions.

So if you come over from LinkedIn expecting to immediately turn readers into $300 calls, $1,500 cohorts or $5,000 consulting clients, I’d be careful.

One writer I spoke with gave me a better way to think about it. I’d said maybe the goal isn’t always to “grow your Substack.” Maybe it’s to decide what job Substack is supposed to do inside whatever you’re building.

His answer was basically: exactly.

That’s where I’ve landed too.

For me, Substack is strongest at discovery, relationships and depth. I want the right people to find my thinking, spend more time with it and know there’s a larger business behind the newsletter if they ever want to go further.

What happened when I tried it myself?

After all that analysis, I also wanted to see what happened when I actually tried to build on Substack myself.

When I came back in August, I had 48 subscribers on the platform. I wasn’t starting from zero visibility, obviously. I already had a large LinkedIn audience and years of publishing behind me, which is exactly the kind of context I wish more growth stories disclosed.

Within my first month, I was at more than 200 subscribers, had generated more than 6,000 views, picked up five paid subscribers, and had more than 50 one-on-one conversations.

I was genuinely happy with that.

The five paid subscriptions were nice, but they weren’t the most valuable result.

The conversations were.

Substack introduced me to people I probably would never have met on LinkedIn. Notes helped me get discovered. The longer articles gave people a much better sense of how I think. And because messaging is so easy, a reader could turn into an actual conversation very quickly.

That is already useful to my business.

So after a month, I’m not looking at Substack and thinking, How do I turn five paid subscribers into 500 as fast as possible?

I’m thinking, How do I keep using this to meet the right people, build a body of work, deepen relationships and create opportunities around the business I already have?

If the paid subscriptions grow too, great.

But they’re a bonus.

The bigger win for me is that I now have another place to build an audience and a direct relationship around my ideas without giving up LinkedIn.

That is much closer to what I was actually looking for in the first place.

I still think everyone needs a newsletter

After all the math, conversations and digging around, I’m actually more convinced about newsletters than I was when I started this experiment.

Just not necessarily about paid newsletters.

Those are two different things.

If writing is your business, paid subscriptions may be exactly the model you want.

But for most professionals, I think the bigger value is everything around the subscription: visibility, credibility, intellectual property, searchability, relationships and a direct audience you can keep building over time.

A newsletter gives you somewhere to develop what you know in public. It gives potential employers, clients, partners and customers enough material to understand how you think. And unlike another short social post, the work can keep getting discovered years later.

That’s why I’m not leaving LinkedIn for Substack.

I’m using them differently.

LinkedIn helps people find me. Substack helps them know me.

And I still want my email list and business infrastructure underneath both, because I have zero interest in spending another eight years building something entirely at the mercy of one platform.

So if you’re happily employed, consulting, building something on the side, running a company or figuring out what comes next, my argument is the same:

You don’t need to become a professional writer.

You don’t need 10,000 subscribers.

You definitely don’t need to spend 30 hours a week hanging out on Substack.

But I do think you should be building a body of work around what you know.

A newsletter is still one of the smartest ways I know to do that.

And if enough people are interested, I’m considering doing a live masterclass showing exactly how I’d set one up: which platform to choose, what to write about, how to structure it, and how to use it to build visibility and eventually lead people toward whatever you actually want to sell or become known for.

Because the hardest part probably isn’t starting a newsletter anymore.

It’s deciding what job you want it to do for you.

And underneath both, I’m continuing to build assets and income streams that give me more control over what happens next.

Which, really, is the whole idea behind the new brand I’ve been building, FU Money Plan.

You don’t wait until you lose the client, the job disappears or the algorithm stops working to start building options. You build them while things are still going well.

If this has you thinking less about “which platform should I use?” and more about what you actually want your work, visibility and income to lead to, that’s exactly what we’re working through in my next FU Money Plan cohort, starting September 22.

We’ll spend four live weeks figuring out what you’re building toward, which income and opportunity paths make sense for you, and what deserves your time next.

And if newsletters are the part you want to learn more about, follow me on Substack and here on LinkedIn. I have a feeling I’m going to have a lot more to say about this experiment.

If you’re already running a business and want help becoming better known for what you do, you can also find my advisory work at UnignorableBrands.co.

If you’re figuring out how to turn what you know into more income, recognition, and career options, subscribe to FU Money Plan

Subscribe now

Confession first: I can’t say I went from zero.

I opened this account last year and let it sit untouched.

So this isn’t a zero-to-hero story. It’s more of an “I finally showed up and started trying” story, which feels more useful anyway.

At the beginning of August, I had about 48 subscribers.

One month later:

204 subscribers
5,000+ views
4 paid subscribers

I spent roughly 20 hours on Substack and $131.

I didn’t go viral. I didn’t import a giant email list and call it organic growth. I didn’t join a follow-for-follow scheme.

I just started treating Substack like something I actually wanted to learn.

Here’s what happened.

The numbers, first

The subscriber growth is nice, obviously. But the number I’m paying the most attention to right now is the 5,000+ views.

I’ve seen publications with much larger subscriber counts getting fewer views, which tells me my work is getting seen well beyond the people already subscribed.

That’s what I want at this stage.

I’m much more interested in reaching the right people than collecting a big number of people who followed me for reasons that have nothing to do with what I write.

And I’m going to keep publishing these numbers every month, including the flat months and the months when something I tried completely bombs.

There’s something humbling about being new somewhere after you’ve already built an audience somewhere else.

You know enough to know what good looks like, but you’re still starting over.

A very quick history

This actually isn’t my first attempt at Substack.

The first time I showed up, I wrote a dry, slightly sarcastic field report after a short scouting trip. I was deep in my “serious Fractional CMO / GTM Revenue Architect phase” at the time, writing for a much more buttoned-up business audience.

My conclusion was basically: I don’t think this place is for me.

So I left.

Then I came back.

This time I wrote about Substack like a pilgrim heading into the Wild West: lots of opportunity, very little order, and no idea what I was walking into.

One month later, I’m still more backpacker than settler. I haven’t figured the place out, but at least I know where to catch a few fish.

What surprised me most

The social side.

Everyone talks about coming to Substack to escape social media, and I understand why.

There are no ads in the feed. My DMs are almost completely spam-free. Nobody is sending me a connection request and immediately asking if I need help generating qualified leads.

It reminds me of early organic Facebook, or LinkedIn before LinkedIn became whatever LinkedIn is now.

What I didn’t expect was how easy it would be to actually talk to people here.

There’s chat. There are DMs. You can message someone without going through the weird ceremony of explaining why you deserve to connect with them.

I genuinely look forward to opening my Substack inbox now, which is not a sentence I expected to write about any platform in 2026.

And the mix of people is interesting. I’m seeing writers, career people, tiny-business owners, longtime newsletter creators, people starting over, and a whole wave of Instagram creators moving into newsletters.

Every so often, someone I know from LinkedIn appears too.

It still feels early enough that people are actually talking to each other instead of simply broadcasting at each other.

I hope it stays that way.

Starting now, this becomes a monthly report, and this is where the free version stops.

Paid subscribers get the receipts: what I published, how much time and money I spent, what actually moved growth, what failed, the tactics I refused to use, and what I’m testing next.

Same sections every month, including the months when the numbers suck.

If you’re building here too, this is the part worth stealing.

Read more

Before I started working for myself, I sat down and did some math.

I wanted roughly $20,000 a month in recurring gross revenue.

I wanted to keep business expenses under about 20%.

And I wanted to cap paid client work at roughly 20 hours a week.

I also wanted to stay solo. No employees. No big team of freelancers. Very little overhead.

The rest of my working time had another job: writing, experimenting, building an audience, and creating intellectual property and assets that belonged to me.

That was the business I was trying to build.

I had already helped build and run an eight-figure agency. I’d done the partners, employees, clients, management and overhead version of entrepreneurship. It was successful and rewarding in plenty of ways. It was also extremely stressful.

There’s a lot of business advice about buying back your time by delegating. Hire people. Outsource. Get yourself out of delivery.

I understand the logic. I’d already lived it.

What gets left out is that handing work to someone else doesn’t automatically hand you your time back. You still have to prepare the work, explain it, answer questions, review it, fix problems and manage the person doing it.

And once you have a team, your business gets hungrier.

You need enough revenue coming in to pay everyone. That can push you into taking projects, keeping clients or making decisions because the business needs feeding, even when those decisions aren’t particularly good for you.

I didn’t want to build another hungry business.

My expertise was the fastest thing I could turn into money. I already knew companies would pay well for it because I’d spent my career being paid for exactly that expertise.

So selling my time made sense.

I just didn’t want to sell all of it.

That’s how I ended up with the $20K target.

Why $20K?

Please don’t get too attached to my number.

I lived in San Francisco at the time. I had children. My expenses and expectations were mine.

Someone else might create exactly the life they want on $10K a month. Another person might look at $20K and wonder how anyone survives on it.

For me, it felt safe enough.

It was also less than half of what I had been earning at the agency before bonuses and revenue share.

So yes, I was taking a substantial pay cut.

I was completely fine with that.

At 38, maximizing my income had moved pretty far down my priority list. I wanted flexibility, independence and enough room in my week to build things I owned rather than spending all of my time servicing clients, managing employees or building someone else’s company.

I wanted enough income that I wouldn’t panic and take whatever client showed up.

Enough that I wouldn’t immediately go looking for another job.

Enough that I could give myself time to figure out what I wanted to build next.

At the time, I didn’t have a name for any of this.

Now I do.

I was building FU Money.

And one thing mattered almost as much as the amount: predictability.

I didn’t want a spectacular $30K month followed by a miserable $6K one.

I didn’t want to spend every month looking for the next project, client or launch because I needed cash.

I wanted a certain amount of money already coming in before the month started.

Eventually, I got that recurring baseline to roughly $20K a month while staying solo.

That’s what I now call my revenue floor.

One clarification because this drives me crazy when people talk about business numbers online: $20K was gross revenue.

There were payment-processing fees, software, other business expenses and taxes between that number and what I could actually spend.

Someone saying, “I had a $100K launch,” does not necessarily mean they made $100K.

They may have spent a fortune on ads, affiliates, contractors, software, refunds and everything else required to create that revenue.

Sometimes the impressive launch made excellent money.

Sometimes the profit was pretty ordinary.

Sometimes they lost money.

Funny how that part doesn’t always make the Instagram carousel.

So whenever I share numbers in FU Money Receipts, I’m going to tell you what they actually represent.

What FU Money Receipts is

There is already plenty of business advice on the internet.

I’m less interested in telling you what business you should start than showing you what actually happened when I built mine.

The things that worked extremely well. The ideas I thought were brilliant that flopped. The revenue streams that made good money but created work I hated. What I kept, what I killed and what I would build differently today.

I’ve been doing this long enough to have receipts for all of the above.

I’m writing this series for people sitting in jobs wondering what else they could do with their skills and experience, and for people already running businesses who sometimes wonder whether they want to keep running them this way.

If seeing the real numbers, workload, decisions and tradeoffs behind someone else’s experience helps you make a smarter decision about your own, good.

That’s what I want these articles to do.

And since we’re here, I should probably tell you who this publication is not for.

If you want someone to tell you how to quit your job tomorrow and make $1 million in the next 90 days, I am definitely not your person.

If you’re looking for a $97 Claude prompt that will apparently build your seven-figure funnel while you sleep, the internet has you extremely well covered.

I’m interested in the messier questions.

How much did it actually make?

How much time did it take?

What did it cost?

What did you give up to get it?

Did you even like the business once you built it?

Would you do it again?

Those are the questions I wish more people answered.

Which brings me back to my $20K revenue floor.

The route I took to build it was fairly winding. Some income streams were excellent for cash and terrible for my time. Some things described as “scalable” hid a ridiculous amount of work behind the scenes. A few revenue streams stayed with me for years. Others I eventually got rid of completely.

And if I were starting again today, I would build the mix differently.

Below the paywall, I’m breaking down how I built the service-business portion of that $20K floor:

• how I packaged the expertise I already had

• how I decided what to charge

• why I chose recurring retainers over more lucrative projects

• what it actually cost me to run the business

• the contract term that protected my monthly baseline

• and how I kept the whole thing small enough that I still had time to build something beyond client work

Annual subscribers also get my actual rate sheet and the detailed revenue breakdown behind the $20K monthly baseline.

Subscribe now

Read more

People are funny.

We can be anxious, Type-A perfectionists who want everything researched, organized, planned, and preferably color-coded. I’ve probably spent more time reading reviews before booking a four-night vacation than I spent investigating some of the jobs I eventually gave years of my life to.

Think about how absurd that is.

We compare hotels. We shop around for mortgages. We agonize over schools, cars, wedding venues, insurance policies, and whether the swimsuit we’re ordering online is going to make us look like a sausage. Then we make one of the biggest financial decisions of our lives surprisingly casually: we take a job.

Maybe there are two or three interviews, a few nice conversations, and someone makes an offer. We shake hands and then start building our entire life around the assumption that paycheck is going to keep showing up every single month.

We buy the house, finance the car, have kids, increase our lifestyle, and take on school fees, vacations, mortgages, debt, and all the other things that slowly turn “I have a good salary” into “I absolutely need this salary.”

And somehow we call this security.

Meanwhile, the median U.S. wage and salary worker has been with their current employer for only 3.9 years. In the private sector, it’s 3.5.

We’ll take out a 30-year mortgage based largely on income from a relationship that, statistically, is nowhere close to 30 years long.

How did we collectively decide this was the conservative option?

And yes, I know what we tell ourselves. People get laid off, but I’m good at my job. Marriages end, but mine is fine. Businesses fail, but mine is doing well. People get sick, but I’m healthy.

Until they aren’t.

You know those stories you see sometimes about a perfectly normal family whose life suddenly unraveled? Someone lost a job, then came a medical crisis. Or a divorce. Or a business failure. Savings disappeared. Debt piled up. The house became unaffordable.

You watch and think, God, that’s awful. But the people in those stories usually looked perfectly normal a year earlier. Good job, house, kids, bills getting paid, dinner plans for Saturday.

Then something changed.

And it often doesn’t take ten disasters. One health crisis, one divorce, one job loss at exactly the wrong time, or one bad financial decision can be enough to make someone who thought they were doing fine stare at their bank account and think:

What the hell happened? How did I get here?

Only 55% of U.S. adults had enough emergency savings to cover three months of expenses in 2025, so this isn’t some tiny group of reckless people making terrible decisions. A lot of perfectly capable adults simply don’t have much room for life to go badly.

I’ve been there. I’ve watched things I thought were secure disappear. I’ve had income vanish, relationships end, plans blow up, and enough unexpected expenses land at once to make a life that once looked very solid feel frighteningly fragile.

That’s why I think about security differently now.

If one thing disappearing could blow up your life, you have a concentration problem. Maybe it’s your job, your biggest client, your business, your spouse’s income, family money, a platform, or something else you’ve come to depend on.

And weirdly, the best time to deal with it is when everything is going well, because that’s when dependence feels safest and you still have choices.

The point isn’t to live in fear that your job, marriage, business, or health is about to implode. That would be exhausting.

It’s to stop assuming that because something is working today, you can safely build your entire future around it.

You can’t control every curveball life throws at you. But you can make sure one curveball doesn’t get to make every decision that comes after it.

That’s where FU Money comes in.

First, what exactly is FU Money?

Yes, FU stands for exactly what you think it does: f*** you.

For me, it’s less about telling someone else to f*** off and more about telling the world: I get to decide what happens next.

You can change jobs, leave a client, work less, move, try something new, or simply change your mind without money immediately making the decision for you.

FU Money gives you options.

You may have spent 10, 20, or 30 years building expertise, relationships, a reputation, a career, a business, or skills people already pay for. So before you rush off and invent seven new income streams, take a good look at what you’ve already built.

The question is: how much of it can still help you if the thing currently paying you disappears?

If your company disappeared tomorrow, what would come with you? If your biggest client left, who else could you sell to? If LinkedIn, Instagram, or some other platform stopped sending you leads, would people still know how to find you?

Those are much cheaper questions to answer while everything is going well than when you suddenly need the answers.

Every FU Money Plan comes down to four things.

1. Income

First, where does your money actually come from, and how much of it depends on one source?

Someone earning $250,000 from one employer can have an excellent income and still be surprisingly vulnerable if that paycheck disappears.

And no, this does not mean you need seven side hustles and a color-coded spreadsheet tracking all of them.

A few well-chosen sources of income may be enough to make losing one painful instead of catastrophic.

2. Ownership

Next, look at what you actually own.

Your expertise, relationships, reputation, intellectual property, direct access to an audience, products, assets, systems, equity, or anything else that still has value when your current job or business changes.

Your employer may own the title on your business card. They don’t have to own all the value you created while you were there.

The more you build that can travel with you, the less often you have to start from scratch.

3. Leverage

Then ask how much of your income requires you to personally show up and do the work.

If every new dollar requires another hour of your time, eventually you run into the rather inconvenient problem of only having 24 hours in a day.

Leverage can come from products, licensing, intellectual property, investments, systems, people, technology, or simply finding better ways to charge for expertise you already have.

You don’t need everything to become “passive.” You just need enough breathing room that earning more doesn’t always require working more.

4. Options

And finally: if your current setup changed tomorrow, what could you realistically do?

Could you consult? Advise? Take another role? Sell something you know? Build a small business? Reduce your hours? Take six months off?

This is the part people tend to think about after something has already gone wrong.

Much better to know the answers now.

Because the more viable choices you have, the less power any one job, client, business, platform, or person has over your life.

That’s really the whole point of FU Money.

But I don’t need FU Money because…

There are a few reasons people convince themselves this doesn’t really apply to them.

These are the big ones.

1. “I make really good money.”

So did I.

I earned well, had savings, owned assets, and thought I was pretty secure. Then came a bad divorce, legal expenses, inconsistent income, and a few financial decisions that became much more expensive when everything hit at once.

A surprising amount of what I had built disappeared.

A high income is wonderful. It does not automatically make you financially resilient. In fact, the more you earn, the easier it is to build an expensive life that depends on continuing to earn at that level.

2. “My spouse or family has plenty of money.”

Your spouse or family may be wonderful. They are still not an insurance policy.

People divorce. People die unexpectedly. Businesses fail. Debts surface. Your dad remarries after age 65 and his new gold digger wife blows his wealth. Sometimes you discover that the money or assets you always thought offered you protection don’t belong to you in quite the way you assumed.

You can be married to someone or from a family with substantial wealth and still end up in a much weaker financial position than you ever imagined.

3. “My company is stable. We’re profitable.”

Great. I hope it stays that way.

But profitable companies lay people off too. We’ve watched companies report excellent earnings and then announce thousands of job cuts shortly afterward.

Your employer doesn’t need to be failing for your job to disappear. Leadership changes. Priorities change. Companies restructure, automate, acquire, merge, flatten teams, cut costs, and decide they need different skills.

Your company can be having a fantastic year while you’re having a terrible Tuesday.

The health of your employer tells you surprisingly little about whether your particular paycheck is safe.

4. “I don’t really want to deal with this now. Maybe later.”

Fair enough.

But putting it off means accepting that a surprising amount of your life may still be controlled by whatever currently pays for it.

You need the job because otherwise you’re fucked. You tolerate the client because otherwise you’re fucked. You stay in a relationship you desperately want to leave because financially you have no idea how you would survive outside it.

That’s a very different definition of “doing well” than the one most of us like to use.

The distance between “I’m doing really well” and “What the hell happened to my life?” can be frighteningly short.

Sometimes it takes one job loss, divorce, health crisis, business failure, or badly timed financial hit.

And it can happen fast.

So yes, you can think about FU Money later.

I’d rather build mine while I still get to decide what “later” looks like.

Your plan might be surprisingly small.

People make this far more complicated than it needs to be.

Your FU Money Plan could be a job you enjoy plus advisory income. A consulting business plus investments. A salary plus a board role. A business plus one product that earns without you.

Please do not build yourself another exhausting full-time job in the name of freedom.

The best plan is the simplest combination of income, ownership, leverage, and options that gives you enough control.

You do not need a portfolio career

There seems to be a new prescription for anyone who wants more control over their working life.

Build a portfolio career. Become fractional. Start consulting. Launch a digital product. Create multiple income streams. Monetize your audience.

Sure. Any of those could work.

You could also hate them.

I’ve tried enough ways of making money to know that something can look fantastic on paper and still be a terrible fit once you’re the person who has to wake up every morning and do it.

So I’m not going to tell you what kind of career or business you’re supposed to build.

I’d rather ask a much smaller question:

What makes sense for the next 12 months?

That’s plenty.

You don’t need to decide what you’re doing for the rest of your life. Frankly, I’ve changed my mind too many times to pretend that would even be useful.

For the next year, you might keep your job and experiment with consulting. Try fractional work and discover you love it. Try it and discover you absolutely do not. Build something small. Take on one advisory client. Save more aggressively. Create something you own.

All useful information.

Give yourself some room to experiment before turning the experiment into your new identity.

The goal is to make your next 12 months stronger than the last 12, learn what actually fits, and use that information to decide what comes next.

And earning more is only part of this.

You can add another $50,000 of income and immediately add another $50,000 of lifestyle. Congratulations, you’re busier. You may not be any freer.

Some of what you earn needs to become something that stays with you: savings, investments, equity, intellectual property, products, cash runway, an audience you can reach directly, or other assets that continue to have value beyond this month’s work.

Your combination may look nothing like mine.

You might keep a great job and build one thing on the side. You might have three clients and a large cash reserve. You might own a small business and investments and never create a digital product in your life.

Or this year might simply be the year you build enough runway to make a much bigger move next year.

There is no correct FU Money career.

You’re trying to build the right combination of income, assets, and options for the life you’re living now.

And when that life changes?

You get to change the plan too.

I learned this after I needed it.

At 38, after more than 20 years in marketing and a former CMO title, I assumed I could get another great job. Three career coaches and more than 200 applications later, nobody hired me.

Since then, I’ve tried 12 income streams and made six business pivots. A few failed. Several worked. And some made very good money while slowly turning into something I didn’t want to keep doing.

Those were probably the most useful ones.

Because it turns out “Does this make money?” is a pretty lousy way to decide whether something is worth building.

I also want to know what I actually kept, how much of my life it consumed, how dependent the income was on me personally, and whether I liked the life that came attached to it.

Good revenue can hide a surprisingly bad deal.

So start here

After eight years, 12 income streams, and six pivots, I’ve accumulated a decent collection of scars.

I might as well make them useful.

Ask yourself one question:

If the biggest source of security in my life disappeared tomorrow, how many real options would I have?

You don’t need to quit the good job, blow up the business, leave the relationship, or reinvent your entire life.

Keep what’s working.

Just build enough money, income, assets, and options outside any single source of dependence that you’re there because you choose to be.

That’s FU Money.

Want the numbers behind what I’ve actually tried? Full Receipts is where I share the revenue, costs, profit, mistakes, and what I’d do differently.

Then Upgrade to paid →

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When you’re ready, here are three ways I might be able to help:

1. Build Your FU Money Plan

A practical 4-week program for professionals and entrepreneurs who want to build more income, ownership, and options beyond one job, client, offer, or platform, without creating another life they want to escape from.

And no, the answer isn’t necessarily seven income streams, a portfolio career, or another complicated business model.

Build Your FU Money Plan →

2. Book a Private Strategic Advisory Session

Bring me a specific career, business, positioning, monetization, or growth problem and we’ll work through it together.

Book a Private Strategic Advisory Session →

3. Discuss a Larger Strategic Engagement

For founders and companies looking for more substantial marketing, positioning, or growth strategy support.

Discuss a Larger Strategic Engagement →

Until next time, keep building a life you get to choose.

Love, 🫶

Krista

What do I have in common with Belle Burden, Steve Jobs, Paulina Porizkova, Sam Altman, Tori Spelling, and thousands of laid-off workers?

We all learned that security can look permanent right up until someone else changes the terms.

Subscribe to FU Money Plan for weekly ideas on building more financial control, ownership, and freedom into your work and life.

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Security Can Be Borrowed

Belle Burden came from wealth, graduated from Harvard, earned a law degree from NYU, and spent 20 years in what appeared to be an idyllic, financially secure marriage. In her memoir Strangers, she writes about how abruptly that life unraveled and how much of the financial management she had largely left to her husband.

Burden was not left penniless. In fact, subsequent reporting based on divorce records showed that she had substantial personal wealth and trust interests. That’s not the part of her story I find cautionary. What struck me was that even a wealthy, legally trained woman could reach the end of a long marriage and discover how little attention she had paid to the financial structure underneath it, including what belonged to whom and how the prenup would work if the marriage ended.

Steve Jobs helped create Apple and still lost his place inside the company he founded. In 1985, after a power struggle with CEO John Sculley and Apple’s board, Jobs was stripped of his operational responsibilities and eventually resigned. He still had substantial personal wealth, but founding the company did not give him permanent control of his position inside it.

Paulina Porizkova spent decades married to rock star Ric Ocasek. After his death, she discovered that he had excluded her from his will. A life surrounded by considerable wealth did not mean she controlled that wealth.

In November 2023, OpenAI’s board abruptly fired Sam Altman as CEO. He was reinstated days later after employees and investors revolted. At the time, Altman reportedly held no equity in OpenAI. He was already independently wealthy, but his firing showed how quickly even one of technology’s most powerful executives could lose control of the position he occupied.

Tori Spelling grew up in one of Hollywood’s wealthiest families, the daughter of television mogul Aaron Spelling, yet inherited only a small fraction of his enormous estate and has spoken publicly for years about her own financial struggles.

In December 2024, Intel’s board gave CEO Pat Gelsinger a choice: retire or be removed. He stepped down after less than four years in the role. Running one of Silicon Valley’s most iconic companies still did not make the CEO chair his to keep.

Then there are thousands of people with none of the celebrity, power or family wealth.

Amazon cut 16,000 jobs in January and made additional cuts in its AI organization this summer. Across tech, more than 125,000 jobs have already disappeared in 2026.

We tend to look at these layoff stories as news but behind each are real people.

Like Mike Prinke. The 38-year-old Epic Games employee with terminal brain cancer was among roughly 1,000 people laid off in March 2026. His wife said the family lost not only his income but his employer-provided life insurance, and because of his condition he could not simply replace that coverage. The viral post got CEO Tim Sweeney’s attention, and Epic said it would work with the family to resolve the insurance problem.

When Security Depends on Someone Else

Different lives, same structural risk: someone else could change the terms.

Different circumstances, same vulnerability: something important to their financial or professional security was ultimately controlled by someone else.

Most employees don’t think of their salary, health insurance, life insurance, retirement contributions and equity as one income source, but structurally, they often are. One employer controls all of them.

Wealth around you is not the same as wealth you control.

A great salary, status, a successful spouse, a prestigious employer or even a thriving business can all feel like security. But if too much of your life depends on one person or institution continuing to cooperate, some of that security is borrowed.

I Learned This the Painful Way

For years, I had many of the things we’re taught to associate with having made it: a successful career, a beautiful home, a marriage, a title and a good income.

At 38, after leaving the agency I had helped build, I spent nearly two years trying to get hired and submitted more than 200 applications before accepting that the stable paycheck I assumed I could replace might not be coming.

The money mattered, obviously. But that wasn’t the deepest wound.

The wound was realizing how much of the life I thought I had built actually depended on structures I didn’t completely control.

Suddenly I wasn’t thinking philosophically about financial independence. I was asking very practical questions: Can I afford to leave? What happens if the income stops? How long can I keep this going? What if nobody hires me?

And eventually, a harder one:

What exactly is still mine?

We spend decades accumulating things that look like professional wealth: titles, salaries, impressive companies on our résumés, colleagues, access and status.

Then one day the company email gets shut off and you find out what actually came home with you.

I think we measure financial security too heavily by income and not enough by control.

How much of your financial future can someone else change without your permission?

One employer controlling your entire income is concentration risk. So is one client funding most of your business, having most of your net worth tied up in one company, or building a creator business entirely dependent on somebody else’s platform.

Investors aren’t exempt from this either. A portfolio can look diversified while still being dangerously concentrated in one company, sector, asset class or platform. Market crashes expose one kind of risk; failures like FTX and other crypto platforms exposed another: sometimes the asset itself isn’t the only thing you’re betting on. You’re also betting on whoever holds it, manages it or gives you access to it.

Concentration Risk Changes Shape

Entrepreneurship comes with its own concentration risks.

A founder can still have nearly all their wealth locked inside one company, answer to a board, lose operational control, get diluted, or watch the valuation collapse.

I’ve met agency owners who couldn’t lose two clients without panicking, consultants earning excellent money who had essentially built themselves another job, and creators with huge audiences who couldn’t contact those people without going through an algorithm.

I’ve made versions of these mistakes myself. I’ve tested 12 income streams and pivoted six times, and eventually I learned that simply adding more ways to make money isn’t necessarily freedom either.

If you have five income streams and every one requires you to keep pedaling, you’ve just built five bicycles.

These days, I care much more about portability: skills I can take anywhere, a reputation attached to my name, relationships that survive a job, intellectual property I own, ways to reach people directly, different ways to earn, and assets that can become more valuable over time.

I also want enough runway that a bad client, bad boss, bad relationship, layoff or business failure doesn’t immediately decide what I have to do next.

What FU Money Means to Me

The cliché version is millions in the bank and a dramatic office exit. The useful version is much quieter: enough control to make an important decision without fear making it for you.

It means having enough control over your own financial life that you can make an important decision without fear making it for you.

You can say no when something is wrong, leave when something is over, survive when somebody else changes the rules, or start again without feeling like everything you spent years building disappeared with the old life.

Before I call something financial security now, I ask myself a few questions:

1. If my primary income disappeared tomorrow, how many months of runway would I have?

2. Who can materially change my financial life without my permission?

3. What assets and earning capacity would still be mine?

4. What am I building that can grow without requiring proportionally more of my time?

Those are the questions behind my FU Money Plan and the work we’re doing inside Creator Paybook.

Nobody needs to quit a good job or collect seven side hustles to do this.

I think more of us need to build enough professional and financial ownership that one person’s decision cannot dismantle our entire life.

I learned to pay attention to that much later than I wish I had.

Now, whenever something in my life looks like security, I ask a much less comfortable question:

If this disappeared tomorrow, what would still be mine?

If you’re thinking about how to build more financial control into your career and life, subscribe to FU Money Plan. I write about reducing dependence on any one employer, client, platform, relationship, or income source, and building enough ownership and optionality to make decisions on your own terms.

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If you want to go further and actually figure out what you could build next, Creator Paybook is my live four-week program for designing a business and income model around your skills, goals, and version of success.

I don’t care where you live in the world. There’s one idea that seems to transcend cultures, languages, and distance: what a good life is supposed to look like.

The details vary, of course, but the checklist is remarkably familiar:

✓ Get a good education.
✓ Build a successful career.
✓ Make good money.
✓ Find a partner.
✓ Buy a nice home.
✓ Have a family.
✓ Travel and enjoy life.
✓ Be happy.

That last one is almost treated like an automatic consequence of checking all the others.

By the time I was 30, I had checked almost every box.

I was married with three children, helping build an eight-figure creative agency, working as CMO and co-owner, and getting to work with clients I once would have considered dream clients. We had a beautiful home in San Francisco. We traveled. We lived comfortably. I had reached the point where I didn’t have to think about whether I could afford the groceries in my cart.

And I don’t want to rewrite history and pretend I was secretly miserable through all of it. I wasn’t. For a long time, life really was good. I felt lucky.

That’s partly what made what happened next so confusing.

I had checked the boxes. So why did I increasingly feel like I couldn’t breathe?

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The Finish Line Moves

What I didn’t understand at 30 was that there really isn’t a finish line.

I thought we had worked hard, built the business, bought the house, created the family and reached this comfortable place where we could finally relax and enjoy it. But something strange happens when you achieve things you once thought would be extraordinary. After a while, they stop feeling extraordinary. They just become your normal life.

The beautiful house becomes the house you live in. The nice car becomes your car. The expensive vacation becomes where you go on vacation. You stop thinking, Wow, I can’t believe I get to do this, and without even realizing it, you start looking around at what comes next.

And there is always a next level.

There is always someone with a bigger house, more money, a more impressive career, better connections, more interesting vacations, or access to a room you haven’t been invited into yet. As our success grew, our social circles changed too, and so did my idea of what was normal. Things I once would have considered extravagant barely registered anymore because everyone around me was doing some version of the same thing.

That changed me, and not entirely in ways I’m proud of.

I became more judgmental. I noticed where people lived, what they drove, where their kids went to school, what they wore, where they traveled and what they had accomplished lately. I spent more time around people who noticed those things too. I hate admitting that because I don’t particularly like that version of myself, but she existed.

I had spent so many years trying to become successful that somewhere along the way, success itself had become another form of keeping score.

And the problem with a scoreboard is that there is always someone ahead of you.

A Tuesday Morning

I found something else I wrote years ago describing an ordinary Tuesday morning in our house. Reading it now, I can almost feel my shoulders tense.

It starts at 7:00 a.m., with all three kids already awake and the house in chaos. One child is arguing with me about what to wear. Another is crying after a fight with a sibling. Someone is yelling for me from another room. Breakfast is half-eaten, school things are missing, and I am moving from one small emergency to another while watching the clock because we are going to be late.

Eventually I manage to herd everyone toward the garage. Of course, things have been forgotten, so somebody has to run back inside. Then the front door gets left open. I’m already sitting in the car with the engine running, calling for everyone to hurry up.

We finally pull away. I remind them to buckle their seat belts. There are maybe two minutes of silence before my youngest asks where his lunchbox is.

I look at the clock.

7:50 a.m.

And my workday hasn’t even started yet.

Not every morning looked exactly like that, but enough of them did. Other days I was squeezing in a 6:30 yoga class before getting everyone ready, or trying to fit in time with my trainer after school drop-off. Then I would shower, do my hair and makeup, walk to the office and switch almost instantly from Mom managing morning chaos to CMO managing clients, employees, projects and deadlines.

Afternoons became another logistics exercise. For a while I handled much of the pickup and after-school shuffle myself. Later we used aftercare and eventually hired a nanny, largely because driving three children around while running a company had become ridiculous. We had help cleaning the house too, which sounds as though it should have made life easy, but it never really felt that way.

Years later, when I tried to describe what consumed my days, I wrote the list down in this order:

Driving.

Work.

Kids.

House.

Husband.

Errands.

Working Out.

I put driving first because I genuinely felt like I lived in the car.

Looking back, this is what seems so crazy to me. We had money. We had help. We had built the kind of life that was supposed to make things easier, yet somehow maintaining that life had become a full-time job of its own.

Maintaining the Good Life

Then there was everything required to maintain the life itself.

I spent a lot of money on my appearance. My hair-color appointments could run around $400. I had manicures, eyelash extensions, facials that cost hundreds of dollars, expensive skincare and makeup, and a wardrobe that always seemed to need something new. I worked out constantly, sometimes twice in one morning, and had a personal trainer several days a week.

Reading that now, I realize how excessive it sounds. At the time, it didn’t feel particularly excessive.

That’s an important distinction.

When the people around you live similarly, your definition of normal quietly changes. I had friends who spent far more than I did on clothes, beauty, travel and everything else. In my own social circle, I actually thought of myself as relatively restrained.

The same thing happened with travel. There always seemed to be another trip on the calendar or being discussed. Hawaii. Mexico. Vegas. Somewhere overseas. A weekend away. A nice restaurant. Something to look forward to.

And then there was the world around our children’s private school, where status seemed to seep into everything. Which neighborhood you lived in. What you drove. Where you traveled. What your children were doing. Which activities they had gotten into. Which schools came next.

I don’t want to make everyone from that period of my life sound awful. They weren’t. Some were wonderful people, and many were probably caught in exactly the same cycle I was.

But I do know that I became more judgmental during those years.

I cared more about appearances. I noticed things about people that the younger version of me probably wouldn’t have cared about at all. I spent more time around people who noticed those things too, and after a while it became difficult to tell which desires were actually mine and which ones I had simply absorbed from the environment around me.

Years later, I wrote that I had spent much of my life trying to be the good student, good wife, good mother, good friend and competent businesswoman. As long as I played the role well, I got to keep my part in the play.

By then, the role had just become more expensive.

The strange thing is that none of this felt like a trap while I was doing it. It mostly felt like success.

Until it didn’t.

I Don’t Recognize Us Anymore

Somewhere along the way, my husband and I grew apart.

Not overnight. There was no single fight or dramatic moment I can point to.

It happened slowly, while we were busy building the life we thought we wanted.

One day I remember thinking:

I don’t recognize us anymore.

And I didn’t mean that in a good way.

I had started to dislike our lifestyle. The constant upgrading. The pressure. The schedules. The expectations. The feeling that every decision had already been made for us by the life we had created.

But it wasn’t just the lifestyle.

I felt like we had stopped knowing each other.

Sometimes we would sit across from each other at dinner, just the two of us, and have nothing to talk about beyond the kids and work.

That scared me and made me fall into a deep depression.

We had built this incredible life together, but somewhere inside it, we had lost the part where we were simply two people who enjoyed and choosing to be together.

So I was the first one to suggest getting away.

Not forever. Just for one school year.

Part of me hoped that if we could remove ourselves from the noise for a while, we might find each other again. Close some of the distance that had grown between us.

I wanted us to step outside our normal life long enough to take a break from the madness.

I thought it would be good for us as a couple, and good for the kids too. I wanted them to experience a different way of living, go to school somewhere new, and maybe even learn another language.

So I started researching Brazil, Australia, and even parts of Europe where we had family, primarily looking at places with international school partnerships that would allow the kids to spend one school year abroad without creating problems with their transcripts.

I even looked into house-swap programs.

The destination almost didn’t matter.

I just wanted us to leave for a while.

To live somewhere else. Slow things down. Put some distance between us and the machinery of our everyday life.

To me, it sounded like freedom.

To my husband, it wasn’t realistic.

He was running the company and had a full team of people in the office depending on him, along with clients, employees, and commitments he couldn’t simply walk away from.

And because his company was the main thing paying for our lifestyle, he won.

I think that was the first time I really understood that we were wearing golden handcuffs.

We had built a life that looked like freedom because we could afford so much.

But we couldn’t leave it.

The house, the cars, the schools, the employees, the clients, the bills, the lifestyle. Maintaining all of it required us to keep doing exactly what we were doing.

We had more money than I had ever imagined having.

And somehow, fewer choices than I expected.

From the outside, there was nothing to escape.

We weren’t broke. We weren’t failing. Nothing had obviously collapsed.

We had the house, the careers, the children, the vacations, the cars, the schools.

Our life looked too good to walk away from.

But inside that life, I was becoming increasingly desperate for something to change.

So I tried to ignore it and lose myself in our routine.

It wasn’t that hard.

There was always something that needed to be done. Work. Kids. School. Activities. Dinner. Errands. Weekends. Vacations. Another Monday morning.

We still had a happy life in many ways.

We just weren’t really united anymore.

And it was surprisingly easy to go on autopilot and just keep living the life we had built while ignoring the divide between us.

The Hardest Part About Golden Handcuffs

I’m going to stop my story here.

What happened next is a much bigger story, and I’ve written about pieces of it elsewhere. I also want to be respectful of my family’s privacy. This isn’t about calling out my ex-husband or assigning blame. Neither of us was perfect, and we both contributed to the distance that eventually grew between us.

This article isn’t really about what happened after I left. It’s about why leaving something that looks so good can be so incredibly difficult.

For me, the hardest part about the golden handcuffs was the guilt.

There wasn’t one terrible thing I could point to. There was no domestic violence, alcoholism, drug addiction, cheating, or toxic boss making my life unbearable.

Sometimes, as awful as it sounds, I almost wished there had been one obvious reason. Not because I wanted something terrible to happen, but because then I would have had an explanation people understood.

Someone could ask, “Why would you leave all of that?” and I could give them one clean answer. They would nod. They would understand. Maybe they would even feel sorry for me.

But “I’m no longer happy with my life” doesn’t get the same response.

Especially when the life you’re unhappy with is a life many other people would love to have.

It made me question whether I was being selfish or entitled. Maybe I should have been more grateful for what I had. Maybe the problem wasn’t my life at all. Maybe it was me.

Believe me, I spent a long time thinking about that, both before I left and throughout the year that followed. If I’m being honest, I carried some of that guilt for much longer.

That’s part of what makes golden handcuffs so difficult. They don’t necessarily keep you inside something terrible. They can keep you inside something good enough that leaving feels irrational.

As I got closer to 40, though, another thought became harder to ignore: How much time do I actually have?

I don’t mean that in some morbid way. I simply became much more aware that life wasn’t infinite.

There were things I still wanted to experience while I was young enough, healthy enough, and free enough to do them. My children were getting older. I was getting older. Opportunities wouldn’t necessarily remain open forever.

I started wondering how many more years I was willing to spend hoping that someday I would feel differently about a life I already knew wasn’t right for me.

Of course I worried about the consequences. I knew leaving would hurt people. I knew there would be financial consequences, and I knew I could be making an enormous mistake.

But I also believed I would find a way to make things right afterward.

My situation was particular and, in many ways, extreme. You don’t have to leave a company, a marriage, a house, and almost everything familiar to understand what I’m talking about.

Golden handcuffs can look much more ordinary.

They can be a salary you’re terrified to lose, a mortgage that requires you to keep earning at a certain level, stock options you’re waiting to vest, private school tuition, a prestigious title you’ve worked years to earn, or a business you built that now owns most of your time.

Sometimes it’s simply a lifestyle you can afford but can no longer imagine stepping down from.

Or a life everyone around you keeps telling you that you should be grateful to have.

Sometimes the hardest life to leave isn’t a bad one.

It’s a good life that no longer feels like yours.

The Way Out

I wish I could tell you that this ended like an action movie, where I grabbed a parachute, jumped out the window, and sailed off toward some wonderful new life.

Obviously, that wasn’t what happened.

I had three children. Ending a marriage and dismantling the life we had built together was incredibly painful, and it isn’t something I celebrate or feel proud of. I’m certainly not advocating divorce. For me, it was the last possible option, after reaching the point where I no longer believed there was another way forward.

What I can tell you is that somewhere in everything that followed, I found a new purpose.

At the time, I wouldn’t have known how to describe it that way. If you had asked me what I was looking for, I probably would have said independence. I wanted the ability to support myself, make my own decisions, and build a life that wasn’t dependent on someone else’s company, salary, or choices.

If you’ve read some of my other articles, you already know I didn’t figure out how to do that immediately. Not even close. I tried a lot of things before I eventually understood what I was really trying to build.

And the conclusion I came to changed my life enough that it still shapes the work I do today.

Next week, I’m going to tell you what that was and why I think far more people need to start thinking about it long before they ever find themselves trapped by golden handcuffs.

But I’ll give you the spoiler now.

It comes down to two words:

FU money.

Not billionaire money. Not private-jet money. Not even millionaire money.

FU money is having enough financial independence and enough ways to support yourself that you can make an important life decision because it’s right for you, rather than because you’re terrified of what will happen if you say no.

If golden handcuffs are what can keep you in a life you no longer want, FU money is what gives you choices.

That’s where we’re going next.

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Thank you for reading.

As you can imagine, this is an incredibly personal story, and I know some of you may be judging me right now. I have to live with that. Trust me, I’ve judged myself enough over the years too.

I’m not sharing this story for attention. I’m sharing it because I want you to understand why building FU money matters so much to me.

My story is unique, but so is yours. Over the past eight years, I’ve met people from all walks of life with completely different circumstances, different struggles, and different reasons for wanting more control over their lives.

But so many of those stories eventually came back to the same thing:

Having enough independence to make your own choices.

That’s what FU money is really about.

Thanks for following along.

-Krista

In early 2020, I left California with three bags, my toddler, and a one-way ticket to France.

I wasn’t moving to France. At least, that wasn’t the plan.

After several very difficult years, I was exhausted and financially stressed. My marriage was over, I had sold my shares in the agency I had helped build, and my attempt to return to a traditional career had gone nowhere.

My dad invited me to visit him in France, so I packed what I could carry, took my little girl, and left.

I figured we’d stay for about a month.

A few days after we arrived, France went into lockdown.

Suddenly I was in a wooden cabin in the French Alps with a toddler, very little money, unreliable heat, and three older children back in the United States whom I had no idea when I would see again.

Then my dad got COVID and died very quickly.

When I look back at the photos from that time now, it’s strange. There are mountains, little villages, green fields, my daughter smiling.

You could easily think I had gone off to Europe to start some wonderful new life.

That is not how it felt.

I wasn’t thinking about reinvention or building my dream life. I was trying to make enough money, take care of my kids, and figure out what the hell I was going to do next.

I’ve written before about becoming unemployable at 38 and losing the professional identity I had spent years building.

But that’s the career version of the story.

I’ve never really written about what those years felt like.

The photos probably tell that story better than I can.

So I’m going to show you.

The Life I Was Leaving

There was a time when my life looked pretty damn good from the outside.

Before I turned 30, I had helped build a successful eight-figure agency, operating as its CMO and working with brands like Apple, HP, and Google. We owned a million-dollar home in San Francisco, I was married, and I had three beautiful children.

I had worked incredibly hard for that life. And for a long time, I thought it was the life I was supposed to want.

But I was deeply unhappy.

My marriage had become increasingly rocky, and it wasn’t only my marriage. I still loved my work, but after years of pushing so hard, I was exhausted and getting dangerously close to burnout.

I remember looking at myself in the mirror one day and thinking:

I can’t do this anymore.

That decision changed almost everything.

I sold my shares in the agency. My husband and I divorced. We sold the house and liquidated most of what we owned. Then came the lawyers and legal fees, which ate through years of financial security faster than I ever imagined possible.

Still, the biggest surprise came afterward.

I assumed I would simply get another senior marketing job.

Instead, I spent the next two years applying for more than 200 positions, hiring three career coaches, rewriting my résumé, working my network, and doing pretty much everything people tell you to do.

Nothing worked.

I’ve written much more about that chapter in Unemployable at 38, so if you’re curious about what happened professionally, you can read that story here.

For this story, you only need to know where those two years left me.

By 40, I was divorced, jobless, in debt, without a home of my own, raising four children, and still owed back taxes I could no longer pay.

Yep.

I was basically totally f*cked.

I Had to Make Money Fast

I had to figure out how to make enough money to support myself and my kids, without a job, in the middle of a global lockdown.

And I had to do it fast.

I wasn’t sitting in the French Alps mapping out my future as an entrepreneur or thinking about personal branding and multiple revenue streams.

I needed money for groceries.

What I did have was more than 20 years of marketing experience, a laptop, and an internet connection.

So I started with what I knew.

I took on consulting work and helped people with positioning, branding, websites, newsletters, advertising, podcasts, LinkedIn, and pretty much anything else someone was willing to pay me for.

Some things worked. Some absolutely did not.

At the time, fractional work wasn’t nearly as common as it is now, so sometimes I was also explaining why a company might hire someone like me without putting me on payroll full-time.

But people started paying me.

After two years of applying for jobs and trying to convince companies I was worth hiring, that felt significant.

Sometimes it was only a small project. It didn’t matter. A few hundred dollars could mean groceries, gas, or getting a bill paid.

My three older kids were staying in San Francisco with their dad, but my toddler was with me. There is nothing quite like having a small child depending on you to make “I need to figure this out” feel very real.

And slowly, something started clicking.

Companies might not have wanted to give me a job, but people were willing to pay me directly for what I knew.

The internet became my lifeline. It gave me a way to work and connect with people from a place where I otherwise had very few options.

I’m still incredibly grateful that we live in a time when you can start something with almost no money. Back then, I was using free LinkedIn, free Zoom, one free Calendly link, WhatsApp and Slack. That was basically my tech stack.

We massively overcomplicate what we think we need to get started. Most of my first clients came from putting myself out there and having conversations with people.

Eventually, though, I ran into another problem.

I had plenty of experience.

Almost nobody knew who I was.

Nobody Knew Who I Was

For most of my career, I had never really needed people to know my name.

I had a company, a title, clients, and a team. There was always some context around who I was and why someone should listen to me.

Now there wasn’t.

I had more than 20 years of experience, but very little visibility of my own. If I was going to make money without relying on another company to hire me, that had to change.

I experimented a little with Facebook and YouTube, but LinkedIn became my main platform.

And LinkedIn back then was actually really fun.

People were genuinely open to meeting each other. I was having conversations all day long and getting on calls with new people almost every day. People introduced each other, collaborated, shared ideas, and actually got to know one another.

So while I was sitting at a tiny desk in the French Alps, I was doing a ridiculous amount of networking.

I wrote a lot too, mostly about things I knew from experience and usually through stories. I didn’t have some sophisticated content strategy. I wrote about things I cared about and tried to make them useful.

One of my earliest breakthroughs came from something I barely planned.

I spontaneously decided to run a free five-day challenge.

There was no elaborate launch. I announced it, invited people to join, and nearly 1,000 people signed up.

I wasn’t selling myself as a LinkedIn coach, and most of them weren’t trying to become LinkedIn experts. They had businesses they were trying to grow, and nobody knew they existed.

After the challenge, people started asking if they could work with me. Some wanted coaching. Others wanted help with their businesses. Pretty quickly, those conversations started turning into customers.

LinkedIn was also rolling out new features like live streaming and newsletters, so I tried those too.

Honestly, I tried almost everything.

Some things went nowhere. Some worked far better than I expected.

But from that little desk in France, I was slowly building something I hadn’t really had before:

A network that knew me, not just the company I worked for.

Then I Started Selling Things

Once I was talking to people all day and working with clients one-on-one, I started getting a much clearer idea of what people actually needed.

And I started selling things. A lot of things.

I would hear the same problem come up several times and think, okay, why am I explaining this individually to five different people? I could just create something around it and teach everyone at once.

So I started doing a lot of live masterclasses.

If several people were struggling with positioning, I might build a masterclass around positioning, announce it on LinkedIn, and see what happened.

I created workshops, challenges, coaching offers, and all kinds of experiments based on what people were already asking me about.

I wasn’t doing months of market research or building elaborate funnels. I was close enough to the people I was trying to help that they were basically telling me what they needed.

So I listened, built something, put a price on it, and tried to sell it.

Some things sold really well. Some didn’t.

But I learned far more from actually selling things than I ever would have from endlessly planning what I might sell someday.

And eventually, I learned something else:

Just because people will pay you for something doesn’t necessarily mean it’s something you should build your business around.I wasn’t doing months of market research or building elaborate funnels. I was close enough to the people I was trying to help that they were basically telling me what they were struggling with.

So I listened, built something, put a price on it and tried to sell it.

Some things sold really well. Some didn’t.

And then I would try again.

I Started Diversifying My Income

Around this time, I started thinking more seriously about having multiple ways to make money.

After everything that had happened, relying on one employer, one client, or even one offer made me nervous. I wanted options.

By then, I was earning from coaching, live masterclasses, cohorts, paid challenges, and marketing services. For a while, I got really good at building quiz funnels for clients, and I also took on some social media management.

Then I got my first brand deal.

It was with a huge Fortune 500 company, and they paid me what felt like a ridiculous amount of money at the time.

I remember thinking, wait, companies will actually pay me for this too?

Then came affiliate income.

If I genuinely liked something and was already recommending it, I started using trackable links. I didn’t expect much from it, but people bought things.

That worked surprisingly well too.

Every time I figured out another way to make money, I felt a little more confident.

And honestly, a little less scared.

If one client disappeared, I had other clients. If coaching slowed down, maybe a masterclass sold. A brand deal, affiliate income, or service project could cover the gap.

Little by little, my entire financial life stopped feeling dependent on someone else giving me a job.

I started thinking:

Okay. I think I’m actually going to make it.

What This Actually Looked Like

I should add some context here, because I don’t want to make any of this sound easier than it was.

I absolutely had an unfair advantage: more than 20 years in marketing.

But for most of my career, I had been managing the work, not doing every single piece myself. If I needed copy, graphics, video editing, or a website built, I had talented people around me.

Now there was just me.

And admittedly, I kind of sucked at some of it.

It’s very different directing the work versus sitting there trying to figure out why the graphic looks terrible, the video won’t export, or the landing page isn’t selling.

It was humbling. It also gave me a much greater appreciation for how hard good marketing actually is.

I was also building my own business while actively serving clients. I still had coaching calls, workshops, projects, and deadlines. I wasn’t sitting around marketing myself all day.

And then there was real life.

I was alone with my toddler. No childcare. No partner at home to split the load. Meals, bedtime, laundry, groceries, household stuff, and a house that seemed to have something broken at all times were mine too.

So no, I wasn’t peacefully sitting in the French Alps building my dream business from my laptop.

I just kept figuring out what I could do with the time, money, energy, and skills I had.

I Wanted Something I Owned

Eventually, I wanted something more permanent than a collection of offers.

I wanted my own platform.

So I created From Zero 2 Six Academy, an online entrepreneurship academy for people building service businesses.

Over time, I built six courses, The Solopreneur MBA mastermind, and the Profitable Solopreneur community, along with live coaching, workshops, and cohorts.

I ran it for three and a half years, working closely with people trying to turn their skills and experience into businesses that could actually support them.

It gave me a front-row seat to what happens when business advice meets real life.

And eventually, I started noticing something that made me question the whole premise of what I had built.

Why I’m Not Giving You the Numbers

You may have noticed that I haven’t told you how much money I was making during any of this.

That’s intentional.

Income numbers are everywhere online, especially in the coaching world. $20K months. Seven figures. Screenshots of Stripe accounts.

Personally, I find a lot of it tacky.

The minute you give people a number, they start measuring themselves against it. Why did she make that much and I didn’t? Am I behind? Am I doing something wrong?

Suddenly the number becomes the story.

I do think you need to know your number. How much do you actually need? What would make you feel financially secure? What kind of life are you trying to pay for?

Those answers will be different for everyone.

There is one money moment I will tell you about.

The first time I realized I had made more on my own than I ever thought I could, I cried.

After spending years wondering whether anyone would even hire me again, I had figured out how to support myself without waiting for someone else to give me a job or decide what I was worth.

That felt pretty amazing.

The Happy Ending That Wasn’t

This is probably where a normal reinvention story would end.

I had survived the divorce, career collapse, lockdown, and starting over. I had built an audience, created multiple ways to make money, and built an academy of my own.

Great. She figured it out.

Except I hadn’t.

The longer I ran From Zero 2 Six Academy, the more obvious it became that I had made a pretty big assumption when I built it.

On the surface, everyone was an entrepreneur trying to build a business. Beyond that, they had wildly different skills, goals, available time, families, ambitions, and ideas about what success even looked like.

And I had created something that essentially said:

Here’s the blueprint. Follow these steps.

At the time, I thought that was a strength. I wanted people to know exactly what to do.

Eventually, I realized I was trying to give very different people the same roadmap.

I knew the model no longer felt right, but I didn’t yet know how to fix it.

So I shut the academy down.

Yes, I walked away from revenue.

I still think it was the right decision.

I didn’t know what I would build next. I just knew I couldn’t keep teaching one version of success to people who clearly wanted very different lives.

Back to What I Knew Best

After closing the academy, I went back to what I knew best: being a CMO.

I had already spent years doing this work, so I was very much in my comfort zone. The problem was that getting hired in San Francisco had already proved nearly impossible. Now I was living remotely in France, so the chances of landing a traditional CMO job felt even worse.

So instead of trying to get hired again, I started offering my experience as a Fractional CMO.

Honestly, it felt natural.

I knew how to walk into a business, figure out what wasn’t working, and help fix it. After several years of trying all kinds of new things, I was back doing work I had already spent decades learning how to do.

And I have to admit, getting the CMO title back felt good too.

If you’ve read my story about becoming unemployable at 38, you know how much of my identity had once been tied to my career. Becoming a Fractional CMO gave me some of that confidence back.

For about two years, it worked really well.

Then, sometime during year three, I started getting restless.

I realized I was once again spending most of my time and energy building other people’s businesses.

And I couldn’t stop thinking:

What am I building for myself?

Of Course I Built Something New

If you’ve read this far, it probably won’t surprise you to learn that I started building something new.

Of course I did.

Even while I was working as a Fractional CMO, I kept thinking about From Zero 2 Six Academy and what I had gotten wrong.

I still cared deeply about solopreneurs and independents, and I wanted another shot at building something for them.

But this time, I didn’t want to hand everyone the same six steps and assume they were all heading to the same place.

That’s how Creator Paybook came about.

Instead of starting with a blueprint, I’m starting with the person. What do you actually want? What are you good at? How much do you need to earn? How much of your life do you want work to consume?

Then we build from there.

And no, I can’t promise Creator Paybook is the last thing I’ll ever build.

You’ve just read this article. You know me better than that by now.

My bigger vision is to keep building services and media under Unignorable Brands that help more people create successful independent businesses, careers, and lives.

Years ago, I left California with three bags, a toddler, and absolutely no plan.

At the time, I thought my biggest problem was that I didn’t know what came next.

It took years of businesses, offers, pivots, clients, courses, successes, mistakes, and starting over to understand that nobody could hand me the answer anyway.

I had to decide what I wanted to build.

And apparently, I’m still deciding.

Which, at this point, feels pretty normal.

So the next time a coach shows you a beautifully neat path from one offer to millions of dollars, think of me.

Real businesses rarely move in a straight line. There are experiments, bad ideas, things that work until they don’t, things you outgrow, and plenty of pivots.

You just don’t usually see all of that in the success story.

It started with a few whispers.

Substack.

I’d hear the name here and there, usually from writers, and I’ll admit I never paid much attention. My impression was that it was basically like Medium, a place for professional writers to write very writerly things for other writers.

Then I started hearing about it more often.

People I followed on LinkedIn would post something and say they’d written the full article on Substack. Writers I remembered from Medium were suddenly publishing there. Eventually curiosity got the better of me, so I wandered over to see what everyone was talking about.

That’s when I discovered something mildly ridiculous.

I already had a Substack account.

Since 2020.

Apparently Past Krista had arrived at the frontier years earlier, looked around, and quietly gone home without leaving Present Krista any useful instructions.

I no longer had access to the account, and Substack wasn’t able to help me recover it, so I started over. And because apparently I learned nothing from the first incident, I created two accounts this time for security.

Excellent start.

Then I entered the Wild West

I had no idea what I was looking at.

Notes. Publications. Restacks. Chats. Recommendations. Writers recommending writers. Notes that seemed to be doing extraordinarily well for reasons I couldn’t begin to explain.

And then there was my feed.

For reasons known only to the algorithm, Substack seemed convinced I was deeply interested in perimenopause, divorce, men behaving badly, and women with several cats rebuilding their lives.

To be fair, maybe the algorithm knows me better than I’d like to admit.

Professionally, though, I was confused.

I’m a marketer and entrepreneur who writes. I care about business models, money, positioning, work, creators, audiences, professional identity, and why smart people sometimes build businesses they eventually realize they don’t want.

So I figured I needed some help understanding this strange new land.

I joined a cohort run by a couple of genuinely lovely people who knew Substack well. Unfortunately, it also made something clear pretty quickly: I wasn’t really their target audience.

Most of the conversation revolved around becoming a full-time writer, growing through the writer community, recommending one another, commenting on each other’s work, and participating heavily in the Substack ecosystem.

There’s nothing wrong with that. It just wasn’t what I was trying to build.

Some of the growth advice also felt uncomfortably close to the engagement-pod and follow-for-follow behavior I’d spent years avoiding on LinkedIn.

So I finished the experience thinking I’d either have to figure Substack out my own way, or accept that maybe it wasn’t for me.

Naturally, I kept coming back.

Meanwhile, LinkedIn was testing my patience

LinkedIn has been incredibly good to me.

I’ve found clients there, built relationships around the world, grown a large audience, and had opportunities I never would have had otherwise.

I’m not leaving.

But by 2025, reach had dropped dramatically, the platform was changing, and I was becoming much more aware of something I had always known intellectually:

I could spend years building an audience there and still own none of it.

LinkedIn owns the platform. LinkedIn controls distribution. LinkedIn can change the rules whenever it wants.

At one point I was frustrated enough that I seriously considered walking away altogether, but abandoning an audience I had spent years building would have been ridiculous.

So instead, I started paying closer attention to what was happening elsewhere.

And Substack kept giving me reasons to look again.

Paid subscriptions.

Your own publication.

Chats and community features.

A direct relationship with readers.

And then I discovered the feature that really got my attention:

You can download your subscriber list.

You can leave.

That was huge for me.

After years of thinking about professional equity, audience ownership, platform dependence, and how much of our careers we build on land that belongs to someone else, Substack suddenly made more sense.

Maybe this wasn’t Medium 2.0 after all.

Maybe everyone really was loading up their wagons and heading west because somebody had heard there was gold out there.

So eventually, I packed mine too.

So where exactly is the gold?

For me, it starts with ownership.

I’ve spent years building an audience on LinkedIn, and I’m extremely grateful for it. But if LinkedIn disappeared tomorrow, I couldn’t exactly pack up my followers and take them with me.

On Substack, if someone subscribes to my publication, I have their email address. I can export the list. If one day I decide Substack has completely lost its mind, I can pack up the wagon again and leave.

That changes the relationship.

Then there’s the business model.

This was probably the biggest reason I started noticing so many writers migrating from Medium.

Medium has its own ecosystem and its own model for paying writers.

Substack makes it incredibly easy to create your own publication and charge readers directly.

No pitching an editor.

No submitting an article and waiting to see whether somebody wants it.

No asking permission to start.

You could wake up tomorrow, decide you’re now the proud publisher of The Weekly Potato, and have subscribers by lunchtime.

I find that kind of incredible.

And you don’t have to become a full-time paid newsletter writer for any of this to be useful.

I already have a business.

What interests me is having a place where my writing, audience, community, products, and business can actually connect.

That’s where Substack became much more interesting to me than simply “a place for writers.”

LinkedIn and Substack are useful for different reasons

I don’t really see one replacing the other.

LinkedIn is still incredibly good for discovery.

Someone who has never heard of me can come across one of my posts because somebody in their network commented on it. A CEO can find an article. A potential client can look at my profile and immediately understand my background.

And I can do the same with them.

That’s something I didn’t fully appreciate until I came to Substack.

On LinkedIn, I usually know who I’m talking to.

I can see that someone is a founder in London, a consultant in New York, or a marketing director in Singapore. I can see their work history, company, posts, and often whether we know some of the same people.

On Substack, sometimes I click a profile and get a first name, a tiny photo of a dog, and approximately zero additional information.

Who are you?

What do you do?

Are you a Nobel Prize-winning economist?

Are you twelve?

Do you even own that dog?

I have questions.

The anonymity also has a downside.

I’ve already come across things I would never expect to casually stumble across in my LinkedIn feed, including racist content, extremist propaganda, and explicit sexual material.

I’m perfectly capable of reading opinions I disagree with.

But there’s disagreement, and then there’s opening your feed over coffee and wondering how you accidentally wandered into a part of the internet you definitely weren’t looking for.

So no, I’m not declaring Substack the promised land.

The wagon has hit a few potholes.

And then there are Notes

I still don’t understand Notes.

I’ve spent years studying content and distribution. I understand LinkedIn pretty well. I can usually look at a post and make an educated guess about why it traveled.

Notes?

No idea.

I’ll see something like:

Sunday.

Apparently 4,000 people needed to hear that.

Meanwhile, I’ll publish something I spent actual time thinking about and Substack appears to show it to seven people and a squirrel.

Clearly I still have some frontier skills to acquire.

Oddly enough, I kind of enjoy that.

I’m new here.

I don’t have the platform figured out.

And after spending years being the person who supposedly understands LinkedIn, there’s something refreshing about being a beginner again.

What I’m actually here to write about

After eight years of entrepreneurship, 12 revenue streams, six pivots, a few spectacular mistakes, some things that worked far better than expected, and several moments when I wondered what on earth I was doing, I have plenty to talk about.

I’m interested in what happens after the shiny announcement.

What happens when the business you built stops fitting the life you want.

Why talented people can make good money and still feel trapped by what they created.

What happens when a title disappears.

How you turn experience into something you actually own.

How you build recognition without becoming an internet personality.

How you create multiple ways to earn without accidentally creating six different jobs for yourself.

And occasionally, why LinkedIn has 99 problems and somehow keeps finding another one.

I care much more about the messy middle than someone standing at the finish line explaining their perfect five-step formula.

Those formulas usually look a lot cleaner in hindsight.

Who I hope finds me here

Smart, experienced people who are questioning the traditional script.

Maybe you already have a business, but something about it no longer fits.

Maybe you have a great career and want to build something that belongs to you alongside it.

Maybe you’ve been laid off, burned out, retired, scaled back, changed industries, moved countries, raised children, started over, or simply reached the point where you’re asking:

Is this really how I want to spend the next ten years?

Those are the conversations I’m interested in.

I’m still building, experimenting, changing my mind, and occasionally driving the wagon into a ditch myself.

But I’m willing to talk about what happens between the success stories.

The pivots.

The bad bets.

The things I spent money on and regretted.

The things I nearly didn’t do that changed everything.

And the lessons you generally acquire only after paying for them in time, money, ego, or all three.

What you’ll get if you stick around

Free subscribers get my essays and observations on money, work, marketing, reinvention, business models, and how people earn now.

Paid subscribers get closer to what’s actually happening behind the scenes: the numbers, experiments, decisions, what worked, what didn’t, and what I’m changing next.

After eight years, 12 income streams, and six pivots, I’ve accumulated a decent collection of scars.

I might as well make them useful.

So if you just discovered this publication, welcome.

Pull up a chair.

Or climb into the wagon.

Apparently we’re heading west.

A lot of entrepreneurship stories begin with a happy announcement.

Then comes some version of:

“I wasn’t going to put my dreams on hold anymore.”

Usually accompanied by a very confident caption about finally choosing yourself.

Mine looked very different.

I’ve taken the entrepreneurship route twice in my life. The first time, I helped build an agency. Years later, I built a business on my own.

If you want to learn how to build FU money so you have more independence, more choices, and more freedom to work and live on your own terms, you’ll probably want to subscribe.

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Both decisions were personal, but the second came from a very different place. I wasn’t chasing freedom or trying to escape corporate life. I was trying to figure out how to support myself after almost everything I had relied on, professionally and personally, had changed.

A difficult divorce had dragged on for nearly three years. I had lost my professional identity and income. I was raising four children while navigating life after divorce, and I spent two years trying to find my way back into a traditional career.

I applied to more than 200 jobs and hired three career coaches.

Nothing was really changing.

By then, my savings were disappearing and debt was replacing them.

I didn’t need another inspirational quote about following my dreams.

I needed a way to take charge of my own future, put food on the table, and stop waiting for some recruiter to decide whether I was worth calling back.

That’s when entrepreneurship stopped feeling like an option.

It became the way forward.

Then COVID Hit

I left for France just days before lockdown restricted travel and the whole world shut down.

I thought I was going for a month—to regain strength and clarity about my career.

Life had other plans.

My dad became one of the early COVID victims, going from healthy to gone in a very short time. It was devastating.

Suddenly, I was in the mountains with a toddler, isolated in an old wood cabin with poor heating, constant problems, barely any money, and days without seeing another adult.

Every day, I worried about getting sick myself, not knowing who would take care of my daughter if I did.

It was one of the hardest periods of my life.

Not exactly the glamorous beginning to an entrepreneurial journey.

All I Really Needed Was Internet

The house had one thing that turned out to matter more than almost anything else: internet.

And apparently, I didn’t need much more than that to start building.

I posted content every day. I networked constantly, went live, hosted Zoom events, and made a point of talking to new people every week.

I also experimented like crazy.

Over the next few years, I tested around a dozen different revenue streams and pivoted six times. Some ideas worked. Plenty didn’t. Every attempt taught me a little more about what people valued, what they would pay for, and what kind of business I actually wanted to run.

Content ended up being one of the biggest catalysts.

It helped me become visible again after years of feeling professionally invisible. My LinkedIn audience eventually grew to more than 77,000 followers, my newsletter to more than 37,000 subscribers, and I was named a LinkedIn Top Voice three years in a row.

None of that happened quickly or according to some clever master plan.

I was figuring it out by doing it.

My Link to the Outside World

In total lockdown and deep isolation, the internet became my lifeline.

It was how I stayed in regular contact with my three older children, who were isolated back in the United States. But it also became the way I started rebuilding my career.

I had decades of marketing experience and had already been a CMO, so I understood fairly quickly what I could sell. Fractional CMO work wasn’t really a thing yet, but consulting certainly was.

So I started there.

I began posting content aimed at business owners who needed help becoming more visible, and then I said yes to almost anything I knew how to do.

Positioning. Rebranding. Websites. Podcast strategy. Newsletters. Advertising. LinkedIn strategy. If it fell under marketing and I knew how to help, I probably did it.

At the same time, I began coaching people who were much earlier in their entrepreneurial journey and needed help figuring out how to market themselves.

There wasn’t some beautifully designed business model behind any of this.

My attitude was much simpler:

Figure out what people need. Help them. Learn. Adapt. Keep going.

Looking back, that may have been the best business plan I could have had.

The Solopreneur Bottleneck

Eventually, I ran into a problem almost every solopreneur recognizes: there was only one of me.

As the business grew, so did everything I had to manage. Clients, courses, coaching, content, email, community, administration. I brought on a VA and started building better systems around myself, including a CRM, project management tools, Kit for email, and Kajabi for the academy.

The business became much more organized.

But organization didn’t solve the bigger problem.

I had built six courses, two masterminds, a paid community, and a coaching business around teaching people how to market and grow their businesses. And somewhere along the way, my people-pleasing tendencies had turned that into an enormous amount of teaching.

I kept adding more because I wanted people to have everything they needed.

The problem was that many of the people I was helping were still early in their businesses. They didn’t have the time or capacity to execute everything themselves, and they often didn’t have the budget to hire people to do it for them.

More information wasn’t the answer.

And I was burning myself out trying to provide it.

Eventually, I had to admit that the business model wasn’t working for me anymore.

So I shut down the academy.

A Different Business Model

After shutting down the academy, I went in a very different direction.

By 2023, fractional executive work was becoming much more common, and Fractional CMO was a natural fit for my background. Instead of trying to help dozens of people at once, I could work deeply with a small number of established businesses that had the resources to actually execute on the strategy.

I capped myself at five clients a year.

For a while, it was exactly what I needed.

The business became simpler. I could charge well, work with fewer people, and spend my time solving higher-level problems instead of constantly creating courses, running a community, and trying to support people at completely different stages of business.

But I never really forgot about the people I had been trying to help through the academy.

There was still a problem I hadn’t solved.

How do you help someone earlier in their entrepreneurial journey build something that actually fits their skills, circumstances, income needs, and the life they want to live?

I knew by then that simply handing someone more courses, worksheets, and strategies wasn’t the answer.

I just didn’t know what the answer was yet.

To Be Continued

My entrepreneurial journey isn’t over.

If the last six years have taught me anything, it’s that I probably shouldn’t expect it to be.

I’ve watched successful creators shut down courses, close communities, and walk away from businesses they spent years building. I used to find that surprising. Now I don’t.

We change. Our lives change. What we need from our work changes too.

There are seasons when we want to grow, seasons when we want more time, and seasons when something that once fit no longer does.

I no longer see every pivot as a failure to focus.

I’m actually grateful I tried so many things. That’s how I learned what I liked, what people valued, what exhausted me, and what I never wanted to do again.

Six years ago, I thought I needed to figure out what I was going to do with the rest of my career.

Now I’d rather build work that fits the life I have today and give myself permission to change it when I change.

Maybe six years from now, I’ll be doing something completely different.

I’m okay with that.

I’m enjoying the journey.

I hope you’ll follow along.

At 38, the idea that I might be unemployable felt surreal.

Thirty-eight is supposed to be a pretty good age professionally. In fact, when this happened to me in 2018, women between 35 and 54 were in the highest-earning age groups in the U.S.

That makes sense. By then, you’ve had enough time to build real experience, make mistakes, develop judgment, lead people, manage difficult situations, and actually know what you’re doing. I had always assumed experience worked a little like compound interest: the more of it you accumulated, the more valuable you became.

At 38, I thought I should be entering some of the strongest earning years of my career. Instead, I was struggling to get hired.

Before everything fell apart

A few years earlier, I thought I had done everything right.

By my early 30s, I had what I considered the good life. I was married, raising kids who went to private school, living in a nice house in a city I loved, and financially comfortable enough that travel or the occasional splurge didn’t require a major calculation. We weren’t living some billionaire Silicon Valley fantasy, but we were comfortable.

Professionally, I was doing work I was proud of. I was CMO and co-owner of a thriving agency that had grown into an eight-figure business. I had a title, a company, clients, colleagues, and a professional identity that felt established.

I had been working since I was 20, including through three pregnancies, and work had always been fulfilling to me. I had built a career, a business, a family, and financial stability. I remember looking at my life sometime in my 30s and thinking, more or less, I did it.

That didn’t mean I was finished or that I wasn’t ambitious. I was always thinking about what came next. But I believed the foundation underneath my life was solid.

That’s important because I wasn’t bored with my career or looking for an excuse to blow up my life in pursuit of some romantic idea of freedom. The life I had carefully built simply stopped being the life I could count on.

Then Everything Changed

At 38, that foundation disappeared.

I got divorced, sold my shares in the agency, and liquidated assets. Within a relatively short period, the household, career, and financial structure I had spent years building had fundamentally changed.

This wasn’t some deliberate midlife reinvention. I wasn’t bored with my career or chasing a romantic idea of freedom. I was trying to figure out how to rebuild a life that, not long before, I thought was secure.

I wasn’t asking myself an exciting question like, What do I want to do next? I was trying to answer a much more practical one: How am I going to support the life and family I already have?

Given everything going on, full-time employment seemed like the obvious answer. What I didn’t know yet was that the career security I thought I had accumulated didn’t work quite the way I assumed it would.

So I Did the Responsible Thing

San Francisco is an expensive place to start over, especially while going through a divorce and trying to create two separate households for your kids. For much of that period, I was staying in Airbnbs while trying to secure a long-term rental, and the costs kept piling up: housing, school, food, activities, transportation, and enormous legal fees.

Moving somewhere significantly cheaper wasn’t really an option because we shared custody and I needed to stay close to my ex and the kids’ schools. For context, San Francisco was already the second-most expensive rental market in the country in 2018, with the average apartment renting for about $3,600 a month. I wasn’t exactly looking for a one-bedroom, either. I needed enough space for my kids.

I actually tried moving about 15 kilometers south for a while to reduce my housing costs. It made perfect sense on paper, but the extra commuting was hard on the kids, who were already dealing with enough change from the divorce. Eventually, I moved back close to their dad. I didn’t want my financial problems to become another disruption they had to absorb.

During mediation, I remember going through our monthly expenses for the kids. The mediator studied the numbers, went quiet for a moment, and finally said, “You guys spend way too much money on your kids.”

She wasn’t wrong. I just hadn’t yet accepted how much our financial reality had changed.

When we were together, I thought we earned more than enough to support the life we had built. I didn’t pay that much attention to what everything cost because we could afford it. Divorce changed that calculation very quickly. Now there were two households instead of one, huge legal expenses, new housing costs, and no predictable income coming in on my side.

I could literally watch the money leaving my account. More than anything, I was worried about making sure my kids had what they needed without destroying my own financial future in the process.

The truth is, full-time employment wasn’t what I really wanted. If my circumstances had been different, I probably would have gone straight back into entrepreneurship. I had loved the independence of owning the agency, and deep down I knew I wanted to build something of my own again.

But I also knew exactly how long it could take for a new business to produce reliable income. I had already lived through the early agency years when we barely made anything and had to work incredibly hard to get it off the ground. With kids to support, high expenses, and a shrinking financial runway, I didn’t feel like I had the luxury of doing that again.

So I made a deal with myself. I would get a full-time job for maybe five years, pay for my kids’ school, rebuild my finances, and get back on my feet. In the meantime, I could start something small on the side and gradually build my way back into entrepreneurship.

For this season of my life, I thought I needed to do the responsible thing rather than the thing I actually wanted. And with my experience, I assumed finding a good full-time job would be the easy part.

I Hired Three Career Coaches

Once I decided to pursue full-time employment, I took the job search seriously. Over the next two years, I hired three different career coaches: one to help with my résumé and overall search strategy, a former recruiter who specialized in LinkedIn and applications, and another former recruiter who coached me specifically on interviewing.

My finances were already under enormous pressure while I was paying for all of this, but I saw it as an investment in my future. If professional help could shorten the search and get me into a solid full-time role, it felt worth it.

I rewrote my résumé, got new professional headshots, overhauled my LinkedIn profile, and started posting regularly. At the time, I had no intention of becoming a creator or building an audience. LinkedIn was simply part of my strategy to get hired.

The search itself quickly became a second job. By then I had a full-time contract role, so most of my job hunting happened after hours. I would put the kids to bed, sit down at my computer, and spend the evening researching companies, tailoring applications, writing cover letters, following up with recruiters, preparing for interviews, and tracking everything in a spreadsheet.

I was also active on LinkedIn every day, commenting, posting, reaching out to people inside companies, and setting up informational conversations. I joined one of the largest tech job-seeker communities in the Bay Area and started attending events. I met people for coffee, spoke with recruiters, worked with my coaches, and went to networking events whenever I could.

Over two years, I submitted more than 200 applications. I gave the search everything I had.

One thing nobody really tells you about seriously looking for work is how much unpaid labor it requires before anyone pays you a dollar. In my case, I was fitting that labor around a contract job and a family.

Community Matters When You’re Job Hunting

A long job search can become incredibly isolating. You spend hours behind a computer applying, following up, getting ghosted, and trying not to turn every rejection into a judgment about your worth.

I made a point of getting out of the house and around other people. Through the Bay Area tech community, I became involved with LinkedIn Local, a grassroots movement where people organized free in-person meetups with people they had connected with on LinkedIn. I eventually started helping host the San Francisco events every couple of months.

I also started volunteering what I knew. Through career organizations, I gave free talks to people trying to break into product marketing. As I learned more about LinkedIn and started growing my own following, people began asking how I was doing it, so I started teaching that too.

None of this got me hired, but it gave me community and a way to keep contributing at a time when rejection was constantly testing my confidence. Helping other people reminded me that I still had something valuable to offer.

I Was Working, But Still Falling Behind

Early in the search, a placement agency found me a contract role that was genuinely interesting. It had a lot of responsibility and moving parts, and the work itself was a great fit for my product marketing background. I enjoyed the actual work, but morale was low and the environment was bleak. It reminded me how much I had valued the autonomy of owning a business.

My life outside work was exhausting too. I had a newborn at home and was still pumping milk while working. I had temporarily moved outside San Francisco to find a rental large enough for the family at a lower cost, which meant commuting back into the city while also trying to be present for my older kids during my custody time.

Most days felt like one long handoff from one responsibility to another: work, the commute, the kids, the baby, and then the job search after everyone was asleep. I was still pumping milk during that period, which tells you roughly how glamorous this particular chapter of my career was.

The contract brought in income, but it still wasn’t enough to cover my housing costs, legal bills, family expenses, and everything else that had changed after the divorce. My savings kept shrinking, and eventually I crossed the line from spending down savings to accumulating debt.

One of the hardest things for me to accept was that I wasn’t going to recreate the same life I had before the divorce, only in a separate household. Looking back, I was still trying to preserve some version of it. I furnished the kids’ rooms nicely and even took vacations we couldn’t really afford. Those weren’t smart financial decisions, but at the time I was struggling to accept just how much my circumstances had changed.

I Failed

After two years, I had to admit that the plan hadn’t worked.

There had been plenty of rejection and even more silence. Some applications disappeared without a response. I was told I was overqualified for certain roles. Other jobs paid far less than I needed to support my household, or required commutes that simply didn’t work with my life.

There was one opportunity I genuinely thought was going to work. The company flew me out for interviews, and my conversations with the person who would have been my manager and two future colleagues went extremely well.

Then I met my potential manager’s manager, and I could immediately feel something change. Maybe she already preferred another candidate. Maybe I simply wasn’t what she had in mind. I’ll never know, but I didn’t get the job.

That rejection hit hard because by then I had done almost everything I knew how to do. I had invested in professional help, applied to more than 200 jobs, networked constantly, learned LinkedIn, practiced interviewing, worked contract jobs, and kept trying to convince myself that the right opportunity was just around the corner.

Meanwhile, my finances were getting worse. The contract was taking up most of my time but still wasn’t paying my bills. Every month, more money was going out than coming in, and I was now actively going into debt.

The hardest part was feeling as though I was failing everywhere at once. I felt guilty that I wasn’t spending enough time with my newborn. I felt guilty about the long drives back and forth for my older kids. I felt guilty that after the divorce I couldn’t give them the same life and experiences I had been able to give them before.

By then, my life no longer felt like a temporary rough patch. I was working constantly, worrying constantly, and still falling further behind. The contract wasn’t covering my expenses, the job search wasn’t producing a job, and I had crossed the line from spending down savings to accumulating debt.

After two years of trying to make the responsible plan work, I finally had to admit that it wasn’t working.

I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do instead. I only knew I could no longer afford to keep doing more of the same.

Next week, I’ll tell you what happened when I stopped trying to rebuild the life I’d had and started figuring out what came next. So if this topic interests you, follow along.

There’s a growth trick hiding in plain sight on every platform right now. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

It looks like this. Someone joins a paid growth community. Within weeks, their engagement explodes. Hundreds of comments. Thousands of likes. Then comes the testimonial: “I grew faster in 30 days with this program than in three years on my own.”

Subscribe to FU Money Plan. I’m documenting what I’m building in real time: the experiments, numbers, pivots, mistakes, and lessons behind creating independent income without working my life away.

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

The numbers are real. The growth is not.

Here’s the mechanic. Every platform’s algorithm treats early engagement as a quality signal. When a large account comments on your post, the algorithm reads it as an endorsement and shows your post to more people. When fifty members of the same community pile into your comments in the first hour, the algorithm reads momentum and distributes accordingly.

Paid growth communities know this. Membership quietly includes engagement: the leader’s account comments on members’ posts. Members support each other’s content. Everyone’s numbers go up. Everyone’s testimonial writes itself.

I’m not describing anything illegal. I’m describing a pod with a price tag.

Borrowed vs. earned

Let me be precise, because the line matters more than the outrage.

Borrowed distribution is neither new nor bad. A podcast appearance is borrowed distribution. A guest essay is borrowed distribution. Someone respected sharing your work is borrowed distribution. Every recognized name you can think of borrowed reach on the way up.

The question that separates strategy from theater is simple: borrowed from whom?

When you borrow distribution from an audience full of your future clients, borrowing converts. The reach becomes relationships, the relationships become opportunities, and some of those opportunities become revenue.

When you borrow distribution from an audience of people exactly like you — fellow members, fellow aspiring creators, fellow marketers — you get solidarity, and solidarity photographs beautifully. Big numbers. Full comment sections. Warm feelings. And a customer count of zero, because the people cheering for you were never going to buy from you. They’re rooting for you the way classmates root for each other.

That’s the tell I watch for in every “overnight growth” story: the engagement went up. Did the business?

How to spot it in 60 seconds

Next time a post stops you with a suspiciously loud comment section, run two checks.

First, look for the heavyweight. Is there a very large account in the comments? Large accounts routinely engage with each other — reciprocity among peers is normal. But when a large account keeps showing up on much smaller accounts, there’s usually a relationship behind it. Often a paid one: a membership, a cohort, a community where engagement is part of the package.

Second, look for the common denominator. Click through ten of the commenters. Are they all in the same program? Same hashtag, same challenge, same community in their bios? Congratulations — you’ve found the pod. Not a conspiracy. Just classmates applauding classmates.

Neither check makes anyone a villain. But both tell you the numbers you’re envying are rented, and the testimonial you’re about to trust was generated by the machine it’s praising.

Why this matters if you’re the quiet one

If you’re an accomplished expert watching louder people rack up engagement you can’t seem to match, this pattern is half the explanation. You’re comparing your earned numbers to their borrowed ones.

And here’s the part I care about, because I’ve lived the expensive version of the mistake: an audience of the wrong people is worse than a small audience. Years ago I added tens of thousands of connections in a single year. The numbers looked wonderful. That inflated, misaligned network still suppresses my reach today, because the algorithm learned to show my work to people who were never my market. I’m still paying interest on engagement I “won” years ago.

So when you’re tempted by anything that promises fast engagement — a pod, a challenge hashtag, a community that guarantees comments — ask the only question that matters:

Will these people ever buy from me, hire me, invite me, or recommend me?

If yes, borrow away. That’s called marketing.

If no, you’re renting applause. And rented applause doesn’t just cost money. It teaches the algorithm the wrong lesson about who your work is for — a lesson that can take years to unteach.

The slower, boring, compounding alternative

Earned distribution has exactly one growth hack: make things worth showing to strangers, consistently, in a voice that’s unmistakably yours, aimed at the people you actually serve.

It’s slower. It looks worse in screenshots. There’s no testimonial moment where everything explodes overnight.

But every follower means something. Every comment is a potential relationship. And the algorithm slowly learns precisely who your work is for — which means every post you publish starts working harder than the last.

Recognition compounds. Applause just echoes.

Make sure the one you are celebrating is the long-term one; not fleeting.

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