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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.