Daniella Flores is the founder of I Like to Dabble.Courtesy Daniella Flores Key Points “When a job no longer serves you, notice it and start looking elsewhere. If a manager won’t give you a raise, look elsewhere. Give yourself a raise. Your skill development, paychecks, bank account, and mental health will thank you ten fold for it,” writes I Like to Dabble founder Daniella Flores.
“Through freelance writing work, design projects, my blog, brand deals, and the digital products I sell on Etsy and my blog, I brought in an additional $60,000 in 2021. In total, I made over $200,000, a long way from that first $30,000 a year job in 2012.”
When you graduate school and start finding your way in the world, no one tells you how much you should be asking for when accepting a job. Often new graduates are expected to take low-paying jobs or even unpaid internships.
I took an unpaid internship at my first job out of school, which landed me a $30,000 a year job as a web engineer a couple of weeks into the gig. At the time, I thought that was enough since I was busy learning. Then student loan payments started, I got an apartment, and I was spending money without much of a plan.
On top of that, I fell into the trap of working 80 hour weeks for a start-up, which wrecked my mental health and burned me out to the point that I didn’t want to come into work.
Thinking back to how exhausted I was when I left that job, I’m a little resentful. Not enough people talk about work trauma and how that affects your ability to negotiate for higher pay throughout the rest of your career, advocate for yourself, build income outside your job, and build up your financial life around you.
I was fortunate to find freelance coding work after that and went on to work in retail I.T. I was only making about $40,000, but I bumped it up through job hopping to $60,000 within two years.
After experiencing back-to-back layoffs, I pivoted into government contracting and then fintech, while increasing it to $141,500 in another four years and being able to work from wherever I am .
Through freelance writing work, design projects, my blog, brand deals, and the digital products I sell on Etsy and my blog, I brought in an additional $60,000 in 2021. In total, I made over $200,000, a long way from that first $30,000 a year job in 2012. Here’s how I made it happen. I started putting myself first
In much of the beginning of my career in tech, I was going with the flow. I didn’t have many goals besides that I wanted enough money to support my life. Since I didn’t know how to manage my money, though, I didn’t know how to get there.
As the years went on, I became more familiar with burnout than I did what I actually wanted to do with my career and where I wanted it to go. Going through two layoffs in the same year clarified for me that I was disposable.
All those times I dropped everything I was doing at the whim of someone in higher up management that was having an issue. All those times I was on call on nights, weekends, and the two years that I was permanently on call with no backup, working on vacations, and picking up the phone at 3 AM because if I didn’t, there’d be consequences. And all those times I passed up looking for other opportunities that would better suit me because I thought my current job couldn’t go on without me.
All of that work was for a company that could replace me in a heartbeat. I was manipulated by the corporate culture of always being able to step in and “help out” because “that’s what you do.” For what?
I realized what I was doing wasn’t for me and it was actually hurting me. I had to start putting myself first. I got clear on my goals
It was time I got clear on what I actually wanted and how I was going to get it.
I started by thinking about my goals outside of my working life. I had no interest in climbing a corporate ladder, getting some large house, and acquiring empty status items. My idea of a dream life was moving somewhere near the west coast, getting a plot of land with a decent size house in close proximity […]
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