How Much I ACTUALLY Made At Every Job (THE HONEST TRUTH)

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This is the digital nomad quest podcast with Sharon Tseung. teaching people how to build passive income, become financially free and design their best lives.

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Hey, guys, it’s Sharon Tseung. And today we’re gonna be talking about how much I actually made at every job. So I’m going to be going into how much I actually made each year with official records. And I’m going to go up to 2021. Because basically, in 2022, was when I really retired from the nine to five world. And I’m going to go over the years where I actually had jobs, I figured this is going to be very helpful and interesting for you guys, as this is something I would have wanted to see in the past, it’s always helpful to hear other people’s journeys around money. Now, if you want to know exactly how much you made each year, this is what I did. So I went to ssa.gov, which is an official government site that tracks your income, they access your tax documents, which are linked to your social security number. So when you sign up, you’ll give some basic information, confirm your identity, and then you’ll go to my Social Security, you’ll click View My past earnings to see a chart of what you made every year since you started working. And then to get your full income number, you actually want to look at the tax and Medicare earnings column on the right since the Social Security taxes tap out after a certain amount. So this is going to be super nofilter and transparent. Normally, I wouldn’t reveal these exact numbers. But I think if more people were transparent and talking about what they’re doing with their money, how much they earned, people would get a better understanding of what they should do and how they should manage their money. Alright, in 2006, I was making $1,626, I was basically working in high school from 2006 to 2008. I worked as a chess teacher, because I was actually nationally ranked in chess, I was even featured on the Channel Five news when I was little for playing 14 Kids simultaneously at one time, and I worked at five different chess clubs. At one point between these high school years, I generally got paid around $50 for class, which honestly is pretty good. That’s like $50 an hour for high school student even now I would say $50 for an hour of work is a lot of money. When I was a chess teacher, it was actually kind of hard thinking of the different lessons and dealing with problem kids, but I grew a lot and learn from doing it. So in those years, 2007 I made $4,091 I’m guessing this was when I had more chess clubs that I was working with. And in 2008 was $1,118. That’s around when I stopped and started college at UC Berkeley. So as you can see here from 2009 to 2010, I didn’t make any money because I was focused at school at UC Berkeley. I wanted to immerse myself in my studies, but also have a good time. So this was the first time I was away from home, I was excited to be in college. And honestly, it was a great time. But in 2011, I realized I wanted to start making some money. So as you can see here 2011, I made $2,729 And I actually started working as a resident assistant, I remember preparing so hard for those interviews, because those jobs were extremely in demand, I ended up getting waitlisted, which I never thought I would get in so I just moved on with my life. I got some roommates lived in a different apartment, but then in the second semester actually got the job and I decided to go for it. But as an RA you don’t actually get paid anything. You just get room and board while you’re in charge of your residence. But I realized I would help my parents a lot by doing this. Now as a resident assistant, I would create programs and events for residents listen to their problems, help them and there’d be nights where you’re supposed to walk down the halls and report any issues and help people who are locked out of their rooms or have serious problems that you have to help deal with. So again, I didn’t get paid anything for this. But out of everything I did. This was probably the most lucrative because it saved a lot and room and board expenses. At one point I worked as an event assistant for I believe $12 an hour at the Institute of East Asian Studies. And I just remember helping people prepare the space helping make the appetizers for events. I did a lot of different random things like I even remember doing psych studies for extra money. So it was actually pretty good money. So you guys should try to do this if you are at a university that has these psych studies because usually they’d pay maybe 30 to $50 per study. You basically go there and answer questionnaires or you do certain tasks and they’ll observe it. I also remember working as an infant Study Center lab research assistant, but I don’t completely remember what I was doing. I think I was helping with some administrative tasks for the research study. And during the summer between junior and senior year, I started working as a marketing intern at two different companies. I remember a lot of people were already getting internships every summer and I realized I had to get on board the previous summers I did like these Taiwan internships and I also did do like a health care or public health internship or something like that. But around that time as I saw a lot of people doing really prestigious internships knowing what they wanted to do with their lives. I realized I had to start thinking about that as well. The positions I got were kind of random. I started working at one company that was more of like a sales position. They’re trying to do a group on type of company

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Ain’t but it totally failed, they were trying to have customers buy coupons on their site essentially. So rather than buy the full amount on Groupon, you buy the coupon for like $1 or something to get 20% off or 30% off. And it was no cost for those businesses to list their marketing on our site, we would just make the little $1 fee or $2 fee, which wasn’t much I was really shy and scared when I would walk to business owners and talk to them to try to get them to do their marketing on our site. But then I realized I could just batch email people, which was a lot more effective and easier for me as an introverted person. The other internship I was doing was another marketing internship where a few of us were kind of helping him start this business. And I don’t think that worked out either. But I knew that having these internships first of all was helpful for me to build up my savings. But it was also helpful in getting my first marketing job. And I had been double majoring in music and psychology, which was extremely random. So at least having some marketing positions allowed me to start applying for those nine to five positions in the future after I graduated. So in 2012, I made $20,046. And basically, I started my first job making $30,000 a year it reports lower i 20,000. Because I started later in the year, again, like I wasn’t really thinking about what I wanted to do with my life too much. I only really started thinking about it later on in life, I just thought I had both creative and analytical sides of me. So I thought maybe I should just go into marketing, I already had that internship experience, I might as well do this. So it was a marketing coordinator position at a startup. Now a lot of my friends were already making a good amount of money after they graduated, they knew what they were doing. They knew what they wanted for their life. But at the time, I just didn’t care that I was making less I thought money didn’t matter. But then on my first full time job after two weeks, I was shocked that this is what people did with their lives until they were 65. And I was like Is this going to be the rest of my life. I remember my supervisors even made me cry, like made me feel really bad about myself. Like they would say they wouldn’t have the time to train me, but then they would just yell at me. So then in 2013, I decided to switch and I started interviewing at multiple places while I was still working on my job. And then I was able to land a contract position at Google. So in 2013, I made $41,942. And my salary at that contract position was $52,000, I Google I was a partner brand manager. And I would basically approve trademarks on different boxes and different marketing materials that partners used of Google. So for example, if a cell phone company had on their marketing materials, like a Google logo, Gmail logo, Android logo, and they wrote some text around it, us as partner brand managers had to approve or unapproved, let them know what they had to change in order to make it up to code. As a side project. I also helped with Android social media. And I also helped with the launch of Android Wear. The great thing about Google is they pay for your transportation and they pay for your food, I had a really good time there, I made friends with co workers that some of them I’m still friends with. And these big tech companies really like give you all these benefits to make you want to stay. Now as a contract physician, I was only working there for maybe one and a half years or so. And then I had to move on. But it really opened my eyes to how you can honestly get trapped there. Obviously there are people who love working at those companies. But it wasn’t me. And I would talk to my friend about it how amazing these perks were. But it didn’t make us happy. We were just doing the same thing over and over again. And we had a lot of happy moments. But I did still find myself kind of thinking what am I going to do with the rest of my life. I can’t be here. I didn’t want to be there. I also wondered to myself, like if I worked at Google with a high salary, it wasn’t a contract position. It was something really full time would I have been able to leave and retire from my nine to five what I’ve explored all these side hustles and worked on content and tried to build passive income, Shawn and I kind of call it like golden handcuffs. And I’m kind of glad that I didn’t get paid a ton more because it would have definitely been hard to leave. For example, my parents were really proud when I worked there, and I always kind of want to make them happy. So it’s definitely hard to leave and kind of shift away from the traditional route. But luckily, this was still a contract position. I wasn’t making six figures, I had to move on to the next job. So once that contract position ended, I actually decided to do a month long solo Europe trip in 2014 to kind of figure out my life but at that time, I was interviewing and actually landed another job at a startup as a marketing manager. So in 2014, I made $37,974 And it is because I stopped for a month and then I started my new job towards the end of the year and my salary at this new job was $65,000 I was basically working at this t shirt fulfillment company so it’s very in line with the things that you know I do now or I’ve done side hustles around you guys have probably heard me talk about merch by Amazon where you have print on demand companies printing and fulfilling your orders for you so you don’t have to create the shirts yourself. That’s basically what this company did there.

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are an equivalent to Teespring. But they also partnered with stores and help them fulfill their T shirt orders. This also actually gave me inspiration to start working on other side hustles. One of the reasons why I took this job was my boss was essentially the CEO of the company. And he was younger than me. He basically started this company in high school when he was making T shirts for his tennis club. And he realized that it was so expensive to buy these shirts elsewhere that he decided to print his own shirts, and he tried to make it as cheap as possible for people to order. And because he was able to print these shirts for a lot less, he started his own company to help other people print their shirt, I was just inspired by his entrepreneurial spirit. And I am very grateful for this position, I got to see kind of both the entrepreneur side as well as working at a big tech company, right, I got a lot of different experiences and working with the CEO, and really doing that paid marketing to try to drive sales gave me a lot of experience in digital marketing, I think I apply a lot of what I’ve learned from that as well to my business. Now, I basically worked here until 2016, when I quit and travel for two years, so I’m gonna go into that later. So in 2015, I made $70,939. And that’s because he would give me bonuses for different benchmarks that I would be able to meet. For example, if I was able to get X amount of sales around our product, I would be able to make extra in bonuses. And that’s how I was able to make this amount of money. And then in 2016, I made $60,269, basically in May of 2016 was when I quit and travel the world for two years. And I did take multiple part time remote positions. So even though I left in the middle of the year, my number was still pretty close to that $70,000 mark, because I was building on my businesses, I was working on part time jobs. So I still made money while I was abroad, I kind of want to back up and talk about all my different positions, I just want to say I am super grateful for all these different positions, because it’s taught me a lot. And another thing is I didn’t study marketing in school. So I didn’t really know the proper way to do these different things. I’m glad that these startups gave me the chance and gave me that experience to learn how to do marketing for their companies. I think it did make it harder for me to get positions. Because I didn’t have that formal training. Even at Google, I did learn the proper way to do things at a big company. But I didn’t learn how to drive revenue in that company. I didn’t learn how to make more money for Android Wear and things like that. So it did kind of make it harder because I didn’t have the proper process to run paid ads to optimize these different things so that companies would want to hire me for that. But at the same time, I never had really much of a gap between jobs because I was pretty good about just sending hundreds of resumes out at the same time. And I would job hop at each of these increasing my salary pretty quickly. As you guys can see here, I started in 2012, making 20k Right and then I ended up between 60 to 70. Before I quit my job and traveled if I were to try to get promoted and keep getting raises, I wouldn’t have had such a big salary increase. So my jumping jobs actually helped me a lot with my finances. So you guys might have watched that video where I talk about jumping from 30k a year to millionaire by 30. And in it I talked about how in 2014 that month long solo your trip really opened my eyes to how much I was missing out on in life. So then in 2015, I started studying obsessively learning about side hustles passive income achieving financial freedom and I stumbled upon the term the digital nomad who makes money while traveling. And I also learned a lot more about making passive cash flow. So then in 2016, I was taking multiple part time remote positions in order to prepare myself for my travels abroad because I wanted to experience life fully. But I also wanted to learn how to make passive income. So I started creating an Etsy shop and selling digital products. I started writing blog posts, I started writing Kindle books, I started making money through these different methods to prove that I could create cash flow for myself and achieve financial freedom. So in 2015, I booked a one way ticket to Stockholm six months out and then I left to travel the world I would work at cafes while building passive income through different means. And at the end of it, I was able to even increase my net worth after traveling and I made a decent amount of passive income that sustained my travels. But what I found was that making passive income wasn’t fulfilling enough and I realized financial freedom is not the ultimate goal. It’s a means to an end because I could have just sat there doing nothing but I’d let my years pass away without realizing there have been things that would have made me happy to pursue it also didn’t make me happy just chasing passive income numbers and I needed more fulfillment and more learning in my life. So that’s why I actually came back to the Bay Area. So we’re going to skip to 2018 where I came back from my travels, I was like maybe I should take a marketing position and get better at marketing. I also thought I should work on something more impactful which was around the time when I started working

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on my Instagram more my blog more, I started really doubling down on my personal brand helping people achieve financial freedom through passive income and different things. So in 2018, I took another position as a marketing manager at another startup, again, it was hard for me to get big companies to hire me because I didn’t have that formal experience. But I think it was all meant to be because the startup experience always teaches me so much. So in 2018, I made $99,350, my salary was actually $110,000. So it was a significant leap from all my previous positions. And I think I was able to do this because I built all these different passive income streams for myself. And I proved to myself that I was pretty good at marketing, I could make revenue from my own business. And in interviews, I showed employers that I was able to do this, I’m super grateful that this company took me in because I had a two year gap essentially from traveling. So normally, that doesn’t look very good for employers in 2019, they actually gave me a raise to $126,500, which was really amazing. And around that time I had met Shawn, we started really working on our own separate personal brands. So in 2019, my actual number here on the records is $121,293. So each year, I was increasing my salary by a lot in 2020, I made $146,975. This was the longest ad worked at any company. But honestly, I liked working there, because I had a lot of free time to do the things I wanted to do. And it was pretty enjoyable to work on different projects. But I would say with this company, I don’t think they had enough direction. They didn’t really know what they were trying to do. But I was just kind of along for the ride. So in 2021, my number was $285,958, which is pretty insane. So let me talk about this huge jump right in 2020, I started making those tic tock videos, it was COVID time I was bored, I decided to make personal finance videos talking about real estate, I started investing in real estate more as well. And things started taking off with my personal brand. So in 2021, I was able to learn how to really build a business with it. And as well as make a larger impact to people, I would have never imagined my personal brand to get to this point to be honest. So as you can see here, I essentially doubled what I made in 2020. But in June of 2021, they actually laid me off. So now my income is just from the personal brand. And from my real estate, which allowed me to retire from the nine to five world I remember at the time, it wasn’t like oh my god, what am I going to do, I don’t have any income because I had actually made all these different passive income streams. For myself, I worked really hard on these different things that my passive income actually exceeded the amount that I made from my nine to five job, I don’t think that company exists anymore. It looks like it looks like everyone left that company. So they basically were running out of funds that they had to let people go, they didn’t really have the right direction. So I’m guessing that’s kind of why it fell apart. So that leads up to 2022 and 2023. So now basically, I’ve just been more so enjoying my life as well as gradually kind of build up our personal brand. We also launched goods Sweet Homes, which is helping people create generational wealth through real estate investing. So my focus now is to build it up even more try to build the products that people are looking for. And hopefully we can get to further levels. So even though I don’t have that full time income anymore, which cut my income at the time, I’m planning to really build it up even more. But I also realized that the goal for me is to actually just live an intentional life and do the things that make me happy. So from my lesson in 2018, where I realized chasing numbers doesn’t make me happy. Now I’m more about tackling my bucket list figuring out what makes me happy and pursuing those things. So I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. I really tried to be transparent with you guys here. I don’t think most people would reveal all these numbers, but I hope it helps you guys and I hope you guys follow along my personal brand, Sharon Tseung as well as good sweet homes. We’re really trying to help you guys with your journeys as well. And we’ll see how everything goes because technically I’m full time on it. Now I’m not working a nine to five job but I think when you work for yourself, the sky’s the limit. You never know how much you can actually achieve. So I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Please make sure to rate review and subscribe. It really helps our podcast grow. And thanks again. I’ll see you guys in the next one.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai