Going from $8/hr to $132,000/yr to $10/hr: My Salary Story
My salary history through 5 years in NYC, plus how I got here
One of my first Substack posts was about how your salary shouldn’t be a secret. I’ve shared a bit about my salary here and there on my monthly resets, but I haven’t stayed entirely true to what preach—I haven’t shared the full story on how I doubled my salary within four years post-college but now make a lot less. Part of this is because, as you can see from the subject line of this post, it’s been a turbulent time. But part of this is because it’s really, really hard to talk about how much money we make.
I drafted this post out a few times over the past few months, all in different formats, and it took quite a bit of courage to click publish. I asked myself a dozen times, why? Why do we hate talking about our salaries? In New York state, where I live, it’s required by law to share a salary range with a job posting. It’s illegal for an employer to prohibit you from talking about your salaries with your coworkers. Not only is it protected and encouraged by the laws, but I know it’s so important to talk about our salaries—to help others understand their worth, to figure out if you should negotiate a raise, and, well, just because it’s interesting. Those are all reasons why I decided to make this post. And still, talking about my salary history makes me want to curl into a ball.
Reading the title of this post, you might already have some assumptions, ranging from “you were overpaid” to “you were underpaid” to “how do you survive in NYC making that?” to “if you were making that much money, you should have saved more.”
So, let me explain the crazy title of this post—it all starts with my first job in 2012.
Part 1: 2012-2018
2012: $8.25/hr-$20/hr. My first W2 job was at a local Christmas tree farm (yes, I will accept comparisons to Taylor Swift). I got the job by reaching out to local businesses in the area. I worked four weekends during the Christmas season for minimum wage. I also started tutoring this year—my starting rate was $20/hr, and I started with a couple middle school students one day per week. I found that gig by networking around town (I grew up in the suburbs outside NYC).
2013: $8.25/hr-$30/hr. I kept the job at the Christmas tree farm, and I also picked up another seasonal job in the fall at another local farm. I had a minimum wage job at Panera Bread that lasted about one month that summer (I accidentally set some bagels on fire). I also continued tutoring, about four hours per week, raising my rates to $30/hour for new students.
2014-2016: $30/hr-60/hr. These three years, I only made money through tutoring (plus the occasional Poshmark sale). I started college in 2014, and only worked when I was home for the summer. I did raise my rates to $60/hour for my last client, but only tutored over summers when I was home from college, so even though this was quite a high hourly rate, I didn’t clock in many hours.
2017: $20/hr. I took the spring semester off from classes and instead did an engineering co-op (I worked for the semester). I continued the co-op into the summer, but didn’t negotiate a higher salary, which I came to regret. I stopped tutoring since I wasn’t home at all (and the hours at the co-op were crazy).
2018: $20/hr. I completed a summer internship at another large company and made around $7,000 for the whole summer. This went towards my final 5th year of college (graduation delayed due to the first co-op).
Part 2: 2019-Present
2019: $68,500/yr. In my first job out of college, I made $68,500/yr. Unfortunately, this wasn’t my dream job at all, so a few months later, I started a new job, my dream job at the time, at $65,000/yr. I had been offered $55,000 initially, so I was pretty excited to negotiate that up to $65,000! And I was eligible for overtime, so I made closer to $70,000/yr due to a busy holiday season. At the time, I was paying $1,400/month in rent for a tiny bedroom with two roommates in the East Village.
2020: $65,000/yr. Performance reviews were right around the corner in February, but then, well, we all know what happened in March 2020. I was lucky to keep my job at all, but didn’t get a raise due to the company’s financial state. I also worked a lot less overtime since there was a lot less work to go around.
2021: $75,000/yr-$100,000/yr. I finally got that raise to $75,000 in early 2021. But by then, the job market had started to improve, and a different company reached out to me to interview. After going through the interview process and negotiating, I was offered a starting salary of $100,000 (with a starting bonus!), which was truly an insane amount of money to me at the time. About two months earlier, I had moved into an apartment with rent at the very top of what I could afford ($2,100/month with one month free on the 12 month lease), so I felt relieved to be making more money and having a cushion.
2022: $110,000/yr. I got a raise at my job, and I stayed with that same company through the end of the year. While I was happy with the raise, I was starting to feel unsatisfied with other things in the job, and I was ready to move on. I started to interview more later that year. The hours I worked each week ebbed and flowed quite a bit depending on projects I was working on. I also moved into a new apartment during this time, paying more in rent than I ever had, $2,350/month.
2023: $132,000/yr+$10+/hr. I ended 2022 interviewing at two companies, which ended up giving me competing offers. I was able to negotiate the offer I preferred to $132,000, which I was ecstatic about. However, I soon realized that due to higher healthcare costs at this new company, this raise wasn’t nearly as big of a raise from the previous job as I’d hoped (lesson learned: review the benefits package!). Partway through the year, I also picked up a side gig that paid $10/hour plus tips, usually around $30/hour. I worked there around 4 hours/week, but the hours at the corporate job were racking up, often well over 40 hours/week, plus travel time.
2024: $10+/hr. I left the six figure salary earlier this year. Long story short (long story here), they asked me to relocate to another state, which wasn’t an option for me. I kept the side gig, actually increasing my hours there to closer to 15-20 hours/week now (still $10/hour plus tips, usually closer to $30/hour total). I was lucky enough to have some money saved up and decided to take a break from the 9-5 (or more like 9-7 in NYC) corporate grind. I started a business making something I find super fun (party games), something that I didn’t have time to do last year (even though I haven’t paid myself a cent, instead investing the money back into the business). I’ve been spending my time doing lots of other things that don’t make money, but were enjoyable: I started this Substack, started running consistently, and wrote 40,000 words of a novel (so far).
I’ve also been applying to jobs, finally about a month ago coming to a more clear realization of what I want next in my corporate career. It’s amazing what a few months of being able to do a pilates class at 10:30am followed by a long walk in Central Park can do for someone’s mental state, and I’m so grateful for this time, even though it really messed up my salary history graph :)
Talking about how much we make is important. It empowers us to negotiate raises and reduces pay disparities and pay discrimination. It’s especially true here in New York City, where rent is so expensive that a $10,000 raise can mean the difference between living with roommates and living alone or being able to move out when your apartment windows get covered in scaffolding and not being able to (uniquely New York problems, and yes I’ve dealt with that).
Inspired by this, I’m starting a new series on Ten Dollar Latte called Making It in NYC, featuring profiles of how much New Yorkers make and spend on rent. The first post drops next Monday, 8/5. Subscribe so you don’t miss it, and if you want to be featured, check out the questions here and send me a DM or reply to this email!
Check out my monthly spending recaps and goal resets here (and subscribe so you don’t miss the next one this week)!
Submit a question to my financial advice column here (I’m not a financial advisor, this is fun advice like how to split the bill on a group trip)!
And if you want to make your next happy hour unforgettable, check out my party card game company, Sidetracks.
Love this transparency, thanks for sharing! I've found job hopping is the easiest way to increase your salary. Every time I've moved to a new company I've gotten about a $15k-$20k raise — even if it was a lateral title move.
"It’s amazing what a few months of being able to do a pilates class at 10:30am followed by a long walk in Central Park can do for someone’s mental state" --> Lifelong dream of mine. - Salary transparency in the corporate world is key. I wish more people understood this.