One of my goals this year is to increase my income by 30-50K. I am currently employed full time and am looking for guidance from the thoughtful and capable HN community on ways to do that. I can code and design. I have been part of a small team running a startup and have worn many hats on the technology and client facing sides. My biggest strength is to be able bridge business and technology. I can talk technology to non technical folks and talk business to technical folks.
Thanks for your help !!
After you get your raise phone some recruiters, ask for more from the new company.
If you get a raise and another offer you've probably got your 30k.
Edit—To imsofuture's point below: Yes, come to your employer with another offer that you would actually take, but with a real preference to stay (otherwise, just go). Ask for a raise, and if the discussion doesn't go anywhere, describe the decision you face between more money elsewhere and a preference to stay if the money were not a differentiator.
This is not extortion, and a reasonable employer will not treat it as such. It is the way you find out what you're worth and get paid commensurately. Changing jobs is not the only way to get a raise, and it's certainly not the best way—for you or for your employer.
You will be the first up against the wall if you accept a counter offer to stay.
On 50k, ask for raise, now on 65k. Ask new employer to beat current salary, offer of 80k.
Without the first raise you don't get to leverage a higher salary at the new job for the 30-50k op needs. And good luck getting 30k raise at the same job, that just doesn't happen.
Moneys not everything, it probably shouldn't be a goal.
Instead by focusing on making yourself happy you'll be better off and probably be earning more.
Just a theory.
You can go through and live in a decent house with a decent car and you'll be happy if you make yourself happy but I just don't see how people can argue that money doesn't make you happy or happier. I get that in and of itself if you fuck yourself over and you don't keep your friends or family or kids and you work so much that you will be unhappy even with money, but money can make you happier even if its indirectly. You may be one to sit at home and do nothing on the weekends and I get that, but having money allows you to go out and experience things. It buys experiences that you normally couldn't have.
Having no money does limit what you can do in life. The case can be made that you are happier not doing things but I think if you are the least bit adventurous money can buy you pleasure, joy, experiences shared with loved ones, and in the indirect result happiness. I believe family and friends are more important, but saying money should't be a goal is just silly in my opinion. Why not have both as the girl on the taco shell commercial would say?
With no money there is a slew of problems that come your way..late rent, bills, struggling to always be on top, etc. With a lot of money I'm sure there are issues as well..but I'm pretty positive you can't find anyone that has a lot of money that has good relationships that would trade their large bank account to gain more happiness and be more free. If it's not your personal goal then that's your decision and your life.
I'm NOT saying that chasing money should be your only goal. Working crazy hours in a field you don't like while ruining relationships is not healthy and isn't good. But strategically gaining money by working hard and smart and taking risk isn't such a bad thing. I'm a big believer in doing what you love and being the best at it and getting money that way, I'm not a fan of getting a degree in a field and working your life in that field just because of the money.
Happiness starts with you and ends with you. Whatever you surround yourself with should be things that make you happy. It's also not relative. Having more money shouldn't just make you automatically happier, but it should cut out some stress to let you be free to be happier and enable you to do more things that make you happy.
/rant
It depends on current earnings and it also depends on what others around you earn and it levels off.
And it's not logical in any way. Halving your wage but then quartering everyone else would make most people more happy (As per experiments)
Commute time for instance is something studies show people don't realise the negative effects on happiness. So earning ten grand more will make you more happy but if it increases commute time you could end up less happy overall.
And I think if you earn more but end up less happy you're more likely to waste the money on stuff or quitting your job or missing a promotion and many other things that might in the end make you earn less long term.
If you want more money and the happiness that goes with it I think don’t concentrate on the money.
As for the rest... "money isn't everything" is such a situational and personal sentiment as to be worthless, especially in the context of someone who expressly states that more money is one of his goals.
http://thestartuptoolkit.com/blog/2012/12/how-to-screw-up-yo...
Maybe not quite the same thing as OP, but I've always been weary of chasing the money in this tech world. You manage to get some crazy good salary and now you're kinda stuck with "golden handcuffs". I personally am aware of 2 people who had comfy corp jobs, steady "mandatory" raises. Everything seems great. Then the year 2008 real-estate-bubble-burst happened and wiped them out. If the OP is very disciplined; living below his salary & keeping his skills sharp then I guess he'd be fine, but that's not how most people handle getting more money. I like to think I can handle it myself, but I have to admit that as the raises come, I find new concerns to make me buy yet another organic food/pillow/blanket/bottle/etc.
My suggestion. Hire a maid. That will save you 8 hours a week. She (yes I'm sexist it will be a she) will make $15 an hour and work 4 hours saving you 8-12 hours. You can work at Radio Shack and earn $22 an hour. Working 12 hours a week that will make you $13k. Use your discount to buy things you were going to buy anyway save another $4k a year. That is 17K and you will have only spent $3k to get that. Netting you $14k for the year. If you want $30k double your hours to 20 hours a week.
You can't seriously expect persons to believe any of this is grounded in reality, can you? Retail wage earners do not make 22 dollars an hour, no matter how many terrible monster cables and extended warranties they shill.
If you add the constraint "I want to keep my day job", then I'd suggest negotiating with them (and, er, not mentioning that you're unwilling to leave them prior to having that conversation).
There are many people who have, in recent memory, made appreciable fractions of your goal numbers by taking one service offering which they'd be really good at as a technologist -- say, designing iPhone apps or what have you -- and wrapping that service into a teaching product. There are a variety of form factors: book, video course, in-person training event, online webinar, yadda yadda. This does not get less viable if you mix substantial business expertise into the offering or your promotion of it.
If you want to execute on that, I'd start building up a mailing list of people who have given you permission to talk to them about $BROAD_OUTLINE_OF_YOUR_TOPIC post-haste. Virtually no plan for building products gets worse if you have 100, 300, 500, etc people who are willing to hear from you about it.
Consulting currently pays a lot of money. You can make 6 figures without much hassles. Don't quit your job to start consulting without having a group of prospect to sell to. Build your prospects list first, by doing content marketing and networking in site like linkedin.
If you want to take the business route, you can make that amount of money by automating tasks and selling the software. What should you automate? Everything that has to do with lead capturing is worth its zeroes and ones in gold. Start there.
Anything else?
Yes! Start blogging. About your skills. About your projects. Get people reading about you. Even if you don't have an idea at the moment, people will gravitate towards you and give you good ideas.
Whatever you do, realize that this will take time. At the very least, two months of work. Worth it? You bet!
Good luck.
If you can design and code then you've got more skills than I had (I am code only), so I'm sure with a little effort you could put together a decent side business. Just be prepared for the life sucking that comes along with working 100+ hours/week. But it isn't all bad, working for yourself, sometimes, provides its own satisfaction.
Eventually my freelance business grew so big I quit my full time job--that was always my goal and it is the reason I was willing to suffer so much at the beginning.
I have two clients for some freelance and I do web application for them, earning me $19k over last 2 years ( plus $8k finishing in another month). They run their own businesses and they are very happy with them, but I am not sure how to expand past them. I don't think I will ever do it full time, but if I can choose the right gigs, could definitely be worth it.
I guess it is a bit of a chicken and egg problem, but there's always a way to get those first couple clients. Reach out to your personal network, everyone knows someone who needs a website. Price the first couple of jobs cheap, do good work, and your name is bound to get passed around. Also after you build your first dozen sites, many of them are bound to require maintenance--eventually you end up with fairly consistant work even if you aren't closing new deals all the time.
After a year or so I had enough work to support me full time, and after 2 years I had enough work to bring on a second person.
On a serious note, never stop looking for the next job. If it comes up, move. It'll add more stress to your life, but not only will you learn more about software, you'll learn more about how organizations work and what you can do to maximize your perceived value to the company.
http://www.quicksprout.com/2013/03/18/the-neil-patel-guide-t... http://www.dotsauce.com/2010/10/21/how-to-sell-domain-names/
Also, if you invest in generic term domains for the 2013-2014 GTLD landrush for quality extensions like .blog, .cars, etc. you stand to make a quick profit during the GTLD launches. Please do your research first, of course, I wouldn't want you to lose money.
In my books, professional domain squatters are scum and the rules that unfortunately allow this should be changed. You should not be allowed to squat like that on a public resource that is scarce and getting scarcer, this is a net loss to everyone else (except maybe the registrars, which are in on it).
Promotions and raises are more likely to come when you "step up to the plate" and show how much value you can create. And then you can simply ask to be rewarded accordingly. If you really did your boss a solid, and he's a good manager, he will recognize it and might even give you a pay bump without you even having to ask.
If your boss shoots down your ideas, or lets you implement them and then doesn't recognize them or takes all the credit for them and rewards you with nothing, then update your resume and move to another place where your value may be appreciated.
I did this for a few of my own freelance projects - it worked ok, although I also found that as a solo freelancer, the clients that were interested in hiring me tended to have budget restrictions that made them nervous to commit to sums of money that necessitated subcontractors. So it was an occasional thing for me.
You may not realize it, but relative to ten years ago, you know a lot more, so put that knowledge in an ebook or course and sell it to people ten years younger than you.
Build mobile or web apps.
And an understanding of how accounting/finance is better than being to do all the math since many of the stock information websites help you out with any kind of information you want to know.
Also using programming you can grab data from sites using Yahoo API or other APIs or simply webscraping(if they allow it) and produce your own tests on market information to prune information for resulting trades.
I'm in the process of transitioning from IT to Law. This obviously takes longer than a year and it's certainly not for everyone. However I expect to be able to use my technical background (though not expertise per se) in legal work.
