When I was a teenager my dad would not ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, he would tell me. He would say “Mad, you have to get a good job working at one of the banks, there are so many opportunities in the banks and you don’t even need to go to university!” “Or you could be a receptionist or an office worker, those are great jobs as well, etc” So like any other normal kid I took my dad’s advice. After I left school, in 2014 I got a job as a trainee receptionist at local accountants earning, wait for it…. $11 per hour or 23k per annum. (The wage was lower than minimum wage because I was on a 12-month traineeship so they also paid a couple of thousand towards a TAFE certificate)
Honestly, this job sucked big time for me. Two of the other women I worked with were absolutely horrible. The only good thing about it was that I made a life-long friend who 7 years later is still one of my best mates. (Sharni* that’s you by the way if you are reading) After my 12-month traineeship was up I got a job for an international recruitment company working in Admin for a nice pay increase of 38K per year. When I told my family I was earning 38K per year at 19, my nan’s exact words “wow that is fantastic money” Because to her it really was.
It is funny how different people have different opinions of what a high income is and it seems it is all relative to your life experiences. 38K to me at that time was a lot of money because I had only earned 23K the year prior. But seven years later 38K to me for a full-time job would be bordering on the poverty line. In fact I think it could even be considered less then minimum wage in Australia.
Fast forward a few years in the recruitment role I had been promoted quite a few times and was no longer in administration but a consulting role. My income was now a base salary plus commission and over the years from 2017-2021, I earned between 75K-105K each year for those five years. It was an extremely stressful, high-pressure job with long hours, high targets, and high levels of dealing with people but it was also 100% worth it. I had never in my life tasted that sort of money and to be earning that throughout my early 20’s was the foundation of my approximate 470K net worth at 25. (Made up of my paid-off house and 50k share portfolio)
When I told my dad and my nan what I was earning in that job they were absolutely floored. The idea of an unskilled 21-year-old earning that sort of money in a regional part of Australia was crazy. My dad had been a skilled tradesman working as a welder for most of his life and he had never cracked 70K mark in 35 years of working let alone cracking the 100K mark. This was a huge eye opener for me. It showed me that there was really no ceiling on your earning capacity if you were prepared to work hard and chase new opportunities.
Recently due to covid, I left that company after 6 years in total and I took a big pay cut to go back into a government admin role. I am now earning 65K but it is low stress and there are pay rises each year as well as opportunities to progress. Not going to lie it was extremely tough to make that decision after earning such a high amount of money for a few solid years but the market had changed dramatically during covid so I really had no choice but to leave.
I ended up still living at home until I was 23 and used this time to save the money from my high income to put towards a huge house deposit in 2019. I ended up buying a property for 320K and moving into it. My mortgage was only small, I think around 80K and I ended up paying that off over the subsequent two years by the time I turned 25. I turned that property into a rental when I moved to Brisbane to live with my partner.
The point of this story is not to toot my own horn because I obviously acknowledge that not everyone has the privilege to live at home until they are 23 and it is certainly rare to earn that type of money in your early twenties especially not in a city. But the point of the story is that if I had taken my dad’s advice of staying in the receptionist role I would never have had a taste of what making good money can do for your life. The absolute maximum I would have earned at the accountants as a receptionist would have been 40K and that would be it. I would never have built the financial foundation that I have now. Sometimes we have to take a risk to earn more money. There is only so much spending you can cut but the amount of income you can earn is variable. There is such a big difference between earning 40k and earning 80K so much so that it is 100% worth changing careers, studying, or creating additional sources of income to hit that milestone.
