How did I get into this race?

When I started my job at KPMG, a prestigious, well paying job for a 23 year old, I remember thinking about getting to an income of $100,000 a year. When that happened, I thought, I could probably just go ahead and go part time. 80%, 4 days a week, that would pay $80k. It’s plenty of money, right? Well – it was for my family growing up, as it’s about what my dad’s annual income was.

I remember getting to 100k, when I was at EY in the early aughts, working my tail off. But that was not the time to step it back. I was less than a decade into my career, pushing hard for each next promotion. Honestly, I loved my work, and my colleagues. These were some of the smartest people I’d ever met, and ever will meet. I was in the room. Also, what was I going to step back to? I was in a relationship with someone who worked 7 days a week, 14 hours a day, and we weren’t planning a family. No reason to waste opportunity.

When I think back to it now, I wonder why I didn’t decide it would be a great time to reduce my SPENDING even if I wasn’t going to reduce my workload. I could have been saving and investing, and that ‘extra’ $20k a year would be about $170k today (if invested in the S&P 500 from 2010 – 2025). This might be a moment where I would go back and shake myself, if I had a Time Machine. Though truthfully, I was making a lot of poor choices in 2010, including that relationship. I have plenty more to say on why that 30 year old girl wasn’t saving and investing, more on that later. But how did I go from feeling that $80k of annual income was more than enough to the years after that, where $150k wasn’t enough, and neither was $200k?

The easy answer is lifestyle creep, some version of “I like nice things.” But it’s so, so, so much more than that. It’s COMPARISON. It’s WORTH. Oh, how I wish I had the perspective to say that my future net worth would outweigh my feelings of personal value!

When you spend almost all of your time at work, work becomes who you are. Your friends work there, because when are you going to go out and make new ones, or keep in touch with old ones? You can’t, so you bond with the people who are spending 3,000 hours a year with you in a cubicle. And the work you do feels so, so important. Your brain reinforces this, so that you can stay sane. I must be happy. This must be worth it. Otherwise, why am I showing up here 6 days a week? Because the work is important, I must be important. And how do I know just how important I am? My salary tells me. My salary and my position in the firm.

Early on in my career, a partner told me that there would be a future where I was the one adding value to the firm and its clients. (His point was that day was not today). It was a lesson I took to heart, and every promotion, every raise, was a signal that I was getting to that future. Sure, I didn’t know everything, but I was fully staffed and fully chargeable (these things probably mean nothing to normal people!) and that meant I was getting there. The number on my paystub was the most clear way to determine just how valuable I was. Also, I had been laid off at KPMG in 2009. Lots of people were laid off in 2009 – but at the time, it had only been me, my department, my position. I felt any sense of self worth I had built through my years of hard work and early promotion and achieving just melt away. I needed that to NEVER happen again. I had something to prove, and my base salary helped me prove it to myself.

Only when I got into financial planning did I realize what a terrible perspective I had. It didn’t dawn on me all at once, not really. But slowly, I started to meet clients who had plenty of money, more than enough for their lifetimes and often, their kids lifetimes. And I realized that this money had not protected them from anything. It wasn’t keeping their family close. It wasn’t keeping family members from drug addictions or bad relationships. It wasn’t even giving people the peace of mind that I thought you were supposed to have. In fact, the more money people had, the more they worried about it.

My understanding came to fruition once I was managing people, and responsible for setting the compensation of others. It also became my responsibility to discuss it with them, to explain how we got to that number. Nothing prepared me for it. Compensation is a tricky thing, and there are hundreds of variables. Firm performance, growth rates, inflation, talent availability, individual performance, and on and on and on. In these conversations I’ve had folks who are thankful for a 3% increase to cover cost of living. In these conversations I’ve had people who are enraged that their 15% raise was not 18%. People who are frustrated because they had a number in mind, and where we landed fell short. More and more, it was painfully obvious that it isn’t the money, or the percentage. It’s that we as humans interpret this number as a representation of personal value.

Our worth cannot be distilled down to our work. It took me years of coaching to understand this. If someone you first meet asks you to describe yourself, what do you lead with? If what you do is the first thing out of your mouth, you’ve got a work/worth issue. As long as you have this issue, friend, there is no number that will ever, ever be enough.

The good news – it’s fixable. It CAN be enough. You can be enough. Your family, your house, your life, you friendships. If you’ve gotten this far, you want to do the work. The work is hard and consuming and freeing. The work is important and heavy and will simultaneously lighten your every step. And I’ll be here to help. The work is just beginning.