4 Strategies to Make More Money in Your Career

There are 4 strategies to making more money in your career:

1. Passive
2. Active
3. Aggressive
4. Savage

When you're passive, you're not in control.

When you're active, you push the envelope.

When you're aggressive, you maximize your earning potential.

When you're savage, you care about one thing: the mighty dollar.

Lets talk numbers.

Setting the stage

Consider this:

You make $100k/yr and have 4 strategies:

1. Passive
2. Active
3. Aggressive
4. Savage

This your salary after 3 years:

1. $115,000 (+$15k)
2. $121,000 (+$21k)
3. $132,000 (+$32k)
4. $138,600 (+$38.6k)

How did we get to these numbers?

The Passive Strategy: Do nothing

With the Passive Strategy, you do nothing and expect a 5% merit raise every year.

After 3 years, you make $15k more ($115,000 vs $100,000).

5% raises are good, but not good enough (if you're ambitious). You may not even get 5%. The average merit increase at many companies is 3%. Which means after 3 years you would make $109k, only $9k more than your starting point!

That's pretty sad.

But if you want to coast, deeply value other parts of your job, and don't care much about making more money, be passive. It's okay.

But if you are ambitious and want to make more money, be active.

The Active Strategy: Get a promotion

With the Active Strategy, you push for a promotion and ride that new base salary into future raises.

Assuming you get a 10% raise for the promotion, then 5% yearly raises:

After 3 years, you make an extra $21k ($121,000 vs $100,000).

You can see the compound effect of getting a big raise. You make an extra $7k by getting that promo ($121k vs $115k). You have a larger base salary, so future raises get you more money. 5% of $110k is more than 5% of $105k.

This is why you should always be on the lookout for your next promotion. Not only will you learn more and become more capable, you improve your livelihood now and into the future.

The ceiling is higher though, when you get aggressive.

The Aggressive Strategy: Switch companies

With the Aggressive Strategy, you switch companies when you get an offer that's 20% more than you make right now.

Again, you ride that larger salary into future 5% raises.

After 3 years, you make an extra $32k ($132,000 vs $100,000).

That's $17k more than the passive approach ($132k vs $115k)!

This strategy gets you more money but is a big decision and it's more work. You might like your current company, see room for growth, and may not think 20% more money is worth leaving for. That's okay, you simply need to know that it's an available strategy.

But if you're dead set on making more money, there's one more strategy that will get it done.

The Savage Strategy: Promotion & switch

The Savage Strategy is a combination of Active and Aggressive.

You push for a promotion at your current company, stay for a year, then use your new promo and title to switch companies and make 20% more.

After 3 years, you make an extra $38.6k ($138,600 vs $100,000).

That's $23.6K more than the Passive Approach ($138.6 vs $115k)!

You picked up part-time job without doing any more work.

This is the most difficult strategy and bears the most risk. Your first company may feel like they got burned since they just gave you a promo and you probably didn't learn enough in your one year after promotion to get fully capable, so you might be getting in over your head switching to another company so quickly.

Also, recruiters may question why you switched companies a year after getting promoted. Have a good response to this even though we know why...money.

Money is only one aspect of your career, but it's a critical one.

You have bills to pay and mouths to feed.

You don't have to optimize for money but you do need to know what strategies you can implement to make more of it.

Which strategy are you going to use?