By most objective measures, $180k is very much on the high end for that role in the US. Markets vary of course, but the lifestyle you've setup for yourself doesn't determine what your skills are worth.
Salary varies with experience and size of company quite a lot, but $180,000 is certainly not outside the norm. I think it's possible to buy a $1M house on that income if you save for 4-5 years.
There you go: that's a skill and specialty on the REVENUE GENERATING side. Bottom line, another recommendation is Don't be a COST if you want to go past $200k.
If you have a job that is specifically NY based that is hard to get elsewhere and is an actual paid in money, not cachet career (i.e not working for a magazine) like banking or software, you should earn the 180K pretty easily.
You can sell your business. You can't sell your job. Plus 180k a year, especially if location independent, is still a lot. Median income in the USA is 40k.
Why do we "need" to start doing something that's false? $200k+ is a lot of money. It's a top-5% household income in the U.S. (and that's including dual-earning households). You can live a very good life just about everywhere with it. I live a very good life in an expensive city on less! Heck, it's a very good income even if you limit yourself only to technologists in the Valley, a rather rarified social milieu: most Googlers make less.
Sure, you can make more than that, but in a general discussion about freelancing, it's not all that interesting to break down fine gradations of the upper-middle-class, which can be usefully bundled into the category of "people who are very successful at consulting/freelancing". Heck, I'd probably put the cutoff at $150k+ if I were designing a poll, since above that threshold you are no longer trying to make it as a full-time consultant who can support a good lifestyle.
I do think it could be interesting to break out the truly wealthy, adding a separate category for $1m+. But there isn't really any interesting difference between $200k and $300k.
reply