How Much I Make As A Principal Engineer At Amazon (EXACT Amount)

when I first started in my career nobody ever sat me down and went over exactly how much money they made and talked through how they were thinking about it advice about income is always given in general but the most valuable bits come from specifics and when it comes to income nobody's really sharing is Taboo in our society but it shouldn't be so in the next 30 seconds I'll disclose the exact amount of money I made in 2021 how I'm trending in 2022 and how I earned it but most importantly how I think about it I do understand that the economy isn't going so well right now and that these details may upset people and breed resentment towards me this is you and seeing my income details is not helpful please navigate away the last thing I want to do is upset people okay my addressed gross income for 2021 was one million thirty thousand four hundred and one dollars and here's the proof welcome to a life engineered where we take an engineering approach to your life and career my name is Steve meta your overachieving cousin that your parents always compare you to or hey mister you forgot your card and I'm in L7 principal engineer on this channel I give you all of the advice information I wish I had when I was coming up in my career and it will always be free this is my gift to you I hesitated for quite a while about whether to make this video at all honestly it's scary but I think it'll be really useful to folks especially with the economy as it is at the time of this filming in late 2022. so here we are but if things go off the rails I'll delist it simple as that first things first I'm not defined by my job or how much I make and neither are you having more money means you can consume more and rarer things nobody is defined by their consumption it doesn't impress me who you are and your Deeds do are you creating things expressing yourself or making the world a better place are you an interesting person you stand for something can you tell a good story and a funny joke you make people feel better that impresses me there are going to be two reactions to my income first there will be the people that make more than me or a question why I don't make more money given my role in level compensation at my current company is heavily stock base and largely depends on market conditions some years I do really well and outperform other companies other years it looks like I got a demotion if you make more money than me good for you truly happy for you if you still think that I could be doing better after watching this video let me know in the comments section below we can talk about it comparison is the thief of Joy it's all too easy to question Your Existence because of other successes but your net worth is not a stand-in for your personal worth not going to feel worse because others are doing better success isn't a zero-sum game the other reaction will be utter disbelief regarding how much money I make I'm not sharing to flex but to give you actual numbers and to give my mental model and how I think about my income this is useful if you want to have a similar courage trajectory as me a software engineer in the US but this income is not guaranteed the market could completely tank it could get laid off the world could change fundamentally when things change they change really fast that's why along with my numbers I'll also let you know how I'm thinking about writing out the choppiness that's the important bit of this video sorry to let you down ladies but I'm taken the tax return from earlier is a joint tax return so household income that's inclusive of my wife's and my own our income can be broken down into two broad categories wage income or W-2 income in the US and non-wage income or investment income then Uncle Sam takes his cut which leaves us with what we take home let's start with non-wage income we made 355 139 in 2021 in this category this is a slice of income where we don't directly trade our time for money I'd like this portion of income to grow over time but it doesn't need to happen immediately I'm willing to invest in it over the long term to see a big jump in the future case in point my YouTube channel took in 289.48 in 2021 on 101 900 views in 2022 as of today income is eight thousand five hundred and forty two dollars and eighty nine cents on one million nine hundred and eighty three thousand four hundred and thirteen views which represents a nearly 30 times growth in revenue and 20 times growth in views these are top-line Revenue numbers I still haven't made a profit on YouTube If you factor how much I've spent by a long shot in fact if you factor in the hundreds of hours of time YouTube has been a gigantic loss for me if you know my Channel at all I often say your undivided attention is the most precious currency in the universe and I'm plowing a lot of it into YouTube if you'd like to support the channel and help keep sponsors away from the content take a look at my patreon page I understand the Optics of asking for support while also disclosing a large income but if I could I would spend most of my time creating high value content and giving it away for free on the internet the more support I get the more content I can justify the creation of if you can't afford to support me that's totally fine my content will always be free for everybody there just might be less of it or you might see a sponsor placement here or there my strategy is to create as much informative and engaging content as I possibly can and what I do make from content creation I plow right back into making more and better content and the world becomes a better place for it I look at YouTube as a place where I can invest and that many people not just me can profit from so I can't quite quit my day job yet but if the channel 20x is again next year well then we'd be cooking taking a long-term view on all this and I'm committed to this investment and I'm committed to you my viewers outside of YouTube I made 354 850 on non-wage income the largest portion of this 331 107 came from my investments in cryptocurrencies this is another example of a long-term investment you cannot crypto all you want but it's been really good for me over the years I started investing in 2015 mostly in Bitcoin and ethereum and some smaller coins crypto gains usually come from selling and not from huddling in 2021 I started divesting in Bitcoin and I put more into ethereum since the network doesn't require as much electricity this is so much better for the planet long term but don't come at me Bitcoin Bros I'm not anti-bitcoin I still have some just not as much as before to round out the other non-wage income 5837 came from dividends and 18 155 came from capital gains on and crypto Investments mostly appreciation from stock grants there were also a ton of smaller line items that won't be of interest to you at all but that I mentioned so that the portion of my viewers checking my numbers don't go off on me okay this year 2022 has been a terrible year for the economy the broad Market is down 20 with tech stocks down 40 percent and crypto completely tanking if you're watching this in the future you'll know whether this is just the beginning of the pain or whether we're at the end of it I'll likely take a large loss for 2022 though likely not as large as my 2021 gain this underscores a couple of points one your investment strategy needs to be longitudinal you want to make an investment so that the payoff is years later time in the market is better than timing the market a focus on maximizing your Investments within a particular year will undermine your long-term prospects which leads to two when you experience losses you shouldn't pan Excel all of your Investments I'll take an investment loss this year but I'm not selling everything and my world is not crumbling at least not yet I brought it up in a different video but I saw sold my long-term investments in 2007-2008 which will affect my net worth by more than a million dollars by the time I retire it's okay to be a bit cash heavy now but don't liquidate everything especially if there's a penalty for doing so and three most importantly when you have a good year and receive a windfall you should not substantially increase your lifestyle if I bought a fancy boat last year this year's losses would really sting and I'd have a floating money hole more on lifestyle inflation in a bit let's talk about wage income along with my wife our W-2 income is 675 262 dollars let's start with my wife's contribution she made 139 728 dollars in 2021 she's a senior software engineer engineering manager she quit her job as a manager early in 2021 at a medium-sized company and joined a startup later in the year as a senior developer so this wage represents a partial year of work like all startups she took a pay cut when she joined in exchange for getting on the ground floor it won't go too much into detail file since this channel isn't about her but the takeaway is that your partner really matters it matters a lot Not only would we not have eclipsed a million in income without her but we are aligned on values financial and otherwise if you're single make sure to align on finances before committing to a long-term relationship like marriage it's just as important as considerations like faith and spirituality or having children finding an awesome partner that compliments you is worth more than money my wife is my partner in crime and my best friend and I love her dearly if you're not single and I probably don't need to tell you this but you have what you have in a partner barring a big change like divorce I don't have any advice for you there sorry my salary last year was 535 533 my base wage in 2021 was 160 000 and rsus or restricted stock units basically soccerens's salary was 375 533 my compensation is really tied to the performance of the stock price last year that wasn't so bad this year I'm on track to make about a hundred thousand dollars less this year on top of investment losses for 2022 we might make 25 or even 50 less than last year this smarts a bit but my world isn't crashing down first part of working at my company is stock based compensation every year can't be a windfall year the expectation is that some years aren't going to be as good as other years when my annual performance review occurs I will expect the company to make up the difference this sets me up for future good years because I'm looking at a longer time Horizon than a single year I know this will equalize over time because it's happened before to me I'll adjust the numbers in the following example to compensate for a recent 20 to 1 split on October of 2007 the stock price was 7.55 cents and by December of 2008 the price tumbled to two dollars and 10 cents my compensation was adjusted for the next year to account for the nearly 75 drop in value I didn't know it at the time but the RSU grants in 2008 set me up to have an unbelievable amount of income when the economy did make a recovery the stock price went up 500 percent in the next three years and five thousand percent in the next 10 years while I'm not expecting anywhere near the same amount of growth after this recession nobody knows what the future is my point is that if your time Horizon is longer than a year or two and you don't need the money immediately to survive long-term Focus Smooths out all the bumps in the road and sometimes like in my situation the Great Recession actually facilitated an enormous windfall in upcoming years there's some Whiplash for sure I sold some things at the absolute bottom because of course I did but the high highs only came because of the low lows second I'm really lucky to have a job where I'm well compensated even in down years and really really well in good years have a good work life balance despite what you hear from unhappy former employees and work around some of the smartest people I know a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush last year when the tech sector was growing like gangbusters I thought to myself should I go work for meta coinbase or stripe and get 100 and thousands more it may be different if I was in a different phase in my career but at this point I'm unlikely to increase my chances of major promotion by moving companies and there's a non-zero chance that my quality of life would go down if I moved so at least for me as long as my compensation is in line with the industry or better over time I'm good I'm not going to grind myself into a fine dust and completely sell out for a little bit more rather spend my spare Cycles making YouTube videos and finally and this may be the most important part these swings and income don't change my quality of life at all if in good years I bought a supercar in unnecessarily large and flashy house in the nicest part of town flew private bought a boat or blingy jewelry I'd be screwed in down years I've been very very wary of the hedonistic treadmill which is the tendency for humans to acclimate quickly to nicer and nicer things and expand their lifestyle I'm not saying you need to be a stoic minimalist that doesn't have any nice things but if you do expand your lifestyle you should do it at a reasonable pace for us we have a reasonable house and a car and food on our table I can spend on some of my hobbies and get the nicer version of things but everything is not my hobby if I made a half as much or double my income my life would be nearly identical I have enough to survive and time to spend with my family and friends everything past our living expenses is saved and invested so I can retire faster if I make a lot then I don't have to work as long if I make less then I'll work until I'm older either way my day-to-day life is the same and my day-to-day life is awesome let's talk about taxes we're in the highest tax bracket in the US it's a graduated system so not all of my income is taxed at that rate I paid Uncle Sam 322 474 dollars in Texas which brings my effective tax rate to around 36.1 percent Washington state has no state income tax so after taxes we netted seven hundred and seven thousand nine hundred and twenty seven dollars if we lived in Silicon Valley our W-2 income would be higher to account for a higher cost of living and state income taxes but then we'd have to live in Silicon Valley we were both raised in the Pacific Northwest and its home we thought about moving but we're not staying because we're trying to minimize our tax liability or anything it'd be really easy to start ranting about taxes since 320 000 buys a lot of nice things but if I live somewhere else I wouldn't have the opportunities that I have in the US so I'm not going to complain I don't waste effort on minimizing my taxes or messing around with geographical Arbitrage if we lived elsewhere I think my strategy would be to find a remote position that paid West Coast salaries but if I couldn't my strategy would be the same I'd maximize my earnings where I was save what I could invest in the long term and retire faster and that's how we got over a million in 2021 and we're weathering the storm for 2022. I wouldn't make the same exact choices as me if my advice makes sense to you then take it if it doesn't make sense to you don't my ideas are free for everybody applying it to you and your life is the hard part and I can't do that for you that was a lot but here are the takeaways one make money decisions based on the long term a year or two isn't long term 20 to 50 years is when the market is bad don't panic so when the market is hot don't get fomo and Panic by when you have a good year say for the bad years two don't inflate your lifestyle too quickly do it slowly you can get the nicer version of things for your hobbies but everything shouldn't be your hobby three you need to be aligned on financial values with your partner just like you need to be aligned with things like children and religion having a partner that compliments you is priceless and you can lose way more than half with a messy divorce finally after taxes and living expenses invest in the long term this can take the form of investing in yourself or your partner like going to school real estate crypto stocks or safer Investments it doesn't matter this way you can retire or have Financial Independence earlier I'm still looking for people to Mentor a coach on the channel if you want to be that lucky person or learn how to find an awesome Mentor you have to watch this video you can also find my latest video here I hope you found this video useful thanks for watching and we'll see you next time foreign

Channel: A Life Engineered

Views: 358,720

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Id: 1QF-3dchcL8

Length: 15min 3sec (903 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 16 2022