Once I get a good job, I’ll make it.

What did “making it” look like?

Andrea grew up in New York, the only child of parents who came from Peru in the late ’90s. Her mom cleaned houses and her dad worked as a plumber. Money was tight, and she learned to compare prices at the grocery store and put part of every birthday check away for a rainy day.

Like many children of immigrant parents, she became the family’s translator early: at the bank, at the doctor’s office, and anywhere English was a barrier. Navigating the SAT and college applications was something she had to figure out on her own. Her life plan was simple. Go to college, get a good, stable job, and you’ve made it.

A few days before Thanksgiving of her senior year, the email came. Microsoft was offering her a spot in its new-grad program: a $78,000 base salary, plus a bonus and stock. She ran downstairs to tell her mom, called her dad, and cried.

It was money that neither of my parents had ever seen, especially as young as 22 years old.

Why wasn’t one paycheck enough?

With the promise of a great salary, she moved from New York to Dallas but quickly realized her paycheck covered her basic expenses (rent, groceries, gas) with little cushion for much else.

By then she’d found the FIRE movement (financial independence, retire early) and its promise: invest enough, early enough, and work becomes optional long before 65. That changed the math.

If I really wanted to set myself up for financial freedom, I couldn’t just rely on the single source of income.

Where did the first extra income come from?

As a child, Andrea watched her dad take on extra shifts and side projects her whole life. In college she’d stacked two or three jobs at a time: tutoring math, swiping students into the cafeteria, working the gym’s front desk, contact tracing during COVID. So she went looking for remote work she could do after hours.

She landed a contract role with a nonprofit, doing data entry and market research. It paid consistently every month, and that extra cash went straight into investing.

How did TikTok turn into a business?

With the ignition of her interest in the FIRE movement, Andrea went to TikTok scouring for more tips. Everyone on her feed said to open a Roth IRA. Nobody showed you how to actually do it.

Everybody would talk about how important it is to invest in it, but no one actually showed you how to do it.

So she screen-recorded every step and posted the tutorial. It took off. Viewers told her they’d finally opened accounts because of it, so she kept going: automating investments, opening a high-yield savings account, and other how-to steps most finance content skipped.

Invigorated, she put an email in her bio but got months of junk and scam messages. Then, as the tutorials gained traction, companies started reaching out. Her first brand deal paid $1,000. She’s since added UGC (videos brands run on their own channels) and a deal with Dell.

I never thought that a 30-second video could get paid that much.

What does it cost her?

Her evenings. She logs off from her day job around 5, and most nights go to contract work, filming, or editing, sometimes until midnight.

Early on, she gave herself 15-minute breaks between tasks and burned out. Slow growth on TikTok made it worse, with the nagging question of whether anyone even cared. Now she schedules 30 minutes to an hour between tasks and takes a week or two off every summer.

What surprised her at tax time?

Her first year with side income, Andrea didn’t realize she owed self-employment tax on it: the Social Security and Medicare an employer normally splits with you was now fully on her to pay. She’d heard about deductions, but the options were so overwhelming that she claimed basically none that year.

Andrea tracked 12 months of credit card statements in Excel and totaled her deductions by hand.

The stakes have grown since. In her first year, she estimates she owed around $3,000 on her side income. This year is shaping up to be her biggest yet, and she expects that number to land closer to $8,000 to $9,000. So she’s learning what counts: creator gear like her tripod and phone stand, office supplies, and possibly part of her home if she uses it for the business.

Two weeks before our interview, she started using Keeper. Connecting her credit card surfaced office supplies she hadn’t thought to count, and Keeper asked about lunches she’d have forgotten were business meetings.

I would manually have to do that during tax time, go back to January and be like, what did I spend back then?

Her plan now is to use Keeper to stay on top of her expense tracking, so she’s armed and ready for next tax season.

Shooting for Coast FIRE

Most of Andrea’s extra income goes into the stock market and her retirement accounts. By her own estimate, she’s already hit Coast FIRE for retiring at 65: she has enough invested that it could grow into her retirement without another contribution. Now she’s pushing to make that 50.

While Andrea is shooting to hit her Coast FIRE goals, some of that extra money goes to enjoying life now. She took her mom to Italy last year, and they’re planning Turkey next.

You’re never going to have your parents be this young, right?

What she’s after isn’t a bigger number. It’s the option to walk away from a job that isn’t treating her right, build her own business, or grow her brand, without money hanging over the decision.