My Selfish Choice To Pay Myself Less

I’ve been the CEO of my media company, The Financial Diet, for eight years. For the past four of those years, my salary has been $90,000. Sometimes I receive bonuses or commissions for specific projects I take on, but sometimes I don’t: in 2022, I netted out a clean $90,000 pre-tax, as we needed to prioritize cash to rebuild our coffers after a turbulent few pandemic years. In that same time, the company has grown, all other compensation packages have increased (to the point that I ranked sixth in the company for income last year), profitability climbed by several hundred thousand dollars, and we successfully moved to a four-day workweek permanently with no reductions in compensation. In short, things have been good. And while this is not attributable to my own personal salary remaining largely stagnant, that choice represents an ethos that I believe has been invaluable to our organization, both the business itself and the people who comprise it.

I don’t say any of this to martyr myself: I live in a dual-income, child-free household and my husband works in tech. I pay our $2,395 mortgage every month, secured at a 2.75% fixed rate at the nadir of New York City’s pandemic-cratered real estate desirability. There is nothing I want that I can’t buy, and nothing that represents a value more substantial than my time and freedom. I keep my salary low as much for selfish reasons as for altruistic ones: I don’t want the pressure of funding bloated executive salaries. Similarly, the move to a four-day workweek was a push to reclaim my own time from redundant meetings and emails as to liberate anyone else’s. I pursue hobbies, have a beloved side project I’ve been nurturing for a little over a year now, and I go for long walks and bike rides through Manhattan as often as I can. But I also watch a lot of television, and spend my mornings in bed on my phone, watching dogs get picked up on a school bus in Alaska live on TikTok. No one should praise me for doing what I do, because I make no personal or financial sacrifice to do it.?

And none of this would be worth discussing – let alone publishing on LinkedIn, holy digital temple of productivity and perpetual growth – if it weren’t relatively unusual for executives, especially in industries like mine. The idea of C-Suite compensation astronomically eclipsing that of the average worker has become so normalized as to be a foregone conclusion. And while some execs have built PR empires by giving themselves massive pay cuts (even if those execs later find themselves embroiled in predictable scandal ), the idea of never having given yourself outsize compensation in the first place still seems relatively unfathomable. And this is understandable in a culture where lifestyle inflation is the norm, and frequently puts the wealthy on hamster wheels of both social narrowing and consumer posturing that all but guarantee that having more will mean needing to work more , unnecessarily, just to maintain a hyper-inflated perception of what is normal.?

While I acknowledge that our decision not to have children means there are certain expenses we will never incur, the endless upward financial trajectory that children often bring for the wealthy – private schools, tutors, exclusive camps and clubs, luxe vacations, elite universities, apparent Cartier bracelets for accomplishing the task of turning 13 years old – are all entirely optional. In a country where most Americans struggle to pay their bills, cannot afford an unexpected $1,000 emergency , and where both parents are forced to enter the workforce as a single income is no longer sufficient to support a family, the idea of a cosseted upper class condemning themselves to a life where the bloated compensation packages killing our economy are a necessity is an affront to our collective humanity. No one deserves to earn 400 times more than the average worker at their company. No one works that hard, creates that much value, or has an inherent worth that makes their dreams, ambitions, and families 400 times more important.

But it would at least be understandable – if not defensible – if this massively disproportionate pay were actually causing the rich to be happier, but at TFD, we have extensively covered the fact that it isn't . The rich are isolated, they are less empathetic, they form and maintain fewer meaningful connections, they work longer hours than necessary and spend less time with their loved ones. They don’t enjoy their money, for as much energy as they put into acquiring it. At every level, the more money you have, the more you are separated from the world around you and no longer forced to interact with it in a way that temporarily inconveniences, but which ultimately forms the connective tissue of community.?

Even before being in the position of deciding my own income, I worked extensively for the ultra-wealthy: as a domestic worker, in elite country clubs, at exclusive restaurants. Having come from a working-class background, the exposure initially filled me with an envy that led me to overspend myself into credit card debt, but it quickly revealed itself to be a poison apple of which I wanted no real part. The longer I spent in these spaces, the more I didn’t envy the children I worked with – I pitied them, infected with the ravenously aspirational mindset of their parents before they were old enough to talk. I didn’t aspire to be a member of the extravagant clubs I was tasked to cater to, only felt baffled as to the purpose such a club could serve to people who had already won at the game. Being in these ultra-privileged networks when you’re fabulously wealthy can no longer represent a lightning-strike opportunity for connection and upward mobility, it can only mean anchoring yourself to a lifestyle where what you earn will never be good enough.?

In many ways, executive compensation feels like just another way in which the blackjack table of late capitalism has suckered us into the gambling addict’s mentality. We don’t know when we’re up and it’s time to leave the table, we can only keep doubling down, even when the chips no longer mean anything. Rather than walk away and actually enjoy our winnings, we find ourselves increasingly glued to the cards, chasing after a vaporous concept of “more” that stopped holding value a dozen hands ago.?

I don’t deserve praise for my personal choice to limit my earnings, because it’s in my direct self-interest, and I only wish that more people in my position could give themselves the gift of realizing that choosing less is actually the greatest possible outcome for themselves. The diminished returns of compounding numbers is the sucker’s choice, and no luxury or convenience – no matter how validated it may be by the increasingly few people who still have more than you – is worth the glorious freedom of saying, and truly meaning, “that’s enough.”

-Chelsea Fagan, CEO and co-founder of The Financial Diet