Cinneah El-Amin embraced 9-5 work on her path to wealth. But she job-hopped, getting significant salary bumps along the way.
She increased her base pay by more than $100,000 over 5 years working in financial services and tech, and earned additional money in bonuses.
El-Amin was laid off from PayPal in February as part of a 7% cut to its workforce, becoming one of the now roughly 200,000 global tech-sector employees laid off since the start of the year.
With the layoff, she lost a $186,000 base salary. But she wasn’t stressed, thanks to her lucrative side hustle: Flynanced, a personal finance brand she launched in 2020 that roughly doubled her 2022 income.
El-Amin, 28, is based in Harlem and offers courses and paid coaching through her website. She continues to cater to her audience of “9-5 hotties,” as she calls them, who are mostly women of color. And since she is not actively looking for her next 9-5 job, she considers herself on a “rich hot girl sabbatical” through the summer (another nod to Megan Thee Stallion).
“The level of financial stability I have now would have never been possible if I’d had to wait around to get promotions,” she said. “Job-hopping transformed my career, and also my money and wealth.”
El-Amin grew up in Baltimore, in a household where she said she was cherished as the youngest of three daughters. Her mom worked in higher education and her dad, in manufacturing.
Her family didn’t talk about money much, “and we definitely did not talk about wealth building or investing,” she told MarketWatch.
To pay her way through Barnard College, she worked multiple jobs — fundraiser, tour guide, and odd jobs around campus — and covered the rest with scholarships, financial aid and student loans.
“That really instilled in me that I didn’t want to struggle for the rest of my adult life,” she recalled. “So I needed to figure out a plan to be able to have more money and to be able to enjoy the money that I could make.”
She majored in Africana Studies, which she didn’t expect to be a money maker. To make up for that, she took on corporate internships. She indulged her love of travel through study abroad experiences covered by the college.
After Barnard, she moved to North Carolina to attend a one-year master’s program at Wake Forest University on a full tuition fellowship. She learned about different career paths and networked, and through a connection, landed her first job at American Express as a senior product analyst. There, she negotiated a $68,000 initial offer to $72,000.
“That’s literally how I fell into product management, and that really started the trajectory of my entire professional career since,” she said.
She returned to New York City, where she rented an apartment in Harlem with two roommates.
After learning about the FIRE Movement — Financial Independence, Retire Early — El-Amin began to rein in what she saw as overspending. She worked on a budget with a financial advisor, and realized she had disposable income she could be putting toward her debt and investing.
At American Express, her pay increased, first to the $80s, and then to $99,000. Then, in 2020, she moved to Mastercard, where she negotiated her way to a $130,000 base salary plus a bonus. That year, she set her sights on paying off her $23,000 debt, which was a mix of student loans, personal loans and credit card debt.
She started Flynanced to document her debt-free journey and love of travel. Pandemic shutdowns helped her pay down her debt with her bumped-up salary. She worked remotely for three months from Tulum.
Through Flynanced, she shares income-boosting and wealth-building strategies, targeted to fellow women of color.
“We can put money aside for travel and we can also pay off our debt,” she said. “We can also be badass investors. We can also be people who are buying homes.”
She applied to dozens of jobs in 2021, looking to grow her skills and her salary and work fully remotely. In 2022, she joined PayPal. After negotiating, she was offered $186,000 plus a sign-on bonus that brought her to over $200,000.
El-Amin does not believe her job-hopping made her a layoff target. And she encourages others to see job loss not as career ending, but as a chance to pivot or learn new skills. She plans to focus on Flynanced, which earned five figures in net income in 2022, as she travels and enjoys time with friends and family.
“Do something else,” she said. “That’s my hope in terms of talking about layoffs, to give people hope and inspiration, to show them they have options right now.”
Julia Barrett-Mitchell contributed to this story.
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