Why I left California for Las Vegas @BusinessInsider

Welcome back to the Ally from Corporate Podcast. If you're interested in learning more about career development, job searching, and growing as the badass professional I know you are, you've come to the right place. So sit back and relax. Let's get into it.

Welcome. Welcome back. This is the third time we're trying this, hopefully with the good audio, good positivity and everything. So this podcast episode, we're talking about the Business Insider article that we just had published today, and we're going to chat about it. So what happened? How did you do it? What's going on?

I made a video on TikTok a few months ago. It was a while ago, and the TikTok video said, I took a 20% pay cut. Here's why. And people don't usually take pay cuts. They try to jump up in pay when you go from job to job. So last week, Business Insider, a wonderful woman who works there messaged me and said, hey, I saw your TikTok video. We want to write an article about that. We want to know why you took a pay cut, a 20% pay cut. So I've been emailing back and forth with them all week, talking on zoom with them, and they published an article today called I Left California for Las Vegas even after a $39,000 pay cut. My house is bigger, my 401k contributions went up, and the quality of my life improved. And it's basically my career as told by Business Insider. So it's pretty cool.

That is really, really cool. So tell me a little bit about how the moves you made, they seem like, super random in the article. You know, how did you come about all of that?

You know, you and I talk about finances all the time, right? When we go for walks, when we're driving anywhere, laying in bed at night, like, it's just a regular part of our conversation. And a lot of the moves that I have made after I met you don't seem very random to me. They were carefully calculated with insurance in mind, like, interest rates in mind, cost of living in mind, take home, pay taxes. So I feel like the underlying story here, with all the different moves I've made in my career, they all have finances in mind. And I feel like you taught me that when I met you in, like, 2017. And that's because I believe that's because you're from Zurich, Switzerland, and they teach people about money from a very early age. So I'm, like, grateful. Like, I didn't learn about finances a lot when I was younger, but you taught Me a lot.

Thanks. Yeah, we try, you know, I'm trying to better myself, you know, every day a little bit. So that's really interesting because it's so. It so describes. I feel like that even though you took that pay cut, as it said in the Business Insider, that even though you took a pay cut, it still resulted into more money. So for normal people and for the common folks out there might seem like, why would you ever take a pay cut for less money? But it actually kind of made sense in our situation. And I know it's not going to work for most people, but for us, it really did, Right?

Yeah. Taking the pay cut, I. You know, where I was starting from? Before I took the cut, I was being paid $185,000 at a startup in San Francisco, but I was commuting almost every week from Vegas to the Bay Area on my own dime.

You.

And I even bought an RV at one point, talks about that in the article. Huge RV to live in in San Francisco so I wouldn't have to commute. And then we did, like, two months of that, and we were like, all right, we gotta start job searching. Luckily, I. I know. I remember that. That was kind of a come to Jesus moment. You sat me down in the RV and you were like, how long are we gonna do this? We had just moved to Vegas two months before, and, yeah, it was. It was a good choice.

That what happens, you know, once you're. Once you do things, you know, and once you try to better your life and do things, stuff like that happens. So did you regret moving here or not so much?

No, it's better in every sense. I do miss the ocean. I do talk about that in the article, but I love Vegas. I love the weather. Um, I love my neighbors. I love the entertainment and the sports here. I love that the economy here has making money in mind. It's not like giving a bunch away. It's not giving away a bunch of freebies to people like California does. Nevada is like, let's make money. I love that. So I feel like we're learning a lot about how to be business savvy here. And, yeah, it's just a great place to live.

You know, I think that's very, very true for us because now we work from home, we have a bigger house, taxes saved on all that. But I didn't think that Business Insider or any news agency is going to want so much proof.

Yeah. So Business Insider, they say at the beginning of the article, we have verified. Actually, let me read what it Says basically, they had to verify everything I was claiming here.

It's.

It says her salary and employment history have been verified by Business Insider. Every number and every claim. You see me making an article had to be W2s. Tax forms, offer letters, resignation letters, property tax bills, proof of sale of house, proof of purchase of house. Like, we had to verify everything.

I know, and I think it's crazy because there was so much information that we had to send over. Took us hours. It's really interesting to see how it worked out with them reaching out. And you're like, oh, my gosh, I'm going to send over my tax information to somebody that I don't know. And then they're like, hey, can you show us the proof that you sold the house? Do you have proof that you bought the house? Do you have proof of your hoa? Do you have proof of all these different things that are, like, years ago that are old and you had to go and find it? So kudos to you for still having all that. I would have probably deleted it.

I know. I keep trying to tell you, stop deleting your emails, honey. That's like, not a good habit. I had to go back to 2013 in my email and find, like, job offer letters from back then. But I did redact all my personal information, social account numbers, addresses, because they don't. They didn't need that. They just needed like dates and dollar amounts. So. Yeah. But no, I love living here. One of the reasons we chose to move here was to have more room. Um, we lived in a. About a thousand square foot townhouse in California, and right now we live in a 3,500 square foot house right now. If you're watching this on YouTube, Rico and I are in the same house right now. I'm in my office, which is a whole ass room, and he's in our bedroom. And he's sitting at a desk right now. And if you see there's a desk also behind him with a completely different setup. That's our bedroom. How big is our bedroom?

Like 800. It's almost like 1,000 square feet.

It's 800 square feet.

It's bigger than my. Than my house was in California. I had to find the word. It's like it's bigger than my whole house was in California.

Yeah. Insane. Our closet, our bathroom, and our bedroom are bigger than our entire house. So it was a good move. I feel like we have more room to make content here. Podcast, film, videos, have guests, entertainment. It was a great move for us. But oh my God, the rv. We still have some battle scars from this whole journey. Talk about living in the RV and like how much we had to pay for that.

So it's interesting because I looked at apartments and they were so expensive to have a decent nice apartment. So we bought a $70,000 RV. And with that RV, the payment over 20 year fixed loan, that was a whole nother video that went viral was like $500 a month. And the truck payment was like $700. So that combined was like $1200. And the lot rent in the San Francisco in a nice one was 2,200amonth. So yeah, with Internet and everything came like to like 3,500. Like, oh, it's still cheaper to do that than actually rent and you can just pack up and leave.

Yeah. But knowing what we know now, we probably should have just rented. But also that company should not have told me it was remote and then tried to call me back to the office.

But that's what everybody did. And thank God we had an RV to do that because I think there's people that moved to Florida, like on Zoom. And I just saw we are live again on YouTube for some reason. And guess who tuned in. Harshal.

Number one fan, Harshal.

Yeah, I don't know what happened, why it was so weird before. And yeah, let me.

Let me tell everybody. So like Rico said, we have tried to film this podcast episode. This is our third or fourth time this morning. We tried the first time and we. I was in a terrible mood this morning. Just feeling a little moody, you know how it goes. And he. I was like flipping him off in the pod in the podcast filming. And like he was like, you know, we're live, right? And I got so mad. But. And then we tried to film it again and I think the audio was messed up. So this is the third time.

Yeah. And for some reason it's like it's live on YouTube but not on the other platforms because I just checked while you were talking. So I do not know what the criteria is to go live on any of them because it says a checkbox. So I need to talk to somebody at Riverside, but yeah, back to Darvi. It was crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy.

Yeah. Switching gears here, I just saw in Slack that we got a new message from our coaching client. I've been chatting with her this morning because she has an interview coming up. So you guys know that we launched our career coaching program. It's a job search accelerator two weeks ago. Half of our clients now have had interviews last this week and next week or jobs.

Yes. So.

And one person got a part time job already.

Yeah, so one person got a part time job. That means she and two others had. A few others had interviews lined up and. Yeah, so it's really working well. Yeah, yeah.

I've been prepping, I've been prepping my clients with interview tactics we'll call them. Anybody can show up in an interview and answer questions. But if you show up with a project portfolio where you can share your screen and show that you can do CAD instead of just telling somebody you can do cad, if you can say with confidence why you're the right person for the job, if you have a carefully rehearsed answer to tell me about yourself. So that's what we've been working on lately. We have office hours today in about 45 minutes and that's just an opportunity for them once a week, every Tuesday to. Yeah, just ask me any questions. It's just closed. It's a closed group. We'll have about five people join today and they just get to ask me any questions about job searching.

Yeah, it's really working out really, really nicely. So I'm really stoked for all these people and I feel like we're giving them so many tools and so many like tips and tricks that they'll never need another career coach. I feel like we're giving them so many tricks, so many like good ways of applying that I'm like, you know, I don't think they'll ever need another career coach because we're giving them all the tools, all the resources and everything else. So if they know the process once they're like, okay, I can, I can interview and apply by myself now. Next round with all the tricks that we've learned.

Yeah. And helping them change their mindset also of with networking specifically. So planting seeds now so you can pick fruit from the trees you've grown later on down the road, that's definitely a long term skill they're learning that will help their career tenfold in a few years from now.

Yeah. And what I feel like is that we're really trying to get them to interact on LinkedIn with each other and starting to build that community aspect that's going to really help them grow and be like top accelerators at their career and in their field. And I love that they're really start, you know, interacting with each other's comments. Everybody kind of posted and so I feel like that's a huge, huge win for them if they keep it up because that's what networking is kind of all about, right?

Yeah, absolutely. And I think you definitely inspired them with the LinkedIn. Because if you've been following me for a while, you know that Rico is basically my social media manager. He's like, the inspiration for a lot of my stuff that I post, the moves that we've made, the magazines we've gotten into, like, podcasts newsletter. You know, that was a lot of. That was your idea. And so I love that you hosted office hours about two weeks ago and you walked everybody through, like, LinkedIn basics. Because you showed me how to do all that, too, way back when.

And so I think about doing another one next week on networking because I feel like it's so crucial nowadays to network because there's no way to out, to, like, stand out without networking and getting internal referrals and doing things like that. Because that is just so, so crucial. And I didn't believe in it at first, but people showed me that it is. And now I'm like, oh, my gosh, that's like the best way of actually applying for a job.

Yeah, 100%. And I have a tip for everybody listening. If you want to get into NETWORKING, go to calendly.com calendly make a free account, set up your calendar and start networking with people professionally on LinkedIn. And you can send your calendly link to people and say, hey, I'd love to do a coffee chat with you. I found an article that you'd like based on your profile. Love to share it with you, and I got some questions about your career. Love to get to know you better. So send them your calendar link. They can book a spot with you. And then, boom, you've made a new friend for 30 minutes. And you never know, they might connect you with a job someday.

Yeah, you know, that's a crucial part. I feel like networking is first giving, then receiving, and a lot of people got that wrong. They want to take rather than give. Yep. So, yeah, I think we're on a really, really, really good track. I think our clients are on a really, really good track. And I'm super thankful for the coach we actually hired. So he's going to come on on the next episode and talk about how we did it and what kind of resources and all that stuff. And thanks to you because you're just amazing at it. So, yeah, this is a really, really interesting journey, and we got real cool opportunities coming. So I feel like people should stay tuned and subscribe. Like, newsletter is going to be coming if you haven't read the article yet about Business Insider. I will link it below and let us know if we're if we did the right thing, if you would do the same, if you wouldn't. But do you have anything else to add?

No. God bless.

Yeah, this is it, and we'll end it. And thanks, everybody.

Bye.