A 30-year-old shares how she achieved a seven-figure net worth by increasing her earnings fourfold and putting the additional money into investments

Michela Allocca’s Journey: From Corporate Life to Financial Empowerment

• Michela Allocca transitioned from a traditional corporate career to launch Break Your Budget, a personal finance platform.
• By leveraging TikTok and Instagram, she expanded her reach, resulting in lucrative brand collaborations and digital product sales.
• Through disciplined saving and strategic investing, Allocca built a net worth exceeding one million dollars.

Leaving the Corporate World Behind

When Michela Allocca first entered the corporate workforce, she quickly realized it wasn’t the right fit for her. After earning her finance degree in 2017, she began as a business analyst at John Hancock, then moved to an investment consulting firm two years later. Although she initially believed she had landed her dream job, Allocca soon discovered that the industry didn’t align with her aspirations or values.

Despite her analytical background and lack of design experience, Allocca was inspired by a friend who was successfully building a social media presence in health and fitness. Friends often sought her advice on money matters, prompting her to share personal finance tips online. In 2019, she started Break Your Budget on Instagram, using it as a creative outlet outside her day job. For the first year, it remained a passion project with little financial return.

Rapid Growth Through Social Media

Break Your Budget gained significant traction when Allocca expanded to TikTok during the pandemic, taking advantage of the platform’s early growth and limited competition—especially among women in their twenties discussing personal finance. She focused on delivering clear, practical advice tailored to young women navigating their finances, which resonated strongly with her audience.

Her following grew from a few hundred in 2019 to over 1,000 in 2020, and then skyrocketed to more than 200,000 by 2021. As her influence expanded, brands began reaching out for partnerships.

Allocca began her professional journey in Boston and now lives in Chicago.

Turning a Side Hustle Into a Full-Time Business

In the early stages, brands offered around $1,000 for sponsored TikTok videos and bio links. Securing just one partnership per week allowed Allocca to match her corporate salary. She also introduced a budgeting template for sale, further boosting her income. By the end of 2021, her earnings from Break Your Budget reached approximately $100,000—surpassing her day job and giving her the confidence to pursue her business full time in April 2022. Since then, her income has quadrupled compared to her previous corporate role.

Currently, Allocca’s revenue is split evenly between brand and finance partnerships—which, while lucrative, can be unpredictable—and digital products like her expense tracker and financial independence calculator, which provide steady monthly income. She has also diversified her earnings with affiliate marketing and YouTube AdSense, which contributed about 10% of her income last year.

Building Wealth Through Smart Investing

Despite her increased earnings, Allocca has intentionally avoided increasing her spending, a strategy she credits as essential to her financial growth. While balancing her corporate job and side business, she invested all her business income rather than using it for daily expenses. For example, if she earned $4,000 a month from brand deals, she would set aside $1,000 for taxes and invest the remaining $3,000 in her Roth IRA and brokerage accounts.

Even after leaving her corporate job and seeing her income multiply, she maintained her modest lifestyle. Her investment approach is straightforward: she prioritizes maximizing her retirement accounts, which are invested in target-date funds, and allocates additional funds to a taxable brokerage account using broad-market index funds and ETFs. She avoids riskier assets like cryptocurrency and real estate, preferring to keep her portfolio diversified and focused on the stock market.

Allocca also maintains an emergency fund with about six months’ worth of expenses in a high-yield savings account, along with a small cash reserve for potential real estate opportunities. The majority of her wealth, however, remains invested. Between her retirement and brokerage accounts, she has accumulated investments exceeding seven figures.

She attributes her financial success primarily to increasing her income outside of her corporate job, emphasizing that while not everyone may want a side hustle or to start a business, earning more has been the key driver of her wealth.

In 2023, Allocca published her book, "Own Your Money."