People see the internet version of my life and, understandably, start doing the math.
I have a full-time job as a sixth-grade teacher, but I also make money online. I work with brands. I earn affiliate income. I have a YouTube channel. I have this Substack. I have spent the last three years posting online and the last two years figuring out how to turn some of that work into actual income.
And now, we’re buying a house.
Not just a house, either. My dream house.
The kind of house that feels almost ridiculous to say out loud because three years ago, if you had shown me this house and told me that I would eventually be living in it, I genuinely don’t think I would have believed you. I wanted a life like this, of course. I wanted to feel happy. I wanted to feel healthy. I wanted to build something of my own. I wanted a home that felt like mine.
I just didn’t think my life was actually going to become any of those things.
Three years ago, I was miserable. I was at my highest weight. I was unhappy in ways that had nothing to do with the number on the scale, and I was trying to figure out how to change my life without really knowing where to begin.
Now, somehow, I have built an audience online. I have lost 95 pounds from my highest weight. I have a career that I genuinely love. I have two kids and a husband I am building this life with. I make money from something that did not even exist in my life a few years ago.
And in January, we’re moving into a house that feels like everything I have ever wanted.
I think that’s why I understand why people might look at my life online and assume they know what our finances look like.
They see the brand deals. They see the content. They hear me talk about making money online. Now they’re watching us buy a house.
And naturally, people start filling in the blanks.
I think people assume I make more money online than I actually do.
I don’t blame them. “Content creator” has become one of those careers where the numbers are completely invisible, which means everyone gets to imagine whatever number they want. Sometimes people assume you’re making millions because you have a decent following. Other times they assume you’re making absolutely nothing because they don’t understand how any of it works.
The truth is somewhere in the middle.
Making money online has changed our lives, but not because I suddenly became rich.
Right now, the money I make online helps keep us afloat.
That is probably the least glamorous sentence I could write about making money on the internet, but it is also the most honest. The money I make online helps us pay bills. It helps us make payments. It helps us absorb expenses that would otherwise land entirely on our regular paychecks. It gives our family another income stream when our life is already expensive and our debt is already heavier than I would like it to be.
And yes, I can see the potential for it to become something much bigger.
But potential and reality are not the same thing, and I think the internet has become very, very good at pretending they are.
Making money online is not as easy as people make it look.
Everywhere you look, someone is telling you that they quit their job and replaced their six-figure salary from their laptop. Someone made an absurd amount of money selling a digital product while they slept. Someone else is convinced that courses are the answer. Affiliate marketing is the answer. UGC is the answer. Printables are the answer.
Apparently, there are approximately forty-seven answers, and everyone on the internet is selling at least one of them.
I have tried digital products because everyone says digital products are where the money is.
I have made them.
Every digital product I have created has failed.
Not quietly underperformed. Not almost worked. Failed.
I have created things because I thought that was what I was supposed to do next. If you have an audience, you create a product. If you want to make more money, you create another product. If the first one doesn’t work, you create a better one and put it in a prettier Canva template.
I did that.
The money, unfortunately, did not cooperate.
And I think that’s important to say because there is a version of this story where I could tell you that I started posting online, figured out the formula, created passive income, and slowly built a business that now runs itself.
That would be a much cleaner story.
It just wouldn’t be mine.
I’ve been posting for more than three years now. I started making money around two years ago, and then last year, it started becoming more significant.
But then it also became too much.
Teaching takes a lot of my time and energy. Raising two kids takes a lot of my time and energy. Creating content takes a lot of my time and energy. At some point, I realized I was trying to turn every spare minute of my life into an opportunity to make money, and I had to take a step back.
I still struggle with what to call this sometimes.
It’s a business, because it makes money and requires work. But sometimes it still feels like a hobby because I don’t have the time to give it the attention I know it could probably use. I’m trying to build something alongside a career that already asks a lot from me, and there are days when I feel like I’m doing neither of them as well as I want to.
I don’t have a dramatic story about quitting teaching to become a full-time creator because I genuinely need my teaching job.
I don’t make enough money online to quit.
But even if I did?
I’m not sure I would.
I don’t want to escape teaching. I want to have choices.
I love teaching.
I worked really hard for my career. I have spent years becoming better at it. I genuinely enjoy being at school, and I love working with kids. I need the benefits. I need the stability. I need the predictable paycheck that arrives twice a month whether or not the algorithm decides it likes me that week.
So when people ask why I still teach if I make money online, the answer isn’t complicated.
I need my job.
And I also love my job.
Maybe one day that will change. The honest answer is that I could see myself leaving the classroom eventually, but not for at least another five years. Even then, I would probably substitute because I love being in schools. I could also see myself becoming a vice principal or moving into administration.
I genuinely don’t know yet.
And I think I’m okay with that.
My goal isn’t to replace one life with another. My goal is to have more choices inside the life I already love.
For a long time, I think I imagined financial change as something dramatic. I thought we needed one big thing to happen for our lives to finally feel different. A better job. A huge raise. A business that suddenly took off. One magical moment where I opened my bank account and discovered that all of my problems had been solved while I was asleep.
Unfortunately, that has not been my experience.
We didn’t wake up one day financially secure. We started stacking.
My teaching income. Jason’s income. Brand partnerships. Affiliate income. YouTube. Substack.
None of those things alone has completely changed our lives.
Together, though?
They matter.
And I think that’s something people underestimate when they’re trying to build an additional income stream. They immediately ask whether something can replace their full-time salary, and if it can’t, they decide it isn’t worth doing.
But I don’t look at it that way anymore.
One income stream doesn’t have to carry your entire life to change your financial situation.
My YouTube income doesn’t replace my teaching salary. My Substack income doesn’t pay our mortgage yet. Affiliate income isn’t buying us a house.
But those things help.
And right now, helping matters.
We’re buying my dream house, and I am still scared we can’t afford it.
The house is around $401,000.
We’re using a 3% FHA loan, and we have already put down $15,000. We currently have around $20,000 saved specifically for the house, and we’re estimating that we may need somewhere between another $5,000 and $10,000 for closing.
We’re hoping to use a 3-2-1 buydown, which would put our payment at approximately $2,800 during the first year before it eventually increases to around $3,200. That includes the HOA, taxes, and insurance.
And that is before we buy a refrigerator.
A washing machine.
A dryer.
A dining room table.
Or deal with the fact that our backyard will initially consist of absolutely no landscaping.
Just dirt.
Which is exciting because apparently buying your dream house also comes with discovering how expensive it is to make dirt look intentional.
But I love this house.
I don’t just mean that I like it or think it’s a good investment or can imagine myself tolerating it for thirty years.
I love it.
It has everything I have ever wanted in a house. I can picture my family there. I can picture my kids growing up there. I can picture holidays and birthdays and ordinary Tuesday nights.
And I think that’s why this decision feels so emotional.
This is my dream house, but that doesn’t mean I don’t lie awake sometimes wondering if we can actually afford the dream.
I am excited.
I am terrified.
I am grateful.
And I am looking at our finances more carefully than I ever have before.
Because the truth is, we are not buying this house because we have reached some magical financial finish line. We are buying it while carrying debt. We are buying it while I’m still trying to grow my business. We are buying it while my student loans are in forbearance. We are buying it while trying to figure out how to make our money stop disappearing the second it arrives.
Sometimes you can be incredibly excited about something and absolutely terrified by the exact same thing.
And maybe that’s the most honest thing I can say about this entire house.
The house is part of the dream.
Feeling financially secure inside of it is the bigger one.
Making more money and having more money are two completely different things.
This might be the lesson I am learning most aggressively right now.
I make more money now than I did when I first started posting online.
That does not mean I always feel like we have more money.
Because more income doesn’t automatically erase debt. It doesn’t automatically teach you how to budget. It doesn’t automatically make you save for taxes or stop spending money because something feels justified in the moment.
And the internet is particularly good at showing revenue without showing reality.
Someone can tell you they made $10,000 this month, and technically that might be true. But that number doesn’t tell you how much they spent to make it. It doesn’t tell you how much they owe in taxes. It doesn’t tell you how much went toward debt.
Revenue can make someone look rich long before they actually feel financially secure.
And that is exactly why I wanted to write this article.
I don’t want to build a money pillar here where I pretend I have all the answers. I don’t.
I am still figuring this out.
I’m still making mistakes.
I’m still changing my mind too often.
I’m still trying to find the balance between making my work affordable for people and making enough money for it to actually support my family.
I raise prices because I need to make more money, then worry no one will pay. I lower prices because I want things to be accessible, then worry I’m making everything too cheap.
I change things.
A lot.
Sometimes my biggest business problem isn’t a lack of ideas. It’s my inability to leave something alone long enough to find out whether it actually works.
I’m working on that.
But before we talk about what I’m working on, I think it’s time to talk about the actual numbers.
Because I know that’s what you’re wondering.
You’re wondering what I make as a teacher. What Jason makes. How much comes from the internet. How much debt we actually have. What we’re spending. What we’re saving.
And whether this house is going to require us to survive exclusively on frozen chicken and good intentions.
I would wonder too.
I know that’s probably why you clicked on this article.
You can hear people talk about multiple income streams anywhere. Open Instagram for approximately thirty seconds and someone will tell you that you, too, can make passive income from your phone.
But that’s not really what you’re wondering about me.
You want to know what I actually make.
You want to know what I actually owe.
You want to know how much debt we’re carrying while buying a $401,000 house.
You want to know whether the money I make online is changing our life or simply helping us survive it.
And honestly?