I was earning $500,000 a year at 30: Here are the 10 best pieces of advice I can give you about money

Flickr / Herry Lawford

After graduating from college, my career moved quickly up the corporate ladder, including eight years on Wall Street.

I worked at JPMorgan Chase, I was a vice president at Citibank, and then a director at Lord Abbett Investments on the e-marketing and e-commerce side.

Every day a new company was going public, and I lived across the street from the New York Stock Exchange.

Every night before a business day, I would hear them setting up some crazy paraphernalia in the Street. There were giveaways on the Street because there was so much “silly” money. Anything with a dot-com got funded or went public.

For example, Pets.com was launched in 1998. In case you don’t know the story, the Pets.com people spent half of the value of their company on a Super Bowl ad and by 2000 the company was defunct.

I was earning $500,000 a year at age 30, but I felt like I wasn’t making much money because I was in an established industry without big stock options. It was conservative and I was conservative. It didn’t fulfill me. I felt like I wasn't making a good difference in anyone’s life.

So I quit that job, moved to Central Florida and started my own financial advisory business. Everyone thought I was crazy. Who walks away from an amazing job like the one I had?

I had to reinvent myself as an entrepreneur. It took me a long time to build my firm, one client at a time, from scratch. I went from $500,000 income a year to almost zero the next. It challenged me personally, professionally and emotionally.

The beautiful side of the hard work is that I have a much better sense of my purpose in the world. I love being a practicing certified financial planner because it equips me to make a difference in my clients' lives. I get to help them make all the right moves with money. It is rewarding to watch them achieve the goals we set out together, and I even wrote a book so I could reach a wider range of the population, from the young to the seniors who might not be able to afford a certified financial planner.

Now here are some of the best pieces of advice I can give you about money.

1. Beware of FREE money

Credit cards are NOT free money. Use them as you would cash, or don’t use them at all. If you use them to stopgap your life, you will never have financial freedom.

2. Simplify budgeting

It’s simple. Know what you have coming in and going out each month. Do you know this? It doesn’t matter if you do it on a napkin or Mint or an app on your phone. This is so simple, yet so important. It is the building block of all financial planning.

3. Know your worth

Assets (what you own) minus liabilities (what you owe) equal net worth. And your net worth does NOT equal your self-worth.

Always remember that.