Michela Allocca left the corporate world to build Break Your Budget, a personal finance brand.
She grew her audience on TikTok and Instagram, which led to branding deals and digital product sales.
Allocca invested her increased earnings, achieving a seven-figure net worth through disciplined savings.
When Michela Allocca started working in the corporate world, she was quickly disillusioned.
The finance major, who graduated in 2017, began her career as a business analyst at John Hancock. Two years later, she moved on to work at an investment consulting firm.
“It was my proverbial dream job,” the 30-year-old told Business Insider. “I thought that would be the job for me, and once I got into it, I realized, not only do I hate this, but I also hate this industry. I don’t see a growth path forward that makes sense for me.”
Content creation wasn’t exactly great on paper for “an analytical type of person,” as Allocca describes herself. “I went to school for finance. I had a job in finance. I don’t have an eye for design.”
However, encouraged by a friend who was building a social media following in the health and fitness space, Allocca began posting about personal finance, a topic her friends were increasingly asking her for advice on.
“I was like, ‘OK, you’re making money talking about health and fitness on the internet. Why don’t I give it a go and see if I can finally turn it into something?'” said Allocca, who started her Instagram brand in 2019. “For the first year or so, nothing came of it. I used it as a creative outlet to find satisfaction outside of my work.”
Allocca’s side project, Break Your Budget, gained momentum when it expanded to TikTok, which increased in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic.
She benefited from the time. In 2020, discovery was higher because there were fewer creators on the platform, she said.
Plus, “there weren’t a lot of women talking about personal finance online, especially in their mid-twenties, so I didn’t have a ton of competition. But I think another layer was the delivery — what I was talking about and how I talked about it.”
She’s focused on creating the kind of content she personally wants as a woman navigating money in her 20s: actionable, easy-to-understand advice.
“It was so, so plain and simple,” she said. “And I think that really resonated with people.”
Allocca began her career in Boston and currently lives in Chicago.Courtesy of Michela Allocca
After growing from a few hundred followers in 2019 to around 1,000 in 2020, her audience rose to over 200,000 by 2021. That was when the brands started to reach partnerships.
In the early days, brands offered around $1,000 for a TikTok video along with a link in the bio. If she booked one membership a week, “that essentially matched my corporate income,” said Allocca, who also launched a budgeting model that she sold through her link in bio.
As the sales and brand offerings piled up, the additional income began to feel substantial.
The momentum continued until the end of 2021. That year, she said she made about $100,000 from Break Your Budget. It was more than she earned from her day job, and it gave her the confidence to get away from corporate America. She went full-time with Break Your Budget in April 2022. Since then, she has doubled her previous corporate income.
Today, Allocca’s income is divided more or less equally between two main income streams: About 50% comes from brand and finance partnerships, which tend to pay more but are less predictable. The other 50% comes from digital products, including her expense tracker and financial independence calculator, which provide recurring monthly income.
More recently, it has increased affiliate revenue and YouTube AdSense, which made up about 10% of its revenue last year.
Despite her increased earnings, Allocca said she hasn’t changed her lifestyle – which has been essential to growing her wealth: “No matter how much you increase your income, you have to avoid lifestyle – otherwise you’re not actually going to make progress.”
While she was working her corporate job and building Break Your Budget on the side, she didn’t use any of her business income to cover day-to-day expenses. Instead, she invested it: “If I was making, say, $4,000 a month from brand contracts and put $1,000 aside for taxes, that other $3,000 was going into my Roth IRA and a brokerage account. I didn’t touch it.”
And when she quit her job in 2022 and her income 4x’d, she kept her spending largely unchanged, even though she could afford to spend a lot more.
Allocca published her book, “Own Your Money,” in 2023.Courtesy of Michela Allocca
Her investment strategy is simple: She focuses first on maxing out her retirement accounts, which are invested in target date funds. She invests additional income in a taxable brokerage account, using broad market index funds and ETFs.
“There’s nothing funky in my portfolio,” she said. “I don’t have any crypto, I don’t have real estate, and I don’t plan to in the near future. I just try to get as much money in the market and as diversified as I can.”
She also keeps about six months worth of expenses in a high-yield savings account as an emergency fund, along with a small amount of cash earmarked for a potential real estate purchase if the right opportunity arises. Moreover, almost all her money is invested.
Between her retirement accounts and the brokerage account, she has more than seven figures invested, according to screenshots seen by Business Insider.
Ultimately, she attributes the growth of her net worth to her focus on earning more.
“The reason I was able to reach these big numbers is because I added income outside of my corporate job,” she said. “It’s not the sexiest thing – not everyone wants to side hustle or start a business – but that’s the big driver.”
