Michela Allocca left the corporate world to build Break Your Budget, a personal finance brand.
It grew its audience on TikTok and Instagram, leading to brand deals and digital product sales.
Allocca invested his increased earnings, achieving a seven-figure net worth through disciplined saving.
When Michela Allocca started working in the corporate world, she quickly became disillusioned.
The finance major, who graduated in 2017, began his career as a business analyst at John Hancock. Two years later, he moved to an investment consulting firm.
“It was my proverbial dream job,” the 30-year-old told Business Insider. “I thought this would be the job for me, and once I got into it, I realized that not only did I hate it, I hated this industry. I didn’t see a growth path that made sense for me.”
Content creation wasn’t exactly a good fit on paper for an “analytical type of person,” as Allocca describes it. “I went to school for finance. I’ve had jobs 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, she’s making money talking about health and fitness online. Why don’t I give it a shot and see if I can eventually turn it into something?'” said Allocca, who started her Instagram brand in 2019. “For the first year or so, nothing came of it.
Allocca’s side project, Break Your Budget, gained momentum when it expanded to TikTok, which grew in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic.
She benefited from timing. In 2020, the discoverability was greater 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 we didn’t have a lot of competition. But I think another level was the delivery— What I was talking about myself How We talked about it.”
She focused on creating the kind of content she would personally want as a money-surfing woman in her 20s: easy-to-understand, actionable advice.
“It was so simple and straightforward,” she said. “And I think that really resonated with people.”
Allocca began his career in Boston and currently resides in Chicago.Courtesy of Michela Allocca
After growing from a few hundred followers in 2019 to around 1,000 in 2020, her audience reached over 200,000 by 2021. That’s when brands started reaching out for partnerships.
In the early days, brands offered around $1,000 for a TikTok video plus a link in their bio. If he booked a partnership per week, “that basically matched my corporate income,” said Allocca, who also released a budget template that he sold through the link in his bio.
As sales and branded deals piled up, the extra income started to feel substantial.
The momentum continued through the end of 2021. That year, she said she earned about $100,000 from Break Your Budget. It was more than she earned from her day job and gave her the confidence to leave corporate America. She went full-time with Break Your Budget in April 2022. Since then, she has quadrupled her former corporate income.
Today, Allocca’s revenue is split roughly equally between two main revenue streams: About 50 percent comes from brand partnerships and financing, which tend to pay more but are less predictable. The other 50% comes from digital products, including her spending tracker and financial independence calculator, which provide recurring monthly income.
More recently, she added affiliate income and YouTube AdSense, which accounted for about 10% of her income last year.
Despite her increased earnings, Allocca said she hasn’t changed her lifestyle — and that’s been key to growing her fortune: “No matter how much you increase your income, you have to avoid decreasing your lifestyle — otherwise you won’t make progress.”
While working her corporate job and building Break Your Budget, she didn’t use any of her business income to cover her day-to-day expenses. Instead, she invested it: “If I was making, say, $4,000 a month in branded deals and setting aside $1,000 for taxes, that $3,000 went into the Roth IRA and a brokerage account. I didn’t touch that.”
And when she quit her job in 2022, and her income quadrupled, she kept her expenses mostly the same, even though she could afford to spend a lot more.
Allocca published his book, Own Your Money, in 2023.Courtesy of Michela Allocca
Her investment strategy is simple: she focuses first on maximizing 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 own any crypto, I don’t own real estate and I don’t plan to in the near future. I’m just trying to get as much money into the market and diversify as much as I can.”
She also keeps about six months 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. Other than that, almost all of her money is invested.
Between his retirement accounts and brokerage account, he has more than seven figures invested, according to screenshots viewed by Business Insider.
Ultimately, she attributes the increase in her net worth to her focus on earning more.
“The reason I’ve been able to hit these big numbers is because I’ve grown my income outside of my corporate job,” she said. “It’s not the sexiest thing — not everyone wants a side hustle or starting a business — but that’s the big driver.”
