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Making $100k/month in corporate
Thamina Stoll
August 06, 2026
Hi Sheconomist Insider 👋 It’s Thamina, Founder of The Sheconomist. This is your bi-weekly dose of celebrating the female economy where I help ambitious, purpose-driven women like yourself flip the script on money, career & wellbeing conventions so you can live life on your own terms.
TLDR:
💪 Don’t let anyone take away your agency
💫 How to engineer a remarkable life
💰 I made $110,000 in my 9-5 last month
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🧪 Freedom Formulas
If you've ever opened a "company-wide announcement" email and held your breath, you know exactly why I spent $20,000 of my own money on an immigration lawyer in 2023.
A bit of context.
I'm German. I had been in the US on a work visa, and my employer was already filing my green card. So on paper, hiring my own immigration lawyer made zero financial sense.
But in 2023, I read the political climate and trusted my gut. I anticipated Trump was going to win again. I watched immigration rhetoric harden and processing timelines increase. I watched tech companies run layoff cycles that felt different from the ones before.
And I did the math on what my L1 visa actually was.
It was a string attached to my employer.
If they let me go, I had weeks to leave the country I'd built my life in.
So I hired my own attorney. I self-petitioned for an Exceptional Ability green card. I wrote my own case for why I belonged here.
~$20,000, out of pocket.
The employer-sponsored petition was also moving in parallel.
Why I decided to take matters into my own hands?
When your employer files for you, the lawyer's client is your employer. Not you.
Their interests are aligned with the company's interests. Their job is to protect the company's process, not yours.
The minute you and the company stop being aligned (layoff, role change, restructure, return-to-office mandate you can't meet), things can get difficult.
My lawyer worked for me.
I got my green card.
And I no longer had to be scared to death every time my company announced a workforce update because my entire life in this country no longer hinged on whether one VP decided my role was redundant.
Plus, my work visa would have very likely expired before my employer's petition would have been fully processed.
(of course, they didn't tell me that, I only knew because I invested time and energy into fully understanding the complexity that is US immigration)
The math wasn't mathing.
Those $20,000 didn't buy paperwork.
That money bought AGENCY.
The lesson I want to share with any ambitious woman, immigrant or not:
The most expensive thing a corporation can take from you is your agency.
Buy it back wherever you can, even when it looks irrational on a spreadsheet.
A maxed out 401k + company match buys it back.
A 12-month emergency/FU fund (not three) buys it back.
A side hustle that earns its first dollar buys it back.
Sometimes $20k to an immigration attorney buys it back in a single transaction.
I have never once regretted making that investment in myself and my future.
I’m sharing this personal story with you because I want you to ask yourself where in your life and career people, organizations, or employers are taking away agency from you.
And then reflect on ways how you can reclaim that agency.
❣️ Thamina’s Top Picks
✨ This week’s Moodboard
Post credits go to DayswithDeys, cindy susana, The Glow Edit, Shivam Mishra️
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💸 Cooking up Wealth
I made $110,000 last month in my normal corporate job without being a genius or having any side hustles.
This is the side of corporate that nobody talks and I’ve been observing how 9-5 jobs have been increasingly demonized in recent years because seemingly everyone on the Internet is telling you that working a 9-5 doesn’t give you any freedom but I just made over $100,000 in July.
And if that isn’t as close to freedom as you can get while only working 40 hours AND having unlimited PTO, which I’m actually taking advantage of, then I don’t know what is.
So let me explain how I got here.
Every single job at your company sits on one of two sides. The side that spends the money, or the side that makes it.
Examples of departments that spend money: HR, Legal, Comms, Marketing.
But there are also departments that MAKE money and THOSE are the juicy ones you want to land if you wanna build generational wealth.
In my case, that’s Tech Sales. In Sales, your pay is base plus a variable on top of your base.
And here's the part that actually makes a $100k month like mine possible: Exceeding your revenue targets.
There’s something called commission accelerators. Once you're past your revenue target, your commission rate goes up on every dollar after that. And that can get lucrative quickly.
And here’s the thing: stop imagining wolf of wall street sales or picking up the phone to call people that have never heard your name. I don’t remember the last time I made a cold call.
These roles are consultative.
You're the person the client trusts to actually solve a business challenge. If you're the type of person who's good at explaining complicated stuff and keeping people happy, you're already qualified. You just don't have the financial upside just yet.
And while I certainly don’t make $100k every month, let me tell you, some Senior Directors and VPs at my company / in Tech Sales do. This is not uncommon.
I know Tech Sales is never talked about as an option in college so if you’re curious about my job, let me know and I can cover it more extensively in the future.
In abundance,
Please note that I may receive commissions for some but not all my recommendations. I will never recommend something I don’t actually genuinely believe in or haven’t used myself.
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