Hello everyone. It's me, Chelsea Fagan, your host, founder and CEO of the Financial Diet and woman who loves talking about money.

And often when we're talking about money on TFD, we're talking about what we're earning.

Now, at the end of the day, no matter how frugal you are, no matter how many things you cut out of your budget, no matter how many better choices you're making,

for most of us at some point, we

are going to have to focus on earning more, not just

because it is where we can make bigger increases and strides

in our long-term goals, but also because we all

deserve to be getting compensated as fairly as possible

for the work that we do.

And especially when it comes to things like negotiation

and advocating for ourselves, we know very well that women who are the vast majority of people

who listen to this show are not nearly as aggressive when it comes to advocating for themselves.

Most of them don't negotiate and especially don't negotiate at the initial offer stage of a job, which is the time at which your starting salary is set, which if your raises are percentage based, which they often are, is going to be the number from which all subsequent increases in pay are going to be based. So when you fail to negotiate, when you fail to advocate for yourself, you're not just cheating yourself on that moment, but for every future moment that you're at that company. We've also talked quite a bit on

this channel about how for most people, because their biggest income is going to be from their

primary job, the biggest increases are going to come from that primary job. And often the

largest increases in salary are going to come from changing companies and changing roles

rather than moving up in one corporate ladder

for very long periods of time.

But there's a lot more nuance when it comes to how

to navigate our careers, how to navigate HR as a company,

how to work with other people, how to deal with other people

who quite frankly are kind of difficult to work with, and basically just strategize our careers in a way that makes them

...