I wore golden handcuffs for the better part of three decades and thought they were proof I'd made it. Group CISO at Standard Chartered Bank, S&P Global, Qantas Airways, IBM. The compensation packages got bigger at every move: base salary, equity, annual bonus, pension contributions, long-term incentives. Every new offer felt like validation that the system valued me.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to realise the system wasn't valuing me. It was pricing me. There's a difference, and it matters more than most executives want to admit.

The trap is not the salary

When people talk about golden handcuffs, they usually mean the money is too good to walk away from. That's not quite right. The salary is not the trap. The trap is what the salary has done to your identity, your dependency, and your ability to imagine a life that isn't funded by someone else's payroll.

You can earn $400,000 a year and still be financially fragile, because if the income stops, everything stops with it. That is not wealth, it is a high-paying dependency.

Many of the executives I work with have spent 20 or 30 years building impressive careers and have almost nothing that earns without their direct involvement. They have savings, and they might have shares vesting over the next few years. But ask them to keep their current lifestyle going for 18 months without a salary, and many would start sweating within the first quarter.

You are running your life like a P&L statement

Here is the shift that changed how I think about money. It comes down to two financial statements every executive already understands at work but rarely applies at home.

A P&L statement (profit and loss) tracks revenue in and expenses out, and whatever is left is your margin. Most executives run their personal finances exactly this way. Salary comes in, the mortgage, school fees and holidays go out, and whatever survives gets parked in savings or super. The whole model depends on revenue continuing to flow, which means it depends on you continuing to show up.

A balance sheet measures something different: what you own that holds value and earns independently of your effort. That might be property that produces rent, a business that runs without you in the room, intellectual property that sells while you sleep, or content libraries, digital products, licensing agreements and equity in ventures you helped build.

A salary is a line on the P&L. It measures activity, not worth. Assets are the balance sheet, and they measure what works whether you show up or not.

If you have been in corporate for 20 years and your balance sheet is mostly your house and your super, you have been running a P&L life: high revenue, low asset accumulation. The business equivalent would be a company turning over millions with nothing on its books, and no investor would touch it.

My dad understood this better than any CFO I've worked with

My father worked in a foundry, which was hard, physical work, but he also ran an ice cream van on weekends and evenings, and he owned rental property. He built redundancy into his income the way an engineer builds redundancy into a bridge.

If the foundry shut down, the ice cream van still ran. If the weather killed ice cream sales, the tenants still paid rent. He never used the language of portfolio theory or diversification. He just understood, from lived experience, that depending on one source of anything was a structural weakness.

Daniel Priestley puts it in three words in his book 24 Assets: income follows assets. My dad lived that principle long before anyone wrote a business book about it, and it took me three decades of climbing corporate ladders to remember what he'd already shown me.

The irony is that executives are trained in risk management, redundancy and contingency planning. At work we build disaster recovery plans and business continuity frameworks. Then we go home and bet our entire financial life on a single income source controlled by someone else. We would never let a business run with that kind of concentration risk, yet we accept it in our own lives without question.

What is your actual freedom number?

The early-retirement writers Kristy Shen and Bryce Leung work out their number by multiplying annual expenses by 25, the so-called 4 percent rule. Whatever multiple you settle on, the starting point is the same, and most people skip it: your burn rate, meaning your annual expenses minus any passive income you already have.

So start there. What does your life cost per year, with nothing cut? Include the mortgage, the school fees, the insurance, the holidays, the subscriptions, all of it.

Now subtract any income that would continue if you stopped working tomorrow: rental income, dividends, business revenue that does not need you there. For most executives that second number is close to zero, which means their burn rate and their total expenses are almost the same.

That gap between your expenses and your passive income is the problem you need to solve, and a bigger salary does not solve it. A bigger salary just raises the revenue line on the P&L while the balance sheet stays empty.

The shift from P&L to balance sheet thinking

Making this shift does not mean quitting your job. I am not suggesting anyone resigns on Monday. I am suggesting you start putting time, energy and capital into building assets alongside your career, rather than waiting until you leave to start from scratch. I set out a 90-day structure for that in How to Build a Business in 90 Days Without Quitting Your Job.

It means asking a different question. Instead of "how do I increase my salary?", the question becomes "what can I build or buy that produces income without me?"

The answers vary. For some executives it is property. For others it is a digital product or an education business built on their professional expertise. Some build a consulting practice that can eventually run with a small team. Others invest in or buy small businesses.

The vehicle matters less than the principle: every dollar and every hour you put into an asset moves you from P&L dependency toward balance sheet strength. Your career becomes one income source among several, rather than the only thing between you and financial trouble.

What this looked like for me

While I was still in corporate, I co-founded the Cyber Leadership Institute. It started as a side project built on expertise I had developed over decades as a CISO, and over time it became a seven-figure business. When I left corporate in 2024, I did not jump into the unknown. I stepped onto a foundation I had already built.

That is the difference between an exit and a collapse. An exit is planned, funded and supported by assets that were already producing before you walked out the door. A collapse is what happens when someone leaves a high salary with nothing underneath them. How you plan that exit depends on your runway, which I cover in Planning Your Corporate Exit at 40 vs 55.

My dad would have called it common sense. I call it balance sheet thinking, and I wish I had started a decade earlier.

Three questions to ask yourself this week

You do not need a full financial plan today. But you do need to get honest about where you stand. Here are three questions worth sitting with:

  1. If your salary stopped in 90 days, how long could you keep your current life going? I mean your actual life with all its current costs, not a reduced version.
  2. What do you own right now that produces income without your involvement? Be strict. Shares that might pay dividends someday do not count. What is producing cash flow today?
  3. In the last 12 months, how many hours did you spend building an asset versus earning a salary? If the answer is zero, you have been running a pure P&L life, and the balance sheet is not going to build itself.

These are not comfortable questions. They were not comfortable for me either, especially when I realised that years of senior salaries had produced almost no independent income-producing assets. But discomfort is where the shift starts.

Salary is a tool, not a destination

None of this is an argument against earning a good salary. Thirty years in corporate gave me the expertise, the credibility, the network and the capital that made everything else possible. The salary funded the assets and the career built the authority, and I would not trade that experience.

But a salary that funds nothing except lifestyle is a salary on a treadmill. It feels like progress because the numbers go up, while the balance sheet stays flat. The goal is not to stop earning. The goal is to make sure what you earn is building something that lasts beyond your next employment contract.

Your salary is not wealth but revenue, and revenue without assets is just a high-paying job with an expiry date.

If you want a clear read on how dependent you are on the salary today, the free assessment below scores it in about five minutes.