I’m a 38-year-old software engineer making $200K a year. I grew my salary by moving to the US and plan to retire soon in Mexico.

Carlos Santana Roldán is a 38-year-old software engineer living in California.

Business Insider has verified his income and employment history with documentation.

The following as-told-to essay has been edited for length and clarity.

I think my current software engineer job will probably be my last job as an employee.

I’m tired and my eyes are burning all the time; I’ve been doing this for almost 20 years.

I’ve had a cabin business in Mexico for about five years, and maybe after three or four more years, once I build one more cabin, I’ll retire from coding.

I’ll be able to be financially free and have enough money to just enjoy time with my family for the rest of my life.

I started my software engineering career working for around five years in Mexico for a few different companies that contracted for companies in the US.

I made around the equivalent of around $800 to $1,500 a month.

Here’s my salary journey since moving to the US.

In October 2013, I moved to the US as a contractor with Globant on a TN visa, and I started working for Disney in Seattle.

My initial salary was $90,000 per year.

It was a big jump, and it helped me to pay off my car in Mexico and my wedding expenses when I got married about a year later.

It was good money, and Washington doesn’t have state income taxes.

I was still working with Disney and making the same amount, but my monthly paycheck was less because of the state taxes.

Salary Journeys is Business Insider’s first-person series following real people and their real paychecks — how they built their income, what it means for their lives, and what they learned along the way.

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In 2016, I moved from Disney to Beachbody, the company that developed fitness programs like P90X and Insanity.

There, I was paid around $120,000 a year, which was a good bump.

While there, I learned the coding framework React, which was more trending and paid more than other coding frameworks I’d worked with.

Since then, I’ve written five books about React, and I earn small royalties on those books.

In 2017, I landed a job with Globant again, as a tech lead at Disney within ABC News.

I was paid $127,000 a year, a small jump, but I was motivated by the fact that the position was as a tech lead and not a regular developer.

The following year, I lost my job only a couple of weeks before my visa expired.

Normally, on the TN visa, you have a 60-day grace period to get a new job after being laid off, but because of my visa expiration, I had to return to Mexico.

I applied for jobs directly from Mexico, but most companies wanted to do in-person interviews.

I got a job with a startup that was acquired by MindBody.

They gave me $10,000 to relocate to San Francisco, and the salary was around $145,000.

Meanwhile, my wife had been working, but when we moved to San Francisco, she lost her job.

She couldn’t find any jobs in San Francisco, so I suggested she try LA.

I figured that if she found a job in LA, it’d be easier for me to move in there a few months later.

She did, and we lived separately for eight months.

Every weekend, I traveled to LA or she traveled to San Francisco, while I looked into moving.

In San Francisco, you make more money, but you also spend more.

Rent and food costs are way higher, and transportation is very challenging, especially if you need to take the train into the city.

Still, living there is a good experience that I recommend everyone try.

In 2020, I took a week of vacation and went to LA to start looking for a new job, right before the pandemic hit.

I originally applied for a manager position, but they really liked me as a developer.

The manager position would’ve paid higher — I think around $185,000 — and the developer position they offered me was $140,000, less than what I was making at MindBody.

After eight months of instability, I didn’t care.

I was looking for any job that would allow me to move to LA to be with my wife.

If the job didn’t work out, I could jump to another one the next year.

The funny thing is that I was so tired of things that I signed the contract without reading it.

I thought they offered me the $140,000 salary, and that was it.

I didn’t realize until later that they also offered me restricted stock units (RSUs).

I got $225,000 worth of Snap stocks, split across four years, when they were around $12.50 a unit.

At that point, I was building my cabins in Mexico for the rental business, so I didn’t care about waiting for the stock to grow in value.

Every month, when I got stock, I’d sell it and send the money to Mexico to build the cabins.

The first year, the stock skyrocketed from $12 to $80, and I used the money to build two cabins in Mexico.

In 2021, I made around $420,000 because the stocks skyrocketed.

I worked for Snap for around two years and three months.

Then, the stocks started going down, dropping to below $30 a unit, and I lost my job a week before my daughter was born.

For insurance reasons, we ended up having to delay the birth of our daughter by one day.

Thank God everything went well, and there were no major issues, but the job loss felt personal.

My next job was at APM Music as a principal engineer, which I got through someone I knew at a previous job.

Principal engineer is one of the highest positions you can get as an engineer.

I started with making $175,000 a year, plus a 10% annual bonus; in total, it was about $192,000.

After two and a half years and some salary bumps, my salary increased to $190,000 base salary plus a 12% annual bonus, totaling around $213,000.

I worked there for about three years, but I became too expensive for them to keep once we completed our project and entered into maintenance mode.

They were very nice and gave me three months to look for a new job, for which I’m very grateful.

The job market was crazy, with AI and all of the layoffs.

Also, many companies didn’t want to hire people on visas, I was looking everywhere — even in Mexico — and only got two or three interviews.

Because of my cabin rental business in Mexico, I was able to still get money from my Mexican bank account while I was unemployed.

I was surviving on around $900 per month.

My wife was paying the rent, and with the money I got from Mexico, I was buying the food and paying for basic stuff in cash.

It was expensive due to ATM transaction fees, but it was the way I could survive while I looked for a new job.

I was tired of applying, so I removed the “Open to Work” badge on my LinkedIn profile and changed my position as if I started a new startup.

I had developed a software to manage the reservations for my cabin rental business in Mexico, and I had a plan to extend that software to also handle hotel reservations and make it into a SaaS.

The funny thing is that after that, I started getting emails from recruiters within two weeks.

Instead of me looking for a job, recruiters started reaching out to me.

I started receiving some contract offers.

One was for a role that’d involve working in Mexico, but at that point, I’d been living in the US for more than 10 years, so moving back would’ve been a big change.

My current role is as a contractor with a large music corporation, where I’ve been working for about a year.

It’s a little bit less than what I was getting before, but with how bad the market is right now, it’s my best choice.

At this point, especially with my visa status, I feel like I’m reaching my limit in the current market.

When you make good money and then you get way more, there is a moment when your mind is like, OK, I want more, and more, and more.

It’s interesting because in Mexico, it was totally different.

Even when I was making way less money, I was saving or spending less than what I made.

In the US, it feels like something in the system forces you to buy more stuff.

Also, rent is getting more expensive over time.

I still have debt, but not too much.

I’m a very adaptive person — I can live with $400,000, with $200,000, or with $50,000.

I know that my visa isn’t permanent.

That’s why I’ve invested basically all of my money in Mexico, because I’m aware that if at some point I get tired or something happens, I’ll have something in Mexico that I already invested in.

If you’re interested in sharing your salary journey, please fill out this Google Form.