Making $125,000 a year is quite a comfortable place to be for most people. That’s a number most people never say out loud, let alone on camera. Alex Petrakieva said it anyway. In fact, she quit the lucrative job, and now she earns twice as much. By May, she wrote herself two $100,000 cheques.
She quit her $125k job
Alex Petrakieva, a Chicago-based UX designer, revealed how she left her high-paying job for an ‘experiment’. Today, that leap of faith helps her make double the money.In a video shared on Instagram, Petrakieva spoke about how she spent years in corporate UX content design before she walked away. By her own account, the role paid $125,000 a year. Good money, steady work, the kind of job most people don’t quit on a whim. But she left anyway and turned to content creation. Initially, it was more of an experiment than a career plan. Now, that experiment is the job. “I’m having a little bit of a hard time. I left my corporate job last year. I was a senior UX content designer. I was making $125,000 a year, which is a great salary,” the woman said. “But I decided to give content creation a go, just to try to see what would happen.”The video, posted in May this year (2026), shows the woman in disbelief that she is receiving her second $100,000 cheque. “I’m about to write myself a $100,000 cheque. And the most insane part is, this is the second time this year that I’m doing this. And I do this because I can’t transfer that big an amount with the bank. I have to write myself a cheque,” she revealed.Most creators who talk about income lean into the number. But Petrakieva got stuck on the mechanics of it — the sheer logistics of moving money she still isn’t fully used to having. “It’s really difficult to express myself with this amount of money and to talk about it, because it’s a lot. It’s a lot. And my own mind hasn’t caught up with it. And so this is why I struggle to share income now. But I do want to say that if you want to create content, do it. If you want to do it for fun, do it,” she said.The content creator also encouraged her viewers to chase their dreams. “If you want to take a risk on something, do it. Because this happened to me in two and a half years. Maybe it can happen for you too.”
How content creation changed her life
Alex Petrakieva also spoke about how dramatically her life has evolved with content creation, and how her mind is just catching up. “I don’t think my mind has fully caught up with how much my life has changed. Sometimes I stop and think about how dramatically I’ve changed the trajectory of my life, and it feels… huge,” she wrote.She also spoke about the uncertainties that come along with it. In corporate life, though there was fear of lay-offs, it never fully took over. “When I worked in corporate, sure, lay-offs were always in the back of my mind. But I never let that fear fully consume me because I believed I could always find another job.”Building something with her own name on it hasn’t offered that same safety net. “The highs are higher, but the lows feel much lower too. There’s a level of uncertainty that is mentally much heavier than I expected and, if I’m being honest, it’s unlocked a whole new kind of fear for me,” she asserted.But she doesn’t regret the trade. “And yet… it has been 100% worth it.” Why? “Because I know I could have never created this kind of life in two years if I had stayed where I was,” she added. The video resonated with thousands online. Some even talked about their journey with content creation. “Alex, you still continue to inspire me. You have no idea how much my life has changed bc one of your videos resonated so much with me that I decided to finally give myself a chance. One year into content creation, and I’m about to make 100K from the last three months alone. I still don’t believe it most days. But as a mum of four, the kind of flexibility this gives me I can’t put into words. Thank you for sharing your numbers; it may not resonate with some people. But I am telling you it is changing lives. Mine included,” one user wrote. Many appreciated her for sharing her honest experience and inspiring others.