CNBC Make It

Some ideas are born on Ivy League campuses. Others, at a California Pizza Kitchen. That’s where Mark Cuban and his college friend Todd Wagner were in 1995, eating lunch and talking about Indiana University basketball. They lived in Dallas, and had to listen to games on the phone with someone physically in Bloomington, Indiana. “There’s got to be a way that we can listen to Indiana University basketball ... over the internet,” Cuban recalled the two of them saying, during a MasterClass course released Thursday. The idea blossomed into Broadcast.com, one of the first streaming platforms of its kind. Cuban and Wagner sold the company to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in stock in 1999. It remains Cuban’s most lucrative entrepreneurial endeavor, topping the $6 million sale of his first company, software business Microsolutions, in 1990.

Not only is California the state with the second-highest average rent payment, but it also boasts the highest average monthly mortgage payment, according to a new report from bill pay service doxo. The average monthly mortgage in the West Coast state is $2,576, which is $1,174 above the national average. The average cost of bills in California is 38.7% above the national average, according to a 2023 doxo report. Meanwhile, West Virginia has the lowest average monthly mortgage — the average payment is $961. The doxo report found that 40% of households in the U.S. have to pay a monthly mortgage and that the average monthly payment is $1,402. It was the most expensive common household bill, with Americans spending an average of $885,000,000,000 a year on it.

Not worrying about how other people see you is easier said than done. But, if you can ditch that habit, you’re likely to become much more successful, says Talia Fox. Fox is the CEO of Kusi Global, a small Washington, D.C.-based executive coaching firm, and was a leadership fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health from 2014 to 2017. She learned how damaging worrying about others’ perspectives can be from personal experience, she says. “I had to let go of the habit of fear. I call it self-centered fear,” Fox tells CNBC Make It. “Anytime I’m about to take an action, the thing that stops me from taking the action is worrying about what someone might think about me.”

When your boss is the president of the United States and gives you career advice, you take it. Aneesh Raman was working as a speechwriter for President Barack Obama from 2011 to 2013 and remembers one key piece of career advice the president would often share: “Worry about what you want to do, not who you want to be.”

To live “comfortably” as a single person in 99 of the largest U.S. metro areas, you’ll need a median income of $93,933, according to a recent SmartAsset analysis. “Comfortable” is defined as the income needed to cover a 50/30/20 budget, which assumes 50% of your monthly income can pay for necessities like housing and utility costs, 30% can cover discretionary spending and 20% can be set aside for savings or investments. Here’s the income a single person needs to live comfortably in the 25 U.S. cities with the highest cost of living.

Pay transparency policies, where businesses actively share the salary range on an open job, are becoming the norm. A majority, 60%, of companies now share pay ranges in job ads as of Payscale’s latest report on compensation best practices, which surveyed more than 5,700 business leaders and HR pros in late 2023. That share is up by 15% from the previous year and includes 21% of employers who say they list salaries because it’s required by law, and another 39% who do so regardless of any local or state-wide legislation. Payscale experts say employers now bound by pay transparency laws are seeing their workforce engage in the topic. Some 27% say employees have been asking more questions about their pay. It’s empowered workers, too: 14% of business leaders say employees have left because they saw job postings with higher pay elsewhere, and 11% have seen a job posting within the organization and realized they were being paid less for a similar job.

The sheer number of platforms and the tech used to streamline the job application process almost make it “too easy” to mass apply to jobs today, says Donald Knight, chief people officer Greenhouse, the hiring platform. While making hiring more accessible and efficient is a good thing, Knight says, it can also lead to job-search burnout. “In the past, where you might have had 40 steps to complete an application, today, most people can do that in less than seven steps,” which can take as little as 45 seconds total, Knight tells CNBC Make It. And scores of job-seekers have gone public recently about applying to hundreds of jobs without ever hearing back. He offers five steps to focus your job search and stand out from the competition.

For employers, there are various red flags in a job interview. Showing up late could be a red flag, being unprepared to talk about the job is another, and there are also phrases that might cause them to raise an eyebrow. “I work too hard” and “I’m a perfectionist,” for example, make it sound like “you are full of s---,” says Nolan Church, former Google recruiter and current CEO of salary data company FairComp. Conversely, there are things employers like to hear during an interview. “I always tell people to come with stories,” says Church. Here are the kinds of stories he likes to hear.

Jenny Woo’s four streams of income have taught her a few important lessons: how to start side hustles, sustain them and make them more lucrative. Woo is a 42-year-old ex-corporate consultant and Montessori school administrative director who lectures at the University of California, Irvine, runs an online emotional intelligence course and freelances as a business consultant. She also has a side hustle called Mind Brain Emotion where creates emotional intelligence-focused card games — 11 of them so far, on topics ranging from relationship skills to job interviews — and sells them on Amazon. The games brought in $1.71 million in revenue last year, or an average of $142,700 per month, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. The side hustle’s success is due, at least partially, to a three-step process Woo followed, she says.

Every self-made millionaire has a different story of how they amassed a net worth that lets them bear the title. Some live frugally or invest aggressively, while others start companies of their own that take off and make them rich. But each success story usually has at least one piece of advice that’s applicable to people at any point in their financial journey. Here are money tips from five different self-made millionaires that you can use to help meet your own financial goals.