Season “How to Make 250K Per Year” · Episode 1
Why 250K a Year
Why exactly 250,000 euros a year, and what do they have to pay for? · 3 November 2026
The numbers here are rough. They describe Germany in 2026 and one particular setup: one person running a GmbH with a holding company above it, married, privately insured, using as much AI and automation as possible. I am not a tax advisor, so before you build anything on these numbers, sit down with one.
01
Twenty thousand a month
250,000 euros a year is roughly 20,800 euros a month. When I say it out loud I round it down to 20,000, because that is the number people actually react to, and maybe you just did too.
I set that goal in 2018, in my first business coaching, the year I founded my GmbH. It was a target then, and if you are just starting as a freelancer, it is a target for you too: your first year will very likely not bring 250K. Where I stand today, in November 2026, is a revenue of about 250,000 euros. Depending on the year, 40 to 60 percent of it is still sold time.
Why aim for a number you will not hit in year one? Because the number tells you what to build. That is why this whole season is about 250K, not 100K and not a million, and in this episode I go through it with you line by line, using the table I use myself. First, though, it helps to look at the other road to 20K a month.
02
The employee route
Most people never get to 20,000 euros a month as an employee. In 2024 the top 1 percent of full-time employees in Germany started at just over 213,000 euros gross a year (Destatis, April 2025), while 20,000 a month comes to about 240,000. Fewer than 1 in 100 get there.
The jobs that do pay it exist. Especially before 50, they usually come with long hours, the structures of a big company and the politics that go with them. That is totally fine, and plenty of people choose it on purpose and do well.
What you give up on that route is the last word on your own decisions. Think of your calendar, your projects, the year you would like to slow down: someone above you has a say in all of it. That is the whole point of this season for me. I am after the authority over my own decisions, and the money is what makes it possible.
So the question changes. It is no longer "can I earn 20K a month?" but "what does 20K a month have to pay for, once I own the decisions?"
03
What 250K pays for
Here is the business side, per year, for one person with no employees and a few freelancers where needed.
| Business, per year | Euros |
|---|---|
| Revenue | 250,000 |
| My salary, 10,000 gross a month, plus the employer's health insurance subsidy | −125,000 |
| Leased car | −9,000 |
| Laptop (100 a month) and phone (100 a month), both leased, plus insurance | −2,700 |
| Tax advisor, bookkeeping done with AI | −4,000 |
| Software and AI | −5,000 |
| Insurance, IHK, bank, work travel | −5,000 |
| Profit | ≈ 99,000 |
| Corporate and trade tax, about 30 % | −30,000 |
| Left in the company | ≈ 69,000 |
| To the holding, 10 % of revenue, every year, for retirement and investing | −25,000 |
| Free buffer | ≈ 44,000 |
If you only look at one line, look at the tax. For me, understanding the German tax system was one of the biggest levers, and I still do not claim to understand it fully. Early on I paid around 10K for a weekend workshop to learn how it works, not just how to pay taxes, because I did not want to be the person who tells a tax advisor "do my accounting and that's it". There is a lot of architecture in how a business and its taxes can be set up.
This is not about avoiding taxes at any price. Everybody has to pay them, and that makes sense. I would never move my business abroad, and not paying tax in Germany was never the plan. The plan was more money to invest. Used wisely, the German system leaves you exactly that, and money that gets invested helps the economy too. For comparison: on the top part of a high salary, income tax and solidarity surcharge take about 44 percent.
Then the private side, per month.
| Private, per month | Euros |
|---|---|
| Net from 10,000 gross (married) | ≈ 7,700 |
| Rent | −2,500 |
| Food, activities, travel | −2,500 |
| Insurance incl. health, school, other fixed costs | −2,500 |
| Left | ≈ 200 |
Travel sits in the second line, 10,000 to 15,000 euros a year. For us that mostly means one summer: six weeks in Italy by car, the whole family, Airbnb houses, no luxury, about 10,000 euros.
Look at what that table pays for. A family that is looked after, holidays, a car, a school, and nobody working themselves into the ground to keep it running: that is a good everyday life. It is not a life of luxury, and it does not need to be.
On paper the private side is tight, with about 200 euros left a month. Where you can breathe is one level up, in the company. That is the 44,000.
04
The bad year
Now say another Corona comes and everything shuts down.
When the last one came, the hardest hit for me was not a number, it was focus. With three kids at home it was horrible to concentrate on the business, and that taught me what a bad year can really mean: not only less revenue, but time that suddenly is not yours anymore. It also reminded me why focus is a superpower.
So I ran the same costs against smaller years. This is my rough math, and nothing changes except revenue:
| Revenue | Left after tax | To the holding | Free |
|---|---|---|---|
| 250,000 | ≈ 69,000 | 25,000 | ≈ 44,000 |
| 200,000 | ≈ 35,000 | 25,000 | ≈ 10,000 |
| 175,000 | ≈ 17,000 | ≈ 17,000 | 0 |
| 150,000 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Look at the 200,000 row first. A year that comes in 50,000 euros short still pays my salary, still puts the full 25,000 into the holding and still leaves something over. The free buffer runs out around 175,000. At 150,000 I get my salary, and nothing goes to my retirement.
That is what the buffer buys you. A bad year stays a bad year, instead of becoming the year you take any client who calls, stop paying into your future or go looking for a job.
It works the other way too. In a year where I have more time, the buffer lets me choose: I can grow, invest more, try something like Bitcoin, or spend a little more on nice things. If you have no kids, your buffer is bigger still. Mine is 44,000 euros of choice.
05
Why not 150, 200 or 300
Every step on the ladder buys you something different.
| Target | What it gives you |
|---|---|
| 150K | Your salary. No pension. |
| 200K | A pension, until the first bad year eats it. |
| 250K | Family, the future, a bad year and a choice. |
| 300K | Room for your first hire. You don't need it to live well. |
250K is the highest number I can still run myself, with a few freelancers around me, AI doing the bookkeeping and the routine work, and no employees. Above it, the next sensible step is usually a hire. A hire brings payroll, management and the responsibility for someone else's income, which is all fine, and a different business from the one I want.
Below 250K, you have the opposite problem: the first bad year already reaches into your retirement money.
06
What one hour has to earn
There is no single hourly rate. You have projects, and the better you get, the more they pay. When you start out as a freelancer and go to clients directly, you can probably charge about 50 to 60 euros an hour, and on Upwork you will probably have to negotiate a bit.
So it is tempting to pick a number, something like "I want 80 euros an hour". Here is what 80 does to your year:
| Calculation | Result |
|---|---|
| Full-time, 44 weeks × 40 hours | about 1,760 hours a year |
| × 80 euros | ≈ 141,000 |
That is roughly half the target, and it takes the whole working day, every working day. To hit the full 250,000 from hours alone, you would bill about 1,600 hours at 156 euros, which is a consultant's year. I no longer want that life.
Now turn it around. Say you want to work 4 hours a day, 5 days a week, and still make 20,000 a month.
| Calculation | Result |
|---|---|
| 4 hours × 5 days | 20 hours a week |
| 52 weeks minus 6 weeks holiday, minus 2 weeks for public holidays and sick days | 44 weeks |
| 20 hours × 44 weeks | 880 hours a year |
| 250,000 ÷ 880 hours | ≈ 285 euros an hour |
And not every hour is billable, because sales and admin take their share. If 3 of your 4 hours go to clients, you have 660 billable hours, and each one has to bring about 380 euros.
So 20,000 a month from hourly billing alone means about 300 euros an hour. Really good lawyers charge around 300 to 400. It is not impossible, but it is the point where, at some stage, you need to switch from selling hours to building digital assets. Here is how that mix could change over time, with example numbers that show the shape and are not my own figures.
| Stage | Freelance | Digital assets | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Build: full-time client work, from 60 to 80 an hour over the first years | ≈ 106,000 to 141,000 | 0 | ≈ 106,000 to 141,000 |
| Shift: client work plus the first assets | 130,000 | 70,000 | 200,000 |
| Target: 20 hours a week, 660 billable hours at about 150 an hour | 100,000 | 150,000 | 250,000 |
In the target stage you work half the hours of the build stage and earn roughly twice as much.
That leaves the build years, when your rate is far from 300. I look at freelancing in those years as paid learning: someone gives you money to learn. Nobody pays the 300 to 400 an hour your goal needs for something you are still learning, and that is fine, because what they are paying for is the learning.
Early on I had projects that paid only 150 to 200 euros, and I put 10 or 20 hours into each of them. The client did not pay for those hours. I did it because it was a nice challenge and I could learn something.
One client used three tools that had never been connected before, and the data did not arrive correctly from one tool in the next, so I had to learn how that works. Projects like that are how I understood my Upwork profile at the beginning.
How that became a niche is the episode “Finding Your Niche”. The short version is that my niche was the mix of technology and marketing, and on Upwork that set me apart. Tracking and martech problems sit between marketing and tech, and I could stand on both sides.
07
How you get there
20,000 a month is possible outside a job as well, and the path I am taking has three stages. In the first, you grow a freelance business and sell what you know to clients, by the project or by the month. In the second, you put part of that money into digital assets. For me that is mainly intellixOne, a marketing software that has existed in code since spring 2024. In the third, the composition shifts: maybe a few freelance jobs stay, but most of the money comes from the assets.
What does stage 3 look like in numbers? 250,000 euros without hours is, for example, 21 clients paying 1,000 euros a month, or 10 paying 2,000. It is the consultant's income without his 1,600 hours. That second calculation is what I am building intellixOne for: a monthly fee per service, no hours. You can see what that looks like as a product on intellix.one, and if you would rather learn AI in marketing yourself, start at versipellix.de.
The buffer from chapter 3 is where stage 2 gets its money. That is why the table matters even in a year when you are far from 250K: it shows you how big the buffer has to be before you can build anything next to the client work.
And where am I myself? As of November 2026, 40 to 60 percent of my revenue is still sold time, depending on the year, and there is no proven return from intellixOne to my time yet. So I am in the middle of stage 2, on a bridge: today the sold hours pay for building the income without hours.
Deadlines stay on the other side of that bridge too, because products have customers, outages and cancellations, and those set deadlines as well. What changes is who sets them, and I want that part for myself.
08
This week
Take the private table from chapter 3 and fill in your own numbers: rent, then food, activities and travel, then insurance, school and fixed costs. Add them up and multiply by twelve. That is the yearly floor your business has to carry before one euro goes into your future, so write it down next to my 7,500.
09
The open question
I don't know yet how many years the shift from stage 1 to stage 3 takes. I have reached the number, though. Revenue is around 250K, even if a big part of it still comes from sold hours, and a strong case for 250K does not mean I stay there once I have it.
So next to the road there, this season asks a second question, and that one is mine: do I push for more now, or stay at this level and put my energy into something else? Every episode brings you one step closer to that decision. I will only make it in the last one.
Next in this season: “Freelancer or Employee”. Why the price of my hour matters less than how many of them I sell.