I Earned £72,000, But Did I Manage It? A Young Developer’s Financial Test
I earned £72,000. But did I truly earn that money, or did I just work and hand it over to someone else?
Let’s put the numbers on the table with no emotion.
Assume I earned an average of £14,400 per year and regularly converted it to TRY. Based on average monthly exchange rates, the table looked like this:
2017 – Average 4.69 TRY → ~67,500 TRY 2018 – Average 6.41 TRY → ~92,300 TRY 2019 – Average 7.23 TRY → ~104,100 TRY 2020 – Average 9.09 TRY → ~130,800 TRY 2021 – Average 12.43 TRY → ~179,000 TRY
Every year, I gave the same effort. The same mental load. The same sleepless nights. The same sacrifices.
But the TRY equivalent I received increased dramatically every year. Not because I worked better, but because TRY kept losing value.
Now the most striking calculation:
If I had not converted even a single pound to TRY during that period and had kept everything in foreign currency...
72,000 GBP × 59 TRY = 4,248,000 TRY
This difference is not a technical detail. It is a mindset difference.
The Biggest Illusion: Confusing Nominal Income with Real Income
While my TRY balance in the bank was rising, I felt rich. Interest was coming in. I thought, “My money is working.”
What was actually happening was this:
In a high-inflation country, staying in the local currency means paying an invisible tax.
I earned interest, but inflation was higher. I stayed in TRY, but TRY was losing value systematically. I was told to do arbitrage. The idea that interest was “good” was drilled into my head.
But the simple truth was this:
My income was in GBP. Part of my spending was in TRY. But by converting all my assets to TRY, I took on exchange-rate risk.
That was an investment decision. I wasn’t even aware of it.
The Cost of Work and the Reality of Capital Protection
You sit in front of a computer for hours. Inactivity. Stress. Sleeplessness. Social isolation.
You burn your mental capital.
And then you melt the reward of that effort with a wrong financial decision.
This is heavier than making a technical mistake.
A bug in code can be debugged. Financial mistakes are noticed years later.
The hardest lesson for me was this:
In an inflationary country, local currency is not an investment vehicle.
Local currency is a cash-flow management tool. Not an investment vehicle.
What Does the Chart Tell?
When you look at the GBP/TRY chart in the long term, you notice one thing:
This is not a “rise” chart. This is a systematic erosion chart of a currency.
As a developer, I knew I should be able to read charts, but I didn’t know how to read a financial one.
What we call trend is not a short-term wave, but a long-term direction. And the direction was obvious.
Bank Advisor or Personal Responsibility?
At one point, it is easy to blame the bank advisor.
“Interest is good.” “Do arbitrage.” “TRY deposit makes sense.”
But the truth is:
No one carries responsibility for your money as much as you do.
Financial literacy cannot be outsourced.
I did not outsource my technical knowledge. I did not make someone else write my code. But I left the management of my money to someone else’s mindset.
That was strategic blindness.
Hard Truth for Developers
Earning good money in this sector is not enough. You need to hold income in the right currency. You need to separate assets from cash flow. You need to distinguish nominal income from real income.
My biggest mistake was this:
I treated income as “success.” I did not think about capital protection.
But the game is this:
Generating income is one level. Protecting income is another level. Growing income is a completely different level.
I was at level one. I failed at level two.
The Real Lesson
That £72,000 taught me this:
Making money is not a technical problem. Managing money is a mental discipline.
And the most painful part:
While writing code, I thought I was building the future. But without financial awareness, I was actually eroding my own future.
As a developer, I knew how to build systems. But I had not built a financial system for my own life.
In the next article, I will cover:
What did I change after this mistake? How did I start thinking about asset allocation? What is the minimum financial defense architecture for a developer living in an inflationary country?
Because the issue is not money. The issue is protecting the value of your effort.