This story is part of CNBC Make It’s Millennial Money series, which examines how people earn, spend and save their money.

Nabeel Khan knew he wanted to be an entrepreneur early in life.

In high school, Khan hired “12 of the smartest kids I could find,” he says, and co-founded an AP tutoring company. They charged between $20 and $50 per hour and made “about $5,000″ within the first month, he says. He says he loved the challenge of working in customer service and balancing costs and earnings.

The now-27-year-old went on to study materials science and engineering at the University of Michigan, thinking he might dive into the world of sports equipment after college. But over time, he says he realized he could have a bigger impact as an entrepreneur in the tech world.

When he graduated in 2020, Khan accepted an offer as an operations manager at an Amazon warehouse, which became an entryway into tech.

While his initial offer as an operations manager was for $50,000 per year, within five years, Khan says he was working as a senior AI product manager at the company earning $432,000 per year, including base pay and company stock.

Khan left Amazon in July 2025 to pursue entrepreneurship and co-founded SkillAxis, which creates AI product managers for non-tech companies. His quick rise at Amazon and the savings he amassed enabled his departure, he says.

Here’s how he built his career at the tech giant and made the transition to entrepreneurship, and a look at his life in Brooklyn, New York, where he currently lives with his girlfriend.

At Amazon, Khan immediately began looking into how he could grow in the company, specifically in roles that would contribute to his dream of becoming an entrepreneur.

He discovered the roles of project manager and product manger, both of which would be promotions and teach him skills like managing people and designing products.

To learn more about how to get hired for those roles, Khan looked for mentors who held them both within Amazon and outside of it. He says each mentor gave him advice about which skills he would need to get hired, as well as specific project ideas for how he could prove he had what it took to move forward.

Khan created an educational road map for himself and says he would spend evenings and weekends working on gaining new skills he hoped would help him get promoted. For example, he spent six months taking a software bootcamp class from the Georgia Institute of Technology to learn how to code, he says, and got certified in Amazon Web Services.

He also looked for opportunities to practice and gain new skills while in his current job. In his role as an operations manager, for example, he helped update the safety system in the warehouse, which helped build his portfolio to become a project manager.

“I was always finding ways to be creative about the role that I was currently in, going above and beyond to find ways that I could apply that next role,” Khan says.

By mid-2021, Khan was promoted to project manager, earning $66,000 a year. By mid-2023, he moved into a product manager role, earning $146,000, and by 2025, he was a senior product manager earning $432,000.

While at Amazon, Khan says he saved upwards of 80% of his income, accruing around $666,000 by the time he left between his various savings, investment and retirement accounts. In part, it’s why he felt comfortable leaving, he says. He knew if anything went awry, he’d have a financial cushion to fall back on.

During that time, he primarily held positions that were either remote or required a lot of travel, enabling him to save money on housing. Instead of having a home base where he paid rent, he split time between his parents’ home in Georgia and his girlfriend’s home in New York in between work trips.

When he finally made the leap to becoming an entrepreneur, Khan first lived off of his savings.

Between July and November 2025, SkillAxis brought in about $51,000 in sales. He now pays himself about $5,000 per month from the company to cover his living expenses.

Aside from having built up a financial cushion, Khan left Amazon in July because as he plans for his future, he says this is his window to make a big career swing.

Khan lives with his girlfriend in a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. Here’s how he spent his money in October.

• Rent: $2,125
• Food: $1,238 for groceries and dining out
• Transportation: $899 for the subway and rideshares
• Health insurance: $289
• Business expenses: $198 for a Filmic Pro subscription and travel
• Subscriptions: $143 for his two gym memberships, his Wall Street Journal subscription, Spotify, iCloud and Google Drive
• Discretionary: $93 for laundry and entertainment

Khan and his girlfriend split their rent 50/50, and his girlfriend has a stipend from law school, which covers their Wi-Fi and various utilities. Khan is still on his family’s phone plan, which covers his phone bill. He’s already paid off his student loans — around $50,000 worth — and currently has no credit card debt.

Despite Khan’s history of saving, he’s not currently contributing to his savings as he builds his business. He says he’ll resume saving money in the future after his company grows. As of early November 2025, his net worth is about $703,000, including his checking accounts, savings, investments, retirement accounts, cryptocurrency and a couple of watches, worth around $6,000 each.

As a kid, Khan says he remembers seeing his dad watch a commercial for an Omega watch and comment about how nice it would be to own one. Once Khan made enough at Amazon, “I ended up getting one for him,” he says.

Going forward, “my financial goal is to have an overall net worth of $1 million by the time I’m 30,” Khan says.

He wants to enter his 30s with more financial stability. To get there, he’ll double down on making sure his company is successful by identifying gaps in software tools and letting the market guide them to build the solutions their clients need, he says.

For anyone who wants to try and copy his career growth, “just be creative about what you can do in your current environment,” he says. If you find ways to go above and beyond your job description, “you’ll end up benefiting yourself and your reputation wherever you are.”

Khan currently spends about 80 hours per week working, and the rest working out and seeing the people he cares about most. “A successful life to me is one that balances work as well as time with family and friends,” he says.

But big picture, he is happy with the balance he’s struck in life. Between building his company and spending time with his family and friends, “I think I’m living my dream life right now,” he says.

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Every parent hopes that their child will still come to them years from now to spend time together, share their victories and setbacks, and seek guidance.

As a conscious parenting researcher, I’ve studied more than 200 kids, and I’m a mother myself. This kind of lifelong closeness is built early on in the small, everyday moments that teach a child whether it’s safe to be fully themselves around their parents.

Here are the practices parents should start early on if they want a relationship that lasts well into adolescence and adulthood.

Children rise to the expectations we set for them. When kids are micromanaged or constantly overcorrected, they can slowly become more resentful or secretive.

Offer trust early and often. Try saying: “I trust you. If anything feels tough, you can come to me.” This trust becomes the foundation they rely on later, when life gets more complicated.

If you want your child to come to you as a teen, they need to learn early that their inner world is safe with you.

When you shut down crying, fear or frustration, your kids may just stop bringing them to you. Validation can sound like: “Everything you feel is allowed here.” Emotional safety now leads to emotional openness later.

I’ve seen so many kids pull away from their parents because they feel suffocated by expectations.

Give them space to be curious, loud and weird. Kids stay more connected to the people who allow them to be who they are as they grow older.

Acceptance isn’t the same as agreement. It’s the message: “Who you are is loved and welcome here.”

Children stay close to adults who make room for their whole identity, not just the parts that are easy to parent. When they feel accepted now, they’re less likely to hide themselves later.

The strongest parent-child relationships are built on repair. Replace “I’m sorry you feel that way” with: “I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve that. I’m going to do better.”

When parents take responsibility, they teach children that mistakes don’t break the relationship.

Kids are more likely to shut down when they don’t feel heard. So when they share fears or frustrations, they’re usually asking for connection.

Instead of immediately trying to offer a solution, try saying: “Tell me more about that.” Listening builds the bridge they’ll keep crossing as the stakes get higher.

If a child learns early that disagreement leads to conflict, punishment, or withdrawal of your love, they’ll stop being honest later.

Healthy closeness requires emotional freedom, so when your child disagrees with you, respond with curiosity instead of control. Teach them that honesty is safe and that it will never threaten your bond.

Reem Raouda is a leading voice in conscious parenting and the creator of the BOUND and FOUNDATIONS journals, now offered together as her Holiday Emotional Safety Bundle. She is widely recognized for her expertise in children’s emotional well-being and for redefining what it means to raise emotionally healthy kids. Connect with her on Instagram.

Want to give your kids the ultimate advantage? Sign up for CNBC’s new online course, How to Raise Financially Smart Kids. Learn how to build healthy financial habits today to set your children up for greater success in the future. Use coupon code EARLYBIRD for 30% off. Offer valid from Dec. 8 to Dec. 22, 2025. Terms apply.

We often underestimate how much our morning rituals can set the tone for the rest of the day. When you prioritize activities that spark a natural dopamine release, you aren’t just waking up — you’re essentially giving your brain a head start on feeling motivated and balanced.

“Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, which is a chemical released by brain cells, and it’s mostly involved in motivation, learning and reinforcement,” says Mia Soviero, a neuroscience researcher who conducted research at NYU Langone Health and Columbia University’s Zuckerman Institute.

“It isn’t just about feeling good. It’s mostly about learning and motivating you. So, it helps our brain understand what actions are worth repeating and what habits we should have in our lives that we should strengthen,” says Soviero, who also founded the nonprofit Research Girl, Inc to help aspiring science researchers receive more opportunities in their field of interest.

A common misconception is that dopamine levels are always supposed to be boosted, Soviero says: Neurotransmitter levels are meant to fluctuate.

“We don’t want to always have really high dopamine levels, but we do want to have a healthy dopamine system,” she says. “You just want to build these good patterns in dopamine, where dopamine is able to be released the way it’s supposed to.”

Here’s how Soviero structures her mornings to keep her dopamine system healthy, she says.

Step 1: Exposure to sunlight

Soviero’s ideal morning routine for the best mood starts the night before: Getting adequate sleep sets the tone for the next day, she explains.

Then, “I make sure that when I wake up, I get exposure to some light in the morning,” she says. “Opening your curtains in the morning and getting sunlight on your face for a few minutes have actually been scientifically proven to reduce depressive symptoms, especially if you have seasonal depression.”

Sunlight exposure directly affects the area of your brain that controls your body’s internal clock, or your circadian rhythm, according to Harvard Health Publishing.

Not getting enough exposure to sunlight each day “can cause your brain to produce too much of the sleep hormone melatonin and to release less serotonin, the feel-good brain chemical that affects mood. The result of this chemical imbalance? You feel low and lethargic,” the health blog states.

Step 2: Sudoku

Soviero makes time in her mornings to do “small, meaningful activities” like completing a daily Sudoku puzzle.

“It’s a great way to kick off the day with a little dopamine from doing a puzzle. It’s that feel-good chemical from achieving [it],” she says. “Novelty and new things that you aren’t expecting that are good can increase dopamine levels in the brain and contribute to dopamine health. So that’s why puzzles are great.”

Solving crossword puzzles and physical puzzles can have the same effects on your brain, Soviero says: The brain has a reward system that boosts dopamine when “something unexpectedly good happens, and then decreases when something worse than expected happens.”

“This means that evolutionarily, we would strive for goals in the hopes that we’d get this feel good chemical as a reward,” she says. “So when you do something, [like] learning a new skill, and you’re surprisingly good at it, you get this influx of dopamine.”

Step 3: Text a friend

Each morning, Soviero practices a simple and significant form of social connection: texting a friend. “I’ll send a text to my friends [like], ‘Hey, good morning. How are you doing today?’” she says.

“Humans are biologically wired for connections,” Soviero adds. “When you get to make that human connection, it’s scientifically proven to boost your mood because that’s what we’re supposed to be doing.”

Spending too much time without interacting with close loved ones like friends and family can harm your health, she says. Being socially isolated and feeling lonely can increase a person’s risk of developing heart disease, dementia, depression and other chronic conditions, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Connecting with others is “really healthy, not only for your brain but also for your body,” Soviero says.

Want to give your kids the ultimate advantage? Sign up for CNBC’s new online course, How to Raise Financially Smart Kids. Learn how to build healthy financial habits today to set your children up for greater success in the future. Use coupon code EARLYBIRD for 30% off. Offer valid from Dec. 8 to Dec. 22, 2025. Terms apply.

On my first day of work at the neighborhood ice cream shop, my boss lined up cups on the counter, handed me a scooper, and set a timer.

“A perfect scoop takes under 24 seconds,” he said. 

Ice cream splattered as I tried to keep up. It humbled me, but I kept showing up. The pay is $16.50 an hour plus tips, and I — a 31-year-old with years of experience in news and tech — expected to be working alongside teenagers. 

Instead, when I started working at Lady Moo Moo in Bed-Stuy, I found myself surrounded by people who, like me, had already built careers and are now navigating an unpredictable job market. Some had been laid off just as I had. Others, like my colleague who is a sex educator and public health advocate, lost funding in their fields. A few are juggling multiple part-time roles to stay afloat. 

We’re all piecing together income however we can, showing up where steady work exists. We have responsibilities and ambition. We’re trying and adapting. There is zero shame in it. 

My life used to look very different. At 23, I was the U.S. news lead for ByteDance’s first U.S. content product, TopBuzz. By 25, I oversaw content strategy at SmartNews, a Japanese news aggregation startup that once felt like the future of media.

I still remember the 10th anniversary celebration. The company flew the U.S. team and several colleagues from Japan to San Francisco and put us up in beautiful hotel suites. The CEO opened a five-figure bottle of whiskey in front of everyone. The future felt bright. A few months later, most of the U.S. team, including me, was laid off. Talk about whiplash.

In 2024, Meta offered me a job that was listed in New York, which has always felt like home. After I accepted, the role shifted to San Francisco. I was hopeful about this next step in my career when I moved west. But no one on my team worked in my building, I had five different managers, and I was laid off again after only a year.

I moved back to New York with part of my severance, assuming my experience, especially with Meta, would help me find work quickly. Instead, I stepped into the most brutal job search I’ve ever experienced. When I logged onto LinkedIn, my feed was full of people going through the same thing.

After a long interview process at Yahoo, I didn’t get the full-time role I’d applied for. But a month later, the hiring manager offered me a part-time weekend contract. I accepted immediately. It meant waking up at 5 a.m. on Saturdays and Sundays and going without benefits, but I loved the work and wanted to stay in the industry.

I figured a job at the ice cream shop in my neighborhood, which is open every year from April through November, might help fill the gap. 

I never expected to get a scooping job in my 30s. I took it to make some extra money until I regained my footing. But I ended up finding so much more in it. 

At Lady Moo Moo, the line wraps around the block even on rainy days. On Halloween, a little girl dressed up as the shop’s golden gumball. The basement is filled with gifts, drawings, thank you notes and even a paper mache cow a customer made.

People come in after long workdays, school pickups, and difficult conversations, or simply because they want a moment of sweetness. I saw couples on dates, friends catching up, and neighbors stopping by because the shop is part of their daily rhythm. 

Every shift, I met people who never imagined they would be picking up part-time work: artists, teachers, nonprofit workers, tech employees, museum curators, and neighbors doing their best to make life work in a difficult economy. No one was ashamed. Everyone showed up for themselves and for each other.

During our final week of the season, the owner took the entire staff out to dinner. I’ve worked full-time jobs with far larger budgets that never expressed appreciation like that. Walking home afterward, my arms sore from 24-second scooping drills, I didn’t feel “behind” in my career. I felt grounded and grateful. I felt like I belonged somewhere again.

Do I want another full-time role? Of course. I miss health insurance. I miss buying fresh groceries. I miss sleeping past dawn. But this experience gave me something I didn’t realize I needed — and when the shop opens its second, year-round location in early 2026, I’ll keep scooping while I continue my job search as long as my schedule allows it.

In a moment when the job market felt chaotic and stability seemed elusive, I found steadiness in a community that held me up. It reminded me that life is about more than titles and résumés.

It’s about the places you go and the people you meet who show you that you’re not alone — the ones who scoop beside you and turn a side gig at a small neighborhood shop into something that feels like home.

Kaila Curry is a journalist, senior content manager, audience engagement and social media strategist and, most recently, an ice cream scooper. She has held editorial and content leadership roles at ByteDance, Meta, and SmartNews, and is currently seeking a full-time role.

Want to give your kids the ultimate advantage? Sign up for CNBC’s new online course, How to Raise Financially Smart Kids. Learn how to build healthy financial habits today to set your children up for greater success in the future.

Workers who moved out of London for remote work are under pressure to come back to the office in the city, and some are choosing to stay in Japanese-inspired sleeping pods for just £30 ($40).

I travelled to Piccadilly Circus in the heart of London to spend a night in a newly opened capsule hotel, after two of my colleagues who live outside the city recommended staying there.

Zedwell Capsule Hotel, a brand owned by Criterion Capital, opened in September and offers nearly 1,000 capsules measuring 1 meter long, 1 meter wide, and 2 meters in depth — likely the smallest hotel rooms in London.

It has a rather unassuming exterior despite being located inside the historic London Pavilion building — originally built as a music hall in 1885. The entrance is around the corner of the busy station, through some black doors.

The cost of staying in a hotel in Central London is staggering, sitting at an average of £265 per night in the third quarter of 2025, according to real estate firm Knight Frank. In comparison, the average daily rate of hotels across Europe was 125 euros in the summer, according to an analysis of over 600,000 reservations from 2,000 independent hotels by RoomRaccoon.

Criterion’s Head of Hotels Halima Aziz told me that the capsule hotel addresses a gap in the market between budget hostels and affordable accommodation.

“We’ve formed this sweet spot between the two. We’re not a budget hostel. We’re not coming in at a £15 rate, giving you a bunk bed in a steel room,” she said.

“When we decided to get into capsules, we really took inspiration from Asia, and the capsule concept was really born out of Japan as a response to very similar pressures we’re facing in London.”

In Japan, the first capsule hotel was built in the city of Osaka in 1979, primarily to serve as an inexpensive overnight option for salarymen who worked late and preferred to stay out drinking and socializing rather than spending more money commuting home.

It’s given rise to some capsule-style hotels in New York, from sleeping pods by Kama Central Park, to Nap York, a sleeping station with private pods for short naps or overnight stays.

Now that the concept has come to London, I was keen to see for myself what the British version has to offer.

It’s a Monday evening, and instead of my usual work-from-home routine, which involves preparing to go into the office the next day, I’m crawling into a brightly lit sleeping pod.

I roll down the garage-like shutters and lock it from the inside as I prepare to sleep. My head is just inches beneath the ceiling of my pod, which has a light dimmer, two clothing hooks, an air purifier, a wide mirror stretching along the head of the capsule, and charger sockets.

Although I can feel my luggage — a backpack and tote bag — at the end of my bed, and the bottom of my coat hung on the hooks, I’m surprised by how comfortable and cozy the bedding is.

I switch off the lights and noisy air purifier and find myself enveloped by pitch black and silence. It feels eerie, but with nothing to distract me, I fall asleep quickly.

Earlier in the day, I checked myself into the hotel using one of four kiosks, and as I roamed around the hotel, I noticed that the walls were painted black to match the exterior — and there isn’t a single window in sight.

I rode up to the first floor and used a key card to access my female-only dormitory. My capsule was one of seven stacked side by side or on top of each other, and some were only accessible via steps.

I learned that despite the low initial cost, there was a series of additional amenities guests can pay for, from an extra £10 to be in a female-only dormitory, to £8 for a padlock, and £15 to store luggage securely.

The hotel had an unfinished feel. The entrance was covered in scaffolding and the faint sound of drilling could be heard from inside the building.

That’s because it is “still under construction,” Zedwell’s General Manager Greg Walsh told me. The drilling sounds were coming from underground where a larger reception was being built, with direct links to Piccadilly Circus Station.

CEO Aziz confirmed that the building is not complete, adding that the additional cost for the female dorms was largely due to upgraded amenities, including a towel inside the pod and a female-only beauty room complete with hairdryers — although this is still under construction and not currently accessible.

“Ultimately, if you’re not just targeting the traditional hostel market, and you want to widen access, you need to respond to people’s needs, and people have needs for laundry, for beauty, that wouldn’t typically be considered,” she added.

While exploring the building, I found shared toilets and showers with classical music playing inside, as well as vending machines in the reception with snacks, drinks, slippers and eye masks amongst other items.

I wandered out for dinner and with Oxford Circus, Leicester Square, and Covent Garden within walking distance, it wasn’t hard to entertain myself.

During my time in the hotel, I discovered I was one of many working professionals in the building. I spotted several guests arriving in suits and ties and carrying briefcases. One chef from Newcastle even told me he paid a total of £284 to stay in the hotel for a fortnight to work in London.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, many office workers in London moved out of the city, where it was cheaper to rent or own a home, due to remote and flexible working options becoming a normality.

A 2021 report from City Hall said it was likely that London’s population fell during the pandemic. The number of payrolled London employees dropped sharply by about 210,000 by November 2020, with the report citing that flexible work arrangements made it easier to move out of the city.

The trend persisted, and by 2022, 43% of commuters lived over 30 minutes away from their workplace in the U.K., reflecting higher property prices in central areas, according to a report by commercial real estate firm CBRE which surveyed over 20,000 people globally.  

Additionally, CBRE found that 41% of people worldwide were planning to move to more remote locations in the next two years either in the same city or to a different city.

However, in 2025, there’s been a sharp recall in remote work offerings with major companies enforcing return to office mandates in London from HSBC to JPMorgan, Amazon, Salesforce and John Lewis.

Zedwell’s Aziz said one of the hotel’s core demographics is young professionals and hybrid workers who are using Zedwell as a “base in the city” due to their flexible working patterns which require them to be in the office for a few days a week. Roughly 20% of the hotel’s customers are corporate workers, Aziz said.

“The cost of commuting from Oxford, Cambridge, city centers that aren’t accessible via the London Underground system, is quite high,” she said. “Our product is often cheaper than their commute or late-night travel home.”

The return-to-office mandate has left workers who don’t live in cities scrambling to find inexpensive ways of staying in the city, without having to resort to unattractive options like hostels.

“Where they wouldn’t traditionally consider a hostel product, we identified that they would indeed consider a capsule hotel, because it gave that privacy,” Aziz added.

As a Londoner, my usual commute to the office lasts just over 30 minutes, so the hotel doesn’t offer much in terms of convenience for me, but I can see the appeal for those living further away from the city.

When I awoke in the morning, I almost forgot that I wasn’t in my bed at home. After a quick shower, I got ready inside my capsule before heading out and joining the throng of commuters in central London.