Julia Holden can relate to the struggle of getting your baby to fall asleep.

In February 2024, she and her husband noticed that their newborn son Maxime fell asleep more quickly when his eyes were gently covered with a burp cloth or small towel, she says. As a new mom “in survival mode,” Holden quickly looked for a purchasable product — a comfortable eye covering that’d stay on his tiny face if he moved — but couldn’t find one she liked, she says.

As a younger adult, Holden had dreamed of entrepreneurship, so her near-instant thought was to make this product herself and sell it, she says. She designed a baby hat with an attached eye covering, named her side hustle Sleepy Hat and, over the course of the next year, spent nearly $16,000 from her personal savings to bootstrap the business, she says.

Since June 2025, the business has brought in five figures in revenue each month, including over $90,000 in December and more than $69,000 in January, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. The company is profitable, says Holden, who initially launched it while working full-time as a senior relationship manager for an advertising company and taking care of her baby.

She found time for Sleepy Hat in 20-minute windows between breast-feedings at her home in Lawrence Township, New Jersey, she says. “I had no outside funding, no team and no child care beyond family help,” says Holden, 34.

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Holden quit her job — which paid her $95,000 a year, she says — in October to focus on Sleepy Hat full-time. Most of its profits have been reinvested back into the business, including payroll for two-part-time contractors who help with inventory and running ads on Google and Amazon, she says. “I also recently took on an advisor, [who has] a little bit of equity,” Holden says.

Holden paid herself $2,500 from the business in 2025, and has been living off her remaining personal savings and her husband’s income as an assistant director at Princeton University. She works anywhere from 30 to 60 hours per week, including weekends, she says.

Doing all of that while being a mom to a now-2-year-old is taxing, but since she sets her own schedule, she can at least take more time during daylight hours for herself and her family than she did at a 9-to-5, she says.

“I’m still stressed, but for a more meaningful reason,” says Holden. “It feels more important. It’s much more satisfying.”

Holden didn’t have “proof of market fit” when she decided to launch Sleepy Hat, she says. Rather, she brought the idea to other moms in her circle, who she says all called it “genius.”

She intended to spend about $10,000 launching the business, and surpassed her budget on “product development, creating patterns, creating prototypes and samples … and then all the tiny little things that add up, like purchasing a domain, a trademark [and] building a website,” she says.

She didn’t have a design background, so the first pattern she and her mom created together resulted in a hat that was “completely the wrong size,” she says. An entrepreneur friend referred her to a factory in China, which sent her prototypes. But her “tech pack” — a garment blueprint for manufacturers, essentially — initially wasn’t detailed enough, resulting in about $1,500 worth of defective products, she says.

After finalizing the product’s design and ordering 1,500 units, Holden “splurged” on a photographer to fill a website for Sleepy Hat with professional-looking images, she says. The website launched in September 2024, and didn’t receive many sales until around December, when Holden posted her product and website on online marketplace Grommet, she says.

Sleepy Hat ended the year with just under $2,000 in total sales. “My first sale from a stranger was life-changing,” says Holden. “I was so excited but also terrified to actually ship the product.”

Holden joined Amazon as a third-party seller in August 2025. Roughly around then, her posts on Sleepy Hat’s TikTok account started gaining traction, with some garnering hundreds of thousands of views and thousands of likes. Moms bonded in the comments over their “FOMO babies” who fought sleep while on walks, car rides or in restaurants, saying they “needed” the hat for their kids.

Most of Holden’s sales now come from paid online advertising, she says. She’s designing Sleepy Hats with new patterns and materials, improving her social media strategy and updating her packaging, she adds.

“The goal is to increase my own salary on a quarterly basis this year,” says Holden. “I hope to double what I pay myself in Q2 in April … I hope next year to be able to pay myself actually more than what I was making at my full-time job, so six-figures plus.”

Holden isn’t technically a first-time entrepreneur — she previously started a short-lived T-shirt brand and website for women runners — but she’s still working on her financial acumen and organizational skills, she says. She’s worked with an accountant, alongside her advisor, to help her cover that weakness, she says.

“You need to understand every dollar that’s coming out and every dollar that’s coming in,” she says. “And I’m not particularly finite. I just don’t gravitate towards spreadsheets … So it’s definitely been a learning curve to force myself to take the time and understand the balance sheet and where every dollar is going, and it’s still a work in progress.”

Holden has also learned the value of trusting her gut, she says. She recalls a moment when her sister, who owns a PowerPoint tutorial business, advised against launching a startup as a new mom.

“She was like, ‘I would not start a business right now. You’re [freshly] postpartum,’” Holden says. “And I was like, ‘OK, I hear you. I’m going to do it anyway.’”

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Washington-born couple Cassandra Tresl, 33, and her husband, Alex Ninman, 34, were living in the Czech Republic with her grandfather when their daughter was born in 2020. They faced a crossroads: move back to the United States or stay abroad?

The couple had moved in with Tresl’s grandfather around March of that year after learning they were expecting, using her grandfather’s place as their home base while traveling around Europe before Tresl was due to give birth.

Tresl says they had told friends they’d move back to the U.S. after their daughter was born, but when they started looking at how expensive it would be to buy a house and pay for childcare, they decided to look to Italy instead. 

“I really thought that if I had a kid, I would go back to the States,” Tresl says. “And then it ended up not happening, because I realized how much more expensive it would be if we did go back.”

They decided to explore options in Italy after Tresl remembered seeing stories about towns across the country selling one-euro homes in order to attract foreign investors to buy the houses, rehab them and drive up the dwindling population numbers.

Tresl first wanted to determine the actual cost of purchasing one of those homes to see if it was an option for the couple, since they didn’t want to spend more than 20,000 euros, or about $23,627 USD, on the purchase.

Many of the one-euro properties come with a catch. In some towns, the one-euro purchase is symbolic and the real prices are in the thousands. In others, the bids start at a single euro, but the final price is usually higher. And once buyers get their properties, they generally have to complete the renovations within a certain timeframe.

“I started to look online for houses for sale in Italy. Since we were in Europe and we’ve been to Italy, it wasn’t a problem to go there and check out some of these houses. I’m also not the type of person that would have ever done anything like this sight unseen,” Tresl tells CNBC Make It.

In 2021, the couple went on a house-hunting tour in Italy and viewed 15 homes across Abruzzo and Tuscany. They ended up purchasing a two-floor, two-bedroom house just under 1,076 square feet, with a third bedroom in the basement and an attic, in Abruzzo.

They knew renovations would be costly, so Tresl says they picked their home largely based on the price — and the fact that the terrace has a view.

“I’m a spreadsheet type of person, so I had all the pros and cons of all these houses and it came down to Abruzzo being a much better value in general,” she says. “In hindsight, there are a lot of other reasons why I’m glad that we landed here, but at that point in time, I knew nothing else besides the price and that I wanted the best deal.”

The couple closed on the house in February 2022 in an all-cash deal for 11,500 euros, or $13,150 at the time, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.

“I loved the price and the terrace,” Tresl says. “People think that it’s super easy to just throw a rock in any direction and find a house with a garden in Italy, but it’s just not the case. We do have a terrace, and we have a really nice view, and that was a nonnegotiable for me.”

The price also allowed the couple to buy the property outright, which “alleviated a lot of stress in multiple areas of my life,” Tresl says. “If my income fluctuates or money gets tight, at least we don’t have a mortgage and our family has a secure roof over our heads. This financial freedom was actually one of the main factors that made this move and decision possible.”

Tresl, Ninman and their daughter briefly returned to the Czech Republic to develop a plan for where to live, since their Italy house wasn’t habitable at the time — it needed a lot of work since it had been empty for 30 years, Tresl says. They decided to rent an Airbnb in a nearby town in Abruzzo for a little over a month while their house was renovated.

Because the house had been empty for decades, the walls needed resurfacing, some electrical work needed to be redone, the windows and doors needed redoing and the bathroom and kitchen needed to be gutted. Ninman did most of the work himself, but the couple hired out to do the plumbing, Tresl says.

In total, the couple spent around 12,000 to 15,000 euros, or $14,207 to $17,758, to renovate the home, they estimate.

As part of the renovation, the couple made the terrace bigger, added a bathroom downstairs and turned the basement into a proper guest suite. They finished most of the renovation in the fall of 2022, but redid the basement and attic in 2023.

Tresl says she wanted the house to have an eclectic design, so she visited thrift stores and flea markets to source vintage pieces.

“I wanted natural materials and to combine both warm and cold. I have a lot of color in the house in terms of paint because I felt like the house was small, so I wanted to make it a happy house,” Tresl says. “Everything I picked out, I have a reason for it. I wanted to set a goal for myself that everything I look at reminds me of where I got it from.”

Although the couple doesn’t have a mortgage, the house isn’t completely free to live in. Here’s a breakdown of the couple’s house-related expenses, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. All expenses are rounded.

• Internet: 12 euros (about $14) per month
• Property taxes: 61 euros (about $72) annually
• Water: 91 euros (about $108) every two months
• Electricity: 217 euros (about $256) every two months
• Garbage: 286 euros (about $338) annually

The couple also has a pellet stove that they use in the winter. It can cost an additional 42 euros a week, or about $200 a month, for heating, Tresl says.

Since moving to Italy permanently, Tresl left her tech job and started creating content for her travel blog and newsletter. She also works for another travel blogger as an operations manager. Ninman left his job as a butcher when the couple moved out of the U.S. and now manages a second property the couple owns and rents out on Airbnb.

In addition to their primary residence, Tresl and Ninman acquired a second property in Italy in 2024, which they rent on Airbnb for up to 85 euros, or about $101, per night.

Located in the countryside of their town, the single-story two-bedroom, one-bathroom house sits on its own land and has a private garden. The couple bought it for 17,000 euros, or about $20,083.

Tresl says she’s been asked before why the couple doesn’t make it their primary residence, but she says she loves being in the center of her town. “It’s really nice just to be able to walk anywhere from our house,” she adds.

Now that the couple has two properties in Italy, they say they are staying put — most likely until they are empty nesters.

“My husband and I have talked about probably moving out of Italy once we know what our daughter is doing and if she decides to go to school somewhere else,” Tresl says. “It will free us up to do whatever, but that’s not something we’re thinking about for at least another 10 years because I want my daughter to have stability.”

They visit the U.S. about once a year, and although it will always be home, Tresl says it feels more foreign each time she returns. 

“I feel like an outdoor cat having to go back in or vice versa … It just feels odd. I grew up in the ’90s and I feel like my childhood was so different compared to what I witnessed on my last visit. It’s a huge part of why I love being in Italy right now, because my daughter, I feel, is getting a much more wholesome experience and a genuine childhood,” she says.

Conversions from euros to USD were done using the OANDA conversion rate of 1 euro to $1.18 USD on Feb. 9, 2026. All amounts are rounded to the nearest dollar.

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People are nostalgic for a simpler time without smartphones, social media and AI. Cat Goetze is dialed in.

The 29-year-old in Los Angeles is the founder of Physical Phones, a Bluetooth-enabled landline phone business that’s taken off in recent months.

In 2025, her business brought in over $789,000 in sales, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.

But like all “overnight” success stories, Goetze has been working at it for a while now.

Goetze says she first had the idea for a landline-style phone product in 2023 after spending the better part of the pandemic trying to reduce her screentime. She daydreamed about her childhood sharing a landline with her family.

“When I grew up, there was this booklet that the school sent out to all of the families in the school district that literally had all of the students’ names and their home phone numbers,” Goetze says. “I distinctly remember prank calling some of the other people in the school using that phone book.”

But when she looked into what it would take to actually install a landline in her home, including getting a new phone number and paying the $80 monthly service she was quoted, she set out to find a different way.

“With my technical background, I thought to myself, it probably wouldn’t be that difficult to just hook up a landline phone to my smartphone,” says Goetze, who pursued an interdisciplinary major in science, technology and society at Stanford. “Then I started tinkering around and prototyping and figuring out a way to build that.”

In 2023, Goetze built a prototype of her first phone, a pink handset, and posted it to TikTok. At the time, she didn’t have much of a social media audience, and the post got no traction or sales.

“I was like, OK , whatever, that’s fine. This was like a fun project,” she says. “I wasn’t really trying to make money off of it anyways.”

Two years later, in 2025, she’d gained a following for her online brand, CatGPT, where she discusses AI and digital wellness.

She was also noticing more people talking about wanting to reduce their smartphone dependence. It reminded her of her landline phone prototype, so she posted about it again.

That video from July 2025 went viral, getting over 8 million views across Instagram and TikTok. The product, officially branded Physical Phones, passed $120,000 in sales in its first three days.

“As a creator, your job is really to kind of hold an antenna out into the zeitgeist and pick up on what people want creatively, spiritually, emotionally,” she says. When she revisited the idea at just the right moment, “it took off.”

Physical Phones are battery-powered and connect to a smartphone via Bluetooth.

Once connected, the landline acts just like your cellphone. If your phone rings, the landline will too, and you can carry out your call from the handset. To make an outbound call, you can use the landline set to directly dial the number.

For most of us who no longer memorize phone numbers, you can also pick up the handset and dial star (*) to activate the voice assistant on your phone, like Siri, where you can direct it to dial a certain contact.

The Physical Phone also works with audio calls from FaceTime and Whatsapp.

Pre-orders for Physical Phones opened in July 2025 and fully funded the first round of production, covering things like warehousing, shipping, printing, hiring and “everything else that we needed to actually get the business off the ground,” Goetze says.

The business sources phones from a manufacturer in Asia, meaning it also lost a “whopping portion” of profits due to tariffs under the Trump administration’s new policy, Goetze says.

Goetze says working with a manufacturer was the hardest part of the process of launching Physical Phones because she’d never done it before and, as she learned, it can be time-intensive.

“It’s pretty draining, honestly, because what I underestimated before building Physical Phones was just how every single detail gets pored over for a hardware product,” she says. It took two to three months to finalize the first Physical Phone, she adds.

Goetze says her goal with the first round of orders was to deliver them to customers by December 2025 in time for Christmas.

Shipping everything by cargo boat would have taken too long, Goetze says. The only way for them to meet their goal was to fly all the phones from the manufacturer in Asia to their warehouse in California by cargo plane.

The endeavor cost the company nearly $74,000, which covered the international freight charge; customs entry fee; and delivery, service and administrative expenses.

“It was a huge hit to our profit margin,” Goetze says. “But I also think that it’s those kinds of decisions where you really stand up for your customer and you show them how much you care.”

Once they got all the phones to their warehouse, Goetze says she and her team “called in every single friend, family member, colleague, neighbor that I knew and basically asked anybody with a pair of hands to come to the warehouse and help us break down and ship all of these phones within 24 hours.”

Goetze says she and her team prepared 4,000 orders for delivery across the U.S. in December 2025.

Physical Phones currently sells three styles of phones, including a handset, wall mount and rotary phone, which range in price from $90 to $110. To date, Goetze says the business has sold over 7,500 devices.

Physical Phones made about $439,000 in profit in 2025, which Goetze says she reinvests back into the business for research and development for new models, and to hire for her small team of four.

Goetze doesn’t take a salary from Physical Phones and supports herself with earnings from her CatGPT media business, which includes branded content and content partnerships.

She recently hired a CEO, Josh Silverman, who was brought on during the first round of production and now runs the business day-to-day.

Looking ahead, 2026 is all about growing Physical Phones through potentially selling to retail, Goetze says.

“One of the main questions that we’re toying with right now is: Do we want to continue to have this sort of drop model where we ship out large quantities of inventory at a time, or do we want to have more of a traditional e-commerce or evergreen model where we have stock consistently?” she says. “There’s pros and cons to each.”

Goetze is soon launching Cat Labs, a creator-first product studio where she plans to build new products, apps, websites and services.

“As a creator-founder,” Goetze says, “my zone of genius, if you will, comes from my ability to stick that cultural antenna up into the air and understand what my audience wants, and being able to predict and build what they want next.”

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More companies are leaning into “peanut butter” pay increases this year, according to Payscale’s Pay Increase Preview Report.

The term refers to across-the board raises “that are even and spread thinly, like peanut butter would be on a sandwich,” according to career coach Colleen Paulson.

About half — 48% — of surveyed organizations said that they will continue giving out pay increases based on performance, according to Payscale.

But the report found that plenty of companies are contemplating “peanut butter” raises: Along with the 9% of organizations that already practice across-the-board pay increases, 16% said they were newly planning to implement the approach this year and 18% said they were considering it.

“There’s always a tension in organizations of how to how to balance the needs of your high performers while taking care of the entire group,” says Scott Hoffhines, a compensation expert and the vice president of rewards and systems at SalesLoft, especially when companies have “limited resources.”

Still, in Hoffhines’ view, companies that implement “peanut butter” raises should be aware that they are “essentially giving up on their top talent,” he says — and that could lead to morale and retention problems down the line.

The concept of “peanut butter” pay raises isn’t new, Hoffhines says. Last year, for example, Starbucks made headlines when it gave 2% raises to all corporate employees in an effort to reduce costs, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Strained compensation budgets could be behind why some companies are implementing across-the-board raises, according to Paulson. “These companies are under so much pressure to cut costs, and this feels like an easy way to do it,” she says.

Fairness is also a concern: The Payscale report noted that “tying merit pay increases to performance ratings has come under criticism in recent years for being too subjective and prone to bias.”

Some companies may view across-the-board increases as a more “equitable” approach, according to leadership coach and talent development expert Sarah Eppink: They ensure that front-line employees who “don’t necessarily have the visibility of individuals in HQ offices” aren’t overlooked for pay raises, says Eppink, who is also an adjunct instructor at Bowling Green State University.

“Peanut butter” raises are also easier to execute from an administrative perspective, Eppink adds. In general, managers don’t want to “have to deliver bad news,” she says. Implementing across-the-board raises removes the need for “difficult conversations” about why certain employees will or won’t receive merit-based increases.

Across-the-board raises may seem “equitable on the surface,” but they can be discouraging for high-performing employees, according to Eppink.

When pay increases are no longer tied to performance, workers who are “hitting it out of the park” will question, “Why would I make exceptional contributions when the bare minimum is receiving the exact same reward that I did?” she says.

In the long term, these employees are likely to become “disengaged” and look for other jobs, Eppink says.

Companies may not see the impact of “peanut butter” raises on retention right now, according to Paulson. In light of the “challenging” job market and low hiring rates, she says, many workers are reluctant to leave their current roles — and employers are well aware of that.

“In a competitive job market, companies don’t really feel the need to increase compensation in the same ways that they would in another market,” she says.

However, employees who feel short-changed today are likely to look for other roles when the job market is more favorable, according to Eppink.

Cutting into compensation is “such a short-sighted strategy” for companies, Paulson says. Top performers will be “out the door as soon as they can” when they find employers that better compensate them for their skills, she says.

During the Great Resignation, for example, people voluntarily left their jobs at record rates — 47.8 million people quit in 2021 and 50.5 million people quit in 2022, compared to 42.1 million in 2019. More than a third (37%) of employees said that low pay was a major reason they moved on in 2021, according to a Pew Research Center study.

In the past, Paulson says she would advise employees who were disappointed with their pay raises to talk to their managers and make a case for a larger increase. But in today’s job market, she knows employees are nervous to “rock the boat,” she says.

“Everything feels a little bit more tenuous,” Paulson says. “It feels a little bit riskier to go in and have those kinds of conversations with your manager.” Still, it doesn’t hurt to ask your manager if you could be eligible for any other benefits, such as additional vacation time.

If you’re considering switching jobs, Paulson recommends updating your resume, optimizing your LinkedIn profile and setting up job alerts to “dip your toe in the water and see what’s out there.”

“You never know: You might find a great opportunity with people that really appreciate what you bring to the table and will pay you what you’re worth,” she says.

Still, Eppink recommends taking a step back to evaluate the “long game” before deciding to leave your job over compensation concerns. “I would not counsel anybody to use this one instance to make a life-altering decision as big as leaving an employer,” she says, “especially right now.”

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Engineering majors earn some of the highest salaries right after college — and they’re still near the top years later.

That’s according to the latest findings from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, based on 2024 U.S. Census data, the most recent available.

The analysis breaks down annual earnings for college graduates by major and reflects the income of full-time workers whose highest degree is a bachelor’s, excluding currently enrolled students. Various engineering degrees have consistently ranked among the top-paying fields in recent years.

The highest-paying majors for workers ages 22 to 27 are computer engineering, computer science and chemical engineering, with recent graduates earning median early-career salaries of $85,000 or more. That’s well above the U.S  median personal income of just over $45,000, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. 

However, engineering accounts for about 6% of bachelor’s degrees awarded nationwide, representing a relatively small share of all college graduates, according to the most recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics.

Here are the 18 majors that lead to the highest salaries for workers ages 22 to 27:

1. Computer engineering: $90,000
2. Computer science: $87,000
3. Chemical engineering: $85,000
4. Aerospace engineering: $85,000
5. Industrial engineering: $83,000
6. Electrical engineering: $82,000
7. Mechanical engineering: $80,000
8. Construction services: $75,000
9. Civil engineering: $75,000
10. General engineering: $75,000
11. Miscellaneous engineering: $75,000
12. Economics: $72,000
13. Business analytics: $72,000
14. Finance: $70,000
15. Mathematics: $70,000
16. Nursing: $70,000
17. Mathematics: $70,000
18. Finance: $70,000

Engineering graduates remain in strong demand for their mix of mathematical skills and technical expertise, which are valuable across a wide range of industries, data from the National Association of Colleges and Employers shows.

While artificial intelligence is reshaping how the technical work is done, employment in many engineering fields is still projected to grow over the next decade, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Engineering also tends to pay well over time. Among graduates ages 35 to 45, every engineering major reports median pay of at least $100,000. Here are all of the majors with mid-career median earnings of $100,000 or more, according to the New York Fed.

1. Chemical engineering: $135,000
2. Computer engineering: $131,000
3. Aerospace engineering: $130,000
4. Electrical engineering: $123,000
5. Computer science: $120,000
6. Mechanical engineering: $120,000
7. Construction services: $120,000
8. Civil engineering: $115,000
9. Economics: $115,000
10. Finance: $112,000
11. Business analytics: $109,000
12. General engineering: $105,000
13. Miscellaneous engineering: $105,000
14. Physics: $105,000
15. Engineering technologies: $104,000
16. Industrial engineering: $100,000
17. Mathematics: $100,000
18. Information systems: $100,000
19. Marketing: $100,000
20. Biochemistry: $100,000
21. Political science: $100,000

In contrast, education and arts majors tend to earn significantly less overall. By ages 35 to 45, six fields of education majors report median earnings below $60,000, placing them among the lower-paid fields in the study.

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