I’ve had a rash of co-workers and Facebook friends posting about MLM’s like Rodan and Fields, Nerium, and It Works! So, I’ve been reading Lazy Man and Money’s blog posts about MLM’s, and decided to chart their self reported income disclosures visually. Visually looking at a graph can be very different than looking at a table of the same data.

MLM Income Disclosures

Each MLM must publish income disclosures to be compliant with governmental FTC regulations. These disclosures can tell you how much people are earning at each level of the company. For example, the top level at Rodan and Fields is the RFx Executive Consultant. According to Rodan and Field’s discolsures, 0.1% of all active distributors are at that level. That translates to one in a thousand distributors is an RFx Executive Consultant. The average annual earnings for the top 1 out of a 1,000 consultants was $661,474 in 2015.

In the charts below, are the distributor levels for R + F and It Works! with the percentage of distributors who in each level with their average earnings next to it.

Rodan + Field 2015 Income Distribution

Source: Rodan and Fields 2015 Income Disclosure

It Works! 2015 Income Distribution

Note: The It Works! disclosure is reported in monthly values, whereas the previously mentioned R + F values were reported as annualized values.

Source: It Works! 2015 Income Disclosure

A special thanks to Jason Davies for posting his example of a D3 stacked population chart that I modified for this.

Finance is one industry that is very strong across most American cities with many job options that pay extremely well compared to median salaries. Read more to find out about the cities with the largest job markets and the fastest growing job markets. Also explore the county by county data in the interactive map at the bottom, where you can explore the regional differences in job growth rates, raises, income, and number of people employed in companies in the financial sector.

Top 5 Cities by Total Number of People Employed in Finance

These cities generally align with the major financial areas that you typically think of for finance. NYC has Wall Street. Chicago has commodities and is the heart of trade for the center of the country. Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Dallas are corporate centers with many financial companies supporting. While these cities currently have the most jobs, they aren’t all growing. So these cities might have healthy financial sectors today, in the future other cities lower in the list may grow past them.  Many of the cities in the top 5 such as Chicago and Los Angeles have seen substantial drops in financial sector employment over the past 10 years. Keep reading to find out where the up and coming cities are.

Top 5 with Growing Finance Sectors

Texas dominates the counties with the largest nominal increases in employment in the financial sector with 3 of the top 5 counties with job growth over the past 10 years. With greater job growth comes greater opportunity to move companies for increased pay and responsibilities that you might not be able to get in more stagnant markets.

Top 10 Counties by Growth Rate

While Texas dominates the raw growth by number of jobs, the fastest growing counties by annual % job growth are spread all over the country in smaller cities. It may be good to launch your career in a smaller market that is growing fast. Sometimes it’s better to be a big fish in a small but growing pond than a big fish in a large shrinking pond.

Interactive map after the jump.

Continue reading Top American Cities to launch a Financial Career →