I was going through some mail I’d received recently, and happened across a document from the Social Security Administration titled “Your Social Security Statement.” Within this document was a section titled “Your Earnings Statement,” which showed my actual gross income for every year since I began working in 1996.

I also spent some time a few weeks ago going through some old stuff at my parents’ house, and I came upon a stack of old pay stubs from my first three years of employment, which of course showed the total year-to-date income at the end of each year.

Using these two documents, I was able to fix my income history graph to become an accurate reflection of reality, rather than just an approximation.

It’s not really a big deal, as my memory-based estimates were fairly close, but here’s the corrected version, based on the data from the Social Security Administration: