Earned on your own terms or not at all
Sun in Aquarius lands in your 2nd house, so how you make your money matters as much as how much. Work you consider pointless is genuinely unbearable regardless of the pay, and you will leave a good salary over a principle. You need income arranged in a way you can defend to yourself.
That produces an unusual working life and one recurring vulnerability: independence taken as far as it goes here requires a financial cushion, and the same temperament that insists on the terms tends to neglect building one.
The status objects do nothing for you
Cars, watches, addresses, the signals other people spend on: you are close to immune, and occasionally quietly contemptuous. That saves you a great deal of money over a lifetime. Watch only the inverted version, where refusing the obvious thing becomes its own statement and costs you comfort you would actually have enjoyed.
Money as a principle, applied unevenly
You have views about what money should and should not be used for, and you act on them, which is rarer than it sounds. The unevenness is worth noticing: strong principles about some categories and no system at all for the rest. Write down what your actual rules are, and see whether they cover more than three things.
Income from somewhere unexpected
Your earning tends to arrive through routes nobody planned: the side interest that became viable, the network rather than the application, the arrangement that did not exist until you proposed it. That is a genuine capability. Keep proposing arrangements rather than applying for positions, since the second route has consistently served you worse.
A floor is not a compromise
Freedom to refuse work you dislike is purchased with reserves, and without them the principles become expensive theatre performed under pressure. Build the floor precisely so that the independence is real. Automate a fixed amount out of every payment, at a level low enough to survive a bad quarter, and stop treating it as a concession.
Enough to say no
The number that matters here is not comfort or retirement, it is the sum that allows you to decline work on principle without consequences. Calculate it. Having an actual figure converts a vague resentment about compromise into a target, which is the only framing that motivates you to save at all. Recalculate it every couple of years, because the figure moves with your commitments and an out-of-date number stops working as a target.
Invent the arrangement
Standard employment structures fit you badly and you are unusually good at proposing something that did not previously exist: the role, the contract, the collaboration. Do it explicitly rather than waiting to be offered a fit. Most organisations will agree to an odd arrangement that solves their problem, and almost nobody asks.
Choices your relatives find alarming
Leaving secure work for something unproven, or refusing an obvious opportunity on principle, tends to worry a family who value stability. Stop justifying the decision and describe the arrangement instead: what you earn, what the plan is, what happens if it fails. Concrete answers settle people that reasoning never will. Offer the numbers before they ask, since a family who has to extract them assumes the worst about the parts you left out.
They wanted the conventional signs of providing
A partner may be looking for the standard markers that somebody is invested: the joint account, the property, the visible commitment of resources. You supply something different and consider the markers hollow, which is a defensible position and not an answer to what they asked for. Find out which specific marker matters to them, and either provide that one or say plainly that you will not, rather than substituting your own version and assuming it reads.
What the independence is for
Autonomy is the goal you have organised everything around, and it is a means rather than an end. Ask what you intend to do with it once you have it. People with this placement sometimes secure the freedom in their forties and discover they never decided what the freedom was in aid of.