My wife and I have similar careers, making similar money. We are paid well, but not as well as we could be paid. It is unclear to us how much our companies needs us... in other words, we don't know what are market value is... but we know our salaries are roughly average.
We both have advanced degrees, but live in a town with limited employment opportunities. We work for different companies, the two companies in town. Thus, if we wanted to get other companies involved, we would need to move to a new location. We are not entirely opposed to this, but it presents a difficulty as we would both have to land jobs in the same location. Our end goal is to FIRE, within 10 years ideally, and if possible optimize our happiness in between now and then. Currently our jobs are kind of mediocre; we more or less enjoy the work we do, but sometimes there is a lot of stress, our pay could be higher, and the location we currently live is a mediocre-at-best match.
So our options are:
1) to have one of us travel to the other company to try to get higher pay
2) do 1) and then try to change to different higher paying locations within the same company; possibly moving a couple is easier under those conditions.
3) try to apply for jobs with new company(ies) from our current positions
4) do nothing, and put on the blinders until we hit FIRE.
I'm just curious what general strategies people might use, or what experiences they've had.