Solution:
Assign yourself to the group that the files belong to.
For example, if your web files are owned by nobody
and assigned to the group webgroup
and your ftp user is finaldestiny
then you would run the command usermod -a -G webgroup finaldestiny
You also need to make sure the folder and files are writable by the group, not just the owner. You can chmod -R g+w webroot
to add write permissions to all files and folder in the webroot for the group.