Should I Quit My Relaxing Job To Make More Money?

00:00:00.000 | All right, Jesse, what do we have as our first question here?

00:00:02.600 | We got some good questions here.

00:00:05.000 | First is from Fork in the Road.

00:00:06.600 | I'm currently working in higher education administration at Aurora University.

00:00:10.660 | My lifestyle is slow and I have a lot of free time, which I enjoy.

00:00:13.920 | However, my income is quite low.

00:00:16.380 | Many of my peers with similar degrees have moved on to data science or software engineering,

00:00:20.680 | live in big cities and have fast-paced lives.

00:00:24.200 | They are definitely pros and cons of both lifestyles and I don't really see a good way

00:00:27.840 | of choosing.

00:00:30.080 | Well first of all, I think data scientists, I think fast-paced lives.

00:00:35.040 | They're just slinging hundreds, cocaine all hours of the night, pulling up in their Kawasaki

00:00:44.320 | Ninja motorcycles, slapping five.

00:00:48.080 | The data scientists do it in the standard deviation.

00:00:50.360 | I don't know, I'm trying to think what's on their shirts.

00:00:52.160 | I'm pretty clever.

00:00:53.160 | So here's what I'm doing here, Jesse.

00:00:55.160 | This is an inversion, right?

00:00:56.440 | So we were talking about people who are working too much and wondering how they can maybe

00:01:02.840 | make that more sustainable.

00:01:04.480 | Let's invert that with this question.

00:01:06.920 | Someone who's not working enough or not working that much at all and wondering if they should

00:01:10.960 | be working more, but how do they do that in a way that's not going to overwhelm them?

00:01:15.200 | So how do they find that?

00:01:16.440 | How do they get to that mean we're looking for?

00:01:18.840 | They're coming out from another direction, but trying to end up in that same place, having

00:01:21.800 | the right level of work.

00:01:25.220 | So as long time listeners know, my standard answer to any of these, should I change my

00:01:28.880 | job questions usually comes back to lifestyle centric career planning.

00:01:32.920 | I say, look, you should have this clear vision of your ideal lifestyle, all aspects of your

00:01:37.040 | life, not just work.

00:01:38.960 | It should be tangible.

00:01:41.200 | You can smell it, taste it, see it, feel it.

00:01:44.040 | And then you figure out how do I work backwards from that to make it happen, given whatever

00:01:47.960 | opportunities, skills, existing career capital I have in place.

00:01:52.560 | And then you sort of build a reasonable plan to get closer to that vision.

00:01:57.400 | This question brings a another element into that discussion, which I think is important,

00:02:02.040 | which is the notion of an income floor.

00:02:04.520 | All right.

00:02:06.220 | So lifestyles and lifestyle centric career planning are abstracted away from details

00:02:10.860 | of this is your particular job.

00:02:13.020 | This is your particular income.

00:02:14.580 | But we cannot abstract income completely out of these discussions because if your income

00:02:20.140 | is below a certain level, there are issues that could arise that will destabilize any

00:02:27.660 | aspirational lifestyle goal.

00:02:31.260 | There's a stress generation factor that happens.

00:02:33.460 | If you feel like you don't have enough discretionary income to handle the things that come up in

00:02:39.900 | the normal course of life, it is a constant source of stress.

00:02:44.500 | It doesn't matter if, yeah, but I, my house nearby this rural university has a nice yard

00:02:50.040 | and it's scenic.

00:02:51.040 | And if you're worried about money all the time, that stress is going to outweigh that.

00:02:56.700 | Also if discretionary income is low enough, so many of the different options you have

00:03:00.780 | for actually investing in and fulfilling visions for different areas of your life are going

00:03:05.220 | to be cut off to you.

00:03:06.380 | I just, I don't, I can't take this time off.

00:03:08.780 | I can't afford to do this.

00:03:09.780 | I, I don't have the money to buy the mountain bike for my dream of mountain biking.

00:03:14.540 | So there's something that I call the income floor, which is important.

00:03:17.940 | And that's where you take, and I'm using this term discretionary income.

00:03:20.900 | What I really mean by that is your income after fixed expenses.

00:03:25.400 | So now we're trying to normalize for like how much does your house cost?

00:03:29.020 | You know how much, uh, you have to pay tuition for private school for your kids because of

00:03:33.300 | where you live, that's the best option, et cetera.

00:03:35.140 | So that the money you have leftover, if that's below a certain floor, which you can conceptually

00:03:41.340 | figure out, then a particular lifestyle plan, we can think of as being unsustainable.

00:03:48.060 | So it's like, you want to say, here's my lifestyle vision.

00:03:50.960 | How do I using my existing opportunities and skills and options, how do I get closer to

00:03:56.980 | this lifestyle while staying above my income floor?

00:04:02.340 | And we want to throw that into the discussion here, fork in the road, because you said my

00:04:06.220 | income is also quite low.

00:04:08.860 | So this is actually gonna be the crux of what you do next is figuring out does low quite

00:04:12.620 | low mean below your income floor.

00:04:15.140 | That's another bit of planning you have to do.

00:04:17.780 | How much money would you need after you pay for your housing expenses, et cetera?

00:04:21.140 | How much discretionary income do you think you would need to feel non-stressed and like

00:04:25.560 | you have interesting options and the various things that matter for you in your life.

00:04:29.000 | If in your current job, you're below that, getting above that income floor is a necessary

00:04:35.880 | component of your lifestyle vision that you're trying to move towards.

00:04:39.780 | Now you might find that you're already above it.

00:04:41.380 | Yeah, you don't make a ton of money, but where you live is cheap and it's fine.

00:04:44.740 | Good benefits.

00:04:45.740 | You're not really worried about calamitous, whatever health occurrences.

00:04:49.680 | So you might be fine, or you might feel that you're close to it, but everything else about

00:04:54.280 | your lifestyle where you live is good.

00:04:55.740 | Well, that's fine.

00:04:56.740 | You don't have to close an income gap and you can make a plan to do that.

00:04:59.300 | I want to move up to this next level in the administration.

00:05:01.540 | I'm going to do this thing on the side because I have a data science background and I'm going

00:05:06.020 | to do some side work and we can easily push that above.

00:05:10.180 | Or you're going to have to make a change and say, you know what?

00:05:12.560 | I'm well below it.

00:05:14.260 | There's nothing I can really do here to get above it.

00:05:15.980 | So I'm going to have to make a change.

00:05:17.500 | So the income floor I think is really important.

00:05:21.060 | If you do make a change, I want to assure you that there is a middle ground between

00:05:28.460 | being the administrator in the rural university and big city, fast paced, cliched data scientists

00:05:35.540 | doing Coke off the stomach of a stripper vision that we all have of you data scientists.

00:05:41.500 | There is an in-between ground.

00:05:43.700 | And how do you access that?

00:05:45.680 | What is the map you use to find the in-between ground?

00:05:47.900 | It's again, it's this lifestyle center, career planning augmented with the income floor.

00:05:51.820 | If you have software engineering skills, if you have data science skills, you can figure

00:05:56.020 | out, okay, I don't need to make all of this money.

00:05:58.620 | I need to get above this floor.

00:05:59.820 | Oh, you know what?

00:06:00.820 | I could go to Boise and work at the tech sector there that's burgeoning.

00:06:06.860 | And this is actually a pretty reasonable job, but it gives me above that floor and it still

00:06:10.100 | has some of the aspect I like of rural living over here.

00:06:12.340 | I mean, you have a lot of options is what I'm saying.

00:06:14.420 | There might be remote work options.

00:06:15.660 | Well, I could take this remote work job or I could do contract work.

00:06:19.180 | And you know what?

00:06:20.180 | If I had five clients doing contract work, I'm above the floor, but I could live wherever

00:06:22.780 | I wanted, but the income is better.

00:06:24.660 | You have a lot of options.

00:06:27.100 | And this is why I always come back to working backwards from your vision is because that's

00:06:30.660 | what allows you to navigate the territory of options.

00:06:34.500 | Without that, we fall back on cliches.

00:06:36.220 | We fall back on extremes.

00:06:38.220 | Without that sort of guidance, we think I either become a lawyer or I become a teacher,

00:06:43.460 | right?

00:06:44.460 | That's a very standard Ivy League graduate thing.

00:06:46.060 | Or you think I either move to the big city to be a software engineer and I have to somehow

00:06:49.860 | like afford to live in the Bay Area or I have to stay in a very low income administrator

00:06:54.580 | job in this rural county.

00:06:56.660 | We think about extremes.

00:06:57.780 | We think about cliches.

00:06:58.940 | If we don't have a specific compass to navigate us through that territory.

00:07:02.700 | So lifestyle vision, career planning with an income floor as a non-negotiable component

00:07:08.180 | of wherever you end up, I think you have many more options than you think.

00:07:12.340 | You have many more knobs to turn with the degree you have to build that lifestyle than

00:07:16.660 | you might at first imagine.

00:07:19.500 | Mr. Money Mustache sent out an email kind of like moving or he was visited San Francisco

00:07:24.820 | and talked about some of those issues.

00:07:27.100 | What was his, he came away from visiting San Francisco saying, "The lifestyle here is so

00:07:33.140 | expensive.

00:07:34.140 | Why would you live here?"

00:07:35.140 | Or he came away saying, "I'm moving to San Francisco."

00:07:37.400 | He came away saying he did some research and he's like, "There's still a lot of cool things

00:07:40.900 | you can do in the city.

00:07:41.900 | The food is actually not that much more expensive if you buy it in a grocery store."

00:07:45.660 | He goes, "There's a lot of free places you can go."

00:07:47.180 | And he took pictures of him in the parks and certain places and walking around not paying

00:07:52.540 | for gas, that sort of thing.

00:07:54.220 | Here's my, I'm going to give a deep poll here for like really long time denizens of online

00:08:02.580 | culture, especially old blog culture.

00:08:05.620 | I'm talking early 2000s here.

00:08:06.980 | This reminds me of it.

00:08:08.420 | Leo Babuda, Zen Habits.

00:08:10.780 | Do you know Zen Habits?

00:08:12.700 | No.

00:08:13.700 | So this was really, he helped kick off this.

00:08:16.020 | So there's this online minimalism movement that really kicked off pre-social media.

00:08:21.380 | So these were, when I was getting started, these sites like Zen Habits were a couple

00:08:26.740 | years ahead of me.

00:08:27.740 | In fact, Leo of Zen Habits actually had a program where you could sign up and he would

00:08:31.580 | mentor you as an early blogger.

00:08:33.500 | He mentored me for a while and gave me some advice.

00:08:36.100 | So I remember being in grad school at MIT in the early 2000s, like 2005, 2006, reading

00:08:42.740 | Zen Habits.

00:08:43.740 | This is when the minimalists got started a little later, but, and this was also the time

00:08:47.980 | of becoming minimalist.

00:08:50.180 | And I don't remember all of them.

00:08:52.140 | They all had minimalism in the name, basically.

00:08:53.980 | Courtney Carver, I'm trying to think of the different names.

00:08:58.140 | Anyways, it was this whole movement about simplifying.

00:09:01.060 | And it really was, I wrote about this in my quiet quoting piece for the New Yorker a couple

00:09:04.980 | weeks ago about, briefly I mentioned for the millennials like us, this minimalism movement

00:09:10.460 | that arose after 9/11 during the financial crisis of 2008, that whole first decade of

00:09:16.540 | the 2000s was really millennials trying to grapple with work and life.

00:09:21.420 | And it's, it's, it's when we were moving away from follow your passion, we were the first

00:09:25.780 | generation raised on that.

00:09:26.940 | They're trying to figure out how do I put work to work on behalf of what I want my life

00:09:31.420 | to be.

00:09:32.420 | Right.

00:09:33.420 | But anyways, Leo was one of the original guys.

00:09:34.420 | And he, through Zen Habits was about simplifying your life, slowing down.

00:09:39.220 | And he, he lived in Guam, six kids, was in debt and was out of shape and smoking or whatever.

00:09:47.460 | And through Zen Habits, he began chronicling, he got in better shape.

00:09:52.180 | He stopped smoking, built up this audience and wrote a guide.

00:09:57.620 | I forgot even what it was called, but like a PDF guide and started selling it.

00:10:01.460 | And that did really well by 2005 standards, right?

00:10:05.460 | Like today, when you think about someone doing well, we're like, oh, that's great.

00:10:08.220 | Like Jordan Harbinger signed a $5 million podcast deal.

00:10:11.660 | This was more like, man, I made $70,000 or something.

00:10:14.020 | Right.

00:10:15.020 | But he paid off all of his debts.

00:10:16.020 | And he was, what made me think about this story based on what you're talking about,

00:10:19.620 | is they moved to San Francisco.

00:10:22.180 | All his six kids, he quit his job.

00:10:23.780 | He could make just enough off of this and they lived really cheaply.

00:10:27.140 | So it reminds me exactly what Mr. Money Mustache was talking about.

00:10:30.260 | He wanted to live somewhere interesting.

00:10:31.460 | So they moved to a row house in San Francisco.

00:10:34.180 | They homeschooled their kids and just went to the parks and to the ocean and just walked

00:10:38.180 | around and just loved, their whole life was built around just being in an interesting

00:10:42.740 | place.

00:10:43.740 | So it made me think about that.

00:10:44.740 | He was living cheap and made a really cool life.

00:10:47.860 | So he's like, if we're going to live cheap, we want to live somewhere that's fascinating.

00:10:51.460 | Zen Habits, that guy was awesome.

00:10:54.380 | You would read that and you would just be like, man, I got to simplify my life.

00:10:59.300 | A good movement.

00:11:00.300 | All the older, I have listeners out there who know what I'm talking about, but that

00:11:03.620 | was a cool little cool period of in our culture that then morphed in the fire culture into

00:11:07.700 | Mr. Money Mustache.

00:11:08.700 | Right.

00:11:09.700 | So fire was the, um, fire was the followup to the online minimalism movement.

00:11:15.700 | So fire was more like a geeky version of that.

00:11:18.820 | So the minimalism movement had, you know, like the minimalist and Leo and Courtney and

00:11:23.980 | Joshua Becker.

00:11:25.540 | And these guys were, they're kind of cool.

00:11:27.860 | It was kind of, they're cooler guys, right?

00:11:29.700 | Like we're going to just hike with our backpack and, and like live simply.

00:11:33.220 | And Josh and Ryan moved to a cabin for a while.

00:11:35.820 | And then we got the new version, which Mr. Money Mustache helped kick off.

00:11:38.900 | And now it was more geeks who are like, I've got my spreadsheet tells me that if I get

00:11:43.740 | a 3.6 return post-tax on my, you know, SEP IRA, I'm going to be able to retire.

00:11:48.700 | So then there was like this kind of geek version of it, but it was all the same idea.

00:11:51.140 | And then the fire movement kind of got shut down because I mean, it's still around, but

00:11:55.940 | they got super shamed.

00:11:57.060 | Right.

00:11:58.060 | So then they got super shamed of like, you guys all are privileged and this and that,

00:12:01.220 | and they all got worried about it.

00:12:02.380 | And so a lot of them kind of disappeared and I don't know what's going to come next, but

00:12:05.580 | that's a whole other conversation.

00:12:06.580 | [inaudible].

Should I Quit My Relaxing Job To Make More Money?

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