Wanting to change careers is one thing. Having enough financial breathing room to make that change is another.

Barney Whiter — aka The Escape Artist — joins Lucia Knight to explore the idea of financial runway: the amount of time and choice your finances give you if you want to step back, change direction, retrain or temporarily earn less.

But your runway isn't determined by your salary alone. How much you've accumulated matters, and so does how much your life costs to maintain. As Barney puts it, “lifestyle inflation is the enemy of career change.”

And sometimes, the more successful you've become, the harder that can be to see.

What You'll Take Away

• Why financial runway can give you more freedom to make a career change
• A simple way to think about how much runway you currently have
• Why earning more doesn't necessarily mean having more career options
• How lifestyle inflation can quietly reduce your freedom
• Why your professional “tribe” may influence what you've come to see as a normal lifestyle

Feeling stuck but not sure where to start?

Career change doesn't have to begin with knowing exactly what comes next. Sometimes the first step is understanding what's keeping you stuck now.

Take Lucia's Joy at Work Quiz (https://lucia-trqb5gnw.scoreapp.com) to discover your Joy at Work potential score, where you may have the easiest opportunity to make a change, and the blind spot that could be getting in your way.

Resources:

Read Lucia's original article about Barney's career change - https://www.midlifeunstuck.com/jam-makers-1/2019/3/4/barney-whiter-the-escape-artist-accountant-to-financially-independent

Learn more about Barney and The Escape Artist - https://theescapeartist.me/about/

Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: Lifestyle inflation is

the enemy of runway.

Lifestyle inflation is the enemy of optionality.

Lifestyle inflation is the enemy of career change.

Lucia Knight - CEO Midlife Unstuck: Barney Witter is one of us, and he knows

a thing or three about career redesign.

He left his career in corporate finance age 43 to do more life, including

investing much more time with his family and on his own development,

including writing and coaching on the subjects of money, investing, financial

freedom, financial independence, work, burnout, and career change.

I think you're gonna enjoy this conversation.

Let's dive in.

Barney, can you tell me what is the relationship between money,

investing in personal finance, and the ability to change career in midlife?

Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: The relationship between money and

changing career, to me is simple and can be explained as the more financial

runway you have, the safer you are.

The more financial runway you have, the safer you can change career, take a career

break, step back and have the ability to downshift if you need to before working

your way back up to where you are.

Because when you are changing… The, the bigger the career change,

the more likely you are to have to drop down the rungs of the ladder.

And -- I'm a visual person, so the way I visualize this, my dad like

learned to fly a microlight, one of those little sort of lawnmower

petrol engines with a pair of wings.

And it was basically he did it in a field, and the runway, such as it was the strip

of grass before the hedge at the end.

And to do it, you had to, from a standing start, you had to go full

throttle because to get up the speed and the momentum to clear the hedge.

So the more runway you have, the safer you are.

Now, the financial equivalent of that is the more emergency fund that you have,

the more accessible financial net worth you have, the more money in the bank you

have, just the greater the period that you can survive, either, between jobs or in a

new job, a new career where you've dropped down the ladder and it's gonna take you

some time to get back to where you were.

Lucia Knight - CEO Midlife Unstuck: Lovely.

Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: So I define financial runway as your accessible

financial net worth divided by your spending rate, divided by your burn rate.

In the case of a simple emergency fund, if you spend 5,000 a month

and you've got 15,000 in the bank, you've got three months, right?

That's your runway.

That's the amount of time that you can drop out of the labor force, drop out of

work you can t-take out to find a job.

And so to me, it always comes back to the concept of runway.

That is what gives you the freedom to change job, change career, retrain,

drop down the ladder, b- be an interim, do some volunteer work perhaps.

Lucia Knight - CEO Midlife Unstuck: So the longer that runway, the

more choice, the more freedom, the more time you're giving yourself.

Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: Yeah.

The more runway you have, the safer you are.

The more your runway the better your ability to change job,

change career, change your life.

Lucia Knight - CEO Midlife Unstuck: Okay.

Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: There are two elements to that.

There's one is the stash that you've amassed and hopefully

invested and hopefully, compound interest and investing will help

you do some of that heavy lifting.

So there's the amount of cash that you've stashed away, but then there's

also like what's your lifestyle?

What's your burn rate?

Have you allowed your lifestyle to inflate up in your old job?

Because that is the temptation that we all face.

I-- like I remember when I first, started working in finance and it's

the most natural thing in the world, like you're with people your own age,

y-you're, you're earning good money for the first time in your life.

What does everyone do?

Everyone, goes to the pub.

Everyone gets some nice clothes and goes to the pub.

And so lifestyle inflation is the enemy of runway.

Lifestyle inflation is the enemy of optionality.

Lifestyle inflation is the enemy of career change

Lucia Knight - CEO Midlife Unstuck: Oh, I get it.

And I remember one of the very first articles I ever read of yours, and

it I quote it often, and you said that you knew partners in legal

firms who couldn't afford to retire.

And I have since met partners in legal firms who can't afford to retire

because of just what you've said.

Lifestyle way beyond

Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: I met a p- I met a partner in a hedge

fund who told me he couldn't afford to Now maybe he was just being modest

and, just downplaying his wealth.

But those careers are hothouse careers where you spend a lot of time at

work, you spend a lot of time with type A hyper-competitive people.

You spend a lot of time forming group norms and group expectations

around what is the minimum acceptable holiday and the minimum acceptable

car and the minimum acceptable postcode to live in yada, yada, yada.

And a job is more than an occupation that pays you money.

It's also a tribe, and with that comes the potential trap of hive mind and,

just keeping up with the Joneses and lifestyle inflation and trapping yourself.

So a, a partner of KPMG once told me, " I live in a gilded cage."

yeah, it's a very pretty cage.

There's very fan- it's ve- made out of very fancy gold, but I live in a cage."

Lucia Knight - CEO Midlife Unstuck: But I live in a cage.

I'm gonna hit pause there because Barney has agreed to come back next

week to dive even deeper into the link between your financial situation and

making any changes in your work life.

And when you're ready for more, take the Boost Your Joy at Work Quiz.

I built it for experienced people who know that more joy at work is possible,

but they're just not sure where to start.

This is where to start.

You'll discover your joy readiness score, your easiest quick win, and

your biggest blind spot so that you can start moving immediately towards

work that you might want to do forever.