How Much Is Enough?
By Kevin Gibbons
How much money do you need?
How hard do you need to work for that money?
When I entered the professional workforce (over 30 years ago now!), the expectation was you would continue to work towards advancement, promotion and increased salary. If you were in the technical field, you would start as a junior engineer, work towards senior engineer and then either become a Subject Matter Expert (SME) or technical manager. If you were in the legal or financial fields, the goal was to ultimately become a partner. In any case, your career was defined by continuous advancement until you reached retirement age.
This outlook is changing. Many business leaders are bemoaning that “today’s workers just don’t want to work.” Pundits blame laziness, “wokeness,” privilege and a host of other causes. I prefer to view it as a workforce coming to its senses about true work-life balance. Even when I was starting, more seasoned coworkers told me, “no one ever lies on their deathbed wishing they had spent more time in the office,” but today’s workers are taking that idea to heart. When a young friend of mine was establishing herself as a production manager at a high tech company in the San Francisco Bay Area, I gave her some advice on how to set herself up for ultimately advancing into senior management.
She replied that she was not interested in such advancement. She had determined that she was working to fund her lifestyle. As long as her job met that requirement (which includes funding her long-term financial goals), there was no need to work towards advancement. She is an intelligent, highly focused person who excels at her job, and by all accounts is very much valued by her management and co-workers. She most definitely is not lazy! She just knows that she has a finite amount of energy and time and chooses how much of both to invest in her job and how much to dedicate to the other aspects of her life.
She is not alone in this regard. Recently, Business Insider published an article about 39-year-old Alonso Morris willingly taking a pay reduction so he could work remotely. One interesting statistic from this article is that according to an Owl Labs and Global Workspace Analytics State of Remote Work survey, almost half of all American workers would take a 5% pay cut to continue working remotely.
So what does this have to do with you? Consider this a call for self-reflection.
· Why are you working? Is it part of your core identity? Are you happy with that?
· How much money do you need to live the life you want to live, now and in the future?
· Does your work situation support that need?
· Are you working in a job and a career path just because “that is what you are supposed to do?”
Some people find great personal meaning in their careers, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. It is just worth asking if that is what you want for yourself and working to adjust your life based on your answer to that question, always keeping in mind the philosophy of The Savvy Life: to be purposeful with how you spend your time and your money to balance saving for the future while enjoying your life today.
Kevin Gibbons is a Cash Flow Planning Expert, the Vice President of The Savvy Life and co-author of the international bestseller Living The Savvy Life. For the past ten years, Kevin and Savvy Life Founder Melissa Tosetti have worked with over 700 individuals and families to create Spending Plans.
To learn about how Kevin and Melissa work with clients to create Spending Plans, visit The Savvy Life’s Home Page. If you’d like to learn about how they work with financial advisors and their clients visit: The Savvy Life Advisor’s Page
