@TuneInTuneOut this is interesting and continues to surprise me 😊
I’m surprised that you were surprised by the “it’s who you know” thing being important.
I’m also surprised by your comment on pensions because money and happiness and the link that some people make there (thinking that money doesn’t bring happiness above a certain level) wouldn’t relate to the sorting the basics of financial security.
You’ve said you feel like a failure. Why? You didn’t chase after something unrealistic, you had work even in a period where you say you’d walked away from the rat race… people employed you for consultancy so clearly they think well of you and like working with you, and it sounds like you have had the motivation to try lots of new things. I think that’s brilliant! Nothing about that says failure!
and the comment about feeling like a coward…. I’m not seeing that either. Where has that come from? It sounds like you wish you were more idealistic. Whereas actually I wonder if being more realistic would bring more happiness.
The people I’ve mentioned who quit the rat race had no financial back up. They might be okay with their decision?…There’s a couple of them I’ve lost touch with. The others were professional contacts who came back into it having spent a phenomenal amount of money in pursuit of an unrealistic dream really.
I know I have a very different approach to finances to a lot of people, so I won’t go into massive detail here. Just one example is a guy who left a job in the City, went to pursue an unrealistic career dream, ended up having to sell his flat, (predictable) went into a rented flat share, then couldn’t get back into the sector because his line of work was very desirable, very competitive, and five years out of it (during which time he did zero networking, zero keeping his skills up-to-date) was probably too much. He might have got away with it if he’d been absent for six months and he could have lied and said he was travelling or something.
@Crushed23 I’m in awe of the FIRE people!
I don’t see anything like that on Instagram so I don’t know. But one person I do know who was successful, she was very open about the fact that her husband was supporting her. She wanted to be a writer. She got something published while she was still in full-time work (that was key to her decision to stop work) and then within a year she had been hired by a major TV company, they were U.S.-based but they were making a bunch of UK film scripts and she worked on those. She said very freely that if her husband hadn’t been paying the bills at that time, she would not have done it.
it’s a whole other ballgame when someone else is supporting you financially. I was quite cross when I first started freelancing because I met quite a few people who were basically doing their thing as a hobby business. I did have a side hustle and I did have an idea about turning that into a full-time job. But the people I met through researching that, I would say more than half of them were funded in another way. I mean that’s absolutely fine, but it’s annoying when they set themselves up to give advice and they don’t know anything about business loans, or in some cases even just the business planning. Having someone trill
“ just try it” when it would be an investment of my own savings was really frustrating! I needed to talk to people who had a plan, who had experience of running the premises and could talk to me about unforeseen costs and so on.
I am forever grateful to the people who said to me bluntly that they were giving it a try and if it didn’t work, they would pack it in in two years or something. It made me realise the side hustle was not worth a full-time attempt. Basically, I needed hard data from people who were starting out in the same position as me. I was probably in my 30s then and it was a real shock to me to find out how much shit people talk. It’s like those people you see on the Alex Polizzi programme who are just pouring money into an unsuccessful hotel for years. I fundamentally don’t get it.