Quit a High Paying Job Because I Hate It?

Brought to you by the EveryDollar app. Start budgeting for free today. Trying to figure out if I'm losing my mind from wanting to walk away from a high-paying job and start all over in something new that pays quite a bit less, at least a start. So I'm in a financial sales position right now. It's almost all commission, so I average around $250,000 a year. And I know I'm blessed to be in a financial position I'm in, but for the last couple of years, I've found zero fulfillment in this job, and I've been pretty unhappy. The culture is very much like work first, family second, and there's not a whole lot of job security. We're really pushed to work past the schedule hours, work every single weekend, and it's really starting to affect my relationships outside of work. What are you selling? I have a lot of... a financial product mortgage. Okay. So you're a mortgage underwriter? Officer. Okay, a loan officer. Yeah, okay. So is it the work or is it the conditions in which you're doing the work? Why can't you do that somewhere else that has reasonable culture and reasonable hours and makes a little less? And it's actually not the actual day-to-day work, it's the environment and the hours and the bad priorities that's driving you crazy, right? Yes. And I've had quite a few workers or co-workers that have left and went to other companies in the industry, and ultimately, pretty much every one of them comes back to the company we're at because they said this is really the best company in terms of technology and stuff. But the culture has been like this and it's really gotten worse over the last, I would say, 12 months. And what I'm worried about mainly is over the next couple of years, I want to be in a position where I'm starting a family, and I look at my co-workers and I see them really struggling to keep up in the job and be there, be present for their families. And I just don't want to end up being the parent or the father that's not there. Again, I am not buying the fact that you can make $250,000 at one company, and you can't work normal hours and work for good people and have a better balance to what you're doing and make $150,000 to $200,000 at a different company. I don't believe that. I think your co-workers have given you a message that's not true. As if there's one place on the planet that this whole thing can happen and it works, and everywhere else it doesn't work. Bullcrap. Correct. Yeah, and that's really the feeling that we get from leadership. I don't care what leadership told you. You already don't have faith in leadership. Why are you listening to anything? So what opportunities have you been looking at? Yeah, so we have a family friend who's an electrician in our area, and he's been trying to get me to be an apprentice for quite a while now. Why? So a completely different path. Why? Because this one company that you work for sucks, so now you're going to go be an electrician? He doesn't know anything about my job. So why would he even ask? We're talking about you. Why would you do? I mean, okay, I'm an electrician, and I know a guy that is a mortgage guy who's obviously making a lot of money. Maybe I don't know it's a quarter million dollars a year. Why would I even talk to that guy about being an electrician? That's just strange. Yeah, he knows I've always been interested in working with my hands, and I ended up just kind of falling into this job through an internship in college, and it was always supposed to be, you know, I'll do this for a couple years and then move on to something else. How old are you? I'm 29. And how long have you been doing the mortgage broker deal? About eight years. Eight years. Okay, so you're looking at this going, man, I fell into this job. This is not what I intended to do. This is not what I set out to do. I need to stop this train, and I need to get on the path that I really want to be on. Correct. Understood. Okay. How are you doing financially? I'm good. So I have, in my checking account, I have about $15,000. I do have an emergency fund with about $25,000 in it and a high-yield savings. No debt at all. I'm very, very fortunate there. And then I have a high-yield savings with about $115,000 that was supposed to be for, hopefully, a wedding here in the next year or two, and then a down payment on a house and that sort of stuff. Okay. So you're getting married in the next year. Any kids? No. Okay. Listen, I do think that you should do work that matters to you, work that you feel good about. It's all about how can we get there, and is there a way that, over time, we can create the same value? Because the hard part for me is to know that you were worth $250,000 in the marketplace, and then to go down without the horizon of being able to meet that peak again. That would bother me personally. If it doesn't bother you, that's okay. So tell us about the electrician. What's the route? What does it look like? And what do you want to know from us? No problem. So it would be a five-year apprenticeship. It would be a union electrician. So I'd start at about $21 an hour. In five years, when I make it through, I'd be a journeyman. Right now, the pay is about $42 an hour, but that would just be my base pay. It doesn't include any fringe benefits or anything on top of that, like health insurance money going into a retirement account. When I do the math, working the same amount of hours I'm working right now, which is 55 to 60 a week. You don't want to work that many hours. So we can't compare it to that. Correct. You're right. So it would be a pay cut at the five-year mark. If I make it through the apprenticeship, I'd be sitting around about $130 a year. As a journeyman, and that's kind of the peak? Correct. Yeah. Unless I would move up to be a foreman and so on. And you really hate this company. I think so too. This is like, they have wounded you so badly that you're willing to jump into a pit of acid to get away from them. How do you know that you'll love being an electrician to the tune of a $100,000 pay cut? That I don't know for sure. And that's what scares me the most, why I called in to get your guys' advice on this. I'm not buying. I think you're running so hard away from something that you're not looking carefully at what you're running to. So if I were going to advise a 29-year-old who made $250,000 a year, who's in a toxic culture, and he knows how to sell, I'm not against the trades. I'm a fan of the trades, okay? But you have painted the best possible scenario for a union journeyman electrician, and it's going to take you five freaking years to get back to half of your income. It's just not logical. Could you not go to another mortgage firm first and test that out and go, because Dave's right, you're clearly good at what you do. I think you could make $160,000, $180,000 day one somewhere else, working normal hours and not being spit on every day or whatever's happening over there. And then see how you feel. You've got to get away from the place. I'm not disagreeing with that. But I think you've convoluted the career field as being horrible with the company as being horrible. And you need to separate those two things first before you make this decision. It's hard to me when, and you'll probably be able to put better words to this, but when you're clearly really good at something and you're clearly very gifted at it, it's hard to then say, but you're not going to do that. You're going to go to this. Do you know what I mean? You've got that talent and that gifting for some reason. I don't know. It's hard to walk. Again, this smells like an escape rather than a journey. And I don't, it just doesn't smell right. And so you asked our opinions and we've given a whole three minutes of thought to your whole life. Okay. So it's not really fair to you. Well, he doesn't have to choose between this and that. There are some other routes he can go through before he comes. I think it's a false dichotomy that the only way to be happy is to completely leave everything that you're doing. I would start by leaving the company that you're in and then see where that takes us first. And then I would decide from there. And then is there another way that I can do electrician and own a company that is electricians and so forth? That puts us out of the Ramsey show in the books. We'll be back with you before you know it. In the meantime, remember there's ultimately only one way to financial peace and that's to walk daily with the Prince of Peace, Christ Jesus. Create your free every dollar budget today. The simplest way to budget for your life.