When Financial Fear Keeps You Stuck at Work
Sometimes money really does limit your career choices. But sometimes financial anxiety makes change feel impossible before you've worked out what is actually possible. Lucia Knight and Barney Whiter explore why financial fear can leave experienced professionals frozen in work that no longer fits — and the three numbers that can help you replace uncertainty with useful information.
When you're thinking about changing careers, money matters.
You may have a mortgage, family commitments and a lifestyle built around your current income. Changing direction could mean earning less for a while, retraining or taking time away from work.
Those are real considerations.
But there's another side to the financial question: fear can affect how we judge the risk in the first place.
In my previous conversation with Barney Whiter, aka The Escape Artist, we looked at financial runway and how knowing what you have available can help you assess whether you can afford to make a career change.
But what happens when financial anxiety stops you from seriously considering change at all?
Why Staying Put Can Feel Safer
Money decisions don't happen in isolation.
Barney points to status and our desire to fit in with the people around us as powerful influences on the choices we make.
A certain salary may support the house, schools or other things that have become part of your life. Your professional world can also shape your expectations of what success is supposed to look like.
Then add uncertainty.
A career change might involve a period of lower income, retraining or simply not knowing exactly what will happen next. If you're already anxious about money, staying where you are can feel considerably safer than stepping into that unknown.
As Barney explains, that fear can keep you stuck.
Financial Anxiety Can Create a Freeze Response
We often talk about our instinctive response to danger as “fight or flight.”
Barney adds another response: freeze.
When an animal senses a threat, staying completely still can be the safest response. Barney sees a parallel in people who feel trapped in work they no longer want to do.
When financial change feels threatening, doing nothing can feel like the safest option.
That doesn't mean your financial concerns aren't real. Nor does it mean the answer is to ignore the risk and make a dramatic career move anyway.
It means it's useful to distinguish between what you fear might happen and what your actual financial position tells you.
And that requires information.
Stop Being an Ostrich and Know Your Numbers
Barney's practical advice is wonderfully direct:
Stop being an ostrich.
Rather than avoiding your finances because looking at them feels uncomfortable, examine your situation.
As Barney puts it, you need to “know your numbers, know your position, know where you are.”
Without that information, it's difficult to make an informed decision about a career change involving risk, uncertainty, time away from work or retraining.
There are three numbers he suggests starting with.
1. Your emergency fund
How much cash do you have readily available for an emergency?
That might represent three months of expenses, six months or something different for you. The important thing is knowing what you actually have.
2. Your accessible financial net worth
Your total net worth isn't necessarily the number that matters when considering a change.
Money tied up in your home or a pension you can't currently access won't necessarily fund a period between careers.
Instead, look at the financial resources you could actually access if you needed them.
3. Your spending
Finally, how much does your life actually cost?
Barney calls this your “burn rate.”
It may require the decidedly unglamorous job of looking through your bank statements and working out where your money goes. But without knowing your spending, you can't understand how long your available resources could support you.
In other words, you can't know your runway.
Replace Financial Fear With Financial Information
None of these numbers will make a career decision for you.
You might look at them and discover that changing careers immediately isn't financially realistic.
But that's useful information too.
There is a significant difference between “I can't change because it feels too risky” and “I know what my financial position is, and here's what I'd need to change before I could make a move.”
One leaves you frozen.
The other gives you something you can work with.
And you don't need to solve your entire financial future today. As Barney points out, getting clear on these three numbers is something you could begin this week.
Find Your Starting Point
Money may be one reason you're feeling stuck at work. But understanding your finances is only one part of understanding what you want your working life to look like next.
The Joy at Work Quiz can help you identify your Joy Readiness Score, your easiest quick win and a blind spot that may be getting in the way — so you have a clearer place to begin.
Take the Joy at Work Quiz:
https://lucia-trqb5gnw.scoreapp.com
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When Financial Fear Keeps You Stuck at Work
[00:00:00] Why Financial Anxiety Can Keep You Stuck
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: That is what's happening when people are stuck in jobs often, not always, but often they are stuck where they are from a essentially a biological freeze response triggered by financial anxiety.
Lucia Knight - CEO Midlife Unstuck: This is the second conversation I had with Barney Whiter. Barney is one of the most knowledgeable people I know who speaks with such authority, knowledge, and experience. I think you're gonna enjoy this. Let's dive in
Lucia Knight - CEO Midlife Unstuck: What financial beliefs do you see holding people back from making work-life changes in and around our age at this halfway point of our lives?
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: What we've just been talking about is the most obvious one, which is status. It is ego. It is the desire to conform. It is the desire to fit in with your tribe.
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: And there's that classic phrase in self-help, You're the average of the five people you spend most time with."
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: Who does a lawyer spend most time with? Other lawyers.
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: Not their family.
Lucia Knight - CEO Midlife Unstuck: Yeah
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: They spend most time with the other lawyers. And so, that desire to conform is so powerful. It's so powerful.
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: The social element is real. I need to stay in this job to earn this much money to send my children to these schools or to have this house or have these things. So that would be the first one.
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: I think the next biggest one is fear.
Lucia Knight - CEO Midlife Unstuck: Yeah.
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: The fear of change, the fear of uncertainty just financial anxiety.
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: I see a lot of people that have financial anxiety hardwired into them.
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: I'm one of those people, by the way. 'cause my parents, when I was 11, They bought the biggest house they could, borrowed the most money, and in 1981, interest rates went to 17%. And so ever since then, I've had a horror of debt.
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: And debt ensnares, debt traps you, debt keeps you chained to your current job because all change has some element of risk, and all change has some element of I'm gonna have to, be brave and take somewhat of a leap in the dark here.
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: And if you have any financial anxiety that fear will keep you, stuck where you are.
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: The final thing I would add there is that, is the concept of like scarcity mindset versus abundance mindset.
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: So when we are worried about resources, the ability to buy food, shelter, water these are the most basic of requisites.
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: And so when that is threatened, either actually or in your perception, you're triggering the lizard brain.
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: And when the lizard senses scarcity, it goes into fight or flight
Lucia Knight - CEO Midlife Unstuck: Yeah. And, so therefore all of those beliefs mean that we feel that it's safer to stay put than to go out behind the hedge because we don't know what's out there. We need the water, we need the safety, we stay stuck. Yeah
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: Exactly that. And it's actually even just to double-click on that point, people talk about fight or flight. The correct phrase if you actually look at nature is freeze, fight or flight. So the most common response in nature to, if you're a rabbit and you sense there's a fox over there, is you just freeze.
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: Because movement gives your position away. Movement attracts the predator. So a rabbit is more likely just to freeze, hence rabbit in the headlights than it is to run away or fight the fox.
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: And so That is what's happening where when people are stuck in jobs often, not always, but often they are stuck where they are from a essentially a biological freeze response triggered by financial anxiety.
[00:04:21] What to Do When Money Is Keeping You Stuck
Lucia Knight - CEO Midlife Unstuck: If someone is listening and everything you've said absolutely resonates, what could they do practically this week to position themselves better so that they can, either soon or in the future, they can achieve their new work dreams or life dreams?
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: So practically, the thing that they can do, I would summarize it as stop being an ostrich. So what does an ostrich do? Os- the ostrich buries its head in the sand, and that is comforting to the ostrich on some level.
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: That's the worst thing you can do. The best thing you can do is stop being an ostrich and examine your situation.
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: Know your numbers, know your position, know where you are, because if you haven't got that basic information, then how can you make informed decisions on your ability to make a career change that involves some risk, some uncertainty, maybe some time out of the market, some retraining? And so I just think you have to know your numbers
Lucia Knight - CEO Midlife Unstuck: Okay, can I ask you something about numbers?
[00:05:33] The 3 Numbers You Need to Know
Lucia Knight - CEO Midlife Unstuck: Can you give a list of, let's say, three to five numbers that they could go off this week and nail down
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: One, your emergency fund
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: So that's have you got whatever, three months, six months cash in a bank account that says break glass in case of emergency on it?
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: So know your emergency fund, and then broader than that is know your accessible financial net worth. Let's say you've got a million pound net worth, b-but that's mostly the family house and money in a pension, and you're 40. Hmm, Doesn't really help.
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: So what you're interested in is not total net worth, it's actually financially accessible net worth. So that's your emergency fund plus perhaps, your stocks and shares ISAs, plus your, your gold coins, plus your buy-to-let rental property or whatever it is, or whatever assets you might be able to lay your hands on and convert into cash and liquidity and something that can fund your runway.
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: Point one, know your emergency fund. Point two, know your accessible net worth. Point three, you can't know your runway.
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: Unless you know your spending. So you have to know what your burn rate is. I do financial coaching and no one wants to like do the really boring, mundane work of, "Oh, let's download my last three bank statements and examine where did it all go?
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: That you need to do to know your burn rate, and you need to know your burn rate to know your runway
Lucia Knight - CEO Midlife Unstuck: And all of that could be done this week if you prioritized it. Yeah?
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: Yes
Lucia Knight - CEO Midlife Unstuck: Brilliant.
[00:07:11] Boost Your Joy at Work Quiz
Lucia Knight - CEO Midlife Unstuck: 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.
[00:07:44] What Joy at Work Looks Like for Barney
Lucia Knight - CEO Midlife Unstuck: except I've got one more question for you I'm really interested in what joy at work for Barney Whiter looks like, sounds like, feels like, smells like.
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: For me it is the ability to be self-employed. For me it is the ability to be master of your own They do say the problem with being self-employed is that the boss is an idiot, but I would rather take my own idiocy than someone else's.
Lucia Knight - CEO Midlife Unstuck: Okay. So that freedom, that autonomy is super important to your sense of joyful work
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: So my schedule, I just I like living an off-peak life. So I like to go to the gym when it's not rammed. I like to go to the body pump class at 9:30 rather than 6:30 in the morning. I like to be master of my own diary as well as master of my own destiny. And that's not an easy place to get to.
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: It takes years of either saving or carving out career capital where you earn the right and the black book and the contact and the reputation to be able to survive outside of the, the sort of institutionalized world. But for me your mileage may vary, but for me, that is the benefit.
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: That is what I want to achieve from joy at work. It's the personal connection. It's the personal connection with the clients. It's the, the meaning that comes from you are on your own golden path. You have all the meaning and the purpose in the world.
