Can You Afford to Change Careers? Start With Your Financial Runway
Want to change careers but worried about the financial risk? Lucia Knight and Barney Whiter explore how financial runway can give you more freedom to make a change — and why a high salary doesn’t necessarily mean you have more options. They also look at how lifestyle inflation and the expectations of your professional world can quietly make it harder to leave a career that no longer fits.
Wanting to change careers can quickly collide with a very practical question: Can I afford to do it?
For experienced professionals, that question can feel particularly complicated. You may have built a good income alongside a mortgage, family commitments and a lifestyle designed around what you currently earn. Even when your work no longer fits, walking away from that income can feel risky.
But salary alone doesn't tell you how much freedom you actually have.
Barney Whiter, aka The Escape Artist, uses a different measure: financial runway.
What Is Financial Runway for Career Change?
Think about an aeroplane taking off. It needs enough runway to build the speed and momentum required to get safely into the air.
Career change can require runway too.
A significant change may involve taking a career break, temporarily earning less, retraining or stepping into a different kind of role. The more financial breathing room you have, the more time and choice you can potentially give yourself while making that transition.
Barney defines financial runway simply:
Accessible financial net worth ÷ your spending rate = your financial runway.
For example, if you have £15,000 available and your life costs £5,000 a month, you have roughly three months of runway.
The point isn't that there is one correct amount everyone needs before making a career change. It's that knowing your runway turns a vague question — Can I afford to change? — into something much more concrete.
Your Income Is Only Half the Story
There are two sides to financial runway.
One is what you have accumulated and can access.
The other is how much your life costs to run.
That's where an uncomfortable paradox can appear. As income increases, spending often increases alongside it. The better car, bigger house, more expensive holidays and other upgrades gradually become part of normal life.
Barney calls this lifestyle inflation, and he makes the consequence clear: lifestyle inflation reduces optionality.
A high salary therefore doesn't automatically give you greater career freedom. If maintaining your lifestyle requires you to continue earning at that level, some career choices may become much harder to contemplate.
When Your Professional World Defines “Normal”
Lifestyle inflation isn't necessarily the result of deliberately deciding to spend more.
Your working environment can influence it too.
Some careers involve spending huge amounts of time surrounded by similarly successful, ambitious people. Over time, that group develops its own expectations around what is normal — the holidays people take, the cars they drive, the places they live.
As Barney puts it, a job is more than an occupation that pays you money. It's also a tribe.
That creates a useful question when you're thinking about changing careers:
How much of the lifestyle you're working to maintain did you consciously choose, and how much simply became normal along the way?
The answer may matter more than you think.
A Successful Career Can Still Become a Gilded Cage
Years ago, Barney told me about highly paid professionals who felt unable to leave their careers because of the lifestyles they had built around their incomes.
One described his situation as living in a “gilded cage.”
The cage may be extremely comfortable. It may look like success from the outside. But if maintaining it means you no longer feel able to make different choices about your work, it's worth noticing the trade-off.
You can read more about Barney's own journey from corporate finance to financial independence in my earlier article, Barney Whiter – Accountant to Financially Independent (The Escape Artist).
The aim isn't to conclude that earning or spending less is automatically better. It's to understand the relationship between the money you have, the life you're funding and the choices available to you.
Because financial freedom isn't only about having enough money to stop working.
It can also be about having enough runway to change how you work.
If You're Feeling Stuck, Find Your Starting Point
Money may be one part of what's making career change feel difficult. But it may not be the only thing keeping you stuck.
Before trying to solve everything at once, it helps to understand where a change could make the biggest difference for you.
Take the Joy at Work Quiz to discover your strongest area of Joy at Work potential, uncover a blind spot that may be getting in your way, and identify where to begin making changes toward work that fits you better.
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[00:00:00] Why Lifestyle Inflation Makes Career Change Harder
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.
Lucia Knight - CEO Midlife Unstuck: I think you're gonna enjoy this conversation. Let's dive in.
Lucia Knight - CEO Midlife Unstuck: Barney, can you tell me what is the relationship between money, investing in personal finance, and the ability to change career in midlife?
[00:01:00] Financial Runway Gives You More Career Choices
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.
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: 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.
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: 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.
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: 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.
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: 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.
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: So the more runway you have, the safer you are.
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: 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?
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: 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.
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: 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.
[00:03:39] The Other Side of Financial Runway: Your Lifestyle
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.
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: 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.
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: 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.
[00:05:16] When a Successful Career Becomes a Gilded Cage
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: 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.
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: 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.
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: 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.
Barney Whiter - The Escape Artist: 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.
Lucia Knight - CEO Midlife Unstuck: 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.
Lucia Knight - CEO Midlife Unstuck: 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.
