When You Want to Leave Your Job but Cannot Afford To

Get the constraint out of your head and onto paper

Financial fear is much heavier when it is vague. Most people carrying this have a strong feeling about their situation and have not looked at the actual arithmetic in a long time.

Write down what you spend in a month, what you would still owe if the salary stopped, how long any savings would last, who else depends on this income, what notice period you have and what redundancy or notice pay would apply if the decision were ever made for you.

Sometimes the numbers confirm exactly what you feared. That is still worth knowing, because it converts a dread into a figure and a figure can be worked on. Sometimes there is more room than you thought. Either way you stop negotiating with a ghost.

Reduce what the job is costing you before anything else

If leaving is off the table this year, the immediate task is not endurance. It is lowering the toll, because the toll is what will make you leap badly later.

Some of it is inside the role. Hours you have stopped defending, work that was never yours, a commute pattern that could change, a team you could move within, a conversation with your manager that has been overdue for a year. None of this changes the job. It can make it survivable, which is a different and more useful goal.

Some of it is outside the role. What has quietly stopped since this began: sleep, exercise, friendships, the things you used to be interested in. Those are not luxuries here. They are what keeps the job from becoming the whole of your life while you work on the exit.

Ask for the change you have never actually requested

People stay in intolerable arrangements for years without ever putting the request in plain words to the person who could grant it. Fewer hours, a change of scope, a different reporting line, a move to another team, a period of leave, a remote day.

The answer may be no. A no is information, and it makes the case for leaving concrete rather than emotional.

If asking feels dangerous, that is worth noticing too. Sometimes it is a fair reading of the place. Sometimes it is the fear talking, and the difference matters because one of them is about the employer and the other is about you.

Test alternatives while you are still being paid

The salary you resent is also what makes investigation affordable. Being employed is the safest position from which to find out what else you could do.

Small tests fit around a job: a short course, one piece of freelance work, a conversation with three people doing the thing you are curious about, an internal move that points in the new direction, a project at the weekend that produces something real.

Check your contract before you take paid work elsewhere, and be straight about your capacity. The aim is evidence, not a second full time job that finishes off what is left of you.

Build an exit rather than waiting for a moment

An exit is usually made of unremarkable parts. A number that has to be in the account. A skill that has to be demonstrable. A few relationships that have to exist. A date by which the situation gets reviewed whether or not anything has improved.

Written down, that turns an impossible decision into a sequence. A sequence can be worked at on an ordinary Tuesday. It also gives the current job a purpose it did not have this morning, which changes how the week feels.

Put a review date in the diary. Twelve months of intolerable is a very different thing from indefinitely intolerable, and the difference is mostly whether anybody ever set a date.

Keep the constraint open to question

Cannot afford to is sometimes a fact and sometimes a shorthand for a standard of living, a set of expectations or a promise made to somebody years ago. Both are legitimate. They are not the same thing, and only one of them is arithmetic.

The question is not whether you are willing to live on less. It is whether you have ever asked, out loud, what the actual floor is and who else would need to be part of that conversation.

Households usually carry this badly because it stays unspoken. The person you live with may have a very different view of what could be adjusted, and may already know how unhappy you are.

A note on money advice

Nothing here is financial advice. Debt, savings, investing, pensions, tax and anything sold as a regulated product need someone properly qualified, and in the UK free debt advice is available from Citizens Advice, StepChange and National Debtline.

This page is about the decision and the constraint around it, not about what to do with your money.

A short exercise: the floor, the toll and the date

An hour, written down, ideally with the person who shares the consequences.

1. 1Write your monthly floor: what genuinely has to be covered, separated from what you currently spend.
2. 2Write your runway: how many months without this income before something breaks, and what breaks first.
3. 3List three things that would lower the toll of this job within a month, and mark which one you could ask for this week.
4. 4List one test of an alternative that fits around the job, and put it in the diary.
5. 5Set the review date. Write what would have to be true by then for staying to still be the right call.

Concluding that you are staying for now, for stated reasons, with a date and a lower toll, is a real outcome. It is not the same as being trapped, even when the job has not changed at all.

Two ways this looks in practice

Composites rather than case studies.

Where the book comes in

The Alternative Is Unthinkable by Mark Eve is about the things people decide are not up for discussion, and what happens when they finally are. Money is the most common of them, because it sounds like arithmetic and is usually carrying something else as well.

It is written from meeting people rather than from a theory, and it does not finish with instructions.