Can I afford to quit my job for a while?
Maybe you’re daydreaming about leaving the 9 to 5 that’s sucking the life out of you. Maybe you want to start your own business and know it could be a while before it pays what your job does. Maybe you want to go back to school, or stay home with your kids while they’re small.
Whichever one it is, you’d be living without your paycheck for a while. From the inside it’s hard to tell whether that’s a risk you can take, or what it would cost you years from now.
Start with the monthly budget
The first check is whether you can cover the bills without that income. With a partner, that might mean living on one salary. On your own, it means savings, whatever the new thing brings in, or both. Add up what you spend in a month, take away the income that would stop, and see what’s left. If the shortfall is bigger than you can close by cutting back, that tells you a lot already.
Some costs change too. Childcare can drop if you’re home with the kids, and commuting goes away if you’re not going into an office. Others go up. Health insurance is the big one if you were on your employer’s plan, and school comes with tuition.
Even if the monthly numbers work, that only tells you whether you can get by right now. What it costs you down the road is harder to see.
What a budget doesn’t show
Stepping away costs more than the paychecks you skip. A few things happen at once.
- The savings you would have made. Money you’d have put into a 401(k) in your thirties has thirty or more years to grow before you touch it. Skipping it now costs more than skipping the same amount near retirement.
- Raises. If you go back to the same kind of work, you may start near the pay you left, and that gap can follow you for years.
- Social Security. Your benefit is based on your highest 35 years of earnings, so years with no wages can lower it if you don’t have other working years to replace them.
None of this means you shouldn’t do it. It’s why the answer usually isn’t a clean yes or no.
Play out more than one version
It’s easy to picture this as two choices, keep the job or walk away. The versions in between are usually more useful to look at.
- A year off, then back to work
- Three years off, then back
- Part time while you build something else
- A business that pays a little in year one and more by year three
- A partner’s income carrying more of the load for a while
- Spending less while you’re off
Side by side, you can see how much each one actually moves things.
Expect a range, not one number
You’re hoping for a firm answer, like exactly how much you’ll have at retirement, or a guarantee that the money lasts. Nobody can give you that because nobody knows what markets will do over the next few decades. The same plan can run dry in a bad stretch and leave a pile of money in a good one. What you can see is how wide that range is and how far a choice like two years off shifts it.
Try it with your numbers
I built Spend Enough to answer this for myself on maternity leave. We could live on one salary, but stopping then would have meant about ten more years of work at the end of my career. Read the whole story.
Spend Enough has a “Take time off, then go back” scenario for this, and one for going part time for a while. Enter what you have, pick the ages, and it shows the range of outcomes next to the version where you kept working. It assumes no wages and no raises while you’re off and keeps everything else the same. If you add a partner, there’s a version for them taking time off too.
All of that works in the free version, including every scenario button. If you want more control and more explanation, the full version is $39, paid once. It adds “What would it take,” which shows the spending, savings, or retirement age that would get a plan over the line, plus two decisions side by side on one chart, stress tests that start your plan in a bad stretch like 1929, and a printable report. There’s no account, no subscription, and no phone call to cancel anything. Your numbers stay on your device, and if it’s not for you, there’s a full refund within 14 days.
If you’ve been turning one of these ideas over in your head for a while, put your numbers in and look at the version you keep daydreaming about next to the one where nothing changes. It might cost less than you feared. If it costs more, you’ll at least know what you’d have to change to make it work, and you can start planning for that instead of wondering.
Try the scenario for taking time off