Monday, November 06, 2006 11:15 PM
by
Colter
When Can I Give The Man The Finger?
As a full-time employee with aspirations of the Peter Gibbons lifestyle (I want $1 million so that I can do absolutely nothing), I sometimes wonder when is the right time to give The Man the finger. I work at a great company that has competitive salaries, great bonuses, insurance, 401K, all the ammenities you could ask for. Then why want to leave? I want to be self-sufficient.
You never know when the market is going to turn upside down or my department get outsourced or my boss just decide he's tired of looking at my ugly mug every day. The truth is that no job is safe, so why leave yourself in a position to depend on them?
The folks over at MyMoneyBlog have set their personal goal at $100,000 gross annual income to become employeer-free. This may sound like a lot of money to some people, and not as much to others. Five years ago when I was single and splitting the rent with two other guys and living off of Ramen noodles and sugar-free Kool-Aide I could have lived high on the hog with that kind of dough. These days I have a wife, a kid, three dogs, a mortgage, a car payment, credit card bills, medical bills, tuiton payments... the list goes on.
If my wife kept her job, we could quite easily adjust to me working at home earning $100,000 in entrepreneural efforts. But our goal is to earn our family independance and both work at home. For that, we've come to the conclusion that it is not only important to increase our gross annual income, but to also substantially reduce our debt. How much would it take to get by comfortably without credit card bills? Without car payments? Without a house payment? A lot less.
By working hard to keep our jobs, and working hard to increase our extra income, we have some money left over every month to invest in our future. Paying off the credit cards and other high-interest loans, and rolling those payments into paying off other items, can decrease the amount we need to bring home at the same time we are building our own businesses. In theory, a few years from now we will not only be debt free, but we will be earning higher salaries for ourselves than we ever could have working for The Man.
And that is when we can give him the finger.