Can You Actually Afford To Change Careers?

Episode 25: Concern about money is one of the most common reasons women hold back from exploring a career change. You might be the breadwinner or a single parent or worried that you can't afford to start again.  In this episode, Career Change Coach Dana Stevens has the honest conversation about financial fear and career change. 

In this episode you will learn:

• Why the assumption that career change means financial sacrifice is worth questioning before it becomes a conclusion
• The difference between a genuine financial constraint and a financial story constructed before the options have been explored
• How the Life-First Career Method builds your financial reality into the process from the very beginning
• Why dreaming big and being financially grounded are not in opposition and how the process holds both
• The financial calculation most people never do: what is staying in the wrong role actually costing you?

Connect with Dana:

Website: https://www.danastevens.com/workwithme
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dana_stevens_coach/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danastevens1/
Free Coaching Consultation: https://calendly.com/danastevens/initial-coaching-chat

If this episode resonated, follow The Career Change Studio and share it with someone who’s feeling stuck in their career.

And if you’re ready to design a working life that truly fits your needs and lifestyle, book a free clarity call at https://calendly.com/danastevens/initial-coaching-chat

Special thanks to @Lou_Greenaway_Music for the piano composition and performance.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:51

Hello and how are you doing today? So this week I thought it might be useful to have a conversation that I think maybe a lot of people need to hear, but we don't really talk about very often, or I don't hear it being talked about very often, and that's money. I want to talk about money in relation to career change. And specifically, I want to talk about the fear that changing careers is going to cost you financially, that it will somehow mean earning less, starting again, retraining, stepping backwards, that it's something that you simply cannot afford to do given your responsibilities and the lifestyle that you have. Because this is really common. It's a really common concern that I hear. And women come to me and say, I would love to change, but I'm the breadwinner, or I'm a single parent, or I have a mortgage and children, and I just can't afford to take a risk. Or maybe even I've spent years building up my salary and I'm not willing to start from scratch. And I want to say right at the start of this episode that those concerns are completely valid. Money is real, financial responsibility is real, and if you have people depending on you or commitments that require a certain level of income, that isn't a small thing to be ignored. But I also want to offer you some other perspectives today. Because in my experience, the financial fear around career change is often bigger than the financial reality. Not always, but often it is. And the gap between the fear and the reality is where loads of people get stuck before they've even started looking into things. So today I want to look at where that fear comes from, what is going on underneath the surface, and most importantly, how a properly structured career change process actually takes your real financial life into account from the very start, not as an afterthought, but as a foundation of the process. I want to start with the assumption that sits underneath most financial fear, and that's that changing careers means starting again. It means going back to the bottom. And I've actually done a whole podcast about this, about why changing careers doesn't always mean starting from scratch. So it might be good to go back and listen to that. But you know, sometimes we think that we're gonna maybe reach have to retrain, we're definitely gonna earn less for a while, maybe, and given everything I've built and everything I'm responsible for, that's simply something that I don't want to do or I can't do. And I do completely understand why that can feel true, because there are some career changes that do involve retraining. There are paths that will require you to take on a lower salary before things build back up again. And some options, of course, do cost money to pursue. That is real. But here is what I want to offer you. That assumption for most people has been applied to every possible option before you've even explored a single one of them properly. The conclusion that most people get to that change is financially impossible, is often reached before all the evidence, all the facts are actually gathered. And what I see again and again in my work is that the landscape of options is almost always much wider than people initially think. Many career changes, particularly at midlife, when you're bringing significant experience and transferable skills, do not involve starting from scratch at all. They involve redirecting what you already have, moving into an adjacent field where your experience is genuinely valuable, applying skills that you've spent years developing but taking them to a different context, building on what you are, not dismantling it, and having to begin again. The idea that career change must equal financial sacrifice is a story, right? Sometimes, occasionally, it's an accurate story, but often it's this first thought, not a considered conclusion. And first thoughts about career change hardly ever give you that full picture. And most people have ruled out career change on financial grounds before they've even looked at a single option. And that's not a result of financial assessment, it's a fear response. Now I do want to make an important distinction here because it does really matter. There is a difference between a genuine financial constraint and a financial story we've constructed before we've looked at the options. And in my experience, many people conflate the two all of the time, including people who are really intelligent and very self-aware, right? Happens all the time. So we don't have to judge ourselves if we're doing this. But this is what a genuine financial constraint is. It might sound like I need to earn at least a certain amount per month to cover my financial commitments, and so any option that can't meet that threshold in a reasonable time frame is just not going to be viable for me right now. Right? Now that is a very specific, workable constraint. It does not close the door on change, it just shapes what change can look like for you. Now, the difference is a financial story, it sounds like this. I can't afford to change full stop. No further investigation required. Right? This is when the answer is no before the question has been properly asked. And the difference matters because one of them is useful information that goes into the process and helps you start the work and the journey, and the other one stops that process before it even starts. And here's where it gets interesting because financial fear, like most fear, is very good at disguising itself as practical thinking. I can't afford to change. Sounds like a factual statement. It sounds like you're being very considered, very responsible. But if you have not actually explored the options, if you haven't looked at what a change might realistically look like for someone with your specific experience and your skills and your circumstances, then it is not a fact. It's a feeling dressed up as a fact. And I'm not saying, and I will keep saying this, I'm not saying that the concern isn't real. I'm saying that it deserves to be tested rather than simply accepted without exploration. Because the version of your future that lives in the fear is almost always going to be much more limited than the version that emerges when you actually start looking. There is a real difference between I've looked at my options and the finances don't work, and I'm afraid that the finances won't work. One is a conclusion and the other is a starting point. So let me tell you how I actually work with this with my clients because I think it might be quite different from what you're imagining. One of the first things we do when I work with someone is build what I call their life first criteria. And this is a personalized set of filters specific to that person in their life, that every option, career option that we explore later gets measured against when we get to that decision stage. And financial need, financial reality is always one of those criteria. And what that means in practice is that from the very beginning of our work together, your financial reality is on the table, not as a barrier, but as information to help you make decisions. And it's one of the most important pieces of context that shapes what a good outcome actually looks like for you personally. Now, here is something I want to be clear about because within that structure, I will absolutely push you to dream big, to think differently. I'll encourage you to explore options that you might have dismissed, or consider paths that you haven't thought of, or think more expansively about what is possible, maybe more than you might allow yourself to do alone. That's part of what I offer. But the exploration is important. It's part of how you find options that you would never get to if you stayed only within the safe and the familiar. But the dreaming and the deciding are two different things. And when we get to deciding, every option gets looked at through your real life, through your actual financial needs and commitments and circumstances, through what is genuinely workable for you, not some hypothetical version of you with no mortgage and no responsibilities. So if an option involves a period of retraining that you can't afford, we might decide to park that option or at least postpone it until later, or figure out how to afford that, right? If something requires a significant drop in income that your life just can't handle, that it can't absorb, it comes off the list. Not because your ambitions aren't valid, but because an option that doesn't work for you in real life is not the right option for you. However appealing it might look on paper. And while that might be disappointing, usually when you've done the exploration around it and you've realized all the reasons why it doesn't work, you're able to park that option and find peace with that decision. So I want to reassure you, this is not about coming up with a vision of like a future life and then being left to figure out how to make it financially viable. The financial viability is part of the vision. It's baked in from the start. Dreaming big and being financially grounded are not opposites, right? They're not in opposition. My life first career process holds both at the same time, and it's important to do that. And I want to address something else that I think sits really close to this fear, this financial fear, and often can get quite tangled up in it. The fear of the leap, right? There is a version of career change that lives in a lot of people's imaginations that goes something like this. One day you're just going to decide, then you're going to hand in your notice, then you're going to walk away from everything you've built, and you'll throw yourself into the unknown and hope for the best, right? I often refer to it as like jumping off a cliff. And either it works or it doesn't, right? But really, I just want to reassure you, I want to be really clear, that is not what my career change process is, anyway. It's not even close because what the process actually looks like is considered, structured, and grounded at every stage. We spend time, real time, building clarity on what you want and why. We test options against your real life before you commit to anything. We build a roadmap with practical steps so that by the time you're ready to make a move, you're not leaping into the unknown. You're stepping into something you've thought through carefully, planned for properly, and decided on with genuine confidence. One of the things that I find most meaningful about this work is watching someone's relationship with the decision change over the course of the process. People often come in feeling like any move forward is some sort of terrifying risk, and they leave with a clarity and a self-trust that means the decision, when they make it, doesn't feel like this huge leap at all. It feels like an obvious and considered next step. And that shift doesn't happen by accident. It happens because of the work we do on the thinking, the beliefs, the fears, and the planning. You're not going to be handed a direction and then told to go and make it happen on your own. You're going to be supported through the stages of getting there, including the practical ones. And that must include the financial planning piece. If the path we decide on involves a transition period or a step down in income before things build back up, or any kind of financial adjustment, we've got to talk about that. We'll look at what it actually requires, what the timeline looks like, and what needs to be in place before you make your move. You're not going to be stepping off a cliff. You're going to be walking down a path that you helped to build. This is about a plan. A plan that's built around your real life, including your finances, from the very beginning. One other thing I want to just mention is that lots of people do the financial calculation on changing. They think about what it might cost, what they might earn, how it might be less, what the risk is, and that calculation feels scary, so they often stop. But very few people do the financial calculation on staying. Because staying has costs too, real ones. There's the earning potential cost. If you're in a role that's not right for you, that you're not thriving in, maybe you've outgrown it or it doesn't reflect what you're actually capable of, you're quite possibly not being paid what you could be. And the right role, one that genuinely fits your skills and experience and the direction you want to go in, can come with better earning potential over time, not worse. Career change at midlife is not always a step backwards financially. For many people, it can in fact be a step forward. And there's also the progression cost, staying in the wrong role means years of not building towards something that matters to you, not developing in directions that are meaningful to you. Maybe not accumulating the experience or skills or reputation that will open doors you actually want to walk through. That is a real cost. And then there are the costs that don't show up in any financial calculation at all. The energy spent every day on work that doesn't fit, the emotional toll of the Sunday scaries or that Monday morning dread. The quiet erosion of confidence that comes from spending years in a role that you know isn't right. Your relationships, your health, your life outside work that suffers when the work is wrong. Those things aren't nothing. They're not free. So I'm not saying that the financial concern about changing isn't valid. I'm saying the financial picture is not complete until you've looked at both sides of it. What change might cost and what staying is already costing you. Because staying has a price too. So to finish today, I want to say that I do understand that the fear, the financial fear around career change is real and valid. So I'm not dismissing it, but it is worth examining because the fear itself is often bigger than the financial reality. It tends to arrive as a conclusion before you've explored the options. And like I said, that's much more to do with fear than facts. So if you are in a situation where your financial responsibilities do genuinely constrain your options, that's real and it will be respected in the process. Your financial reality is not an obstacle to working with me, it's part of the brief, right? It's one of the most important things I need to understand about your life in order to help you design a change that will actually work for you. And you're not going to be asked to leap into anything. The process is structured, considered, grounded, and any decision you make will be one that you have planned for, you've thought through, and you feel genuinely good about. And not because the fear has gone away entirely, but because you will have done the work that means the decision is real and you have a clear path. If the financial question has been one of the things stopping you from exploring, at least exploring what a career change could look like for you, I really hope today has opened that up a little. And if you do want to have a real conversation about your own specific situation, including the financial side of it, that's exactly what a free consultation with me is for. We can look at it honestly together, and you will leave the call with a much clearer picture of what is actually possible. The link as ever to book is in the show notes, so do come and have that conversation. It really does cost nothing and it might just change everything. Thanks so much for listening today. I'm going to see you next week. Bye for now.