Losing my job wasn't devastating because of a habit I built 6 years in advance

Matt Becker

On November 15, 2013 I lost my job.

It was a sad day, but not a surprising one. I'd been working for a start-up software company for the past six-plus years and the simple fact we had to face was that we needed to move on.

It hadn't worked, at least not in the way we dreamed it would. Sometimes that's just the reality of a start-up.

But this isn't a story about losing my job. This is a story about what came next.

This is a story about the opportunities you're presented when you plan for the worst but dream of the best.

This is a story about all those years of saving finally paying off.

What might have been

Let's face it. Losing a job is scary.

On top of not knowing what I would do next, I had a wife and 20-month-old son to consider. Not to mention another son who was due to be born in just over a month.

This was not the ideal time to lose a job. But then again, is there ever an ideal time?

In an alternate universe I might have been sent into a panic. My immediate focus would have been generating income. As much as possible and as soon as possible.

I would have shotgunned resumes out in all directions and probably grabbed the first job that paid even a decent salary. I probably would have stayed in the healthcare IT field (like my previous job) because that would have been the easiest way to quickly get a job that paid well.

After all, I've got a family to feed and bills to pay, right?

But that's only if there were jobs immediately available. What if there weren't? More stress. Lots of it. Questions about where the money's going to come from. Maybe some debt starts to pile up.

You get the picture. It's not a happy one.

Here's what actually happened

My wife and I knew this day was coming. It was stressful simply because it presented us with the unknown. But we didn't feel panic.

Instead, we felt opportunity.

Because here's the thing: we had savings. Lots of it.

We'd been saving for years and this was the point where it was really paying off. Our emergency fund alone could support us for about 10 months. Add in some of our other savings (not counting any retirement money) and we could last over 14 months with NO additional income coming in. If we were willing to make some significant lifestyle changes, we could live for over 2 years just off our savings.

Because of our savings, we knew our family would be okay for a while no matter what. Which meant that rather than being forced to make a quick decision, we had the opportunity to really weigh our options and choose our path forward.

Through a combination of chance (losing my job) and planning (our emergency fund), life was presenting us this huge opportunity to create the life we truly wanted.

Now we just had to take it.

What is it that we want?

I've written before about what financial freedom means to me and my wife, and it essentially comes down to this: having the ability to do what we want with our time.

Kind of vague, but that's actually purposeful. We're not specifically looking to retire early or travel the world or anything like that, though those things may end being part of it. We simply want to create a life in which our time is spent on things we actually enjoy.

So with that in mind we had three main options in terms of the professional path I could pursue, each with some pros and cons: