$100k I would be more relaxed, pay off everything except the house to lower monthly cost and try to find something perfect, that provided enough to live on.
$1M, I would retire, probably, or work part time, not worry about making enough to live on.
$10M, I would absolutely start a business, profit sharing co-op.
$100M, I would set up an endowment for charity for those in my city and probably sell my house and just travel.
Having adequate savings and/or additional income absolutely changes the job hunting game. This is one of the big reasons they having a 6-month emergency fund of necessary expenses is critical for financial health. It reduces the needs to make decisions that sacrifice long term benefit for short term survival. Like for many here, $10k is not that number for my household. We need much more in savings for a family of 4 with disabilities.
But let’s talk about how it changes the job hunt. The big answer is that you do not need to take any given offer. You can hold out for the right offer. For my wife, that meant passing up higher-paying contract roles and roles with less-than-ideal management and work life balance situations. When she found the right job, the heading she was working with was very clear, “This is the type of company where the pay will not look as great as some at first. Look at the benefits. Look at the employee reviews. This is the last job I am ever going to find for you.”
Having a safety net let us hold off until my wife found the right job. It was not about “knowing your worth” where you then ask for too much. It was about finding the best match. That ideal match has been very good for my family for many years now.
That’s what I was thinking. $10,000 for me is about 2-3 months of expenses. Of course, if I lost my job and knew things were going to be tight, I’d cut back on spending. I could probably get that $10,000 to stretch to 4-5 months, but it still wouldn’t make me relax my job search much.
Now, if I had $100,000 in the bank, I’d be quite a bit more relaxed in my job search. Give me $1,000,000 in the bank and I’d question if I even needed to find a job. $10,000,000 in the bank and I’d retire and live off of the interest.
$10k is not very much money to live on where rent alone is $2000~2500. I think if I had $100k I would be very picky. Or better yet, I would try to start my own business.
Yeah Im jealous of OP that in their area that’s “hefty” in my area that would cover maybe 2 months expenses if you were being frugal, certainly it wouldn’t be “restart your career savings”
I got burnt out between my last job and my current one. I quit and took 3 months off before starting my current job.
Admittedly I had ~30k saved and went through about 15k of that in the 3 months as I went travelling etc. but I wasn’t stressed. I emailed some friends and shot some old colleagues on linkedin saying I was looking. An old friend got me an interview in the first month, went through the whole process in about 2 weeks after that and had a new job lined up 1 month before I was due back home. But I didn’t have that “Oh shit, I need to start my new job ASAP! I’m fucked!!!” panic which was nice.
I was also much more relaxed in the interviews etc. because I wasn’t panicking for work, instead I became super picky about what I wanted and was very open about it. Asked for more money, was open about what I actually want to do and it all worked out. It was amazing - in the past I was more trying to escape a bad workplace vs. going “I know what I want, can you make this work for both of us?”
This is the answer. We are in this position now. Husband still unemployed, but has turned down several low offers. If we didn’t have savings, he would have taken a job below what is enough to live on, but at least it’d be something.
With the cushion, he job searches full time instead outside working hours.
That would stress me the fuck out to only have $10k to live off of until I got another job. If I already had a job I’d just keep it until I found a new one. And it looks better if you have a job when you’re looking for a new one. What kind of employer wants to hire someone who doesn’t have good enough sense to stay out of that kind of situation? They’d have to wonder what could have happened to make you leave one job without having another one lined up. From their perspective how would they know if the problem was the other people or if it was you? And when there are other candidates to choose from, why would they choose the one that might bring a lot of drama?
I still looked for jobs, but since I had a good 3 months of buffer I wasn’t hard pressed to take any shotty offers, and was able to accurately apply the algorithm for the Suitors Problem.
Google the Suitors Problem solution for the efficient way to search for jobs and minax your odds of getting a good offer.
The suitors problem (aka the 37% rule, an optimal stopping algorithm) doesn’t apply to job offers unless you have to either accept or decline the offers on the spot. A better solution would just be set a deadline of date x, tell each job offer you’ll have an offer to them by date x, look at all of your options together, and pick the best.
The time to implement the suitors problem or 37% rule is when you have to accept or decline each option as you see it. You know what you’ve declined, but not what is left. A very micro example is you have 3 playing cards, and you want as high of a value as possible. (I’m also adding in the threshold rule, it significantly improves the 37% rule).
Card 1: if it’s not an ace (98th + percentile), don’t keep it
Card 2: if it’s higher than card 1, or is a king (90th percentile), keep it. Otherwise, leave it.
Card 3: you have to take it if you didn’t take card 1 or card 2.
The purpose of the 37% rule isn’t necessarily to pick the best option, just to pick a good option, and it’s the best algorithm for the specific scenarios that you apply it in, and is significantly (and statistically) more likely to give you a better option than other methods. It can be applied where choices > 2, has a set max number of choices, and all of the choices are randomly ordered.
I would go into it more, but my last long explanation and examples didn’t post correctly. For some great reading (even if you don’t have a math background!) I highly recommend Algorithms to Live By by Brian Christen and Tom Griffiths.
The suitors problem (aka the 37% rule, an optimal stopping algorithm) doesn’t apply to job offers unless you have to either accept or decline the offers on the spot.
Yeah the thing is typically you only have fairly short windows to accept/pass on job offers. At least here in North America, I usually wasn’t given a very long opportunity to make my choice for a given offer. Usually tops 1-2 days to say yes or no once an offer is tabled. If I lingered on it too long, they would usually go with someone else who can decide faster.
Which meant usually tops I only had 2-3 offers tops on my table at the exact same time.
By comparison usually the interview process took about a week on average, total.
And, yes, once you decline a tabled offer you are much less likely to be able to go back and get it again, from my experience.
The suitors problem, in a high flow environment where job offers come and go every day on the fly… does indeed apply quite well.
And thats what I did, I estimated I could go for about 4 months if I tightened the pursestrings, so I spent the first month and a bit gathering job offers and simply just writing everything down in a spreadsheet, and created a scoring algorithm to rank them all based on wage, benefits, bonuses, remote vs in office vs hybrid, and a bunch of other variables.
Once I felt satisfied that I had a ranking formula that “felt” right, I took the highest scoring job on that list from the first month of data, and then started actually seriously considering offers and took the first job that gave me an offer that scored higher than that highest score from prior data.
I also recommend Algorithms to Live By, haha, it’s an awesome book and I’m gonna +1 that recommendation to anyone else who reads this thread XD
I want to note that by following this process, I over doubled my wage compared to my last job, and if I had just jumped on the first half decent offer I got early on, I would have been making about 2/3rds the wage of the job I actually ended up holding out for.
Ahh I didn’t realize some jobs were like that. When I was in my job search last year as a new grad I had 4 job offers and they were all fine with me taking until the end of the month (2 1/2 weeks for the earliest offer, coincidentally the one I picked and am very happy at)
I quit my job 90 days ago. The day I quit I had a ticket to the galapagos islands booked for 3 weeks of travel there. I took my time when I got back to get everything in order and relax. I ticked off 2 more national parks in the PNW and got a lot of mountain biking done.
Once I got back my job search was looking for companies and projects that I think are likely to turn into something. I went through a lot of interview rounds before I accepted a job offer a few days ago for a non-profit in biomedical data.
Sounds ideal. Last time I did this in a similar way. I did apply to 2-5 roles a week which were amazing and appealing roles to me though, with the result I got to keep unemployment insurance requirements met, which paid for my very cheap travel expenses overseas. Eventually one of the long shot roles worked out, and I booked flight home to start work.
Between my mortgage, child support, and kids college tuition, that would be gone in a month.
However if it were a hefty amount, nothing would change. I’ve never taken intentional time off between jobs and I still wouldn’t. Unless it were a life changing, lottery winning, early retirement amount of money, I’d be too anxious about where I’m getting paid next. I would not enjoy time off
If I were truly unemployed and worried we’d cut back a lot, but currently our expenses are $6k/month. I think I could realistically cut a grand off, maaaaybe grand and a half tops. but only could save more by restructuring debt, and changing my 401k investments.
Three types of comments here: You take your time looking for a good job, You rush to get another job, You ignore the spirit of the question and whine about a technicality
Me, me, me haha. If you have the money to live nicely for awhile, spend time finding out what jobs youre really passionate about and go for those. Even if your under qualified it cant hurt to apply. Sometimes they can offer entry jobs to get were you want to be. If you already know what you want to do, spend some time updating/improving your resume and see if you can get a a few companies to fight over you. There’s a lot of power being able to walk away from the negotiation table if you’re qualified and its just not the right time.
Totally fucking agree and thank you for being so level headed. It’s true, when you have the time and a savings (USE A DAM NUMBER THAT YOU CONSIDER TO BE A LARGE AMOUNT OF MONEY ACCORDING TO YOUR SITUATION THAT WOULD HELP YOU WHILE UNEMPLOYED FUCK)
You do have the flexibility financially and for the betterment of your career, to walk away from jobs that are toxic, low paying and have no career growth.
You’re not rushed to just take anything keeping you in a vicious cycle.
I wish that everyone could have that. :( I hate how things are
How much 10k is to you is relevant to the question. For some of us that’s a month, for some that’s six months. It makes a difference to how you respond.
I’d become an Uber driver, and I’d only take jobs that were 100% definitely better than that. I’d make sure to earn everything I needed so that my $10k isn’t drawn down.
Having the space to reject jobs and take one’s time is an excellent resource during a job search. A nice long one.
Add comment