Your “high-paying” job is costing you $120K a year

I left banking to get richer. It worked.

Hi, I’m Hannah! Welcome to Nonlinear News, where I write for smart ambitious people forging nonlinear paths.

Short note this week! I want to share something I’ve been working on for you and why I built it.

Every week, someone in banking, consulting, or some other high-paying, prestigious-on-paper job asks me a version of the same question: “How do you actually leave?”

And I always want to say: you just quit. That’s how.

But I remember being so deep in it in banking that I couldn't picture what that would even look like. The “how” is much more complicated than it sounds.

I would make up my mind to leave after working 20 hours straight.

Then I would see my paycheck come in. A week would pass.

I would decide to quit after being berated for a missing footnote at 10pm. Then I would hesitate again because I couldn’t imagine making less money.

I would wait until the next paycheck and tell myself it would get easier. Or that I could just apply for an MBA and leave then. So on and so forth.

The whole time, I was trying to consume my way into clarity.

I thought that if I just found the right framework or heard the right story, I’d finally know what to do and have the courage to do it. That the money wouldn’t matter if I just had enough “clarity”.

I would feel briefly motivated after consuming the content, then go right back to work. Until the next month, the next bonus, the next performance review.

The thing I wish someone had told me then:

I was never going to get to solving the clarity problem until I proved to myself that leaving made financial sense.

I had a math problem to solve to first.

If you’re looking to leave a prestigious-on-paper, high-paying job that makes you feel like you have the proverbial golden handcuffs on, you have the same math problem to solve.

There are 3 numbers most people in your position never calculate:

Your true hourly rate. Not what’s on your offer letter — what you actually earn per hour. Real comp divided by real hours, with nights and weekends. Time you spend worrying and panicking about work. Mine in banking ended up being only $50 an hour.

Your replacement number. The income you’d actually need to maintain your life if you left. Not your salary — your real expenses once you strip out everything you spend because of the job. The apartment near the office, the dinners, the wardrobe. Most people find that it’s 40-60% of what they’re making now because so much of the status tax disappears with the job.

Your stagnation cost. What staying is already costing you — in skills you’re not building, positioning that gets harder to explain every year, experience in the thing you keep saying you’ll start when the timing is better. If you’ve already made up your mind to leave, every month you stay is a month you’re not compounding in the right direction.

None of these numbers are on your paycheck or offer letter. No one builds a spreadsheet for them.

But my “high-paying job” was costing me $120K a year.

My true hourly rate in banking was a fraction of what I made in my next job. After quitting, I saved and invested much more even though I made less. I started learning and growing in a field, where 5 years later, my unique skillset allowed me to build a secure 9-5 and 5-9.

Your numbers might be higher or lower than mine.

Come do the math with 800+ people next week.

I’m hosting a free live training on Tuesday, March 24 @ 7pm EST.

The Real Math Behind Your Golden Handcuffs (And What to Do About It)

Let’s see what numbers look like for you.

»» Sign up ««