3. Leaving Corporate: How I Knew, What I Saved, and What Happened Next

You know that feeling when you're mentally ready to quit your 95, you have been quite quitting for months, but your bank account is like, no, we need the loud working place. This is that episode for anyone who is sitting at those crossroads, we're gonna be talking all about the financial reset that I kind of did before I left my corporate 95 to build what is now financial girl that you're listening to. I asked you guys, what is holding you back from actually taking the step for yourself, leaving your 95, maybe working on a more creative business, anything but, and these were your top questions. So in this episode, we are going through how much you should save before quitting your 95. How do you know when it's the right time to quit your 95, dealing with the uncertainty and the regular income and lifestyle and mindset shifts that you need to be thinking about after quitting and unexpected lessons and what actually mattered when it came down to the realities of life. And above all, guys, you wanna remember, this isn't financial advice, it's financially hot advice. No shame, no guilt, no spreadsheets, except one because I did use one to actually decide to quit. And no pretending that a financially hot journey is linear. So how much should you save before quitting your job? Now, a lot of the questions around this was like, how much did I actually save before quitting? Is there a golden rule? Is there a percentage of salary that you should put away? And how do you also make sure that you're financially going to be okay before you quit? And what I really want to emphasize here is that, like this is a really important question. This is, this should be the thing that you're thinking about when you're also deciding to quit your job because we, this is a constant cost of living crisis out here in the UK, okay? We're not gonna deny that. But also 60% of people who want to actually quit their job for them, the thing stopping them is financial insecurity. So you want freedom to make that choice in an empowered way, right? You don't want to be forced into the situation, but you also want to make it with clarity. And what you don't need is infinite savings over the top savings to actually last year give you an unreasonably long runway to last without nine to five. So what I would say is you don't need predictable cash flow, but you do need the skills to generate or build a predictable cash flow, right? And you also need the evidence. So I, from my few years of earning money as a creator, I proved to myself that, okay, I have the ability to not only charge my worth, but also when I do charge it, it's, it's, it's high enough that I can make a living off of it, right? And I just want to emphasize that when I quit my job, I do not have the numbers. I did not have the numbers I have now. I don't even have large numbers now, right? I had less than 10K, less than maybe like even 8K followers on Instagram. I had less than 30K followers on TikTok. I had less than 20K subscribers on YouTube. So relatively small numbers, but I had got to a point where I was charging well and I was also getting enough traction to be able to comfortably quit my job. I also did a lot of part time freelancing work and do a bit of social stuff for them and that also contributed to the income that I was earning at the time. I had previously earned and could earn. So it wasn't just all built on my social media and like brand deals and stuff like that. But if we wanna think about what is the ideal, quit fund formula, right? We want to focus on what does it cost to live your life? And this is not luxury life, okay? If you're at the point of your life where you wanna quit your nine to five to do something on your own, whether that is something that you've been passionate about for years or you just want something different, now is not the time to live luxury, right? And you can, I'm not gonna stop you, you can live luxury, but you're just making things harder for yourself if your nine to five is kind of, is not the place you wanna be right now, right? So I think scale down your living costs in terms of don't actually scale them down. But if you think about what are your bare minimum, things that you're paying month to month to be able to have a roof over your head, eat food, and pay your bills and get some Wi-Fi. You know, the absolute basics, what are those per month? And maybe times that by six. Personally, I did nine. So I gave myself nine months of runway. I probably could have given myself six, but nine made me feel comfortable as a risk averse person. And I also did not include any accrued income from that as well. So what I mean by accrued income is, income I was due to receive either by my corporate workplace or all the other little things I was doing on the side, not little things I need to get out of the habit of down, down playing all the work I used to do. So I did have other things coming in and I didn't include that in the funds I needed to build. I also made the decision to leave my nine to five quite impulsively. So I didn't, for example, give myself six months to build a six month fund. I just immediately cut all of my sinking funds going to holiday savings and things that I was saving up for. I just sacrificed those to quit my job. Basically, I relabeled my savings if you want to put it in a much simpler way. And I don't know if I massively don't regret doing that because I still went on holiday and had fun. And that kind of run into my savings a bit more. So while I relabeled my funds, I didn't actually follow in action what the labels suggested for me to do, right? However, I did have that income coming that I didn't account for when I was building those funds so it still helped in terms of being able to survive. I still had money coming in. Six months was ideal. I did nine months. So I gave myself almost three months of wiggle room, which actually came in handy because I ended up still going on holidays and things like that and spending the money that was supposed to be my emergency fund for giving me this runway, having left my job, right? So what you can do instead is maybe you have six months of your emergency living costs and maybe you give yourself like two months extra money and that's your emergency wiggle room. Now, all of this said, this is your quitting your job fund. This should be on top of your emergency fund. So your emergency fund is a very similar kind of formula in terms of how you should build that three to six months of like absolutely basic living expenses but don't use that as a fund to quit your job. That is, it's an emergency fund in terms of, okay, if you were literally made redundant and next week you had to you had to find a new job, that is what an emergency is. But if you're actively premeditating, I just took that from like true crime and crime like TV shows and things. I don't know if I can apply that word to thinking about finances but here we are. If you're planning to leave your job and you're not being forced out or it's not a decision you're making under pressure, I would suggest building a new fund and not using your emergency fund to do so because then you'd have to rebuild your emergency fund while also not having a job which might add a bit of financial anxiety into the little big pot of things that's going on right now. And you might hear the term runway, like I think I've already said it in this episode but you want to think of your quitting fund like a plane runway, like literally how long you've got left until you need to take it off, like you need that space to get off the ground. So whether that is okay, you need, like for example, for me, I gave myself nine months to try and test loads of different, not business ideas, but I was just testing out like different ways of working digital products, working with like freelancing or contracting clients. I was trying out loads of things to figure out what it is I want to do with a creative job. Now that I don't have a nine to five, like I didn't initially quit to do this full time. How do you know it's the right time to quit? And these questions were around, well, I'm glad you noticed the right time. Did you wait until your business income was replacing your salary? Did you take a leap of faith? Was it super impulsive or was it logical? So for me, it was a mixture of things, like I said, I think before, like I'm a very logical person, like I'm not super impulsive. Like my definition of impulsivity is the fact that I quit having only thought about it for like maybe four or five weeks, whereas maybe your definition of impulsive might be like I decided this morning and I had in my notice in this afternoon. For me, I was ruminating on it for a while. I asked the opinions of I'm a lot of friends and family before I did it and for me, it was just like growing feeling inside of me that I had to do it. And if I didn't do it, I would just regret it. And so it was a mixture of both in terms of like what I was feeling inside. I did not wait until my business replaced my salary because I didn't have like a repeatable, passive business structure yet. It's something I still want to build, but I really want to build things in the right way. And I get in my own way when it comes to that a lot of the time. Like I don't want to build for the sake of building. I don't want to earn for the sake of earning and that's a really huge reason as to why I left audit or accounting in the first place. If you go back and watch my old videos, I just needed, I need a job where I have personal impact. I can feel good about what I do and it's a necessary thing for me. I've realized that now about myself so when it comes to my business replacing my salary, I quit to be able to do that. However, that being said, like I said in the first section, I did have income coming in. I had accrued invoices waiting to be paid. I had super low costs. I have a high level of trust in myself to generate the money that I need and that might sound silly. Like you're like, "Oh, you quit because you trust yourself?" Yes, yes, I did. There's an 80% truth to that, right? I trust myself but also that trust is built on proof. I have generated, like being a creator, as you know, is super lucrative and it was lucrative for me at such a small scale and I knew that the scale that was at then. If I was getting upwards of 20k on the scale that was at then, then surely the more I grow, it's only going to get more. Also, I'm also super selective. It's not like I need to do loads of brand deals to make loads of money. I am charging quite highly for why I'm worth and also I'm trying to diversify how I earn that money in the first place, right? That's also why I wanted to quit because I want to experiment with the ways that I could try and earn money. So, yeah, for me, it was a combination of the fact that I had built that proof, which means I could repeat that, you know, the proof in the future. And also, it was just growing inside of me that it felt like the right time. So, I acted on that. And if you're looking for an answer there of something you can apply to yourself, if you're like someone who is sitting in your corporate job and you're maybe where I was when I was thinking about handing in my notice, you could kind of apply this as a decision framework. Like, think about can you cover 60 to 80% of your needs? Like, do you, are you confident in your ability to do that for the length of the runway that you're emerging or that you're quit fund would cover from the first section? Do you have an actual plan? Like, do you have people coming to you for services work? If you're creators, it brand deals that you've got coming in consistently. If you're working on a business, have you got like, I don't know, leads? Have you got customers ready? Which leads on to number three, like, have you proven to yourself that you can make money outside of your pay slip? Because it's that proof that really will give you that feeling of, yeah, it's the right time to leave, even if the business doesn't match your income. So, dealing with uncertainty and a regular income, this has been a little hard for me in terms of the budgeting side. And like, what I do with my money in a non-regular way. Because my budgeting and my personal finance routines were all based around the cyclical nature of my finances in the first place. Like, that's what drove everything was my monthly pay slip. So, without that, it's been a little bit harder because I haven't adopted a monthly salary from my business yet. And that's at the time of recording this episode. So, that is changing soon. But for the last like eight to nine months, I haven't had a regular salary from my business yet. So, the income and certainty has been a source of stress. But honestly, just purely because I'm not used to it and I need to figure out a system. So, I don't think it's something negative and something that you should fear if you're thinking about making a similar leap of faith. Or if you think that that's going to be like, it's going to be too messy to handle. Because it is just a new environment. Like, when you got your job, it was a new environment and you figured things out. So, for me, my budgeting method has kind of reversed. So, in terms of, instead of thinking, okay, how much can I spend? How much should I spend? Where is all my money going? I'm thinking, okay, how much do I need to make? And how much do I need to top up in all of my different funds to pay all of these different costs or expenses in my life? And then I can build my business around that. What the uncertainty, though, and for example, I was asked a lot of questions around, how do I mentally handle the fluctuating income? And what does financial stress look like in self-employment? It is just the unpredictability. Like, you cannot predict if a client will come back. You cannot predict if you would literally even get paid. Like, you might have heard of the fact that, you know, late payments or overdue invoices are quite a common thing in the creative industry and the creator industry as a whole. And that is financial stress for me. Because, first of all, I don't like, I don't like confrontation. So, I don't like chasing people. And I don't like, you know, weird tones and emails. It just makes me uncomfortable, but it has something you have to do in this industry. So, for me, that contributes to a level of financial stress. But the fluctuating income, again, I mentioned it earlier, but like the self-trust element is a big part of that in terms of, okay, income is double this month. It might be 20% 10% next month. If you're not okay with that actually happening and realizing itself in real life, you can either, you know, go through a year of it and you get better at it. Or this lifestyle isn't for you. Or you just set things up in a way that you are mentally okay with. So, for example, if you would really struggle with income uncertainty, then maybe you actually need a much longer runway to be able to quit your job. So, maybe instead of six months of a quitting fund, you have 12 months. And then from that 12 months, maybe if it's in an unlimited company, you structure it in a way where you get paid, a regular salary every single month. So, obviously, you would have to talk to an accountant to do that. And like there are other people to other professional experts to be able to help you actually realize that in your actual life. But that's a way that you could combat the income uncertainty by, you know, preparing for longer. So, you are, it's not like, you know, this life wouldn't be for you if that was the case, but it just takes some thinking ahead and some strategy. So, you could also think about, you know, attracting or setting up your deals or your income in kind of ways that where you get retainers or you get monthly payments that are equal, you know. There are ways to structure your business to give you that reliability and remove the fluctuation from month to month. That's something that I'm personally working towards to help with the financial stress of like income uncertainty. But right now, I'm just dealing with it with a mixture of delusion and self trust and frugality. Lifestyle and mindset shifts after quitting. So, these were questions like, do I miss the corporate vibe? What risks did I weigh before quitting? And like, how I actually adjusted my lifestyle? And I did make a lot of downgrace to be honest in terms of I just really simplified my spending. And my costs of living are quite low anyway, so I didn't have to like, for example, downsize my living situation or anything like that. Like I probably would have if I did before. But you just have to think about like, well, you don't have to, but what I did was really just think about like, what are my needs and my wants? And what is more important to me right now and what is important to me is building this business and being in this field and really embracing this time in my life without the anxiety, without the stress. So, to do that, if I shop less, if I reduce my foods, if I'm cooking more, if I'm going on holiday less, like I'm personally okay with that, but you might not be. So, those are questions I've asked myself and made decisions off the back of, which I'm happy with, to be honest, like I don't think I would get that later on. I would have gotten not quitting and not to get a chance on all this later on. And then the other thing I just really, I'm still struggling with, like, quite a few months after I've left, is just a structure of your day and like the control over your time. I am someone who gets really easily stuck in the idea and the idea refinement stage, let's call it that. And I struggle with execution. Execution was really easy in a corporate job because you are literally like, you cannot progress if you don't execute, right? You are in a big organization and you're part, you're cogging a wheel or all these kind of things. When I stress yourself, you have to get things done. And you also, like I think I'm just kind of struggling to get out of the 95 mindset as well. So I'm struggling to find when the best time is for me to work out how I structure my walks and my, like my mindsety things because there are no rules. So I have to create my own rules. Then I have to also feel right and like good about those rules. And that's the kind of gray area and like the muddy waters that I'm navigating right now. But that I'm absolutely not going to complain about that. That's like the best problem to have. When do I get to work out? I don't have to go at peak time. Like hello, that's the biggest ever advantage to any of this is I get to avoid the peak times of the gym. Unexpected lessons and what actually mattered. So these were things like how did people react when you quit, how do you set priorities, how long did it take to actually replace your salary? So my total revenue, if I'm going to start with the money one, the total revenue in voice has currently matched my corporate salary, but that's not the same take home pay. You have to just remember that. So just because I'm earning the same as my corporate salary in terms of like actually invoicing for that amount, it doesn't mean I'm getting that amount in my bank account and I'll make a lot more content to explain this because business finances are so confusing. They are so confusing and so overwhelming and so I'm going to do some content with my accountant to help you with that, but it didn't take long, but it could have been faster. And I will explain on that. I will explain it in a further episode as well. How did people react when I quit and how do I set priorities? So people, when people hear what I've done, I am very in my head about emphasizing that I had this corporate job before and now I do this and I'm just navigating it and all this kind of stuff. So I am still kind of navigating my own ego with this a little bit, but in terms of people reacting like so many people were super supportive, absolutely no one was unsupportive to my face anyway. And I think that is just a testament to my circles and how much support I get from them. And I've had quite a lot of people tell me that they wonder why I was never in this career in the first place. When I say career, not creator, but in terms of like a creative career, guys, the amount of times I would tell people what I did and there would be like, what you're in finance, you're a consultant. Like someone years ago told me that I was way too bubbly and charismatic to be in finance. And it's not that you can't be bubbly and try the charismatic in finance, but I think it just proves that I've always felt like a little bit of a fish out of water in corporate and now I just don't. I feel a lot more myself and I think people around me can see that which is nice. And in terms of time, like I mentioned before, honestly, like deciding what to do, deciding how to make money, making a plan to make that money, it's all easy. Trusting yourself to actually do the stuff and do the work and implement the strategies and earn the money. That's the hard part. So setting priorities for me has kind of, it's constantly revolving around the action and how I can do things in a way that I feel good about because now that I have the luxury of like decision-making is mine and I can do, I can strategize my business in the way that I want. I struggling to even navigate that because it's like, oh now the world is my oyster, I'm so overwhelmed. I will soon and I'm hoping that I can like expand on that in further episodes because I think that I think there's a right way to do things in terms of maintaining your sense of self, not burning out, feeling good about your work, but also having maximum impact on people that I'm learning from, a lot from my own like idols and people I look up to in like the creature industry and like even in my personal circles and my networks and stuff. So I will make more content on that. But it is hard. It's hard to set priorities when there are a million priorities you could set. And that brings us to the end of all the questions. I really want to end this with the fact that, you know, you don't have to feel 100% ready to quit. You don't have to have the most perfect set of funds. You just have to really think about what it is you want from your next step and get really intuitive about your gut, I think because those two factors really play a lot into how you'll feel about your decision later on. Like despite, despite being able to save for your your quit fund and do all the things in the right way, you need to feel good about the decision because that, I think that always is the thing that influences like, oh, in 60 years when you're retired, what do you think you'll regret that the gut feelings when you make these decisions? Those are the things you're going to remember not doing it perfectly. If you want my actual tracker or the spreadsheet that I use to figure out your, you know, your quitting number, the actual number that you'd want to see in that fund or the number that would give you that 60% confidence to leave. Click the link in the description. It's linked there for you. And don't forget to join us in the weekly newsletter for a lot more insights, articles to level up your conversations to get more financially hot and I will catch you in the next episode.