Work Your Money, Not Your Life

How to Balance Your Career and Personal Finances to Get What You Want

Roger Ma, Jennifer Ma

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781119600367
• eBook ISBN: 9781119600374
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Finance

Your all-in-one guide to getting your career and finances in order — for greater clarity, happiness, and peace of mind. Studies show that if you're like the majority of young professionals, you feel dissatisfied with your job, your finances, or your overall station in life. It can seem impossible to disentangle the work stuff, the money stuff, and the personal stuff, because they're all inextricably linked. But the good news is, you don't have to go at it alone: Work Your Money, Not Your Life is your all-in-one guide to achieving both your career and financial goals so that you can get where you want to be. In his debut book, Roger Ma, an award-winning financial planner and a publisher strategist at Google, offers secrets on how you can craft a meaningful career, gain financial comfort, and achieve a greater sense of purpose. And the premise behind it all is this: money affects every part of our lives. Simply by sorting out your personal finances (and it isn't as bad as it sounds!), you can build a foundation from which you'll be able to find the right career path, visualize your desired lifestyle, and turn your dreams into a reality. You'll learn how to:

• Relieve yourself of the work, money, and personal stressors that keep you up at night
• Dispel the job myths that are preventing you from a more rewarding career
• Apply the fundamentals of personal finance to your unique situation, without all the confusing jargon
• Prioritize and balance your career and money needs through exercises and easy-to-use templates, launching yourself on the path to the life satisfaction you desire

When the life you're living and the life you want to live don't match up, everything feels off balance. Where do you begin trying to connect the dots? Start with this book. Through accessible, practical advice, you'll learn the career and financial strategies you need to live the life you deserve.

Part I
Here's the Deal

“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”

– Albert Einstein

I'm sure you're eager to jump into the actual nuts and bolts of optimizing your career and finances. But before concerning ourselves with any practical details or fancy arithmetic, let's take a step back and identify why the work we'll be doing together in this book is important.

Although work and money are interconnected, the extent to which these two areas of our lives impact and inform each other may not be so obvious. It certainly wasn't to me. However, I've found that creating an integrated work and money strategy can empower people to gain more control over their lives than they might have imagined, leading to greater happiness and a clearer sense of purpose. This has certainly been the case for many of my financial planning clients, as well as for me personally.

We'll cover several key concepts in this section that will help motivate you on your journey toward professional and financial well-being. In particular, we'll examine how your living expenses can either help or hurt your job and life flexibility. We'll also clear up some common misconceptions about how to pursue a satisfying career by dispelling several of the myths that may have led us into unrewarding jobs. The insights you gain will lay the foundation for your work and money plan.

Chapter 1
You're Worth More Than You Think

Since you're reading this book, chances are that you can relate to my story in some way. Maybe you have what is considered a “good” job by most standards, yet you feel like you don't have much to show for it. Your net worth seems to be growing slowly, or not at all, and may even be negative … and to make matters worse, it's not like you hop out of bed in the morning skipping to work. Or maybe you love your career, but you can't figure out how to meet your financial goals. At times you may wonder, “What am I doing all this for? I imagined life to turn out a little differently than this.”

You're not alone. Nearly 70% of Americans don't like their jobs, according to a Gallup study,¹ and 65% of Americans lose sleep over their financial worries, based on a CreditCards.com poll.² Career and money woes appear to be especially prevalent among young professionals. In fact, a LinkedIn survey found that 75% of people in their 20s and 30s had experienced “insecurity and doubt” around work and money (no duh, right?) — or what they might call a “quarter-life crisis.”³

While many of us have tried to improve our careers and our finances, we may have done so by approaching them as two totally separate problems. But in reality, decisions you make in one of these areas can have a huge impact on all other areas of your life. When I came to this realization for myself, it totally changed how I thought about work and money, and how I chose to live my life.

Net Worth Is Not the Be-All and End-All

“You are not your job, you're not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet.”⁴

Yeah, that's a line from the movie Fight Club, but it's true: your net worth doesn't define who you are as a person or equate to your self-worth. Yet, early in my career, that's exactly what I thought. It was a pretty demoralizing mindset, especially when I stacked myself up against the billionaire corporate titans who graced the covers of Forbes and Fortune.

I was so focused on the dollars and cents (or lack thereof) that I neglected to account for everything else I had going for me. I was a young, college-educated professional with plenty of time to build my skills and earnings potential — my human capital. And according to the College Board, the value of your human capital can be significant, with average lifetime earnings for a college graduate estimated at nearly $1.2 million.⁵ Unfortunately, human capital isn't an asset that is typically accounted for in the calculations of a simple net-worth statement — but maybe it should be.

If you think about your total wealth as being made up of both your human and financial capital (Figure 1.1), it becomes clear how your work and money are connected, and why it's so important to find a job you like. In the beginning of our careers, our ability to work and earn income actually comprises the majority of our wealth. As we work, we begin to convert part of our earnings potential into real dollars, which allows us to fund our living expenses, save for our financial goals, and grow our financial net worth. During our prime working years, and especially early on, small improvements to our human capital, like building new skills or starting a side hustle, could have a much larger impact on our future net worth than trying to earn an extra 1% on our tiny investment portfolio.

Figure 1.1 The evolution of your human and financial capital.

Saving Money Is About More Than Just Retirement

Do you ever think about how bizarre the concept of saving for retirement is? After finally getting out of school, you enter the workforce raring to start a real job (or if nothing else, to be getting a paycheck), only to immediately be told that you should start socking away money for retirement — a point that feels like eons into the future when you're supposed to just play golf, volunteer, and sit on the beach. What the heck?

The reason this sequence of events may sound odd is because there's nothing logical about retiring. In fact, retirement as we know it didn't even exist until the late nineteenth century, when a politically savvy German chancellor invented the concept. For all of recorded history up until that point, you worked until you died — usually in labor-intensive jobs.⁶ Even when retirement programs did begin to gain popularity, workers couldn't begin collecting pensions until they were 65 or 70 years old. At the time, a lot of people died before they could even make it to retirement — and if they did make it, they often didn't get to enjoy it for long.

Fast forward to the present day, and it becomes clear that our attitudes about retirement haven't caught up with the times. The median retirement age in the United States today is 62,⁷ despite the fact that life expectancies have leapt to the 80s.⁸ Meanwhile, work has become much less physically taxing (gotta love the information superhighway!). While it would be tough for most 75-year-olds to toil at the steel mills all day, they might not find it so hard to consult for companies, write memos, or drive for Uber. And sure, playing golf and sitting on the beach sounds fun when you're working 60-hour weeks, but that could get old really quick (no pun intended).

Don't get me wrong — I do think saving for a potential retirement is important, but what if we could reframe our thinking about jobs, retirement, and this large financial goal? What if you could find a job that you loved doing, and that you didn't want to retire from? In that paradigm, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Here's the Deal
• Part II: Figure Out Your Starting Point
• Part III: Optimize Your Job
• Part IV: Optimize Your Finances
• Part V: How to Stay the Course and Enjoy the Journey
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• About the Authors
• End User License Agreement