Hello team,
Need some outside perspective for our current situation.
We're a married couple. Through high earnings, side income and frugal living (70% saving rate), we were able to achieve a significant sum in invested assets and a paid off condo.
The situation is that my wife is tired of her job (accountant) because she has been working there for 5 years, doing basically the same things month to month. The company has grown from 5 to around 40 people during this time, so she has much more load now. Her boss doesn't want to hire any help for her though motivating this decision by stating that my wife only works 38 hours per week now. My wife would prefer to work around 20-24 hours per week eventually, and she told her boss about it, but the boss kind of ignored it for now.
She has a good salary, and is always praised for her work and contributions to the company (she has been taking care of the whole financial side of the business for 5 years). The negative side of this is that she couldn't take a vacation longer than 1.5 weeks for all these years, somebody needs to keep billing and doing payroll (show must go on). And she has constant stress of having to work super hard to finish everything on time.
We have been planning to visit our home country for 2-3 months, and then maybe slow travelling the world for a month or two at a time (returning home in between). All these plans are not achievable with her current job as she can't perform her work remotely. On the other hand, I work remotely most of the time and my company is ok with me travelling extensively.
Our current expenses can be covered by our side income (35% of our basic expenses) and investments (65%). In addition to that, I don't plan to leave my job for quite some time, as I love it and I earn twice as much as my wife.
What's the problem, you ask?
My wife is afraid that if she leaves her job, and then something goes wrong financially and she will have to search for a new job, and it will be worse than her current one (probably less pay, worse overall conditions), and it will be even more stress, etc. Basically, unknown is scary.
To be honest, travelling the world is mostly my goal, I just see that she's not happy with her job right now, and think why not leave it and take a break for quite some time. She is not as excited about travelling as I am, but she enjoys it.
Maybe she will even get pregnant during this break, as we're working on it now. If she gets pregnant in the next couple months, then she will be eligible for the full maternity and parental benefits (max $25k over 1.5 years). If she gets pregnant later than 5 months after she leaves her job, then she won't receive any. Of course, you can't really plan whether you get pregnant or not, and when it happens. So, she worries a bit about these benefits, but I try to tell her that $25k over 1.5 years is not that much taking into account our current financial situation.
If she takes this career break then she can help me work on our side business to grow it.
Update:
Another thing I forgot to mention is that she's afraid that she will feel useless without a job and not contributing income to our family finances while I'm working.
/Update
I thought maybe some outside perspective will help her decide.
Thank you!
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