Hello everyone,
I am a nurse. I work more than full time and make over 100k/year. I am 28 years old, am married, and we think my wife is pregnant. Our goal for a long time has been to work and save until 30 and call ourselves barista FI and both work part time allowing our assets to keep growing. Current net worth is 350kish. I was projecting we would have 600kish at the time we switched to part time work at 30 yo.
Now COVID is here. Work is stressful. I am feeling burnt out. I have always been one to do a good job at work, so my reward has always been more work. I have many coworkers taking various types of covid leave, leaving even more of the work on me.
I am taking some time off work next month, hoping that will help. I have around 600 hours of various types of accrued leave. The opportunity has come up at work to switch to part time (20 hours per week) this year. I am not sure if I should make the jump early?
Reasons to make the jump now-
-Feeling burnt out
-The person I would be sharing hours with plans to retire in 2-3 years allowing me to go back to ft if desired
-Possibly 1st baby on the way
-I could pick up more shifts as desired
-when the other nurse retires and I can go back to full time I could do 2 years then to make up for the 2 years I would be skipping now(if I wanted)
Reasons to wait-
- we have not hit our goal (600k)
- we currently rent, I am concerned working part time may complicate getting a mortgage
- I would be forfeiting 4 hours sick leave and 5 hours vacation per month
- insurance would cost 250 more per month
-I just got promoted to a lead position (5% extra) so I would likely have to give that up hurting my resume
-I am the union president, we are starting negotiations in December meaning I’ll be spending time (2days per month) away from work anyways in 6 months
-with a baby on the way and 600 hours of leave I could take off a large amount of time to help with the burnout while collecting full pay/benefits
Basically if I switched to part time so would my wife and we would barely tread water financially. Again we could both pick up more shifts as desired to pay for extras as needed. It would be a simple life where if we want more we work more but have a lot of extra time.
Would you make the jump this year or wait at least another year?