What if Your Dream Job isn’t Lucrative?

I spend so much time encouraging people to go out and holler for a dollar, Honey Boo Boo that I forget this very simple fact sometimes.

To me, “dream job” has always been synonymous with, “makes me very wealthy.” Go figure. For whatever reason, when I fantasize, I imagine myself writing leisurely from a cabana somewhere in Bora Bora wearing an all-white swimsuit and picking plump grapes off a charcuterie board.

It’s not lost on me that this just sounds like an expensive vacation. But the operative word here is “dream,” and I’m not about to manifest anything short of ludicrous.

So when a reader DM’ed me on Instagram and asked me my thoughts about what to make of it when your dream job isn’t lucrative (she wanted to be a teacher), the first thing I thought was:

Oh my God, you are at least a 400% better person than I am.

And the second thought was, That’s an outstanding question.

It never occurred to me that someone’s dream job might be low-paying. But now that it has, I think there are two major aspects of this question.

While this site may suggest otherwise, money isn’t technically the endgame

I’ve always equated money with freedom because my personal finance education underpinnings come from the financial independence community (an intense and common sense-driven approach to money management that says if you save like your house is on fire, pun intended re: fire and the “financial independence, retire early” acronym, you can retire decades ahead of schedule and essentially buy the rest of your life back from #TheMan).

The implicit suggestion here is that your job is not something you want to be doing – in this philosophy and mindset, you’re most interested in getting on with your life in a post-work era before you receive your AARP card in the mail.

The FIRE icons (like a guy named Mr. Money Mustache) have the most hilariously pure hobbies – wood-working, biking, creating podcasts helping other people do the same. In order to achieve FIRE status, you have to have 25x your annual expenditures saved. The math works out such that you’re assuming an average rate of return in your investments of 8% and you’re using 4% per year, that way the interest always replaces what you use and the total account balance never goes down. My head exploded when I first heard the concept.

Imagine you spend $30,000 per year (this is actually almost exactly my annual spend) – this would mean that once I have 25x that amount saved, or $750,000, I could live on that money in perpetuity, assuming I only used $30,000 of it per year (4%). If the market grows by 8% annually, the money I use will always be replenished. Of course, this is a mathematical vacuum, because you’ll always have the odd year where things tank and your money isn’t replaced by compound interest.

It’s such a great community – but there’s a parallel path that’s equally desirable, and that is having a job you’re obsessed with.

If you have a job that you’d do anyway for free, then does it really matter if you’re saving thousands of dollars a month and going on expensive vacations to Bora Bora every week? Probably not – because even if you were retired, you’d still want to be doing it.

Work is just an exchange of your time for someone else’s money. If you’re enjoying what you’re investing that time in, then the money is gravy. You need it to live, but you don’t need a supercharged path to wealth and financial independence because you don’t actually want to be independent from your work.

The trap that so many of us fall into is believing that money is the end goal – it’s not. The end goal is freedom and happiness, and it just so happens that usually money is the means by which we can achieve those things. But if your dream job is the means by which you achieve them, you don’t need 25x your annual spend in a brokerage account to be contented.

Your passion doesn’t have to be your job, if your current job is otherwise great

The job that pays the bills in my life is a UX writing role that I am comically fortunate to have – I work for one of the best companies in the country that consistently makes top 10 lists for best employers, and I am compensated fairly in exchange for working with great people on interesting, challenging work.

In short, I got really, really lucky. (I also worked hard, but I’d be remiss not to credit the luck that contributed to my situation.)

That said, is optimizing copy and user experience through A/B iterative testing my most fiery passion in this lifetime? No. No, it isn’t.

Do I enjoy it? Yes. Am I good at it? Yes. Hell, do I feel some level of passion about it? Of course I do. I think we all feel some passion about the things at which we excel.

But do I believe I was put on this planet to create incremental revenue through UX optimization? My hunch is no.

Here’s the very liberating truth I’d love for you to walk away with today: If your job is enjoyable, challenging, and pays you well, it doesn’t have to be your passion. Sure, if you can swing it, incredible – but don’t give up a great thing because somewhere along the line you read in your Millennial Guidebook that if your creativity and passion isn’t paying the bills that you’re a failure.

Sometimes when our favorite thing becomes a job, it starts to feel like a job. I genuinely have a hard time just attending exercise classes now and enjoying them because I can only think like an instructor. I’m either in learning mode or critiquing mode, and it’s increasingly difficult to just find a release (which was the sole outcome prior to my fitness instructor career). It’s not that I’d have it any other way, but merely proof that sometimes the magic of a side hustle or hobby is that it’s NOT responsible for covering rent and car insurance.

That’s a lot of pressure to put on something you do for fun.

Marry a realistic understanding of math with the magic of your expectations

You need money to live.

That’s just the truth.

But how much you need varies by the type of lifestyle you want to live. My monthly expenditures are usually somewhere around $2,600, and my take-home pay outpaces that by more than double. This tells me that if I found the dream job of my life and it paid $3,000/mo., I’d still be OK. That’s a freeing thought in and of itself.

However, I know myself, and I know that having extra (and the ability to save quickly) makes me happy. The knowledge that I always have an escape chute enables me to breathe easier. If something ever went wrong – if I ever had a change of heart – I know I could pick up the metaphoric phone and pull a, “Mom, will you come pick me up?” as my emergency fund and low cost of living whisk me away to Never Never Land.

For that reason, I’ll still probably continue my income strategies and schemes. The best thing about your financial strategy is the ability to change your mind. Maybe someday I’ll become a person as wholesome as the one who DM’ed me.