HBR Guides to Managing Your Career Collection (6 Books)

CHAPTER 8

Can You Actually Afford to Change Your Career?

by Russell Clayton

Who wouldn’t want a meaningful career and better balance between work and home? For many of us, it’s finances that keep us from making a career change. Sure, our current job has lost its spark, but it’s stable. Dependable. Reliable. Steady. We worry and wonder: What would a career change do to our bank accounts? To our way of life? To our family? We assume that a major reinvention would involve a gap between paychecks when we’d leave our job and break into a new field. Sometimes we think (or we know) that the career we’d love would fill our days with more meaning but pay us less (significantly less, even).

Take Steve. A well-respected HR manager in the public ...