I think the biggest privilege I have is actually not my savings, but the knowledge that it probably shouldn’t be hard to find a job that covers my expenses if things don’t work out. It’s unlikely that I can get in the same position I left with the same compensation, but I’m okay with that.
I did manage to save about 5.5 years of expenses before leaving. But I’m 35 with 2 small kids (2 and 4), so I definitely need to earn a living. Having a decent amount of savings definitely helped with the change, but I believe I would have still left if I had less or no savings. If that was the case, I would have probably tried to find a part-time remote job (or contracting) that would have allowed me to do something for myself while still paying the bills.
I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
I think the biggest privilege I have is actually not my savings, but the knowledge that it probably shouldn’t be hard to find a job that covers my expenses if things don’t work out. It’s unlikely that I can get in the same position I left with the same compensation, but I’m okay with that.
I did manage to save about 5.5 years of expenses before leaving. But I’m 35 with 2 small kids (2 and 4), so I definitely need to earn a living. Having a decent amount of savings definitely helped with the change, but I believe I would have still left if I had less or no savings. If that was the case, I would have probably tried to find a part-time remote job (or contracting) that would have allowed me to do something for myself while still paying the bills.
I think the biggest privilege is being able to say
while also recognising that you are richer than 99% of people in the world.