Pay Dirt is Slate’s money advice column. Have a question? Send it to Athena and Elizabeth here. (It’s anonymous!)
Dear Pay Dirt,
In the last couple of years, I’ve become increasingly tired of the over-priced, crowded city in which I live and have decided it’s time to move on.
My goal is to spend one year living abroad/traveling and then pick a new city to settle in. I initially thought I could get a remote job (my current employer has no option for remote work) that would allow me to do this, but after a year of applying and getting nowhere, I changed tactics and started a business. The business currently brings in a little over $1,000 a month in profits, and I can run it from anywhere, but this isn’t enough to make the leap to a new country (even a cheap one).
My mother has said I can live with her rent-free as long as I want but I would need to quit my stable, full-time job to do so (she lives in another state). On the one hand, I think this makes the most sense since I would hardly have any living expenses and ample time to grow my business. On the other hand, I’m afraid if things don’t go as planned, I’ll find myself one of those sad, perpetually underemployed grown-ups living in their parent’s house indefinitely who goes around telling everyone about their unrealized dreams. Should I just stick it out for a while longer in my current job and city until I can afford to go abroad or should I pack up and stay with family until I’m ready to fly the nest (again)?
—Perpetually Indecisive
Dear Perpetually Indecisive,
Given your plans to travel and move to a new city, you don’t seem like the type who’d end up a sad, underemployed grown-up living in your parents’ house indefinitely. Your entrepreneurial ambitions would seem to indicate that you’re resourceful and creative in terms of figuring out how to make money, so if things don’t go as planned, I doubt you’d just throw in the towel, either.
That said, you should base your decision on what you think would best set you up to figure out your next long-term move, and part of that is figuring out how much money you’ll need to travel and comfortably move somewhere else and how long it will take you to get there. At your current job, you have a predictable salary so you can estimate that easily, but as you have probably already discovered, running a small business offers less certainty. It also offers more upside if you’re successful.
If you don’t have children, a mortgage, or other material obligations, it might be a good time to try to make your business work because you can easily switch courses if it doesn’t work out and you may not be able to do that later in life. But if stability is more important to you, keeping the job you have is a lower risk. So what you really need to understand about yourself is whether you really like running a business (doing it full time is very different than doing it as a side project on top of a stable salary) and what your personal tolerance for risk is. There’s no correct answer; it’s a matter of how invested you are in your business and how much uncertainty you can handle.
—Elizabeth
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