Like you, I struggled on whether I should downgrade my career for a lesser stress job, but the downside is, I will lose out financially.
Let me share with you what I did and how I was able to have a better quality of life.
If you are thinking whether to downgrade your job, I recommend that you do not do it until your new lower level job has one or all of the followings :
The effective working hours in your new role must match or be equal to your current role
Here’s a truth most people overlook, a high salary doesn’t automatically mean you’re earning good money. I once had an impressive title, substantial paycheck.
But when I calculated my actual hourly rate, I discovered I was earning per hour similar to an entry level worker in retail. I don’t even get paid overtime.
Consider this, earning $100,000 annually while working 70-hour weeks translates to roughly $27 per hour. Someone making $50,000 working standard 40-hour weeks earns $24 per hour, nearly the same, with far more time for life outside work.
Those extra hours come at a steep cost, time you could spend with family, building relationships, or developing new skills that compound your value over time.
Before accepting any lower position, calculate the effective hourly rate. Divide the salary by your true working hours, including not just physical presence but mental load which is the time spent thinking about work problems even when you’re off the clock.
Your new position must offer comparable or better hourly compensation when factored this way.
The actual value you get from your work must increase
A pro tip is to ensure your skills significantly exceed the position requirements. This mismatch creates enormous value where you’re being paid for time you are using towards better wealth building activities.
In my current role, my official schedule is nine hours daily, but my actual work hours is perhaps two to three hours maximum.
Being overqualified for the position means tasks that consume an entire day for others take me a fraction of that time. This leaves me with six to seven hours of paid “free time” every single day.
When I work two hours but get compensated for nine, the value extraction from my employment multiplies by 4.5 times.
I essentially have a full-time salary that funds the pursuit of my own interests for most of each day.
If you divide it to per hour basis, I am actually getting paid very well despite my lower annual package.
You need to have a wealth generation plan in mind
When you want to downgrade your role, it doesn’t mean you will have a drop in wealth building. Having a high salary doesn’t matter if you don’t have the skill to put it into proper use.
This is where this strategy of taking a lower end job becomes transformative. With those six to seven hours of daily availability, I converted them into an investment education and wealth-building operation.
Property Investment: With dedicated research time, I spent over a year identifying undervalued properties. When you can only afford one investment property, every detail matters.
I studied everything from construction quality to renovation costs, neighborhood dynamics to rental demand patterns.
I secured tenants myself to eliminate agent fees. I maximized this opportunity, paying minimum down payment and investing the remaining capital in dividend-yielding blue-chip stocks.
Stock Market: I taught myself financial analysis, reading annual reports, understanding balance sheet mechanics, identifying accounting red flags.
I had time to read articles from Seeking Alpha, Wall Street Journal, South China Morning Post, and Nikkei Asia.
I engaged deeply with investment communities online, discovering strategies I would never have encountered otherwise.
Today, my passive income from rental property and dividend investments exceeds what I sacrificed by accepting the lower position.
Every dollar from salary, rent, and dividends flows systematically into government-backed blue-chip stocks yielding 5% annually.
Additional income stream
I’m currently leveraging my available time in the office to explore AI applications and social media content creation.
I try to create content specifically for financial education based on research I’ve already conducted for my own investments.
Since the foundational research serves my personal needs anyway, creating content from it requires minimal additional effort.
This continuous self-education during work hours occasionally impresses my supervisors with cutting-edge knowledge.
More importantly, if I can get income from content creation, in addition to my dividend payout and rental income, it insulates me from income volatility in ways my higher-ranking colleagues will never achieve.
Company that has flexibility to your work hours
My current position offers substantial work-from-home flexibility, a practice that became widespread globally following the COVID-19 pandemic. Remote work capability provides extraordinary autonomy over daily life.
As long as one team member maintains office presence, I can choose which days to work remotely.
This flexibility has revolutionized my work-life integration. I was able to exercise at home during working hours, manage personal errands efficiently, and coordinate home maintenance without consuming vacation time.
Given my manageable workload, I could finish all my work while I am in the office and effectively do my own things during the day of my work from home.
This gives me an effective 4 days of work per week and gives me a 3 day weekend. But of course I need to be around my laptop when I work from home.
Before downgrading, look for positions that offer flexible benefits like working from home and you will effectively have an extra day off per week.
An extra unexpected benefit from these arrangement
An unexpected advantage emerged from this approach, because I constantly consume newspapers and financial publications to manage my investments, I’ve developed genuine expertise across numerous domains.
I can engage in sophisticated conversations with individuals far above my age bracket. I could strike conversations with anyone because I was well aware of what is going on around the world. Previously, I struggled to hold substantive conversations.
From these readings, I sound smart whenever I open my mouth and in addition with my good work performances, I was given chances to promote a few times which I rejected.
Even my bosses were puzzled why I was always rejecting chances people wanted but couldn’t get.
This kind of career choice requires discipline because you are a full time employee that is self employed
This approach only succeeds if you deploy your free time productively.
If you spend your free time at your new job socializing aimlessly or consuming entertainment, you are just wasting your time and you should just continue to climb the corporate ladder.
Some of my former subordinates have implemented similar strategies successfully. One operates a chicken farm in another country, managing it remotely with a local partner.
Another opened a barbecue restaurant. Both leverage their limited office responsibilities to build independent businesses.
Although my position was higher, they obviously made more money than me.
So should you downgrade your job position
My advice is this, if you work in an industry where you can’t achieve at least one of the benefits mentioned above, downgrading probably isn’t worthwhile. That said, if you have non-financial reasons for making the change, that’s a different story, such as stress or mental health etc. . The points I’ve discussed focus purely on monetary considerations.
Taking a step down in your career doesn’t have to mean losing out financially. With the right strategy, it can actually improve your financial position.
Here’s my recommendation, pursue a downgrade if you have a clear plan and productive activities lined up for your extra time.
However, if you struggle with self-discipline and won’t use that free time productively, downgrading likely isn’t the right move for you.
