Penelope Trunk The Brazen Careerist

I write all the time that you should change your job if you don't like it. Some people say that's totally impractical advice.

In fact, a lot of the comments on my columns say my advice only applies to rich people, or that single parents, families living from paycheck to paycheck, and people in debt can't use it.

Deep Denial

I think the people who write this are in denial. Of course there are exceptions, but what they're usually really saying is that their current standard of living is more important than being happy in their job.

That's fine. But they shouldn't complain that my advice doesn't apply to them. It does. They just choose to have an expensive lifestyle instead.

I ought to know. My own financial life used to be so unstable that when I told my brothers I was writing for Yahoo! Finance they thought it was a joke. And then they got concerned for me that Yahoo! would find out about the real me, and I'd lose my job.

Millionaire Dreams

My bank account looked very good back when I was running my own companies. They were well funded, and I extracted a large salary from investors -- on top of equity -- because it used to be OK to do that. The year my husband and I moved to New York City, I earned more than $200,000.

I had never lived in New York City before, but I'd seen photos of John and Carolyn Kennedy coming out of their TriBeCa loft and figured that's where I would live with my husband. It was a rude awakening when I discovered that our combined incomes would have to be in the millions in order to have a loft in TriBeCa.

So we moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn that was so small that I had to put all my books in storage. And just about everything else, too.

A Turning Point

Then 9/11 happened, and my husband and I both realized that we wanted to change careers and have kids right away. Bye-bye, big paychecks.

He started volunteering at human rights organizations. I became a freelance writer, and had a poverty-level income (for New York City). Then we had a baby. I'd like to tell you that we lived on our savings for a while, but we didn't. It lasted for about nine months in Manhattan.

That's when we realized we had to totally shift our lifestyle to accommodate our work choices. We made big decisions. We stopped being friends with people who could only order $70 bottles of wine at dinner. We didn't go to the beach because we didn't have a car to get there, and besides, beach passes were too expensive.

Trading Culture for Flexibility

Soon, we found ourselves making almost every decision based on money, and we didn't like living that way. So after a lot of research on how to choose where to live, we moved out of New York to Madison, Wis.

I've written a lot about how we chose Madison, but the bottom line is that we looked for the city with the lowest cost of living that we could be happy in. (The runners-up, in case you're interested, were Minneapolis, Portland, and Austin.)

Once we got to Madison, things changed. Money wasn't nearly as big an issue. We became more flexible, and we have more freedom in our decision making.

I'm not going to tell you that Madison is a bastion of culture and innovation -- it's not. But if you want to live in a bastion of culture and innovation, it'll cost you in flexibility.

Big Changes

Personal stability, the flexibility to find fulfilling work, and meaningful relationships are about as much as you can ask for in life. And though I'm not certain, I have a feeling that you don't need to live in a major city in order to get them. All the other stuff you might want is secondary.

If you want to have the ability to change careers, quit jobs you don't like, and try out new things, you might need to make huge life decisions to accommodate that.

I have friends in San Francisco who had only one child so they could afford to keep their low-paying jobs. I have other friends who are moving from the center of Portland to the boondocks of Portland so they can afford for one of them to be a stay-at-home parent. These are big decisions.

Grown-Up Decisions

I'm not saying you have to live in rural Alabama or forgo having kids. I am saying that you need to be an adult, and admit that adults make big decisions. Things don't just happen to you -- you have power to decide what your life will be like.

And if you set your life up so that you can't change jobs, you need to take personal responsibility for it. It didn't just happen to you -- you're making decisions about that, too.