Job Musings

There are two kinds of careers: the kind you own and the kind you rent.

Owning your career allows you to stay in control of your income on a daily basis, accumulate assets and use systems that produce income and guarantee ongoing residual income (paying you year after year for something you only did once).

Contrast a rental career, which keeps you living paycheck to paycheck. You have a boss whom you have to pretend you respect so the checks keep coming. He or she is the landlord and can evict you at anytime whether for whim or cause. You trade time for money. You try to live below your means so that you can one day stop trading time for money and live on savings. But the rented career is not an asset. The moment you are jobless, the earning train stops dead in its tracks. And so does your lifestyle.


Now there are three kinds of rental jobs:

1. The kind you dislike—even hate—yet you do it because it provides the security of a steady, if inadequate, income plus benefits.

2. The kind you tell others you like, but you know you would quit if you received some sort of windfall, such as a winning ticket in the Big Game Lottery.

3. The kind of job you would do for free. Yeah, right.


When you are entrenched in a rental career, it’s easy to lose sight of the benefits of ownership. That was my story until I was evicted from my rental job in January. Actually, it was my story for sometime after the eviction. You see, if after the job is gone, you think of yourself as unemployed, and therefore pitiable, you have bought in to the rental system and may be destined to rent a job for the rest of your life.


I realized I considered myself pitiable by equating employment status with having food to eat, gas for the car and so forth. The truth is, the situation only existed because I had been too long invested in something that yields poor return on investment—a rented career.

When you try to leave the rent-a-job club, other members gang up and try to stop you. They might look like your parents or your spouse, a co-worker or even your boss.


Here’s the cold hard truth. No one cares about your future as much as you do. You must own it and act as if you have a two million dollar investment on the line—because you do. That is more or less how much a job-renter earns in a forty-year career averaging fifty thousand dollars a year.


Two million dollars! That’s a lot of money. Why then do so many people approach retirement with tiny nest-eggs? Because they used the money they had for the things they needed or wanted. And there’s nothing wrong with that.


Here’s an indisputable fact: Everyone who seems to have more money than he or she needs is likely also to have multiple streams of income: Job plus rental houses; Job plus Job; Job plus the stock market; Job plus a side business; Multiple businesses; Inheritance plus a business.


I’m blogging because I want to remind myself in writing the things I know to be true regarding the risks of renting versus the benefits of owning one’s career. I want to call out and challenge society’s assumptions about jobs. And it will probably chronicle my own journey from broke renter to prosperous owner.

Let the journey begin!