Mindy Jensen: Welcome to the BiggerPockets Money Podcast, show number 305, where we interview Daniella Flores from I Like to Dabble dot com, and talk about the things you need to consider before quitting your job to go full-time self-employed.
Daniella Flores: I got in therapy last year, and that was the one thing that helped me a lot. We were talking about this because I was like, I’m not sure if this is the right move because my job has all these amazing benefits, but I really want to do this. I really want to do this full-time because I feel like I’m wasting all this time—not wasting, but, you know, you use your energy throughout your workday doing these tasks, and the energy that builds up for the stuff you want to work on. So then after that, I’m like, oh, there’s all these things I want to do, and I feel like I’m losing this time to something else that my heart isn’t into, that, you know, I don’t see a future in. And we talked about it, and she’s like, I see the way you talk about your blog. And she’s like, I don’t see your face light up like that when you talk about your work. She’s like, that’s all you need to know. She’s like, it sounds like you know what to do. I was like, that’s right, I do, I guess.
David Pere: Hello, hello, hello.
Mindy Jensen: My name is Mindy Jensen, and joining me today is David Pere from the Military Millionaire Group. David, what’s going on?
David Pere: I’m not finding the unmute button. That’s what’s going on.
Mindy Jensen: Hey, that’s my job.
David Pere: Apparently, because you can use the spacebar to unmute, which means that I leave myself muted so there’s less noise. But apparently, if you drag the Google Doc over to type and then hit the spacebar, you just make a big gap in a sentence, which is what I just did instead of talking. So that’s what’s going on in my life. And we had an appraisal come back really high today, so that was cool.
Mindy Jensen: Well, nice for you. We had the exact opposite. So I wish your appraiser lived over here. David and I are here to make financial independence less scary, less just for somebody else, to introduce you to every money story, because we truly believe financial freedom is attainable for everyone, no matter when or where you’re starting.
David Pere: Whether you wanna retire early and travel the world, go on to make big-time investments in assets like real estate, or start your own business, we’ll help you reach your financial goals and get money out of the way so that you can launch yourself towards your dreams.
Mindy Jensen: A few months ago, Daniella posted on Twitter that they were thinking about quitting their job, but there was a lot more to it than they originally thought. And if you’re struggling with it, you’re not alone. I know this firsthand because my own husband—
Daniella Flores: Hi, Carl—
Mindy Jensen: —struggled with this too before he finally took the plunge. So I feel qualified to talk about this both with Daniella and to give advice to people who are listening as well. David, you’re also successfully unemployed, right?
David Pere: Yes, ma’am. Have been since October.
Mindy Jensen: Now, is that official? Do you have a job? Do you do any sort of work at all? Or do you just sit around on the beach all day and eat bonbons?
David Pere: Well, I’m technically still in the reserves for the Marine Corps, though I have not actually gone and done anything for the reserves in the last five months. So we’ll see how long that lasts. I have not received a paycheck from anything outside of my LLCs since October 10th.
Mindy Jensen: Okay, so then I would call you unemployed, because if nobody’s paying you, then you shouldn’t be doing any work for them. So Daniella is here today to talk about both the circumstances leading up to their potential retirement, or separation from employment, and what they’re going to do once they get there. One of the things I like most about Daniella is that they don’t like to hustle, they like to dabble. Their blog is called I Like to Dabble dot com, and they do not promote the grind-at-all-costs mentality that really makes life kind of suck. To quote Daniella, “Stop this ‘you have to hate your life to become successful’ rhetoric. Hustle culture doesn’t work. You can do meaningful work in moderation and be happy.” Daniella has taken these dabblings, combined them with their full-time job in IT and their low expenses, to get them to the precipice of retirement, which is where we join them today. Daniella Flores from I Like to Dabble dot com, welcome to the BiggerPockets Money Podcast.
Daniella Flores: Oh, thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited. I love this podcast, and I can’t wait to get into it.
Mindy Jensen: I can’t wait to jump into your story. So let’s get a little bit of a background from your money journey. Where did you start, and right up to about now, where you are considering leaving full-time employment.
Daniella Flores: Yes, so I guess I’ll start my story back when I started side hustling. So when I started my first go at side hustling was when I was in high school. I didn’t really think of it as side hustling at the time. I had a problem with spending money because I just wasn’t familiar with how I was kind of triggered by money. So I would basically spend my—well, at the time I worked at a movie theater, so I would spend like the whole paycheck on things that didn’t matter, like food and clothes. These were things that I didn’t necessarily need at that time. You know, I wanted them, but they really didn’t matter. And through all of that, by the time my bills came, I would need money for those, because, you know, I was paying for my car, I was paying for my cell phone. I was still in high school, so I didn’t have rent or stuff. But I would go and sell my clothes, as well as go to thrift stores and buy stuff and resell those online. So at the time I was using Craigslist for this stuff, because this is back in the day. And I was trying to basically remake the money back that I’d already blown, because I didn’t really—I had the education to have a good financial foundation from my parents, but I was somebody that would never listen to any of that. I thought that, oh, I have it covered, I’ll do what I—this works for me. And it did not work for me for a very long time. And I went on that way for about a couple of years, until I got into college. I had to get a little bit more serious. I stopped side hustling per se. I had basically—there were jobs. They weren’t like these little one-off things I was doing. I was working three jobs through college trying to graduate. I was so eager—at the time working at my mom’s surgery center and hating doing—I was doing health insurance verification, and I hated the tediousness of it. I was like, I can’t wait to get out of college. I’m gonna work in tech. My life’s gonna be so easy. I can’t wait to do all these things, have control of my life. It’s gonna be great. And I got out of school. I took an unpaid internship. I was making $0 for those first couple weeks. I got hired on eventually at a $30,000 salary. I thought that was a lot. I was not making much after taxes or anything. It was maybe $1,500 a month after taxes, health insurance, life insurance, 401k—the benefits that cost money at the place I was working at. From there, I actually had my first real experience in IT. I was a web engineer, but at this startup, the environment—the way it was—everybody was around my age, right out of college. We were all working 80-hour weeks. They would have alcohol in the office, all this food for you. They’d have parties and go to concerts for free, all these things so they could keep you in this environment so you’re always working. And I burned out hard, and I burned out very quickly. It took maybe 10 months, and I burned out so bad I just stopped going to work, and I was actually fired from my first job out of college. And that was when I started my first legit freelance kind of side hustle. I got a job waitressing, and then I got a freelance gig with one of the former clients that worked with me at that startup. I didn’t sign an NDA or anything, so I was totally fine, just by the way. So, working with that freelance relationship, doing basically what I was doing at that startup, but as a freelancer, and they asked me, what would you like to get paid? We can pay you $100 an hour. And that blew my mind. It was crazy ’cause they really valued my work. At the time, I was completely clueless about what I should ask. They’re like, how about $100 an hour? It was only for 10 hours a week, so I was like, that’s perfect, I can do that. And so I did that for a while, and I worked as a waitress. And then I still had this pressure though from my family to get a real job. “You need to get back into a real job. What are you doing? You’re not going anywhere.” So with this kind of mindset my whole life is like, you go to college, you get a job, that’s what you do, and then eventually you retire. There’s no stuff in between that you think about too much, because you’re thinking about all the time of like, I got to work, I got to make this money, I got to live, I guess. And it was at that time I was trying so hard to get another job. So I eventually got another job. And then from there, I kind of moved up through these different positions and did a lot of lateral moves throughout my career in tech. I did a lot of job hopping because I felt I was just stuck a lot at the other salary ranges I was in through these jobs I was taking. So I had to kind of job hop to get my salary to bump up as I went. And I never really got any of my money stuff together during any of that. I was still spending like I’ve always been spending. And it wasn’t until about 2017 where we finally had to start getting our stuff together. I was having the student loan offices calling me all the time about student loan payments that needed to be made. We had credit card debt that we had to pay, and we had car debt that we had to pay. At the time, my wife was also paying for her house, because when we met, it was her house that was in her name. So I was like, okay, we need to kind of get our stuff together. And that’s kind of what actually propelled us to basically get our money stuff together. So, as a long-winded answer, I went through kind of all of these weird events in my life that were kind of telling me like, hey, you need to get your stuff together. And eventually, I just got it together.
Mindy Jensen: Yay! Better late than never.
Daniella Flores: Yes.
Mindy Jensen: Okay, so I have a few things I wanna unpack from this. First, you said, “I can’t wait to get out of college so my real life can begin.” And that is going to be the callback for later when you talk about your retirement, because, you know, I hear you saying, oh, everything’s gonna be great once I can quit my mom’s job, or quit this job with my mom where I’m verifying insurance benefits, which has to be just a horrible job. And then, you know, then I can get this great job. And I hear that mentality from people who want to retire. Oh, once I retire, everything’s gonna be great. And then you went on to talk about the life that you had, and it was not great, because it wasn’t the life that you wanted. And the retirement—and I know this firsthand from my husband’s experience, I’m gonna call on David to get his firsthand experience—is that if you don’t plan your retirement, it’s not great. It’s kind of sucky. And your life gets pulled, and your attention gets pulled, and your time gets pulled in all these different directions, because you have no plan. And I’m really excited to talk about the next phase of your life, because I wanna see what you’re planning, because I can see so many good things. Like, you have learned from the time you were in college that, you know, oh, I can’t wait to get my real life planned. And I know—I follow you on Twitter, I read your blog, I know you’ve got plans, and your retirement is gonna be great, because you’re not just jumping into it with both feet and, hey, whatever happens, happens. You have to plan things in life, or life will happen to you. So I just wanted to get that out there. You also had this pressure from your family to get a real job. Everybody listening, stop pressuring people to get a real job, whatever they wanna do. If it’s covering their bills, if they’re not asking you for money, don’t bother them. And then in one of your blog posts, you say, “I am an advocate for job hopping to increase your salary, within reason.” I wanna dive into that a little bit, because I’m old, and I come from an era where you don’t job hop because you look flaky. And I can remember how many times my parents told me, “Well, you don’t like this job, but you can’t leave because you’ll just look like a job hopper, and nobody will ever want to hire you.” I’m like, I have applied for so many jobs that I have gotten or been offered because I’m a good interviewer. Like, they’re not going to care. But apparently they do. And now they don’t, within reason. So what does “within reason” mean to you?
Daniella Flores: So within reason, for me, I think that’s more of an open thing. Like, hey, if you’re job hopping every couple of months—like two months, three months—and that’s all your resume looks like, you know, I’m not gonna say that that’s a good idea. That’s what I meant by “within reason.”
Mindy Jensen: Okay.
Daniella Flores: So job hopping, for me—if the job isn’t working out for you, whatever it is, however long you’re there, leave. Find whatever way you can to leave that job and find a better job. But if you’re doing job hopping to just raise your salary, you know, don’t do that. Like, “Here, I’m going to job hop 10 different jobs and get a $500K salary.” It’s like, what are your goals though with that?
Mindy Jensen: So let’s get to where we are today. You are considering leaving your job, but there’s a lot of things to consider, not just, okay, I quit, bye, I’m done. And I liked your most recent article on grow.acorns.com. Is it acorns.com, or grow.acorns.com?
Daniella Flores: I think it’s grow.acorns.com. It’s the CNBC-Acorns, I guess, publication partnership that they have.
Mindy Jensen: Yeah, it was “Hack Your Job to Earn More Money.” And step number one, you negotiated for full-time remote work. I love this tip from you. During the pandemic, I made sure to negotiate for this because I knew we would be asked to come back to the office eventually, and we wanted to move to another state. So you negotiated before anybody else was asking to stay home full-time. You’re there right at the beginning of the pandemic. Talk about that. Let’s talk about how you negotiated this, because this is not just, hey, I wanna work remote forever.
Daniella Flores: Right. Oh, absolutely. So, I first want to say, like, a preface here. So as somebody who works in tech, it is a lot easier for me to negotiate remote work than it is for somebody who is, like, a teacher, per se. I just want to say that for anybody listening. So negotiating remote work for me was something that I had a lot of actual experience with. So with the kind of positions I’ve had throughout my career, I’ve always worked remote in some capacity. It’s either been a hybrid remote relationship, where it’s at least like one day remote, to as much as being full-time remote. The last 3 jobs that I’ve had, I’ve been a full-time remote worker. So I kind of knew already what they were looking for in a full-time remote worker when it came up to, you know, we were all sent home during the pandemic, and I was like, yes, I’m back in the full-time remote role again. I want to stay here because, where I work currently, when I was originally hired, they had told me that I would eventually have the chance to become full-time remote. But at the time, their policy was hybrid. So I was actually going into the office before the pandemic about 2 days a week. So once we were home full-time, we wanted to make our move happen, because with the way everything was at that time, we thought it’s like, it’s either now or never, we gotta move now, we just gotta make it happen. So my wife was looking for jobs in the area we wanted to move to, and I was doing kind of the data analysis on my side with my job, looking around at the different programs, because there were already people that worked full-time remote in other locations that have always been doing it that way, because they had positions that were open as remote only, because it was a global company. This company has offices all over the world. So they already had groups that were working remote, they had people that were working remote. And so I looked around first to kind of look at the climate of the company, like, how are they going to receive it if I ask? So I did that, and then I used our ticketing system. So the way that we do our work, everything’s tracked in tickets, and there’s all these different types of tickets. So I can actually pull my own metrics of how I work and how much I get done, which is the same stuff that I use every year in our reviews. And I went through all the stuff that I do, and then I showed them all the extra stuff I was able to do by working full-time remote since the pandemic. And I also showed that it was like this push of, they kind of made it that way anyway. When they sent everybody home, the expectations increased like crazy. If anyone’s listening and they work in tech, they probably understand what I’m talking about, because now there are things in tech that weren’t there before. There are measurements that they measure how you’re working. They measure the tickets that you’re doing. They measure the data that’s in your tickets. They have these KPIs now that are set up to actually have people lose their jobs, which is kind of a whole other conversation. But I kind of presented all this to them, and I was like, look, the job is already basically demanding me to be remote. My wife and I are preparing to move to Washington State. And then I kind of presented all the information. I talked with my manager, and he was like, I’m okay with it, we just have to go to legal and maybe sign some stuff. But it was also that personal relationship I have with my manager, and the way that he said I was always present. I wasn’t somebody he had to try to chase down. He said I always did my work, you know. He never had a doubt of me being full-time remote if anything would change. He’s like, you’ve kind of been hybrid remote anyway, I know how you work remote, I don’t think anything’s going to change. We just have to see how the company can legally do that.
Mindy Jensen: I think there’s a lot of people out there who hate their job and, oh, if I could just work from home, it’ll be great. But if you go to work and you hate your job, it oozes out of you that you hate your job. It oozes out of you that you’re a miserable person. And then you’re like, hey, I wanna work remote. And your boss is like, why would I let you work remote? You don’t get anything done at the office. Why would I let you go home and do even less at home? Like, you presented yourself as, I’m very good at working remote, because here’s my past work experience, I’m already getting more stuff done because I’m already working remote, look at how great I am already, it should be very easy for you to allow me to work remote. And I mean, being a good employee is going to get you the most benefits from your job. And if it’s not, then, you know, that’s a different conversation, you do need to quit your job if your company isn’t appreciating you. But you have to be somebody that the company wants to keep. They’re not going to bend over backwards to keep a crappy employee. So I love this tip that you — I went through the tickets. I don’t want to offend you and call you a big data nerd, but—
Daniella Flores: Oh, well, I am a data nerd, so.
Mindy Jensen: Good, that’s a term of endearment on this show. I bet you have spreadsheets too.
Daniella Flores: Oh yes, I love spreadsheets.
David Pere: This is something Tim Ferriss kind of talks about in The 4-Hour Workweek, right? Like the idea of being able to show that you were more — like, test out a day at home and then show you were more productive that day and whatever. Where was the company physically located before you went remote?
Daniella Flores: So the IT headquarters in our specific region was in St. Louis, Missouri.
David Pere: Oh, well, I can’t even talk smack about you leaving, because I’m in Springfield. So—
Daniella Flores: Springfield. I went to college in Springfield, actually.
David Pere: MSU?
Daniella Flores: Yeah, Missouri State University, for my first year. Yeah.
David Pere: Cool, cool. Good area. Yeah, that’s where I do most of my investing. So what I was gonna say, though, is that one’s kind of odd, actually, because I was gonna ask if they gave you a slight pay cut. So I have a friend, Daniel, who lived in Carlsbad, California, and he moved to a much more affordable market to work remote full-time during the pandemic. And they gave him a little bit of a pay reduction for the move. However, it was still — if you look at cost of living to pay, it was still a much larger — it was like a pay raise essentially, to move. But I guess if you’re moving from St. Louis to Washington, you probably went to a higher cost of living area, so probably didn’t give you a pay cut for that.
Daniella Flores: Yeah, and it was so — it’s odd, because for my employer, they have offices all over the world. So in every big financial market country, they have an IT headquarters. So with that said, there are tons of employees that work remote. So they have actual location markers that they could have put my name to. And I had the same salary that I was getting before that. So they didn’t change my salary at all. And it’s actually shortly after that that I job hopped within the company to a higher salary, but I still was able to stay remote.
Mindy Jensen: Let’s talk about that.
Daniella Flores: Yes. So this was actually a little less than 1 year ago. It was about May. So, my former team, if anyone’s listening — I hope they’re not — everybody on the team is great, there’s just a couple of people that made it a very toxic environment, even though I was working virtually. And I know a lot of people say that in toxic environments, there’s an extra boundary there with remote, and yeah, that is true. But at the time — think about this time last year during the pandemic — people’s attitudes, there was that tension everywhere with work and everywhere you went. And it came out in team meetings, and I was getting on these 5:00 AM calls and trying to run these calls efficiently to make sure that we were on target for certain efforts that we’re doing in our iterations. And so I got on these calls, and I would just get yelled at, screamed at, for over the smallest things, like a link that they don’t wanna click to view a thing on a screen. I mean, it’s the things that these people get upset about. I was like, okay, this team’s not working out for me. I can’t deal with this every single day, where I’m on the verge of tears after just a couple of morning calls. So I started looking around internally at the company. They have an internal career portal that actually gets everything listed there first before it gets listed to their external portal. But I also looked into their mentorship program. So I reached out to a mentor, and we started meeting on a monthly basis. And then she kind of gave me some tricks to look at the internal portal, to kind of be like, hey, this hiring manager, I know that that position is for this specific thing, because it wouldn’t really be in the job description, everything’s so vague in all the descriptions. She was able to kind of give me more of a lowdown of certain jobs. So I was actually starting to apply to a couple things internally. I didn’t get anything, and not really much traction was happening. And then, luckily enough, somebody else that was in my network at the job — they were just somebody else on another team, they weren’t on my team, but we had talked because we worked on various projects together — and she said, hey, I have word that there’s a new organization being spun up, and they’re looking for a lead reliability engineer for this team. They reached out to me, but I’m taking a manager position, so I gave them your name. And I was like, oh my God, thank you. And they reached out to me the next week for an interview. We interviewed. They said, it’s fine, you can stay remote. And they said the words, I don’t see us ever returning back to the office. But now they’re all there, and I feel horrible about it. But anyway, I was able to find this new team, I did a move. I was a senior software engineer then, and I’m now a lead reliability engineer. So I got a pay bump with that, and I got a bonus bump with that, and that was a huge save for me. I kind of got lucky on it, because I was applying to other things, and I even got an email back from one of the offices. It was one that was listed San Francisco/remote. And I was like, well, cool, it’s remote, they’ll let me probably stay remote. So I applied to that one, and they actually were trying to set up an interview with me. But they said, okay, we are remote now, but once we go back, we need you to move to San Francisco. And I was like, San Francisco is one of the most expensive places to live, absolutely not.
Mindy Jensen: Like, no.
Daniella Flores: I work remote now for the same company, I don’t know why you would require me to be there. So that one actually, they passed on me, ’cause they said that if you’re not going to move here to eventually work in the office, then it won’t work. And I was like, okay. And then that next week, I got — that came through with my friend on the other team. So that was pretty cool.
Mindy Jensen: That reminds me of a job interview I had once, where the interviewer said, and if you’re here after 6 o’clock at night, the company will buy you dinner. And I’m thinking to myself, I don’t wanna be here at 6 o’clock. Why are you acting all excited? I can make my own dinner at home, I don’t wanna work till 6 o’clock at night. And they would also buy you a cab home. I’m like, the train’s $1.50, I’ll just take the train, thank you, ’cause I don’t wanna be there so late. They make it sound like it’s so great. Oh, well, we’re remote now, what do you mean you don’t wanna come into the office and move to San Francisco? And it’s like, I told her to take my name out of consideration. It sounds like, they passed on me, that’s a good thing.
Daniella Flores: That’s a great thing.
Mindy Jensen: Yeah.
Daniella Flores: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, ’cause I was like, I was looking at houses in San Francisco, I’m like, pretty sure we can’t get one under $2 million. So that’s a hard pass.
Mindy Jensen: And that’s a shack that needs a lot of work, and, you know, broken foundation, no plumbing, electric is sparking, so they’ve turned it off.
Daniella Flores: Right.
Mindy Jensen: There’s no floors. Who needs floors? Why are you so picky, Daniella?
Daniella Flores: I know, right?
Mindy Jensen: So you just mentioned 5 AM calls when you were talking to your team in Missouri.
Daniella Flores: Yes.
Mindy Jensen: That’s not cool.
Daniella Flores: No, it’s not cool. So the nature of that team at the time, since we were an external customer-facing application — so these are people using rewards on their credit cards — we were an external-facing application, but we worked with various teams in different regions, which a lot of the teams at that company are structured that way, where you have a program, which is like your group of teams. And in that program, you have all the regions, and you all kind of have to find a way to connect when time zones never match. And I was the one who got the not-best end of the stick on that one. It also was a team that was very male-dominated. I was the only woman — I was only female-present. At the time, I identified as a woman. Now, I mean, to people, I’m female-presenting, as you look at me, you think female. But on my team, the only other person who was a woman was — she was part-time, and she — I mean, she was very good to work with. It was like I kept getting — I wonder if any women in tech are listening to me right now — but they might often feel like they’re being stuffed into secretary tasks or administrative tasks as someone in tech. And that often happens on teams like that. And I was someone who was often shoved into these things, to run meetings. Like, hey, Daniella, you want to run this morning meeting, oh, we already — they like to work with you, you’ll be great for it. And I was like, well, sure. I should have said no. And I say no now. Now I say no.
David Pere: Yeah. So here’s the question: did the 5 AM call equate to 2 hours earlier being done? Or was it, in addition to your normal work hours, you’re going to be on the phone at 5?
Daniella Flores: Well, I was able to get off earlier, as long as nobody sent me an instant message on Slack right at the last minute that they need me to fix some, you know, life-shattering issue. And then, you know, that slashes their evening.
David Pere: I’m the weirdo who would have loved that. Like, oh, you mean I can wake up early, but I get to be off at 3 in the afternoon every day?
Daniella Flores: Yes, sold. Yeah, that is a good thing. I do get off earlier. So even now, I don’t start that early. I start at 6 and I get off at 2, which is perfect.
Mindy Jensen: Yeah, but still, 5 AM — there’s, I’m assuming, and maybe I’m just being too American, but I’m assuming that you’re working with people in America on your team. So you’ve still got — I mean, even if it’s Pacific and Eastern time, there’s a large chunk of time that you can still find in the middle of the day to not have to get up at 5 o’clock in the morning for some stupid meeting that probably could have been an email.
Daniella Flores: I should clarify that when I say regions, I mean global regions. So we were on the morning — morning calls are usually with India, so our Pune team. So that’s a big part of all the teams are — those teams over in the Asia Pacific region.
Mindy Jensen: Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah, maybe that’s just me being American, everything centers around us.
Daniella Flores: I know, right? I’m always thinking that my time zone is the one.
Mindy Jensen: It is, except it’s my time zone that is the one. Yes, Mountain. And I’ll even send emails to people that I know we’re in different time zones, like, can you do this at 10 o’clock? And then they call me at 10 o’clock their time, they’re like, hey, where are you? It’s 8 o’clock, what are you talking about?
David Pere: Yeah, I know. And the funny thing, though — it would almost make it easier if you always spoke in your time zone — but Mindy’s actually pretty good about remembering what time zone you’re in and sending it in your time zone every now and then. So then it throws me for a loop, and she doesn’t, and I’m like, totally lost, I’m like, oh my goodness, now I’m super confused, because normally, yeah.
Mindy Jensen: I try to put it in all caps to try to bring it up, this is Mountain Time Zone. But you know, sometimes I forget, I’m like, ooh, I feel bad. But yeah, okay.
Daniella Flores: Mountain’s a good one, I know that one. It’s only an hour after me, so.
Mindy Jensen: Yeah. Let’s talk about this next tip you have. I made sure to prioritize my time — I love these next 2 pieces that you have. I stopped saying yes to everything. I started denying meetings that would be emails. Oh, if only we all had that power. And especially denying all meetings outside of my working hours.
Daniella Flores: Yes. So, when I first started in tech, and even up until a couple years ago, I would say yes to everything because I was anxious that if I didn’t say yes, I wouldn’t be seen as somebody who is performing well, because there are expectations that they set, but you always feel like you have to go above those to feel like you’re even being adequate. Obviously that’s not true, but I figured out that me wanting to be available for everything and wanting to do everything was only hurting me, not helping me. So I stopped saying yes and I started saying no. And I found out it’s not that bad to say no. People really don’t care. It’s okay. So that was nice. Occasionally you get that person who really, really wants to have that meeting—it’s really necessary. And all you have to do is— what I did a lot of times is say, “What are your questions that you want to address on this email?” And then they’ll send me the questions and I’ll send them their answers or send them the resources that they need. And it’s like, there you go, that’s all you needed to do. But now the number one thing that’s helping me the most is that people will load up my calendar with meetings if they see open slots. That’s how everybody schedules meetings, I guess—through Slack—they want to see, oh, what are your open slots? They don’t really ask anymore. So I’ve been time-blocking the things that I need to do throughout the week at work, so I make sure that those are actually taken up too. Because it’s like, all right, I know I have a bunch of reports I have to run for month-end data stuff, so I have to block this many hours on this day to do this. And if I do that, that makes sure that I don’t have all these meetings coming in and taking up my time. Then I have to push this work to whenever else it can get done, because I don’t want to do it on off hours. That’s a no—not going to be working on off hours. And I want to get my work done when I want to get it done.
Mindy Jensen: Yeah, during work hours. Because especially as a work-at-home person, it’s so easy to say, “I quit at 5 o’clock,” but now it’s 6:30 and I’m still sitting in front of my computer because I just have one more thing to do. In IT, in tech, in almost everything, there’s always something else you can do. I am very fortunate that when I started at BiggerPockets, I think Brandon sat me down and said, “Josh will always give you 150 more hours of work than you can do, and he knows it. So do what you can and then stop at the end of the day and start the next day. There’s always more work than you can do.” And I was like—it was week one that he said that, and I’m so glad that he did, because I would have felt overwhelmed with all the work. It’s an online website where people can come in and talk any day, and I was in charge of the forums. So anytime, day or night, there’s somebody posting there. I could have literally been online all day, every day, and never slept and never ate and never saw my family, just trying to keep up, frantically. And of course that’s not sustainable—I would have to sleep and eat and whatever. But you can work 18 hours a day if you want. I don’t want that, because that’s not a fun life.
Daniella Flores: Oh, no, not fun at all. And I guess a lot of people, for the folks that had the experience of going home to work remote, you might’ve realized that there was an influx of meetings. When I went home remote, it was like all my days are just people trying to create all these meetings. My dad works in tech too, and we were talking about this because he’s like, “I feel like all I’m doing all day is being in meetings. I can’t do my work.” We like to complain back and forth about our jobs because we have very similar jobs. So we were talking, and he’s like, “It’s all these people—they’re just managers of things that they don’t know what they’re managing, and they’re just sending me meetings so they look like they’re busy.” So yeah, we talked about it. It’s like, all right, stop accepting them, and start filling up your calendar with the things that you know you need to get done, and make sure you’re not completely sabotaging yourself at work.
Mindy Jensen: Yeah, exactly. Okay, well, let’s move into your next life.
Daniella Flores: My next life, yes.
Mindy Jensen: What does your next life look like?
Daniella Flores: My next life looks a little bit like my life now. So I’ve been working on my brand and my blog, I Like to Dabble, since 2017, on and off. Those first couple years I stepped away from it a lot because I was getting burnt out with the content generation wheel—that roller coaster you’re on as you’re generating content. So I burned out here and there, and I stepped away from it, and then I would come back. And then the last three years, I really hit the ground running and got more serious about it. As I started to hone in on ways to help people like me—people in the LGBTQ community, creatives, people looking to increase their income if they don’t feel comfortable negotiating or looking for those opportunities—I tried to hone in on the things that I felt strongly about. I was like, “I feel really passionate about this.” For a long time I’ve had a problem with the word “passion,” because you could have so many passions in your life—there’s not just one. So I was like, this is something I really want to do. I got into therapy last year, and that was the one thing that helped me a lot. We were talking about this because I was like, I’m not sure if this is the right move because my job has all these amazing benefits, but I really want to do this full-time, because I feel like I’m wasting all this time. Not wasting, but you use your energy throughout your workday doing these tasks, and the energy builds up for the stuff you want to work on. So then I’m like, oh, there are all these things I want to do, and I feel like I’m losing this time to something else that my heart isn’t into, that I don’t see a future in. We talked about it, and she said, “I see the way you talk about your blog.” She said, “I don’t see your face light up like that when you talk about your work. That’s all you need to know.” She said, “It sounds like you know what to do.” And I was like, “That’s right, I do, I guess.”
Mindy Jensen: So I have firsthand experience with this from your wife’s point of view. My husband said the same thing: “I don’t want to work here anymore. I want to do other things, but I make all this money, I have these amazing benefits. Who am I to leave this great-paying job to go pursue my passions, my dreams? Why would I leave this? It seems so selfish.” It took him a year to come to terms with this. And even then, he asked his boss, “Could I just go three days a week?” And even that was like, “Ooh, I should ask him, but I don’t want to—what if he says no?” And then he finally asked, and his boss was like, “Yeah, I don’t care.” It feels like this huge decision because it’s so life-altering to you, but it’s not such a huge deal to your boss, because then they still got him. He had proprietary knowledge—he wrote blood bank software for the VA hospitals, David. So if you got blood in 2008 to 2015, he made sure you didn’t die. So you’re welcome.
David Pere: I can’t imagine that being a super high-stress job. I mean, the VA does everything super slow and inefficiently, so they probably don’t care when you get anything done.
Mindy Jensen: Except it could kill you if it gives you the wrong blood. So yeah, it must be stressful.
David Pere: Not me, I’m AB positive. I can take anything you got—I’m good. I’m the one that can take everything.
Mindy Jensen: Oh, okay, well, good for you. I don’t know anything about blood—Carl knows it all. But it was really stressful, so he stepped down, and the boss was like, “Yeah, sure, no problem.” And then when he finally quit, he’s like, “Wow, I should have done this years ago.” I think that’s going to be the same for you. You mentioned just a few moments ago that somebody at work works part-time. Have you considered stepping back at work instead of quitting cold turkey, to test it out?
Daniella Flores: Okay, so this is something I’ve been thinking about, and I haven’t tackled yet. It’s another one of those fears, I guess, where it’s like, okay, I want to ask for part-time work. I’ve looked into it, and I asked—they have an Ask HR portal—and I asked, “Hey, are we still eligible for benefits if I were to move part-time?” And they said yeah. So I haven’t asked my manager yet, though. I just asked HR for information. They didn’t say, “Yes, you can do it,” it was just informational—that yeah, you can still get benefits at the same rate you do now if you’re part-time. So that leads me to ask my manager that, but I’m trying to take stock of the current situation I’m in. Unfortunately, they just started going back to the office a couple of weeks ago, so I’m on calls, and all of my team is required to be in the office two days a week, I think, is what they’re doing now. Some of them do three or four, depending on the person and their style. But I can tell—I don’t know for sure if it’s there or not—but there’s like, “Oh, we all know Daniella gets to work from home all the time.” And they even have these benefits—the job has actually added new benefits to their package called Work From Anywhere Weeks. They have entire teams and people that work remote full-time who always work from anywhere. They were talking on their call the other day, like, “Oh, I’m picking out my Work From Anywhere Weeks,” and stuff, and I was like, no comment, I can’t say anything. So if I bring this up to my boss, like, “Hey, can I move to part-time?” I don’t know what she’ll respond with. I haven’t tackled it yet, but it’s an option I’ve been thinking about. But I’m also trying to think about the timing for it, because everyone just went back, and I feel like I’m the odd one out and they don’t like it.
David Pere: Just punch your own ticket in the IT system to make it look like you worked the full week.
Daniella Flores: There you go. Yeah.
Mindy Jensen: They’ll just never find out.
David Pere: You run the system that catches people, so you’re good.
Daniella Flores: There you go.
David Pere: Legal disclaimer, I’m not an attorney, but—
Daniella Flores: Right, yeah, exactly. So, yeah, I’ve thought about moving to part-time. Maybe it’s something I should ask before I try to quit. So I think that’s great that you brought that up.
David Pere: All right, so your blog is all about side hustles, right? Dabbling and freelancing and a lot of those things that are not passive or recurring income. So when you say “retire,” are you taking the money that you’re making from there and reinvesting in something that’s going to be able to give you cash flow or passive income? Or is your idea of retirement like mine, where I’m retired and it’s my choice, therefore it’s me doing whatever I want, and you’re going to continue to push the blog forward and freelance and everything, but you’re viewing it as retired just because it’s on your own terms? I’m just kind of curious about the financial position there, because usually when people make the transition from employed to successfully unemployed, there’s the finance question. And then once you check that box and you’re like, “I’m good,” then it becomes, “Well, now what do I do?” Those are two totally different problems, but they both arise when you leave the employment world.
Daniella Flores: Right. So I’m leaving my employment world, but I’m not retiring and living off of investments. We are still actively investing, but we won’t be withdrawing from those investments during this. The only one we have is our brokerage account, and that’s like ten years in the future kind of thing. So we could use that money if we needed to, but we also have emergency savings that we’ve saved up—I’ve been saving up for months. I actually originally wanted to quit last year, and I just keep extending it because of all of my own doubts and yada yada yada. So I’m not retiring from all work ever—I’m just retiring from being a W-2 employee to being a self-employed person. So my plan is to run the blog, but also do my freelance projects, do the consulting and the coaching that I do, work with the several different publications that I do. Some of those do have passive income streams—like the blog brings in ad income every month, we have affiliate income, some digital products that, planned around those launches, will have passive income come in. And we’re also trying to build up systems to make sure that I can automate a little bit more of that and guarantee a little bit more recurring income as we continue to save more and prepare for—
David Pere: Is it possible—does your job offer decent vacation benefits, or is it possible to do a sabbatical? Because, you know, in the military, you could take like 30 days paid vacation, and you could take a full month off, and at the end of the month you’re like, “Wow, yep, I’m ready,” or, “All right, I’ll give it a little bit longer.” So if that’s an option, I would definitely recommend doing that.
Daniella Flores: Ooh, sabbatical—I don’t know if they have sabbatical as a benefit, I haven’t seen that on their benefits. But we have 30 days of vacation. I’ve already been using vacation like crazy this year because I know that I want to use it all up. We still get paid out, though, for any that we don’t use. But I’ve been using it way more this year—usually I have it offloaded from the summer to the end of the year, but this year everything’s been offloaded to the beginning of the year because I want to leave. I’ve been taking a little bit too much vacation lately, which actually there is no such thing as, I know.
David Pere: I mean, that was exactly what I was going to suggest—take as much as you have. If you have 30 days on the books, take 30 days and don’t think about work at all, and pretend you’re retired. By the end of that time period, you’ll probably know if you’re actually ready or not.
Daniella Flores: Yeah, so that’s what I did—kind of a month. My mom and I went to Napa, California, and I hadn’t even talked to her about it, because my parents were one of those people in the back of my head being like, “It’s a real job, you can’t leave it. What about your 401(k) match?” Blah, blah, blah. So we even talked about it, and she’s like—because I was showing her this project I was working on with another publication, and she was like, “This is really cool,” and she was really engaged in it. She’s never been engaged in the stuff I do because it’s tech, and she was in nursing and hospital administration for a while, so she doesn’t really vibe with all the tech stuff. So I was talking about it, and she’s like, “You look so excited when you talk about this stuff. I’ve never seen you talk about your work like that.” And I keep hearing this from other people. I was like, “Yes, I love it. I want to do this full-time, I know.” And she was like, “Right away you want to quit, or you want to quit down the road?” And I was like, “Well, I kind of want to quit this year.” And she’s like, “Well, I mean, you enjoy it.” So I was like, “Well, I didn’t expect you to say that, but okay.” I mean, my dad is the one I have to convince, though. But either way, I don’t need to convince him anymore—it’s not like I live with him.
David Pere: No, you just got to convince yourself.
Daniella Flores: I know, right? That’s the real one I have to convince.
David Pere: I’m not saying that you have to convince yourself and make the leap—I’m just saying that’s the hardest part of the decision, coming to terms with, “Okay, yeah, I feel like this is the right move now.” I wrestled with it for like six months. So—
Daniella Flores: Oh yeah, I’ve been wrestling with it now for about a year. I’m wrestling with it mostly because of just the way I was raised and the way work is in my family. My dad was an immigrant from Venezuela. So when he came over here, he worked several different jobs. He got into IT and he worked up from help desk to a lead architect position. He’s a union worker and he’s very much like, work, work, this is the way to work in America, this is how you become successful and get what you want. When I was a kid, he’s like, America is the greatest country in the world. Where he came from, the tradition over there was to send the males to America to get an education if you were in a well-off— like, not a well-off family, but a family that was able to do that for their male children. I don’t know why that’s a tradition per se. They weren’t really technically well-off. My grandma was a teacher and they had like 8 kids. But he was eventually able to come to America and that was ingrained in my head as a kid, that culture of work— this is what you’re going to do. And I didn’t want to technically— I didn’t want to go for tech for school originally, but I was good at it and I was interested in it and I knew it made money. I really wanted to go for fine art, but I did not have the money to pay for a fine art degree. I wanted to take out loans, but I didn’t want to take that many loans out, and my parents wouldn’t help me pay if I did fine arts. So I had to meet somewhere in the middle. So I kind of did both. I did tech and graphic design and, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mindy Jensen: So you can take your tech salary and now you can finance your fine art love and do whatever you want because you have set yourself up to be in this position. And I’m kind of glad your parents didn’t let you take fine art, because my parents did. And for a long time I stayed at that $30,000 level that you started out at. I didn’t get up to $200,000 because I was working in, like, what can you do with a fine arts degree? Would you like fries with that? I studied fashion design. David’s laughing at me because he’s like, I’m not a fashion person at all. So it was like a stupid thing for me to study. It’s not my passion. I really don’t even know why I did it. I would have been better off studying business, or I don’t know, tech isn’t my friend. When I was in college, it really wasn’t a thing. I’m just glad that you were on that path. Now you can continue making money in tech things. Can you freelance in your tech job? Are there freelance opportunities or?
Daniella Flores: So I started out, you know, in my tech role, like after that startup, I worked as a freelancer for a while. And that was on the side. And even after I got a quote-unquote real job, like my parents would say, I stayed on with that freelance client for a while doing one-off work for them because it was a nice extra income. So I can freelance. I did freelance web development for a long time on the side of my job. And I basically attribute it to me burning out with tech. In the long run, I would never actually work freelance in coding or programming or anything like that again. I’ve been in tech for 11 years now, so I’ve ridden this wave for a while. And I’ve tried a lot of different things, and I’m just ready to move on.
Mindy Jensen: Okay, I’m just trying to gather up some ideas before I give you some advice. I love David’s idea for a sabbatical.
Daniella Flores: Oh, sabbatical. Yeah, it’s great if it’s available.
Mindy Jensen: If it’s available.
Daniella Flores: Right. Yeah. But I mean, I’ve been building up the income with my business for a while now, and I’ve gotten it to at least match my pre-tax income to my job. However, I have expenses, like everything that makes the blog run. I have people to pay that help me with the blog. I have to pay taxes with that money. I have to pay my own health insurance with that money. I won’t be able to get a match anymore. All those things go into this whole decision. That’s what’s really holding me back, because it’s like, okay, these expenses are going to increase a lot.
Mindy Jensen: Okay, so can you get health insurance through your wife?
Daniella Flores: Yes, health insurance through my wife is more than our mortgage.
Mindy Jensen: Oh, awesome. Welcome to America, the greatest country in the world.
Daniella Flores: We have amazing health insurance.
David Pere: Right?
Mindy Jensen: Okay, so then maybe not that one.
Daniella Flores: So we’re a family that uses our health insurance a lot. There are certain healthcare needs that we have to see a doctor for, like, every month. And there’s a lot of prescriptions that we get. So we have to opt for her private healthcare that’s through her employer, because there’s nothing on the marketplace that meets our needs. We don’t want to buy health insurance that’s not going to cover anything. So this is the only option that we have. People have gone back and forth trying to give me all these options for health insurance, and I was like, can someone give me an option that makes sense? Geez.
Mindy Jensen: Move to another country.
Daniella Flores: Exactly right.
David Pere: That’s part of why I stayed in the reserves, because, you know, 6 months I still get TRICARE. And then after that, after this month, I guess, I go to paying for TRICARE out of pocket. But on the reserve side, it’s like $270 for the family. And when I was looking at health insurance— and I wouldn’t say that we have any kind of crazy medical stuff, I mean, I’m crazy, but otherwise— it was still, there was a comma in there, and I was like, are you kidding me? I live in Missouri, and we live like— we believe in like, oh, butterfly stitch, that’ll do. Out on a farm, like, what do you mean I need to pay this much money? So yeah, it’s kind of— it was definitely eye-opening for me to see that. So that was one of my biggest concerns getting out, that expense. And I ultimately had an option that I took. But yeah, I get that one.
Daniella Flores: Yeah, it was one that I did not see coming, because the cost— last year it was different. It was still high, but it wasn’t that high. And we went back and looked at it again during open enrollment period for them, because I was like, okay, this is the time, I’m ready to do this, let’s see what their insurance is. And we brought it up and we called the lady, because we looked at the form and we’re like, that can’t be right. So we called them. They’re like, yeah, that’s right. And we’re like, okay, never mind.
Mindy Jensen: So does your company provide you with health insurance, with good health insurance?
Daniella Flores: Yeah, so currently we pay about a little under $300 a month for both of us. It is pretty good insurance. It’s still high deductible, like $3,000 deductible, but it’s 80/20 after that, which is about the same as this insurance that’s under her, but with a way larger price tag on the premiums.
Mindy Jensen: Okay, so looking at your options— and this is more of like a research opportunity for you— but what is your job? What do you excel at at your job, your day-to-day job? You mentioned tickets and you’re doing IT stuff, and I know already that’s way over my head. You could tell me exactly what your job is and I’d be like, uh-huh, uh-huh, that’s not my job. What do you do better than anyone else? What do you enjoy doing about your job? What would you spend your part-time time doing? So just like you went to your boss and said, here’s all of the data about how I used to be a remote person and this is all the stuff I did— how can you present to your boss a good pitch for allowing you to be part-time? Look, I do all the stuff that everybody else hates, or look at all the stuff that I’m so good at that nobody else knows how to do. Whatever it is that you’re doing, how can you pitch it that it’s in their best interest to let you stay on part-time with these amazing benefits so that you can work on your side stuff, but you still have the benefits? So you take that equation out— that like, what am I going to do for healthcare equation— out for a while, while still being able to do the stuff that you enjoy doing at work. ‘Cause you don’t want to be like, hey, I’ll take all the garbage work that everybody hates, and then you’re working there 20 hours a week that really suck, 20 sucky hours. Or can you load up 2 40-hour weeks and then 2 weeks off? Part-time is whatever you make it. They just have to say yes. You can cobble together whatever it is that you can do. What is it that you’re great at that you can solve a problem with for them? Do you know what I mean?
Daniella Flores: Yeah, no, this is a great— yeah, this is like an angle I’ve never thought of before with asking for part-time. I thought about it kind of— I thought originally, like, if I was going to pitch this to my manager, it’s, okay, I do this currently. If I take X, Y, and Z out of this equation, I could still do all of this currently, at 20 hours a week rather than 40 hours a week. So I originally was thinking of ways like, okay, we spend a lot of time handholding people that are higher up at the company through, like— so our team also supports this reporting console and stuff that they use to retrieve a lot of their data metrics that they use for their things. And a lot of time we have trainings for all this, and all this stuff is out there, like, automated, where they can go and grab that training themselves, and all these things. But we spend a lot of time handholding them for things that they don’t really want to take that extra step to go find themselves. I take a lot of time every week to do this, and I was thinking about kind of pitching that angle a little bit, where it’s like, all right, here’s all this work that I’m doing that isn’t really valuable, that’s already actually out there and available for people to actually retrieve themselves. This is a lot of manual work that isn’t necessary. I can still do my job in 20 hours a week, maybe give up one project— I don’t know what to do with that yet, but, you know, give up one project. And also we can try to increase communications about the resources that are out there so our time isn’t wasted.
Mindy Jensen: That could be. And just because you’re asking for part-time doesn’t mean, okay, I want to start part-time tomorrow. Hey, I’d like to start part-time in June, and see what happens. Or, I’d like to start part-time and test it for six months and see how it goes, and here’s the suggestions that I’m going to make. And leading up to that— and June is a great time, because that’s summer— leading up to June, any one of these handholding requests that comes in, instead, send them to me, and I’m going to say, here’s that resource, you can just click right here and find that information. And then when they come back and say, oh, can you show me how to do this, it’s right here. And then train them to do this. I am very guilty of that, because my thought is, well, why should I go have to figure this out? Daniella knows how to do it, I’ll just ask her. Now, if I ask Daniella, how do I do this, and she says, hey, it’s right here, oh, okay, I’ll go get that link. And you will become very familiar with all those links and where they are, and then they will become familiar with where those links are as well. A lot of times they don’t know where to look. Probably they do know where to look and they’re unwilling to look. They would rather you just tell them, oh, click here, click there, whatever. But if you continually push them over there, I’m—
Speaker 1: I know.
Mindy Jensen: I’m hopeful that they will actually continue to go over there. But, you know, you can start to train them into that. Once they stop getting their hand held, maybe they’ll take the initiative.
Daniella Flores: Right. Yeah. And that’s kind of already been in place. Those little practices that we put in place to reiterate things to people— yeah, we’ve been doing that for a while. But that’s a great point that you kind of put to— maybe look at part-time and ways that I could talk to my manager about ways that we could do that, which I need to put more thought into, kind of figuring how that would look.
Mindy Jensen: Yeah. And what’s her big pain point? Does she have a big pain point? What problem can you solve for her? Does nobody ever do tickets on Friday afternoons? Then you can make sure you’re working on Friday afternoons.
Daniella Flores: Everyone’s always doing tickets, unfortunately. It’s like the worst thing about working at a global company is that there’s no 9 to 5 office hours. It’s 24/7.
Mindy Jensen: Okay, well, that’s not a helpful hint then.
Daniella Flores: Yeah, but it does highlight a pain point of hers, is that she doesn’t want to be available in the other time zones. Neither do I, really, though. The only one that I would maybe be available for is— or Australia, which is like, right now would probably be when they were getting online. But, you know, stuff like that— I could probably think of stuff like that, where, okay, what are her pain points with our partner teams that we work with? Maybe I can take off some of that from her plate, but I don’t know how to structure that with the work that I’m already doing. Who— how would she receive it? Like, okay, if you want to move to part-time, what things do you need to move off your plate? And I can’t give that to anyone else. Would I have to hire somebody else? I don’t know how that part of the conversation would go.
Mindy Jensen: If you’re not holding somebody’s hand, you can do your 20 hours and still get it all done, then she takes the handholding off of your plate. Who’s going to do that? That could be more evenly distributed throughout the team.
Daniella Flores: Yeah, it could be. Right now, the way that they resource stuff, they try to, whatever they can, try not to hire anybody new. They try to maximize productivity. I guess a lot of companies do, obviously. But there are things that I do— there’s projects that I could be doing but I can’t do, because I don’t have room for them on my plate. And I’ve said, oh, I can’t do that, they don’t have the capacity for that. So there’s actually projects out there that I can’t do because I’m already doing too much. So I don’t know how I can transfer that to 20 hours and have her be like, oh, that’s a good idea.
Mindy Jensen: Okay, so research opportunities.
Daniella Flores: Yeah, yeah. I can definitely— I’m going to research it and see how maybe other people have approached this conversation in a similar environment. So that gives me a good idea.
Mindy Jensen: And then if she says no, you can’t go part-time at all, you would leave. Would that change her mind? Sometimes that changes minds, when you’re like, hey, I would really like to go part-time. No. Well, here’s what I’m proposing. No. Okay, well, here’s my 2-week notice. Oh, wait, let’s talk. But sometimes that doesn’t happen. And sometimes, here’s my 2-week notice, oh, well, we’ll miss you. And then that’s, you know— I worked at one place and this girl said, I can’t work here anymore, I have to quit. And the boss was like, no, no, no, let’s keep you, tell me what’s going on. And then a couple of weeks later, she was having a bad day. She’s like, I can’t work here anymore, I have to quit. And they’re like, okay, bye. And she was like— you could tell she was really ready to quit the first time, and she was really not ready to quit the second time, and was like, oh, well, I guess I’m going to leave then.
Daniella Flores: Yeah. Well, and that could happen too, which I’ve already thought about. It’s like, I’m good to go. If this health insurance wrench did not come up, I’d be gone already. I already had the meeting set up and I had to cancel it. I was like, nope. She’s like, is everything okay? I’m like, it’s totally fine. Yeah, everything’s fine.
David Pere: I would say if you’re that close, the one thing you— I don’t know, maybe you are factoring this in, but how much additional revenue can you bring through your platform by being full-time? Because I would be willing to bet that whatever that health insurance costs, you’ll cover that gap very quickly.
Speaker 1: Oh.
David Pere: So I’m not going to tell you to make the leap, because that is for you to decide, but I will tell you that I am paying more in salary right now than I was earning when I left a year ago, and it has grown very quickly, with me being able to make those decisions and have all that time.
Daniella Flores: Right. And that’s what I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, is that, okay, I’ve only been working on this platform like 10 hours a week. If I had 40 hours a week to dedicate to this, and even with the income I’m bringing now, we would be able to cover the health insurance costs still. We wouldn’t feel comfortable about it, just scrimping and stuff. And that’s doable, of course. But it’s like, okay, this is the income now, though, with how much I can work on it. If I can work on it, you know, 4 times as much, which, what would that be? It’s like, that’s huge then. And I don’t know what that looks like yet, but I know it looks better than what it does now. So that’s a great point too.
David Pere: And as you think about things from like the marketing standpoint, or the brand standpoint, or whatever, right? The tagline of, I’m side hustling to earn extra income and leave my job is one thing. The tagline of, I left my job because of this and I will never have to work again, that will also help drive your— I mean, again, it’s— I’m not going to predict the future and tell you what to do, but I’m just saying, you will be surprised when you do make the leap, whenever that is. You will be surprised, hopefully pleasantly, by what happens with the revenue at your side hustle when you’re able to focus on it full-time, not have things throwing off your creative flow and distractions. You’re able to use that tagline. Like, one of my buddies has a Ferrari, right? He sells coaching programs. And one of the things he said when he was looking at weighing the cost of the car was one of his coaches was like, well, do you think if people see that you have a Ferrari, they’re gonna buy into your course more? And he was like, yeah. Well, tangibly, he’s paid for the Ferrari in course sales. And so, it’s like, oh, and that’s something people don’t often think about. So like, I think that even just being able to say, hey, I’ve already made it and here’s why, will help everything grow that much quicker.
Daniella Flores: Oh yeah, I’ve thought about that as well. It’s like, part of my brand though has always been like, okay, you don’t have to quit your job. You can use your job to help you then build your side hustles and all the stuff to eventually move away from it. And yeah, that’s tracked until I got to this point now where it’s like, I don’t see myself still going in this direction. And I know how it looks, how it actually would look if I do. It’s so funny ’cause I can actually visualize all of it. I’m ready for it. But it’s like my own limiting beliefs are obviously still blocking me. But now it’s like, okay, now I finally figured out all these things that I thought were roadblocks, but now I get to plan around them. Now I won’t have any more surprises. So it’s, yeah.
Mindy Jensen: You said that your side hustle, your blog, is bringing in the same pre-tax income as your W-2, but then you have all these expenses to pay. What is your blog income after all of your expenses in terms of your spending?
Daniella Flores: Oh, for our spending, like family spending? Yeah, so that would be— I was like, you know, looking at the numbers right now. After tax for my paychecks and after all the other stuff, I get about a little bit above $5,000 a month. There’s a lot of stuff that gets taken out of my paycheck, but I get about $5,000 a month. With my blog, of course it fluctuates month to month depending on projects and launches that are going on and seasonality. It’s been fluctuating this year before tax and before expenses, like $6,000, 8, 10 for the last three months. So it’s still kind of all over the place. But after that, I was like, okay, after all that though, I still think I can put in after tax at least 3 a month with my wife’s income. We just won’t be able to contribute as much to retirement, which is— it’s fine. For a while it took me to get around that, because of my retirement benefits at my work, I’ll be missing out on that 10% match, which is like, okay, that’s fine. I won’t be able to contribute that much more extra outside of my 401(k), and it’s like, okay, that’s fine. It’s gonna be fine.
Mindy Jensen: Right now. Right now, you won’t be able to. Right now, exactly. Right now. When you are self-employed and you have no full-time employees other than your spouse, and you have a self-directed solo 401(k), you get a 25% company match.
Daniella Flores: What do you mean I have a 25% company match?
Mindy Jensen: When you’re self-employed, if you open up a self-directed solo 401(k), your company can match up to 25% of your salary into your 401(k). So you’re up to $52,000 or $54,000 contributing to your 401(k).
David Pere: It might actually be $56,000 now.
Mindy Jensen: $56,000.
Daniella Flores: I know, but how does that work if I’m the company? Like, I’m an LLC.
Mindy Jensen: Yeah, a self-directed solo 401(k) is for self-employed people.
Daniella Flores: Yes.
Mindy Jensen: You open up your 401(k), you personally can contribute— this year it’s $20,500— and your company can match your salary as contributions to your 401(k) up to 25% of your salary. So your personal LLC can match in there. And I’m not a CPA, I’m just telling you this is another research opportunity. My company matches. So $20,500 automatically goes into my 401(k). And then 25% of that is $5,000. So now I have $25,000 in my 401(k), all legally, or $26,000. And I’ll be over 50 this year, so I’ll get the over-50 bonus. And then any money that I make, my company matches 25% of my salary. So right now you have a 10% match. And of course, you have bills to pay and all of that. But once you get over that, where you are making a lot of money, then your company can throw 25% of your salary in up to a total of $54,000 or $56,000. So instead of your measly little $20,000 a year in your 401(k), you could be getting up to $54,000 in your 401(k).
Daniella Flores: But where does that money come from? Is it expenses around my business then?
Mindy Jensen: No, it’s the income for your business. Let’s say your business makes $100,000 this year and you pay yourself $50,000. Your company can match your salary up to 25%. So 25% of $50,000 can go into your— okay.
Daniella Flores: I understand that. I understand how it works when I work for a company and they match it. I thought it comes out of their pocket. When it’s my company that I have and it’s my LLC and I’m contributing to this for the solo 401(k), you know.
Mindy Jensen: It’s like an expense for the company.
Daniella Flores: Oh, so that’s what I was asking. Yeah. So it’s an expense.
David Pere: Okay, yes. It would basically be like you paying yourself $50,000 to take a salary from your company and then paying your solo 401(k) $12,500 as the 25% match. And then for the LLC, that $12,500 is not income because of however that all plays out. But you’re basically paying yourself an extra $12,500. It’s just going into the 401(k) instead of your pocket.
Daniella Flores: Yes. Okay. Yeah. Okay, I did kind of know this. I just never looked into how that would match. But now I get it. I get it. So it’s never going to be income because it’s going into that solo 401(k).
Mindy Jensen: Yes, so definitely talk to a CPA. Neither of us are CPAs.
Daniella Flores: Obviously. Yeah, I’ll talk to my CPA.
Mindy Jensen: Talk to somebody who knows what they’re talking about. But yeah, there are ways for self-employed people to save for retirement. You’re just not able to save for retirement right this minute, like as soon as you quit your job.
Daniella Flores: But as soon as you quit your job, you can dabble a little bit more in these side hustles that you enjoy and have the time to look into these things, to set up a solo 401(k) and talk to my accountant about how to do that, because that actually changes my mindset a little bit about all of this.
Mindy Jensen: I think the bottom line is you don’t have to make a decision right now. What are you going to do? You can take the time. You have a job that you like. It sounds like you enjoy what you’re doing. You’re just ready for the next step. So take the time to really explore the options that you have, and the choices that you have, and really choose the right adventure for you. Talk to your wife. Look at what she’s got. Look at what you’ve got. Her insurance is terrible. Does she want to quit her job?
Daniella Flores: No, she doesn’t want to quit her job. She has a really good job, and she enjoys it.
Mindy Jensen: That’s— I don’t like the word stable, but that’s like a stable position that can help support you while you are doing this side job, which can be the reason, you know, the stability that you need to take the leap. And what’s the worst that can happen?
Daniella Flores: Right. I mean, the worst that could happen, there’s nothing really that bad that could happen. It doesn’t mean that— at first when I was like, okay, I’m gonna quit my job, it’s like, quit your job, I never thought— I was like, okay, when you quit your job, you can always go back and do something else if you want to. It’s not like you’re stuck doing this thing. I could do whatever I want with my life. I’m not tied to this job.
Mindy Jensen: Yeah, you’ve been in tech for 11 years.
David Pere: Given that you’re in the IT field, going back and saying, well, hey, it’s not that I’ve been unemployed, I’ve just been working on this project.
Mindy Jensen: Right. Yeah, I was employed at this company and now I’m going to this company.
Daniella Flores: Yeah, and there wouldn’t be a gap on my resume anyway, because I include my business on my resume.
Mindy Jensen: There you go. Perfect.
David Pere: If I ever create a resume, I’ll do that. That’s cool. Never thought of that. I don’t think I’ll ever have a resume. But you know.
Daniella Flores: Yeah, you don’t need one. But if you ever do create one, hopefully you will never need one either.
David Pere: You’ll be fine, Daniella.
Daniella Flores: Yeah, I’ll be fine, I’ll be fine. I mean, we had a good plan. We still have a good plan. It’s just, you know, I’m not on anyone else’s timeline but my own, which is kind of like, sometimes I feel the pressure where it’s like, who’s making me, who’s urging me to do this stuff so quickly? Nobody. Just me in my head. It’s like, I could take some time.
Mindy Jensen: Yeah, but your head can be such a bad place to be, ’cause you just get these thoughts and they cycle back and forth and you’re like, I can’t see outside of this. I get it, I hear you. Okay, Daniella, is there anything else you want to share with our listeners before we let you go today?
Daniella Flores: Nothing besides, don’t let anyone tell you your job isn’t a real job.
Mindy Jensen: Yes, yes, yes, yes. If it makes you money, it’s a real job. If you enjoy it— what is that? If you enjoy it, you’ll never work a day in your life. Whatever, get paid too. Okay, she is Daniella from ilikedabble.com. Daniella, where can people find out more about you?
Daniella Flores: You can find out more about me on my website, ilikedabble.com. You can take the free side hustle quiz, or anywhere online on social media as I Like to Dabble and I Like to Dabble Blog on Instagram.
Mindy Jensen: Awesome. Thank you so much for your time today, Daniella, and we’ll talk to you soon.
Daniella Flores: Thank you. Talk to you soon.
Mindy Jensen: All right, David, that was Daniella from I Like to Dabble. What’d you think of the show today?
David Pere: That was good. I think they’re absolutely prepped to leave the corporate world, and eventually, when they realize it, it’s all going to work out for them.
Mindy Jensen: I really liked your suggestion of the sabbatical. I liked some of the ideas we had for maybe stepping down to part-time, or maybe cobbling together something that could really work out. I really like the idea that you had, that once you separate from full-time employment, you are going to see your side job, your side hustle, your dabble money, increase, because you have more time to focus on it. You have more time to spend on it. And you’re like, what did you say? Your creative flow isn’t broken up halfway through the day and, oh, I gotta go fix this ticket. So I’m super excited for everything in Daniella’s future. And I really know that they’re gonna just crush it.
Daniella Flores: Yeah.
David Pere: Absolutely going to be totally successful. It’s not a comfortable leap, but if you’re financially ready, which it feels like they are, then once you make the leap, it’s just a matter of overcoming that fear, that doubt, the imposter syndrome, and making it happen.
Mindy Jensen: I completely agree, and I have firsthand experience with that, and it’s absolutely right. Now my husband’s like, oh, I have too much stuff to do, I can’t believe I ever had time to work. And he’s happier than he ever was working. So, I’m very excited for Daniella’s possibilities, and the future is wide open. Okay, David, should we get out of here?
David Pere: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Mindy Jensen: From episode 305 of the BiggerPockets Money Podcast, he is David Pere, and I am Mindy Jensen, saying, can’t say blue jay.
