The Social Marginal

Common sense, I know; but after a couple discussions today, I was again reminded that many individuals don’t think of it that way.

Regardless, the most important financial asset you have is your Job (or retirement/pension/disability income).  That means you need to treat it like a financial asset, or more specifically, an investment.   It means that appropriate time, attention and care needs to be put into it to fully realize the potential of it, and just as importantly, like an investment, if it’s going down hill, you need to know when to throw in your cards, cash out, and move onto another.  Holding onto a bad job can be extremely detrimental to your growth and overall long term financial success; sure, you’ll forfeit short term dividends, but they’ll generally pay off in the increased long term gains from a change of jobs.

And like an investment, proper diversification is key to long term success and weathering down times; for example, diversification of your client portfolio by industry if you run or manage a business.  By applying appropriate financial management/investment logic to your career, you can often ‘depersonalize’ the evaluation process a bit and help yourself decide what the best move is for you with a minimal amount of stress affecting your decision.

So I encourage everyone to step back and look at their current job as it was an investment.  If it looks like a bad investment, maybe it’s time to start making plans to move on to a better one.