The Real Cost of Staying

I had a moment a while back where I sat down and actually calculated it.

Not vaguely, the way you do when you are trying to reassure yourself things will be fine. Actually calculated it. Numbers on paper.

If I stay exactly where I am, doing exactly what I am doing, what does the next ten years look like?

Same salary bracket, more or less. The same ceiling I have been pressing against for years. Some incremental rises that get swallowed by the cost of living before I can feel them. And superannuation that will not be enough to retire on, even if I work the whole way through without a gap.

I sat with that for a while.

I am not sharing it to be bleak. I am sharing it because I needed to look at it clearly before I could make a real decision about what I wanted to do differently. Because as long as I kept it vague, I could keep pretending there was a version where it all worked out on its own.

There is not.

And I think a lot of women I speak to have done the same calculation, quietly, in their heads, and just not let themselves say it out loud yet.

We are good at showing up. Educated. Capable. We have done everything right, and still we are living pay cheque to pay cheque. Still doing the mental arithmetic before we spend money on something we want. Still watching the years go by in a job that would let us go without a second thought if it needed to.

That is not a personal failing. It is a structural one. But knowing that does not make it easier to live inside.

What changed for me was not the calculation itself. It was asking a different question afterward.

Not “how do I make more money in my job” because I already knew the answer to that one, and it was: slowly, incrementally, and not enough. But “what would it mean to have a second income stream that grew independent of how many hours I worked?”

That is the question I sat with.

I am still sitting with it, honestly. I am one year and four months into building something alongside my full time job, and I have not arrived anywhere impressive yet. But I am somewhere different from where I was. And the ceiling I was staring at does not feel like the only option anymore.

I am not writing this to tell you what to do.

I am writing it because I think the calculation is worth doing. The real one, not the vague reassuring version.

And if you do the maths and find what I found, maybe it is worth asking the next question too.

If you want to understand what I have been building and why, my webinar is a good place to start. The link is in my bio.