Why I Decided to Switch to Part Time

I’m going to preface this post by giving you a glimpse into my work life over the past 10 years after I entered the real world post Master’s degree.

Back in 2008, I was finishing up my Master’s and received a job offer from the very first company I was interested in and the very first company I interviewed with (given the economy at that time, this was pretty much unheard of in 2008 – one of my good college friends ended up working at Starbucks for years after receiving her Bachelor’s because no one seemed to be hiring – and she’s now a rockstar lawyer).  I was extremely grateful for this experience and extremely eager to learn about a new field (energy) which I had no previous training from in school.

For 18 months I was in a Business Rotation Program where I rotated among 3 departments within the company for 6 months each.  I was only interested in these “rotational” job postings as I still had no clue what I really wanted to do with my life (other than travel) and I liked the idea that I could take some time to learn about different parts of the company and see where would be the best fit.  I was not super passionate about energy at the time, but now that I have been in this industry for 10+ years I am glad I ended up in this path as I find it very interesting and unique.

After those 18 months were up, I ended up on the trade floor in a shift work role where I worked 12 hour shifts (either 6:00am-6:00pm day shift or 6:00pm-6:00am night shift – weekends, holidays, you name it) trading physical energy as energy cannot be stored (yet) so it is always being bought and sold every hour (buy low, sell high). I was able to tell my company that I enjoyed the trade floor the most but where exactly I ended up on the trade floor was out of my hands.  I essentially fell into this shift work role.

Now this schedule is NOT for everyone.  I’ve learned that some people love it and some people hate it.  Those who hate it cannot deal with the flipping crazy schedules.  Those who hate it cannot fathom staying awake until 6:00am (not going to lie I was very worried about this too as I am a granny, not a night owl).  Those who hate it leave quick (1-1.5 years). I, however, was on team love it.

I knew my EXACT hours that I would be at work.  I knew I would be working less than 40 hours per week on average.  I knew I would be getting paid overtime to work a holiday.  I knew my schedule for the entire year (unless I wanted to do some swaps of course).  I knew I had MANY 7-14 day periods off over the year (10 to be exact) and was able to plan a lot of trips accordingly. Because I had so much time off, I would contact one friend and try to convince him/her to go to XX country with me using their 2 weeks annual leave, then contact another friend to go to country YY with their limited vacation, then reach out to yet another friend to go to country ZZ with their vacation time, etc, etc.  And luckily, once Nic entered the picture and entered the work force she too was on a shift schedule so we swapped our shifts around so we would be off at the same time and could travel extensively together.  I knew the exact amount of hours I would be in the office (no last minute emails to work on a powerpoint due tomorrow). When I was off, I knew someone else would be in the office on their shift doing the exact same role as me and thus there was never a need to check work emails when I was not on shift. I knew there was no work travel involved.  I knew I had that work life balance that SO many people would dream of.  People who can handle the timing of the shift schedule do not leave these roles because they know how good they have it (and in the energy industry, these roles are not common at all).

I did this shift work role for 5 years with one company and then for another 1.5 years with a second company once I moved up to Calgary.  Clearly I was on team “love it”, and had turned down a few opportunities to leave the desk.

Some may call this career suicide but I knew from the get-to that work-life balance was very important to me and I never wanted to be glued to my job even if it meant a higher pay.

Climbing up the corporate ladder to someday become a VP was never something I valued.  I saw how stressed out those people looked and how many hours they were putting in the office and I knew that was NOT a life I wanted to life.

For someone in their 20s with limited responsibility, I would highly look into shift work as it allows for such an amazing work life balance and ample time off to explore this amazing world we live in. Some fields that are typically shift work include nurses, doctors, police officers, firefighters, and then some one off positions like mine happened to be. Note that this position within the energy industry as a whole is very rare. There are 10 of us in our corporate headquarters of 2,000+ people with this schedule. For my previous company, it was 20 people out of 5,000+ at the headquarters.

Enter 2017.

My old employer (who I thought I would never work for again since they are headquartered in FL and I’m on the other side of the continent now) reached out to me seeing if I’d be interested in joining back with them on their development team as they just opened a little branch office in Calgary (of all places!).

I met with them and after A LOT of hemming and hawing I decided to finally take the plunge away from shift work.  I knew it would be very hard for me to adapt back to the Monday-Friday lifestyle but I figured where else would I get the opportunity to work in a development role trying to build early-stage utility-scale renewable energy projects (where my only experience was back in 2010 in the Business Rotation Program with them for 6 months).

I am very grateful for this experience over the past 2.5 years as I really was able to understand a totally different side to the business.  But I also learned that this role involves a lot of travel.  A LOT.  I was averaging 2-3 weeks a month away of work travel… to pretty remote locations nonetheless. Maybe if I was in my 20s this would have be seen in a positive light. But as someone in her 30s with a little infant, this was awful and what led to me to look for other opportunities.

Don’t get me wrong, it was great to see and drive through towns I likely never would have visited on my own. I love sitting in the window seat of a plane and looking out below, and I loved all the yummy work food I was able to expense (and would never buy with my own dollars).  But I felt like I hardly saw my family.  And this comes from someone who was able to figure out a way to work from home in my pjs rather than our branch office on days when I was not traveling for work. However, the idea of giving up working from home (when I wasn’t traveling for work) was very hard for me to give up.

Additionally, I had a very difficult time going from seeing your results every single day (did I make good trades this hour or not?) to working on projects that may or may not turn into fruition 2, 3, 4, 5 years down the road. I also had a very difficult time setting up work/life boundaries.  In this role, I was expected to be checking my email constantly even if I was on vacation.  Sometimes I had to bring my laptop with me to work on some spreadsheets while on vacation (a big red flag for me).

When I first started this role in mid-2017 I told my new boss upfront that I already had a 3.5 week long trip to Europe and a 2 week trip to Hawaii planned for the year (again, thank you shift work) and he looked at me quite puzzled but accepted it and when he found out later on Nic was pregnant he immediately thought all the travel was because we were having a baby and wanted to get some travel out of our system.  I should have seen the red flags then.

No, this is how I had always lived my life since starting my shift work role back in 2010.  Multiple big trips a year were common for us (thank you travel hacking). Again, we are not living a deprived life in any sense! In the 2.5 years in my role outside of shift work, the only vacation I was able to manage were trips down to FL (paired with work trips down there to see co-workers at the headquarters) and trips to the cabin – but again, I had to work some of these days remotely when I was logging vacation days into the system. I’m sure most people reading this can relate to this type of vacation setup but for me I felt like I couldn’t escape my job.

Also only having 2 days off Saturday-Sunday just blows my mind.  Working 5 days and then off for 2 just seems insane to someone coming from shift work.  I know it’s the normal for most of society but I never got used to it.  Call me crazy, but I would much rather cram in longer days at work to have longer durations of time off in between.  Being spoiled with the shift work schedule, I feel like hardly anything can get accomplished in 2 days off!

Enter Nic’s idea.

The whole traveling a ton for work was not only wearing on me but on Nic as well as it meant she was solo parenting all the time, which is not easy when your child is super active and does not sleep well.

She asked if I’d ever go back to shift work.  Oddly, my first response was no.  I didn’t think my body could handle the crazy hours anymore.  As mentioned above, I also did not want to give up the ability to work from home (my shift work role would be 100% in the office due to all the computers (8) necessary for the position).

After months, and I mean MONTHS of further discussions, she came up with a pretty brilliant idea.

When I left my previous employer where I was last working shift work, I knew that one of my co-workers had a health issue and was only working part time (days) and her nights (which I, the introvert at heart, prefer) were being picked up by others on the 10 person team who wanted to get paid OT.

I first reached out to her to see if that was still the same set up.  It was.  For over 2.5 years my old boss was still scrambling to fill her night shifts with people to work OT.  May I present to you the solution – me 🙂

My old boss and I had been in contact a little bit during the first year when I left trying to get me back and I finally reached out to him 2 years after my departure to see if he’d be interested in having me fill in the pesky night shifts that were constantly needing to be filled.  He certainly was.  He left the timing very flexible and it was up to me to decide if I wanted to make the switch.

A big part of me didn’t want to give up the work from home in your pjs set up.  I loved working from home.  If Nic needed me to come up from the basement to help with a diaper change, I could do it (that is, assuming I wasn’t on the road for work of course). If there was a lull in my schedule, I could come up and play with the kiddo for an hour.  But then the other part of me realized that wasn’t the daily set up.  For a majority of the time, I was not at home, rather I was in the air or in another part of the continent. I also didn’t want to give up all my matcha tea lattes on the company dime. At least by only working nights, I could eliminate the need to ever wear dress clothes again and could go to work in sweats and a hoodie.

A big part of me also thought “hey, the markets are doing well, if things continue as is, I likely can retire come March 2020 after my next bonus and be done for good if I keep working full time”. But March was still 8 months away at that point, that’s a long time to put something off that is interfering with your entire family.  I finally realized that I needed that balance back.

The number cruncher in me ran the numbers and I determined a few pretty amazing things:

1. Switching to this part time shift work role means I will only be in the office for 73 days out of the 365 day calendar.  I work anywhere from 3-6 shifts per month.  That in and of itself is pretty insane. Full time Monday-Friday employees with 3 weeks off + company holidays are in the office around 225 days a year. So I’m only actually working ~1/3 of the days compared to what I would have been doing in my full time role (granted 12 hour days vs 8 hour days, but again, I’d rather cram in the hours and get more days off). In essence, I’m off and at home with my family 80% of the year.
2. Switching to part time means I get 20 different chunks of 2 weeks off at a time each year for a total of 40 weeks off a year.  Now THAT is work life balance. Ready for my schedule? 3 nights on, 14 days off, 4 nights on, 14 days off. On repeat. INSANE. There’s talk about switching the schedule around where it would then become 2 nights, 8 off. On repeat. It would still be the same 73 shifts a year in the office. I’m indifferent as it ultimately means I’m off and totally checked out from work 80% of the time. I’m actually leaning towards the 2-8 schedule so my body has an easier time adjusting back to a “normal” schedule when I’m off.
3. I essentially took a 50% pay cut from my full time salary to take this part time 50% role.  However, my hourly pay actually goes UP.  How so?  I am in a lower tax bracket now. In my full time role, I was netting ~$44/hour after taxes.  In my part time role, I am now making ~$49/hour after taxes.  We also qualify for close to the full amount of the Canadian Child Benefit since I dropped my salary and Nic is not bringing in an income at this time. So we will now receive around $5,000/year of tax-free money from the government for our child. The extra $5,000 from the government for the Canada Child Benefit equates to an additional $5.70/hour bumping it up to $54.70/hour.  I will however be spending an extra ~$50/month on gas to and from the office which I did not have to deal with in my previous role.  This adjusts my hourly rate down by $0.68 so we’re sitting around $54/hour when all is said and done.  So that’s a net difference of $10 more per hour compared to my full time role. I also will be receiving a higher percentage of my annual bonus with my new job (previous bonus was around 15-20% and shift work bonus will be 30-50% of my salary).  Bonus aside, I’ll be in the office 1/3 of the amount of time and I’ll be making 22% more each hour to boot. I also am still receiving employer provided health coverage too so no issue there shifting to part time. My boss shared with me that if I were to go to 100% full time (aka doubling my current salary), I would be the highest paid employee on our 11 person team even though I am no where close to being the most senior member.
4. I will now need to be employed for a longer period of time to reach our family of 4 FIRE number.  I was estimating that we would be at our family of 4 FIRE number in April-May 2020 if I kept working full time and our investments grew at 5%.  With this switch to part time, we will now be at our family of 4 FIRE number in about a year from now, so about double the duration compared to if I kept working full time (which makes sense).  A few pros to this extension. We will continue to have employer sponsored health benefits for a longer duration (dentist and massage therapy, I’m looking at you!). We also are hoping to time my departure from the corporate gig with hopeful babes numero dos’ arrival so I can exit the workforce by making use of Canada’s generous 18 month paid parental leave (and still be receiving employer sponsored benefits during that time frame) which will cover our living expenses for the first year to aid us into our first year of early retirement to help with sequence of returns risk. If I were to have remained at the full time gig and left in early 2020 before hopeful babes two, I’d be giving up about $25,000 of after tax dollars from the Canadian government for parental leave.

And THAT is how my brain works ha.  I am super analytical and a massive planner and have a lot of difficultly doing anything on a whim.  This decision to switch to part time took me 5 months to finally decide on. Now that I’m a few months in, I am happy to report that hands down 100% this was the right decision. We all are so much happier! Honestly, it feels like I don’t even work anymore.

Do you think I’m crazy and would have just stuck it out with the full time job? Or would you have switched to part time if the opportunity presented itself?

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We believe in stacking up life hacks to keep your enjoyment levels to the max without depleting your bank account.  Here are some ways to further educate yourself and save thousands of dollars over your lifetime by making some simple adjustments:

• Investing Newbies: Check out our free Investing 101 Series.
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