What Will You Actually Need to Live On If You Leave?

That question sat at the heart of Before You Leave Corporate: The Financial Conversation Nobody Has With You, and it turned out to be the question that unlocked everything else.

I went into the session knowing we would cover numbers, benefits, pricing and financial runway. What I did not fully anticipate was how quickly the conversation would move from the practical to the deeply personal. Because once you start talking honestly about money — what you earn, what you spend, what you are worth and what you are afraid to charge, you are no longer just talking about spreadsheets.

You are talking about identity, confidence, generational history and the stories we inherited about what people like us are allowed to have.

We talked about what it really means to go from a salary to zero. About the gap between what your employment package is worth, often £15,000 to £20,000 more than your take-home salary when you add pension contributions, healthcare, income protection and death in service cover, and what your business revenue would need to be just to stand still. Most people in the room had never done that calculation.

We talked about the challenge of living on less before you leave not as a punishment but as proof to yourself that you have more control over your financial life than you realised. And we talked about what generational wealth means for Black women specifically, why so many of us were never taught to speak openly about money at home, and how those inherited beliefs about our worth show up decades later in how we price ourselves, what risks we are prepared to take and whether we feel entitled to financial freedom at all.

The question I kept coming back to throughout the session was this. What is your relationship with money telling you about the decision you are making? Because most career transition decisions are not purely financial. They are emotional decisions dressed in financial language. And naming that honestly is the first step to making a plan that actually works.

My biggest takeaway from the room was simple. Do not make a career transition based on hope alone. Know your numbers. Know your worth. Build your runway. And have the conversations about money that perhaps nobody ever taught you to have. Freedom feels very different when it is financially planned for.

The conversation continues. On 6 October I am co-hosting What is Work Costing You Right Now? with the Network for Black Women Leaders. Not just "can I afford to leave?" but "what is staying actually costing me?" Because sometimes the most important financial decision is not about money alone. It is about having the clarity and the confidence to choose what comes next.

If you would like to continue this conversation one to one, a Financial Clarity Session with me is the natural next step.