Golden handcuffs are a trap that keeps people stuck in jobs they don’t enjoy or find fulfilling because of money.
They are notoriously difficult to break and most people don’t realize how heavy they become until they feel trapped.
Don’t let golden handcuffs take away your freedom.
The key to avoiding them is knowing your priorities in life and matching your spending to meet those goals.
How Much Do You Value Freedom?
In college, the best piece of advice my professor gave me before I started my career was:
“Keep your expenses low and save your raises. The day you hit your walkaway number, you pack your stuff and head for the exit sign. Or else you’ll never leave.”
While you may not have thought about it, the reality is the more you rely on income from your job, the less freedom you have over your life.
There is an opportunity cost to every decision in life. Whether or not you are willing to pay that cost is up to you.
- Earning a high income comes with long hours and high stress
- Having expensive tastes limits your ability to build F You money and take risks
- Working a job you tolerate because you need the paychecks reduces your opportunity to find more fulfilling work you actually enjoy
Managers love to hire employees who have big mortgages, kids in private school, and a lifestyle that cannot be sustained without their high-paying jobs.
Those who have traded their freedom away with their financial decisions have no choice but to continue running the rat race.
I stress the importance of saving early and working towards financial freedom because it will lessen your dependency on your job and give you options in life.
By having a financial base and knowing I have options, I noticed a big difference in happiness in my work life.
I was more confident in expressing my opinions and setting boundaries which allowed me to focus on longevity in my career.
I knew that even in the worst case if things didn’t work out, I had options and a financial runway to find better opportunities.
Not being bound by golden handcuffs gave me an incredible sense of freedom because I could focus on my priorities and never let money or a job stand in the way of what’s truly important to me.
It gave me the confidence to turn down a promotion opportunity because I knew it wasn’t right for me. I wasn’t willing to trade my valuable free time for more money.
To me, having that feeling of freedom is priceless.
Match Your Spending With Your Priorities
Understand that golden handcuffs don’t happen overnight. Most people don’t realize that it’s slowly growing heavier until one day they feel trapped under its weight.
Speaking from experience, it’s very easy to overinflate your lifestyle as your income rises and there is social pressure to keep up with higher spending.
If you’re making more money in your career, aren’t you missing out on living the good life if you’re not spending it?
While I think everyone should use money as a tool to improve their life, there has to be a balance.
The key to avoiding golden handcuffs is to learn how to sustainably increase your spending to match your priorities in life.
Lifestyle inflation is a one-way street and when most people earn more, they start to spend too quickly without considering their priorities.
This is how a lot of poor financial decisions are made and why even high-income earners live paycheck to paycheck. Over time, what was once a luxury becomes a necessity as they adapt to having certain things and living a certain lifestyle.
Most of the things we need to live a happy and fulfilling life don’t require much more money, but they do require self-awareness and appreciation for what we currently have.
I know that my dreams, health, and relationships with loved ones are the priorities in my life and this has helped guide my decisions and create a lifestyle around these goals that is not dependent on just money.
At the same time, I’m very motivated to earn because I know that spending more money on these priorities will improve my life satisfaction over time, while still being able to save aggressively to build my financial freedom and buy back my time.
Focusing on my priorities in life, keeping my fixed expenses low, saving and investing aggressively, and being intentional with upgrading my lifestyle have helped me from being trapped by golden handcuffs.
Spending more money does not guarantee lasting happiness, but feeling trapped in a soul-sucking job is guaranteed to make you unhappy.