Why You're Worried About Money (and An Easy Way To Change That)

Copy My Financial Runway Calculator & Show Up Like A Confident Job Hunter

F.Y.I - I’m hosting a free live workshop next Thursday where I’ll share how you can create your own playbook to land a dream job offer in less than 90 days. I’ll share more in a minute, but you can register your spot here.

Happy Saturday Everyone! ??

I hope you had a great week.

I’m here to help you get more dream job offers faster with less stress.

Less stress.

Stress is one of the most important factors in my overall philosophy.

Follow the right steps early in your job hunt, and it will be filled with inspiration and abundance.

Avoid the critical early steps of clarity creation, and you’ll find yourself anxious, overwhelmed, and urgently latching to anything that comes your way.

Stress takes two forms.

Good stress helps you.

It can push you to finish something you know will improve your life but can’t get yourself to complete.

It can be the kick in the ass you need to keep your job hunt momentum.

Good stress looks like responding to a connection at a dream company that just reached out.

It’s the tension you feel in your body when lifting weights or out on a run.

You’re stressed because you’re working on something you deeply care about and want to get right.

Bad stress does the opposite.

It makes you constantly fearful.

In a sense of fight or flight at all times.

You can’t focus on the important things because you’re constantly looking for that unknown kill shot that will finally get the best of you.

If you know your financial runway, you’ll:

• Show up more confidently in networking conversations and interviews
• Be able to take your time to find the right opportunity
• Be more present in your daily life (not constantly worrying about $$)

If you don’t, it’s going to be a serious problem when you’re job hunting.

Before I jump into sharing my Financial Runway Calculator (which you should 100% copy) I wanted to share something…

Next Thursday, I’m going to be hosting a free live masterclass covering my entire job hunt playbook and philosophy:

5 Proven Steps To Land More Dream Job Offers In Less Than 90 Days

In this training I’ll be revealing:

• The critical starting point that most people miss and end up stuck, frustrated, and settling as a result.
• The two crucial components to having unshakeable confidence.
• How to turn your network into a job opportunity engine.
• My proven, copy-and-paste method for getting recruiters to say, “The team loves you, it’s clear you can do the job, let’s get this contract signed!”

PLUS - those that attend the call with me live will also receive a free copy of my elite job hunter playbook.

In it, I reveal the exact framework I used to go from cubicle data entry to Uber employee 250 and from unemployed to VP of Operations at a well-funded Y-Combinator startup.

It’s going to be an awesome time, and I’d love to have you join.

Especially if you’re interested in cutting through all the doom and gloom of the 2023 job hunt to land an amazing role.

To grab your spot, just click here. (Attendance is limited.)

I hope to see you there!

Now let’s get back to that financial runway calculation.

The Focus Killer

A successful job hunt is all about focus.

Focusing on:

• What actions matter and will compound.
• Companies, industries, and individuals that you find interesting.
• Problems you can solve.

Anything that diverts that focus can and will kill your job hunt.

Bad stress diverts focus.

So it’s important to identify those potential stressors ahead of time.

The number 1 stressor in a person’s job hunt is money.

It has been and always will be money.

Why?

Money is time.

The more money you have, the more time you have to develop skills, build relationships, and create value for others.

Money can also borrow time from others.

That’s what taking a course or hiring a coach does.

You’re condensing their experience into a matter of minutes.

If you had all the money in the world, it would only be a matter of time before you achieved your dream role.

But we don’t have all the money in the world (or we don’t think we do), so we have a real (or perceived) ticking clock.

And that causes us stress.

I have found four major reasons money causes stress during the job hunt:

1. Financial trauma.
2. Financial ignorance.
3. Financial scarcity (real or perceived).
4. Greed.

A Family Financial Secret

I grew up in a middle-class home in the suburbs of Seattle.

My Dad was a lawyer, and my mom stayed home for most of my childhood and cared for my two brothers and me.

Despite always having enough money, there still seemed to be an anxiety about spending money and that we never had enough.

Not that my parents wanted more and more.

It was just a feeling of stress whenever money was mentioned.

My parents taught us to respect our money and save, save, save.

I didn’t know where it came from then, but I remember having so much anxiety whenever I bought something as a kid.

Whether it was baseball cards, a video game, a new baseball glove, a movie ticket, or a dinner or lunch out, it didn’t matter.

I would stress whether it was something I needed (not wanted) for hours, days, or weeks.

That stress continued into my early 30’s.

This mentality helped me by:

• Allowing me to be very careful about my money.
• Pushing me to save as much as possible.
• Making it impossible to spend more than I made.

But, it took a toll.

Money was anxiety to me.

Just thinking about money would make my heart pump and my palms sweat.

Not because I didn’t have enough but because something inside me was warning me, saying, “But what if…”.

If I were going to buy something, I would research it, read customer reviews, read articles about it, watch videos, and understand the best option on the market.

I would constantly think, “what happens if I spend this money and it turns out to be a waste” or, “what happens if I spend this money and something comes up that I can’t pay for because I spent that money.”

I didn’t know then that this anxiety came from my family’s history as well as my financial ignorance.

In my childhood, I took everything as gospel and listened to all the stories, advice, and life history of my parents and their parents before them.

I didn’t know any better, and most, if not all, of the advice and molding was instrumental in making me into the person I am today.

But, there are subtle nuances and family trauma’s that you don’t realize are there.

Those traumas can span generations and affect you without you even knowing it.

I found that money was one of the phantom traumas that my family was carrying.

My Dad’s parents were born in Iowa in the early 1920s.

They were farmers.

My grandfather worked on a dairy farm and became a state basketball champion by shooting hoops on the barn wall between switching the milk machine from cow to cow.

As my grandparents grew up, their early childhood in the roaring ’20s gave way to one of the toughest times in American history, the Great Depression.

My grandparents were 7 and 8 years old when the Great Depression hit in 1929.

Their earliest memories were of lack and need.

My grandmother’s family didn’t have enough money to support her, so she was sent to other family members' homes to live.

She went to 7 different schools in 8 years as she jumped from family to family.

Growing up, my Dad would tell stories of this time, but it wasn’t until later that I saw the downstream effects of that trauma and how it affected the family.

There was a fear of money.

“The money will run out, so you shouldn’t spend it, and some calamity could strike, so you can’t trust your money in investments.”

“Your money is best kept in cash.”

“Don’t trust people with a lot of money because they likely got that money through dishonesty.“

They didn’t say this explicitly, but it was a learned behavior through action.

We didn’t talk about money and not knowing any different, I assumed this was the way of the world.

I only realized the extent of my financial ignorance and limiting beliefs when I graduated college and entered the “real world”.

By identifying my limiting beliefs resulting from my family history, I could move past them.

I highlight my family history to show you that if you’re feeling financial anxiety in your job hunt, it may have nothing to do with how much or little money you have.

You could have millions of dollars in the bank and still feel anxious.

It could have something to do with deeply ingrained financial scarcity passed down to you from prior generations.

Your best chance at navigating through ingrained financial trauma is identifying limiting beliefs and training your mind to realize where it’s being irrational or flat-out wrong.

The Financial Anxiety Cycle

Sometimes financial anxiety comes from ignorance.

You can be the most financially literate person and still be financially ignorant.

How?

By ignoring reality.

Most people are like ostriches.

They bury their heads in the sand when they feel danger.

It doesn’t matter if the danger is real or perceived.

They put the danger out of sight and, by doing so, solve the problem.

Right?

Wrong.

They’re just so uncomfortable with what the reality could be that they choose to ignore it until it’s too painful to ignore.

I used to be a job hunt ostrich.

My anxiety about my finances led me not to want to look at the real numbers.

By not looking at the numbers, I lacked financial knowledge.

My lack of financial knowledge led me to have an unclear financial runway.

My unclear financial runway led me to have more anxiety.

And on and on.

Don’t be an ostrich.

Don’t assume what your runway is.

Know your runway down to the dollar.

It’s only by pulling the numbers and putting together a financial forecast that you’ll get financial clarity.

I promise the anxiety will dissolve once you have that financial clarity.

One of three things will happen:

1. You’ll realize you have more runway than you thought (Sweet!)
2. You’ll confirm you had the runway you thought (That’s what I thought!)
3. You’ll learn that you have less runway than you thought (Time to get to work!)

None of these options are bad.

They are just reality.

And you can create a plan with reality.

P.S. I know ostriches don’t actually stick their heads in the sand.

Anxiety From Financial Scarcity (Real or Perceived)

For many people, money drives a scarcity mentality.

If you know your financial runway, you will know whether you have real or perceived financial scarcity.

Let’s say that you run the numbers, and after making some cuts, you can make it six months to a year without making money.

That means that your financial scarcity is perceived, not real.

It may not feel perceived, but you have a lot of time to ensure you land the right role.

If that’s your situation, you just need to stay the course and continue to execute your strategy.

If, on the other hand, you run the numbers and you don’t have a lot of time (<3 months), then all that means is that you have to get more serious and get to work.

You can also extend that runway without getting a 9-5 job.

What else can you do?

• Drive for Uber, DoorDash, and
• Sell skills on Upwork or Fiverr
• Join TaskRabbit

These things may not seem sexy, but they can be the difference in having the runway you need to land the job you want.

Do them right, and you can build case studies or craft product improvement recommendations for companies you want to work for.

I talk about how my need for fast cash and taking a non-ideal 9-5 job almost cost me millions.

GREED: The Final Financial Anxiety Driver

Greed can drive as much anxiety as financial scarcity.

How?

This is how I have seen it play out.

You start with the salary in mind.

As you start your job hunt you ask, “How can I make over $200k per year.”

Your barometer is the dollars you will make, not the work you will do, if you have done that work before, or if you will enjoy doing that work.

What happens next?

You apply for roles outside of your area of expertise.

You shoot for titles higher than a logical person would jump to.

You target roles in which you would transition industries completely and still jump levels.

These people find themselves consistently rejected from conversations and frustrated.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be ambitious.

But your desire for more money now can cloud your ability to find a role and company that is the best fit to get you to where you want to go that will provide a big payout later.

My Financial Runway Calculator (Download Below)

Thankfully, there’s an easy way out of financial anxiety.

You can make it easy by making a copy of my Financial Runway Calculator here.

The way out is to understand your expected expenses, expected income, total cash reserves, cash reserve limit, and months of financial runway.

Then, understand where you can extend your runway by cutting unessential expenses or earning additional income using your existing skillset.

If you’re not familiar with these terms, that’s completely fine.

I’ll go over them below.

Expected Expenses

Expenses are payments that you make with your cash/debit or credit.

These can fall into many categories, including:

• Auto & Transport
• Bills & Utilities
• Business Services
• Education
• Entertainment
• Fees & Charges
• Financial
• Food & Dining
• Gifts & Donations
• Health & Wellness
• Home
• Investments
• Kids
• Loans
• Personal Care
• Pets
• Shopping
• Taxes
• Travel

Expected Income

Expected income is the money you and your household (if you have a partner) expect to collect in the coming weeks and months.

Things you should consider here:

• Your bi-weekly paychecks if you’re employed
• Severance pay
• Payment for unused vacation
• Unemployment
• Self-employed income
• Partner’s or any additional household income
• Investment income
• Income from side hustles or full-time businesses
• Any additional income that you expect from other places (parents, siblings, etc.) to keep you afloat

Total Cash Reserves

The total amount of cash you have sitting in your bank's savings and/or checking account.

This is all the cash you can draw from during your job hunt.

This does not include investments that you could withdraw.

We don’t want to consider that as an option right now.

Cash Reserve Limit

Your “cash reserve limit” is the cash amount you don’t want to drop below.

This can be for financial reasons and psychological reasons.

You may say, “I don’t want to dip below $20k in savings,” or “I don’t want to dip below 3 months of living expenses”.

Whatever that number is, it’s the amount of money in the bank that you don’t want to go below.

If you have a partner or significant other, you want to speak with them about this number and ensure you are both aligned.

Make sure that your partner is enrolled in this journey with you.

Months of Financial Runway

This is a simple calculation.

(Total Cash Reserves - Cash Reserve Limit) * -1

Expected Monthly Net Income

If your net monthly income is negative (which isn’t crazy if you have been laid off since you won’t have a paycheck), then this equation will spit out the number of months you have before you hit your cash reserve limit.

If your net monthly income is positive, you expect not to dip into your cash reserves and have an unlimited runway.

Once you know this number, it will allow you to put financial anxieties behind you so you can focus on the important process of getting to where you want to go.

You should continue to track your weekly and monthly expenditures to ensure that what you calculated as expected expenses and income match the real expenses and income.

If you keep them aligned, you can remove the weight of financial anxiety from your shoulders.

REMEMBER: The goal of calculating this number is not to stretch your job search to the limits of what you can financially bear. It gives you the psychological safety to know that you’ll be ok financially to find the role that best fits where you want to go.

Action

Open up this Financial Runway Calculator and make a copy.

Pull your last month’s income and expenses into a spreadsheet.

Make sure to pull data from any credit cards you use as well.

A service like Empower or Mint is very helpful and can do most of this work by connecting your accounts.

Both are 100% free to signup and use.

Record the following information:

• What were your total monthly expenses?
• What are your top buckets or categories of spend?
• How much are you spending on food?
• How much are you spending on housing?
• How much are you currently investing?
• How much are you spending on areas that are not food, housing, or investing?
• What is your current total checking account amount?
• What is your current total savings account amount?
• If you will receive severance, how much will you receive, and when will you receive it?
• Do you have other sources of income than your own? Do you have a partner that you rely on?
• What will your total expected monthly income be?
• What expenses can you cut (particularly in the non-food/housing buckets) without negatively affecting the health and well-being of you and your family?
• What is the total cash level that you do not want to dip below?

Take your current monthly expenses minus the areas you can remove to get your expected monthly expenses.

Add your sources of income together, including any expected severance, to get your expected monthly income.

Subtract your expected monthly expenses from your monthly income to get your expected monthly net income.

Take your total cash reserves (your checking and savings accounts) and subtract the cash receive limit you don’t want to go below, then multiply by negative one.

This is your allowable cash depletion.

Finally, divide your expected monthly net income by your allowable cash depletion.

This will give you your total months of financial runway.

If this number is negative, you have expenses lower than your monthly income, and you won’t hit your cash reserve limit unless your expenses increase or your income decreases.

Voila! You now know your timeline for finding your next role.

There you have it, my financial runway calculator.

This is a number you should know like the back of your hand and monitor on a monthly basis to make sure you’re still on track.

If you know this number, I promise you’ll be able to stay true to your job hunt strategy and that it can significantly reduce or eliminate your financial stress.

Let’s become career champions together ??

Kyle

P.S. Whenever you’re ready, there are 3 ways I can help you:

#1: Free Job Hunt Strategy Call: Request a free job hunt strategy call with Kyle to get closer to landing your dream role tomorrow. On our call, we will walk through your vision and how to make it a reality, cover the obstacles standing in your way, and help determine the best next step for you to take based on your short-term and long-term goals. Schedule a call today!

#2: Register for my FREE masterclass next Thursday at 1 PM ET / 10 AM PT: 5 Proven Steps To Land More Dream Job Offers In Less Than 90 Days. Register here

#3: Follow me on LinkedIn for more job hunt systems, productivity tools, and networking templates.

?? Job Op of the Week ??

Each week I’ll highlight a different job opportunity I think is cool and give tips for how I would approach getting into the role.

This week we have the Chief of Staff position @ ResortPass.

What the company does: Ever want to hang out at the pool at the Four Seasons or see what it’s like to chill in the spa at the Ritz Carlton? Now you don’t need to pay thousands of dollars for a room to access those amenities. You can use Resort Pass to get pool, spa, and amenity access at the best hotels and resorts in the world.

Why is the role awesome: You will be the right hand of the CEO and his partner across the business. The CEO is the former ClassPass Global Head of Operations, so he knows a thing or two about this type of business. You’ll be able to work with and learn from a highly talented CEO, operator, and company builder. Plus, you get ResortPass credit to access private beaches, deluxe saunas, awesome pools, and much more.

Why is the company awesome: It’s a classic marketplace play. These locations have excess capacity left unused for large parts of the day. ResortPass allows these companies to monetize that unused capacity. You're golden if you can show case studies for how it makes sense financially and acts as an entry point for upsells.

How would I approach getting in: I would watch videos (like these 1,2) and read articles (like these 1, 2) to get as much information as possible about the company and the people working there in their own words.

I’d then reach out to Tae Lee, Darshit Desai, and Lindsay Thoren with a personalized LinkedIn connection request message and email. From those conversations, I would look for areas of pain that I could alleviate immediately using my prior experience.

Ex: Create a case study playbook showing the most important marketplace metrics/KPI’s w/ descriptions of why they’re important and how to influence them, an example of how you have helped executives manage investor relations, and rools/processes that you have implemented to help companies scale without manual work.

Apply for the job here and DM me on LinkedIn, mentioning this newsletter, send me your resume, and if it’s relevant I’ll forward it to my connections there.

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