How to Quit Your Job So You Can Work From Home or Become a Stay at Home Mom

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You’ve been wanting to quit your job ever since Martha started purposely mispronouncing your name to customers just to piss you off. Or maybe you’re just ready for a change. You’re sick and tired of the 9-5 grind and want to be in control of your schedule.

When I first quit my job, I was working for Wells Fargo as a Personal Banker, and my branch was without a manager for several months. My district manager made me responsible for all of the ridiculous conference calls to check our branch’s sales progress throughout the day.

I was also the only banker in our office, so if a customer walked in needing to open an account, get into their safe deposit box, or cancel their debit card because of fraud, I wasn’t available.

Because I was on a stupid conference call.

Wells Fargo (and other large corporations) take note:

Conference calls and mandatory meetings are a surefire way to disrupt the flow of business.

4 Reasons to Quit Your Job

How do you know it’s time to throw in the towel?  Quitting a job is a decision that can impact your life for better or worse. Here are four signs it’s probably time to quit.

1. You feel triggered just thinking about your job

   If you feel intense anxiety at bedtime, thinking of what’s to come the next morning or you dread getting out of bed every day to go into an office you just can’t stand, it’s time to quit your job.

2. You have no work/life balance

   Finding time to have fun and enjoy life away from work is so important. For a few years, my husband traveled for work out of state.

   The first year in his new job, he stayed in hotels 180 nights of the year. This put a ton of pressure on me and our kids missed him. We missed out on quality time because when he was home on the weekends, he was exhausted.

   I was also exhausted from caring for our kids on my own while running a business and trying to maintain a home that didn’t look like a disaster zone.

   Our marriage suffered, and we are still recovering from it. There’s always a choice. Choose your family over your work and find a way to balance it all. Don’t quit your job without a plan, though! That would be crazy and irresponsible.

3. You want to be a stay at home mom

   If you desire to stop working to stay at home with the kids, there is a way to make it happen. You just have to carefully weigh all of the pros and cons.

   Whether you’ve just had your first baby and don’t want to go back after maternity leave, or you have a few kids and are ready to focus on helping the middle school or high school children with their studies, you have to budget for it. Make sure that it makes financial sense to quit your job. Then, go for it!

4. You want to start your own business and work from home

   Deciding to quit my job and sell real estate was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made for my career. Taking it a step further, starting my blog and YouTube channel as a side hustle was the second best thing for my business.

   As a new Realtor in a brand new market, I was able to make more money in my first year than I did at my full-time job at Wells Fargo!

   Now that Perfection Hangover is just over two years old, I’m earning over $4,000 per month!

   If you’re interested in how to start a blog, read my blogging tutorial. If you own a service-based business, like real estate, insurance, or even a daycare center, you should not wait and start a blog now. You can supplement your income substantially with blogging income.

Related Posts:

• How to Start a Blog {That Actually Makes Money}
• February Income Report: How I Earned $5,365 Working From Home
• How I Got 10,000 Blog Page Views my 4th Month Blogging {Traffic Tips}
• Winning Pinterest Strategy for Blogs: Tailwind Tribes Tips for Beginner Bloggers
• Income Report Update: How I Earned $23,000 Blogging

Should I Quit my Job for MLM?

Speaking of fitness, I’d be doing you a disservice if I didn’t share my experience with multi-level marketing. You see, I once was a Beachbody coach as a side hustle. I thought it would be a good way to get in shape while making money on the side.

I was recruited by my ex-sister-in-law Jocelyn, who was ‘all-in’ on the business. Her insatiable drive to help others was contagious, and I wanted in on the exciting opportunity to make money from home.

I was the ideal recruit for Beachbody because:

• We had just relocated to a new area and I had no friends, no community, no support.
• I had gained a lot of weight and was losing self-confidence and feeling generally down on myself.
• When I believe something, good or bad, I share it with everyone I know. So I’d be a great ‘pusher’ of the products.

I’ll spare you the entire story, but a year into the business, when it came time to do my taxes, I realized I had reinvested every dime I had made while Beachbody coaching back into the company. I had earned NO INCOME.

You can read more about my breakup with Beachbody here. Jocelyn ended up quitting her $70,000 a year middle school home economics teaching job to pursue Beachbody full-time.

Within a year, she was no longer with Beachbody but had moved on to a new ketogenic company and for the past 2-3 years has been offering some sort of coaching for social sellers aka network marketers.

99% of Network Marketers Lose Money

My advice? Don’t quit your job for MLM. In fact, don’t do multi-level marketing at all. 99% of network marketers lose money and only 1% earn a profit. Some of these companies’ products are great, but the business model is set up to make the company rich…not you. Find your passion and go ‘all-in’ on your strengths.

You can find your strengths by reading StrengthsFinder 2.0 and taking the test included. Be sure to order the physical copy so you can get the access code for the test. I made the mistake of buying my copy at Goodwill and had to buy another copy online.

Can You Afford to Quit Your Job?

When I quit my job after we moved to Illinois, it made financial sense. My income at the time was approximately $1700 per month (take-home after taxes and health insurance). At the time, we had two kids in full-time daycare and one in before and after school care.

Childcare costs were a whopping $1300 per month, and while I made enough money to pay it, that meant I was really taking home $400 per month before calculating fuel costs.

If you calculate $400 per month divided by 173.3 hours (2080 hours in a work year divided by 12 is 173.3), I was earning a mere $2.30 per hour! This was hardly worth getting out of bed for!

So we tightened our budget and made some changes. The most noticeable way we have saved money is that we made the switch from traditional health insurance to Christian Healthcare Ministries. We save over $10,000 per year on healthcare insurance costs.

This change alone has been enough to justify quitting my job to stay at home.

Other Ways we Saved Money

If you’re married, create a personal budget based on living off of one income. Can you swing it? What areas can you save money to achieve this goal? Other expenses we cut so I could stay at home with the kids:

• Our family switched from DirecTV to YouTube TV and started streaming our favorite tv shows with our Roku TV.
• We switched from Verizon to Cricket for cell phone service.
• I stopped eating out so often and started cooking more meals at home. We even got our grocery budget down to $60 per week for a family of five!

Start a Side Hustle to Make Money From Home

Blogging isn’t for everyone. Nor is a career as a YouTuber. However, I now earn more money than I did in banking by writing and recording videos a few hours a day and I have the flexibility to be able to be there for my kids more.

I have control over my schedule, and I can turn down projects if I start feeling overwhelmed. This is the flexibility and entrepreneurship I craved when I tried multi-level marketing, but I realized I don’t need a company telling me I need to take selfies and promote products all day long. I can actually get paid to write and speak about the things that matter to me.

In February, I earned $5,350 working from home from multiple streams of revenue. I probably worked 20 hours per week that entire month. That’s $67 per hour of income without a college degree. 

I attribute this to finding my purpose, starting a blog and YouTube channel, and focusing on helping others. I also sold a home in the month of February from a referral of a friend.

Online business and real estate have been my sources of income, but there are several other ways to make money from home. I recently wrote a post about 87 legit ways to make money on the side, such as donating blood plasma for money.

You can also start your photography business or paint or stain porches. You can design business cards or write other people’s resumes.

Find a need or pain point and help people. It’s as simple as that!

What to Say When Quitting a Job

I’ve lived in five different states, so I had to break the news that I was leaving a few different times. Whether you’ve hated or loved your job, you still want to have a good employer reference, so you’ll want to make a graceful exit. Here’s what to say when quitting a job.

Write a letter of resignation and start with an introduction stating how grateful you are for the opportunity to work for such a great company. You can add something about how the company values were aligned with your own and that you have grown individually and professionally in your time with the company.

Then, write a paragraph informing them of your decision to leave the company. Give at least two weeks’ notice if possible. If you quit your job to take a much better job that requires you to start sooner, explain that while you wish you could give two weeks’ notice, unfortunately, you must be available to start your new venture on XX date.

If you live in an ‘at-will’ state, meaning either party can end employment at any time for any reason (or no reason at all), write “I understand that XX state is an at-will state and I want to thank you for understanding my need to give shorter notice than I had hoped.

Thank them again for the opportunity and sign it. I would be willing to write a resignation letter for you for a fee of $50 if you would like! Just email me at coaching [at] perfectionhangover.com and we’ll consult about your experience. I’m happy to help as I know this is a difficult and uncomfortable thing to do (especially when you have nothing positive to say about a company).

Don’t Let Others Make You Feel Guilty for Quitting Your Job

For some reason, family members who think they’re all-knowing seem to think that they know what’s best for us. We all have that parent or in-law or friend who has to work outside the home to make ends meet or support their lifestyle.

Listen to me carefully. It’s not you. It’s them. Jealousy and hatefulness come out when you start making changes and people don’t approve.

This is a family decision between you and your spouse or an individual decision if you’re unmarried. Don’t allow others to make you feel guilty after you’ve quit your job.