Facing Redundancy - A New Start - Weighing Up Money, Security and Happiness

Hi SaraJayne, and welcome to myLot! These kinds of decisions are difficult, aren't they? I "changed directions" a few years ago... more or less "reinventing" myself from a high-pay, high-stress business job to becoming a free-lance technical writer and eBay "entrepreneur." I suppose the bottom line question is "what is REALLY important to you?" Every choice we make has a "price" of sorts. The "price" of a job we truly love might be a lower salary, or needing to move to a different town. Similarly, the "price" of a really well-paying job might be stress and a 3-hour commute. In figuring these things out, also remember that your TIME is not "free." What is the "cost" of spending three hours a day on the train to and from London? Or will you (worse still) be driving? It's really difficult to put a monetary value on "happiness" and "job satisfaction," but we can at least APPROACH the problem by taking a long hard look at what happiness MEANS to us. Often, it's not about the money. And often (as I discovered), when we have happiness with our job, the "stuff" we used to buy with our higher salaries becomes less important, because our contentment is "filled" by something OTHER than "stuff." Hope some of that made sense, and good luck to you!