You always need enough money that you can quit when it’s time

By David McElroy · October 5, 2020

Everybody knew Kent wasn’t going to last long. He had been hired as sports editor of a small daily newspaper — and he was a disaster from the beginning.

I watched it all happen because I was managing editor of a small weekly in the same company. I had friends in the daily paper’s newsroom who were telling me everything as it happened. In his first week on the job, he and a local high school football coach were talking privately about a star player for an opposing team who had been injured in a shooting a couple of years before. A bullet had been left in his head after the shooting because it was too close to his brain. It was a miracle that he had returned to play football.

Kent and the coach were talking about the player and were jokingly referring to him as “Bullet Brain” in their private conversation, but Kent didn’t have the judgment to know this wasn’t something to be made public, so he quoted the coach — in a story that ran in the paper — calling the opposing player “Bullet Brain.”

He wasn’t fired, but he clearly wasn’t going to work out.

After he had been there a few days — maybe a few weeks — everybody came back from lunch one day and noticed that Kent had left a note taped to his terminal. He had gone to lunch — and the note explained that he wasn’t ever coming back.

From that time on, the code phrase at that newspaper for quitting was “going to lunch.” We all joked about doing what Kent had done. At different times, we all wanted to. (I was promoted to be Kent’s replacement, but that’s another story.)

Everybody needs enough money set aside that he can “go to lunch” one day and never come back. At some point, everybody needs to quit.

Everybody ought to have “I quit” money — or “going to lunch” money, in our old terms. You need to have enough money set aside — at least six months of living expenses — that when you really feel the need, you can say “I quit” to wherever you’re working. (More than six months would be even better.)

If you don’t have a cushion of at least that much, you’re going to feel trapped when you inevitably realize you need to leave a job — and you’re probably going to step into a less-than-ideal situation instead, just out of desperation. Or worse, you’ll stay where you know you shouldn’t be.

When I worked in politics, I had the freedom to “fire” my clients any time I decided they were more trouble than they were worth. Why? Because I had plenty of money. I could get rid of any client and I still had plenty of other work. And even if I had dumped every client in one day, I had enough money laying around to survive for several years without income.

Today, I don’t have that freedom. If I decided I couldn’t take another day or week at my job, I would have to grit my teeth and find alternative income before walking out. Even though I have a great relationship with the owner of my company, there’s a lot less freedom when you feel you can’t leave. And I find that constricting — all because I don’t have “I quit” money. I can’t “go to lunch” if I need to.

A job can be like a jail for many of us. I know from long experience that I ultimately need to work for myself, for reasons that are too complicated to get into here. Last winter, I had decided I was leaving my company this past summer — to pursue filmmaking instead — but the pandemic hit and changed the economics of everything. So I’m still there.

Having money set aside is like having a “get out of jail free” card. You don’t necessarily have to use it, but knowing it’s there gives you the confidence and peace to know that you don’t have to put up with something which makes you miserable.

I can live on far less today than I could 10 years ago. The money I need to pay for six months of living expenses is chicken feed by my old standards. If I had understood how important it was to always have such cash available, I would have made different decisions 10 or 15 years ago. I would have enough money today to give myself that option.

We’re about to embark on an expansion at my company that could let me make even more than I used to make in politics. If that works out, I’m not going to spend it. I’m going to stay in my cheap little house and drive my cheap little car — and I’m going to set aside enough money to live on.

I need enough money set aside that when I need to leave something — a job, a partnership, any situation — money will never be a consideration.

The day will come when I need to “go to lunch” and not come back. You need to be prepared for such a situation in your own life, too.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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