Prefer the story? I told it on Medium: Why “Just Get a Job” Stopped Working for Me at 50. This is the maths underneath it.
Once you’re past fifty and the money looks thin, everyone hands you the same four answers. Get something part-time. Go freelance. Turn the hobby into a little side line. Or just stay on a couple more years.
I’m leaving a quality job next April after forty years, and I’ve heard all four since the summer, one of them over the garden fence. So I did what forty years in regulated manufacturing trains into you. Before trusting any of them, I ran the numbers.
The figures below are made up, but they’re ordinary: the kind you’d find in any local advert. The arithmetic is real, and it’s the same arithmetic I’m running on my own options.
Why bother now? Because the offers tend to arrive before you’ve decided anything. If somebody has already said “just a few hours a week”, you’ve probably got days to answer, not months.
1. The part-time job: what £12.50 an hour actually pays
Take a local job at £12.50 an hour, sixteen hours a week, spread over four four-hour shifts. The advert says £200 a week.
Say tax takes 20%, because it sits on top of whatever else you earn. That leaves £160. Then the shadow shift starts, meaning the hours and money a job takes from you that the payslip never records:
- Forty minutes there and back, four days a week: 2 hours 40 minutes
- Fuel and parking at £5 a day: £20
- A sandwich and a coffee, because you’re out anyway: £10
You keep £130 for 18 hours 40 minutes of your week. That’s £6.96 an hour, a little over half what the advert promised.
Put the same sixteen hours into two full days and it shifts. You drive twice instead of four times, so you keep £145 for about 17 hours 20 minutes, which is £8.37. Same job, same rate, £1.41 an hour better, purely because travel is charged by the day.
If you go back at all, buy your work in whole days.
Want the sums done for you? The True Cost of Earning calculator puts your current job and up to three alternatives side by side.
2. The leak hunt: money nobody taxes
Before adding hours, check what’s already leaking out.
Money you earn gets taxed. Money you stop spending doesn’t. At a 20% rate, cutting £100 a month of spending is worth the same as earning £125 before tax. At the part-time job’s real rate of £6.96, that £125 would cost you roughly 18 hours of work every month. A leak hunt costs an afternoon, three months of bank statements and a highlighter.
It reaches further if you’re near retirement. A common rule of thumb says a pot can pay out about 4% a year, so you need roughly 25 times what you’ll spend annually. Every £100 a month you stop spending for good is £1,200 a year, or about £30,000 less you’d need saved. (Plenty of UK planners use a more cautious rate than 4%, which makes the saving bigger, not smaller.)
The workbook has the 45-minute leak hunt checklist and word-for-word scripts for the retention calls.
3. Staying on full-time: count the recovery hours
The other suggestion is simply to stay on. So try a full-time job at £36,000. After tax and National Insurance that’s about £29,440. At 37.5 hours a week for 46 weeks you’re paid for 1,725 hours, so the label says £17.07 an hour.
Now add one hour of recovery for each working day: the stretch when you’re home but no use to anyone. That’s 230 hours a year, and the rate drops to £15.06. Add £1,200 a year of takeaways bought because nobody could face cooking, and it’s £14.44.
For about three years I took every Saturday overtime shift going. Time and a half. I’d have told you it was the best money I ever earned. I never counted the Sunday I spent too flattened to do anything. I tested every batch that crossed my desk and never once tested that.
One UK footnote: once you pass State Pension age you stop paying employee National Insurance, so the same salary keeps a little more. Run your own figures.
4. Freelancing: the hidden factory
Quality engineers have a name for work that eats real hours but never appears on the production report: the hidden factory. Freelancers run one behind every client. Pitching, scoping calls, revisions, invoicing, chasing the ones who pay late. For a lot of people it’s two unpaid hours behind every paid one.
The sum is short:
Real rate = quoted rate ÷ (1 + unpaid hours per paid hour)
So £60 an hour for consultancy, with two unpaid hours behind each billed one, is really £20 an hour before tax. And as a sole trader you’ll pay your own National Insurance and keep your own books on top.
Turn it round to set a price. If you want a real £30 an hour and expect two unpaid hours for every paid one, you need to quote £90. If the market won’t pay that, shrink the hidden factory before you cut the rate: fewer, bigger clients, deposits up front, revision limits in writing.
The Freelance Rate Floor tab in the calculator does this for you.
5. The hobby: some things should stay unpaid
Then there’s the side hustle. You like gardening, so sell the veg. You’re good with dogs, so walk other people’s.
Once deadlines, customers and a tax return turn up, the thing you did to rest becomes a second job with unpredictable pay. Section 3 shows what recovery time is worth. Ask three questions before you sell anything you enjoy:
- Would I still enjoy it if a paying customer hated the result?
- Will I do it on a deadline, on a day I don’t feel like it?
- Where do I go to rest if this becomes work?
A no to any of them, and the hobby stays yours.
The three-number check I’m using before April
None of this is new. Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez set out the real hourly wage in Your Money or Your Life back in 1992. All I’ve added is a quality manager’s suspicion of any number nobody has checked.
Before I say yes to anything, I’ll run three numbers:
- True hourly rate. The money you keep, divided by every hour the work takes, including the commute, the admin and the recovery.
- Leak value. What I could free up without earning a penny, grossed up for tax.
- Life cost. What happens to my sleep, my evenings and my weekends.
An option gets a yes only if it pays more than I could free up by fixing leaks, and leaves the third number no worse. Anything else is a no, however good the advert looks. (I wrote about testing what you actually want before committing to it, too.)
When I ran my own audit, my real rate came out at roughly 60% of the one on my payslip.
Run your own numbers
If you’d rather not do this with a pen, it’s all in The True Cost of Earning: Calculator + Workbook: your true hourly rate for your current job and up to three alternatives, the leak hunt, the freelance rate floor, a 12-week health tracker and a yes/no decision scorecard. It works in £, $ or €, and you choose what to pay.
The full story, with the neighbour, the fence and my own payslip, is on Medium: Why “Just Get a Job” Stopped Working for Me at 50. Paid subscribers on Substack get the complete worksheets and scripts.
Same trap, other side: Golden Handcuffs in Tech and The Safest-Looking Salary Is the Riskiest Bet You’re Making.
Figures are illustrative. This is a thinking tool, not financial or tax advice.