I Started Investing Because My Career Fell Apart | What Changed After I Gave Up on Promotions

Why I started investing

People ask me this a lot, and the answer isn’t glamorous. My career hit a wall, raises were off the table, and I needed to figure something out. It wasn’t some grand plan for financial independence. I was backed into a corner and started investing out of desperation.

Turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Getting there, though — that part sucked.

Getting promoted nearly broke me

I made manager in my late 30s. Around the same time, my wife got pregnant. Great news, but she had severe morning sickness, so I was basically running the household solo. Morning routine, commute, manage a team all day, come home, do it all again. Some nights she’d get really sick, and I’d barely sleep.

Picture a car engine redlining for weeks straight. I wish someone had tapped past-me on the shoulder and said, “Hey buddy, that engine’s about to seize.”

People love talking about work-life balance. Here’s the thing — when both work and life are running at 100%, there’s no balance to find. That’s 200% on a system rated for 100. The math doesn’t work.

I burned out and took about a month off. When I came back, I stepped down from the manager role. It took my body falling apart in my late 30s to finally understand that willpower has limits.

What did I do during that month off? Honestly, I barely remember. A lot of staring at walls, probably. But I think that empty time was exactly what I needed. Up until then, I’d always equated doing nothing with slacking off.

Career ceiling: confirmed

Once you step down from management, you don’t get back on the track. I looked at my situation and thought, “Well, I’m going to be a regular employee for the rest of my career.”

And honestly? After nearly cracking up once, I had zero desire to go through that again. So fine. But when I did the math, it was alarming. No more raises meant my $50K salary was basically the ceiling. A baby on the way, wanting to buy a house, education costs piling up — and income frozen.

…Am I screwed? That was genuinely my first thought.

Here’s the funny part, though. Once the pressure of “I have to get promoted” was gone, my head actually cleared up. Dropping out of the rat race forced me to think differently: “Okay, if my paycheck isn’t going to grow, what else can I do?”

Maybe being cornered makes you calm. Or maybe I just had nothing left to lose.

My former peers kept moving up the ladder, and sure, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t envious sometimes. But envy doesn’t change the fact that my body already proved it couldn’t handle that path. Letting go sounds negative, but reframed as “I released a path that wasn’t right for me” — it doesn’t sound so bad. At least that’s what I tell myself now.

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Talking to a financial planner

About six months after our baby was born, life finally settled into a rhythm. We wanted to buy a house, so I went to see a financial planner.

I’d only planned to ask about mortgage options, but midway through the conversation she asked, “Are you doing any investing?” When I said “Just a savings account,” she brought up NISA and iDeCo — Japan’s tax-advantaged investment accounts. Think of NISA as something like a Roth IRA (investment gains are tax-free), and iDeCo as a 401(k) equivalent (contributions are tax-deductible, but locked until retirement).

You might think starting to invest while taking on a mortgage sounds reckless. I thought so too — “Is it really okay to invest while carrying a home loan?” But the planner pointed out something simple: compare the mortgage interest rate to the expected return on index funds. My mortgage rate was under 1%. The long-term average return on a broad index fund is around 4-6% per year. By the numbers, putting money into a tax-free investment account made more sense than aggressively paying down the loan. Sure, the psychological weight of debt is real, but numbers don’t lie.

Look, I knew NISA existed. I just never got around to it because it seemed like a hassle. When I actually looked into it, I thought, “Wait, I’ve been leaving tax-free investment gains on the table this whole time?”

I bet some of you reading this are in the same boat — you’ve heard of these accounts but haven’t opened one yet. I get it, I was there. But there’s a surprisingly wide gap between “knowing about it” and “actually doing it.” The only reason I crossed that gap was because stepping down from management made it painfully clear that my salary alone wasn’t going to cut it.

People with comfortable incomes tend to procrastinate the most. Ironic, isn’t it?

Getting burned on individual stocks was actually useful

Investing wasn’t totally new to me. I’d traded individual stocks before.

I was spectacularly bad at it. Buy something because “it’s going up!” — it drops. Hold off on selling because “just a bit longer” — miss the window entirely. Checking charts every day, stomach in knots. I quit before I gave myself an ulcer.

The other thing about stock picking: make a little profit and suddenly you think you’re Warren Buffett. Then you bet big and get hammered. Classic. You probably know someone who brags about their stock gains — ask them for their all-time P&L and watch them get quiet.

So when I learned how index fund investing works, my immediate reaction was “this is made for someone like me.” There’s no room for my emotions to screw things up. You set up an automatic monthly contribution and forget about it. With an index fund, you don’t need to care about any single stock’s price.

For a guy who burned out from trying too hard at work, an investment approach that rewards doing less was a gift. You could even call it the lazy person’s strategy — because trying harder actually makes you worse at it.

$70K sitting in a savings account, doing nothing

At the time, I had about $70K in savings. Built up over years of disciplined saving, and all of it just sitting in a bank account collecting dust. The annual interest was maybe a couple of bucks.

Everyone says “it’s a waste to let money sit idle,” but when you see $70K earning pocket change per year, “waste” doesn’t even cover it. It’s a joke. A convenience store coffee costs more than what my entire savings generated in a year.

I didn’t dump it all in, obviously. I kept six months of living expenses as an emergency fund and moved a portion of the rest into index funds. I also started a monthly automatic investment — about $200/month to begin with. I was nervous. In hindsight I could’ve started with more, but with a fresh mortgage and a baby who could need anything at any moment, there was no reason to go all-in right away.

The feeling of money that had been sleeping finally starting to work — that was genuinely satisfying. If my salary can’t grow, I’ll let my money earn for me. Once I reframed it that way, I stopped beating myself up so much about the promotion thing.

One underrated benefit: just knowing I had a financial stream outside of my paycheck. It wasn’t even about the amount. Simply not being 100% dependent on my employer’s goodwill made a real psychological difference. Bad day at work? “Well, I’ve got another thing going.” That thought alone is worth a lot.

The first couple of years were rough

Here’s the unglamorous truth: for the first year or two, returns were basically flat, and I was in the red for stretches.

“Maybe this was a mistake” crossed my mind more than once. But since individual stocks had already taught me that chasing short-term results is a death wish, I just left it alone. I went from checking my brokerage app daily, to weekly, to monthly.

Not looking is genuinely the best thing you can do. Opening the app when you’re down serves no purpose. There’s literally nothing you can or should do about it. “Don’t look” might be the single most powerful index investing strategy.

After two or three years, I finally started seeing consistent gains. And once it tipped into the green, compounding kicked in and the growth started accelerating. The first year might have been a few hundred dollars in gains. By year three, it was growing by a few thousand a year — doing the exact same thing.

It’s ironic that getting burned on individual stocks is what prepared me for this. But hey, at least those losses weren’t wasted.

As for my wife — when I told her I was starting to invest, her response was basically “Sure, you handle it.” She leaves the household finances to me, which I appreciate, but it also means the pressure is entirely mine. During the red months, not being asked “Are you sure about this?” was nice. But having nobody to talk to about it was a little lonely.

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Build a second income stream before you need one

Maybe you’re reading this and your career is going great. Promotions, good reviews, steady raises — and investing feels like something you’ll get to eventually.

I felt the same way when I first made manager. I figured I’d just keep climbing. But even when things are going well, you never know when they won’t be. Health issues, family circumstances, company restructuring — there are a hundred reasons your trajectory can change overnight.

You can start investing with as little as $70 a month. You don’t need to do anything dramatic. Just plant the seed. It takes two or three years before you see real growth, but if you never plant it, nothing will ever grow.

I happened to start because of a setback. But if you can start without one, that’s obviously better. The mental load of making financial moves when you’re desperate versus when you’re comfortable — it’s night and day.

Not that you asked for my advice or anything.