Which Way? The Work - Life Balance

REWARDING WORK & GOOD MONEY

There are many different ways to live out our lives. We either choose the way we wish to live, or we drift along trying to make the best of a bad deal. We need to work, to earn money and live. How we work, the money we earn and how we choose to spend it will give us a measure on our work / life balance.

High Earners & Low Lifers
A friend of mine is a nanny for a family living near us in SW London. This part of town has become increasingly more affluent over the last few years, with a lot of the town houses, that used to be lived in by fairly poor immigrants from India and the Caribbean, taken over by rich middle class families who make their money in well paid corporate jobs.

Getting to know some of the original West Indian contingent from this area, I can see that, although they don't have much money, they do seem to have good quality lifestyles - with lots of free time. The family my friend nannies for, has two children that she looks after 5 days a week while the two parents work their long days at their respective finance/IT jobs in the city.

Quite often she'll have the children 'til after 7pm, which is around the time when the children have gone to bed. The parents will juggle the children around whatever it is they like to do on the weekends. This is their only free time in the week where they get to appreciate their kids, each other and have their own 'me' time.

What's The Pay-Off?
It's difficult to get a high paid job without also having the long hours, responsibility and stress that it brings too. So what's more important? I believe there's now so much competition between the high-earners, to get a decent property in the right part of town and immense pressure to retain the style of living that they have become accustomed to, that they surely cannot keep up with the intensity without severely compromising quality of life in the long term. So a lower-paid job that allows more time & freedom to enjoy family and life in general - rather than being stuck in an office etc. is surely going to be the better option for quality of life - providing the pennies are watched. The middle ground is surely going to involve having a well-paid role but just means spending less days doing it per week but there aren't many available full-time positions that allow for a 3 day week - and this is something we should be offering a lot more in the work-place.