Poll of the Day > Would you take a job you love for minimum wage or a job you hate for 100K a year

(+) Yeah! (+)

Take the shit job with the good pay.

Think of it like this:

You're going to hate one or the other. If you hate your 100k/yr job, that's fine. You're hating those 8 hours a day. But outside that, you will live a very pleasant life. 100k/yr is a great salary to live comfortably, take vacations, and do fuck-all.

However, if you take the minimum wage job - if you love the job, that's great. You'll have fun during those 8 (or however many) hours a day. But outside that, you're not going to enjoy your day-to-day life with such a small income.
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I want to be a record producer or guitar teacher; both pay way more than min wage...

Like my last guitar teacher made 30 an hour, 25 hours a week which averages to 18ish an hour if it was a 40 hr week..

Muffinz0rz posted...

Take the shit job with the good pay.

Think of it like this:

You're going to hate one or the other. If you hate your 100k/yr job, that's fine. You're hating those 8 hours a day. But outside that, you will live a very pleasant life. 100k/yr is a great salary to live comfortably, take vacations, and do fuck-all.

However, if you take the minimum wage job - if you love the job, that's great. You'll have fun during those 8 (or however many) hours a day. But outside that, you're not going to enjoy your day-to-day life with such a small income.

There are different degrees of hate. What if your job was dangerous like a soldier, coal miner, or prison guard. And it isn't necessarily only 40 hours a week.
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I would be stuck with the job I hate, because I would need a lot more than minimum wage to pay my bills.
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For what it's worth, if you don't have obligations then the great job with shitty pay is actually the better option.

I can say that because I've done both. I had a great job with completely awful pay during my teenage years and I loved it. I looked forward to working every summer as a result, even though the pay was garbage. By contrast, a few years later I got a job with phenomenal pay, but it was just a terrible job in a terrible company and I was thoroughly unhappy.

And yeah, you can make the argument that that money will go towards letting you enjoy your non-work hours. Except that argument is wrong, or at least misleading. Because - again, from personal experience - the misery from your job will bleed into your off-hours. You will come home mentally exhausted from dealing with "shit" at your workplace (what flavour of shit depends on the nature of your job). You will dread going back, which will colour your evenings and the ends of your weekends. I'm actually grateful I did that shit job, because it taught me the value of doing what you love and that a great paycheque is not enough to offset the awfulness of a terrible workplace.

Now, when you factor debts and bills into it, things change. The great job with shitty pay that I worked was when I was a teenager, living at home, with no real obligations to speak of (come to think of it, I didn't have many more when I was working the shitty job with great pay). I didn't have to deal with the stress associated with making sure the bills were paid at the end of the month, so perhaps that would colour my opinion. But if you have a working spouse or other way of making ends meet so that you're not the sole breadwinner of the household, the great job with terrible pay is definitely the better option.
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darkknight109 posted...

And yeah, you can make the argument that that money will go towards letting you enjoy your non-work hours. Except that argument is wrong, or at least misleading. Because - again, from personal experience - the misery from your job will bleed into your off-hours. You will come home mentally exhausted from dealing with "s***" at your workplace (what flavour of s*** depends on the nature of your job). You will dread going back, which will colour your evenings and the ends of your weekends. I'm actually grateful I did that s*** job, because it taught me the value of doing what you love and that a great paycheque is not enough to offset the awfulness of a terrible workplace.

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That would entirely depend on my personal obligations and how much my partner makes. If I was married to a woman making $200k/year where I really didn't need to work, yeah, doing something I love for almost nothing makes sense. And maybe if my area's COL was so dirt cheap you could live very comfortably on minimum that might be tempting. Realistically, though, you take the money for the job you hate while trying to live well below your means so you can either invest that money or save up to start your own business because that's where the long-term money is going to be.
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you basically have to start working at 16 and never stop working if you ever plan to retire
to me my health and well being at work is more important
a dollar extra is just like 1500bucks a year, that's nothing not enough to make me stay somewhere... and nowadays making lots of money isn't worth it, maybe when you're young but when you get older might as well buy the smallest place you can feel comfertable and horde your money, adopt your neighbors kids...
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Job I love for minimum wage. In fact, while I'm now paid more money than I ever thought I'd see, when I started as a junior programmer in the early 2000s, a lot of people did it for near minimum wage where I lived because of the glut of programmers post dot com crash.

Now obviously it's not how it goes :)