In my team at work a few months ago, the opportunity arose for one of us to reduce from being employed five days to just four days, if we wanted to. This would mean a shift from being required to work 35 hours to being required only to work 28 hours, with an accompanying 20% cut in gross pay, of course.
It wasn’t an easy decision. On the one hand, I have lots of interests and projects outside of work that I usually feel I don’t have enough time for, like making music. On the other hand, there are lots of interesting opportunities at work, and you can’t really say yes to them all when you’re working part-time.
Everyone’s situation is different, and I appreciate that some people can’t afford to go part-time, but that’s what I decided to do. I’m fortunate to be at a stage where I don’t have a mortgage anymore, and I live a reasonably simple life that doesn’t necessitate a huge income.
One of the deciding factors for me was the realisation that a 20% drop in gross pay (i.e. before tax) doesn’t mean a 20% drop in take-home pay. In fact, I’m only about 17% worse off. This is because UK taxation works on a sliding scale: the first chunk of your earnings are tax-free, then you pay a certain percentage of tax on the next block of your pay, and a higher proportion on the next block. Dropping from five days to four meant I was effectively shifting most of my pay into the zero and lower-rate tax bands.
I’m happy with my new work-life arrangement. I try to be as productive as possible on my “day off”, because I can see in my pay exactly how much it costs me to have that day to myself. I use the time to get on with my own projects: things I wouldn’t be able to do just in a lunchbreak or that I would be too tired to do at the end of a working day. But when the sunshine aligns itself with my day off, I do sometimes allow myself a couple of hours in the garden with a book and a coffee… and that’s worth every penny.
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