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This post is part three in a seven part continuing education series on Surviving Nursing. 

Click here for part one. 

Click here for part two.

SURVIVING NURSING REQUIRES SORTING OUT YOUR FINANCES

In the previous post, we talked about how the answer to surviving nursing is not self care - it’s ending role entrapment.  Entrapment is a root cause of burnout and the nursing exodus that no one’s talking about. The concepts in that post are foundational for this one, so if you missed it, I’d encourage you to go back and catch up.

Exciting news though! In this post, we’re getting into the practical side of how you can use your salary to establish work-optional freedom yourself. If nursing is going to be a sustainable career, the best intervention is to find a way to end your own role entrapment. The way to do that is by following the financial path to nursing survival.  

EXPERIENCED NURSES KNOW THAT FULL TIME NURSING IS NOT SUSTAINABLE FOR 40 YEARS. 

Just this past week, my husband – a psych nurse who works per diem– had worked an evening shift and we were doing our normal catch up. The night had been slow and he and his colleagues had some time to chat. A major theme of the chat was that all of his colleagues were burnt out and desperate to leave nursing, or at least drop back their hours, but they felt financially stuck for the foreseeable future.

Who can relate? I know I’ve been there, and my experience working with nurses and NPs is that most everyone gets there at some point. That’s because nursing is a burnout job that’s not set up to be sustainable for a 40 year career. My husband’s colleagues were in their 40s and 50s and feeling done after 10-20 years of service.

Tim, my husband said, “See. Nurses need to be told this. Because the sooner they know this, the sooner they can plan for what’s definitely ahead for them.” 

Yeah, that’s about right. 

Nurses deserve to know that this caring career full of sunshine and rainbows is going to wear them down and leave them at a financial dead end. Nursing is not a career you can stick with until traditional retirement age.

It’s up to us to start sharing that truth, and I’m saying it right now… even if I suspect that you already know it. 

But think about it. When more nurses know that nursing is only healthily sustainable for 10 or 20 years, they can start setting themselves up for an early exit or career pivot right away. And that’s going to put the onus on health care organizations to create work environments where nurses want to stick around. 

So let’s talk about the financial tips and tricks that will make you work optional ASAP and that will change your entire relationship with nursing. 

YOUR FINANCES ARE THE ONE THING IN NURSING YOU CAN CONTROL 

So much of our situation as nurses is outside of our control. Focusing on your finances is the one thing that’s fully inside your control. When you get it right, it will make your career - and your life - dramatically better. In fact, in my experience managed 20 years of nursing stress, getting your finances right is the most powerful, important thing that you can do as an individual to end the sense of entrapment that so many nurses experience. 

There’s good evidence to support this idea.

Financial wellness is important for everyone. You might’ve even talked about this with your patients. A sense of financial well-being reduces overall stress and improves health. My friend Aileen Ramos has written an underrated book about the topic, called Nursing Our Financial Health: Financial Habits for Overall Well-Being. (Grab it on Amazon and give it a read!)

But for nurses, financial well-being plays a bigger role than it does for most. This is because it gives you actual control over your relationship to the overwhelming chaos that a nursing career can often feel like. 

That feeling of entrapment? It’s about feeling like you don’t have the ability to change your situation.

Financial management is about developing a better understanding of the options you already have as a nurse. It’s also about giving yourself more choices. It’s about using your money to give yourself power over your career and your life. Once again, research supports how important this is. Having a baseline sense of control over your career is a key to reducing and recovering from burnout. 

What kind of power am I talking about? I’ll just say it directly, because it’s the thing a lot of people don’t want to talk about. 

If you have your finances right, it will give you the freedom to quit. To quit your job and find another, to drop back your hours, or to leave nursing altogether. 

It’s not my goal to encourage nurses to leave nursing. Exactly the opposite, in fact, which I talked about more in depth in this post. But let’s be honest - some of us need to quit. Some of us are traumatized. Some of us aren’t coping. Some of us have put in our time and should feel completely justified in moving on to something else. A good financial strategy can get you to the point where you can quit before nursing breaks you completely.

More optimistically, financial control is about having the power to do the things that you need to do in order to survive a nursing career. 

Do you know what evidence-based burnout prevention looks like? A 0.5 FTE. Studies consistently show that burnout rates go down dramatically in nursing if you work fewer than 20 hours a week. For nurses who are burnt out, or who are burning out, dropping back hours is an evidence-based way to continue in the profession safely and healthily. A good financial strategy will give you the freedom to do that.

On another level, solid control of finances also gives nurses the freedom to push back against their lack of power and control on the job, particularly when it’s important. 

In studies investigating reasons that nurses fail to report unsafe conditions at work, one of the top motivating factors is a fear of retaliation–particularly fear of losing their job, The more dependent you are on your week to week income, the greater the personal consequences will be if you do end up on the outs at your job. When you aren’t worried about your financial situation, your need to endure an unsafe situations decreases, and your fear of losing that position by speaking up about it decreases as well. 

A SNAPSHOT OF WHAT FINANCIAL WELLBEING FOR NURSES LOOKS LIKE 

Being in the financial position to leave your job, or even your career, might sound like a pipe dream. At best, it’s something to aim for in the distant future, right? When we think about things like financial freedom, we often picture unattainable riches. We feel overwhelmed or like these sorts of things are out of reach.

The good news is, that’s not true. 

If we manage our money properly, nurses make enough money to become wealthy across the long term. Just as good though, many of the most important steps when it comes to ending that feeling of entrapment are the first steps. They’re the things you can do now, which don’t require dramatic life changes or a massive raise.

I teach nurses that building financial wellbeing is a step-wise process. Some of the steps are immediate, some are short-term, and some are long-term. Each step provides benefits that make the nursing life better and more manageable. Once you get started, the additional steps get less daunting. Your strategy will be a lifelong process (just like with physical health), but in my experience working with nurses and APRNs on this, establishing behaviors that will dramatically improve your relationship with work only takes a few months. 

You can get a more in depth training about this process here (and learn how to access 12.0 CNEs while you’re doing it), but here’s a snapshot of what this looks like for most nurses. 

NURSES' STAGES OF FINANCIAL WELLBEING 

1. YOUR FINANCIAL SITUATION NOW

The first step towards financial wellbeing is something that any nurse can do immediately. That is, understanding of what your financial situation looks like right now. Many nurses feel a lack of control not because they’re in bad financial shape, but simply because they don’t understand what’s going on inside their accounts. They don’t know what they have now, and they don’t know where they want to be in the future.

So. ask yourself: Where are you starting from and where do you want to be in the future? 

The “what do I have now” question is pretty simple. What are your current assets, debts, expenses, income, investments, and savings? 

This is something you can figure out in a couple of hours, and it’s a crucial first step, because it helps you know what you have, and whether your money is going where you want it to go.

The longer term question is a little more complicated, but it’s also something you can sort our quickly. What are your goals in life? How much money will you need to achieve them? This will always be a rough calculation, but it’s something you can begin to figure out now, regardless of your current assets. Even questions as big as “how much will I need if I want to retire early, or begin working part time in 5 years” are things you can figure out and begin working towards.

A clear sense of what you have and where you want to go are foundational if you want a sense of control over your situation.

2. YOUR FINANCIAL SAFETY NET 

The second major step to breaking down a feeling of entrapment at work involves stitching together your financial safety net. 

This isn’t the classic nest egg concept, and I’m talking about more than an emergency fund too. It’s making sure that your money is in a place where you can use it when you need it - while also getting the most returns that you can. 

A lot of financial advice leads you to think about money in black and white terms. First you save, then you pay off debt, then you buy a home, then you invest. But the truth is, money is not like that. Not at all! It all goes together and we do all these things at the same time. 

So, this isn’t just about getting a specific sum gathered in a savings account. That might be a part of it, but this is really about getting all of your financial ducks in a row, so you’re saving appropriately, investing appropriately, and paying down debts appropriately. It’s making sure that you have the money you need, when you need it, but it’s also making sure that you won’t miss debt payments and get dinged by penalties even if a crisis comes up. And, it’s about making sure you aren’t leaving cash sitting unnecessarily in a savings account when it could be making money for you in investments. 

This is a step nurses can get started on immediately as well. When you stitch your financial net together correctly, it provides both short term and long term safety and stability.

It allows you to save enough to quit your job, With plenty in reserve to take a break until you’re ready to find another one, but it also means that you don’t sacrifice opportunities to create wealth to leave for your kids or save towards early retirement in the meantime.

It’s not a one or the other approach. It’s a this and that (and that and that) approach. 

(Side note: If this sounds complicated, it’s not, but it is important to have a little bit of guidance. This is the method I teach in Nurses Investing For Wealth - a holistic, looping system that helps you to sort all of these things at the same time and be ready for whatever life throws at you.)

3. PREPARING FINANCIALLY TO TAKE A BREAK 

The third stage involves building enough financial stability to take an extended break, or a sabbatical - enough to cover expenses for six months, or years even. 

Healthcare work often pushes nurses to the point of burnout, but pre-planning for extended time away provides a buffer against that. Having the stability to not just leave your job, but to take a break from nursing for a time provides an additional level of agency and freedom.

I’ll tell you a personal story. 

After 13 years as a nurse, I was so burnt out that I quit my job and hiked the PCT–that’s the long trail from Mexico to Canada. It’s five months of hiking and living outside moving through the mountains of California, Oregon, and Washington. It was amazing. Ask me about it any time.

I had planned to return to work after that. But, after five months on trail, I wasn’t ready to go back. Even the thought of going back into clinic made my stomach do somersaults. Turns out, my holistic money plan– which was the foundation for the Nurses Investing For Wealth Method– was working better than I’d expected. 

And I realized I didn’t have to go back! 

So, instead, I decided to explore Central and South America and learn Spanish. 

After about six months of that, I was in Peru, and finally believing I was ready to return to practice. So I applied for NP work with a locums agency.

I naively thought it would take me a couple of months to land a job and get started. 

Well, what do you think happened? 

Hello nursing shortage!

Within a week I had an interview and a job and a request to start a couple weeks later. I was happy that it was so easy, but annoyed about the pressure to start so fast! I did manage to push the start date back a couple months. 

When I returned, I remembered why I’d burned out in the first place. I wasn’t ready yet. Long story short, I exited after 3 months and wouldn’t look to return to nursing again for years.

As a nurse, getting a job when you need it is always going to be possible. It’s your superpower. 

But having the financial ability to stay away as long as you need to is an essential part of nursing survival in the long term.

4. WORKING WHEN YOU WANT, IF YOU WANT

A fourth level of a financial plan to combat entrapment involves establishing a strategy that will allow you to work part-time, contract, or per diem indefinitely if you need to. 

Because the need in nursing is so huge, overworking among nurses is a rampant problem. But in fact, it’s the opposite of what we should be doing, because working less than full-time dramatically decreases our risk of burnout.

Depending on your lifestyle, hourly income, and expenses, you might be closer to this reality than you think. Being able to afford to work part-time doesn’t require a large amount of savings, and might simply involve better organization around your finances. You might just need to look at all of your money needs, then take what you see and apply it so that you can stop overworking. 

So many nurses I help realize that they can dial way back on work right away. One of my students - Kayla - is an a L&D nurse in her 30s. She was able to organize her money and drop back to working just a few months a year, cover all her lifestyle expenses, max out her retirement savings AND STILL be on track to retire comfortably by her mid 50s.

5. FULL FINANCIAL INDEPENDENCE

A final goal for nurses seeking to free themselves from workplace entrapment is to achieve full financial independence. This means begin able to support yourself without depending on work for income. 

This might seem like an extreme possibility, but we’re really just talking about retirement here. Most people manage to achieve financial independence by age 65 with the help of savings and investments. 

While nursing is often thought of as a 45 year career similar to other traditional roles, in reality it is comparable to other high-stress service roles like police work and firefighting. As in those roles, it is very common that nurses will leave the bedside much earlier than traditional retirement age. While some other forms of public service include inbuilt strategies for early retirement, in most cases nursing does not. 

We shouldn’t have to do it like this, but this is our real life scenario. So we’ve gotta find our own way to play the game. We have to manage our income to achieve the same goals, and retire or switch to lower stress positions after a much shorter period in the field. 

SURVIVING NURSING IS NOT JUST A SELF-CARE PROBLEM 

In the last two posts, we’ve talked about how “surviving Nursing” is often treated like a self-care problem. How do you cope with being placed in a very hard situation? That’s most of what’s on offer from employers and self-help literature. Those strategies may have their value, but the reality is that nursing jobs are very frequently burnout roles. Evidence backs that up, but employers and the nursing profession more broadly rarely acknowledge that fact.

The most powerful thing we can do to survive nursing is to make sure that we aren’t trapped in a role that’s likely to harm us. Hospitals and unions and politicians should collectively be working to make the role less traumatic, but that is a long-term project that may or may not improve the situation for nurses in our lifetime. 

The most powerful thing that we can do as individuals – in my own experience and working with other nurses and APRNs – is to develop financial strategies that ensure that we are never trapped:

• Never being afraid to be the advocates we should be, or 
• Feeling like we can’t leave if we need to. 

Creating financial independence can sound daunting, but it is doable. There are a set of steps you can follow that will get you there. Some things you can implement immediately. Some plans you can set across your career. The strategy to get there isn’t about self-care. It’s about finances. 

Click here for the next post in the series, about how everyone is missing the point when it comes to money and the nursing exodus. 

I teach nurses how to follow the steps of the evidence-based Nurses Investing For Wealth Method so they can customize their own plan for financial independence, end entrapment, and survive nursing. 

I write about some of the things you need to know on this blog, but what’s most important is not what you know when it comes to finances, it’s what you do. Helping you change your financial behavior and therefore change your life isn’t something I can accomplish just on a blog, but it is what the Ultimate Nurse Investing Program does for nurses and APRNs. 

If you’re a nurse who wants to keep learning, take this free 2 hour training ➡ click here.

If you’re a nursing leader, I am also available to speak on this topic at nursing trainings and events. Email me here: [email protected]. 

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