The number that let me leave a £60k job: how I set it a year early

In August 2025 I left Jaguar Land Rover. People call that kind of exit brave. I had been planning it for a year. A year earlier, in August 2024, I had sat at my kitchen table and written down one monthly figure and one condition that had to be true before I would hand in my notice. I handed in my notice because that condition had been met, month after month.

Here is how that number was built, and why the date was decided a year before it happened.

I set the number a year before I resigned

I came to the UK on a sponsored visa. One employer held the sponsorship, so one employer held the job, the right to stay and the plan for my family. I then got the Global Talent Visa, so I was no more tied to any single employer. Before the UK came manufacturing, lecturing and a PhD in Engineering. Then two years of research at Imperial College London and three years at Jaguar Land Rover as a specialist, on £60k.

For most of that time I believed the sensible move was the next role. Then, over a period of months, doors that had been open quietly stopped opening. Nobody behaved badly. It simply became clear that everything I had was attached to one payslip.

In 2023 my sister suggested I look at e-commerce. I ignored her. I call that the lost year, because the idea did not get worse while I ignored it, I just started twelve months late. In early 2024 I overcorrected, ran three things at once and burned out. By August 2024 I was back at the kitchen table with one path and a different question: what would have to be true before I could stop.

What my number actually contained

The first thing I got right was deciding what the number was for. It was never a replacement salary. Waiting to replace £60k would have kept the decision emotional, because I would have been waiting until I felt rich enough.

So the number was my bare minimum month. Rent, council tax, energy, the car with its fuel and its road tax, groceries. Then a few hundred pounds for things that fit no category, and a few hundred more for the month when the boiler fails. Underneath it sat a second figure, six months of that number held in savings and left alone, so a bad quarter would be a problem for the business and not a problem at home.

A bare minimum month is much smaller than your take-home pay. Seeing that gap written down was uncomfortable. It also made the target look reachable. You will spend more than this later. This is only the amount you need covered before you can hand in your notice.

The arithmetic, laid out so you can copy it

This takes one sitting with a banking app and a piece of paper. I did it in August 2024, a year before I resigned.

Writing the condition a year early matters because you set it while you are calm, employed and unexcited. A year later you will be none of those things, and you will have the page to check the decision against.

Why I waited for the worst weeks

A good month proves almost nothing. Any business can have one, and when you are employed and impatient, a good month is exactly what you want to read as permission to go.

So I set the test against the bad months instead. The business had to cover my number in ordinary weeks, and keep covering it after the weeks that went wrong. In the months before I resigned the business had bad weeks. It still covered my number in every one of those months.

Those weeks were useful for another reason. Every problem I solved while I still had a salary was one I would not be meeting for the first time later.

Build first, leave second

The order is the part people skip, and it is the only part that made this safe. I started learning the basics at the kitchen table in August 2024, while employed. I placed the first order with a manufacturer in December 2024, while employed. I launched the brand in March 2025, while employed. I resigned in August 2025, five months after launch, by which time the business had been paying my number for months.

My salary paid for the early mistakes, and there were many. While I was employed I could be bad at something new for months. After I resigned I could not afford the same number of mistakes.

What the job was really giving me was time, bought with a monthly transfer that depended on one employer. I wrote about that in Job security is a story: what actually protects your income in 2026. That salary paid for the business that would replace it. That is why the order matters.

One year on: what improved and what got harder

The business passed £500,000 in sales in its first twelve months from launch, reaching that in March 2026. That figure is sales, not profit, and most of it arrived after I left, on a base built while employed. A third party logistics partner ships every order, so I have never touched a box, and an accountant handles the VAT and tax.

Three things improved quickly. The ideas came back, because ideas need space in your head and a job fills that space even on a day off. The work changed shape, from one hour here and a lunch break there to three clear hours in a morning. And my family got me back, the nursery runs, the evenings with the phone face down.

Now the parts that got harder. There is no salary, and money arrives unevenly. A month can look poor because of timing rather than demand, and a month that suddenly looks poor is a strange thing to watch when nobody is paying you either way.

There are no colleagues around me now, and nobody plans my Monday except me, which is the whole point and, on some days, the difficult part. So I keep a structure on purpose: a screen-free hour with my family, the gym or a swim three times a week, work in one to three hour blocks with my phone in another room. Money was never the motivator. Freedom was. Nobody else sets my week now, so I have to set it myself.

I did not wait to feel ready. I wrote the figure down first, then spent a year building a business that could pay it.

I never felt ready. The figure I had written down a year earlier had been paid month after month, including through the weeks that went badly, so I resigned. The box above is the whole of it. Write the figure, write the runway, write the condition, and date the page.

Build while you are employed, then leave on a number you set in advance. If you are not sure which path to build, start with the assessment.