Barefoot Investor weighs in after Aussie revealed single reason he wanted to ditch his $400,000 job

The Barefoot Investor has warned a father not to quit his $400,000-a-year job after he admitted he considered quitting to spend more time with his family.

Ned wrote a letter to Scott Pape asking if he should quit his lucrative job to spend more time with his children by homeschooling them in rural Tasmania.

The father said he reflected on “what I do and why” after recently turning 40 and realizing his work was taking him further and further away from his children, when he was “ironically trying to give them a better life.”

He described his career as “a career full of risks, a lot of responsibility and a lot of time investment… that has taken my wife and four children all over the world.”

While the job has helped the family own two homes and a “decent stock portfolio,” Ned said he considered quitting to be more present.

“Am I crazy to want to throw away this job (and possibly their future real estate) to homeschool my children and be part of the best years of their lives?” he asked Mr. Pape.

‘Should I earn and save as much money as possible to help them with their existence later? Are some things worth more than security?’

Mr. Pape warned Ned not to quit his job to homeschool his children, but urged him to talk to his employer and find a better work-life balance.

The Barefoot Investor told Ned that his salary indicated that he was a “very valuable” person to his employer and that he should “start acting accordingly.”

“Tell them you want to be able to be home and be with your kids without being stressed,” he wrote in his weekly Column by Newscorp.

“That may mean taking on less responsibility and making less money. That’s okay.

‘In twenty years, your children will be the only ones who will remember you working late into the night.

“Remember that you are a valuable person to your organization, but you are even more valuable to your family.”

Mr Pape added that he had come to the same conclusion years earlier and explained that this was why he had not expanded his business into ‘more lucrative’ ventures.

He said he was reliving the “good old days” of his family, which go by far too quickly.

While the job has made the family financially independent, the father said he realized he had missed out on big parts of his children’s lives (stock image)

Mr. Pape also gave Ned some valuable advice on how best to “just spend time with his kids” rather than just taking them on “a vacation to Disneyland.”

But to do that, Ned would have to be “at home and not in the office,” and at the same time “mentally present… not on his phone or worrying about what’s happening in the office.”