A leap of faith

After an unexpected job loss, this computer scientist is taking a big risk to pursue his dream

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Illustration by Khoa Tran

Jake lost his job in January after his Fortune 500 employer sold his company amid broader cuts in a shaky economy.

Now, he’s taking the opportunity to pursue what he’s always wanted to do—and what drew him to his career in computer science and programming in the first place: video game development. Jake, who asked to use a pseudonym, learned in school that the industry is particularly brutal, but he thinks creating a game on his own might allow him more creative freedom and a bit less pressure. Now, he finally has the chance.

Working from home in Knoxville, Tennessee, Jake had started to feel isolated. So, last year, he sold his house and moved to Atlanta to be closer to friends. He even moved in with some of them while shopping around for a new place. “I wanted to be in an area close enough to the city perimeter; I didn’t want to be all the way up in, like, Cumming,” Jake said. He wasn’t able to find anything he loved in his price range and was still looking when he lost his job. Now, he considers that futile search a good thing. 

“Not buying a house immediately and having job savings lets me take some time and invest in what I want—with some sort of safety net,” Jake said. Between what he got from selling his home in Tennessee, the money he’s stashed away over time, and his severance pay, he has about $300,000 saved.

He said he feels comfortable drawing from those savings until next July, as long as he doesn’t have to dip into what he’s set aside as a potential down payment on a home. At that point, he said, he’ll have to “make some sort of decision on, like, doing something part-time to at least offset that cost, or evaluate how well the game stuff is going.”

He said living off his savings is vastly different from receiving a paycheck every two weeks, and he’s afraid that if this doesn't work out, it may not be easy to jump back into the workforce. But he’s still happy with the choice he’s made, and if there was ever a time for him to take a risk, he says, it’s now.

Even when he was employed, though, he noticed how much the cost of living was rising. Between housing, utilities, and groceries, he said, “things [reached] a crazy fever pitch.” 

“If I wasn't making the money that I was, I don’t know how I would save or how I would have the quality of life that I did,” he said. 

He has friends who say their one-bedroom apartment costs $2,500 a month, which would have been about half a paycheck before he lost his job. “For people who [made] less than me, that’s an entire paycheck, or an entire paycheck plus some,” he said. “I don’t know how people not making the money I did—and I still felt like I couldn’t afford a house—can even live on their own and not be in a roommate or live-with-your-family situation, where you can all share the burden.”

Job title

Unemployed

Age

31

Neighborhood

Marietta

Lives with

Roommates

Annual gross income

$0 ($144,000 before losing his job)

Rent payment

$850 a month

Student loans and credit card debt

$0

Health insurance cost per month + cost of any prescriptions

$124 a month

Phone plan and monthly subscriptions (Netflix, Spotify, food delivery services, apps, etc.)

$80 a month for phone service, Crunchyroll, and Spotify

Utilities per month

$0

Transportation (car payment, car insurance, gas, public transportation, Uber)

$200

Groceries

$250

Restaurants, fast food, drinks at bars, coffees

$180

Vacations

$10,000

Fun (concerts, books, movies, recreational drugs, etc.)

$300

How much money would you need to live comfortably in Atlanta? What hourly rate or annual salary would you be happy with?

$90,000

What’s a nonessential item that you treat yourself to?

Coffee and alcohol

What would you like to have (that you don’t)?

Eating out more

What can be done to improve the cost of living in Atlanta?

Improved transportation would be great

What’s the most challenging thing about living in Atlanta?

Everything is so far apart

What do you love most about Atlanta?

The variety of things to do here •