To Your Wealth: Your career is an asset. Are you managing it like one?
By Michael Haubrich, CFP®
I’ve spent more than four decades as a financial planner, and there’s one idea I wish more people had considered earlier in the wealth-building phase of their lives: your career can be one of your most important financial assets.
Like your retirement savings and investment portfolio, your career deserves attention, care, and long-term thinking.
That idea is at the heart of my book, Career Asset Management: Getting Ahead, Staying Ahead and Using Your Head to Maximize Your Career Value. Over the years, I’ve seen people devote a lot of attention to their investments, doing things like reviewing performance, considering risk, and periodically rebalancing. Often, they spend less time evaluating the assets responsible for generating much of the income they use to build their financial lives: their career.
For many people, employment income and benefits represent a significant source of lifetime financial resources. Your career helps fund retirement savings, support your family, pay for education, purchase a home, and pursue the experiences that matter to you.
Yet careers are often allowed to simply unfold rather than managed with intention.
That’s where Career Asset Management comes in.
Think about your career as an asset
Career Asset Management applies some familiar financial planning concepts to your working life: understand what you have, identify potential risks, invest in future opportunities, and make decisions in the context of your broader financial and life goals.
Here are four ways to begin.
- Put a number on it . Most people can quickly tell you their salary or retirement account balance. Far fewer have considered the potential economic value of their career over time.
That value isn’t limited to salary. Depending on your circumstances, it can include employer retirement contributions, health and insurance benefits, bonuses, equity compensation, professional development opportunities, and potential future earnings.
Estimating those resources can provide a useful perspective when evaluating career and financial decisions. Of course, future earnings and opportunities are uncertain and can change substantially over time.
- Identify the risks . Every career involves uncertainty. Employers restructure. Industries evolve. Technology changes the skills employers need. Personal and family circumstances can change as well.
Career Asset Management means considering those possibilities before they occur.
That includes maintaining adequate emergency reserves, keeping your skills current, developing relationships within your profession, evaluating insurance needs, and creating financial flexibility to help navigate a career transition.
At FSG, we refer to some of your reserve funds as your Career Asset Working Capital Fund—resources available to help provide options during periods of career uncertainty or change.
- Invest in yourself intentionally . People often research financial investments carefully, yet some career decisions receive far less analysis.
Education, skill development, professional credentials, mentoring, and networking can all represent investments in your career.
Three habits have been central to Career Asset Management since I developed the concept: Lifelong Learning. Benchmarking. Networking.
Lifelong learning helps you continue developing your knowledge and skills. Benchmarking helps you understand the value of your skills and talent against an ever-changing marketplace. It also can provide insights of opportunities and risks – are you being paid fairly or under/overpaid? Networking provides the opportunity to communicate your value proposition within your current company and industry/profession at large.
None guarantees career advancement or greater compensation. Together, however, they provide a framework for managing your career more intentionally.
- Align your career with your life . At FSG, financial planning isn’t simply about accumulating more money. Money is a resource that can help support the life you want to live.
The same is true of your career.
A promotion, higher salary, or new opportunity may be attractive, but compensation is only one consideration. Career decisions can also affect your time, family, health, location, personal fulfillment, and other priorities.
That’s why Career Asset Management asks a broader question:
What do you want your career to make possible?
The goal isn’t necessarily to maximize income. It’s to make thoughtful career and financial decisions that support what you define as your Great Life.
It’s never too early—or too late
I wrote Career Asset Management because I found myself having versions of the same conversation with clients: How do you evaluate an opportunity? How much financial flexibility do you need? What happens if your industry/profession changes? Should you invest in additional education? How do you know whether your compensation remains competitive or even more risky, if you are being overpaid because of changes due to technology/ AI?
Those questions can be especially valuable early in a career, when decisions may influence many years that follow.
But Career Asset Management isn’t limited to younger professionals.
In the middle or later stages of your career, you may be considering a leadership opportunity, changing industries, becoming a consultant, preparing for retirement, pursuing an encore career, or deciding when work can become optional.
The principle remains the same: manage your career as intentionally as you manage the rest of your financial life.
What Is Your Career Worth?
Start by asking yourself: What is my career providing today—in income, benefits, opportunities, flexibility, and personal satisfaction? What risks could affect it? Am I continuing to learn, benchmark myself, and maintain my professional network?
And perhaps most importantly:
Is my career helping me build the life I actually want?
At Financial Service Group, Career Asset Management is part of our broader Financial Life Planning approach. We help clients consider their careers alongside investments, taxes, retirement plans, family responsibilities, and life goals—because these decisions don’t happen in isolation.
If you’d like to explore the role your career plays in your financial life, we invite you to start a conversation with us.
Financial Service Group, Inc. is a registered investment adviser. This material is provided for general informational and educational purposes only and is not intended as individualized investment, tax, legal, or career advice. Career value, future compensation, employment opportunities, and benefits are inherently uncertain and may change. Career Asset Management and Career Asset Working Capital describe Financial Service Group’s financial life planning framework and do not guarantee employment, compensation, investment performance, or financial outcomes.
