Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: Getty Images
It always feels too late to make a change. You’re ten, 15, 20 years into a career that you no longer like (or never did), but how can you start over now? Or maybe you’ve been out of the corporate workforce for so long that getting back into it seems impossible. You might have responsibilities (kids, a mortgage, bills to pay) — you can’t just quit your job or go back to school. That ship has sailed.
But maybe it hasn’t. Here, three women who started new careers in their 40s (all moms, some on the heels of divorce) share how they managed to afford the shift, how it’s worked out for them, and advice to others who wish they could do the same.
—Danielle Plummer, 53, a pharmacist who lives in Las Vegas
I fell in love and got married at 24. Before that, I was a professional figure skater, traveling with the Ice Capades in the ’90s. I met my husband when we were both in college. I was studying hospitality management and he was studying business. Then he went into the Marine Corps and to law school. When we were first married, I got a job working as an assistant executive housekeeper at Holiday Inn, making something like $5.75 an hour. Then I had one child, and another child, and another child, and I found myself as a military wife and a stay-at-home mom at the beck and call of the Marine Corps. We moved every couple of years.
We lived in some really cool duty stations. We were in Japan and Spain. I’ve always loved to travel. But it was basically impossible to work. First of all, I had three kids to take care of. But also, we’d move so often that I could never really establish myself. I did some little jobs — substitute teaching, that kind of thing. But by the time we moved to California with our three kids, I had lost my identity completely and I was going nuts. I couldn’t even afford to go back to work. I tried to get a job at the Marriott Residence — even just one shift a week to get out of the house. But it only paid $8 or $10 an hour, which wasn’t enough to pay for child care during that time. That’s when our marriage started to fray — we weren’t growing together.
Then I heard about Creighton University’s distance pharmacy program. At this point, it was about 2009 or so, and no one was offering online classes. My husband was deployed in Iraq and I was desperate — I needed to do something. So I started doing my prerequisite classes for pharmacy school at a community college. I had to take trigonometry, precalc, chemistry, biology. The community college had this early childhood education program where I could bring my youngest while I was in class, and the older two were in school by then. Sometimes I’d ask neighbors to watch them. It was a job in itself trying to find child care when I needed it.
It took me several years to do my prerequisites, and then I had to take the PCAT to get into pharmacy school. I got into Creighton, which was great because I could take classes wherever we were living. That first year I started was when we got divorced, in 2012. We were in North Carolina and then we went to Virginia, too. We were living separately and I had full custody, but I wanted to be near my ex so that my kids could see him. I was supporting myself with student loans and child support, which was not much.
Getting divorced was devastating, emotionally and financially, even though I was desperate for it to be done. Because my ex was a lawyer, he did our divorce papers himself, and I didn’t get a lawyer. I just went to the Navy Federal Credit Union and had my divorce papers notarized. Knowing what I know now, I would never have agreed to that. But I wanted out of that marriage so badly that I didn’t care about the financial ramifications. It was painful and I just wanted to get it over with.
When I started Creighton’s pharmacy program, I figured it was going to cost me about $175,000. But I graduated owing about $240,000, because I took out grad PLUS loans to support myself and the kids. After one year of school, my ex got orders back to California, and I knew I couldn’t afford to live there as a single mom of three kids in a doctoral program. So I moved to Las Vegas, where my parents live, so that they could help. Even still, it was crazy. I’d start the day at 5 a.m. and study while my kids were at school. Then I’d pick them up from all their respective schools and bring them to their afterschool activities. I would be doing flash cards while they were at gymnastics. All my study groups were late at night after they were in bed. I basically didn’t sleep. I was paying $1,299 for a four-bedroom house, which left me with $1,500 to pay for everything else. We ate a lot of stir-fries.
I took out my loans thinking I would be able to get a pharmacy job on a military base. That would allow me to work toward ten-year loan forgiveness, because I’d be a federal employee. But when it became clear that I wouldn’t have that option after I got divorced — those military-base jobs are hard to come by, even for military spouses — I was devastated. I realized I was going to be stuck paying off all these loans by myself.
I graduated in 2016, when I was 43, with a quarter-million dollars in student loan debt, and I got a job at Walgreens that paid $125,000 a year. Then I got a hospital per diem job that paid $70 per hour, so I was able to supplement my income. I also met my financial adviser, who has helped me a ton. I refinanced my student loans a bunch of times. I still have a chunk to pay off, but it’s at 3.1 percent interest, so I pay the minimums; I’m better off investing my money. I’ll finish paying off my loans before I retire, in about 15 years, and I max out my 401(k) every year. In 2018 I bought a house and refinanced it during the pandemic, so my interest rate is really low, under 3 percent. I rent out rooms in it now to traveling nurses and medical students, so it’s a source of income. My kids are all out of the house now.
I was a pharmacist at Walmart for six years and then I got a new job as a medical-science liaison. I started with a company that pays really low, but it helped me break into the industry. Now I’m making close to $200,000. And I love my work so much. My job is to understand clinical trials and educate doctors, nurses, and pharmacists that are using new medications and products so they understand how to use them. I specialize in hematology and oncology now. I spend my day going to these conferences presenting information that can really help others’ quality of life. I also do personalized medicine for women with extreme vomiting in pregnancy, because I was extremely sick for all of my pregnancies. I feel like there’s so much I can do with the knowledge I’ve gained. I get to genuinely improve lives. It’s just the most rewarding experience. I went through a lot to get here — sometimes I really can’t believe I did it — but it was absolutely worth it.
—Jessica Poundstone, full-time digital artist in Oregon
I worked for many years in marketing, mostly doing content strategy. I was always the primary earner in our family. My husband works as an operations manager for a very small wine distributor. I never loved any of my jobs, but I always performed well. And I always did some kind of artwork on the side. Then, when I had kids, they sort of took over all my free time.
The last job I had was for a software company, and I started making artwork on my phone with an app called Brushes. I knew I needed some kind of creative practice or I was going to go insane. I posted stuff I made to Instagram and people would contact me to ask if they could buy it. And I was like, “Oh, okay, sure.” That started to bring in some income, but not a lot. When people asked me if I ever wanted to do it full-time, I was like, “Fuck no, I don’t want to be at the mercy of the consumer market for my primary income.”
But then I began to realize that there were a lot of revenue streams available to artists. So I started turning the dial on some of those to see what would happen. For example, there’s an entire industry of art-advisory firms that place art for hospitals, hotels, restaurants, and stores. I had started to work with a couple of those folks and reached out to more of them. Everything that I do is digital, so it was fairly easy for them to license my work. We would negotiate the price, I’d send them the high-res file, and we’re good. Then the website Chairish reached out to me because they were trying to expand the art they offered on their platform. So I got connected to a lot of interior designers who were using that site. And that snowballed a bit — I became known among interior designers, who then would have professional photographers come and take pictures of their work, and sometimes they were in Dwell or some other publication, which meant my artwork was featured too. It all felt very serendipitous.
Over time, I began to see how I could have multiple revenue streams from my art. I worked out an arrangement with my marketing job so that I could work four days a week for ten hours instead of five days a week for eight hours, and then I’d have a full day to focus on art. When people think about switching careers, they look at it as flipping a switch. But for me, it was sort of a cross-fade. You don’t have to just do one or the other. It was not popular with my co-workers when I went down to four days a week. But I’d gotten to a place where it was worth it. Their disappointment and irritation with me was not as important as me doing what I wanted to do.
Then the pandemic hit. I was working in my marketing job from my bedroom, and it was just awful. My older child was 13, and younger was 10. I was waking up every day with migraines. I was like, Something’s got to give. I cannot be in these corporate meetings anymore. Eventually I took a leave of absence because of the migraines. I worked out a paid-leave situation for three months. It hadn’t been my original plan, but it wound up being sort of an off-ramp.
It also helped that during the pandemic, a lot of people were buying art. I told my husband that I could commit to making a certain amount of money per month, which was a bit of a stretch but I thought I could do it. It was definitely less than I had made before — probably about 70 or 75 percent of my previous salary. And it’s much more variable. But things really worked out. One of my designs got used as a phone case by Casetify, and it was really popular, so I was getting $2,000 or $3,000 a month just from that. And then Louis Vuitton started licensing my work for its stores around the world, which was another few thousand dollars every month. It was all passive income, so I didn’t have to scramble. In the past couple of months, both of those revenue streams have diminished, so I really need to start finding others. I wrote a book called Museum of Dogs and sold that to Chronicle Books — I love dogs and I love art, so it was just fun to make. I’ve taught workshops. I’ve done consulting with other artists to show them how to market themselves.
I recently started freelancing with one of my former employers. Would I rather just be doing art? Sure. But I’m glad that I have my own back if I need to make more money.
I grew up pretty poor, so I know that I can live with less. I have that in me. Like, we can always sell the house. We have options, which not everybody has, and I’m very grateful for them. I would like to maintain my current standard of living, but I certainly know how to move down a notch or two if need be. We go out to eat much less than we used to. We reduced the amount that we’re putting away for retirement and putting in our kids’ college fund. We don’t want to transfer money stress to the kids, but I’ve been clear and transparent that we can help with college, just not all of it. We don’t do weekend trips very often anymore. It helps to have a life that I don’t need constant vacations from. When I was so stressed out from my corporate job, I was constantly like, “I’ve got to get out of here. Let’s go to the beach for the weekend.” And now I’m happy to stay in my living room.
So many people look at what I’ve done and say, “Oh, I wish I could do that too.” And I’m like, “Well, you probably could. Are you willing to make sacrifices and do some pretty scary things?”
Variable income can be a rough ride. It can also be a real blow to the ego. I went from a desk job where people looked to me for help and my opinions to mostly sitting at my computer by myself all day. It’s a big adjustment. I didn’t realize how much of my motivation had been coming from anxiety. And then I finally was like, Oh, I don’t have to be the difficult boss. I can be safe in this other mode of working.
—Lisa Roberts, tech consultant in New Jersey
When I was younger, before I had children, I made career websites for corporations where they’d post jobs and things like that. When I had children in my 30s, my employer was going through layoffs, so I decided to stay home with the kids. My husband at the time, now ex-husband, was the breadwinner, so I was able to step away and pivot to freelance work. I made websites for small businesses, like Realtors or lawyers. It was enough to keep my foot in the door and justify my credit-card bill, but it wasn’t enough to support myself. Then, when I was 40, about a year after my second daughter was born, I got divorced. I needed to make money, so I had to get my freelance business going — it couldn’t be a little side thing anymore.
I tried to expand my freelance work for about three years. And ultimately, being a single mom making websites and not having predictable income was too much. I also needed health insurance; I was still on my ex-husband’s, and that couldn’t last forever. I knew I had to get a corporate job again, but it was daunting. I was 44 and I’d been out of the corporate world for ten years. Having that kind of résumé gap was a very scary position to be in.
I told anyone who would listen that I needed a job. I networked my ass off. I reached out to old colleagues. Eventually through one of them I found an open role doing advertising placement. I don’t want to complain about it because I’m very grateful they hired me, but I was very uncomfortable there. It was not a very family-friendly place, and I felt like I had no idea what I was doing when I started. My co-workers were all younger than me and none of them had kids. Definitely none of them were single moms. It was not a great environment for me, and it was very stressful. I was also commuting an hour and a half each way from New Jersey into Manhattan.
I realized I had to fake it till I made it. I watched, listened, and acted like I knew what I was doing. That’s what 90 percent of people in corporate America do anyway. And I managed and got through it. But eventually I was like, I need a new job. I need something local and I need to be making more money. I was also being asked to travel, and I just couldn’t do that with my kids so young. I was on LinkedIn applying to everything, reaching out, messaging people.
There’s a tech company based in my town, and one day I was driving past the office and I saw that they were hiring — they had a sign out front. I had no idea the company even existed before that. So I called them and told them I was looking for work. And it turned out they needed a project manager to work with e-commerce clients. I went in for an interview, and it was everything I wanted — more money, close to home, no travel. My previous position did not make me an obvious fit at all. They were like, ‘How are you qualified for tech consulting in e-commerce?’ But I was like, “I used to help companies market their jobs to people. If you hired me, I’d be helping you market your products to people. It’s not that different.” And they took a chance on me.
I’ve been there for seven years now. That was my big career change and it made my life a million times better. I finally liked being at work. I still do. I started off working with luxury clients, helping with their e-commerce, and now I work with big manufacturing companies that make nuts and bolts and cement, managing their inventory on the back end. I’ve grown within the organization and I have a team that reports to me now. I have doubled my salary from when I first went back to my old company.
I understand why people feel trapped in their careers, because sometimes you really are. You need to make money. You can’t leave your job. But if you want to change your career, you have to start looking and talking to people. You may not be able to switch right away, but when you sit there trapped, that doesn’t change anything. Just keep on looking and putting yourself out there and hopefully you’ll find your happy place.
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