What it actually took for me to leave consulting

A few weeks ago, I was at a networking event and someone said I wouldn’t have been able to start my business without my husband’s income.

In the moment, I thought, “Yeah, you’re right.” I’m lucky to be in a two income household, and my husband’s income has helped support us while I build Tessera.

But then the comment kept sitting weirdly with me. It felt like it skipped over a lot of the work we had both put in to get here.

For years, I made good money in consulting. I also knew it probably wasn’t my forever job. I saw it as a stepping stone after my MBA: a chance to learn about a lot of industries and get better at working through complicated problems.

During that first year, I started thinking about what I wanted to do next and how I could prepare for it. It would have been easy to say, “I work hard, I make good money, I should get to spend it.” And we did spend money on things we liked. But we also started asking how we could live on about half of our take home pay.

That didn’t happen all at once. We looked at our spending and tried to figure out what we actually cared about.

At one point, we were spending around $2,000 a month on eating out. My husband has bougie taste, and if we were going out, we were going somewhere good. We were also both working a lot, so going out was convenient.

But when we thought about it, the part we cared about most was going out with friends. So we started shifting our spending toward that. It took about six months, but eventually we were spending around $300 to $500 a month on eating out.

We didn’t do this by deciding we could never spend money on anything fun. I still have my nice purses. I still love my engagement ring. We were trying to figure out which spending felt worth it to us and which parts were more habit or convenience.

We looked at our bigger expenses, too. When I moved from Houston to Austin, we talked about buying a house or renting a bigger place. We ended up choosing a townhome. It gave us more room to work from home and have people over, without taking on the higher costs of a house before we felt ready.

I was saving about half of my take home pay, plus what I was putting into retirement. A lot of that money stayed in cash. It was probably more cash than I’d want to keep long term, but I knew I was heading into a transition and wanted to feel like I had a safety net.

When I finally left consulting, that money gave me time. I didn’t spend the first six weeks applying for jobs. I rested, took care of myself, and went to a lot of physical therapy for my broken foot.

I eventually started applying again, but none of the jobs felt right. That was when I started thinking seriously about Tessera. Because I had some room to figure it out, I didn’t feel like I had to take the first job I could find.

And the spending changes we’d made helped more than I expected. We had already gotten used to living on about half of what we used to bring home. So when I stopped earning an income, we didn’t suddenly have to replace all of it.

My husband’s income absolutely helped. That’s part of the story. But it wasn’t the only thing that made this possible. We spent years saving and making choices that kept our expenses manageable while I figured out what I wanted to do next.

I wasn’t saving just to see a big number in an account. I was saving because I wanted the option to leave a job that wasn’t right for me, take a breath, and decide what came next.

That’s one of the things I love about working with people on their finances. Money can be about more than covering the bills or buying the things you want. It can give you room to make a change, start something, take care of yourself, or go after a different version of your life.

What would you want to have a little more room to do?

About Hannah

Hannah Klein is the founder of Tessera Ventures, where she helps people build financial systems that work in real life. She studied engineering at Stanford, earned her MBA at UT Austin’s McCombs School of Business, and spent several years as a management consultant at BCG. She started Tessera after seeing how many smart, successful people felt overwhelmed by money and thought they were the problem.

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