Overemployed Mom Gave up $250K Income, Now Avoiding RTO Policy

Editor’s note: In June 2024, Business Insider wrote about a supply-chain professional named “Lisa,” in Wisconsin, who was secretly working multiple full-time jobs. (Lisa is a pseudonym, but Business Insider has confirmed her identity.) Read our story here. In a recent interview, Lisa shared how she has adapted to life with one job and managed to maintain a similar standard of living.

Secretly working two full-time jobs was a game changer for Lisa and her family. That chapter is closed, but she’s still clinging to the lifestyle it made possible.

In 2020, Lisa was earning roughly $110,000 a year in a remote, corporate manufacturing role when she received an offer for a hybrid job that paid about $150,000. After talking it over with her husband, she landed on an unconventional solution: Take the new job — and keep the old one, too.

For 18 months, Lisa secretly worked two full-time roles, earning roughly $250,000 in 2021 and averaging 40 to 50 hours a week across both jobs. On days she had to go into the office for her hybrid role, she’d bring both laptops — which conveniently looked identical — and juggle her responsibilities from a cubicle or private room.

Lisa said the extra income has put her and her husband in a strong position to afford their three children’s college educations. It also allowed her husband to take a much-needed break from the workforce and focus on caring for their kids.

“It’s given us a financial cushion that would have been impossible otherwise,” Lisa, who’s in her 40s and lives in Wisconsin, told Business Insider last year.

However, in recent years, Lisa said return-to-office pressures and burnout made job juggling unsustainable. In 2022, she gave up her $250,000 income from two jobs for a new position as a supply chain manager with a hybrid schedule that paid $175,000 annually. Nearly two years later, Lisa faced another challenge to the lifestyle she’d grown used to: Her company announced a five-day-a-week in-office policy.

But just as she turned to job juggling in 2020, Lisa has continued to find ways to carve out a work situation that’s best for her and her family. Her first step? Finding a way to quietly skirt her company’s five-day office policy.

Lisa is among the Americans who have secretly juggled multiple full-time jobs to double their incomes. Over the past three years, Business Insider has interviewed 30 overemployed workers who’ve put their extra earnings toward things like luxurious vacations, expensive weight-loss drugs, and their children’s college tuition.

However, in recent years, job juggling has become more difficult amid a white-collar hiring slowdown and return-to-office mandates. Still, some workers have found ways to hold on to parts of their overemployed lifestyles, even as their work situations evolve.

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Do you have a story to share about secretly working multiple jobs? Contact this reporter via email at jzinkula@businessinsider.com or Signal at jzinkula.29. Here’s our guide to sharing information securely.

Read more of BI’s stories on overemployed workers:

Dodging a 5-day in-office mandate

After switching from two jobs to one in 2022, Lisa said her remaining employer encouraged office attendance, but in-person work initially remained optional due to pandemic-related concerns. She typically went in once a week — making a commute of just over an hour each way — a routine her manager was fine with.

Over time, though, in-person attendance a few days a week became expected. Then, in late 2023, the company formally announced a five-day-a-week office requirement. Lisa began thinking about finding a new job, but first, she spoke with her manager to gauge how strictly the new rules would be enforced. Her manager told her that employees could request approval to work from home one day a week, but it would require a sign-off from a higher-level manager at the company. They said they’d support her request.

But the conversation didn’t end there. Lisa said they then had an “off the record” conversation about how much remote work she could get away with. She explained how working five days a week in the office would pose challenges for her family, given her long commute and childcare responsibilities.

Lisa said her manager was understanding and told her to “be here as much as you can.” As long as she was in the office a few days a week — especially on days with key in-person meetings — they wouldn’t stand in her way.

“My manager and I have kind of worked out that if I need to work from home for whatever reason, whether it’s work or personal reasons, then that’s OK,” she said. “At the end of the day, I kind of have a hybrid schedule.”

Lisa, who typically works from the office three days a week, said one reason her manager has been accommodating is that her job involves a lot of virtual meetings, making in-person attendance less essential. As far as she knows, everyone who has formally asked to work from home one day a week has received approval, but she’s not sure if others have come to similar informal arrangements. Either way, she prefers to keep hers quiet.

“I don’t necessarily advertise what I do,” she said. “But there is a quiet understanding in our working group that flexibility is critical for us to be productive.”

Lisa said her biggest concern is that her company will start tracking how often people are working from the office — as some other companies have done — but she hasn’t heard anything about this yet.

“If they start letting people go because they’re not badging in for eight hours a day, four days a week, then yeah, I would definitely be on the list of people they could let go,” she said.

Turning to her husband for childcare while looking for a new role

Given that she’s spending more time in the office, Lisa said her husband has spent more time caring for their children, the youngest of whom is under 10. After taking a break from the workforce, he now works remotely part-time, giving him the flexibility to be there for their kids. When her husband used to work from an office, Lisa said they relied on pre- and after-school programs. But now that he works from home, he’s able to handle school drop-offs and pickups himself.

From a financial perspective, Lisa said they’ve been able to maintain their lifestyle despite his part-time hours for three main reasons. First, her husband is earning more per hour than he did in his previous full-time job, which made the transition to part-time a bit less of a sacrifice. Second, her salary has risen over the past three years — from $175,000 to $195,000 — helping to offset some of the lost income from her second job. Third, the savings boost from her job-juggling days gave them a cushion — one that has helped them absorb income changes without major cutbacks.

“I think we would be OK financially,” she said, “but we wouldn’t be great if it hadn’t been for that two-job situation.”

While working three days from the office has been manageable, Lisa said she’s applied for many jobs over the past year in the hopes of finding a role with some combination of a shorter commute, a more flexible in-office requirement, and comparable pay.

She said she interviewed for one job with an office just 15 minutes from home, but the salary was about half of what she earns now. While the shorter commute was appealing, the pay cut wasn’t worth it — and she said it’s been difficult to find other managerial roles that have the compensation and flexibility she’s looking for.

“It’s hard to find another position at this level,” she said. “There’s just fewer of them, but I’m still looking.”