Why One of Us Had to Go All-In (And Why It Couldn't Be Both)

Two redundancy emails. Same day. Same trip.

The exhibition queue in Japan suddenly felt like the wrong place to process what just collapsed.

I remember standing there, still processing the townhall call and the email that landed as we got off the bus. Both of us. Made redundant. Overseas.

My partner Shanshan already had something lined up pre-holiday, which helped. But I felt lost. Part of me couldn't fully enjoy the holiday - at night, I was scrolling through job boards with this uncomfortable itch of uncertainty. The other part of me wanted to be present, to appreciate the moments. We even joked about extending the trip since there was no rush to head back now. We had our company farewell call near Mt Fuji.

The redundancy didn't create our ambition. It made the fragility impossible to ignore. Two people in similar industries. Two incomes that could vanish overnight. And a half-formed dream of building something real - property portfolio, business acquisition, actual ownership - that we'd been squeezing into weekends for years without meaningful progress.

It forced a question we'd been avoiding: if we were serious about this, someone had to go all-in. But who?

The Math That Changed Everything

We came back to Australia and both went straight back to full-time work. Shanshan landed at Canva. I was at a company with decent flexibility. On paper, we were fine. Two incomes, stable roles, back on track.

Except we weren't building anything. Calls with brokers got squeezed between meetings. Due diligence happened in fragments on weekends. Every conversation about acquisitions felt rushed. We were still in surface-level mode - looking at deals, not progressing them.

Then when our daughter was born a year later, the math changed completely. Shanshan went back to work after maternity leave but it became immediately clear: this wasn't sustainable. Full-time job, full-time mum, full-time dad, plus trying to build property & a business acquisition strategy? Something had to give.

The conversation happened over a few nights. Not a single dramatic moment, but a slow acknowledgment that we were burning out without building anything meaningful. The fragility we'd felt in Japan - that feeling of everything collapsing - was still there. We were just masking it with two incomes and busy calendars.

So we made a deliberate choice. She left her role at a high-growth tech company and went full-time on acquisition work. I stayed employed to fund the runway.

Why Income Became Strategy, Not Safety

Here's what most people get wrong about this decision. They assume the person who stays employed is playing it safe. That they're the one who wasn't brave enough to jump.