Do I Protect My Career or Start My Family Now?

Money Dilemmas is where we talk about the tricky stuff - the conversations about money that live in the grey area between love, power, fairness, and everything in between.

Each story starts with a real member dilemma, the kind many of us have quietly wrestled with but rarely said out loud.

Because money isn’t simply transactional; it’s about what we value, what we tolerate, and what we’re taught to accept.

And at the end of every story, one of our co-founders weighs in - offering her two cents and best advice on how to navigate the dilemma.

The Dilemma

I’ve always wanted to be financially independent.

I built my identity around my career, landing high-profile roles at companies like Fiat and Nestlé.

I’m now a Team Lead in a product design and development department at a mid-sized company.

My long-term goal was clear: invest heavily in my career so I could contribute 50/50 financially at home and never be economically dependent on anyone.

Four years ago, I was working in a large company where I earned the same as my husband, maybe even slightly more. I was also very close to burnout.

Luckily, I found a role in a smaller company with a lower salary and slowly recovered, both physically and emotionally.

The last few years at work have still been hard.

Two years ago, I stepped into a team lead role during a period of constant crisis. I’m managing more than 500 projects a year and carrying the emotional weight of a team under high pressure and below-average salaries.

The company itself is financially strained. There have been no bonuses for years and even shareholder loans to keep things going.

This affected my starting salary and progression, and today I’m paid slightly below market, especially compared to larger companies.

I’m now almost 34, married, and planning to have my first child.

In Switzerland, maternity leave is 14 weeks. Swiss law guarantees 80 percent of salary during that time, but in my company full salary is only guaranteed after three years of employment.

I currently earn around 35 percent of our household income.

From a purely financial perspective, it makes more sense for me to return part-time at 50 to 60 percent, while my husband stays full-time.

We are foreigners with no family in Switzerland, and childcare here is extremely expensive, especially in the first four years.

Emotionally, we both dreamed of an 80/80 setup, each of us spending one day a week at home with our baby.

Financially, that only works if I move to a higher-paying company.

If I reduce my workload to 60 percent:

• My pension contributions will suffer
• I’ll likely need to step back from my team lead role
• My career progression will slow down at a moment I’ve worked years to reach
• There’s also a risk that asking for part-time after maternity leave could lead to my contract being terminated, meaning I’d need to job-search with a newborn

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If I wait one to two years:

• I might secure a better-paid role that makes 80/80 possible
• I could protect my career capital and pension
• But I’m scared of waiting too long. I have endometriosis and my partner also has some fertility issues. Time doesn’t feel unlimited

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On top of this, I already feel overwhelmed at work.

Leading at this pace feels heavy, and I worry about sustaining it during pregnancy or with a newborn.

So here’s my dilemma.

Do I wait, try to secure a better-paid job first, protect my long-term financial independence, and potentially delay motherhood even though I already feel stretched?

Or do I lean into starting our family now, accept a temporary step back from my career and income, and trust that I can rebuild later, even if it impacts my pension, leadership role, and job security in the short term?

I’m leaning toward choosing family, but I’m unsure how realistic it is to stay a team lead at 60 percent and how costly this pause might be in the long run.

I would really love to hear your perspective.

Camilla's Take

Thank you so much for sharing this. I can tell how carefully you’ve thought about every angle, and I really respect that.

This isn’t a question you’re asking lightly, and it shows.I want to be honest about something first. I know people often say there’s never a perfect time to start a family, and while that’s true in one sense, I don’t fully agree with how casually that advice is sometimes given.

There are definitely moments where the timing is clearly not right. Too much instability, too little support, too much strain.

So I think it’s good that you’re taking this seriously instead of brushing it aside.

If it were me, I would frame the decision like this and really sit with it:Two years from now, which situation would feel harder to live with?

One scenario is that you have a baby and you’ve started your family, but financially things feel stretched and uncertain.

You might be spending part of your maternity leave applying for jobs, thinking about your next move, or navigating a career transition while caring for a newborn.

The other scenario is that you’re in a more stable financial position, maybe even in a better-paid and more sustainable role, but you’re struggling with fertility and conceiving hasn’t been as easy as you hoped.

Both of these futures are heavy.

There’s no easy option here.

But for most people, one of them feels more painful when they imagine actually living inside it.

When my husband and I decided to start trying for a family about two years ago, we had many of the same conversations you and your partner are having now.

We talked endlessly about timing, careers, money, and readiness.

In the end, what became clear to us was that the only thing we felt we might truly regret was not having a child.

That doesn’t mean it’s the right answer for everyone, but it was the honest answer for us.If you decide that starting a family now feels right, I’d shift the focus from trying to eliminate all risk to figuring out how to reduce the pressure as much as possible.

That could mean saving more aggressively now to build a buffer, cutting back on expenses where you can, or planning very intentionally for a potential job move during or after maternity leave.

None of this removes uncertainty, but it can give you more breathing room.

I also want to stress that any plan you make needs to go beyond income and careers. It has to include how you’ll divide the invisible work once the baby arrives.

Who carries the mental load.

Who manages the home.

How childcare, cleaning, and daily logistics are handled after parental leave ends.

It might be that you already have a great division of labour, but for so many women in this community, these conversations never happened, and the default quietly became that the mother took care of everything, even after returning to work.

And if you take the longer stretch of maternity leave or reduce your hours, it’s incredibly important to talk about pensions.

A fair setup often means your partner contributing to your pension during that time so that the long-term cost of caregiving is shared between you, not silently absorbed by you.

Finally, I wouldn’t ignore how stretched you already feel at work.

Pregnancy and early motherhood tend to amplify what’s already there.

If your current role feels unsustainable now, that’s important information, not a personal failure.

Whatever you decide, I don’t see this as ambition versus family.

I see it as sequencing.

You’re deciding what you’re willing to stretch now and what you want to protect for later.

Only you can know which trade-off you can live with.

But trusting yourself to answer that honestly matters far more than waiting for a moment where everything feels perfectly aligned.

And whatever you choose, make sure it’s a shared plan with your partner.

This shouldn’t be a sacrifice you carry alone.

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