This article originally appeared on Business Insider.
Tomas, a 30-year-old IT worker based in Georgia, said his journey to an “overemployed” lifestyle began at an early age.
He grew up “very poor,” he told Business Insider, and after his mother left his father, he, his mother and four siblings shared a studio apartment for two years.
“When I got older I thought, ‘I don’t want to live like this,’” he said.
In 2016, when Tomas had about $40,000 in credit card debt and was having trouble paying child support, he decided to look for a second, remote job that he could do secretly. Two years later, juggling his job had helped him pay off his debt, but he wasn’t ready to give it up.
“I felt invincible, and it made me feel like that was one less thing I had to worry about in life,” said Tomas, whose identity is known to BI but was withheld because of his fear of professional repercussions.
To date, Tomas secretly works two full-time remote jobs that pay more than $250,000 a year in combined salaries, according to documents viewed by BI. That helped him grow his net worth to more than $500,000, pay for two new cars, travel more and find “financial stability and freedom,” he said. Tomas added that he would like to have a third job if he could find the right fit.
Tomas is among a small group of U.S. workers, many of them in the technology and IT sectors. secretly do multiple remote jobs. Working more than one job at the same time may not violate federal or state laws, but it may violate some employment contracts and be a fireable offense if a worker is caught.
As layoffs have spread across the tech sector, Tomas said the added job security that comes with overemployment has become even more important. He even encouraged some colleagues to look for a second job and provided advice on how to do so.
“Companies will fire or fire you without any notice,” he said. “I now believe that everyone should always hold down two jobs.”
Finding the right job for overemployment is not easy
Tomas has had several stints as an overemployed worker.
About a year after he started overworking himself, he decided to take a break. He said that one of his jobs had become much more demanding and that he wanted to adjust to the workload before taking on a second job again.
Furthermore, throughout this career, Tomas has they held a mix of full-time and contract jobs, and the latter typically had an expiration date.
As pandemic fears have eased in recent years, Tomas said he has also worked for companies that required employees to return to the office. Since remote work was the key to his overemployment, he decided to part ways with those employers.
These job separations are the main reason Tomas has worked about seven different jobs since 2017. While he generally hasn’t worked more than two jobs at once, he said there were three or four months where he had three jobs — and one month in which he was four. . All but one of his jobs were remote: He said flexible work schedules allowed him to juggle a hybrid and remote role for a while.
At his peak, Tomas claimed to have earned nearly $400,000 in a single year across all his jobs.
Four tips for overemployed workers
Tomas has four tips for people interested in the overemployed lifestyle.
First: Know your job well so you can complete tasks quickly and spend time on your other jobs. Second: Find out which job has the most flexibility so you can reschedule those meetings if necessary. Third: To consistently appear online for a job, don’t rely on moving mice, he said believes that some IT departments can tell when workers are using it. Fourth: If you think your boss is suspicious of you, it’s probably time to leave that job.
Tomas said juggling work has been fairly easy in his two current roles. Both jobs have flexible hours and his shifts start at different times of the day, with only three hours of overlap between them. He said he only had one or two overlapping meetings that required him to find an excuse to miss one.
But during a previous period of overemployment, Tomas said he had a boss who seemed to suspect he was juggling work, asking questions such as why he was online well after work hours. When these questions did not disappear, Tomas decided to leave his job.
Unless you find one job that pays him more than $250,000 a year, about his current combined salary, Tomas said he has no intention of giving up his super job.
“I will keep going as long as I can,” he said, adding, “The rewards definitely outweigh the work.”