I am 37 years old, a combined debt of 30,000￡, renting a room and no job since last year. I have no car, no girlfriend, and no dependants whatsoever. I am single and alone. The only plus is I have a PhD,but then there are absolutely no jobs in the market.
I really want to find a job, get rid of debt, maybe have enough money to buy my own place and then maybe plan for a family. Is my present situation really that bad considering I will be 40 in 3 years time?
Some words of motivation, encouragement or better yet personal experiences will certainly help.
I assume tenured academia isn't a viable option?
I won't lie - pretty bad. You've lost two fifths of your productive career already and have less than nothing to show for it. But people have come back from worse. How easy this will be depends on which field your PhD is in and where you got it. Math, physics, computer science, Oxbridge, upper Russell Group, forecast very good. Be able to be conversant in your research and come up with a good spin on your past experience, and you should get into a decent hedge fund or startup. Worst case scenario you can get into a bank, consulting, or a big 4 tech firm. Assuming you average 130k pounds a year ($200,000) all-in going up with inflation, you should be in a position to retire comfortably by your late fifties or early sixties, and that's assuming you add a stay-at-home wife along the way and have a kid or two. If you stay single or get a wife earning maybe 70k pounds a year or have no kids, or any combination, you could even do early to mid 50s. I don't have a context for the UK, but 35 is about when American specialist surgeons start to get their own practices, and they can retire in a decade and a half on their earnings. That's with medical school debt. If you earn half as much but have a tenth as much debt, you're in a pretty good position. This is assuming you live comfortably but frugally, of course, or you do much better than a 130k p.a. average.
Below here you can support yourself but you won't retire till your early 70s without living like a monk in matters romantic, sartorial, and residential.
"Hard" liberal arts (philosophy, economics, that sort of thing) from Oxbridge or the like should also stand you in good stead. If you can sell yourself as a sort of intellectual knight-errant, you should be a very appealing candidate for management consulting. Economics in particular gives you even more options. More than I can list, really. The City, the upper echelons of government, the Bank of England, various independent consultancies, even political parties and think tanks.
Hard sciences can get you a solid job in the 50-80k a year range, but there's not too much growth potential. They just suck pretty much. Here and below, you start to lose the privilege of raising children with your current situation.
"Soft" liberal arts (gender studies, critical race studies, etc.) is Starbucks barista territory. Good luck getting to zero net worth by retirement. I'd learn a trade. Infra dig for a PhD, but there are literally 30,000 reasons you can't afford to get hung up on things like that.
Inspiring stories: a very good family friend spent the time till his early 40s as an Ivy League math professor before getting fed up with academia and spending his life's savings on law school. Now he's a decamillionaire with a three floor penthouse overlooking Central Park. He's a name partner at an international tax law firm. Not your typical case, but take inspiration from it if you want. I could also cite any number of people who started businesses in their forties, but that's not something you can easily reproduce.
You need to look at moving to find a job, have to go where the money is if nothing in your area. PhD doesn't say in what field, but you are right that you need to get a job and cut back on everything else until your debt is paid off.
The only plus is I have a PhD
That is NOT a plus. Believing it is goes a LONG way to explain why you are unemployed. Get over yourself and take whatever job you can get, and I GAUARANTEE there are jobs aailable that you think are beneath you.
I just finished my BSc at age 45. "Where there is a will, there is a way."
Not bad at all... "You're Alive."
