It was 2011. The government debt crisis in the EU had reached a stage that required the bailout of several countries long thought to be considered creditworthy and stable.

I was a senior analyst then and the bank that I was working for wasn't spared from this contagion. The outlook was bleak and the bank's share price had taken quite a beating.

As part of 'austerity measures', there were also talks of bonus and job cuts across the offices from Europe to Asia. The economic turbulence and uncertainty kept everyone on their toes.

On one fateful afternoon that year, I was called into my CEO's room for a few words. It was a brief conversation but in short, I had been given the assurance of a "golden ticket" and had been recommended to be sent to HQ in Paris for training.

At that point of time, I had no idea what this meant. I gave up the opportunity to another colleague whom I felt needed it more. It was only much later on that I realised this in fact an all-expenses paid two-week trip to wine, dine, possibly stroll along the Champs-Élysées, and rub shoulders with our colleagues from all over the globe. The valuation training was simply a side show.

And then a few weeks later in a twist of events, I resigned to join a competitor bank. The offer came with a sixty percent increase in pay. It came at a time where I had to fund several huge upcoming expenses including the downpayment on my new house.

The news of my departure didn't go down too well. While everyone else was 'congratulating' me, my CEO refused to speak with me during my final days at the firm. Later in that year, I also discovered that the entire analyst/associate pool had basically been decimated, leaving only the VPs and one analyst. That analyst was meant to be me, the last man standing. Fast forward a couple of years later, the team that I had jumped ship for shut down as part of an internal re-organization exercise and cost cutting. Talk about karma.

Decisions like these can be tough. Some might say it was foolish to trade goodwill for money. The money had been good and without it otherwise, I probably would have been crushed under the weight of work while struggling to make ends meet.

Besides, goodwill (to be blatantly transactional) is only good if you can derive something tangible from it in the future, and given the state of the Eurozone crisis then, it didn't look like a pay rise was on the horizon anytime soon.

Yes, not everything should be weighed by its monetary merits. But it is fair to say that many of the benefits and opportunities I enjoy today are the seeds of goodwill planted years ago. Seeds that didn't appear to have any benefits ten or twenty years ago.

That said, being able to gauge when to cut your losses and walk away, versus sticking it out for a benefit in the future requires a certain amount of judgement and faith (some say craziness). Even more so if you have something immediately lucrative on the table.

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"Summertime soldiers" are what Marc Andreessen calls those who only joined a company in the first place because it was already successful and have no interest in really bearing down and applying themselves to a challenge.

These people while hardworking, are however not the type of people you want to retain and groom. As an employee, it isn't technically wrong to jump ship for a better paying job, and I never regretted what I did.

Given the choice to re-write history, I might have went for that incentive trip, soldier on being the lone analyst within the firm and later on down the road, find a way to make back that sixty percent increase in pay.