How goes my life at work?
So, Only a few posts ago I described my thinking on the subject of why I was signing back on to full time employment as an engineering team manager again…
And since then, it seems that two and a half years has passed… wow that went quickly… or did it take forever???... I cant tell
Clearly one side-effect of the job has been that I almost completely stopped posting to my blog… but then again, my blog only really seems to serve me significantly when Im “off doing stuff” and have lots of new stimulus to think about and that isn’t really what happens when we work in steady 9-5 type jobs...
Anyway, here is a status report:
Right, well I just reread my post “The Contractor Who Came In From The Cold” and I have to say that my assessment of what would happen and what it would be like were exactly 100% “dead on the money”…
Which is as usual disappointing but not surprising.
The company management behavior at the project level is exactly the same as before and is in my opinion highly dysfunctional and shows no inclination to change at all… and that is of course because exactly the same people are in charge as were there before and they have exactly the same attitudes as they did before… and as Ive said before, people just don’t change (and that includes myself).
And so, schedules are an eternal joke and the challenge of trying to do a good job managing in that environment is indeed a crappy one… And I was also exactly right in my assessment of my own behaviors in that environment… which is that try as I might to maintain an independent view-point and not get affected by the foolishness of others … well that’s just not possible… I get affected and I get angry and frustrated and well, it’s the same as it ever was.
And so, in short, Im not enjoying it at all.
Its also been 5 years since I went on my last long moto-tour and had a good long break to get the frustrations of work life out of my system (Ive been so spoiled in the past J)
Interestingly, I don’t have particularly strong urges to go off on another long moto-tour at the moment, though there are some rides Id like to do (not least through/around Europe)… but I certainly do have strong urges to not be doing my current job.
The trouble is of course that it still makes far more financial sense to keep doing what Im doing for a few more years… The mathematics is pretty straightforward really and it goes like this:
Ive done pretty well through my homes equity with the Vancouver property boom over the past decade or so (same thing has happened in many places around the world)… but, all that equity is tied up in the land and is not cash… Couple with that the fact that I still actually have a sizeable chunk of debt in the form of the mortgage… which I have lagged on paying off (with my multiple long expensive moto trips) somewhat because of the significant increase in equity… I still owe the bank enough to mean that I wont be paying the mortgage off for about another decade… which is the crux of my current “challenge” J
Because I really really don’t want to be doing my current job for another 10 years!... And therein lies the problem…
Technically, I am reasonably well off and could probably manage to retire… But my “wealth” is largely tied up in equity and is not “liquid”… While Im working, I can use the equity by taking out loans against the house and I can take my long breaks, but while I have debt, I have to work at a high paying job on a regular basis to pay back the interest on the debt… Otherwise the compound interest of the debt quickly grows and overwhelms the value of the equity (about 20 years away by my calculations)… and I then end up living out my later years in a cardboard box under a bridge somewhere… Not what I had in mind!
The only way for me to be able to stop working is to not have debt, and preferably have “investments” that actually grow instead of decline at the bank. But the only way to do that is to sell my house! Not so hard you say… just sell it…
Hmm well, that has a bunch of its own problems, not least of which is where do I live then… Ive traveled about quite a bit and Ive found that being an expat living my retirement in cheap foreign lands isn’t all its cracked up to be (at least for me as I understand myself)…
And anyway, I don’t really want to completely uproot myself and move somewhere significantly cheaper… I actually want to stay in the area that Im currently in … It is where all my friends are and it is where I can get the contracting work that I do want to be able to do as a “staged” retirement plan (I know I would not be happy outright retiring right now so I may as well earn some money working part time in roughly the same job I have)… So going to live on the cheap somewhere else is not really what I have in mind.
But, I do have a plan…
I have a crappy little house on a sizeable block of land in a city where real estate is very valuable… But the value of the place is in the land and not the house… That said, Im happy enough in my crappy little house, and so what I want to do is “down-size” my block of land…
Which is technically not allowed (cant subdivide my block), so what I will need to do is sell my current house and buy a different one… I should be able to do that and use the earnings from the sale of the larger land block to have zero debt on the new smaller block… And then Im a free agent and can go back to contracting and take some longer breaks again… Im sure Id be a pretty happy camper in that mode.
Right, so there is a solid high-level plan and Im 100% "on-board"... Yes I want to do that.
The problem now becomes how to achieve the transition… and that is made much more difficult than it probably needs to be by guess who… Yep Me!
The problem is I am very particular about several things in my proposed new “crappy little house on a smaller block”… I know within a couple of streets and a few dozen houses of where I want that to be (based on my assorted needs … which are more or less the specifications of my current crappy little house)… And there are no houses for sale that meet my needs at the moment.
That is not really a problem though because Im quite happy to wait up to 3 years or so to do the change. And its pretty certain that in that time frame the right thing will come up.
The problem though is that this means that I cant really sell my current house till after I buy the new one… And I cant guarantee that I could immediately sell my house once I want to.
And that means my problem becomes "bridging" finance…
Its pretty hard to go to the bank and say “Hey, can you please loan me a huge sum of money so I can buy a second house”!...
Sure I have the equity to cover the loan in my existing house, but the bank cares more about my ability to pay the interest with income… And as a single professional I admit I am well paid compared to many people, but sadly I just don’t earn enough to make the payments on such a large loan for a second house in this real estate market...
… Oh such first world problems I have J
The arrogance of me!... Im being picky and greedy and its blocking me getting what I want… Yep, that sounds exactly like most of us humans J
So, there is my current challenge … trying to get comfortably free of mortgage debt so I can stage myself into retirement and give up the stress of having to work full time for a crappy corporation. But at least my direction is a bit clearer… I have a specific goal and a specific time line that is “within sight”… 2-3 years is very “immediate” compared to 7-10 years away which in my emotional mind just becomes “forever” away.
It actually feels good to have the core of a plan J
So now all I gotta do is figure out how to achieve it.
