Five thoughts about work and money in 2019
September 30, 2019
I started blogging before the Great Recession and as I prepare for the next one, whenever it may finally touch down, I’m thinking about all the ways we’ve evolved since then.
1. I am a reformed workaholic.
This is huge. I didn’t think I’d ever stop being a work junkie, or stop chasing the highs of earning money and overtime and achieving. I never dreamed of wanting to let go of all that because it’s what paid off debts, paid bills, built up our savings and saved my bacon.
After the Great Recession, I clung to that even harder because I got a sense of how much worse it could have been if I hadn’t been addicted to earning.
Cliched as it may sound, getting pregnant changed all that. It didn’t come in a dramatic blinding revelation or the glow of motherhood (I never got the glow, I feel cheated). It came, as most things do, in a flash of logic.
I thought about all the choices we were getting ready to make, all the sacrifices, and how it just didn’t make any sense to do any and all of those things if we were not actively choosing to be present for zir life as well. At the rate that I used to work, I would miss every second of it. It felt right to actively make the choice to shift my mindset from a woman for whom a career was everything to a woman who had chosen to embrace a career and a family with a whole heart.
2. We are no longer financially precarious.
Amazing and life-changing. Without this, I could not have made the choice I did for #1. I probably wouldn’t have made the choice to have a child either, if we were still financially precarious. I just could not bring myself to do that to another generation.
3. I still feel vulnerable when I’m “only” earning one full time income.
This may just be my personality, it may be an echo from the Great Recession. Losing my job for a year was rough. I had savings, and unemployment income to supplement the savings, so I wasn’t going into debt BUT even while I tried to make the best of that time by spending a lot of quality time with chosen family, it was still incredibly stressful. I still needed to support my biological family and I felt that clock ticking.
So no matter how well we’re doing with our full time jobs, I remember the devastating blow of losing that full time job without any other income. There has to be something else coming in – overtime, side jobs, interest, dividends. I spend a lot of time making sure some of those are set up and I have more anxiety than I should that we aren’t close enough to financial freedom. A full year of non-work income can cover almost one month of expenses. That’s not a lot when worrying about the inability to work. My daily health roller coaster and stressors at work also grind in the message that my ability to earn isn’t promised. That absolutely feeds my anxiety as does a high spending year where we keep having to add more steady expenses for a good reason (Seamus’s health) and his aging is a microcosm of what I have to expect for myself. Aging and poor health is expensive.
Correlation: I wonder if and when we will become stable enough to take money for granted and relax enough to do so. Maybe that could be my next huge overarching goal: hit a point where we (uh, I) don’t worry about income and do what we want to enjoy life and support causes, friends and artists in their endeavors, etc.
I keep reminding myself that we are exponentially, galaxies better, than ten years ago and if I have to stop working tomorrow, I would still find a way. I always have before and I haven’t quit yet. (Though I’m really really tired and kind of want to.)
4. I have learned to relax.
Recreationally, I mean. Relaxation and naps have always been a guilt-ridden thing in my life and I want that to change further. I’m relearning how to just have fun without calculating opportunity cost of that time. It’s a process.
Right now I think the best vacation would be two weeks of only stirring a step outside my house if I feel like it and having all three meals and two snacks a day magically appear when I want it – no thinking required.
Plus a fixed up grassy yard for the dogs to do their zoomies in.
5. I’ve become comfortable with the money decisions I’ve made over the years
Ignoring the whole Dad fiasco, of course, there have been thousands of other money decisions, big and small, that I’ve made for our family over the years.
For example, we poured a huge amount of cash into the mortgage a couple years ago when we bought this place. I made my original decision based on the massive size of our mortgage and our very large monthly payments. If the market took a big hit at the same time as us losing our jobs, we would easily be underwater if we had to sell for any reason. Having to sell due to recession-induced job loss necessarily means that we wouldn’t get top dollar.
I can’t accurately gauge the risk of losing one or both of our jobs in a recession but I do know: PiC’s job has already gone through six rounds of layoffs in the past 3 years and that’s long before a recession. My company could easily shed enough business or revenue to merit layoffs too and I’m an expensive employee. Worth twice my pay of course but as a higher earner they could decide to cut me loose for maximum savings if our revenue dropped significantly. So I knew I was giving up money and chose to do so anyway.
Carl had me wondering how much we gave up. Knowing wouldn’t make a difference, we’re not taking that money out and we can’t change the past. But I’m curious! Using this calculator, I look a look at what our annualized returns adjusted for inflation would have been from approximately Sept 2017 to the present. Surprisingly, looking at the annualized S&P 500 Return with reinvested dividends, it isn’t as much as I expected! 
It’s not nothing but the difference between that and our interest was about 2% so we didn’t give up all that much for my peace of mind and ensuring that we’d generally be ok if everything else went sideways.
We are in a much better situation with our money than say 10-15 years ago when I didn’t know how to save. I would be okay for a while if I quit my job today even if I can’t file for unemployment but I just like the feeling of going to work and being productive on a daily basis.
I miss liking the feeling of going to work, that was nice back in the day 🙂
I’m glad you’re in a much better position now.
It’s funny, we’ve never really been financially precarious but I still find it extremely difficult to relax about money. Even as I’ve gotten better about actually letting us spend it, it’s still one thing I have control of and am “good” at so I obsessively work and rework spreadsheets whenever I have anxiety over something else.
I’m very good at forgiving myself for past mistakes, but only because they are the same mistakes I make today (Huge emergency fund + conservative asset allocation).
Sarah recently posted…Lessons Learned from 10+ Years of Expense Tracking
Hey, you’re a good control for my question of whether I’d be this way if I had never been financially precarious! 😀
I’ve gotten so spoiled with certain things about my current job that I wonder if I could ever go back to something that had less autonomy or required a long commute. I suppose I could, but I’m going to do what I can to avoid that. This is my main motivation for saving.
My job is not particularly tied directly to recession cycles, but is tied to other cycles, and is generally not super stable. I’m a lot less nervous about T’s job, especially if/when he gets tenure, in which case it is secure until the whole educational system breaks down. (Which could happen.)
I have never really been one for regrets. Being conservative isn’t always a mistake, even if it is sub-optimal. I think in HCOL areas where mortgages are much larger than average, pre-paying some of the mortgage has some advantages. Most of them are emotional rather than mathematical, but they are still real. I’m biased, of course, because I did the same thing.
YES I’ve gotten very spoiled with a lot of the non-monetary perks of my current job. I wonder if I could get those elsewhere AND the monetary perks that so many other Bay Area jobs have. (Probably not in my industry…)
I don’t know how my job will weather a recession, but an educated guess is that it *can* be heavily impacted by a recession.
I wish I could do better at not having regrets, I’ve got quite a few. But WRT the mortgage at least, no matter what the difference was, it wouldn’t have mattered because I couldn’t stomach the monthly payment being so high. It felt like a bigger exposure than we could manage.