Black holes

Time seems to have gone into a Black Hole (isn't it what they seem to eat, anyway?). It's insane. Covid messed up the world and a lot of lives. I was talking to a neighbour the other day and we both were a bit astonished at how long we are living here in this community and how fast time goes by.

My previous post dates back a long time ago. Different times, a lot has happened...

This is pretty personal as far as I am considered... you can also skip it and go to the financial part...

 I made some posts during 2020 but I left out one very personal and bid thing. One of the major shocks in the beginning of 2020 besides Covid was the news that doctors discovered prostate cancer with my dad. It was possibly treatable, but only with modern options since it seemed unoperatable. The next couple of years would more or less revolve around that situation, yet we didn't know it at that time.

Before my previous post from October 2020, I had finished my training into the IT field and I was working for a contracting agency and was contracted at a pretty large organization in a very specific field. My days were filled with C# and tinkering on/maintaining fairly old software products. I wasn't sure I liked it but it paid the bills, it was Covid time and I had no clue what else to do. I did miss my income from the prior year: I was working 40 hours a week for 72% of the pay I got for 36 hours a week beforehand. Without any end-of-year bonus and all that. I didn't hate my job but at times found it frustrating and wondered if taking on this chance was the right thing to do. Gradually I became better at it and from then on, work was more or less just as before: a job you do. Goodbye inspiration, lol.

Things went on. Me and my SO managed to go on a holiday to Italy between Covid outbreaks. We actually had a pretty nice roadtrip back then. Life continued with more lockdowns and mostly working from home. During the summer of 2021 my dad kept having issues despite his treatments, went for more scans and then the hammer hit hard, metastases in his bones were discovered. Terrible news. The only option there was from that moment on was either do nothing or enter a chemo therapy treatment. This was a tough decision since my parents have seen the effects on other loved ones before and that's devastating in itself... but he took his chance and went for treatment.

The rest of us struggled on. With a 'back to the office' policy coming into sight causing me three hour a day commute times combined with being put in a different team with even more old tools to work on, I questioned my career path even more. I got (and took) the chance of working at a small fintech startup that offers lending to emerging markets. It felt like I could do good in the world with what I do. Two major downsides: Their software is written in the start-up popular language Ruby on Rails (with which I had zero experience). And the pay... since they still aren't making any money themselves (i.e. negative net result) the pay was even lower than I got at the contracting agency. But I convinced myself I would be happy there. A couple of people warned me that "after a while it'll just be another job but now for an even smaller paycheck", but being the stubborn man I am, I wanted to give it a try anyway.

I started in september 2022. But after a week there, we got devastating news and our world collapsed. My dad had gotten the news that despite his treatments the cancer had spread to his bone marrow. There was nothing the doctors could do anymore.

Things went crazy after that period. My dad soon could not do anything else than be in bed all day. There were nurses coming and going to take care of him and since he had too little strength to do so himself, me and my brothers spent shifts at our parents home to help. We were basically living there, each of us some days of the week.

I feel very grateful that I could work from home (their home) and that my new company gave me all the freedom I could have gotten to take care of the situation. But the start there was terrible, at least.

I struggled. With the situation with my dad and with learning Ruby. It isn't the hardest language, but in a startup where lots of different people had been creating some kind of Frankenstein piece of software and it being in Ruby it wasn't easy. The team captain was always willing to help of course and the team was super friendly and understanding but it just isn't the way I wish I had started there.

The weeks passed by, things went up and down. The end of 2022 came near and all of us were wondering if my dad would be able to make it or not. He amazed each and every one of us because he stayed with us for so much longer than we would have thought. On January 7th. me and my brothers were alone with my parents, just like we had been back in the days we were all young. We chatted, with dad sleeping in the background. In a way, it was our family being together. My brothers left and maybe he felt all was good or something because about an hour later he passed away.

I felt sadness and was in shock for being a witness to such an irreversible change of state. And besides the grief we also felt grateful that his suffering finally came to an end. Because even though I don't want to describe it too much, the deterioration process with that disease is terrible. My dad was a man of socializing and being outdoors, and there he had been, on a bed, looking outside where he could no longer be and being social for longer than an hour took al his energy. It was so, so sad to have to see. And yet we are all so grateful that we were able to spend so much time in those final months and that we're not one of those families where everyone can't stand every other one but that we simply were there when needed and could be of help.

After the funeral and the first 'things that need to be arranged' (it's insane how many thing need to be arranged in a week before a funeral, and then my parents already had decided on a lot of things beforehand! If I can advise anyone: talk about this, put things on paper! Don't get surprised in that roller-coaster of emotions!) I went back to work, and upon arriving there our team lead told me he was leaving the company (just after another senior dev also had left). So from a team of 4,5 (me being the half) we went to 2,5. That sucked.

Back to the work related stuff and some numbers :-) ... or should it be :-( ...

So, now I'm working at a more or less non-profit company trying to change the world by financing entrepreneurs in emerging markets. For even less than before, since I convinced myself the goal would make me happy. Right! Time passed, the company hired a CTO (they had been looking for one for a long time but it's hard) who manages our priorities a lot better, but I still felt struggling (even though I was reassured I didn't have to worry). Then came news that the company was facing some tough weather (even though it'll probably survive for at least another year and hopefully will last for a very long time). Then I had a talk with the CTO where he was (in a friendly way!) pushing me a bit on my contract prolongation. And instead of that triggering a "hey ho, let's go for this" it triggered a "hey, no prolongation means social security and not having to deal with this struggle for a while". And that caused things to go real quick from there. Even though I love the company I work for, their social mission, all the colleagues and the atmosphere there, I obviously was struggling too hard there. Time for change!

After some talking around (it doesn't take too long for a software developer to talk around in these crazy times) I got an offer at, believe it or not, the company I was working for before I left for the IT trainee-ship. The company I wanted so desperately to leave because of I dreaded my job back then. Yes I know. But one thing that always kept nagging the back of my mind is the fact that the IT manager back then told me 'why go? You could have done this retraining thing here, too!', and he was probably right. So I never really completely forgot them and kept an eye out on vacancies. So now they had an opening for a developer there, working in C# and other languages again, also doing some low code and also being able to work close with end users while testing and building features. I was a bit hesitant before the interviews, but I actually got pretty excited about the job. After my second interview I knew they would make me an offer. I was guessing it would be somewhere around 55K (because of my pretty short experience in the IT world) and was more or less on the positive side if that would be the case. Then came the offer. 70K. Holy shit. That's more than I made before I left (although it being close, but I had over 10 years of experience in my field back then).

That 70K is for a 36 hour work week by the way, where I was now making just over 44K based on a 40 hour work week (where I worked 32 hours only, which of course is a personal choice). But the 36 hour work week is allowed to be done in 4 days, too. So that's basically a 77% raise. Understandably, with me already being on the positive side, that sealed the deal.

My current company was surprised and a lot of people hate to see me go (and to be honest, I hate to leave these people too). But I obviously wasn't happy with what I am doing there and needed to reconsider my career path. It's not certain I will be loving what I am going to do, either. But at least I can make my "FI" date not be pushed back even further than I already did. Because this career switch took a darn big bite out of that. 

Watch with me since I made the stupid mistake to calculate what this "do the IT thing" has cost me...

Bare in mind I would have been receiving (on average) around 3200 net a month up until now if I just had kept my job (during which I probably would have done something to myself I guess because at the time I had arrangements to start working 24 hours a week instead of 32 (still making even more as I would be making now!!). So count with me...

The retraining costed me a bit of money. Not even counting my car purchase back then at around 8K. It wasn't for schooling purposes (that was paid by my future employer) but I did had to pay rent, food, insurance, fuel, parking and all that.

After that, I've added the totals I made for the consultancy job and later my current employer.

That all adds up to 111707 in 48 months, an average net of ~2300 net a month. I know it's luxury talk and not bad at all (even though diminishing averages in my current job), but then. Look at what I would have made if I stayed where I was (which probably would have been possible more or less if I took the retraining program at my previous/next employer!)

Now let's open up this personal finance statement I had back then and take a look at my net worth graph...

It's pretty clear that after 2019 I've dipped by a lot (also, I pANiK-sold all my stocks just before the first Covid flash-crash. It's a once-in-a-lifetime lucky thing I guess which I actually shouldn't have done (because getting back in was difficult, stressful and prooved that shoving it back-in all at once would have created the best opportunity instead of spreading (which I did). Past year is mostly a flat-liner, even though I'm trying to save whatever I can (which is around 20% a month which doesn't add enough...). To be honest, of course this graph isn't terrible given the numbers. But it's not what I had in mind a couple of years ago.

Look at the target line. Look at the difference between now (hovering around the 65K line) and where I wished I would be at the end of this year (85K) and my initial target of 100K around 2025. Now think scroll back at the table above... 

 

So. Basically. If I had done NOTHING. I would have reached my 100K target already. A year ahead of schema. Just as I did with paying of my debt in the first place. And who knows I might have found an ever better paying job in the mean time.

I must confess, I couldn't stay in my previous job back then. Things weren't working, at all. And, I had my eye on IT for a while, but to be honest, that's partly because I was intrinsically motivated and partly because of all the FIRE blogs where nearly everyone seems to have an IT job (and hated it, lol). Sometimes I wonder if I just shouldn't move back into the asset management/mechanical engineering field. But then I think of all these opportunities (work from anywhere, find work globally if you really want) and then I love IT and it's problems. But then again, do I really go after these benefits? I'm also a bit leisury and confused at the moment, already knowing more or less idealizing the money part just as I idealized the "improve the world" part. There's a balance in there somewhere and it might have got nothing to do with both IT and money, but I guess that's something to start pondering on again, in the mean time making a little extra doesn't hurt anyway.

My SO, funny as she is, put it this way:

"Boy, you need a lot of learning money". And even though I never admit it, she's right :-)