BlueNote's Journal

Where are you and where are you going?
Family father
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Re: BlueNote's Journal

Post by Family father »

Clever forum bot #76 reporting :D

Congratulations!!!!

rube
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Re: BlueNote's Journal

Post by rube »

Congrats BN!

Jason

Re: BlueNote's Journal

Post by Jason »

Congrats on baby Bluenote.

Every time I see a baby, I'm reminded of my idea for an adult onesie's brand.

EdithKeeler
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Re: BlueNote's Journal

Post by EdithKeeler »

Congratulations!! He’s adorable!

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jennypenny
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Re: BlueNote's Journal

Post by jennypenny »

I missed this post! Congratulations!

I'm so glad everything went well for you. He's adorable.

BlueNote
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Re: BlueNote's Journal

Post by BlueNote »

@Wolf
@Family Father
@rube
@Jason
@EdithKeeler
@jennypenny

Thank you!

My son is doing well, he's healthy and has graduated to smiling and making cute baby noises.

Family spending and savings rate

My DW is on maternity leave right now and will not be going back to work until August 2019. Canada recently started offering 18 months of mat leave. The only catch is, essentially, that you have to spread 12 months of mat leave employment insurance over 18 months. Otherwise the deal is the same, your employer has to place you in a job that is in the same grade, field and dollars you were getting before. My wife is an excellent sales person and will probably have no problems going back to her customers who love her and sent us tons of great baby gifts while she has been off work!

Being a primary care giver for a child is an important and difficult job. Sometimes when I go to work I feel guilty at how easy it is compared to dealing with the bad days of being at home with a child. In order to inject more fairness into the finances my DW and I decided to implement something we jokingly call "family communism". All of our income and expenses are combined and whatever is left over is split between the two of us. This usually manifests itself with me making a large monetary transfer to my wife each month.

Currently we're both at about a 45% savings rate which is pretty good considering the additional expenses of the baby and the massive pay cut my wife took (~75%). Note this figure is an accrual basis number in that it includes amounts that haven't been paid in cash yet but likely have been incurred. We track this by estimating expenses like insurance, auto repairs, car payment and vacation in advance of actually paying for them. I currently have a large reserve of around $7K set aside for this.

A couple of friends of ours have been going through a bit of financial trouble. They mortgaged a house during a huge housing bubble which probably eats up a ton of their salaries. One of them quit their 6 figure government job to try something else that doesn't pay nearly as much. The other is a prolific spender. They have 2 kids one they had only 10 months ago and Mom had to go back to work early at month 9 because their furnace broke and I guess they couldn't afford to fix it without extra money coming in. I can't imagine living at that level. I figure in my situation my wife and I could go for about 6 or 7 years (including a significant long term stock market crash) without any income whatsoever which is an incredibly unlikely scenario.


Luckily family helped out with some of the big purchases, they bought us a crib, dresser, and some gift certificates to toys'r'us (which we spent like we received Venezuelan bolivars!)

I redid my projections and it looks like I'll be able to become FI (using 4% rule) around the age of 47. My kid will be around 9 years old then. I am hoping to pad my results by getting more raises and promotions and maybe get to the 3.5% SWR level at age 47 but we'll see.

BlueNote
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Re: BlueNote's Journal

Post by BlueNote »

Update

DW and I are still saving around 45-50% of income. She's not driving for work anymore, she's nursing our son and still brings in a bit of income.

Obvious, Unwanted and Unprovoked marriage/fathering advice section :lol:

I have learned first hand that babies are very tiring for mothers, and somewhat tiring for fathers (at least this one).This is turn makes marriages more challenging. I am lucky to have a strong marriage but I could see how a child could, totally inadvertently, cause a troubled marriage to fail. My tip is no matter what DW says about you just realize that this is a sleep deprived person, more sleep deprived than you have likely been before. So if you can somehow get DW some more sleep that will go very , very far with the marriage.

Investing

I continue to invest most of my savings in low cost, broad, diversified index funds following an overall conventional balanced strategy.

I have been researching starting a small business. My personality sort of precludes me from many entrepreneurial endeavours. Anything involving dealing with a lot of people is not my strong suit because I am very introverted so customer relations is like a hell for me. So over the years I have whittled down the types of businesses I might want to run. I think it would be good to run the business with my wife, who is extremely good at dealing with a bunch of people and is a very good sales person (makes more than I do by earning commissions).

I have looked at franchises, starting my own thing from scratch and a few other avenues. Franchises don't really interest me I prefer being in the background as more of an investor, analyst, advisor. I don't really have the time and capital to buy a franchise and manage the manager who runs it. I also don't want to get into a partnership or pool my money into a group of investors who will control it.

I am looking at digital assets.I like the idea of buying a digital asset for a number off reasons. The multiples appear quite good compared to traditional businesses, but this could be due to much higher risks. I am good at due diligence and digital asset purchases definitely require excellent due diligence in order to minimize risks. Also digital assets require a skill set that I feel I can develop as opposed to having to force myself to deal with a bunch of humans face to face all the time like a store, restaurant etc might require. I might be interested in a situation where I invest the money and a partner provides sweat equity and a small financial stake. I'd do maybe 5-10% of the day-to-day work and they'd do the rest in exchange for splitting the profits for something like that. Lot's of ideas right now but I am not ready to execute any of them yet, still in the research stages. This might take awhile because my son takes up a lot of my time and I prioritize him over this.

Work

My employer is going through contortions at the top of the house. An activist investor fired the CEO and installed their own board. New CEO is weighing all options (private equity buyout, asset stripping, confining as standalone public company etc.) I might end up getting packaged out in the next year or so if they decide to go private.

BlueNote
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Re: BlueNote's Journal

Post by BlueNote »

Baby

I am very thankful that my son is thriving:

Image

He's about 6 months old now which, as evidenced in the above picture, is the prime cute baby picture phase of life. He's eating some solid foods and can stand for a little while if he's in the mood and leaning on something solid.

Everything else

I decided not to start a small business. They usually fail and they suck up a lot of time and effort. That's the short version of why. The long version is too long for me to get into here but I think I was just bored with work.

Work is alright. I had automated a portion of my job and for awhile I was really bored. I was arriving late, leaving early, taking extended lunch breaks and I still turned in great results. I told my boss I was bored and needed more work. Not long after a dump truck full of work shat on my head I am now reasonably busy again. The problem here is that the more work they give me the more I automate and take out inefficiencies. This results in the risk that if I leave the company it would be difficult to replicate my process, even if they spread it out amongst multiple heads.


We're still saving at a decent clip, like 30-40%, considering that my wife brings home a tiny fraction of what she used to earn before the baby. Her parental leave pay was cut to a smaller amount and will stay at that level until she goes back to work around Aug 2019.

BlueNote
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Re: BlueNote's Journal

Post by BlueNote »

Financial Update

Here's a catch up on my situation. I'm at a savings rate of about 34% of my take home pay. My wife makes 25% of my take home pay in employment insurance for her parental leave. While she is on parental leave we are combining all revenues and costs and splitting the "profits" through a system I jokingly call "family communism". I consider our performance good considering we are also covering the costs of an infant and my wife isn't a rabid FIRE/ERE acolyte. Rent has stayed the same, grocery costs have increased, transportation costs have generally decreased (she was in sales and drove all over the place).

I told my boss how much I paid in rent and she laughed and said she hasn't paid so little for housing since she was in college.

Health

I went in for a colonoscopy, they found and removed a polyp (benign). It was a totally painless process, in fact the propofol sedative was lovely and I had a great dream and woke up feeling great. The only part that was slightly displeasing was the preparation, it involves a laxative that will clean you out (like 99.5% cleaned out) but it wasn't nearly as bad as I forecast. In fact it had a sort of salty lime flavour. According to the doctor you should start getting checked for colon cancer around age 45. Colon cancer is a leading cause of death and if caught early you have a 90% chance of getting rid of it. Some of you are 45 or older, you know who you are, so go ask about it. End of public service ....


Career

If you go back in my journal a few years you'll find some entries where I took a new job and than my company threw a huge raise/promotion at me to stay. That situation fell into my lap due to a combination of luck and economics. My current employer is a metaphorical buggy whip manufacturer in the technology industry. They've become the target of a "hostile" takeover and the new management is cutting heads, projects and budgets in an attempt to milk an old almost dead cow and make a good ROI. A back of the envelope calculation shows me that about half of my former managers have been let go. I want to get let go too because in Canada severance packages are quite nice if you've been with the company for awhile (3-4 weeks salary per year of service) and I am confident I could land a new job easily in this frothy job market.

I'm looking for a new company to hitch my wagon to anyways. I am not holding out hope for a severance package and I don't want to stagnate anymore. The company is hiring people off the street rather than promoting because they aren't allowed to backfill the promoted persons old position. In fact you can't really even change departments anymore because the old department isn't allowed to hire someone to replace you when you leave. This creates a situation of perverse behaviour driven by perverse incentives, a classic munger mental model. In fact Charlie Munger even uses my company as an example in his book. If you can get someone off the street by convincing management there isn't existing skills in the business then you can get more heads. I'm tired so hopefully that was clear. If you are loyal to the company you are systemically screwed but if you are a job hopping careerist you can get a good salary package and a promotion compared to what you did at the old company.

Gratuitously cute baby picture
Image

BlueNote
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Re: BlueNote's Journal

Post by BlueNote »

Being the Father of an infant and FIRE (one year in)


In my experience the FIRE part is actually much easier than the Dad part . I am often exhausted due to lack of sleep and the drain of working 8 hour days and coming home to do a litany of tasks in order to support my family (think cooking, cleaning, errands, etc.) on top of the usual direct child care which also requires energy expenditures. At this age, and for likely for a long while to come, my son has capabilities that he wants to use in a dangerous and irresponsible manner. For example he will literally dive head first off of furniture into the floor if we let him. He will put anything he possible can into his mouth. He will attempt to tear a dogs tail off , when that dog weighs 3 times more than him, with no fear whatsoever. This is all normal behaviour and my son luckily doesn't exhibit any abnormal behaviour, in fact he's quite nice and calm according to more experienced parents. I consider myself an old Dad doing this at 39 years old. I am also somewhat out of shape, my own fault but still a factor. Parenting is tremendously meaningful but can also be quite intense (physically and emotionally) which is more exhausting when compared to being DINKS like we were before. I'm glad I had the chance to sleep-in earlier in my life, I think I've done that 2 or three times in last year vs about 100 times the year prior to having my son :lol:

This isn't to say I don't like being a father, quite the opposite I love it. There's nothing quite like watching someone go from being an utterly dependent newborn and within a year chasing you around your home, playing with you and progressing by leaps and bounds daily. I don't regret having him but I do regret not being more prepared, after all you can always be more prepared.

In terms of FIRE I'll start at the top line and work my way down to the bottom line. Our household income has dropped to about half of what it was before baby, yet I still save a lot more than the average household by living well within my means. Money hasn't been an issue, I sock away enough for my son to easily pay his tuition and other school related costs for 4 years (possibly more) in 19 years time. In addition he eats highly nutritious and tasty home made meals that I cook and my wife disburses. BTW the Kuhn Rikon pressure cooker that Jacob recommends is extremely useful in this regard. I safely make a months at a time of baby's sweet potato, squash, chicken etc. Each food takes like an hour or less to prepare, cook and clean up using that highly useful and convenient device and the clean up and maintenance is marginal. I just pureee or mash up the cooked food and freeze into cubes and store the cubes in labelled zip lock bags in the freezer. Our lifestyle (housing, food, transportation, entertainment) hasn't changed materially.


Otherwise my personal life has had a few of the bumps in the road of life. My step father was hit by a car while walking home from work just before Xmas. He sustained a traumatic brain injury and spent about month or so in the hospital and is still recovering at home. For those of you who walk or bike the main thing I learned was to get eye contract from the drivers around you at intersections whenever possible before putting yourself into their potential travel path. My step father was hit by someone who admitted that he wasn't looking and just drove right into as he was legally crossing on a green light. My father in law also spent xmas in the hospital with a heart issue.

Work still sort of sucks but with all the personal stuff going on I haven't really focused on it until recently. The company I work for is in a declining industry and as a result they've been cutting back for years. This year they decreased their pension contribution and increased my health and dental insurance premiums. In addition they did extensive headcount reductions and have reduced their severance package to the point where I think they're being sued by almost everyone they let go for proper severance. The remaining people are often bitter and unomotivated. I am an accountant and I am having troubles simply gathering audit evidence ( think invoices, contracts, proof of payment etc.) documents for our auditors. People just won't get the documents for me because they say they're too busy or they feel it's somehow below them (often the managers people were let go leaving them with work they weren't required to do before and they feel entitled to never do that type of work) .Meanwhile I've got a group of auditors charging us by the hour sitting around waiting for stuff to audit. To get around this I have been getting access to these documents directly and by learning the systems so that I can dig it up myself, it's been gruelling and difficult working in this somewhat toxic environment with so much office politics and BS.


Anyways that's about it form my stream of consciousness, I don't have any more to give to ERE right now and I am sorry for the increased duration in the frequency of posts.

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Mister Imperceptible
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Re: BlueNote's Journal

Post by Mister Imperceptible »

Congrats on your BlueNote spawn and sorry about your father and in law.
BlueNote wrote:
Mon Jul 02, 2018 9:07 pm
I could probably write a decent short/medium story on this stuff based on personal experience.
Mister Imperceptible wrote:
Tue Jul 03, 2018 8:29 pm
Please play at being Kafka. We want the story.
We’re still waiting. :twisted:

BlueNote
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Re: BlueNote's Journal

Post by BlueNote »

@Mister Imperceptible

Chapter 1): Denial: It's the year 2009 and the company makes plans to bring back the good old days of 2006. We get to meet the cast of characters like the CEO airdropped from the US who has no clue and the CFO lady who basically keep the show on the road. In addition we see how I actually just missed one of those "good jobs, at a good company" deals where you start out of college work 25-30 years and retire on the company pension, or at least that was the expectation of virtually everyone who preceded my hiring group (I was part of a pilot project to hire contractors instead of full time employees). I honestly would have taken a job doing deliveries, laundry or virtually anything other than going on welfare at the time. I had worked in Japan for awhile and scrimped and saved a bit of money while I was there. Teaching english is like the academically educated persons version of going to work in North Dakota on a shale fracking outpost, you make good money and have an adventure, the work sort of sucks but you get used to it. I returned to Canada at the end of 2008 DOH! No jobs and great recession in full swing I went ahead and rented that pricey downtown Toronto apartment that was a good central location for whatever job I ended up getting. I burned through all of the money and was really considering my options, my wife was basically my next level of support. At one point we were considering just giving up on Canada and moving back to Asia to teach english again. I was applying everywhere, one place almost hired me but promptly went bankrupt. Luckily the place that did hire me was a fortune 500 American technology company with a very recognizable brand. blah blah blah

Chapter 2): Clerk work and getting my accounting designation (working all week and doing school work at nights and weekends). Wife extracts guarantee of no further formal education that takes me away from family life. I discover MMM , ERE and FIRE.

Chapter 3) Move from downtown sales office to head office. Sort of a plateau here, meet a few psychopathic executives whose insanity and extreme industriousness at all costs (no family, no non-work friends, asshole to anyone who disagrees etc.) convinces me that I am on the wrong path and don't want to become an executive as it seems almost compulsory to sacrifice your life to the company.

Further chapters would cover the wave upon wave of terminations, restructurings, massive misspending, the politics of budgeting etc.

Do you really want to read a little screed like that? If so I will continue on.

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jennypenny
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Re: BlueNote's Journal

Post by jennypenny »

I hope your step father is doing better, BlueNote. Rough stuff.

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Mister Imperceptible
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Re: BlueNote's Journal

Post by Mister Imperceptible »

I am extremely interested in the Madness of Civilization, as I am of it and in it. As long as it is of value to you to scribble here!!! :twisted:

Jason

Re: BlueNote's Journal

Post by Jason »

That kid has the hands of a surgeon or a concert pianist.

BlueNote
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Re: BlueNote's Journal

Post by BlueNote »

I'll write up something one of these days describing my first 11 or so years of full time employment.

BlueNote
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Re: BlueNote's Journal

Post by BlueNote »

New Job

I'm unemployed for a week until I start my new job. I worked at the old company for almost ten years (my entire professional career thus far ) and from their perspective was a good little salaryman who might actually stay there until they terminated or retired me. It was hard to say goodbye I developed a lot of professional relationships there, in some cases it was almost like family.

The new job is a promotion for me and is at a company that has a lot of growth. The company I worked for before was in a declining sub-industry of the technology industry. As a result of the decline they're doing a lot of cost cutting terminations and outsourcing. The head of our department left for greener pastures and speculated to me that the company would likely be terminating and/or outsourcing about half of our department next year. There was an ongoing struggle to get a promotion but our department head just wasn't allowed to promote or hire new heads. If someone quit they just spread everyone thinner. I was preparing to launch a new job campaign and a head hunter called out of the blue and almost demanded that I go for an interview and the rest is history. It's probably going to help me a bit with a higher salary and possible bonus.

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Lemur
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Re: BlueNote's Journal

Post by Lemur »

BlueNote wrote:
Wed May 01, 2019 6:40 am
New Job

I'm unemployed for a week until I start my new job. I worked at the old company for almost ten years (my entire professional career thus far ) and from their perspective was a good little salaryman who might actually stay there until they terminated or retired me. It was hard to say goodbye I developed a lot of professional relationships there, in some cases it was almost like family.

The new job is a promotion for me and is at a company that has a lot of growth. The company I worked for before was in a declining sub-industry of the technology industry. As a result of the decline they're doing a lot of cost cutting terminations and outsourcing. The head of our department left for greener pastures and speculated to me that the company would likely be terminating and/or outsourcing about half of our department next year. There was an ongoing struggle to get a promotion but our department head just wasn't allowed to promote or hire new heads. If someone quit they just spread everyone thinner. I was preparing to launch a new job campaign and a head hunter called out of the blue and almost demanded that I go for an interview and the rest is history. It's probably going to help me a bit with a higher salary and possible bonus.
Enjoy every second of it! :D
Also congratulations on the new job. I also like the mentality of "possible bonus." Helps me manage expectations ...I never expect one (though a bonus is very likely) so I don't get mentally crushed haha.

rube
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Re: BlueNote's Journal

Post by rube »

Congrats BlueNote!

prognastat
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Re: BlueNote's Journal

Post by prognastat »

Congrats on the new job and good luck in adjusting to your new role.

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