The Great Resignation or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love No Job

My other and I have been weighing these questions a lot lately. His job pays reasonably well but below industry standard, but he has lots of pto, can wfh indefinitely, and very rarely has to put in more than his 40 hours. He could probably make close to 50% more somewhere else, but at what cost? We already live way within our means even though I am making way less money this year because baby. But he has been carrying this team, financially speaking, ever since he got his grown up job. I keep thinking about getting my masters so I can get a proper career-y job and contribute more, but there’s also a big cost/benefit analysis to be done there.

 

I've always had my eye on 50 (T-minus 5.5 years) but leaving the corporate world and opening my own shop threw a wrench in that plan. Not so much that it delayed it, more so that now we have some options. Sell the biz and add that to the retirement account? Or keep the biz but step back, be an absentee owner and just have it make enough to supplement retirement income, cover medical insurance and continue to fund retirement accounts? Or keep working and instead of retiring comfortable, we'd retire dumb comfortable?

I hate working so a large portion of me wants to retire at 50 and be comfortable. But, a portion of me looks at houses at South Lake Tahoe and wants a car that is hard to get out of and makes all the pretty noises so that portion wants to continue working.

 

I think decisions like these are exactly why more people are staying home now. My wife stays home to take care of our two kids. She probably could get some kind of clerical job with a bunch of mouthbreathers, but then anything we'd make would go to childcare, gas to pick them up, etc. Who wants the stress of dealing with coworkers and managers just so we could get another monthly bill? Besides, with her not working, my salary is enough to pay for our expenses and we can use our Biden Bux (child tax credit) to pay for things like therapists and the attorney because our worthless school district refuses to support our daughter. We can afford to pay for these things, even without that tax credit, but it would definitely be more stressful if we didn't have it.

Which brings me to what I think is the real issue. I think plenty of people want to work. The problem is that nobody wants to work for $7.25 an hour, or whatever shit pay that comes with a shit working environment. If companies could pay people less than minimum wage, they would. I mean, restaurants pay servers $2.25 an hour or whatever it is, just so they can make customers pay their servers directly.

Personally, I think it's horseshit that people have more money than they will ever spend, while the people they employ have to work multiple jobs and/or receive government assistance. Capitalism is broken.

 

I can’t really complain, I make $20/hour and work in clinic 2 days/week while family watches baby for free, and work a little from home when the baby lets me. I feel slightly useful and also get out of the house, even if it does mean dealing with annoying people. We are super lucky, even if I forget and act like a broke kid half the time.

My current bad capitalist plan is to buy a house in one of the few remaining affordable-ish neighborhoods in town, rent it out for 3 years while we continue to live in our little condo and save, then have some money to fluff it up before we move in and make it just how we’d like. Then we could rent the condo out until we have old family members we need to take care of and install them here. Lots of moving parts, but I’m convinced it’s a solid plan since the housing market here will likely keep going up faster than our purchasing power. Now I just have to convince my husband.

 

Be wary of going into a rental situation with a plan to evict the tenant in a shortish timeframe. It can become a giant pain.

 

Wouldn’t a yearly lease be standard? It’s not like you have to keep offering to lease a place indefinitely. Honestly we would probably try to find a post doc/med student/fellow to rent it so they would be on a finite time frame as well, but who knows if that’s how it would shake out.

 

In most jurisdictions yearly leases automatically convert to month-to-month at the end of the lease. You can of course give thirty days notice as the end of the lease approaches, but if they refuse to leave you'll find yourself in an eviction scenario. A grad student might work, but a lot of people tend to assume an apartment will be available for as long as they keep paying the rent. Even if it doesn't become a full-blown nightmare, it can easily become an emotional hassle dealing with a tenant who is pissed at having settled into a place and then getting tossed.

 

Also, students are the cheapest renters...so they might turnover often, but you could be leaving money on the table.

 

A few comments on this thread so far.

First, I know many people are worrying about robots taking over jobs, but realistically, the scenario is decades away, maybe even half a century. I'll point to our infrastructure in the US as a prime example. Guess how many utility companies are still using technology from the 80's to keep everything running? Take a stab at the costs to upgrade their entire network? This isn't some mom and pop operation either, this is a multi-trillion dollar sector in the US essentially running on DOS green screens and duct tape.
My company, which isn't a billion dollar company, but probably 4-600 million, still uses a warehouse management system from the 70's. We have JUST started to incorporate SQL reporting into our daily routines and it's been a complete shit show because our systems aren't designed to work with SQL and the company doesn't want to pay someone to do a complete overhaul to bring everything into this century. It would cost the company 20-30 million to do a complete company wide upgrade and I can let you guess how much of a priority something like that is.
However cool it sounds for companies to start making things more automated, all of it costs money. What's cheaper when you have shareholders breathing down your necks for profits, hiring a bunch of $15 temp workers, or upfronting 20 million to automate your shipping department?

As to the FI/RE people, most of the people you see online are nowhere close and will never get to a position to actually retire early and live off investments, passive income, etc. Want to know the secret to getting to a position to retire early? Be flexible, own a lot of property, rent it out for a profit, and sell it when there are huge upswings in the market. That's really it. You can obviously work for 40 years and save into your 401k and only drink gas station coffee vs Starbucks, but the cheat code to building wealth in the US for the past 40 years is making money off the backs of other people and other people's money. You know how rich people are able keep acquiring so much wealth? They borrow against their wealth, with leverage and dead low interest. Want to buy 20 houses and rent them out? Buy one, borrow against it, buy another, borrow against both, and keep doing that until you are flush with other people's money doing all of the work for you. Interest rates are so low right now, it's practically raining free money from everywhere and it seems like the only people taking advantage of it are already wealthy people because everyone else is either too scared or too committed to their lifestyle or "something" to actually go out and make the kind of money which enables them freedom to enjoy life.