It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Subscribe to our Patreon, and get image uploads with no ads on the site!
Base theme by DesignModo & ported to Powered by Vanilla by Chris Ireland, modified by the "theFB" team.
Comments
I hit crisis point 5 years ago when I found myself picking up the pieces for somebody else's screw up. I've stayed with the same company / same role and the crisis has passed, however, you know that in this industry the next one will be along soon enough.
I've thought about packing it in and doing something else but I've decided that the best course of action is to stick it out here for a few more years, continue to save as much as I can (the money is good and I paid off my mortgage before I was 40) and retire before 60 (I'll be 56 in June). If the chance of redundancy comes up then I'll grab it, meanwhile I just try to be as relaxed as possible, focus on the positives and tick off the days one by one.
What I need to avoid is that I reach my savings goal / target retirement date and then get persuaded, or persuade myself, to stay on a bit longer. It would be very tempting to think that each extra month would equal a new guitar. There has to come a point where you buy less and play more.
I'm still there as it's a fantastic place to work, its rewarding and the people are lovely but I've noticed as time has gone on it's got more and more stressful. I think I'm one of those people that gets over invested in a job and therefore I find things that wind me up. I wish I could just come in, do the job then go home and forget about it but that's not how my mind works.
What I'm saying is that for someone like me, I could go and work at a butterfly sanctuary alongside a half naked supermodel and still find things to get stressed over - the change of job made a big difference because it was something new and it took me a while to get fully invested in it but once I was 'in' it became almost as stressful as my old job on about 20pct of the salary !
Feedback
My feedback thread is here.
This thread has struck something of a chord for me. I suspect, being somewhere between 40-45, I am in a similar position to at least one poster above. The prime focus of my job I thoroughly enjoy, but there are several aspects that drag that enjoyment down to 'why bother?' levels. Alongside my normal rota, every 6 weeks I do 3x13hr night shifts in a varied intensity clinical setting with sometimes profoundly ill folks and a 3x13hr long weekend day shifts. Doesn't sound like much, but I'm a grumpy bugger in the lead up to nights, and it takes more than a couple of days to get back to normal. The work I do on nights fills me with dread every time. The weekends are OK, and I really don't mind them, though I am increasingly feeling guilty for leaving my wife to manage the boys when I'm not there.
I could drop the nights, and I am giving increasing consideration to doing so. I'm not sure of the exact financial loss should I do so, but probably in the region of £400/month. Which is considerable. So I need to weigh the pro's/cons. My wife and I have chatted about this a fair bit, and it's probably manageable, but there would need to be adjustments.
In an ideal world, I would up my luthiery game from a hobby to a very small business supplementing the 'proper' job, but I'm not convinced ideal worlds exist.
Anyway, wandering ramblings over.
Adam
I'm 55.
I've got two more payments of £36 to make and then my mortgage is paid.
I've got 13 years left to make one more payment of Nat Ins. to cover my basic pension.
My Dad, who I hope lives forever, is nevertheless 92 and has a reasonably valuable property which will be split between me and my sister. My share will clear my credit card debts, which I'm currently paying off @ £100/month (interest free, so no rush), and the rest will make for a useful retirement fund.
I've always been a "do just enough" rather than someone who works every hour available, and what work I get is generally enough to keep me ticking along quite nicely, especially as I no longer have a partner nagging me to do something with the garden, or the bathroom suite etc.
So all in all . . . things could be worse.
A lot of this depends if you have kids and how many. And if you do at what age they become self sufficient. If I’d stayed in my first house and not had kids, I’d probably be mortgage payed off now and have the option of doing what I liked.
It’s a bit harder to do this if it means telling your family they can’t go on any more holidays and the kids have to move schools to where the houses are cheap. Or even worse, when they go in the cupboards for food and can’t find anything edible because you’ve started shopping at Aldi....
Hahaha.
If it's true that 'You are what you eat'... why shop at Aldi?
Kids these days are spoiled, back when I was a kid you ate what you were given or you didn't eat.
It's my destiny to be a weird curmudgeonly old recluse who'll be found mummified under a huge collapsed pile of dusty old Guitarist magazines. And a neighbour will say "come to think of it, I haven't seen him around the last five or six years".
And then they'll sell my flat on Homes Under the Hammer as Dion Dublin's successor says "you'll need to rip everything out, give it a complete refurbishment, new kitchen, new bathroom and maybe knock a wall down to create an open plan living area".
That being the case, I think I might as well carry on working for now and wait until I'm actually old and useless before bowing to the inevitable.
Feedback
He’s now living in France with his wife, doing the Good Life thing. They've got very little money but they’re both as happy as Larry.