35 is midlife, now I just need to figure out if this is a crisis

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Business, Finance, and Careers > 35 is midlife, now I just need to figure out if this is a crisis

pig slut lisa: Mar 5, 2012; irl is good

I am going through some E/N stuff that's extremely BFC-oriented, so I figured I'd start this thread.

Background
In 2014, when I was not quite a year into my first full-time job with a municipal government, I posted a thread in BFC seeking financial guidance. At the time, I was contributing $100 to my 457(b) with every biweekly paycheck. Turns out I'm a natural saver, so 8-9 months into the job I had like $15,000 in my checking account. This seemed sub-optimal to me, so I did two things: (1) asked for help in BFC, and (2) visited a financial advisor for advice. Fortunately, I listened to the BFC crowd instead of the guy who was gearing up to pitch me a whole life insurance policy. Since then, I've been pretty good with money. I self-direct our household investments in low cost index funds, I've played the credit card churning game with great success, and my wife and I have made good housing, transportation, and other spending choices to ensure our household savings rate stays high.

While the money situation has been good, the employment situation has been...challenging. It's this that brings me to post this thread. To briefly summarize, I graduated from a dual JD/MUP (Master of Urban Planning) program in 2013. I immediately took a job as an entry-level urban planner with a municipal government. I enjoyed this job so much at the beginning. Several years into it, however, my interest in the work was flagging. Some factors contributing to this include:

Disillusionment with the substance of the work
Over the years, I've grown frustrated with the types of things planners are called to work on. Of course, cities benefit from thoughtful planning and regulation, and there is no shortage of urban ills that theoretically could be at least somewhat ameliorated by someone sitting in the role of an urban planner. However, I experienced a growing disconnect between what I thought would be useful and positive to do with our departmental resources and what we actually did with those resources. To provide a brief illustration: While I never got to spend a single hour on addressing homelessness in our community, I was at the center of what ended up being the staff lead on a neighbor dispute about whether a shed was illegally too close to a shared property line by several inches, this dispute ultimately taking several months and several thousand dollars worth of staff time to put to bed. I began to feel a little embarrassed for getting a nice taxpayer salary for doing stuff that I didn't think was very worthwhile.
Disillusionment with the nature of the work
Setting aside the fact that I was losing respect for the types of things I was working on, I was also becoming fed up with the "how" of getting the work done. I began to loathe the fact that I spent most of my day sitting in front of a computer. Worse, a new role I took in early 2021 meant that I was our most public-facing staff member, resulting in a situation where literally anyone in the world could assign me work. I mean this literally. Some lender in Toronto needs a dozen zoning verification letters for the portfolio their client is closing on next week? Better drop everything and work on that, except while I'm doing that someone calls in to report an illegal home auto repair being run out of a home down the block, and when am I gonna come out and shut them down? I had a variety of short-term tasks that were easy to complete, and a few long-term tasks that I found engaging and worthwhile, but then there was this whole other category of tasks that arose out of whatever calls and emails we received that day, and those could range from easy to extremely disruptive and consuming. I struggled with this dynamic.
Side gig I like better
About 5 years into my career, I had the opportunity to teach an urban planning class at the local university as an adjunct. In terms of pay/hour, teaching didn't measure up to my city job at all. However, I loved it from the moment I got in the classroom. I was (am) pretty good at it, too. A lot of my students liked the class, and my teaching evaluation scores at the end of that first semester were higher than the university and departmental median. Since then, I've taught several more semesters, both in the urban planning department as well as at the law school. I find teaching extremely fulfilling, certainly much more than walking someone through the city's rules on installing a fence or helping some guy build a self-storage place.
Feeling stretched
As much as I loved the teaching, it was certainly a lot of work. While my main job rarely bled outside 8-5 M-F, I had to fit in both the teaching itself and all the prep and grading around it. I also had a child in 2019, and of course as kids grow up they demand more time and attention. I was also on a couple boards (professional organization, synagogue), leading one. It all just began to feel like a lot. I remember these evenings where my daughter would come home from daycare and it would take me like an hour to come down from feeling stressed out before I could just enjoy being with her, and by then there's not much time left til bedtime. Being overcommitted was making me either miss things as a parent (e.g. I've only taken my daughter to Sunday school once, because when my wife takes her I can use that time for lecture prep) or put me in a bad mindset for parenting (because I was stressed out). Being a dad rules--I hated how my situation was making me a different parent than the one I wanted to be!

At the beginning of 2022, I started discussing the idea of leaving this job with my wife. She was very supportive from the get-go. I'm sure she'll come up plenty more in this thread, but for now it suffices to say that we are on the same page about parenting, money, what makes a good life, etc., so all is good on that front. Around June or July, I told my supervisor that I was going to leave my job. I did not have another full-time job lined up, and that was kinda the point. I had run the numbers (I will share some in the next post) and knew that I could get away with part-time work for a long stretch while regaining some work/life balance and being able to take care of more things around the house. Specifically, I was planning to add another course or two to my teaching load at the university and enjoy something like a 2/2 course load with no committee work or anything like that. We planned an exit for me at the end of October. All was good.

In August, however, an unusual opportunity fell into my lap. One of the few full-time jobs I would have considered at this juncture, a project manager at a planning-related research initiative, came open with a short hiring window. I applied for the job, received an offer within two weeks (very different from government hiring!), and decided to accept. After 9+ years at the same job, I took a new full-time job at the end of August, with one adjunct course on my plate for the fall semester as well.

I lasted three months. Three lousy months. This job really sent me spiraling to a bad place mentally. Things I disliked about it included:

Fully remote job with no team members
I worked full- and part-time remote plenty during the pandemic, and it was OK. There was this months-long stretch where I went into the office in the morning after daycare dropoff, biked home for lunch, and worked at home in the afternoon. That was the business, it ruled. I think one reason it worked well for me is that I had people and I liked those people. For all that I didn't like about the city job by the end, I always loved my coworkers and my department leaders. What a good, fun group. The remote work dynamic with this research project was very different. I was an out-of-state employee, so I never met my director, a professor who had a number of other things on her plate besides this project. There were no other staff members, so I didn't have anyone to help on anything or even bounce ideas off of. There were some student workers, as well as some teams of volunteers in other states, so I was on Zoom, email, and Slack all the time with people I didn't know. The work began to feel very abstract and unreal, given that I was all alone and just sitting in my spare bedroom.
Communication and work style
I did not feel compatible with the professor I was working with. I'm sure this was exacerbated by the fact that our relationship was completely remote, but I think we were also just at odds with certain things. Examples include: (1) Early on, I tried to establish an understanding of what our organizational structure was. I was told, "you are subordinate to nobody," and yet multiple requests to assist or lead the hiring process for other unfilled positions were deflected or unanswered; (2) She is a new faculty member at this university, and her family still lives several hours away by car, so a lot of work talk ended up getting pushed to phone calls or Zoom calls while she was driving through the mountains. These stressed me out because it's really dangerous to do that while driving, and also because you never get someone's full attention while their driving, but most importantly, the calls kept cutting out because she was driving through the mountains aaaaaaa I can't tell you how nuts this drove me.

I left that job at the end of November. I just couldn't take it anymore. This has resolved some immediate mental health issues, which is good, and in many ways I'm essentially back to my Plan A, which was to work part-time, build up the teaching, and otherwise focus on being a good dad and husband. All good, right?

BUT

It's far from being all roses. I am posting this thread on the eve of my 35th birthday because I feel like kind of a loser. I've gone from being a person who was at the same job for nearly a decade to a person who left two jobs in the span of 4 months. I am experiencing some existential-level doubts about whether there's a future for me in the legal and planning fields outside of teaching. I am experiencing some doubts about how long I can sustain the teaching until that goes sour. I am anxious about not earning a full-time income for the first time in a decade. I am worried my plan is less of a well-considered strategy and more of a ramshackle life raft launched from the boat that perhaps wasn't really sinking at all. I will flesh these out more in a future post, but this background post is long enough for an OP. I'll post this and then recap our current financial position in the next post.

# ¿ Dec 21, 2022 06:09

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# ¿ May 1, 2024 04:09

pig slut lisa: Mar 5, 2012; irl is good

Ah, I see that several years of not posting here much led to me forgetting to remove the placeholder "." from my preview thread title. What a dumbass I am! Maybe a mod can retitle this thread to something clever, or I'll suggest something after I finish my next post.

e: maybe "35 is midlife, now I just need to figure out if this is a crisis" but I welcome literally any other suggestion

pig slut lisa fucked around with this message at 07:02 on Dec 21, 2022

# ¿ Dec 21, 2022 06:26

pig slut lisa: Mar 5, 2012; irl is good

Current Financial Situation
Below is a summary of our current financial situation. I will note that some of the numbers, particularly the spending, is a little fuzzy. I am a natural saver married to another natural saver, which means that we've been chucking tens of thousands of dollars per year into our investments for the past several years. This is unequivocally a good thing, and yet one minor downside is that we have not closely tracked our spending. Our approach has kinda been, "if we're saving $50-$60K per year, why bother tracking what we do with the rest of it?"

Current Income
Wife - Grosses $80-$85K with full-time gov't job
Me - Grosses $16,500 from two university courses

Current Spending
I don't have a straightforward number for this. As mentioned above, we haven't closely tracked it due to saving so much anyway. Additionally, my wife and I take a blended approach on finances. We have a joint account for non-credit card bills, but otherwise we have separate bank accounts and credit cards. We very much conceive of everything as "ours" collectively, so in some respects this is a bookkeeping artifact. We have a joint financial spreadsheet that shows all account, investment, and credit card balances. I update this religiously twice a month; my wife gets to it every month once I pester her.

Anyway, now that I'm not working full-time, I find it most useful to think about our spending in terms of "what post-tax income to I need to replace to maintain our current standard of living?" This is a bit of reverse engineering from our tax returns. Basically, our approach has been to invest anything we don't need to spend, so I can look at our net incomes on our tax return (we've done plenty of pre-tax saving), subtract out the year's post-tax investment contributions, and receive a rough approximation of what I spend from my takehome. For simplicity's sake, we'll call this number $36,000 of spending I want to replace. This will be covered by whatever income I can generate plus a couple other sources I discuss below.

Current Investments
Conceptually, I break our investments down into two groups: those that can be accessed without penalty, and those that incur a penalty for early access. I call these the "Can Touch" and the "No Touch" buckets. I classify IRAs in the "No Touch" bucket, although I know about withdrawing Roth contributions and setting up 72(t) distributions, as I'd really prefer to not touch these early.

"Can Touch" - $455,000
Taxable brokerage - $220,000 (NOTE: I'm riding a six figure longterm carryover capital loss due to a weird family finance thing from several years ago, so I can essentially tap the brokerage account tax free)
My 457(b) - $235,000

"No Touch" - $389,000
My Roth IRA - $62,000
My Trad IRAs - $9,000
My 403(b)s - $33,000
My RHS - $13,000
Daughter's 529 - $10,500
Wife's Roth IRA - $68,000
Wife's Trad IRA - $8,500
Wife's TSP - $185,000

Rough Spending Plan
As I mentioned above, I need to make the dollars add up to $36,000 now that I'm no longer drawing a full-time paycheck. The rough plan is as follows:
1) ~$12,000 will come from what I net from teaching. If I'm able to add more courses, this will go up.
2) ~$12,000 will come from my wife reducing her TSP contributions down from maxing to the full match and nothing more.
3) ~$12,000 will come from our "Can Touch" bucket. I think it makes sense to draw from the brokerage account rather than the 457(b) first, because those withdrawals will be tax-free due to our unusual carryover loss situation.

# ¿ Dec 21, 2022 06:47

pig slut lisa: Mar 5, 2012; irl is good

I have some broader themes and questions I'll type up in another post tomorrow, but I gotta get to bed now. In the meantime, I welcome any thoughts or questions from anyone who reads this. I really appreciate what BFC did for me back in 2014, and I hope to learn from you all again with this thread.

# ¿ Dec 21, 2022 07:04

pig slut lisa: Mar 5, 2012; irl is good

KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:

Welcome back!

Let's take e/n first:
OK so first off you gotta address the feeling like a loser thing and decouple that from analysis of your financial situation. I think you've mainly managed to do that in this post but uh make sure that you aren't doing weird poo poo because you are comparing yourself to others or an idealized version of yourself. You probably feel the need to have permission to take a bit of a break from job/career poo poo which: I, some rear end in a top hat on the forums, grant you this permission.

In regards to the recent job, it sounds like it wasn't a good fit and you kinda built it up in your mind and were ultimately disappointed. I know I could not work fully remote and there's no shame in discovering the same. Before you go out in to the wide world to do whatever, you probably have to make peace with that step in your career.

Also, kind of terrifying for me! I am also about 35 and have been at the same joint for 12 years and I definitely realize I have a lot of my identity and self-worth tied up in the job and if that were to go away it would be a struggle for me.

Thanks! I appreciate the permission

I came back to BFC specifically because these are the right assholes on the forums I need to be talking to.

The loser thing is at least partly bound up in the fact that the research initiative I recently left is fairly high profile in my field. I think I would not feel quite this way had I just left my city job as initially planned. Instead, I was in the spotlight for a few months before dipping fairly abruptly.

KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:

Money:
You all sound pretty spending-averse and you have a bunch of money socked away for 35 years old. (Seriously I'm jealous, that poo poo's tight) So within a sort of normal scope of decision making there isn't much you can do to gently caress it up. Here are a couple of random thoughts for the short term.
1) I'm pretty averse to drawing down from money that is saved up (you are missing on so many sweet gainz!), so I would try pretty hard to offset that third $12k tranche through work. That could be a random other kind of job that has nothing to do with your career or with teaching. (I always have a couple of these kicking around in my head that I know I can do that I would probably vaguely enjoy or tolerate for 6-12 months - sometimes it's nice to do something lovely to remind you how relatively not-poo poo other things are)
2) If you do draw down that money, I agree that you should draw from your taxable brokerage.
3) You should set a time frame as to when you will re-evaluate this situation. I suggest not more than a year, maybe earlier. It could also be a milestone based re-evaluation of your choosing, but I think you need to set some point at which you will take stock of the changes you've made and see how you like them.

Agreed on all points here. I appreciate the confirmation on #2. I was 95% sure about that course of action, but it's nice to see affirmation.

Re: trying something completely new, I am of the same mind. One thing I've done is get on the sub list at my former high school. It's small enrollment and selective admissions, which certainly creates its own issues for students, but the floor on the sub experience should be higher than at some other schools. I'm looking forward to February--my neighbor teaches German at the school, but she'll be away for the whole month, so I'm going to cover her classes during that time. It's some folding money, some structure to my weeks, and something completely new for my brain to engage with.

MEIN RAVEN posted:

I really appreciate you posting about your own situation! Even though I know there are lots of people going through the same sort of thing I'm going through, it's nice to hear another person talk about it in some detail. It humanizes it

I'm glad you have a supportive partner and the means to ease up if/when you make that jump.

Agreed on the therapist suggestion. I'm starting with a guy next month, and I am hopeful about making some progress with him. He's roughly your age and experience level, and on our intake call he mentioned some similar feelings. I was glad to hear it from him. I think the common ground will help me out as we talk.

# ¿ Dec 22, 2022 03:50

pig slut lisa: Mar 5, 2012; irl is good

MEIN RAVEN posted:

Perhaps stepping away from the field for even a year would be really helpful in helping you get perspective on what's really important. Take a job at a florist, or take another class and do something else entirely with that time. Could you plan to use some of your savings for even just one year? What would it really mean to have more time with your kid, or to help around the house? If money itself isn't what's really important, how is money making your life actually better?

This part of your post gets to the crux of the matter for me. While I'm carrying some money anxiety, I know our financial situation is very good. Even if we need to draw $20K/year from the Can Touch bucket, it would last at least 20 years before depleting, and by that point the No Touch bucket will have doubled and then some.

The deeper and scarier issue for me is that I feel like my ability to mentally engage in any kind of work at length has significantly degraded. My attention span is horribly short. I find the computer and my phone to be immense sources of distraction. I find myself struggling to read anything online that's much longer than a tweet, and when I'm doing something IRL my phone is always scratching at the back of my brain, asking to be picked up. This trend was somewhat noticeable pre-pandemic and has only accelerated over the past couple years. I used to be a procrastinator, but I'm becoming more of a not-doer these days.

Even posting this thread takes more effort than it used to. I used to post a ton on the forums, and while I drifted away for a few different reasons, a significant one is that I simply find it harder to focus on reading and writing than I used to. It's kinda scary! So posting this thread is one of a few self-directed things I'm trying out to regrow some very basic skills like "write a few paragraphs without getting distracted by some other website."

And of course, this plays into my uncertainty about where exactly I want to go in my trained fields. How much of me not wanting to work as a practicing urban planner arises out of frustration with the work itself, and how much is just the negative feelings of struggling to stay focused at a computer-based job?

I would say I'm about 3/10 worried about the money situation, but the slipping attention span is a 10/10 problem for me. A world where I'm a stay-at-home dad teaching a few university courses and getting poo poo done around the house is a good future. A world where I'm a stay-at-home dad who loses enthusiasm for the teaching and doesn't get anything done around the house because he's unable to tear himself away from mindless scrolling is a nightmare future. I need to reclaim my brain and my focus!

# ¿ Dec 22, 2022 04:10

pig slut lisa: Mar 5, 2012; irl is good

Thanks moana

Can you tell me a little more about this:

moana posted:

- take a week off every so often and completely disconnect from screens to do an attention span reset

Is that like...you're incommunicado through texting and email for a week? I find the idea of a week of no screens very appealing--Johann Hari did that for a few months in his recent book Stolen Focus and reported a substantial improvement in mood and attentiveness. But it's a tough thing to do in such a field like mine that is so computer-oriented. I definitely can't do it during the semester, either. But I'd love to hear more about what you do and see what elements I can incorporate.

+1 to the idea of physical separation from the phone. I've started doing that more myself and it's definitely helpful.

# ¿ Dec 24, 2022 05:02

pig slut lisa: Mar 5, 2012; irl is good

All of these posts really speak to me.

Regarding ADD/ADHD testing and treatment, I actually tried this back in Spring 2021. I did an initial pysch intake with, like, a family medicine person in my hospital's clinic system. She wrote me a scrip for Wellbutrin and also gave me the number for their ADD/ADHD screening. I started the Wellbutrin, and it helped a little. Meanwhile, I tried getting screened for ADD/ADHD and ran into the stupid, complicated teeth of American healthcare. I recall finally getting through to an actual person, only to have a very frustrating conversation. She kept asking me variations on "are you trying to schedule testing or screening?" I'm paraphrasing; I don't remember exactly what she said, but it was clear that in her role there were two different things I could be calling about, and that it was up to me to tell her which one I wanted. I kept telling her, "I don't know the right words. I was given your number by the last doctor I talked to and that's all the info I have. Whatever the right word is for an initial diagnostic, that's what I need." Eventually she figured it out, only to report that they were scheduling 7-8 months out due to staff limitations. I just gave up on it at that point.

Meanwhile, I stopped taking the Wellbutrin shortly after the Spring 2021 semester ended. I ended up feeling pretty good that summer, including (iirc) getting to a bit of a better place work-wise. The reason I stopped the meds is (a) I didn't think they were producing a major change for me, and (b) I wanted to see how I felt without meds while I only had the city job on my plate with no teaching. It was nice to see it work out the way I had hoped it might. Honestly, that's when the gears started turning about planning an exit from the city job.

So I think MEIN RAVEN and Epitope are onto something when they suggest that a fair amount of my issues may well arise out of the pressure of overcommitment. I was in a lower place mentally in Nov. 2022 than I was back in May 2021, so it might take me more time to bounce back, but I think this is going to be at least somewhat helpful. I'm already feeling better about things on Dec. 29 than I was when I started this thread a week and a half ago. It helps that I've finished my grading and that I wrapped up a transitional memo I had promised but never completed for my brief research gig. Getting things done makes me feel better, who knew? And how do I get my brain to internalize that so I get stuff done earlier rather that putting it off?

That said, I do plan to talk about meds/screening with my counselor when we begin our sessions next month. I would prefer for that not to be my first move, and that I can get to a good place by easing up + talking to a professional. But if he recommends I look into diagnosis and treatment for an attention disorder, I'd be willing to go that route.

# ¿ Dec 30, 2022 05:05

pig slut lisa: Mar 5, 2012; irl is good

In the meantime, there's been a development on the employment front.

A week ago, I received an email in my university account from a local real estate guy who I dealt with a number of times in my city job:

Real Estate Guy posted:

PSL,

I hope you're enjoying your new role with [the research initiative].

I know you're involved with the Urban Planning Department at the University, and I figured you might be a good person to ask.

A client of mine is developing a mixture of industrial facilities with a solar farm at each one in about 25 locations across the state.

His main office is downtown.

We've sort of been winging it, but realistically, we need a professional on staff with an urban planning background. That'd be somebody who could talk with the planner people in these towns in their own language, request zoning changes, negotiate screening types, and just generally handle all the city planning stuff that we suck at.

You wouldn't happen to know of anybody with that skillset who might be looking for an opportunity around town, would you?

Thanks,

Real Estate Guy

I wrote back that I had recently left, and that I'd be interested in hearing more about this work myself. I stressed that I'd only be looking for part-time work at most and that I'm not seeking a long-term commitment right now. He connected me with his client, and I think there's something here. The type of work this guy is looking for is in my wheelhouse, and he understands that I'm not jumping headfirst into anything. We had an introductory Zoom call yesterday where he walked me through some of his needs for his existing portfolio of projects. I asked him what his 2-3 priority projects are, and suggested we work together on those to feel each other out. I left this unsaid, but I also wanted to give myself a potential out up front in case I don't like this kind of work or working with him. It so happens that he had a Zoning Board of Appeals hearing on one of his projects this evening, so I attended that to meet him in person and get a feel for his case.

Where we left things tonight is that we're gonna do another Zoom call on Saturday to flesh out the details of working on a few priority projects together. I emphasized that I am only interested in ~15 hours/week, and he was cool with that. Here is a question that I may need to take to a busier thread as well: How should I approach structuring my compensation as an independent consultant? He actually asked me what I wanted compensation-wise tonight, and I said he should make me an offer after talking with his business partner. I said I'd be open to proposals that are either hourly or project-based. I am friendly with some consultants in my field, and it's easy enough to get their rates, but I don't know how comparable they'd be. They all work for firms, so their rates presumably account for overhead that I don't have. They are also government-side consultants, whereas this work is developer-side. Does that make a difference? I don't know.

# ¿ Dec 30, 2022 05:24

pig slut lisa: Mar 5, 2012; irl is good

Update following some great advice from the negotiations thread:

pig slut lisa posted:

Update on my request for assistance in figuring out how to negotiate a consulting rate:

-Hourly rate: $75 w/first 60 hrs covered by $4,500 retainer (I pitched $80/$4,800 and accepted their first counter)
-$200 kicker on each project I work on that receives zoning approval (i.e. building permit or full zoning entitlement)
-Max 20 hrs/week (typical week will be 15 hrs)
-Biweekly pay, quarter-hour billing increment
-Expenses

I'm pretty pleased with this! Also, something nice that happened is one of the principals asked if I'd be up for coming into the office space they're renting downtown in order to communicate better. That's exactly what I want. I felt less productive and less happy working from home by myself, and this will add some structure to my weeks. Excited to see how this goes, thanks everyone

One thing I'm noticing is that I'm in a much more positive headspace about beginning this work than I was when I started the research job. Heading into that job, I was already having some thoughts of "what can I get away with not doing at this job," probably because I started right around the time the semester started and I was already feeling pressed from overburdening myself. In contrast, I know it's a part-time gig as I head into it, so I feel like I will still have space for lecture prep and working out and parenting and relaxing. It also helps that the scope of the work is so much different. The research gig was tasked with building a gigantic national database of our subject matter while managing a bunch of volunteer teams. This consulting gig is just going to be running each individual solar site through its own zoning approval. The steps I need to take toward the end goal for each project are very clear. I like that.

# ¿ Jan 1, 2023 04:30

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# ¿ May 1, 2024 04:09

pig slut lisa: Mar 5, 2012; irl is good

God, even the fact that I'm writing this much and engaging with multiple forum threads is building my confidence. I was really in a broke-brained place a month ago worrying I'd lost my capacity to do basically anything apart from the bare minimum of brief writing, which definitely didn't include working through some life stuff on the forums.

# ¿ Jan 1, 2023 04:32

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Business, Finance, and Careers > 35 is midlife, now I just need to figure out if this is a crisis