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Money isn't everything, but it sucks being poor. The older I get, I'm finding money is more important. Between the costs of college savings, retirement saving

by madengr 10y ago

Money isn't everything, but it sucks being poor. The older I get, I'm finding money is more important. Between the costs of college savings, retirement savings, medical savings, you'd better be paying your high performance employees well. They may like their work (like me), but money still talks. Regarding the medical savings it's a race to the bottom for employer provided benefits. I no longer have dental insurance at a Fortune 50 company. Medical insurance has increased 3x and now it's essentially a catastrophic plan with $10k max OOP. Far cry from 10 years ago. I put $600/month into HSA for a family of 4. Been doing this for several years and still can't save up the $10k. The damn OOP is now higher than the max HSA contribution. Whenever I do get a raise, it just goes into another expense for some other benefit that has been cut. $17k/yr 401k max * 2 people = $34k $12k/yr edu savings * 2 kids = $24k $7.2k/yr HSA contribution (that's a fucking car payment). $26k/yr mortgage It all adds up.

BatFastard 10y ago
I can appreciate what you are saying, esp with health care. However as I grow older I find money matters less to me (and not because I have a lot of it), I would just much rather ENJOY my craft. Crazy deadlines, horrible tech debt, bad management, are all things I have been thru and do not wish to repeat. "Life's too short to be in a hurry" - batFastard
- a3n 10y ago
  I'm sort of experiencing that now, and not in a good way. I'm out of work ATM, and so when I work on something technical, I work on it because I want to and when I want to. I have found surprising pleasure in having the luxury of stopping progress at an interesting point, and exploring what's around what I'm working on, because I have the time and I'm not required to produce a certain thing by a certain date. For example, yesterday I followed my nose on control characters, the history of which are absolutely not important for or relevant to what I'm working on. Even though I'm old enough to know, I didn't know that the null character was used as a spinning no-op to give electro-mechanical teletypes time to return to the home side. Right there in 'man ascii', the very first character has a history, that goes back to the 1870s (Baudot), or even the 1600s if you like Bacon. You'll have to follow your own nose to get past this link to Bacon. It's not that far. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_character https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_character That isn't directly craft-building, but it does contribute to an appreciation for my craft. Disclosure: I am not an HPE.
- dvtv75 10y ago
  My guess is that you've crossed the threshold where you have enough money to get by. For me, money matters significantly, remains important, and will do so for the foreseeable future. I have bills to pay, food that I need to eat, transport to buy so that I can get to work, but my job doesn't pay enough for all of the above. If I could be paid for my value to the company, I would be in your position. (I train all the staff, a decade's experience working with the poorly designed systems and badly installed hardware. I help the senior staff do their work when everything goes to hell because the IT guys wouldn't do their jobs properly.) Instead, I'm expected to do all this for free - so, I've just started disappearing when it hits the fan. I would much rather enjoy what I do, but since it doesn't pay enough for me to survive, I have little choice in the matter.

by madengr 10y ago

BatFastard 10y ago

I can appreciate what you are saying, esp with health care. However as I grow older I find money matters less to me (and not because I have a lot of it), I would just much rather ENJOY my craft. Crazy deadlines, horrible tech debt, bad management, are all things I have been thru and do not wish to repeat. "Life's too short to be in a hurry" - batFastard

a3n 10y ago
I'm sort of experiencing that now, and not in a good way. I'm out of work ATM, and so when I work on something technical, I work on it because I want to and when I want to. I have found surprising pleasure in having the luxury of stopping progress at an interesting point, and exploring what's around what I'm working on, because I have the time and I'm not required to produce a certain thing by a certain date. For example, yesterday I followed my nose on control characters, the history of which are absolutely not important for or relevant to what I'm working on. Even though I'm old enough to know, I didn't know that the null character was used as a spinning no-op to give electro-mechanical teletypes time to return to the home side. Right there in 'man ascii', the very first character has a history, that goes back to the 1870s (Baudot), or even the 1600s if you like Bacon. You'll have to follow your own nose to get past this link to Bacon. It's not that far. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_character https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_character That isn't directly craft-building, but it does contribute to an appreciation for my craft. Disclosure: I am not an HPE.
dvtv75 10y ago
My guess is that you've crossed the threshold where you have enough money to get by. For me, money matters significantly, remains important, and will do so for the foreseeable future. I have bills to pay, food that I need to eat, transport to buy so that I can get to work, but my job doesn't pay enough for all of the above. If I could be paid for my value to the company, I would be in your position. (I train all the staff, a decade's experience working with the poorly designed systems and badly installed hardware. I help the senior staff do their work when everything goes to hell because the IT guys wouldn't do their jobs properly.) Instead, I'm expected to do all this for free - so, I've just started disappearing when it hits the fan. I would much rather enjoy what I do, but since it doesn't pay enough for me to survive, I have little choice in the matter.