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I've got two: buying a house and going back to grad school. For buying a house, I latched onto the idea that I needed a 20% down payment so I wouldn't have to
by analogwzrd 9y ago
I've got two: buying a house and going back to grad school.
For buying a house, I latched onto the idea that I needed a 20% down payment so I wouldn't have to pay for mortgage insurance so I was trying to save like crazy. Meanwhile, the property values were going through the roof and I realized that I'd always be chasing that 20%. I sat down and ran some numbers with a mortgage lender and that made everything a lot clearer. I could have bought a place two or three years earlier and been making money on the property value with essentially the same amount of savings. Probably not true in every area though.
Kind of the same thing with grad school. I needed a break from school after undergrad, so I took a few years. Work experience is great, but I hit a career ceiling in terms of being seen as "qualified" for certain opportunities. I should have just gone back and started taking classes much sooner.
- nickalekhine 9y agoIf you don't mind me asking, what did you end up studying at grad school to break through your career ceiling?
- jrowley 9y agoFor going back to grad school, was this a masters or phd or mba or something else?
- Balgair 9y agoI'm very interested to know the degree as well!
- analogwzrd 9y agoMasters. If I got a phd, it wouldn't be in engineering. I thought about an MBA, but I felt I needed to focus on becoming much more technical.
- analogwzrd 9y agoMy undergrad is in EE and I'm going back to grad school for embedded systems. Even as a EE, I found myself doing lots of software work - writing little C# apps, C++, data processing code in python, matlib scripts, and once in a blue moon writing firmware for microcontrollers With embedded systems, I can still use my EE background to get my hands on hardware and I'm learning enough software skills to deliver much more professional software whenever I need to. As a EE, I knew how to code but never got a lot of formal software training so learning git, focusing on my modular code, etc. has been really nice.
- milesvp 9y agoFor me, buying a house wasn't so much about house values going up, as rents started going up faster than mortgages in my area. That's why I finally bought. That said, I might have bought sooner had I realized the mind shift that happens with ownership. Want to do something about storage space? Drop a grand at ikea and put in semi permanent shelving. I would never think about dropping that kind if money on a rental.