I know many of you have read my little story here, but I’ve been thinking a lot about big decisions lately, so I wanted to share some of those thoughts with you. I am actually really privileged in that I love my job. In fact, I have loved pretty much every job I’ve ever had. I think I just enjoy working, and I enjoy working with as diverse a crowd of people as I can possibly find.
But as I briefly mentioned in my About page, I was made redundant once, which was actually the beginning of an altogether different journey – one that lead me towards thoughts of investing, passive income, and ultimately financial independence. However, it turned out that losing my job was the best thing that happened to me in 2005, and bizarrely, I somehow was not afraid. I am not a fearful person in general, but I had more reason to be afraid now than ever. I had recently bought a car with a low interest loan. It wasn’t for much, but a loan with no income to pay it back nonetheless. I also had a credit card with a small balance on it, which was now not going to get paid back, due to the lack of income.
Why didn’t I panic? Why wasn’t I fearing the bailiffs? Well, I’m not sure whether it was just because I’m quite calm in crazy situations, or whether I just had an underlying belief that everything would work out okay in the end. In fact, the latter is probably why I wasn’t wetting my pants, wondering what crappy job I could take next to make sure I was okay. So, what job did I take? Well, none actually. I spent three months on a friend’s couch, and then I enrolled at the local college! I told the bank I couldn’t afford to pay the loan back right now, due to recently becoming unemployed. They basically just passed it off a debt company who occasionally rang me to see if I could pay anything back yet.
The ‘yet’ turned out to be 10 months down the line, when I managed to land a really well paid but part-time job. It was so well paid, that I worked 20 hours per week and got paid the same as my younger brother who was working 40 hours! So I enrolled in college “full-time” (I got out of certain classes, due to already having some qualifications) and worked part-time. This allowed me to learn AND earn, which is not always easy to do. I studied all the things that I’d actually quit whilst at school, and additionally gained a vocational qualification, and entrance to university all at the same time.
Recently, I’ve been thinking about some big decisions, brought about my thinking back to when I was happiest. I loved being a student, and would love to start studying again. But there are other questions that fill my mind, because I also love working. Shall I get a permanent job, 3-4 days per week, now that our little one is a toddler? Shall we move house to a cheaper area, and take advantage of the vast profit we’d make on the current house? Then we could use the profits to go back into education, without having to work so much at the same time. Shall forget all of the above, stay where we are, and build an extension? Shall we go even more radical, sell up pretty much everything we own, and live overseas for a while, which is one of our goals? We could also study overseas at the same time.
When thinking about all these questions, and more, it reminded me of when I was made redundant, and what I did about it. I didn’t waste time worrying, that was for one. Secondly, I invested in myself by getting the education that I had long put off. Since then, I’ve noticed that as a couple, we’ve sometimes slipped into some bad habits, that I hope we will quickly, and finally conquer:
- We often have a reactive mindset
- We don’t think about our overall life goals
- We fail to plan
- We fail to plan strategically and SMARTly
1. Reacting to whatever crisis or urgent matter comes along next is not cool. This is both exhausting, and extremely unproductive. You waste precious mental energy by worrying about what to do. What we should actually do, is focus on our core values and make decisions based on those. This is why, when I lost my job, it turned out amazing, because I focussed on education, instead of fearing debt.
2. Not thinking about our life goals is really bad. It’s akin to being reactive, you just sort of float through life without a plan. How are you supposed to get anywhere, if you don’t know the route? It’s really important to focus on your goals, because you learn a lot along the way and you have fun and gain a sense of achievement when you reach them.
3. Failing to plan comes in many forms. Planning is such a useful skill, it is absolutely crucial you master it. It doesn’t mean you whole life is planned out, but just imagine you don’t plan to have a day off and do something fun on Saturday, you just know that work is going to creep up on you and give you some huge deadline that forces you to bring home paperwork on Friday night. We also need to plan for emergencies and so on, hence saving up an emergency fund.
4. Planning sometimes needs to be strategic. I have designed my own strategies for wealth, that I hope will help us, as a family, to achieve a more financially independent life in the future. One of the ways in which you can make your goals more actionable and achievable is to use the SMART methodology.
Have you ever lost a job? What happened to you? Was losing my job the best thing that happened to me, or am I overstating it? Let me know your thoughts. Leave a comment below.
photo credit: blplanet/freedigitalphotos.net
Great perspective on things! I may have to forward this to my friend who has just been told about his redundancy!
Luckily(!?) I have never been made redundant, although now I am starting to think maybe I am one of the unlucky ones. Hah!
I know, ha! Especially if you get a decent severance package
M,
great story. You might have been made redundant but what truly matters is your resilience. You got hit, but you came back swinging. Investing in yourself (especially in education) is probably the best thing one can possibly do. Work and study as the same time has quite a lot to offer besides the books, also.
I am so happy that all has worked out nicely for you guys.
Thanks for sharing M.
See you around.
Grow Independent recently posted…The End
Thanks so much for your kind words. I agree, investing in your own education pays dividends in its own way!
M,
Thank you for sharing your story – very interesting! I think you made a really good call going back to school and combining it with the part-time job. Part of me wants FI to do something like that.
And since I’m only working my first job, I can’t say I’ve been layed off before. Being a civil servant I also won’t have to worry about that since the only way to lose my job would be to comit a crime while on the job or relinquish my status as a civil servant myself. That gives me a lot of peace of mind, actually.
Cheers,
NMW
No More Waffles recently posted…The Case for Health Care Stocks
Thanks for your kind words NMW. It’s great that you’ve got peace of mind in your job, but more importantly, that you’re making plans towards FI. I think there is another scenario in which you could lose your job, and that is with potential economic and political problems in Belgium. The social welfare is pretty expensive and if you get more right-wing governments in the future, that could theoretically mean a cull of civil servant staff. This actually happened in the UK under Margaret Thatcher’s regime. However, under that same regime, we had enormous economic growth, so someone like you would have benefitted from immense increases on the stockmarket.
Thanks for stopping by, as always,
Cheers!
Lost my job in 2009. Was terrified, no opportunities, debt etc. Have spent the past years working on my own web design business, earning WAY MORE than before, traveling, getting out of debt. Best thing for me, too
Ramona recently posted…Top Reasons Why I Don’t Have a Credit Card
That’s great you managed to turn the situation around into something that worked out better for you!
Cheers
Thanks for sharing your story M, a very interesting read. It is very much about what you did when things knocked you down and you just bounced back!
After I graduated, I wasn’t having any luck with getting a permanent job so went down the temporary route. I’d been temping for a year, jobs only lasting from a couple of weeks up to a month. I was still going for interviews and was finally offered a permanent position at a local IT business. When I told the company I was temping for that I was leaving, they immediately offered a counter offer, 6 months and then a permanent role. I accepted and turned the other job down.
I thought that as I’d been given a more secure role, things would change for me but no, I was still the temp, I didn’t get the training that was promised and to my horror, at the end of the 6 months, the permanent position did not materialise. I was devastated and I think that was the first (and last) time I did the ultimate sin of crying in the office!
Took a day off to compose myself and then was back contacting my temping agents and was soon on another job, which lasted 6 months and got me my confidence back. From there, I immediately got a temping job with a US company, although I wasn’t really sure what the job was as my agent had ‘lied’ about my experience! However, I got stuck in and two months later, got offered a permanent position, along with a coveted defined benefit pension.
19 years later, I’m still with the same company, so yeah, getting let go from that company back then was the best thing that happened to me, despite my feeling of devastation then!
And a funny thing? 5 years ago, our company bought out a smaller business and their staff moved into our offices. I recognised a few of them, as the newly acquired company was only that firm that let me go (they’d changed company name)!
And what happened a few months later? They pretty much all got laid off (all those that I once worked with did) as their business got absorbed into ours.
I didn’t gloat.
Much.
weenie recently posted…A Journey Travelled Already
Weenie, that’s quite an incredible story. Have you posted about it on Quietly Saving? If not, I’d love to read the longer ‘Weenie philosophises on job loss’ version.
Cheers
No, that’s the first time I’ve shared this story properly and I’d probably not going into much more detail – don’t want to dredge up sad old memories!
Glad you enjoyed reading it, I may copy and paste it to post on my own blog at some point.
weenie recently posted…A Journey Travelled Already
Really glad you succeeded in the end though, thanks again for sharing… and I do hope you post it on your own blog, because it’s actually encouraging. I was just saying to my colleague this morning, that sometimes when things don’t go our way, it turns out that there’s something better out there waiting for us in the near future, it’s just difficult to see it when we are hurting from the pain of our immediate job loss/illness/grief/whatever bad thing just happened.
Very neat reading your personal story. Sometimes an unexpected change will allow us to do new things and bring better things to us.
Tawcan recently posted…How to start dividend investing today
Absolutely. But we have to have the right attitude to be ready when something unexpected comes along. Thankfully, I am a bit weird in that I’m calmer in stressful situations, and more stressed in calmer situations. I guess I am just contrary, haha.
I tried to move back home from 2010-2013, but I couldn’t find a job. I ended up staying. I wasn’t going to move without having a job lined up, even at the time I had 5-10 years of expense saved. I wasn’t aggressive in generate passive income. I think when I discover the online community of personal finance and the power of passive income, I’m more confidence now, I’m not as scared of losing my job, even though I haven’t reached FI yet! I’m confident that I can could still make it. Having the goal of FI is very powerful, it liberates me. I think I like my job a bit more the closer I reach FI.
Vivianne recently posted…Taking advantage of freebies from US banks
I love the fact that you love your job the closer you are to FI. I wonder if this is because you are just happier, because you are less concerned about whether you lost your job or not?
Cheers
I haven’t lost a job. But I worked for free in the past. Looking back, it was a good decision because it taught me what I needed to do to dollarize my worth. Now I know that if I ever do need to find a job again, I can show how much value I can add.
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That’s great that you had a positive experience out of the situation. I’ve volunteered in the past, and am currently an intern, so I am almost volunteering, HA! It’s really important to know your strengths when job-hunting.
Cheers