There's a twist to your question which might be useful to add: "Let's assume that your job is then guaranteed until retirement; does that change your answer?"
I think this is relevant because for many people, their sense that their job is somewhat precarious means they need to be saving money -- more money than they would if they knew their job was "permanent". [as if, haha: the days of permanent jobs seem to have disappeared]
Thhreshold would have been better, but I missed my chance.
I used to be in Category 1, but am now in Category 3. Nominally for 3 years, but there's nothing actually preventing me from stepping down earlier, other than it meaning someone else would have to do the job and it would make me feel like I wasted all the suffering.
Hrm, maybe it's more category 2, I feel like if I were in this job forever I could make it ok after a couple years of work. I don't think it has to be as awful as it is.
I'm definitely in category 1. I love my current job and the pay is sufficient that I would be happy doing it indefinitely.
Seems hard to fully contextualize without a lot of detail on the respondent's background, pay and work history, living standards, etc.
I'm on the verge of getting a new job at the same employer, a significant bump from what was already a pretty generous salary, so I'm reflecting on the nonsensicality of it all.
It's funny that I still perceive myself as spending most of my salary, even though a good chunk of that is savings and other discretionary stuff. I'm spending a lot more than I'd like on housing (what with HOA dues increases, which I myself crafted and advocated for, plus some escrow BS) so there's ongoing sticker shock even though it's 24% of my gross salary and 36% of my net. And I sock aside 5% of my take-home for charitable contributions without much trouble.
I'm also shifting, to my chagrin, to mostly driving instead of public transit, because standing 5-10 minutes a day on a busy street in a bad part of town waiting for an SUV pressed into duty as a "work shuttle" is just so infra dig.
I go back and forth between thinking I'll do this till retirement and planning to quit in five years.
I'm definitely in category 1. My main existential problem is my skills might become superfluous if we go full fascist, but at least I'm getting management experience.
4: What changed? Are you doing something different now, or is the institution tanking?
Seems hard to fully contextualize without a lot of detail on the respondent's background, pay and work history, living standards, etc.
This was what I was hand-waving about with the bracketed amounts in the categories. One person feels UMC at $60K, another person feels UMC at $250K, but each could cough out a number and point to it and say, "That's UMC."
I'm in charge of our graduate program, but shortly before I started our graduate staffperson quit and we had no staff for 4 months and now someone new who doesn't know anything. It's a nightmare.
(Also the liberal arts in general, and our department in particular, don't seem to have much of a future here. But I could handle the sense of impending doom if I were just teaching and researching and not in this role.)
I'm 1. Since I started my (academic) career late, at 37, I've always mentally figured I'd be working "forever" and it's only recently, as people my age start retiring here and there that I have considered that there might be a next, retirement stage of life. I've been fine with the "gonna work forever" thought.
The OP question hits me as odd, because the point of money is freedom,* and if you get scrooge mcduck money, then you're free to leave really soon, so getting scrooge mcduck money to stay indefinitely does not make sense.
*I guess this is just one point of view.
I'm just marking time until a wizard shows up to send me on a quest with some dwarves.
I seem to be on track for retirement per the online calculators, though it might require me to keep being similarly paid most of my career. One of my determinations, though, is that I not suddenly switch at some point from full-time to no-time - that seems associated with unfulfilling retirements. At some time in the next ten years I want to move to working four days a week. And maybe draw down more slowly over time.
Now that RWM has a book deal, we're constantly bantering about how she's going to retire me when Shonda Rhimes options it or whatever.
I would do my current job for half of what I'm currently paid in exchange for an unbreakable social safety net.
What's the minimum amount of money would you need to get paid to be happy at your job for a long, long time?"
I feel like there should be a category for how much would you be paid to be unhappy. My job isn't shitty by objective measures and many people at my workplace seem basically fine, with maybe relatively normal levels of turnover for a profession with a fair amount of movement (for advancement, family reasons, etc). But I loathe my job and I think I'll finally act on that loathing and get out in the next year or so. I didn't leave for the first few years because of pandemic uncertainty.
I don't think I could be paid enough to stick with it unless I could radically shift up my retirement date. But I am paid enough that it's comfortable, and it's been good for actually saving for retirement, helping my parents through health issues during a pandemic, and being able to pay for more education that I'm hoping to build on to do something else.
At the same time, while I can take a pay cut the insanity of rent in California means I need to think very carefully about how much I can afford to cut. Until last year I was still living largely within my previous job's salary, playing lots of catch up after having no retirement savings. I've been calculating the cost of quitting and need some similar level of employment for the next year or so at least. I'd certainly be happy to do a job I like for similar pay. I'm sorry this one hasn't worked out.
We've got a pretty nice tuition exchange program at Heebie U, and so I feel a little like I have handcuffs on potentially until Rascal is done with undergraduate, or about 15 years.
That said, my job is probably the best I can do, in terms of enjoying what's being asked of me, and having enough free time to maintain my myriad blogs, and not being watched very closely. My only complaint is being a bit bored of it, and that's probably just adulthood.
(So if threshold doesn't have a double h, why isn't it pronounced adul-th-ood, huh? HUH?)
I'm going to pronounce it that way from now on.
I don't think there's any evidence "threshold" ever contained the word "hold" as a component! It looks like the current -sh- used to be a -sk- that was worn down. Old High German driskufli, modern Swedish tröskel, Danish tærskel.
Origin uncertain; probably < the Germanic base of thresh v. (in its original sense 'to tread, step') + (with vowel variation) a Germanic suffix forming nouns of action or instrument (see needle n. and heavel n.).
The reference to "needle" being that the OED sees that word as going back to a verb meaning "to sew", resembling the modern German nähen, plus an instrumental suffix.
Ah, like how "mankind" breaks into "mank" and "ind".
Just to make it a bit more complicated, there's the work itself vs. all the stuff surrounding the work, like how long the hours are, how annoying the co-workers are, how long the commute is... I just had a meeting where the gist of it was we might have to go into the meeting where the announcement was we might have to start going into the office in person if people don't get better about "core hours" while working from home.
Personally I've been fully WFH since covid and actually miss some things about the office, but I did a double-take during the meeting when my boss mentioned a location 2 hours away from home instead of the one I'm used to. That would significantly impact how much they'd have to pay me to keep me.
"ho-meow-owner" is only incidentally a combination of "home" and "owner".
Group 0- I like my job most of the time but can't believe how much they're paying me so don't believe it can last forever (I guess that's a version of 2.last)
The OP question hits me as odd, because the point of money is freedom,* and if you get scrooge mcduck money, then you're free to leave really soon, so getting scrooge mcduck money to stay indefinitely does not make sense.
I know a number of people in category 3, who hate their jobs but will probably stay there until they die because the money is so good. They mostly work in advertising. The money does buy them a modicum of freedom, in that they generally work freelance, so they can stop working for months at a time to go on extravagant vacations on a regular basis. They also tend to love money a lot, and so their calculation of what makes sense is different from yours (or mine).
One of my former bosses who was himself making a lot of money in VC said his wife tried to retire but people offered to pay her $500k for a consulting gig and she felt like it would be silly to not take that much money. I don't know that she hated the work, just that it made it harder to stay retired.
I was imagining people who can keep piling up more things and things to purchase - second homes, boats, ski vacations in Europe, various private school tuitions, etc.
Or I guess that was when I was picturing people in professions that are generally just driven by greed.
You can buy hunting cabins in state forests for the price of a nice, new car. But you have to poop in an outhouse.
If I somehow got a job paying, say, a million a year, I would start to have visions of developing 10-unit apartment buildings dance in my head (right now I moderate myself to visions of ADUs), and those new ambitions might keep me working there as long as possible.
If you do the apartment building thing well you won't need the job anymore, though.
I was imagining people who can keep piling up more things and things to purchase - second homes, boats, ski vacations in Europe, various private school tuitions, etc.
What's Morgan and Baruch and Rockefeller and Mellon going to do with all of that grub. They can't eat it. They can't wear the clothes. They can't live in the houses. Give 'em a yacht! Give 'em a palace! Send them to Reno and get them a new wife when they want it, if that's what they want.
But when they've got everything on the God's loving earth that they can eat and they can wear and they can live in, and all that their children can live in and wear and eat, and all their children's children can use, then we got to call Mr. Morgan and Mr. Mellon and Mr. Rockefeller back and say, "Come back here. Put that stuff back on this table here that you took away from here -- that you don't need. Leave something else for the American people to consume."
You also can't build a cob house in a state forest.
35: It's a pretty risky business. And riskier to build 10 than 150.
For me being a certified nurse assistant in a nursing home sounds like absolute hell, but I'd do it for Scrooge McDuck money for 6 months to a year. Maybe. 50 million dollars for 6 months as a CNA is a deal Inwoukd take. I'd then retire or work in some interesting but unremunerated area.
I'm really lazy. I don't know that there's a job on earth I'd do if I didn't need the money. On the other hand, I'm also really security driven, so doing my current job until my pension kicks in (at age 62!) isn't a hardship. I do sort of think with intrigue about maybe doing something else for the last decade of my working life, from 62 to 70 or so.
I really enjoy my job and I would be willing to take at least a 30% pay cut (maybe more!) if I could do pretty much the exact same job but in the city of my choosing.
This is a tough one for me -- I spent many years in category 1, but not in a sustainable way (I was working way too hard, but had a lot of job satisfaction). These days I'm mostly in category 2; I make decent money (though I'm sure there are plenty of developers 20 years younger than me making more), I like my co-workers, I don't mind doing the job, but I have a lot less job satisfaction and it's a little hard to know what would fix it; there's no way to go back to what my job was 15 years ago (and, again, that wasn't really sustainable anyway).
I get paid quite well by UK standards, although if I was in the US, I'd be earning a lot more for the same job. Still, it's significantly above median wage. But, materially, I'm not wealthy. I don't mean in the "I can't pay for ski trips and private schooling" sense, I mean, I still rent the place I live in, and my pension arrangements aren't great, and there is zero chance I could help xelA to pay for university.
I like my job and it pays well--although I'm massively overworked--but I'd jump in a heartbeat for a substantial pay rise. 30% more would be life-changing.
The secret to me having disposable income is my housing cost.
Along with threshold, I always think that homunculus and epistolary need extra letters (homunoculus and epistolatory).
I met someone who moved here to the Bay from Vancouver doing the same kind of professional job. I made a crack about how much more she must be paying in rent. She said actually, she pays about the same in Oakland as in Vancouver, out of a much higher salary.
"Homunculus" really doesn't come up very often.
The homunoculus is the homunculus in our eyes watching things for us on a big screen like Captain Kirk.
Though if the guy actually shows up to redo our bathroom, my housing costs will go up.
I feel like the fixed housing costs of owning your own home is probably one of the biggest blind spots that boomers (roughly) have about their own financial state vs that of millennials (roughly).
The millennials in one bedroom apartments are paying more than I am for the house, if they have a newer apartment.
But everything in this house is 40 years old and needs redone.
I don't work very much and really don't get paid very much. My life would be easier and presumably more satisfying if I improved both parts. But kids eat any time and money you have, so I'd have to get to some fraction of Scrooge for it to matter beyond a minor improvement and that's never going to happen.
I despise my job so much. It's killing me, but if I leave, will I be able to cover the many healthcare costs it has levied upon me? The industry is bad enough, what with the whole robbing widows and orphans thing, but my current department just makes me stupider and sicker every day. It's just ridiculous, there's no pleasure in my life, and there never will be. So I might as well just stay in the rut until I die, which hopefully will be sooner rather than later.
The absolute worst part is that I can't smoke up anymore cause of the heart disease, so now I remember all of my dreams. I had not fully appreciated how good it was to never remember them.
I am either going to retire or die in my current job. I'd be happy to make more money, but don't really want to work any more. I like my job well enough -- there are tasks I don't much like and some I do. I like it a lot more when my side is likely to win than the other way around -- it's fun to write a winning brief, well, what I've talked myself into thinking is a winning brief. Writing a likely loser because the client needs to be told 'no' by the judge and not by me: not my favorite, but still better than depositions.
Oh hey 51 reminds me that I haven't updated on my parents' situation. We threw out 40 cubic yards of garbage so far and filled two 20' shipping containers with random art they've bought or papers they refuse to throw away, then we had four contractors come in to assess fixing it. First estimate submitted today was about $450k of repairs. I don't know if they can afford that, maybe remortgaging the place since they had paid it off. All the contractors were shocked people were living in those conditions.
Oh yeah one of the best parts, we hired day laborers to help carry garbage out and at one point one of them started poking into the collapsing ceiling Sheetrock and then freaked out because there was a big snake skin in there and he said he was pretty sure live snakes were still in the ceiling.
I should add, the shipping containers and dumpsters so far is maybe half of what was in the house, probably still an equivalent amount to finish emptying.
I'm kinda amazed that it's coming to pass in the very year that you declared it an emergency. It seems like it could have taken five years to get to this stage of progress.
||
ENTREES.|>
Mule Head, stuffed a la mode.
Mule Ears, fricasseed a la got'ch.
Mule Side, stewed, new style, hair on.
Mule Beef, jerked, a la Mexicana.
Mule Spare Ribs, plain.
Mule Salad.
Mule Tongue, cold, a la Bray.
Mule Liver, hashed.
Mule Brains, a la omelette.
Mule Hoof, soused.
Mule Kidneys, stuffed with peas.
Mule Tripe, fried in pea-meal batter.
53: "needs redone"
Moby is now officially a yinzer.
I'm solidly, happily category 1. I make a lot more here then I would at a similar job back in the states and that's before we get to the 30% hardship bonus tacked on to my base salary for being overseas (hardly a hardship as I love it here). My housing is paid for and I get a lot of other perks (travel allowance for going back home on leave, local transport allowance, home maintenance allowance, etc.,) which adds up to a considerable amount. Then I don't have to pay taxes on the first $112,000 of it (next year it's $120,000, thanks Biden!). And I love my job which is easy for me, I work from home one day a week, which day consists of going to the gym for about 2 hours, checking my email about 3-4 times that day and responding if I need to, 9 times out of 10 there's nothing to respond to and of those when I do 9 times out of 10 an email reply saying "I'll look into it and get back to you on Sunday" suffices. I roll in close to 10 if I don't have an early meeting and out 4ish most days. I go all out for the institute I support, our students, and other parts of my job and know that they're well pleased with me upstairs and I would be willing to do more if more was there to be done but it's all easy peasy. As long as the foundation renews my university's contract and my university renews my contract neither of which are in serious doubt I could do this forever. They'll have to take me out in a box.
Sounds so rough Natilo. I hope things take a turn for the better for you.
61- most of the credit for that is to my wife, she is very good at managing projects and pushing people even though it's uncomfortable. She was insistent we were going to show up over the holidays and start cleaning stuff in some form so my parents acquiesced.
My parents are still in denial. Their response to the first estimate was to get into all the details about things they wanted changed in the estimate and ignore the "you're getting sick from living here" message, or any sort of planning about finding alternate living conditions, or thinking about whether they could afford anything in that range.
60- We made various Samuel L Jackson jokes, as one does when unexpectedly encountering snakes.
I oscillate between 1 and 2. 1 Maybe 2/3 of the time. The work remains constant, so the rest is in my head.
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Good ruling by the ICJ today. International law still means something.
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Echoing 65.
SP: The house across the street from me was occupied by the original owners (64 years) though they hadn't been there since COVID. I don't know if they have died since but they had moved to Maine to be closer to their daughter. I don't think the situation was quite as bad as yours, but when they decided to sell they found that their septic had failed. That's at least a 50k fix. If your septic has failed, you either need to sell it to somebody with an escrow to replace the septic or you sell it to somebody who doesn't need conventional financing. So they sold it to a local guy who seems to specialize in fixing up run down properties. It's not quite big enough for a tear down, but they completely gutted it, renovated the kitchen, removed a bunch of trees and redid the septic. Maybe you could do something like that?
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In North Carolina, Southern hog producers, who did not grow cotton themselves, acquired cotton from their Southern neighbors and traded it to Northern merchants for salt and sugar. They used the salt to preserve pork, which was then sold to the Confederate commissary. With the money from these sales, the North Carolinians bought more cotton, creating a very lucrative trade that helped Confederate armies survive near-famine conditions during the last year of the war.|>
It's on a decent sized lot for the area so it's worth something sold as is, probably a teardown. The best opportunity passed (literally) a few years ago when a billionaire neighbor wanted to have more property so he offered waaaaay over value (OP category 3) but my parents said no, and the guy has since died. My parents don't ever want to leave this house so as part of the renovation we asked about converting a ground level room to a bedroom and full bath to plan ahead for when stairs are hard and now they're mad that we consider them decrepit.
Last night I had a dream that a couple of very persistent tech disruptors were trying to get me to come out of retirement to take a job paying 75% more than the job I retired from. In the dream, I wasn't going to accept the offer.
most of the credit for that is to my wife, she is very good at managing projects and pushing people even though it's uncomfortable. She was insistent we were going to show up over the holidays and start cleaning stuff in some form so my parents acquiesced.
Good for her -- that's impressive.
72: I had a dream towards the end of some vacation time a couple weeks ago where I quit during a meeting and walked out.
So, how much would you need to be paid so that you would agree to clean out SP's parent's house?
Officially the day laborer rate was $20/hour but my wife insisted on paying them more when my dad wasn't looking because he would be scandalized at not getting the best deal possible. We paid them $250 a day per person because of the (sometimes literal) shit they had to deal with. There was a bin filled with rainwater that had a dead squirrel and a dead bat floating in it. I knew Spanish for squirrel but bat was new to me.
I'm so impressed, SP. Your wife is a gem.
It seems weird they both died in the same barrel by accident.
I knew Spanish for squirrel but bat was new to me.
This is a true learning experience.
I made a brilliant job switch 10 years ago -- more money, more fun. Our startup was acquired by a Big Conglomerate that has made my job miserable -- but is still paying me well. In my poorly compensated, unstable profession, I find myself in the odd position of having excellent job security, great pay and five days of long, shitty hours a week.
Bottom line: I'm going to hold out as long as I possibly can. I came very close to quitting six months ago, but if I can hold out for another 6 years, I'll be set to retire in style.
Our generation is often squeezed between paying for our childrens' upbringing and our parents dead bats, forcing delays in retirement.
I loved my job for many years (so category 1), largely because of the personality and vision of the founder and former director. His departure after a kneecapping from above some years ago and the manifested personality of his former right hand guy has changed the place, I'm now firmly category 2. Can afford to stop working, probably will stop pretty soon even if every month of hanging on means deeper savings later. Stopping seems like a waste, I'm reasonably good at what I do and with decent management more years of good work would pay off. I've looked elsewhere also.
SP, you and your wife are filial ideals, consider making the adventure into a soap opera like TV show, maybe Korean?
81. Sounds familiar. I value not becoming embittered and see that as a real risk for myself in staying without changes. Sympathies, may the best path be clear and not too unpleasant for you.
I would love to be less than 5 years from retirement but it's more like 20 and that's way too long to wait things out. Supposedly there will be some organization-changing retirements but recent history suggests that septuagenarians can stay in their jobs until they're octogenarians staying in their jobs.
There is a hoarder reality show that this totally would have qualified for and we watched it as training to deal with the situation but there's no way my parents would allow the embarrassment of that.
No, I agree that unscripted TV is a blight and corrosive for people on both sides of the camera. I was thinking of using what you describe here plus the memories of the participants after it's done to have a young unknown version of Phoebe Waller-Bridge or Claire Denis to script, cast, and direct a dramatization. A better version of HBO's The Curse.
There is a hoarder reality show that this totally would have qualified for and we watched it as training
This is great. Also, seconding 77.
Trump has to get rid of $85m of his hoardings.
It'll be hilarious if he ends up losing all his money through an endless series of defamation lawsuits because he is incapable of shutting up or hiring competent lawyers.
90: Agreed. It'll be interesting to see if he pays and what effect bankruptcy proceedings will have on the Republican primary.
Does SP or anyone else have a link to the comment where he originally described his parents' issues? I vaguely remember it, but not enough details to satisfy my curiosity. (I feel guilty asking about what's probably a tough subject, sorry, so I might as well be frank about why I'm asking!)
Hmm, I don't remember but the original email from my uncle starting the whole thing was early October. Maybe a check in thread around then?
Oh good, that will give you most of it. There's one earlier thread about how it started with my mom's brother emailing and saying my brother and I had to deal with it before it killed my parents.
Hey, speaking of animal names in Spanish: we had to replace our 15-year old dryer recently, and the guys who hauled it away and installed the new one were super efficient and polite, and if they had any criticisms of the narrowness and steepness of our basement steps (which the guys 15 years ago would not stop whining about) they confined themselves to expressing them in Spanish. At one point when they had just got the new dryer down the stairs, I was sure I heard one of them say "Camarones". Is there some home appliance-related word that sounds like that, or was he just looking forward to a big shrimp cocktail for lunch that day?
Camiones is trucks, something about another delivery truck maybe?
I've always been impressed by people who can move heavy things. Most of them never actually look strong in the way a weight lifter does.
96: yeah, that might be it.
98: they certainly weren't body builders or anything, but they had to be at least 15 years younger than me, if not 25. I hope they are taking care of their back health -- they did have the usual over-the-shoulder webbing harness that everyone who does that kind of work has these days, of course
Shoulder dolly! We have one and it's been a game changer.
Why do you think they call it a Dolly?
I'm very fond of the fact that, after Aliens came out, Caterpillar actually started to get enquiries from people who wanted to buy a power loader.