Earn some money

I saved up enough money so that I don’t need to work for six months. Now I’m working on a web project that I’ve been wanting to do for ages now, and when I go start my Ph.D. this fall, I won’t be impoverished from the get-go. My daytime hours are now devoted to my own projects!

I’m marking this goal Worth It, but I have doubts. I spent about a year of my life working at a job that I didn’t really care about. I took that job for money, not for love. My plan the entire time was to save up and get out. This is not a good way to live. It’s not a good way to enjoy a job.

I realize that the vast majority of humanity works most their best hours at jobs they hate, strictly for the money, but I really don’t want to settle for that unless I really have to. I think most people cave in too easily to a spurious “practicality”, and don’t explore options that are fun and fulfilling as well as practical. These other options require bold moves and taking chances, though.

So, would I have done better if I had dove straight into my own projects even back a year ago when I was down to $200 in the bank? I guess I’ll never know.

I’m in a good spot right now, so I’m going to enjoy it.

For about one more week, I’m going all-out at work. I’ve got a couple things planned Saturday (an improv class and planning my 10 weeks). Other than that, it’s working daytime, evenings, and Sunday, to finish everything up before my last day.

I find myself enjoying this level of focus. For months, now, it seems that I’ve been getting interrupted by one thing or another so that nothing really goes very far. I prefer total immersion as a way to do just about anything. The deadline of the job ending has provided the focus to get me to say no to just about everything else and immerse myself in the work. I wish I’d done this earlier, simply out of my desire to focus, and not waited for “a good reason” to immerse.

I’ve given up taking Caltrain to work. I’m driving every day, even though it’s 40 miles one way, because driving gives me the freedom to stay as late as I like. Also, while Caltrain is nice in that it gives me some for reading or making inroads on personal projects, doing those things before work means that my brain gets seeded with something other than work at the start of the day. Driving time is “wasted time”, but at least it’s not distraction time.

I took a really close look at my finances. Despite making way more money last year than ever before in my life, I also spent way more. I paid off a lot of debt, so my net worth is much improved, but my savings are still shockingly low.

Observation: Never before have I worried about money as much as now, when I’m making more money than ever before. This is because I set the bar pretty high: I wanted to go to grad school this Fall with a hefty nest egg: at least $40K.

I look at my spreadsheet and think, “OK, better keep at this job. It’s hard to find anything that pays this well.” When I get to work, though, I feel frazzled, partly because the work is choppy jumping between extremely tedious programming tasks, and partly because my heart is truly elsewhere. I have ideas for web sites, I have ideas for interesting books, I have ideas for research, and I have studying to do to get ready for grad school. Switching my brain in the morning to focus on work stuff is painful.

I am torn between just quitting the job and taking my chances on highly speculative web work vs. holding out until I reach a savings goal. I think doing intellectual work just for the money is extremely unpleasant and also quite risky: you get money, but you spend time on stuff that you don’t care about. Will that money really pay off in well-spent time later, or will I look back and feel that I accomplished nothing of value? Time spent doing meaningless stuff can never be recovered. There is stuff I want to do before I die, and the kind of work I’m doing at the job is not it. By sticking with this job, I am not trusting the “improv way of life”.

Looking back, the best times of my life were times when I was unemployed. Of course, they were also times when I was living off a big pile of savings. It takes a lot of courage to refuse good money.

Quitting to do my own projects would be much easier if I reduced my expenses. I am feeling so exhausted from the job, I don’t have time for that! It’s a vicious circle. I think the way to break vicious circles is with drastic action.

However, my current plan is to delay drastic action until May. That’s when I will have enough savings that I’ll feel reasonably comfortable quitting.

I’ve been at that contract job since February. 20/20 hindsight, I should have taken the regular employment offer with stock options, but even so, I’ve earned more money this year than any previous year.

My savings are still not in great shape, though. I paid off credit cards and blew a fair amount of money living it up in San Francisco. Those were important goals of mine, and now they’re achieved. But I still want to rack up some more savings before grad school.

The work I’m doing has mostly been boring. Looking back, I’m rather sad about that. There must be a way to work on something that engages my creativity and still pays reasonably well. Well, I live in the Bay Area, my contract ends in January, I’m here for another six months, and right now is a time of extraordinary opportunity.

Working in that office didn’t accomplish much, and the small web sites turned out to take too much work to get to a state where they could make money. I was just about broke, with a max’ed out credit card, and was ready to post my résumé, when a former co-worker called me and offered me a contract job doing C programming for some good money. I drove down to the SF Bay Area, interviewed, got the job, and moved to San Francisco! I haven’t been paid yet, so money is still really tight, but at least now I’m doing something eight hours a day that is accumulating money at a steady rate. Steadiness really makes a huge difference.

They offered me a permanent position, too: pays lower salary, but includes stock options and doesn’t end in a few months. I felt honored, but I turned it down for now since I still plan to do grad school in the Fall. In the past, I’ve never considered stock options to be worth anything (indeed, none were ever worth even one cent), but I have hope for this company. I’d have to stay a year for the options to vest, which would mean missing grad school this Fall. Having put my real desires on hold in order to make big money has always been disastrous in the past, but I’m tempted. I’ll see how the job goes.

So far, not so good. I’ve been getting various stuff done, crossing items off my to-do list, but not getting a lot of billable hours in. It’s mostly been errands and junk. Working at home, I’ve given in to distractions like cats, web-surfing, and taking naps.

Amazingly, last Sunday I met someone who offered to let me use his office while he’s out of town for the next month. It’s the kind of just-above-street-level office where I’ve always wanted to work, right in downtown Arcata. The perfect place to get away from home and go to my “job”. All I had to do was fix some of his computer problems. It feels like the universe wants to help me earn this money.

I can even take the bus there!

One year and nine months of school give the bank account a pretty bad whippin’.

Ok, let’s face it, most of the things I want to do this summer involve money. Like having a place to stay and doing a world tour to visit friends.

Luckily, I have an opportunity to make a little quick money doing computer work for the next week or two. So I’m going to make doing this job top priority for two weeks or until all the work they need is done.