I don’t even know how people function with less than 18 weeks vacation per year
3 Likes
100% this. I would almost certainly do some stuff that qualifies as “work”. But it would be completely on my own terms and for my own purposes.
When my formal job ended 5+ years ago I hung out my consulting shingle. It’s gone well other than 2020. Work about 900 ish hours per year and probably about a third of that is concentrated on trips so that an average week when I’m home is more like 10 hours.
Def earlier than I planned to consult but I’m happy. I giving up some major earning years but considering I’ve done the 80h/week deal during plant start-ups. I still make what I need and can make more if I want to work more.
Hey, it’s one of these CNBC articles but it isn’t totally egregious and kinda dovetails in with the current conversation.
tl;dr moved from Brooklyn → Cincinatti (prob the most egregious part tbh), which lowered monthly spend big time. Now she does a podcast that makes about $3k/month working 30 hrs/month.
I’m not sure if there was a big windfall in there somewhere though because her monthly income is $3k minus $2k in expenses means she’d have an extra $1k/month to save & invest over a ~75 month period from 2017-2023. The market was pretty hot during most of that time.
Its pretty totally egrigious. What % of podcasts are making 3K a month net? Gotta be less than 1% Its kinda like becoming a twitch streamer, youtuber, or professional sports player. The people who actually make it to the point of it becoming a viable living is so small compared to the number of people actually trying it, that saying “Look at this person, you can do it too!” is more of a lie than anything.
One of my favorite streamers gets asked often something like “Do you think I should try to get into streaming? Is it something one can do if they work really really hard and can make a living off it.” And he always replies with a pretty straightforward “No.” He says no matter how hard you work, you have to be almost astronomically lucky to get to the point of making a living in this space, and even if you do hit the one outter of life, you then have to work 20 hours a day just to keep any audience you might have gotten until you get to the point that you can pay others to do some of that work for you. He says if you want to stream/make youtube content you should only do it 100% as a hobby, with the knowledge that you might never earn a single dime doing it, and if you get unfathomably lucky, then its simply gravy on a thing you want to do.
3 Likes
I love how those articles always start with something like “Eat more meals at home” which will resonate with a lot of people, seems easy and doable. I guess that can explain her paying down $30K in debt in 11 months (after ending that $2-3K/month in dining expenses). OK. And her housing costs go from $1800 to $600 month. But her income goes from $135K/yr to $36K/yr, and her monthly spend is $2K, so after taxes she has what, $200 to save each month? VOILA $350K IN SAVINGS YOU TOO CAN DO THIS AT HOME
2 Likes
A lot of these CNBC articles about streamers who MAKE $250K/YEAR BY WORKING 3 HOURS PER WEEK slowly devolve into ads for said streamers, with links to their bullshit pyramid marketing dogshit businesses right in the article text
Totally fair critique. Also, that 30hrs/month she is quoting is how much she works now and not how much she worked getting the podcast off the ground.
I’ve never really thought about podcasting as a business and kinda just assumed MeUndies, AG1, and those standard podcast ad companies just threw a couple hundred bucks at anyone just in case they blew up. But it makes sense that the podcasts making $3k/month are in the top 5% (maybe 1%).
After watching the video, it included a better timeline and she didn’t actually quit her job until 2021 and almost all of her savings and investments from the previous job.
1 Like
Which hedge fund manager is her father?
It’ll be great for a while. It doesn’t start to suck right away.
Pretty much what I do minus the partner.
loool this post aged well.
Apparently the CEO was upset that the bathrooms were messy and didn’t like the in-office food options. The solution to this is apparently a 50/50 schedule now.
Also, back in September they re-worked all of our cubicles into hotel desks. They have now announced they are going to un-do all that now.
The government is run so much more efficiently than typical companies.
In a year from now it will be 100% in office.
My wife started a new job this year and unfortunately, in the office full time until she hits six months, at which point she can work from home one day a week. The commute stinks, but she likes the job and people, so she’s willing to deal with it.
I’ll preface this next part by saying she likes her boss a lot. I’ve met him once and he does seem very nice.
She messed up her back two weekends ago - freak thing, something happened while she was napping. Excruciating, debilitating pain. She worked from home as best she could last Monday, just propped up in bed. I took her to the doctor on Tuesday and he prescribed a bunch of stuff to see if it helps before taking any further steps like MRI, etc.
The pain combined with the meds prevented her from sleeping. She went 48 hours with barely any sleep, so she was in horrible shape. Basically took the rest of the week off - she just couldn’t function (I think she may have done a little work before she had a total inability to sleep).
She stopped all meds except for the steroids and she was able to sleep again. Plus, her back really took a turn for the better late in the week. So, things are looking good, but she still isn’t quite sure when she’ll feel up to going back to the office, mainly because she wants to make sure her back feels good enough to sit in the car and office chair for long stretches.
She worked from home today, full day, no problems. She told her boss that she’s taking it day by day to make sure she’ll be ok to go back to the office. Her boss told her that if she doesn’t go into the office tomorrow, she’ll have to take PTO, even though she would be working from home. She told me if she didn’t otherwise like him so much and was already scheduled for PTO on Friday (leaving town), she would have been a lot more pissed off than she is.
1 Like
It may be out of the boss’s hands. In any case I hope she’s not planning on providing free labor. If she’s forced on PTO she shouldn’t be working at all. I’d also check to see if there are any short term disability options. Once you find out what all the legal and/or company policy options are for this situation you might be able to go back to the boss and work out another deal under the table if it’s mutually beneficial.
My wife did tell me that if she stays home tomorrow and has to take PTO, she’s not working.
She did make a dramatic improvement over the weekend, and because she has a flight on Friday, she was likely going to test out her back by going into the office at some point this week. Looks like the trial run might be a day earlier. She’ll be fine pretty soon, it’s just annoying what the boss told her.
It’s funny, back in 2015 they started letting us work from home 1 day per week and were even floating the idea of the hotel desks as a 20% space saver since we were running out of room. We may end up back in full time with telecommuting being a fringe benefit. At this point I’m somewhat mentally preparing for it if it happens. I’ve developed a few new routines centered around me working from home and am already coming up with some contingencies in case I’m called back in full time.
My last job the final straw that got me to leave was when they took away our flex Friday’s (we worked 9s with every other Friday off). Plenty of our competitors are now using remote work as a recruiting tool. It would probably work on me.
So we’re like a month into an “official” minimum one day a week in office for everybody, and there’s been amazing non-compliance combined with nonexistent enforcement. Out of our entire support/training staff on my floor (maybe 30 people), there’s been a total of five guys that have come in, rarely on the same days so there’s zero collaboration (so what’s the point?) and at least one of them hasn’t made an appearance the past two weeks, presumably after seeing nobody else is bothering. This is very par for the course for my company, which has made shit up as they go along since day one.
I’ve got the Sunday Scaries and it’s Thursday. 6 weeks off makes that return to work hit different.
