... the thought of a 5k monthly mortgage payment...
My friend is no dummy.
I'm not sure that I can reconcile this cognitive dissonance. And maybe she's beginning to wonder how she got into this situation-- especially during the lowest interest rates of the last 60 years!
She is bright, has a finance MBA from a top school, was a VP at an investment banking team for years, and has no trouble having (and voicing) a non-majority opinion. Yet here she is working a job that is beneath her and does not make her happy and cannot or won't see that there are many other paths besides the treadmill of work.
I think employment security, especially with that size of mortgage payment, is a huge unquantifiable fear for most people. It's impossible to visualize retirement or ER, let alone plan for it, when every month is a race against the howling pack of debt wolves.
Last night spouse and I had a "you will know when it's time to go" epiphany during a family discussion. (Kid's having trouble with a high-school teacher and wondered in exasperation if she'd ever see this situation again at college. Hah!) Some jobs (or the lives around them) are so good that not even Dilbert's PHB can make a dent in one's happiness. No matter how bad the workplace or your life gets, if you're basically happy in your work then nothing can really kill your buzz.
But if a job (or its surrounding life) isn't good then a PHB can become a problem that nothing else can overcome. It might even be a focal point and a metaphor for all the other issues. When it's an all-consuming issue and all your time is spent trying to cope with a bad job, a bad boss, or other bad work things... then maybe it's time to stop trying to fix a bad situation. If there's nothing really good about it, then even if you fix the PHB you're still left with nothing really good.
I literally had the same PHB in two different jobs about seven years apart. The first time I worked for him I just couldn't believe that anyone could be both so incompetent and still so evil. I was also struggling with mid-career issues, [-]chronic sleep deprivation[/-] new parenthood, and a huge shift in personal/family priorities as Navy stopped being a fun life and started messing with family life. But I'd just rotated ashore from sea duty, and when your quality of life rises from a "1" out of 10 to a "2" then the 100% gain makes it hard to notice the fact that your life still sucks. At the time I couldn't see past my military career and I couldn't even spell ER. But I could see a lot of problems with my boss, and that repair effort became an all-consuming obsession while everything else languished. Because in my mind the boss was the source of all the other problems, not just an isolated symptom. Even if that PHB had been replaced with the Leader of the Year, everything else about that command (and my Navy life) would still have been... not much.
Today, after years of ER and with the confidence that comes from financial security, I can see that I should have immediately resigned from active duty, joined the Reserves, maybe taken a few months off, and continued my career with a better boss (and a bunch of other better things too). But obstinacy, the fear/uncertainty of unemployment (we had an $1800 mortgage payment!), and a perceived lack of job skills kept me on the treadmill. The only resolution was the boss' eventual transfer, and I never got back to examining the other issues.
(BTW Brewer I've always envied your confidence to chuck a sucky job to go find another. It's the key factor in not getting locked into a bad situation, and I think it gives you the stamina to deal with workplace problems while staying secure from the knowledge that you can walk away from them.)
Seven years later my same PHB turned out to be the only guy in the Navy willing to take over the command I'd already been at for three years. By this time we'd worked through the career issues, workplace quality had dramatically improved, our kid was sleeping better, we'd worked through our priorities, and we were just about finished executing the ER plan from hell. I'd say we were at 8 or 8.5 and waiting for ER was the only thing left.
By the time I'd reacquainted myself with the "new" boss and realized that he was even worse than before, I also appreciated that there was nothing he could really do to me or our working conditions. In fact the command was running so well that his usual behavior would lose him what little support he had and cost him his job. As I saw how much I'd changed over the last seven years, and how much worse he'd become, I actually felt sorry for the guy. He spent most of his time hiding in his office (tormenting his admin asst) and letting the XO run the command. We essentially avoided each other for my final 18 months and I hardly ever had to see him, let alone deal with him.
The moral of the story to our kid was that difficult people are always around us. If they somehow become the biggest problem in our lives, an all-consuming focus overwhelming anything that's good-- then maybe it's an indication that there's nothing else really good in your life and you need to change your life. It's not worth wasting more time trying to fix the boss to raise workplace quality from a "2" to a "3".
Having low debts, let alone being on the path to an ER goal, makes that life-change planning a lot easier.
Yes, we are an odd bunch!
I thought this was going to be a New Jersey thread...
