Second career?

[uncledrz]

Mountain Mike

I agree with you that Freedom is the most important part of FIRE.

I have friends who have retired, and then opened a handyman or a repair business. They worked when the wanted, on the jobs that they wanted, for the people that they wanted. Always had time for hunting, fishing, a baseball game, a beer, or just goofing off.

All are fully retired now. Seems that fishing just took too much of their time to be bothered with anything less important.

 

[laurence]

Fee based financial planning business, that's for me! Take only the clients I want. I can be like one of those late night infomercials:

"I'm FIRE'd, and YOU CAN BE TOO!!!"

I'll have a good answer to the question for Financial Planners: "if your so good with money, how come you are still working?"

 

[Spanky]

I"ve worked with some of the best IP attorneys in technology. It's difficult for me to imagine a more boring job. Read a dozen or so patents and you'll see what I mean.
--JB

Hi John,

I used to work for a medical device company. My role was competitive analysis, analyzing their products in areas of circuit design, mechanical design, and algorithm development. I also supported the legal department to analyze products and examine patents for possible patent infrigement. I could'nt agree with you more - patents are boring and dry!!! However, the temptation was hard to resist. A new grad was making a salary similar to that of an engineering director in a fortune 500 medical device company.

Spanky

 

[Nords]

Has any one given any serious thoughts about a second carreer? I thought about it and decided the it was not worthwhile in view of the amount of additional education (3 years) and the potential rewards (e.g., self satisfaction).

The military practically requires its vets to start a second career. The VA doesn't want taxpayers to see you huddled under a freeway overpass burning your discharge papers for warmth.

The process can be a huge ego-enhancer. You spend your entire military career being told that you're worthless & weak ("... now drop and give me 20!") and suddenly you're courted by employers who'll promise you just about anything. Six months before retirement I'd answer the unsolicited queries with "I'm just going to take life easy for a while." That was met with "Hey, hardcore, great negotiating tactic. Seriously, when can you start?"

OTOH the job search can be utter humiliation, especially if employers don't appreciate your clear omniscience & omnipotence. I didn't solicit rejection but I watched several shipmates go through the process with companies that didn't deserve them anyway.

Leveraging your strengths into a more revenue-enhanced field may seem like the way to go. Tours as a nuclear engineer and later as a military instructor led to a great offer to instruct military nuclear engineers. Luckily spouse penetrated my ego bubble long enough to point out that I'd feel obligated to actually qualify as one, which would lead to 60-hour workweeks, travel, and department-head meetings or other overhead having nothing to do with teaching. That broke the programming.

That's the extent of my second-career credibility. But I think that running down a different career path is only worth it if you find it at least as fascinating as your current job. The second career has to be something you run toward instead of running away from the current one. If the sacrifices don't seem worth it, then pursuing it won't make you happy. And if it satisfies you, then you won't even consider them sacrifices.

So you answer your own question when you ask "Is it worth it?" Perhaps the question you want is "How could I pass this up?!?"

 

[Spanky]

So you answer your own question when you ask "Is it worth it?" Perhaps the question you want is "How could I pass this up?!?"

Nords,

Thanks. It's hard to pass it up since I am still enjoy what I do now.

Spanky

 

[Craig]

The financial planning mentions above got me thinking, and I checked it out on Vanguard's site. They do hire financial planners ... wonder what that would be like, with Vanguard ...

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Fee based financial planning business, that's for me! Take only the clients I want. I can be like one of those late night infomercials:

"I'm FIRE'd, and YOU CAN BE TOO!!!"

I'll have a good answer to the question for Financial Planners: "if your so good with money, how come you are still working?"

Better still, ask them to show you their last 5 years worth of schedule "D"'s. Not only can you then see how good their personal performance is, but how and where they like to invest.

 

[BunsGettingFirm]

Spanky,

I am in the process now. I am primarily investigating MBA programs, law school, and the related careers.

The biggest problem I have now is that nothing for me just jumps right out at me and says, "Be an <X>!" where X is a firefighter, architect, or what have you. I've been an engineer for a Fortune 500 company for 10 years, and that's been OK so far, but I'm not the kind of person who just thrills at learning the finer points of embedded COM or whatever.

So it's a series of tradeoffs between trying something else I might like more (but not have it be the "love of my life" career-wise) versus time to retirement. I did a rough analysis that said going to law school would have an opportunity cost of about a million dollars in terms of lost wages and tuition compounded over the rest of my working career. Maybe I would make that up in terms of higher salary or not; maybe the increased job satisfaction would be worth it. Or maybe I'd find out being a lawyer would be just as bad or worse than what I do now.

B-school has other issues that I won't go into here. Overall it's a lower-risk, lower-reward choice.

If I could get paid really well for helping others with their financial problems, I'd consider that, whatever "that" is. I don't want to be an investment "salesman" of any kind, and I want whatever I do to be ethically compatible with what I do with my own money. So far the only options I see here are to work for Vanguard in their IT/programming area, or to become a Scott Burns-like financial writer (and I don't like writing too terribly much). Or an estate planning attorney, which sounds interesting.

I personally am taking a lot of time and asking a lot of questions and plan to ask a bunch more. With a family relatively rooted where we are, it's a big decision and I feel I owe it to them.

malakito

Resurrecting an OLD THREAD. I was wondering why I never read this thread because it is so applicable to my situation as well. Then I realized why. I was buried under class work, work work, and GMAT work in 3/2005.

Malakito, are you my long lost brother? I have ten years in engineering as well. Like you, I'm not one of those super geeks (though the girls at the bars would disagree), so engineer is fun, but I certainly don't have my own test bench at home. Building a PC here and there is enough at-home engineering for me.

I have been taking MBA classes part time at a local Philly school though I must say the experience of working full time and going to school part time sucks. I'm not in one of those positions that allows me to goof off half a day, so I have decided to go full time next year to a one-year program. A lot of European and hence Canadian programs modelled after the European programs are one year which is great for us mid-career professionals. A great place to check for programs is businessweek.com and forbes.com. To make the one-year program easier to stomach, it would help if you have taken the introductory classes, but you can get those at any community college. Right there, you have cut down your opportunity cost by going to school for one year instead of two. You might even be able to finagle a leave of absence from your current employer as fall back insurance.

As for the rest of the opportunity cost equation, just make sure you ace the GMAT. A lot of good schools would be happy to give you full scholarship if your score is good enough to get you into a top-10 program. You trade your GMAT score for a full-ride scholarship, and the school gets to use your outlier to pull up their GMAT average. This makes perfect sense if your destination is not Goldman Sachs after B-school. If it is, then target a top-10 school.

Not enjoying writing... That's going to be a problem in business or law school. Besides building spreadsheets, all I did was write, write, and then write some more.

If you're still on the board, I'd love to know what you decided to do.

 

[BunsGettingFirm]

Why is this thread in Life after FIRE? This thread belongs in Young Dreamers.

 

[danm]

Second career? Sure, likewise, I'm in engineering, but likely to get laid off with a big severance, which will put me at about 80% FIRE I estimate. Not an overly healthy one, but sufficient for our needs I expect. I'm not sure if I want to continue with the present career, even though it's lucrative.

Instead I'm thinking of downsizing the career, something that allows me more time and flexibility (and less money). So I could be semi retired for a good while, then full retire later.