I would love some insight on how to make that happen…
If you are serious, I'll explain kind of where my head has been at and what I'm trying to coordinate. I mean, it's "worth what you pay for it" and you are likely way better off financially than I am, but I'm a fighter and have somehow managed to come back from oblivion a couple times.
TL;DR:
Embrace change both in technology and in the world. Don't work for other people who think you're a number. Do things that make your local community better - even if marginally, and pour your money into assets that can produce something or if you can't do that immediately, pour them into yourself. Want less but still dream big, take care of your health, go hiking. Enjoy your life, you only get one of them and nobody ever laid on their deathbed wishing they could have done another turn.
For context, this is why what I'm going to say might not apply to you.
In 2016 when I was 28, shortly after our daughter was born, I got sick and was out of the cockpit for over a year. I lost basically everything at that point - I did not work for a 121 airline and had just changed jobs so I didn't even have insurance at that point because I had not wanted to pay for COBRA. Who gets sick at 28 amirite? Literally we lost almost everything, I went down from massive savings to like $25 in my bank account. I taught groundschool for a local air taxi and finished a math degree while I waited to get my medical back. At that point, I still had all my student loans still, something just north of $60k.
Then I managed to get back in the cockpit again. During the 2 years I was back, I worked literally shift I could, picked up everything until I had zero debt. No student loans, no credit card debt that we'd built up surviving, nothing. I zeroed all that • out and as an early 30's something lived with my parents while they rented out their house (it was weird yes, but it worked) and helped pay down their bills too. The only bills anyone in my entire family has now is house payments for ours and my folks' house. I think my folks have a car payment that's pretty low after my dad got hit in an accident, but yeah - it's low. But literally the entire family's consumer debt on my side of the family is pretty much wiped out now.
Then at the end of 2020, I got sick again, it was back and way worse. I went blind for a bit, I was out of the cockpit permanently. Nightmare stuff. However I went back to school as soon as I could see, learned AI stuff and technical stuff, I worked for a couple years and now I'm running my own thing as of January - I'm actually making money, too! So that's cool... Ok. So... then "what's the play?" Is the question right?
Here are the things I've learned.
1. Nobody is getting out of this thing alive. We're all gonna die, most of us are going to die horribly and slowly. I thought I understood that flying medevac, I did not understand that until I spent time having to wrestle with the visceral realities of this. When you go in for treatment, and you have to explain to your 11 year old where the letter is for him and mom, and his brother and sister, and what his responsibilities are if you don't make it (a lot of pressure to put on a kid, but he rose to the occasion while I was laid up), that's when the reality of the experience starts to get real • clear. We're all going to die. It will likely not be a lot of fun. Playing the game thinking you will get 20 years after retirement is a bad call. Have fun now.
2. Everything that seems normal can be turned on it's head in a matter of hours. There is no normal, there are no adults in the room, nobody is driving the boat unless you decide to step up and drive the damn boat. You cannot rely on the "way things have been" and just because something seems like a good idea now, does not mean it will be good later. You have to be willing to constantly adapt and reinvent yourself to meet the needs of an evolving and adjusting world. There are something like 8-10 billion human beings, nobody cares about you or thinks you're special. That sucks because it's sad, but it's freeing because the requirements of society don't actually apply to you. They don't apply to literally anybody, it's all made up. You shouldn't work for other people because they don't care about you.
3. Comfort is nice, and it's better than the alternative, but it is not guaranteed. If you can accept some discomfort you will do much better than those who cannot. This has been proven to me time and time again. Comfort is usually not the way to "better yourself" and to get better at anything or get through a situation, you're probably going to have to learn to embrace the suck.
4. Your health is more important than your wallet - this one has been the hardest one for me, and I still find myself eating terribly when I am pressed for time or distracted. But when you're healthy you have lots of problems, when you're sick you only have one • problem. It's better to not be sick, so take care of the meat sack your riding around in. Find some physical activity you like and do it as much as you can.
Basically, be hyper flexible, enjoy your life, and push yourself to learn, grow, etc. and take care of your body. Also, modulate your expectations for the future - not "oh the future is going to suck" because I don't believe that it will - it's going to be awesome! But don't put things off. As Doug put it on here once, "these are the good ol' days" so enjoy them. That means doing fun stuff,
now. That means doing those things you always wanted to do...
now. If you always wanted to sail to Barbados, go • do it. It won't hurt your finances
that much. Unless you haul-off and quit, the job will be there when you get back.
So how do you build a life around that? Well, first thing's first. Because I'm pretty sure the economy is "cooked" as the kids say, for the last year or so I have not been investing in any stocks or anything. I would likely have made money had I been investing like I normally do, just throwing in a bit every month, but with the current situation in Washington DC, I found it too stressful after like March of last year. YMMV. After the next big correction, I'll probably go back to investing every month, but for now, I invest in myself and more importantly in physical stuff. I buy education (because nobody can take that away from me), tools that can do
real things in the real world - so 3d printers, power tools, machinery, computers, etc. that I can use in my business, use to make things, and finally, I bought land that I'm developing. And I'm not talking "rent seeking opportunities" - I'm talking land that can have a paid off home on it, a work shop, is climate resilient, etc. and is self sufficient. You'll never be entirely self-sufficient of course and as long as the interest rate is fine, debt makes sense so I'm not one of those "don't get debt dudes" but also, anything that means you
have to go to work is not an asset in a world with AI changing employment and global markets in chaos. So, instead of worrying about the things that are far off, think local; if you can provide value to people in your community, then you'll never have to worry about having enough to eat and if you're not paying the bank for the next $30 years you don't necessarily
need much more than a very basic job.
My strategy right now is use these crazy cheap AI tools to build out bespoke tools for local companies. I am already doing that and have been making a modest bit of cash since the start of the year. I could push much harder - my health will suffer if I do, so I'm going a comfortable pace. Practically speaking, I only write code that I'm capable of auditing / writing too - there are crazy people who just go YOLO-mode or whatever and let it rip. That scares me. But I can write BS web apps way faster than if I were to write it by hand and doing some stats for money making people more efficient pays surprisingly well. And I say BS, but actually they do solve
real problems for people - so I probably shouldn't call them that. Then I make things. Like, real stuff in the real world. We're building hydroponics towers out to grow lettuce in the winter here and building a cabin. The hydroponics will likely never turn a profit, but it's fun and I enjoy feeding people. The cabin means I will have basically zero bills in about 3 years if we finish it off and sell this house. My total property tax on the land I bought will be $450/year pretty much forever, I'm taking EE classes to design the solar set up, and working on mocking up drones for use here in rural Alaska. With the changes that are supposedly coming in Part 108, things could get wild, I want to be poised to take advantage of that. But again, I'm building my plans and strategy around "providing value to local companies" and "pivoting with every future changes that requires a pivot" and "getting less beholden upon external sources of capital."
I don't know if that answers your question or not? But basically, I'm thinking locally, investing in myself and my family, and trying to get less beholden to the man, etc.
The other thing that's important right now is my wife's career - she is in healthcare. She makes senior RJ Captain pay at least now because each year they keep giving the RNs at the hospital she works at retention bonuses? She didn't for a long time, but this has flipped in the last 18 months or so? Healthcare is much more lucrative presently. I would not have been able to quit my old job and take the risk of starting my own thing in January with 3 kids without her income being sufficient to tread water and us having stacked some cash for all of this. Since I got sick the first time that's another thing we have always done. Neither of us "needs" the job we have to make ends meet. If one income is sufficient, the second is all gravy. While I'm building out my customer base things are a little lean, but not really, and we're still going and doing the stuff that makes life worth living. We travel to go back packing pretty regularly, and will be building on the cabin all summer (that'll likely empty us more or less out financially by the end of the summer).
But also, when we do travel, we tend to do so more roughly than the typical traveler would. A hostel in Rome at 12 euros per night is not going to provide the same level of comfort as the hotel the airline gets you. We don't
need some of the creature comforts (some we definitely do, but yeah) and that means we are able to do more adventures for less. Sometimes those are adventures all their own.
