Tag: learning

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Savings and Investment for Noobs

A friend recently came to me with a “problem”. He had recently come into some money. Prior to this my friend didn’t really have anything in the way of savings, nor any knowledge of what to do to put this money to good use. This is one of those good problems to have. He had money, but needed knowledge. Money can be hard to come by. Knowledge is easy to acquire. You just need to know where to look.

So this post is basically an answer to my friend, as well as a handy guide to others in similar situations who maybe know they want to save and invest but have no idea how to start.

Up front, I’ll just say I understand how daunting this all can be to anyone who has never learned anything about investing or banking or finance at all. There’s a lot of factors to keep track of. I’ll do my best here to try and make it simple enough to follow.

Factor #1: What type of account

Regardless of what types of investments you are looking to hold, those investments need to be held in some kind of account. For the purpose of this piece for beginners, I’ll address four different types. Once again for my readers, this is Canada-specific. If you don’t live in Canada then the particular account options will be different and have different names, but the concepts may be similar. I have already touched on some of these considerations in a former post, but I’ll give a bit more detail here:

  1. Normal, non-registered accounts. Most if not all banks will have some investments they will happily sell you. If you happen to hold these investments in a non-registered account, then they will be subject to tax of some kind. So if the investments pay dividends or have some other income stream, then you will have to pay income tax on that income in the year in which it is received. Likewise if you sell any assets in a non-registered account and make money on the sale, you will pay tax on the capital gains. Capital gains just means profit when selling investment assets. This is the “normal” situation, so to speak. If you make money, the government wants their share of the tax on it.
  2. Tax Free Savings Acount (TFSA). This is a registered account. The main thing to be aware of here is that there are limits to the amount of money you can put into this account. The details of contribution limits are explained here. The tax benefits of this account are right in the name; any income or profits earned in this account are tax free, which is great. You are free to withdraw money out of this account at any time, but you have to be very careful about putting money back in, to make sure you don’t breach the contribution limit. This makes this account great for short-to-medium term investing if you are looking to earn a little income on your money and want access to it before you retire.
  3. Registered Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP). This is also a registered account, as it says in the name. It also has contribution limits, but those limits are much greater than the limits for TFSAs. Its main benefit is for deferring tax. What this means is any contributions made this year will reduce this year‘s taxable income. So if you contribute $1000 now, your taxable income for this year at tax time is reduced by $1000. That is because this type of account is geared toward retirement. Tax will be paid on any money taken out of it during retirement, as if you had earned it in the year it was withdrawn. Because it is designed with retirement in mind, there are witholding tax penalties if you withdraw money early. This type of account is great if you are currently in a higher tax bracket and want to reduce your tax payable this year, but not so great if you plan on using the money before you are 65 because it is locked away.
  4. Registered Education Savings Plan (RESP). This account is a bit unique because it is designed specifically for saving for a child’s education. If you have no children (or your children are already over 18) then this account doesn’t really apply to you, but I’m including it here because if you do have children under 18 then this account is a no-brainer.  Why? Because the government will match 20 cents per dollar on the first $2500 invested each year to a maximum of $500 per year, up to a maximum amount of $7200 per child. This extra money is called the Canada Education Savings Grant (CESG). This is free money, and a 20% return on your investment without doing a single thing. Of course, if your child doesn’t go to college or university then you do have to give the CESG portion back, or transfer it to a sibling who still has contribution room, but why not take that money in case your child does want to pursue post secondary education? An RESP can stay open until the child is 36, just in case he or she isn’t sure they want to go to school right away. If they definitely don’t, then the money (after returning the CESG portion to the government) can be transferred to an RRSP.

All four are useful and have their respective merits and flaws. RRSPs are great, especially when your employer also contributes to one for you, but only if you don’t plan on using that money before age 65. TFSAs are great but they don’t really do anything for your income taxes in the current year, and there are limits to how much you can put in. If you’re lucky enough to have maxed out your registered account contribution room, then you have no choice but to use a non-registered account. You get the idea.

Once you have decided which type of account you want to open and hold your investments in, it’s time to decide what to put in it. But before we get in too much detail about the different options, we have to address two major concepts: volatility and diversification.

Volatility

If you’ve ever taken an economics or finance class, and probably even if you haven’t, you might be aware of the “risk vs reward” trade-off. The idea is simple; the riskier an investment is, the greater the potential returns. The classic Economics 101 example of a risk-free asset is a government bond. So a sovereign government issues a bond and that bond has a yield of say 3%. The reason this is risk free is because the government is guaranteeing you that you will get your 3% return. The only risk in holding this bond is the risk in the government going broke and not being able to pay you your 3% (or your principal back!), but since most governments are also in the money-printing business, this risk is pretty darn low. Some countries are on shakier financial ground of course, and maybe their risk of default is greater than that of other countries. Well guess what? Those countries will have to offer a higher yield on their bonds in order to get people to buy them. That is your risk vs reward paradigm in action; riskier bond, higher yield. Corporations also can issue bonds and they tend to be a bit riskier than government bonds, which of course means they offer even higher yields. But once again, the only real risk to the investor is if the company goes broke. Bonds are safe because outside of the rare event when a country or company goes belly-up, you get your yield, guaranteed.

On the other end of the volatility spectrum, you have the corporate stock. Stock prices go up and down all the time. For the most part when you’re talking about stable, major corporations, prices do go up in the long run. But between now and “the long run”, their stock prices can go way up or way down, depending on a lot of factors. They are volatile. So say you invest $1000 in ABC Corp today, and promptly forget about your investment. Two months later you look at their stock price and realize that it has gone down and your initial investment is only worth $800. Boo! That’s terrible! You’ve lost money. But you hold onto your stock, because you’re a lazy investor. A couple of months later you check back and see that the stock price has gone up again! Now your investment is worth $1100! You’re a brilliant investor because you have earned a 10% profit on your investment and now you are rich. Bully for you!

Of course, one day, ABC Corp could get mired in a major scandal and reveal that they are completely broke, making your investment worth essentially $0.

This is the concept of volatility. Riskier assets will pay greater returns, but they are also a bigger gamble. If you can stomach watching your investment go down for a while in the hopes that it will recover and not go broke, then you are okay with risk and are capable of seeking higher returns. Historically, stocks are a better bet for making money than unrisky bonds. The danger is that in the interim, risk averse people watch their investment shrink in a crisis and want to cut their losses by selling while things are low. This is very common. It is also the wrong thing to do, because historically, most companies don’t go broke, and most company’s stock prices recover. Most. The majority of investors hold stocks and bonds, but mostly stocks. The higher your appetite for risk, the higher your proportion of stocks in your portfolio.

Diversification

This is a word that gets used a lot but I wonder how many people don’t understand what it means? Basically this is the “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” principle. Again, let’s go back to Econ 101…

Imagine you lived in a world with only two types of fruit: apples and pears. Some people only eat apples, some only eat pears, and some people eat both to varying degrees. Now imagine some event has done great damage to the apple crop. There is an apple shortage and consequently the price of apples has gone through the roof. What do you as a consumer do? Well, if you’re wealthy and you hate pears, then maybe you just pay through the nose for your apples and gripe about it. But if you’re most people, you change your consumption and buy more pears until the price of apples comes down again.

Now assume instead that rather than being a consumer, you’re the owner of Apple Co. (okay, maybe this was a bad example… Apple Corp? No, that’s no good… Granny’s Apples Inc? Whatever, you get the idea). Your supply has been hit and you’ve had to raise your prices. Consequently your sales are terrible because now everyone is buying pears instead. Well if you own this company’s stock, then guess what? You effectively are one of it’s owners. In this scenario, the share price for this company would tumble and your investment and net worth would take a hit. Meanwhile shares in Pears Inc. are probably getting a nice healthy boost from all those additional sales.

So how do you avoid this potential calamity? Well, you own both companies. By buying shares in both the apples company and the pears company, you hedge your bets and reduce the volatility of your portfolio. This is what diversification means.

In the real world, sometimes individual companies suffer. Sometimes entire industries suffer. Sometimes the economies of entire countries suffer. A well diversified portfolio spreads around your risk so that your investment can withhold certain shocks and keep things even keel, in the hopes that if one part of your investment goes down, another might go up, or at least go down to a lesser degree. Diversification can occur within a market (owning stock in both Coke and Pepsi), within an economy (owning Canadian mining stocks, banking stocks, manufacturing stocks, etc.), and also internationally (owning investments in Canada, the U.S., Europe, Asia, etc.).

Diversification is essential. It is also a lot of work. You want to pick a number of assets from different industries and countries, with varying levels of risk to make your portfolio relatively stable while also taking enough risk to get some return on your investment. Well good news: you can get others to do that for you. The downside is that everything comes at a cost. Which segues nicely into our next section.

Factor #2: What type of investment

Once you have chosen the right type of account for your situation you will want to decide what to put in it. Well, you have some choices. Once again there are trade-offs. Here is a list of investment types in order of lowest return (and risk) to highest.

A savings account

Technically I suppose this is also a “type of account”, but I’m putting it in this list here because you can get both TFSA savings accounts and non-registered savings accounts at your bank. Under most circumstances, I would not advise someone to keep a lot of money in a vanilla savings account at their local bank. The exception would be if you had some money that you absolutely 100% needed all of within the next couple of years. Most commercial banks in Canada will offer these accounts and most of them will offer 0.5-1.0% on these accounts. This isn’t very good, but still better than having your money in a chequing account that offers no interest. Want to do better? Skip the bank and open an account at a local credit union. Not all credit unions are created equal so you’ll want to do your research but their banking fees are lower and their savings accounts can offer more in the 1.5%-2.5% range, which is better than the banks offer.

Mutual Funds

Mutual funds are great for beginner investors. Why? Because someone else has already done the diversification for you. Mutual funds are managed to be balanced investments, so one share of a mutual fund is like a tiny basket of assets featuring investments in different countries, industries, and asset classes. But this management and balancing has a cost. This is why each mutual fund has a Management Expense Ratio (MER), which represents the cost. Most mutual funds will have an MER of approximately 2.5%, give or take. So what does this number mean? Well lets say your little basket of goods of a mutual fund appreciates by 7% over the course of the year. If the MER is 2.5%, then your investment returns will end up being 4.5% (7-2.5=4.5). It is this MER that gives mutual funds a bad name among many investors, because you’re not getting your full rate of return.

I would argue that if you’re a beginner investor who isn’t really sure what he or she is doing, then the MER is worth it. 4.5% is better than 1%, which is better than nothing. Really, savings of any kind is the most important thing, so complaining that you’re “only” getting 4.5% return is silly when you used to earn nothing on your money. The other great thing about mutual funds? Every bank or credit union or investment firm has them. All you need to do is approach a financial advisor or ask someone at a bank. They will then ask you a few questions to assess your risk tolerance and help you pick the fund that is right for you. Then you buy that fund (hopefully repeatedly and regularly through regular contributions) and watch your savings grow. In my mind, it’s more important that you save, rather than waste too much time worrying about exactly whose mutual fund is the best choice. Just buy one. If you find a better one, then at that point start buying that better one instead. Don’t delay!

Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs)

So let’s say you’ve been squirreling away your pennies into mutual funds for several years and watching your savings grow. You’re pleased, but also aware that maybe you have some colleagues who are talking about their own investment portfolios and they’re doing even better than you. Suddenly, you’re starting to question if that 2.5% MER is really worth it. Enter the ETF.

ETFs are actually similar to mutual funds in that they also represent baskets of assets. The main difference is that they are more focused, less balanced, less managed, and therefore have lower MERs. Maybe before, you were buying a single mutual fund with all your savings and it was doing everything for you. By switching to ETFs, now maybe you have to buy 3-5 different ETFs to achieve the same diversification that your one mutual fund gave you. So you have to do a bit more work yourself. On the other hand, you’re saving money now because while before you were paying a MER of 2.5%, now you’re only paying 0.2%. Your 4.5% profit based on 7% return has now become a 6.8% profit in exchange for you doing more of the work yourself.

But there is another catch, and it represents another cost to you. Recall that ETF stands for Exchange Traded Funds. That means they are traded on a stock exchange, like the NYSE or the TSX. How do you as an investor access those exchanges? You need a brokerage account. Getting brokerage accounts is easy enough. There are several to choose from. But the catch is you usually need to pay a commission for each trade. There may be some newer brokerages that have reduced commissions but in general in Canada the going rate is about $9-10 a trade. It might not seem like much, but think about the investor who tries to save $500 a month. Once a month, he goes to his brokerage and has to buy 3 ETFs (one for domestic stocks, one for foreign stocks, one for bonds). Once a month, he has to pay $30 in trading commissions. That’s 6% of his investment amount going to commission. And $30 a month can add up. Clearly, ETFs aren’t for everybody. This is why if you’re just starting off, mutual funds might be a better option for you since they’re less work.

(Worth mentioning: some brokerages will offer a list of commission-free ETFs. If you pick a brokerage that offers one and can come up with a nice asset mix, then the worry about commissions goes away.)

The other thing to keep in mind if investing with ETFs is that at least once a year you need to re-balance your portfolio. What does this mean? Well, let’s say you’re shooting for 70% stocks and 30% bonds. At the end of the year, let’s say your stock ETFs have outperformed your bond ETFs (the value of your stock ETFs has gone up by more than the value of your bond ETFs has).  The stocks in your portfolio now represent 80% of its value and the value of your bonds is therefore 20%. Now you need to buy relatively more of your bond ETF to get back to 70-30% and have things properly balanced. Again, this is something that the managers of mutual funds will do for you which helps to justify their larger MERs.

Individual stock and bond trading

You are confident in your abilities to pick a stock based on sound market principles. You know how to craft a well diversified portfolio to protect yourself against risk and maximize your return. You’re pretty sure you can beat the market. Congratulations! You’re far better at this than most people are. You are probably also not reading this blog entry right now. If this doesn’t describe you, then you should not do this. Stock trading is a great way to go broke and/or turn yourself off investing. Do not do this.

Final thoughts

One thing you’ll notice I haven’t done is recommend any particular funds or ETFs or assets of any kind. There are plenty of online resources for you to pick investments you think are worth buying. I like Canadian Couch Potato, so feel free to give him a try. But the online investing community is quite large and it’s typically pretty easy to find recommendations.

Everyone has their own things to consider. We all have to look at all factors. Why are you investing? When do you want access to your money? Are you looking for a way to reduce your tax bill right now, or is it not a huge problem for you? And crucially how much work are you willing to put into managing your investments? Hopefully for anyone who is able to answer all these questions for themselves, this blog post has been helpful. If not, feel free to ask me questions in the comments, via email, Twitter, or however you wish.

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Wait, what is this blog about? Career or early retirement?

It’s about both.

Good talk. Thanks for coming by.

Alright, I’ll elaborate…

It’s a valid question. For anyone who is following along, you would be forgiven for asking. “This guy starts off talking about retiring early, then spends a bunch of time talking work and career… what gives?” Fair point.

Let me clarify: the ultimate goal for me of course is early retirement. In order to consider retiring, one needs enough savings on which to comfortably live. In order to accumulate savings, one needs to maximize income and/or minimize expenses. The only way to save is to spend less than you earn. Retiring early implies you need to save more, or put a different way, to accumulate savings faster. There are only two ways to save faster: make more, or spend less. Or both.

If you don’t have enough saved yet to retire, you still have to work a while longer. This is the boat in which I find myself. I have to continue working for a few years more at least, but of course the hope is to make “a few” as few as possible. So given that I have to work, now I have some choices to make. I could choose to focus on earning as much money as possible right now, so I can ramp up that savings rate. This is the approach employed by J.P. of The Money Habit and it’s how she managed to retire at 28 (she is much better at this early retirement thing than me… or most people even). The other option is to decide that since I have to keep working for now, why not spend all that time doing something I at least enjoy, or find engaging?

I have worked jobs (yes, plural) where I was miserable. I spent most of my working days bored. When I did have work to do, I often felt the work was menial, or tedious, and largely pointless. In short, I regularly felt like I was wasting my life. Not a nice feeling. Because I have spent a lot of my working years not liking my job (and once again, I know I’m not special; I realize how common this is), my tendency is to focus on the second option, finding enjoyable or interesting work.

Don’t get me wrong, option one is great. Make the most money possible? Who wouldn’t sign up for that? But of course if it were that simple everybody would be doing it. It’s not like they’re handing out super high paying jobs on the street corner to whoever wants one. There’s a reason why we don’t all have the same high paying jobs. We have different talents and different interests. Option two is about aligning our talents with our interests. Option two can be hard enough.

What is retirement anyway?

For anyone who is familiar with the growing number of FIRE (financial independence, retire early) blogs out there, you’ll understand that retiring early does not necessarily imply that we spend our days lounging on the beach, drink in hand, and never lifting a finger ever again. If this is how you plan to spend your retirement, then good for you! Sounds fantastic. I just hope you have enough saved to spend the rest of your days living like this, because it sounds like a good way to go through a lot of money fast. We should all be so lucky.

For those not familiar with the concept, who are new to the FIRE approach, let me break it down for you. There’s a great old Simpsons episode where Homer quits his job at the nuclear power plant so he can fulfill his dream of working at a bowling alley. You could make the argument that for all intents and purposes, Homer retired when he did this. (The analogy doesn’t quite fit because in this particular episode Homer was still dependent on the income he earned from the bowling alley, but it’s close enough for illustrative purposes and it lets me incorporate a Simpsons reference.) If you separate your life into your working years and your retirement years, then your working years are spent working because you have to. In our working years, our primary concern is paying the bills and supporting ourselves or our families. If you have enough money saved that you can live off your savings, but you’re doing some kind of work because you want to, then whether or not you’re earning a paycheque doing it, you are effectively retired. In this case, you’re working by choice, presumably because you enjoy the work.

Now, imagine that there is work you can do 1) that will pay well (or well enough), 2)  that you find interesting and engaging, 3) that aligns with your values, and 4) that will give you good experience to do that thing you love during retirement. Sounds like a good idea, right? Maybe you can work toward a career today that could help you pursue a passion during retirement? Now that sounds a lot better than being miserable for 40 hours a week if you ask me.

I would love to be able to retire tomorrow, but it’s going to take me longer than that. In the meantime, I’d rather not dread going into work. I’m not an authority on careers by any stretch of the imagination. But over the years I’ve come across some good advice. And I’m happy to pass it along when I can. I also have made many mistakes, and I’ll tell you about some of those too, so hopefully you don’t have to make the same ones. Ultimately this is meant to be a space to chronicle my efforts in minimizing my remaining working years. Part of that involves making those remaining years bearable, or better yet, enjoyable. I’ll keep you up to speed on how that is working out for me.

 

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Work: Where do I want to go, and how do I get there?

In my last post, I outlined the things that I think are important to have in a job. I also took some time to explain why I am currently not terribly happy in the job that I have now, based on those criteria. If you haven’t read the last post, feel free to go catch up now if you like.

That explains how I got here. Essentially it says that I am not happy with the status quo. It provides a good explanation of what’s wrong. What I do not want.

So what do I want? Great question. After all, a map is only useful if you know where you are going.

Well in that last post, I introduced a three point scale that I use to evaluate jobs and defined a “good job” as having a score of 2/3 or better. Once again, the three criteria are 1) interesting work, 2) good money, and 3) good people. Let me use that three point scale as a means to frame the discussion and guide me on to the next chapter of my professional life.

  1. Interesting work. “Interesting” is an adjective that is in the eye of the beholder. To be honest, I’m the type of person who can find just about anything interesting, for a little while at least. And therein lies one of my current problems; I’ve just been doing the same thing for too long. Sometimes you just need a change, and that is where I am at now. Even if I were working on something I found absolutely fascinating, there’s a good chance that after a while, I would grow tired of it and need to look to something new. Of course, that’s not the current reality for me. My current reality is yet another case that I think is all too common: I am not doing the type of work that I want to do.
  2. Good money. I’m actually going to modify this one for the purpose of this exercise. I am going to invoke the old axiom that time = money and then apply the law of transitivity to make this item good money and/or time. Recall that I am currently a commuter, going from the ‘burbs to the city and back during a typical workday. Well this is another area where I also think I could benefit from a change. Would I be willing to sacrifice a little money for a lot more time with my family? Absolutely. (The challenge might be adequately defining “a little”.) If I could find a similar job, or even the exact same job I have now, keep my salary the same but ditch the commute, would I take that job? I definitely would. That wouldn’t fix any issues with item #1 but it would still be a big improvement. This area here is a big one for me.
  3. Good people. Hello, uncertainty. This one is hard to know ahead of time. Say you like the people you work with, and you’re considering a new job. What will your new coworkers be like? Well, the best you can really do is try and determine what it would be like to work with your interviewers. But it’s hard to really get a sense over the course of an interview or two of what it’s like to work with someone. You can try asking some good, well thought out questions during your interviews to get a sense of what the company culture is like, or the work environment, or generally what sort of place it might be. But even then, there’s only so much you can tell. A lot of this area is just guessing. Seems as though we’ll have to concede that this item has way too many unknowns and conclude that we must leave #3 largely to chance. The good news is that if I were to rank the three criteria in terms of their importance to me,  #3 would come in third. Your mileage may vary.

Let’s recap, working backwards. #3 is largely out of my hands. We might even be tempted to relegate it from “must have” to “nice to have” status.

#2 is also simple; my clear preference would be to work closer to home, and I’m willing to forego a little bit of money (while still being able to provide for my family and increase my savings) if I can gain back some of time time I spend traveling. This is one potential goal: find work close to home. The thought of leaving work and being home in 10 minutes as opposed to 90 minutes is… a very nice thought.

That leaves #1 as the interesting item on our list. I feel that there’s a bunch to unpack here, so bear with me for a bit…

I have established that in the most general terms, what I want is to do work that is more interesting to me. Or at a minimum to do something different for a change. It sounds like a very simple goal. So why haven’t I managed to do this yet?

Well, how can one achieve that goal? Maybe you think the most obvious answer is “find a new job”. Or maybe you’ve noticed that there is another option I haven’t touched on yet, and that is “transition to a different, more interesting role where you currently work”. Fortunately, there is at least one thing I can do that will help in both endeavours, that will make me a better employee to both current and prospective employer: learning, training and skill development.

Look, there are lots of reasons why your current place of employment might not be giving you the type of work you really want. Some are out of your hands. For example, sometimes managers can get protective of their headcount and they’ll do whatever they can to keep you where you are, whether you want to be there or not, for fear of not having the personnel on hand for them to meet their objectives. You might find yourself in this position and thinking to yourself “yeah, but I’m bored so much of the time, it seems like they have more than enough help to get the job done.” Sure, that might be true now. But what about tomorrow? Your manager might be thinking “what happens if things get really busy and I don’t have approval to hire more help when that time comes?” In this case, escape might be a bigger challenge.

Along the same lines, you might have a clear idea of where else within your company you would like to work, but that group might not be interested. They might be fully staffed and not need any more help. Or maybe they do need  help but in an area where you don’t have the knowledge or skills to provide for what they’re looking. Well if that’s the case, then that’s something that you do have some control over.

Your place of business might not think you are qualified to do the type of work  you really want. So it’s your job to show them otherwise. If you’re missing a crucial skill, then go and learn that skill.

We live in a bit of a golden age, in terms of access to knowledge. There are so many ways to learn so many things. There are websites and blogs, not to mention communities dedicated to just about any topic. There are multiple online learning options to pick up skills of basically any kind. Personally, I like Coursera. Coursera partners with learning institutions like colleges and universities to deliver instruction on all sorts of things. Seriously, go and check out their offerings and you might be surprised at the breadth of their offerings. They also will provide certificates of completion to help prove that you have acquired the skills in question. I’m fairly certain that you can even take some of their courses for free, although to get the certificate and have full access to all learning materials you typically need to pay, but in my experience their prices can be quite reasonable. For most of the courses that interest me, the going rate seems to be about $50-70 per course, although I’m sure there is a range. Sometimes you can take a “specialization” program, which is a collection of courses. I have seen specializations with as few as 3 courses and as many as 10. I am currently on my second specialization program and Mrs. CIQY is working on her first.

The other obstacle is that your manager might not even know that you aren’t doing the work you most want to be doing. In that case of course, it’s your job to let them know. Good managers will want to help you achieve your career goals, though in reality their hands might be somewhat tied. In any case, I would actually urge a word of caution here: if you’re going to approach your boss or manager and tell them that you’re not happy in your current role, tread lightly and choose your words carefully. I have gotten burned by this in the past, and it cost me my job. It’s an interesting story but I’ll save it for a future blog post.

Bringing it back to my current situation, I have told my manager that I have some other interests that I would really like to explore. And I have made him aware that I’m using some of my downtime and my personal time to further develop the skills that those interests would require. So far he is being very supportive, which is great. He is making inquiries into potential projects I might be able to help with that would be in line with my goals. At the same time, he has been careful to let me know that he doesn’t want to part with me completely. He is still responsible for deliveries on our current project after all, and I respect that. But even a partial switch at this point would be welcome. For starters, it would give me that elusive change I have been needing. It would be more experience on something different, and that at least always looks good on a resume. And even if I can’t find anything better at a different company, might as well make the best of a bad situation right? I don’t know about you, but I would rather be busy than bored. Busy is good. Busy doesn’t have enough time to grumble about being unhappy at work.

But by taking some initiative and picking up some new skills that I would like to use at work, I’m making myself a better employee all around, whether I stay or go. It’s one of many things I can do to try and dig my way out of this hole. Worst case scenario, it keeps me busy. And like I said, busy is good.

It doesn’t help with #2 though. Ultimately I do think that my first choice at this stage in life is to find work closer to home. I want more time to spend with my current and future kids and The Missus.

But I haven’t shut the door on making things better at my current gig. I like to keep options open.

Fortunately, I have found at least one thing I can do that can help me with both. And it’s something I enjoy too. If you’re not happy at work and you’re the kind of person who enjoys learning things like I do (do you miss school? I miss school) then I highly recommend taking action. Upgrade your skills or learn a new one. Read blogs or books or take an online course. Look around at Coursera or some other online learning site and I’m sure you’ll find something you’d enjoy that might help you out. Especially if you’re ready to embark on a completely new career, I think it’s a great place to start and give you any new skills that you might need.

I have had to accept the fact that because I stayed too long in an easy job, my skills have gotten stale. The only way out for me, whether at my current company or a new one, is to freshen up those skills. I have started the freshening, and I actually find it really fun and rewarding. Hopefully this effort will pay dividends in the form of me finding interesting work close to home so I can spend more time with my family and less time in transit. But even if it “only” makes me better at my current job, isn’t that a step in the right direction?