Posted by Canadian Dream on January 20, 2012
A large part of my financial success over the last three years has been the fact I’ve been working more than one job. When you have multiple streams of income coming into a household saving more just gets easier as those incomes keep going up. After all my basic spending hasn’t increased all that much despite the fact I’ve been earning more.
Yet 2012 marks a big decision point for me going forward. Do I try and run again for re-election this fall as a school board trustee or let the term close out and focus more on writing? After much internal debate over the holiday season and planning I’ve made a big decision.
First off, I should provide some context for this. Let me first say, being a politician at any level is likely one of the hardest jobs there is. If you do your job right, things work well and you likely don’t get one ounce of credit. Then other times you do the right thing in your mind and you might even come out looking like a villain in the media. Regardless of that, you also get to miss a lot of time with my family attending meetings. Not to mention you never had all the facts and frankly you often aren’t a expert in that area at all when you make a decision. In a nut shell, there are significantly easier ways for me to earn money with a lot less stress. In fact I can fill out one form at my day job and get an instant 10% raise for less time than I put into my board work. So the following decision isn’t about the money.
Yet despite the public abuse at times, I feel like I did get some things done over my last 2.5 years on the board like finally get a focus on student achievement and I still have things I would like to finish. As such I will step up and try to run for a second term this fall during the next election. Even if this means a four year term this time, I will to serve if the public will have me.
Posted by Gwen on October 19, 2011
This is a guest post from Gwen in Ontario, who is 39 years old with a grown daughter, and is trying to rebuild her retirement dream just 20 years too late for early retirement.
Just after I signed for my mortgage, I ran into a serious cash flow problem. Some of my expenses went up (such as car insurance) that I didn’t expect when I was figuring out if I could afford to buy my condo. I had already put in a request for a salary review and was waiting for the outcome of that. In the interim, my net pay covered my monthly bills not including food or any other “luxuries”. So I did the only thing I could think of to solve the problem, I took a second job.
In my day job, I rarely talk to the public, instead I deal with paper and numbers. In my “second” job, I’m on the front lines, customer service at a sod farm. The increase in hours that I worked and the money stress left me utterly exhausted. This 40 year old body cannot handle 65 hour weeks like it could when it was 20. Sunday was my day off. I slept, ate, rested, napped, any thing to recharge my batteries for another long week. I got through it by reminding myself that it was short term, and by watching my emergency fund get replenished.
Being a seasonal business, the hours they needed me to work decreased at the end of June. I worked for 6 hours on Saturdays, and no evenings during the week. I cannot say I was disappointed. My main job income had been increased (in my industry we are lucky if we get an increase once every 5 years). While I still have to watch every dollar, if I’m frugal with groceries, I can put extra payments on my debt, and not panic when I discover an unexpected expense (more on plumbing problems later).
At the end of September, the second job didn’t need me at all any more, and has asked if I’ll come back next year. This got me thinking about other times I’ve done the two job life, and the differences between then and now.
A plan needs to be in place. Previously when I picked up a second job, I found we would eat restaurant or store prepared food more, we would fight more about chores not getting done, and I always felt like I needed a holiday after I stopped (get rested, or rewarded for my efforts). But there was never any “more” money in the bank at the end to pay for that holiday, or for anything else.
This time, there was no “extras”. No eating out or “day-vacations”. The boyfriend helped wherever he could, whether it was making meals, doing my home chores for me, and generally making sure that I could put my full attention and energy to making that extra money, and keeping it. I feel that having a plan and support are crucial to the success of working extra to help get ahead.
Will I do the second job again next spring? I think I will (providing my support is there again), but I will definitely not work quite as many hours, maybe just Saturdays and 3 nights a week.
Have you worked a second job? Any tips to help make it successful?
Posted by Canadian Dream on August 4, 2011
Dear Reader,
I apologize for the drop in the frequency of posts and the quality of my writing for the last month or so. I was little overwhelmed from the new day job and really needed a solid break from everything, which I did manage to do during my vacation in July. Unfortunately this blog got the short end of the stick during it. By quirk of fate I was also reading a few books regarding life planning and doing lots of thinking about what do I want from life. I was defining what is working, what isn’t working and what would I change next.
So while I’m not totally done that process yet I am getting closer to defining what I do want to keep and this blog is firmly in that camp. So while I get back into the routine of writing more and paying attention to the quality of the writing I thought this would be a good time to ask you for your opinion.
What would you like to see from this blog? Please feel free to name topics, posts you would like to see an update to, excel tools or even short ebook ideas. Heck I’m even open to the idea I should just finish switching this blog over to a group blog by picking up a few more regular writers since we are half way there already. Frankly feel free to ask for the moon if you like, I may not be able to do it, but you can ask for it. Or if you find it easier feel free to outline what isn’t working for you on this blog. I’m open to any and all feedback that is constructive. You can either leave a comment on this post or send me an email at candian.dream.free.at.45[at]gmail.com.
Thanks again for your patience during this period.
Tim
