Life Updates

 Day dreaming Tulsa Remote

So in my weekend clicking, an article on CNBC Money led me to a program called Tulsa Remote! I wish I had known about such things years ago when I was looking for my next move. 

With Tulsa Remote, they pay you $10k to make the move to Tulsa and work remotely. I would've jumped on that had I been given the chance. I've been looking for reasons to leave NC, and a $10k incentive is literally all I needed. 

I applied anyway, but I didn't take the application seriously, so not sure what my odds are. The more I looked into it and watched a couple YouTube videos of people who did it- it is literally what I'm looking for. 

Nothing about Tulsa itself appeals to me, but the idea of a built in community and events is what I've essentially been trying to DIY myself. Yeah, I'm at a solid place at work with a lot of downtime and not much to do.

These shared experiences are where I've made friends in the past - college, school, sports, extracurricular activities. After young adulthood, that kind of stops. This program would be a super injection of that.

Anyway, I got really excited but being unsure of my chances quickly tried to erase it from my mind. Luckily, with my Older Brain, I'm able to recover a lot faster from things and not feel the loss as long.

But I did love the math problem and solving for some of the planning.

The Big questions were:

- Would I do it? YES

- When would I move? Anytime, no time felt better than the other except maybe the middle of summer (because of heat and doing manual labor), so I guess before then. 

- Car or no car? Initially, I thought of life without a car and being in a walkable area, that's the dream. But I thought it would be nice to have the car if I wanted to explore. I could ship it to Tulsa or do a weeklong trip as it's a 16 hour drive. Maybe my brother could drive it. If I came back to NC to check on my house, I definitely need a car for that, but I did a quick search and that would be about $300/wk which is manageable. But I could also rent a car in Tulsa for weeks that I needed it. I think the default would be just to take the car. Because who wants to be carrying groceries around in the dead of winter. Not I. 

- The biggest question - What to do about my house? The first thing that came to my mind is $10k is about the exact number I need to pay for my NC house annually - mortgage, HOA, utilities. So that would take care of that. And I'd be fine to pay for my Tulsa Housing even at the increased cost because my salary can afford it. 

- But do I just leave my house unattended? Rent it out for a year? This got me. I think I was thinking I'd probably come back every 3 months to check on it. But I'd love to have a family member live in it for a year at like 500- 600 rent.  This level of optimizing is where I'm stuck. Don't have a real plan, but I like knowing I have the $10k to cover the cost if I could not rent it out. 

- Would I sell it? Definitely not. The reason I stay is the reason I won't sell - the cost of living. As much as this is not my dream house or location, it's my very affordable home base. And based on current information, I'd return to NC after the year in Tulsa. So it wouldn't make sense to sell the house. 

- Where would I live in Tulsa? I think part of Old Me did want to have that luxury apartment living and not have some cheap shabby temporary place with furniture and also #softlife, I would opt for Landing Standby or use a furnished rental. So I think depending on what my budget allowed, I would give myself a bigger budget to live somewhere nicer and do all the young adult things - like getting my hair done, and going out and spending money. All the things that didn't make sense when I started working and couldn't mentally justify the expense. 

From a budget perspective, my 401k is officially maxed out as of March 15, and my baseline goal would be just to set my savings to save another 12k for the year, and I would carve out a budget from the rest. 

If I was truly enjoying myself, I think it would be fun to spend more money and have a truly #softlife for a year. 

Anyway, this was a fun thought exercise and I think the life experience would be even better.

But Enlightened me is not going to be devastated if it doesn't happen. 

Turns out there a few more programs like that. And there's one more with the $10k incentive in WV, but somehow that doesn't seem as appealing, but neither did this until I watched some YouTube videos. You know I'm a sucker for marketing. 

401k Contributions

Something I read on Go Curry Cracker got me thinking about the aftertax contributions. The big boon is yes saving for retirement (after age 65), but also the tax advantage of letting the earnings grow tax free (#megabackdoorRoth). 

I remembered that that's really only going to benefit me for retirement after age 65. Not even on my best day do I hope to live that long. So, I think it would be better to just shovel that money to my brokerage to make it easier to access.

Psychologically, I worry about having too many decisions to make with it. To combat that, I think I'll just have to set up an auto deposit from payroll straight to my brokerage (vs to my bank and then auto-transfer over). And just really trying to stick with keeping everything in an index fund. 

So yeah, we'll see for my next check-in with myself.

Another soft week at work.

This is awesome. There were some tears on my birthday to be sure. And a few on Sunday. It just all kind of sucks, but then I wake up to a light work week and I can't be that mad at it. 

Dan

Part of me wants to keep up the correspondence in a self-injurious way. Part of me wants to be done. The only reason this even bubbled to the top is because Gmail sent an email that the number was expiring, so I felt pressed to make a decision. That has turned into this. To be fair, I had been thinking of contacting him. But that doesn't mean the affirmative was the right choice. I'm torn on what I want to do because Old Feelings keep getting in the way. The most emotionally cost-effective thing is to do nothing. At the very least until I'm sure. It's not life or death, like Mean Brain wants me to think. There's no wrong answer here. And it's a pretty long game with an unknown outcome. Emotionally, I can't afford it right now. I need a lot more emotional income to offset this emotional expense.  It's not a good value, emotionally for me right now. 

Business Taxes

Grr, my colleague shared her income taxes with me and I forgot to claim my "business" when I tried to dabble in shoe resales. Based on how she did it, I could've claimed my travel from last year as a business expense because I talked about it during those trips. Grrr. More money lost. Oh well. 

Keeping On

Overall, I think March is going well as a take it easy month. I have another week before my next kickoff so I bought Discovery Plus; gonna get some steak and lobster; watch some shows, eat my snacks and do some mathing to pass the time. 

I don't even want to get out of this bed today, so we'll see. Since I have meetings tomorrow, maybe I'll be more motivated. Who knows.