State of the CZ: Finances
Financial state is pretty good, but still on a bit of an edge. This year thanks to Obama's incredible economy I made about 120k in the markets, which is nice, that money stays in retirement. Likewise I did a fair bit of work on bitcoin miners over the year, enough to open a SEP IRA for the side business so I can put that into the long term savings pool. Job is good, I have a degree now (woot!) and I should be fairly stable in my profession (security).
However there are bad clouds on the horizon, I have records of my finances going back to 1994, and I've seen what happens to money when Republicans are in power. Stupid republicans like Bush II are even worse, and Trump is shaping up to be about as stupid as W was, so this could be another 4-8 years of no growth, no real profits, and a nice recession at the end.
2008 was a disaster in terms of meltdown, everything including Gold tanked. People lost a lot of jobs, homes, lives, etc. Granted I was able to keep my job (although it prodded me into security), my house (low mortgage), and my life (limited debt overall) but still it was pretty seriously fucked up. When Obama came into office I went all-in because I knew Dems were better on the economy and profited. So what now?
Well, for starters I moved about 20% of my worth into cash for the moment. Time to rebalance my portfolio into a "crappy economy as usual" instead of a "damn we have responsible people running things". Likewise I'm maintaining my gold and bitcoin positions, plans are to sell those first if things really go bad.
More concerning is my career: Aside from the fact that these are supposed to be the most prouctive years for my retirement, I feel stuck. Discovery didn't work out with the huge amounts of money, I'm back to normal amounts of money, but more importantly my line of work depends on people giving a fuck about not being ripped off. If we switch to a government which *PROMOTES* people getting ripped off, then companies may think "why bother with security, we're all going to get ripped off anyway and there are no real consequences with Trumpers in power".
So working for security in companies might not be the best long term move. It might be better to get involved in more.... boutique lines of work where strong security actually matters. Will need to revive contacts and look into this further, at times like this it's good to have one's own company to fall back on if needed.
So overall finances are good with dark clouds on the horizon. Next I need to figure out how to pay for college for the kids, as the option of enslaving them to debt is not one I am very comfortable with. I didn't spend 17 years raising these kids to become someone else's slaves.
However there are bad clouds on the horizon, I have records of my finances going back to 1994, and I've seen what happens to money when Republicans are in power. Stupid republicans like Bush II are even worse, and Trump is shaping up to be about as stupid as W was, so this could be another 4-8 years of no growth, no real profits, and a nice recession at the end.
2008 was a disaster in terms of meltdown, everything including Gold tanked. People lost a lot of jobs, homes, lives, etc. Granted I was able to keep my job (although it prodded me into security), my house (low mortgage), and my life (limited debt overall) but still it was pretty seriously fucked up. When Obama came into office I went all-in because I knew Dems were better on the economy and profited. So what now?
Well, for starters I moved about 20% of my worth into cash for the moment. Time to rebalance my portfolio into a "crappy economy as usual" instead of a "damn we have responsible people running things". Likewise I'm maintaining my gold and bitcoin positions, plans are to sell those first if things really go bad.
More concerning is my career: Aside from the fact that these are supposed to be the most prouctive years for my retirement, I feel stuck. Discovery didn't work out with the huge amounts of money, I'm back to normal amounts of money, but more importantly my line of work depends on people giving a fuck about not being ripped off. If we switch to a government which *PROMOTES* people getting ripped off, then companies may think "why bother with security, we're all going to get ripped off anyway and there are no real consequences with Trumpers in power".
So working for security in companies might not be the best long term move. It might be better to get involved in more.... boutique lines of work where strong security actually matters. Will need to revive contacts and look into this further, at times like this it's good to have one's own company to fall back on if needed.
So overall finances are good with dark clouds on the horizon. Next I need to figure out how to pay for college for the kids, as the option of enslaving them to debt is not one I am very comfortable with. I didn't spend 17 years raising these kids to become someone else's slaves.