![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
No resolutions, but...
Jan. 3rd, 2021 11:52 amI do have intentions. I took December off from the paid kind of work and I'm getting everything back in order, which entails a certain amount of planning.
I'm gonna talk to my various consulting-flavoured folks and get that back on track. It's not especially off-track other than an intentional month off. But tomorrow's Monday so it's a good day to do that. That'll let me do more planning - does that prospective Ruby project happen, or am I looking for two-to-threeish days a week of other Ruby consulting work? Either's fine but I need to get started.
I've been doing DGD and MUD-related work for a couple of fellows at perfectly decent pay lately. I plan to keep it up at somewhere around 1 day/week. Sounds like there will be a lot of it at the beginning of the year and more of a maintenance pace later. Not a bad thing, and kinda the opposite of the possible Ruby contract, which would be perfect.
I'm intentionally mothballing/evergreening my product work. The books and class are still there and you can still buy them, but people are going to do so at a rate that makes me... Eh, maybe $5k a year, or $10k if I'm lucky? Something in that neighbourhood. It's not a lot of work, so that's nice. But adding lots of work to it doesn't significantly increase it and hasn't since about 2013. It's a hobby, not a job. Related: I have a podcast to finish editing. It has never made me any money and presumably never will. But I'll finish it.
I'll keep up some Ruby blog posts for fastruby.io. They're great publicity for me personally, they're happy with things I'd otherwise love to do anyway and I charge them less than my normal hourly rate. So it works out very well all around. That's been about a post a month so far, and I don't think it'll go up from there.
I was hired years ago to track progress of Ruby 3.0 and its performance. Ruby 3.0 is now an existing release and so there will be work for that. Some of it for FastRuby.io, some of it just on my own blog. But that's one more thing to do. It'll be good - I'm happy for the closure. I tend to work on projects more than I work for companies. This has been an excellent long-term project.
All of that is work. On the liabilities front, we have realised that we're spending more money in Scotland than we expected, though still not nearly as much as California. And we've realised that our 529 plans have limited use in the United Kingdom, so we're losing a big chunk of kid future-money. Also we added a kid, so the total should be higher. So yeah, that means we want to save another $150k-$200k (ish) in the next 10-15 years. Another $10k-$20k yearly is very doable. But that's a good argument for me going back to high-paying work in the next few years. Anything we can put away now gets to accrue interest for 10 years.
I'm also a little worried about UK taxes. In 3-6 months we'll know what our first low-income year of UK taxes looks like and what we need to change. In 15-18 months we'll know (we hope) what a high-paid year of UK taxes costs us. But right now we're guessing, not properly budgeting. That's a very important thing to know and we don't know it yet.
I'm gonna talk to my various consulting-flavoured folks and get that back on track. It's not especially off-track other than an intentional month off. But tomorrow's Monday so it's a good day to do that. That'll let me do more planning - does that prospective Ruby project happen, or am I looking for two-to-threeish days a week of other Ruby consulting work? Either's fine but I need to get started.
I've been doing DGD and MUD-related work for a couple of fellows at perfectly decent pay lately. I plan to keep it up at somewhere around 1 day/week. Sounds like there will be a lot of it at the beginning of the year and more of a maintenance pace later. Not a bad thing, and kinda the opposite of the possible Ruby contract, which would be perfect.
I'm intentionally mothballing/evergreening my product work. The books and class are still there and you can still buy them, but people are going to do so at a rate that makes me... Eh, maybe $5k a year, or $10k if I'm lucky? Something in that neighbourhood. It's not a lot of work, so that's nice. But adding lots of work to it doesn't significantly increase it and hasn't since about 2013. It's a hobby, not a job. Related: I have a podcast to finish editing. It has never made me any money and presumably never will. But I'll finish it.
I'll keep up some Ruby blog posts for fastruby.io. They're great publicity for me personally, they're happy with things I'd otherwise love to do anyway and I charge them less than my normal hourly rate. So it works out very well all around. That's been about a post a month so far, and I don't think it'll go up from there.
I was hired years ago to track progress of Ruby 3.0 and its performance. Ruby 3.0 is now an existing release and so there will be work for that. Some of it for FastRuby.io, some of it just on my own blog. But that's one more thing to do. It'll be good - I'm happy for the closure. I tend to work on projects more than I work for companies. This has been an excellent long-term project.
All of that is work. On the liabilities front, we have realised that we're spending more money in Scotland than we expected, though still not nearly as much as California. And we've realised that our 529 plans have limited use in the United Kingdom, so we're losing a big chunk of kid future-money. Also we added a kid, so the total should be higher. So yeah, that means we want to save another $150k-$200k (ish) in the next 10-15 years. Another $10k-$20k yearly is very doable. But that's a good argument for me going back to high-paying work in the next few years. Anything we can put away now gets to accrue interest for 10 years.
I'm also a little worried about UK taxes. In 3-6 months we'll know what our first low-income year of UK taxes looks like and what we need to change. In 15-18 months we'll know (we hope) what a high-paid year of UK taxes costs us. But right now we're guessing, not properly budgeting. That's a very important thing to know and we don't know it yet.
