Golden Handcuffs

Coffee
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I was having similar thoughts. When I was single, I couldn’t wait to retire as I had so many things I wanted to do. However, having had young kids for 6 years now, I lost contact with all my friends and had no time for hobbies for the last few years.

On top of that, of course, is that I am more financially risk averse as I have to take care of kids and not just myself.

But now I find myself in a strange situation:

  • Professionally, I stopped ‘climbing the ladder’ once the kids arrived and so found myself in an interesting spot: senior enough that I have a lot of independence and don’t have to deal with a lot of crap, yet not so senior that my head is above the parapet and have a lot of demands put upon me. Since I’m not looking for advancement, I’m not a threat to anyone and so avoid all office politics (and being very introverted I also avoid contact with most colleagues in general).
  • On top of that, I pared down my responsibilities to things that I can do fairly easily. As you can probably tell from the about of time I spend on here, I can do my job with just a few hours each day, leaving me with a lot of spare time (I don’t say ‘free time’ as I still need to be in front of a computer and be available at short notice during office hours)
  • On the face of it, it is a sweet set-up as I am pulling a decent 6 figure salary with no stress and very little work. I feel I’d be a bit of an idiot to give that up. Yet, on the other hand, once I hit my number, it still would be a ‘waste of my time’ to sit here, even if I’m paid handsomely for it.
  • The other difficulty is that even if I had kept up with friends, they’d all be at work during working hours, so the working hours that I would liberate with quitting couldn’t be spent with friends or family (as kids are at school) for the most part.
  • Maybe an answer is to find productive things I could do during working hours e.g. learning a language on the computer etc..

Is anyone else in a similar situation? How have you handled it?

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I’m not sure if your kids are to blame. I know some people who cultivate their hobbies despite having kids, and myself, I do not have any real time-consuming hobbies despite not having kids. For sure when I was single, I would devote more time to time-consuming hobbies like gaming or trying out some new tech. I guess if I wasn’t in a relationship now, I would be playing with the LLMs and learning what each shiny new released product can do. But for years now it just seems inconsiderate to lock myself up in front of the PC in the evenings and on the weekends.

I could also describe my situation as such. I am a senior developer who you can rent, so I do not hold any high position at any big firm. They just borrow me for a limited time. There is no ladder to climb.

Indeed. These are the golden handcuffs. Millions of people would kill themselves to have our jobs. When I read how 1000 devs apply for 1 position, it’s a huge reality check for me, and the niche I am in, and the conditions I am able to get.

Yeah. You’d need to find similarly FIREd friends who also have nothing to do on a monday morning :smiley: . Your wife probably is also at work, which means you can’t just get in your car and drive wherever you like. One, she will be pissed and two, it sucks to go alone.

For me, I would like a job where I can be fully remote and never have to come to the office. Right now, even if they only require 1-2 days per week, I can’t just be anywhere, have to be near Zurich.

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It is not so much a matter of blaming kids, but after work, I basically do kids stuff until it is time for them to go to bed and then I have free time around 8pm until, say 10pm. For a while, I’d try to make more time by going to bed in the early hours, but I wasn’t really able to do anything productive during the time from 10pm and early hours and wasted it with mindless scrolling.

So it is really that I proritized time with kids between end of work and 8pm. Plus they take up the whole weekend.

Exactly, this is one thing that makes me nervous about quitting. I see reports about hiring slowing down massively - partly due to AI impact where companies might not necessarily firing people due to AI (in my company they are) but simply using the efficiency gains to stop hiring. I was talking to a guy who started his own software company and he told me with AI, his 20 man team are now doing what would have needed 200 developers (I guess in reality, there wouldn’t have been an additional 180 jobs, as AI makes uneconomical jobs possible - but for sure there should have been some additional jobs that AI is taking).

On top of that, I found a niche within a niche and if I quit, I would never be able to get the same cushy deal that I have, so I have to be sure before I take that one-way ticket.

Yeah, my 2 best friends now live in different countries so not easy to meet-up. And my wife still works and doesn’t want to quit for another 10 years.

Office is not a big deal for me, it is only 20 minutes away and I only need to be there 3 days a week. When I’m there, I have my own office so can just close the door and not interact with anybody.

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Correct. With tech improvement, on one hand you need fewer labor to accomplish current tasks, but on the other hand, since the price goes does, now more customers can afford this service. Plus, new jobs emerge that didn’t exist in the past. The pie grows bigger, thankfully. Hopefully, this will still apply even with AI.

Same for me.

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I don’t understand if you are sad or what.

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Are we re-discovering midlife crisis?
I’ll see myself out.

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Not really am or was your situation in about the past two decades, but I’ll share my experience anyhow as the “golden handcuffs” topic title caught my eye.

I was voluntarily wearing my golden handcuffs at Hoolie [164.37 USD▼ -1.12 (-0.68%) today)] probably for … hrm, maybe about my last two or three or maybe even four years before finally quitting.

Maybe where my account separates from yours:

  • The Golden Handcuffs were Effing heavy. :money_bag:
    They weighed high six figures in my latest couple of tax years there, amounting to 7 figures if not selling those stock grants immediately when they vested in a market where tech only ever goes up (does anyone remember?)
    My tax bill alone was 50% higher than my current entire taxable income.
  • My job was in the stiff winds of climbing the ladder.
    In the first decade at Hoolie, this was actually rewarding as merit trumped politics.
    Eventually, politics trumped merit. Middle management became the art of pleasing other middle management. Goofy felt like he was in a goofy environment. Despite Goofy’s name, that’s not really his habitat … but …
  • Those Effing Heavy Golden Handcuffs led to OMY (One More Year) once or twice and – perhaps thanks to COVID-19 – almost another OMY until I finally pulled the trigger in 2020.
  • Where you and I also differ: I was financially illiterate when I started to think about whether Hoolie was really where I wanted to spend the rest of my life
    • I had to go to a financial advisor to tell me that I had made enough money to retire (he of course did not tell me that, but ran the numbers, and after seeing how one needs to run the numbers, I figured I could indeed retire, given I could upgrade my financial literacy).
    • You guys are so much smarter (except when you invest in silly stocks discussed on the stockpicking thread) and you’ve well thought out your plan of when you’re ready to FIRE.
    • If I think of myself at what I think is about your age – guessing from the age of your kids or general life plans – then that former myself knows literally nothing about finance and investing.
      Consider yourself as lucky from that perspective as I consider myself lucky from having worked at Hoolie when it was cool and was getting compensated batshit crazy for work that was IMO fine, but not worth the amount I was getting when I compare it to what I would call honest work
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Now I’m curious as to how old you think I am!

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Come on. Don’t be chicken :wink:

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Knowing that I picture @PhilMongoose as already having quite some seniority, @Your_Full_Name just took 30 years in my Mustachian Post forum headcanon.

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I have no idea what that even means.

I remember some 10+ years ago meeting someone IRL having chatted on a forum. They were surprised when they saw me as they thought I was a “60 year old gay guy” which made me re-think how my writing was being perceived!

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We (I?) tend to picture things without real reasons for it, and as such, my guesses are often wild and inaccurate. I tend to trust them way too much, too.

In this specific case, your writing spells to me that you have some life experience, hence I’m picturing you in your mid forties at least. @Your_Full_Name is used to goofing around so I’m not taking him too seriously but if there’s such an age difference, I’d now picture him in his 60s or even 70s.

The only thing anybody should take out of that is: don’t take stock picking or market timing advice from me, I’m doing it based on my assumptions and I’m way too often willing to let them be supported by quite a bunch of hot air (I don’t like blind spots so I tend to fill them with whatever bit of data I have available, no matter how thin it might be).

Sorry for the off topic, I just couldn’t resist.

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Can I approach it by picture? I present to you a snapshot of @PhilMongoose captured in our latest live chat where the two of us discussed … er … NC … um, NCM. No, wait, NCSM (don’t buy it!).

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(I imagine Phil’s actual home in reality to be a bit more spacious, though …)

I look like I’m 55 though.

But thanks for your compliment … :wink:

:clap:

Same.

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You got it. I’m in my late 40s. I thought YFN might have thought I was younger because of my young kids, but I had them later on in life.

Not as galling as people thinking I was in my 60s when I was in my early 30s!

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As we get older, maintaining friendships becomes increasingly difficult. It is because of lack of time, changing priorities and not sharing the same constraints with other adults.
In my case, I lost friendships :

  • after living abroad
  • after finding my other half. Naturally, your free time get divided by 50% and friends not matching were seen less often.
  • after having toddler was even more brutal. Being social is a real constraint if you want their well being, priorising their nap time, sleep time. Friends that haven’t raise a kid does not understand the constraint, last minute noshow to last minute sickness and so on. You naturally end-up with other parents with kids on the same age because they can play together … and you can rest !

But luckily losing friend mean, you will be more avilable to meet new friend living the same life’s chapter.

I am living the same situation in my young 40s. I have not reach the FI number yet but I am risk averse and it will be hard for me to drop any activities.
Reducing to 60-80% will be a nice target. With kid at school, I won’t imagine myself traveling like a nomad.
We should find ourself really luckz to work in IT where the job market is fragmented with so many technologies that reduce the competition.
I cannot imagine myself dropping an easy job with 2 remote days a week, also a 20 minutes commute knowing that my wife fight to be able to work but got mostly negative return.

You could try to improve your stock picking skills during your freetime ! :sweat_smile:

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Always easiest to say in hindsight, but my bet would have been on mid forties with an overall range of early to late forties.

Certainly not the (close to) methusalem age where my esteemed forum colleages place me at.

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Shame, that reminded me that I did the same, kind of, a while back, well except it was a her…

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As we are talking about age, I think this is a typical generation thing where we see the difference between generation x and older with the millennial and younger. Like you have followed the typical escalator of life (work, meet somone, see less your friends, marry, have kids, have a house…). And we are like, hell no, no way.

I had been working for 5 years when I moved to 80%, and now I’m looking forward working at 60%. I’ve multiple friends already working at 80% and the majority is willing to reduce their working time.

Job is not my priority at all and I prefer to be struggling a little bit financially and being able to save less than working more.

The pleasure to know on Sunday evening that my weekend isn’t finished, is priceless.

But yeah, as work was never my priority, I never stopped my hobbies (I don’t have kid so that helps), and see my friends every weekend.
In fact, that was when I realised that I need to reduce my time, I was finishing my weekend and I hadn’t had the time to do everything I wanted, not a single second to rest and I already had to go back doing something that doesn’t bring as much happiness as the rest.

So, I would say, take the plunge, get back more of your time. I’m sure there is many things that you always wanted to do but you never had the time. For me, I’ve already a list of activities that I want to learn but keep it for later when maybe I will see less my friends or spend less in my current activities (mountaineering, singing, sailing boat, free-diving, skydiving, paragliding…)
Or you might start to cook for the week so you save some money if you or your wife are actually eating out during lunch. Or find a cause dear for you that you can spend time on it (personally, I would love to be volunteering in some zoo or help some ecological causes, like cleaning an area etc)

Some companies accept that you have a 80% but you work 5 days for 6h30min instead of 8h. Or some accept that you take it as holidays and you go on vacation with your kids, brother/sister/parents.

Whatever float your boat, life is too short to spend most of your time making someone else richer.

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I was doing a lot of stuff and had a lot of hobbies, but all that stopped when kids arrived. Partly it is because kids take time, partly because you have less energy and exhausted from lack of sleep. Now that the youngest is 4, I feel like I’m emerging out of the most exhausting part, but my social life has been trashed. I guess it didn’t help that I moved cities a couple of years before so lost my old social network and didn’t yet build up a strong new network before kids arrived.

When I was in my 20s, one of my friends got married quite young and had a kid. We never understood why he never came out with us any more and never made it once to any social event after that. I saw him maybe 3 times after that, once when I visited him at his house after his kids were in bed and a couple of times when I caught him after work before he got the train home.

Now that I had kids myself, I understand!

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