By If you haven’t guessed by now I’m an IT professional in Silicon Valley. Hence, the name of the site. “Being in tech” can usually equate to some sort of new technology, a consumer or enterprise product, or some sort of service. Obviously not everything “tech” falls into those categories but for the sake of this post, because I know techie people like to get technical, let’s roll with it.
So at work, we had an incident over my birthday which included some downtime for some services. This was over a month ago. Luckily, I work with a bunch of great folks so was able to take off for a few hours to spend some time with the family. The team handled it well as usual and we were able to get things back up and running. However, it’s one of those things where “I’m over it”.
After doing some reflection after the new year, being in middle management and having to manage vertically has also brought the happiness meter a couple notches down. Increased responsibility year over year along with different upper management. This past year has probably been the least enjoyable time in my current position and I bet that this trend will just continue over time.
So this post is somewhat of a checkpoint for myself. When you’re busy, you’re juggling the proverbial balls of responsibility. Since it’s the beginning of the year it’s always a good time to reevaluate where I’m at and how things are going.
This year I also made a purchase that some folks in the FI community may raise an eyebrow over. I bought a brand new MacBook. Did I absolutely need it? Of course not. Was it an impulse buy? No, it was’t that either. I mulled it over for at least a month before I actually purchased it. It will come in handy for some of my use cases professionally. I’m always learning new things so this will be good.
So over the past year, my savings rate high was 48.70% with an average of 25.75% for 2019. In 2018 I hit a high point of 52.40% with an average over 19.98%. So I guess you can say I did better in 2019 with a higher savings rate average for the year. The challenge is being consistent, just like going to the gym for me. Sometimes you get busy and the focus becomes a little blurry. Good thing I have this blog and great folks to keep me in check and help keep me in focus.
I’ve signed up for the Financial Freedom Summit this year as well. It will be good to reunite with some friends. Will you be going? Let’s meet up.
