New Year... New Decade... Hopefully New Beginning!!!

Needless to say I have been quite miserable for a while, let's say for at least the past 5 years. I have been miserable about my career, miserable about my finance, miserable about investment, miserable about relationships, miserable about health (I fear that I have early symptoms of Alzheimer, which I need to diagnose this year), miserable about sex life. In general, miserable about my past, miserable about my present, and miserable about my future.

But let me be very clear about one thing. Despite being miserable about life in general, I don't feel totally hopeless or suicidal. Rather I feel motivated, tough not all the time but every now and then like today, to find a cure for my misery. I feel there is "One Thing" as Curly puts in the movie City Slickers, the movie about mid-life crisis, that will be the answer to my quest for happiness, and make me feel "alive" again.

I have to search for that "One Thing" within the constraints of my daily life because I cannot just drop everything in that quest and start anew like in a classic mid-life crisis script. I have responsibilities. I have reputation. Most importantly, I don't know for sure whether such action will lead me to the answer I am looking for or whether it will make bad things worse, and turn my misery into hopelessness. Given the risk-reward, I don't want to take such drastic action.

I have to work within my constraints to find the anti-dot to my misery. Addressing all the things that make me miserable at the same time is overwhelming. I need to tackle one at a time. The most important thing I need to fix at this time is my career. Actually, I don't have a career, just a job. I have a series of tasks I do.  I don't feel excited about going to work because today is likely to be same as yesterday, tomorrow is going to be same as today. I have nothing to look forward to. Moreover, my contemporaries have either moved up or out in the past 10-15 years. So I don't have "buddies" at work. I really feel out of place at my work. I am amazed that I paid so much for doing so little. This means that I am at a very high risk of losing my job, which won't be the end of everything but would not be ideal. On the other hand, I don't see myself doing what I am doing now for next 15 years, I will go crazy.

So basically, I am looking for a career change. Ideally, I want to change to something that I can look forward to doing for the next 15-20 years. If I were to find a new job, I want to be part of a bigger endeavor, "I want to be in a team building a cathedral"  Unfortunately, I don't think anyone will offer me such a job. First, I am hitting almost 50 and my resume has not improved commensurate with my age. As I said, my work is task-oriented meaning I do not have wider managerial responsibility. Nobody is looking to hire 50-year old do task oriented stuff because that's what recent college graduates are for. Second, I have very poor people skill, or what some people call an "introvert". That's probably why I did not have a dating life in my youth, and that's probably why I never had close friends. At my age, I need to be great at networking to find age-appropriate job but I definitely lack that skill. I don't even know where to start, whom to contact, and what to say. 

Instead of looking at my resume and seeing what job I can find with experience, I probably need to turn on its head, and instead define an ideal job/career and try to attain it. Just off the top of my head, I want (1) flexibility i.e. I don't want to be tied to a location or be time bound; (2) decent paying (not looking to massive amount); (3) benefits if possible; (4) lot of room for progress; next year to better than this year; (5) lot of opportunity to met and network with like-minded people. 

While I search for an ideal career for my age, I need to make my current job more palatable because I do not envision abandoning it voluntarily for nothing i.e. early retirement.

 

Trading for Living

I don't think I will make much progress in my current job. Basically I am like a lamb waiting to be slaughtered aka laid off in not too distant future. I am almost 50. Finding another job with good career prospect is not going to be easy mainly because I did not make any progress career wise in the past 10 years, so my options will limited, and based on my experience trying to look for a job 10 years ago, not going to be pleasant.

One of the options I am seriously giving thoughts to is Trading for Living. But there also I have serious misgivings. First, my track record over the past 15+ years has been very dismal, although things have improved slightly im the past year. Second, I am worried about losing benefits like health insurance esp. given I have a 12 year old son. Third, I am not sure if this allows me to leverage my education and experience; you really don't need a college degree, let alone an MBA, to day trade. Fourth, and most important, how does it make part a bigger thing or a cause. Ideally, I would like participate in building a cathedral.

Thinking about being a part of a bigger cause, I think, that what I am looking for. Aside from other thongs, this is what is missing from my current job. So the question is what kind of a cathedral do I want to build?

I feel lost?

I feel totally lost. I feel like I moving forward without a sense of direction like a blind man, not knowing where I am heading and why I am following a particular direction. 

The thing that triggered me was the sense that I will be 47 soon soon, and in just 8 years, I will be eligible to withdraw money from my 401(K) and IRA. I realized that I only have $500K in those accounts. Because I converted my $200K 401(K) to IRA in 2009 after I got laid aff, and did not invest properly, my account has not moved beyond $220K, a disastrous record. At a minimum, given how the market has done over that period, should have been at least $500K in that alone. How am I supposed to make up for the lost time. And this weekend I could not stop thinking about me considering investment in AAPL back in 2003-04 when it first came with iPod. Instead of investing in AAPL, I invested in company called Portal Player because it was supplier to Apple. I lost chuck of money when AAPL ended the contract 6 months after I invested - there was lot of insider selling but I ignored those signs. If I had invested in APPL that amount it would been mover $2 million. The I bought apartment in 2003 for $190K, which I sold this hear for $295K. If I had bought similar apartment in Queens, it would have easily doubled or tripled. Another is that I considered buying NFLX when it was $25 back in 2013, if I had done that I would have made at least $200-$300K. Those are the missed opportunities. Then I invested $110K in Carl Manni's women's inner-wear business. I thought since the owners had all the stake in the business and it survived and did even better during 2008-09 financial crisis, it was on a solid footing. Then Sandy hit in 2012 and the owners made disastrous decision to expand retail footprint instead of building their online platform. It went belly-up this year. I did not lose all given I earned interest15% for couple of years and later 6%  interest on $60K (it was a high as $100K), and 6% DY on $50K equity. Still lost $$60K net. 

Then there is my career. What a mess! My salary has not increased in 10 years, and I don't expect to increase in a foreseeable future. Plus I am getting old every day. I don't see to much future in what I am doing. I really think that I have come to the end of my career and it is heading to a slower death. What I really depressed me is where my contemporaries are in their career. 15 years ago, I had thought that I'd be making $500K by now, but that's not happened and it is not going to happen.

Past is past, cannot change it, what's next? The key is health, I need to stay healthy. If my health deteriorates now, then nothing I do will matter. Second, I need to find happiness in what I do. I need to be excited, and I want see doing it for the next 10-15 years minimum. I don't see myself doing what I am dong for next 5 years. I think I will be out of this place by then. 

So what I do I want to do for next 10-15 years? If I want to do business, that's driven by relationships more than anything else. That is not my strength. I am the quite type. I can't sell anything let alone myself. Plus my interest is very esoteric and does not rhyme with popular culture in this country. That means I am not good at making an impression. That's why my career has stuck. Despite my dismal investment performance, I always dreamed of becoming a world class investor but without having to do the mundane day to day task. 

The other area is personal finance. I am very worried about running out of money. Yes, I am interested but it not translate to any viable business. 

I need find a legal way to make $500K-$1M a year.

Trading for living

I did a quick job search on google on Friday evening to check what's available out there now the summer is over.  Needless to say I was disappointed by what I saw.

My default search phrase is "equity strategist". For some reason I still think my background is best suited to it. But that does not appear to be the case anymore. While I have grown older, my skill level has been stuck at the Associate level i.e. number crunching and writing. At my age, I should have graduated to marketing to clients and speaking to the media. In other words, I am not young enough to be an associate but not have appropriate skills and experiences to be considered for a higher level position. To emphasize this point, I interviewed for an Associate equity strategist position at RBC in 2012, and even back then, my age and experience implicitly became an issue. In 2017 I applied for a more senior position at UBS private bank, and I was not even considered for the position.

My "First" Entry

There are so many ideas and issues playing in my head right now that I am not sure where to start from. That's why I am starting this endeavor. I am hoping that by jotting down the random thoughts that pop into my head on a regular basis, I will be able to see through those haphazard ideas and be able to convert them into a more coherent and practical solutions.

This is not my first rodeo into this endeavor. I have tried it before and each time I had failed to follow-through. I first tried after I got laid off from work in 2008 (At a Cross Road). I tried again in January 2018 when I was really frustrated with my career and wanted learn to sell through Amazon (My Amazon Store Diary). I am hoping that I will give continuity this time. Hopefully, in 5-10 or 10-15 years, I will  look back at this time and feel good about myself having transcended this confusing (and sometimes stressful) period successfully. 

The #1 issue for me at this time is my career or the lack-there-of. I will be hitting 47 in couple of months, and I have never been as pessimistic about my career prospect as I have been now. Basically, I feel really stuck, unable to move either forward or backward. Rhetorically speaking, my career is dying slowly like a crab in a simmering water. 

The reason for my pessimism is that my profession has morphed into a dead-end job. I have couple of specific tasks to do daily/weekly/monthly, which I have become very efficient at doing having done it for the past 9 years. After completing those tasks, I am just chilling out, i.e. reading since I am in front of a computer, but not learning new sell-able skills that can improve my career prospect. I can sense my opportunities have dwindled because I have not gotten a call from a headhunter that see my profile on LinkedIn since 2014-15. I have also not touched by resume since then because I have nothing to add.

Aside from the dead-end job, I am not happy with the culture of the team/department. My manager is busy doing his task and managing up. He is never interested in managing the team. Most of the people at my level in other teams are at least 10-15 years younger than me, so can't relate to them. I basically go to work, do my shit and come home. I skip department events including Holiday parties because I am apprehensive about not finding anyone to talk to.

The likelihood of me getting laid off for the 2nd time in the near future (6 month to 1 year) is very high. Since my work is very task-oriented and not as "critical" for the department's success metrics, I am easily replaceable by a cheaper, lower title/position worker.  And the department has pursued that strategy to cut costs many times in the past. Moreover, lot of my work is getting automated. The business justification for my position is getting eroded everyday. And there is a looming recession. If and when that hits, banks are the first cull its workforce. They have a plenty of reasons to put my name on the top of the list. To be frank, even if I am laid-off for the 2nd time, I won't miss my work though I will miss steady paycheck, benefits and access to market data.

So what am I supposed to do now?

The way I think is that I still have at least 15-20 years of working life ahead of me assuming I am healthy (more on this topic later). That's a long time, almost half of my professional life. I don't want to be miserable and stressed out for that long - been there, done that. So I want to do something that I am good at, and see myself doing happily for the next 10-15 years while making a steady progress. Just thinking about it, my current job certainly does not offer me that opportunity. Neither will another job that I can possibly get with my limited resume, but I am willing give it a try while also looking for what's possible out there.