Redoing my budget for part-time independent software development consulting/contracting
Monday is my last day as a full-time employee at The Evil Empire. Tuesday I will start doing some part-time work as an independent software development consultant/contractor for a "stealth startup" back East -- which I of course can not talk about. This should still give me plenty of time and energy to get involved in other projects of my own. Alas, going from full-time to part-time work does have a dramatic impact on my budget. I have done a rough recalculation in my head and do believe that I can in fact "get by" on part-time work only. Unfortunately, doing that means that my monthly savings rate will fall to roughly zero. The flip side is that my non-financial quality of life will rise dramatically.
Over the next week I will be considering a number of options for how to rearrange my budget.
One decision is whether to use a moderate chunk of my rainy-day fund to payoff my remaining IRS back taxes so that the monthly installment plan payment does not eat up a sizeable chunk of my new and smaller budget. It could work either way. Paying off the back taxes is clearly a financial win, but shrinking my rainy-day fund has potential risks should I run into income difficulties down the road, especially in a weak economy. In some sense this is a tough call, but in the final analysis it probably does not matter which path I choose. I am leaning towards paying off the back taxes simply because it will give me the feeling of a fresh start without any baggage.
My apartment lease runs through May, so I'll stay put at least until June. I may move East, maybe even to New York City again, but only if my new budget will permit it. A move might be contingent on lining up additional part-time work.
posted by Jack Krupansky @ 2:30 PM
2 Comments
2 Comments:
Gotta ask Jack - why would you give up the MS gig with a steady stream of income and benefits, given you could probably moonlight on the side? Seems like you're heading back into the hole that brought you to MS in the first place.
I actually intended to do the part-time work on the side as moonlighting, but since open source and potential compete were issues, I went the routing of asking legal and management to give their approval. They declined. I left.
Moonlighting does not require permission per se, but policy is that open source does require permission. Sure, I could have done the project on the side without anyone even noticing (other than me blogging about it!), but that is not the way I operate.
To be clear, I make use of very little of the benefits that any big company has to offer. Health care being the biggest example. Sure, there are many side benefits of being on the inside, but I decided that net-net they were less valuable to me than my freedom and the satisfaction of working at a startup. The money isn't actually bad and is limited primarily by my desire to stick to part-time work so that I can have plenty of time for my own projects -- and have my weekends free after all of that.
I had sincerely hoped that things would work out for me at The Evil Empire, but they didn't.
Microsoft is a great place to work for a lot of people, but I simply am not one of them. I certainly do not hold myself out as being a prime example of the typical software development professional. I am an outlier, and you can flip a coin as to whether any given outlier will find success at any given company.
-- Jack Krupansky
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home