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[This is part two of a two-part story about how I quit first and got a job second.  Here’s part one.]

When I left the story, I’d just volunteered to get fired from my job (without having another job lined up) in exchange for an incentive.  I realize at this point I didn’t give any context to what that incentive was.  In exchange for quitting and signing a waiver, I got three months of salary as severance along with company-paid medical for three months.

The master plan

Here was the plan. 

The company mandated that, once you volunteered, you had to be off their payroll in about two months.  That meant I had two months of getting paid and working while I looked for new employment.  After that, I’d be out a job, but I’d get paid for another three months.  We figured I could certainly find a good job in four months or so.  If it stretched beyond that, we had a decent amount of money in savings and investments.  Plus, my wife was supposed to return to work around that time after having our baby.  (As it happened, I didn’t get the severance check for a full month after I stopped working.  Good thing we didn’t need that money to, say, pay the bills!)

The job search and the perfect job

This story isn’t really about how I found another job, so I’ll keep this part short.  In the span of a few weeks, I had several phone interviews and some in-person interviews.  I was lucky enough that they were kind of clustered around the same time.  Of the three in-person interviews, one place flaked out, one place turned me down for lack of experience, and the third offered me the job.

The job I was offered was the one I really was hoping to get.  It is exactly what I wanted to do.  Moreover, and more importantly, it is work I’m really good at.  And it came with a sweet perq - I work from a home office.

Now let me tell you right now that working from home is absolutely, positively, one hundred percent as awesome as you dream about.  I am way productive because I don’t have people bugging me all the time.  My commute time is five seconds.  I get to wear shorts and a t-shirt.  Yeah, it’s good.

Funny thing is, that’s not even the best part.  I absolutely love my job.  I seriously can’t believe it.  You know how, every once in a great while, you’ll talk to someone who says they love their job?  I never believed them.  Never.  But I’m here to tell you, it is possible.  You can actually love your job.  I’ve seen the other side.

Is there a point to this story?

Well, yeah, there is.  My point is that you can take a chance and sometimes it will all work out.  It won’t always work out like you want.  It won’t even work out like you want very often.  But every once in a while…

I’m not saying to do what I did and quit before you have a job.  I’m saying be courageous.  Have faith.  Do not be miserable.  If you don’t like your situation - change it!  You do not want to look back on your life and wonder what might have been “if only.”

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I think I can say with a good degree of certainty that people who read PF blogs are, by and large, planners.  I know I am.  So what I’m about to write is going to seem contradictory to that statement.  I’m going to tell you about how I recently left my job without having another one just months after the birth of our second child.  Don’t worry - it has a very happy ending.

[It turns out this story is way too long to be just one post, so this is part 1 of 2.]

Look before you leap, right?

I just read on Free Money Finance a post commenting on the story of a guy who quit to stay home with his 2-year-old son.  FMF sprinkles comments on the story throughout the post.  Some I agree with; some not so much.  Essentially, the guy quit while his lower-paid wife kept working.  They made some pretty major lifestyle changes to accomodate the new arrangement.

I disagree with one thing FMF said in particular and if you read his blog, you know he’s hit on this a few times.  He abhors the idea of quitting first and getting a new job second.  I mean he really hates it.

I disagree with him because that’s exactly what I did.  Let me tell you the story.

Where I was

A couple of months before our second child was born, my company offered one of its periodic buy-out offers.  It’s an old-line company and they routinely do mass firings (I hate the terms ‘lay-off’ and ‘RIF’).  Before they actually fire anybody outright, they usually offer an incentive if people will volunteer.

A little bit of back story.  I’d worked at this job for several years.  I was competent at it but had no passion for it.  I learned nothing on a day-to-day basis, but the pay and benefits were excellent.  I can tell you that many people there felt like they were trapped by the golden handcuffs (ok, maybe ‘gold’ is an exaggeration, but you get the general idea).

I didn’t exactly hate my job.  I just didn’t like it very much.  Ok, I didn’t like it at all.  The only reason to go was the people.  My coworkers made it bearable.  At the point when I left, not only did I not like it, I didn’t care.  That’s a dangerous place to be.

When the company made the offer, initially I was ambivalent.  I mean, they’d done this so many times that it wasn’t much of a surprise.  What shook me a little bit was the intimation that this firing was going to be bigger and they didn’t expect enough volunteers.

If you’ve ever gone through a mass firing, you know that they are indiscriminant.  I firmly believe the correlation between how good a job you do and your likelihood of being canned is close to zero.  Companies just aren’t that smart.  They routinely let good people go and keep idiots.  So in a situation like this, anybody can get whacked.

So, just to catch you up, I am at a job I don’t like and the company is giving me a pretty decent incentive to quit before they might fire me.  Did I mention that if I don’t volunteer and they fire me anyway I get nothing?  Yeah, that’s important to know.

Talking it over

My long-suffering wife, to her great credit, was very supportive.  I obviously didn’t make a snap, unilateral decision, but she didn’t do what a lot of people would have done in her situation.  By the way, when all this went down she was in her final month of pregnancy.

Imagine if you will.  You’re about to become responsible for the life of a second child when your husband tells you he’s considering quitting his job without having another one lined up.

She was great, though.  We talked it over.  Talked about the possibilities.  Discussed back-up plans to our back-up plans.  We prayed a lot and we didn’t sleep a lot for a few days. 

We decided.

I told my boss I’d be volunteering.  I quit.

Tune in next week to find out how it all worked out and I got my dream job.

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The Senate recently passed a bill to essentially bail out people involved in the housing crisis.  Builders, buyers, local governments, future buyers, they all get a piece of the pie.  This on top of the taxpayer funded bailout of Bear Stearns. 

I say let’s just go ahead and bail everyone out…of everything.  Did you buy a car you’re having trouble making the payments on?  Here’s some money.  Lots of credit card debt you can’t service?  Here ya go.  Small business facing financial difficulty?  It’s all yours.

Why are those any less worthy than people involved in the current housing and lending trouble?  After all, each made decisions, presumably after considering their own self interest, that turned out to be bad ones.  A good number people in all these groups really didn’t do anything wrong at all.  In an economy like ours, sometimes you lose even when you do everything right.  Fortune doesn’t always favor the prudent.  Why is it, then, that those hurt by housing get special treatment?

This is coming from a guy who is a homeowner.  That means my house has probably decreased in value, too, just like millions all over the country.  But I’m also a faithful taxpayer (one of the just 60% of Americans who pay into the federal treasury on April 15th).  So that’s my money going to JPMorgan/Bear Stearns, Toll Brothers, and Joe Downthestreet.  And it’s real money.  That has to be paid for.

So if we’re going to make those people whole, why not everyone else struggling with their debt?  Are they any less deserving?

If you ask me, the people most hurt by this aren’t even directly involved.  It’s those people who are trying to do the right thing.  Savers have suffered with plummeting interest rates.  Paradoxically, those trying to borrow that money in the form of an auto loan are facing higher interest rates, too.  And it’s making attending and paying for college harder.

Situations like this teach people, if only subtlely or subconsciously, that it doesn’t pay to be prudent and do the right thing.  Feedback like this changes economic behavior for the worse.  People learn recklessness isn’t as dangerous as they thought.  Savers and investors begin to look like suckers. 

That’s a problem because of basic economics.  An economy that wishes to grow must have citizens who invest and save.  And that investment cannot come from outside the country, as is the case in the US today.  That’s just selling the country, bit by bit.

So let’s just bail everyone out.  After all, we all deserve it.

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Just a quick thought on the ’stimulus package’ the federal government put together.

Cheap money courtesy low interest rates.

Cash in everyone’s wallets thanks to the ‘rebate.’

Isn’t that how we got in this mess in the first place???

Not to beat up on the Fed some more, but isn’t cheap money the root cause of things like housing bubbles?  Won’t very low interest rates further hurt the already pulverized U.S. dollar?  Haven’t we seen this movie before?

And about those checks you won’t be getting until June.  According a Brookings Institution study on the results of the last time they did this, about two thirds of the average check was spent (the other third paid down debt or was saved).  Of that two thirds, much of it was spent on clothing.  When was the last time you bought a piece of clothing made in the U.S.?  Why don’t we just box up some more money into shipping containers and send it to China et al?   I don’t get it.

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Brooke at Dollar Frugal just lost one of her four RSS readers today and she’s feeling down.  Can somebody besides me, her grandma, and her boyfriend please stop buy and subscribe?  Thanks.

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