Congrats, Tradd!! That's wonderful!
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Congrats, Tradd!! That's wonderful!
Just figured it out. Extra $800/month before taxes.Quote:
Originally Posted by happystuff
I was asked to be a manager once and refused it. Actually told them to put the demand in writing just in case I did a horrible job. No way could I deal with being yelled at from the top and the bottom at the same time. It truly takes a saint at some manager jobs.
I remember my boss admitting to me once, "I like managing, I just don't like the people."Quote:
Originally Posted by sweetana3
Water. People. Boat.Quote:
Originally Posted by catherine
Insurance is gonna be big.
Did I mention dumb humans on a boat?
+++Quote:
Originally Posted by jp1
Haha. Yep!Quote:
Originally Posted by catherine
Wow Tradd! Score!
here’s how it went down:
Tradd’s Management: “we would like you to do this “
Tradd says: “nope “
Tradd’s Management: “ok then here’s $10,000 “
I love this!
Pretty much! I love that!Quote:
Originally Posted by iris lilies
OK now knock out that debt girlfriend, and become debt-free foreverQuote:
Originally Posted by Tradd
Hell, yes!Quote:
Originally Posted by iris lilies
Congratulations! That's awesome news!Quote:
Originally Posted by Tradd
I totally understand why you don't want that job. When I left the mega corp five years ago I didn't meet my new (current) boss in person until after I'd been hired and went to Chicago for my first week in the early summer of 2019. At dinner after the first day at the office he was stunned to learn that I'm 12 years older than him and expressed concern that I might want his job. I had to reassure him that I absolutely DID NOT want his job. He has to manage up to senior management. I, at the time, didn't have to manage anything beyond selling insurance policies. And frankly, underwriting policies and selling them to the brokers is the fun part of my job. Over the next several years I apparently did such a good job at convincing him I didn't want his job that when he wanted to promote me to product manager a year and a half ago (he'd just gotten promoted to managing director) he was actually concerned that I would say "no, I just want to keep being an underwriter." And I lived up to his expectation because when he offered me the product manager job I didn't immediately say yes, but instead asked "what would that actually entail?" Ultimately I took the promotion because he convinced me that a sizable part of the job would still be underwriting, which is in fact the case and I'm fine with managing people. Yes, I do have direct reports now, as well as product management responsibilities, but my day to day life is still mostly the fun bit.
One of the interesting twists that came out of that first dinner conversation with boss is that that night I told him he could have me for eleven years if he wanted me because I planned to retire at some point between 62-63 years old and I really didn't want to go start over somewhere else. Today he still has another 6-7 years of my life, so I'm hoping that I get to spend that time working for him at current employer. With that in mind I've already started focusing on making sure that there are others on our team that are trained up to take over my product management role when I leave. It seems like just yesterday that I was graduating from college and eager to start my first job, but now here I am, planning to make sure that someone can take over my mid-level management job after I'm gone.
Thank you for being so candid and up front. Obviously your situation isn't ideal (as I'm sure you're very well aware) but you're a healthy person and your job is such that you can keep working in your PJ's for the forseeable future. And you seem to like what you do. It's not like you're a walmart greeter earning minimum wage who struggles to get out of bed every day to go face unhappy customers and sore knees etc.Quote:
Originally Posted by catherine
As for 2008, SO and I were also kind of a loser on the flipside of your coin. We moved from Jersey City to San Francisco in the fall of 2008/spring of 2009. San Francisco's real estate market is always a whipsaw so spring 2009 would've been a PERFECT time to buy. I was very aware of that at the time but we just didn't have the cash to make a down payment happen. So we didn't. I don't think SO thought much about it but it bothered me for years until we bought our current townhouse.
Neat story!Quote:
Originally Posted by jp1
Another reason I don’t want the manager job is that it has nothing to do with being a customs broker. It’s all on the transportation side. Plus I get a ton of hands on with my job, which I mostly enjoy.
I think once the debt is paid off and I have a good emergency fund, I’m going to open a Roth IRA. Work offers a Roth option as well as regular 401K so I’ll have to look at that.
That's great news, Tradd. Congratulations! The raise should give you a nice boost in paying off your debt!
Just pulled $1K out of savings and threw it on cc. I didn’t want to empty savings down to $1K again, but wanted to do something.
Awesome, you are tackling that debt!Quote:
Originally Posted by Tradd
Just watching one of Kirsten Dirksen's videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpzuYHdEgvc and had a weird job related "yeah, I totally understand..." moment. About 8 minutes in he was explaining that he was trying to get a loan because he'd been given a free teardown shotgun shack but needed to find land for it, move it, renovate it, etc, so he was calling around to lots of banks and everyone basically was like "whatever. no." And then he found one guy who said "if you can find and buy land for it, get it there, plant it on a new foundation and then ask for a loan to renovate it and make it worthwhile, I can make that work and loan you money."Quote:
Originally Posted by jp1
So much of my job as a technology errors & omissions liability underwriter is figuring out how to say yes for writing insurance for a potential insured that has a quirky unusual exposure. Most of them are probably fine, but I can't just randomly toss policies out there. If a loss occurs I have to be able to explain why I thought they were a good risk. Being able to make that explanation for a weird company means being able to write an account that most other underwriters said no to. (and also means better premium since most other underwriters channeled their inner Nancy Reagan and just said no...)
As I think more about this I"m realizing that when the more junior members of our team call me to discuss accounts one of two things happen. Either I agree with them that it's a crap account that we need to stay far away from or I disagree and then spend the rest of the call talking with them to figure out how to justify the account so that we can win the deal and hopefully give that junior underwriter another example of an account we wrote that they can use to justify future accounts.
I think I may be able to get the cc debt to four figures next payday.
Jp, it is interesting to hear about your work.
@jp1
Have you heard about the shutdown of the systems at Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago. Everything was shut down for at least two weeks.
https://www.axios.com/local/chicago/...outage-network
Thanks. I don't often talk about work online. Both because I am ever mindful about saying anything inappropriate or negative, but also because I realize that commercial insurance is not an especially interesting topic to non-insurance people. SO occasionally reminds me about that second point when our good friend B, who I met through work, and I get into a shoptalk conversation when the three of us are hanging out.Quote:
Originally Posted by iris lilies
I find it very interesting as well.Quote:
Originally Posted by jp1
I saw the headline the other day but hadn't really paid attention. I don't know if we've ever seen the submission but I get cc'd when our claims team opens claims on all our insureds so I assume we're not their insurer since this hasn't crossed my desk from a claims perspective. From the somewhat cryptic wording in the article my guess would be that in this case they are actually acting as a tech provider. Most likely they paid someone to develop a proprietary electronic health record system (fairly common in the healthcare world) which they now sell to other healthcare providers. If that system gets hacked, or otherwise stops working, they are going to get sued for failing to provide the service to the medical professionals they've sold it to since they have likely contractually agreed to some sort of guaranteed service uptime level. In this case the purchasers of the tech are probably small pediatrician practices that use them as the primary hospital for their patients when a hospital is needed.Quote:
Originally Posted by Tradd
I found it interesting as well, JP. I worked for a megacorp insurer for most of my working career. I started in claims, and finished up in HR, so I never had more than a fuzzy idea of what the underwriters did.
I ended up pulling more out of savings and it’s back down to $1K. I threw it all at cc. Just barely into 5 figures. Will become 4 figures in on payday. :D
I never have a balance of more than 30 days on my credit card. I put big amounts on my credit card. It’s interesting and amusing to watch my credit score bounce up and down when big amounts go on it.. Like I care… because I don’t.
But this month because I put The landscapers’ fee on my credit card I got a notice that my credit score had plunged again.oh well, and I’m glad I’m not using the credit score for anything.
Iris, same boat here. I have put up to $18,000 on a cc and paid off. I would have given them a check or even cash but they wanted the CC. I was not even picking it up right away so the check would have lots of time to clear. Some merchants are very strange. We put everything! on our Amazon CC card to get points. We are pretty much always over 810 or more on score but as you said, it does not matter.
I know, it’s funny watching my credit score inch up a wee few points with each big chunk paid off.
We put just about everything on credit cards and pay off the balances each month. Haven't paid a penny of CC interest in the past 25 years. Both our credit scores fluctuate between about 830 to 835, I believe that small shift depends upon how much we've spent that month.
I don’t get as high as 800 as I have previously complained about.
But I watch my category go from the highest “excellent” to “very good” to once in a while “good.”
That rating system is deranged.:)
We're in the same boat as Alan, and with the kitchen project, we will be building up some nice reward points. I belong to Credit Karma, and it's amusing to get their encouraging little notes along the lines of "Way to go, Rosa! You've paid off your big Visa balance," because I pay off all my balances every month. They also sometimes send me emails with helpful advice on paying off our loan. It's a deliberately held, zero-interest loan from our furnace installation of 2018, and of course we're in no hurry to pay it off.
I pay off our cc every month as well. Cash back, which I never seem to get around collecting, so there is a significant amount there. Need to do something with it... eventually.
I generally pay it off every month but after years of doing that I paid late last month (I think I got real confused about when bills were due because it was one of those 3 paychecks a month months, not the typical 2 paychecks).
I don't get as high as 800, but for that you need REAL DEBT, like to have ever had a car loan, a mortgage, maybe student loans (I think my partners score is higher for that, for student loans he is still paying a couple decades after going to school for a grad degree he doesn't use). And nope, I rent and paid cash for cars. I think if fluctuates some for opening up new credit cards/store cards or closing them and I'm not going to worry about that.Quote:
I don’t get as high as 800 as I have previously complained about.
But I watch my category go from the highest “excellent” to “very good” to once in a while “good.”
That rating system is deranged.
When I've pulled my free credit reports, it always says to increase my score, I should get a mortgage. That ain't likely to happen!Quote:
Originally Posted by ApatheticNoMore
Sometimes some things just don't make sense to me and this is one of those things. I don't understand going into debt to increase a credit score.Quote:
Originally Posted by Tradd
1993 was the last time we had a "real" mortgage. We had a short term loan in 1999 to cover some time on a new house but that is all. Cannot remember financing anything since then. I guess our rating is high due to large CC limits and regular use and payment. But this required several decades of spending much less than earnings and appropriate use of balance. Much harder today.
I’m still plugging along. I needed new tires ($1K) so I had to rebuild emergency fund from scratch (everything else had been thrown on cc). I added another $1K on top, so $2K in it now. Today was my first regular paycheck with the raise (previous check was retro) so now I know what I’ll be getting each check, I’ll be able to rework my budget.
I had changed Apple One to the premier plan, which is $38/month, includes Apple News+ and Fitness+. Wasn’t using them as much as I thought, so I dropped it down to the individual plan, which gets me Apple Music and my iCloud storage (plus a few other things) for $20/month. I still have the Economist ($21/month).
Cancelled MS 365 renewal for June ($70/yr). The only reason I had it was to have MS Word for my volunteer copy editing with the WI Historical Society. We’ve hit upon me editing a PDF on my iPad with stylus and me marking it up in red. Works much better for all of us and I don’t have to worry about messing up the formatting with any edits and they don’t have to fix formatting. I installed LibreOffice on my Windows laptop, plus I have Apple Pages to use on iPad. There’s always Google Docs, too.
I reupped Weight Watchers ($10/month) as it really helps. I’d really gotten off the wagon when I had the plague in January.
My car insurance (State Farm) was $682 when I renewed a few weeks ago. It’s definitely gone up, but I’ve been with SF since 1991 and I see no reason to change. Every single person I know who changes just for price, ends up in a bad place when they have a claim. I had no issues with my accident December 2022, damage fixed in March 2023. My deductible is $250. Raising it would drop my cost some, but it doesn’t bother me enough to look into it. I can afford the increase. I think insurance was $625 when I renewed in October.
Told landlord I wanted to stay another year (lease renews in early Sept). Might as well just tell him now since I’m not moving!
I’ve gone back to doing just about all my grocery shopping at Aldi and it really keeps costs down.
I did renew Amazon Prime. I can afford it.