A year on, the career plan needs updating. I agreed with the School Director to take long service leave in 2022 and delay my leadership position to 2023-24. Instead, another person would take that leadership role for one year. Two months into the year, the director became a head of school at another university. The person temporarily filling the leadership position took over as interim director and a third person filled the leadership role. When I raised the issue recently, the person in the leadership role said they knew nothing of the plan to put me into the position in 2023-24 and it would depend on the new permanent school director who will be starting in January 2023. I don't think that the new director would be enthusiastic about me in that role.
Yesterday, I met with my immediate Department Head. He said that he thinks the leadership position is now off the table and doesn't think there will be pressure for me to take that kind of role now... He also wants me to again teach one of the courses I dropped.* The advantage, of course, is that teaching this course won't require any preparation. This new course has taken more preparation that anything I've taught before, I think. I am still working on that as the course began this week, but the end of prep is near... I'm not happy about teaching more again... Anyway, I told him that I would want to teach both courses in the same semester rather than spreading them out over the year. I find switching between teaching and research to be hard and end up wasting a lot of time doing that.
I also told him that I had thought about going to part-time status instead. Yesterday, I sent an email to HR asking about that. But I think that depending partly on investment income is a bit scary given the current economic and market uncertainty. On the other hand, the question is whether I will ever feel like I have enough money to retire....
I'll probably end up teaching the old course again together with the new one this time next year.
* He is teaching it this year (he also taught it before). Next year, he wants to revive another course that we have both taught before....
2 comments:
Possible the question to mull over is what you actually want 'retirement' to be like, rather than just 'when will I feel I have "enough" money to retire'.
Do you want to focus on increasing wealth? In which case working at a reasonably highly paid job as long as possible and saving and investing as much as possible for as long as possible is a 'plan'.
Do you want to 'retire' and shift to 100% living off investments while sitting at home enjoying family life 24/7?
Do you want to become 'self-employed' during 'retirement'? A consultant. Write some books? Be 'director' of a self-funded 'not to profit' economic research think tank?
If you're like me you might not know what you want to do in 'retirement', so just keep working/saving/investing more or less out of habit (I think a lot of us 'wage earners' end up institutionalised to being 'at work' after spending a couple of decades in school/uni and then another 3-4 decades in a 9-5 'job'.
Whether or not you have 'enough money to retire' depends entirely on what you want your retirement to be.
It's the reason why a key part of financial planning is to determine what the client's goals are, and classifying them as 'needs' (must haves) and 'wants' (nice to haves). If you don't have a good idea of what your 'ideal retirement' looks like, you won't know how much is 'enough'. It might also be a good idea to use part-time work or LSL to dabble in whatever you imagine your retirement 'dream' will be like. You might modify your retirement lifestyle requirements - which might change 'how much is enough to retire'.
For the moment I have two small children to look after, who my wife is insisting on sending to private schools... So, I need enough to cover the expenses of our lifestyle going forward. I might just be able to cover that currently. But not also moving to a possibly "better" house given the high price of houses. As far as what to do in "retirement" I just want to avoid doing the stuff I don't like doing in the near term....
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