I recently finished the last shift for my employer. As I drove home, an unemployed free-loader, I experienced that end-of-the-school-year feeling where suddenly all those papers you’ve been holding onto since September can be thrown away. The lists of projects, the work numbers, the future crawlspaces that would need to be cleaned out, none of that was my responsibility. My time with that company was over. I could feel Montana on the horizon.
As an adult, we don’t get this feeling often. I wanted to really soak in the moment. There’s a certain amount of stress we carry around with us just below the surface. You don’t notice it’s there until suddenly it’s gone. I’d imagined what the feeling of leaving my job would be like. In reality, it wasn’t quite as euphoric as, say, leaving the 7th grade, but it was still pretty pleasant.
We’re now officially in the next phase of our choosing family over finances master plan where we make our triumphant return to Montana.
If you’d like to catch up, you can read the other parts here:
- Becoming a Part-Time Stay at Home Dad—Choosing Family Over Finances
- Choosing Family Over Finances Part II- an Update and Some Highlights
- Choosing Family Over Finances Part III
Just like a politician, I will play to my base by including lots of pictures of Baby Burrito Bowl as a way to keep folks interested.
Next stop: Montana
For the time being, I’ll be, more or less, a stay at home dad while Mrs. Burrito Bowl keeps working. I do a bit of freelance writing here and there, but it’s hardly enough that I’d consider myself employed. We’re applying for jobs in Montana and could be moving as soon as we can trick someone into hiring one of us.
Mrs. Burrito Bowl doesn’t actually have to trick anyone because she’s a real nurse. I’ll be doing the tricking as my skill set is varied and questionable. [<–unless you’re a prospective employer reading this. I’m just being self-deprecating. Honest.]
We’ve got some choices to make. Should both of us work, or just one of us? Should we live in the same county as our family—even though job opportunities aren’t as good—or should we move near our family but with better employment opportunities?
We’re debating between Missoula and the Flathead Valley. Most of our family is in the Flathead, so that’s our number one preference. But, Missoula has the same hospital system as Mrs. Burrito Bowl currently works in.
Why does the same hospital system matter?
Well, in Montana the wages are significantly lower for nurses. Mrs. Burrito Bowl will make approximately $17/hour LESS in Montana than she does in Portland. Yikes. Also, in Portland, we pay about $120/month for insurance. In the Flathead, we’d pay about $700/month. Higher insurance premiums combined with a lower hourly wage results in about a $3,000 monthly hit to our finances.
The wages in Missoula and the Flathead are about the same. In Missoula, our insurance would be closer to the $120/month range. We’re still taking a huge hit on the income side of things, but at least we wouldn’t be paying so much for insurance.
The difference in insurance premiums alone would result in savings of around $7,000 per year.
Choosing Family Over Finances
We knew we’d make less money in Montana, but we didn’t know the difference would be so stark. We’ve done a good job at squirreling away our money so that we have the ability to make a conscious choice to earn significantly less. The tradeoff will be having our children grow up near their grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles.
An interesting hypothetical question is trying to find where the cutoff is between earning more and spending more time with family. It’s easy to say spending time with family is always more important, but at what point does that equation flip? If we earned $300,000/year in Portland but only $10,000/year in the Flathead is it still a good trade? What if the difference was $3,000,000 per year? At what point is it worth it for us to stay in Portland and work for a few more years?
If we were the type of people to spend whatever we earn, I don’t think there would be an amount we could earn that we’d find more valuable than that time with family. But, because we do save so diligently, any extra amount we earn now will be translated into future time away from work. We’re working now to buy freedom later. When you think of it that way it’s not as easy as just saying “Family is more important than money.”
Another wrinkle to the whole equation is this idea that time with family means our extended family, but ALSO our little immediate family. In Portland, Mrs. Burrito Bowl can earn by herself working three days per week what we’d cumulatively earn together in Montana. That extra time that I’m not working gets to be spent with Baby Burrito Bowl.
We’d have more overall time with our little three-person family if we stayed in Portland.
Coast or Keep Our Foot on the Gas?
The real question is should we try to coast our way to financial independence or should we keep our foot on the gas? Mathematically, we’re about halfway to our financial independence goal. Because of the magic of compounding interest, timewise, we’re much further along than halfway. Dollar-wise, we’re just over 50%.
That gives us some flexibility. We can either buckle down and try to keep saving as much as possible for another 3-5 years until we reach our FI number, or we can take the foot off the gas and coast.
Coasting.
Coasting would mean we wouldn’t worry so much about saving. We wouldn’t start spending anything more, we’d just be okay with earning less. We’d let the momentum of our investments carry us to financial independence while we worked just enough to get by. Doing this, it wouldn’t really matter that we’d earn so much less in Montana.
We’d be trading that money for more time with family. It’s hard to quantify how much that time with family is worth. Family is more important than money, but by earning more money NOW we’d get more time with family LATER.
Foot on the Gas.
If we decided to keep our foot on the gas it would mean trading precious time with great-grandparents, grandparents, and the rest of our family. But, there’s a good chance we could retire by the time June is ready for first grade. At that point, we could move back to Montana and just kick it. Five years from now we could be completely free to spend all day doing whatever we want.
Also, we have a lot of friends in Portland. Leaving here is definitely bittersweet. We’ll really miss the life we’ve built here. The closer we get to leaving the more we’re asking ourselves if that was the last time we’ll hang out with so and so.
But, we’ve outgrown our current apartment. If we stayed here we’d have to get a bigger place. Having us both keep working in our current jobs wasn’t sustainable. My boss allowed me to work three days per week because he knew it was a short-term situation. If we decided to stay, I’d probably have to either find a different job or go back to full-time. Going full-time would mean putting June in daycare and missing the days with her. The cost of childcare in Portland is so high that it almost makes sense for one of us to stay home.
We don’t really have the option of just staying in our current circumstance and stockpiling the same amount of money. We’d be able to save more in Portland than in Montana, but it wouldn’t be the same as before.
Our Plan.
So our current plan is to forge ahead with the move to Montana. I’m incredibly thankful that we’ve spent the last five years being as frugal as we could so that we have the option to make a move like this.
Missoula and the Flathead both have a lot going for them. Missoula has a lot more to do and the job prospects are better. It’s within two hours of the Flathead so we’d be able to visit our family as often as we wanted. It’s just a fun place. I’ve never lived there, but it’s like Montana’s version of how Portland used to be.
If we live in Missoula we wouldn’t make it for the random lunch dates, but we’d be there for the big things like Thanksgiving and Mother’s Day. Those are things we currently miss.
Going to the Flathead would most likely mean we’d be saving a lot less than we would in Missoula. But, we’d be home. We’d be there for the random Tuesday lunches, the impromptu get-togethers, the quick just-stopping-by-to-say-hello conversations. We’d also have closer access to a plethora of eager babysitters.
So, for now, we’re sending applications to both places and we’ll see what lands. We go back and forth on which choice to make. I think it will come down to getting a good job that will work with the lives we want to live. Stay tuned for Part V which will be written while living somewhere in Montana.
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Here are a few more articles you can read since you’re already here.
The Spectrum of Belief and the Circle of Influence
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