The Unseen Servant forums

My cousin practices on Long Island, does mainly mortgages, but loves to get into the courtroom too. It's sad I run Medicaid MH outpatients, when I retire and hang up my shingle (as the kids say) I'll make more money doing therapy part time in retirement than I do supervising 15 therapists doing therapy for folks with Medicaid.

Leitz wrote: ↑Wed Nov 06, 2024 4:48 pm Cool! Running your own business successfully can be significant in both challenge and reward.

I'm learning this quickly.

atpollard wrote: ↑Mon Nov 11, 2024 8:20 pm Decoding the Software Engineering Job Market

Good article, though I don't agree with all of it. Off-shore coders have been a market force for a while and AI is just the newest disruption. However, AI only takes you so far; often the answers are wrong, or incompatible, and the coder needs to understand the technology enough to fix the disconnect. A friend of mine is a serial CTO for tech startups; his MO is a small number of great coders using AI enhanced Javascript and React (or similar) and AWS for the backend. Cloud providers, and AWS is the market leader, are a huge disruption on their own.

A lot of software engineering is learning the domain, the environment, and then putting all the pieces together well. For example, Python is an awesome language, but for Data Science you need to add things like Pandas and NumPy, container management like K8S, Podman or Docker, infrastructure as code things like Terraform, and you probably should know some networking and database admin as well.

If anyone is thinking about or just starting a software engineering career I'd advise finding a mentor in the domain you want to work in and looking for work on an established team. There's a lot to learn besides the programming language and there are still lots of places to learn them. Also, build your portfolio of personal projects on GitHub; make them good and make them public.

Well, lots of paperwork to do, and any deal can fall through, but at least I have an offer letter in hand. Woot!

By the time I start, I will have been out of a job for over ten months. Unemployment ran out a while back; we were able to financially make it because we live well below my income, my wife had a job, and we had been saving for a while. After the financial bust of 2008 we learned our money lesson. It wasn't easy, and sometimes it wasn't fun, but we did learn.

Some of you know I am a person of faith, and that has carried me forward when nothing else would.

How are you all doing?

Glad to hear Leitz. Good luck wrapping it up and with your new job.

Good luck!

On a separate note, if anyone is interested, that it is critical to ensure you have your Roth IRA set up as soon as you can! Even if you can only contribute a few bucks a month to an S&P 500 index fund, it will pay off in the long run.

Especially important to reinforce and make sure your kids are doing this as soon as they are earning income .

It's one of those key things they should teach our kids in school but don't!

Leitz good to hear that you have the offer! Wishing you all the best on the new role.

I second Ravenn's endorsement of Roth IRAs. I am a corporate CPA who does personal tax and financial planning stuff for my family and a few friends. There are a lot of variables but a good rule of thumb is:

1) contribute to employer sponsored retirement plan to the maximum amount matched take that free money if it is available. Some plans will offer a Roth version and these contributions will count when determining your matched amount. If you are not worried about reducing the current year tax liability through a pre-tax contribution into the plan, you can do all of your contributions to the Roth portion of the plan (the company match is always in a tax deferred account so that will grow too). When you retire you can withdraw the money from the Roth portion and not pay taxes on the withdrawals.

2) If you have a high deductible health insurance plan which allows contributions to a Health Spending Account (HSA) and you do not have underlying medical issues which require consistent medical treatment, attempt to max your contributions out to that vehicle. HSAs will allow someone to invest excess funds in Mutual Funds, Stocks, and Bonds. Usually you can start the investment account for any funds greater than $1,000. Unlike a Flexible Spending Account (FSA) the funds in an HSA carry over in perpetuity and HSAs are portable so if you leave the employer you do not have to "cash out" or lose the funds. Also HSAs provide triple tax benefits if you use the money to pay for medical expenses. You take the contribution off your current income reducing your current tax liability, you do not pay taxes on money taken out of the plan if you use it for medical expenses, and any gains you earn in the investment are not taxed.

My family makes fun of me for how excited I get about the benefits of a HSA account. I have told my adult kids (25 and 22 years old) that they should be using a Roth/HSA combo to build funds up for their retirements in 40+ years and they look at me like I am crazy and then I show them how small investments now allowed to grow for that long will lead to significant sums in the future and better yet, they will not add to your tax burden when you are in retirement unlike traditional retirement plans (IRAs, 401(k)s, etc.).

BaltoBruiser wrote: ↑Thu Jan 30, 2025 1:40 pm
My family makes fun of me for how excited I get about the benefits of a HSA account. I have told my adult kids (25 and 22 years old) that they should be using a Roth/HSA combo to build funds up for their retirements in 40+ years and they look at me like I am crazy and then I show them how small investments now allowed to grow for that long will lead to significant sums in the future and better yet, they will not add to your tax burden when you are in retirement unlike traditional retirement plans (IRAs, 401(k)s, etc.).

This . i tell them all the time you'll thank me later!!!

As a social worker who is now over 50 and likely can never retire, I second the above posts! I've got a couple different 401s and 403s and whatever that I probably have to look into merging, but the nonprofit world hasn't been kind for retirement prep. Counting on the lottery though... of course I don't play the lottery so that's another issue. But yeah, set up the retirement, put in the max!!