Reflecting on 2021: Career, Finances and Cost of Living

Wow, where did 2021 go? It was a year of continued new COVID-19 variants, civil unrest, crazy weather (hello climate change) and everything else in-between. Personally, it was a very transformative year. My husband and I had a child, we both switched to new jobs with a pay raise, and we moved back to Texas from California. Just typing all of this makes me realize that it was a year of change. I wanted to take the chance to look back on the past year because that’s part of the reason why I started this blog. I want to reflect and pay attention to my spending, savings, and investments as I continue my journey towards financial independence.

My Career

As I got closer to my parental leave in May 2021, I already braced myself for a potential career change. I saved up enough money to last at least an extra 6 months if I didn’t feel emotionally or physically ready to go back to work after 4 months of leave. I also realize how privileged I was to even have that much paid leave! Many women have none, or have to take sick days, or even worse take unpaid time off to heal from childbirth and spend precious time with their child.

I was lucky enough to have an uncomplicated birthing experience and a support group to help me raise my daughter. I felt ready and comfortable to return to work in August 2021. However, I wasn’t the same person that I was before having my child. I worked in tech sales and my day was often filled with multiple 15 minute phone calls, sending quotes, and giving software demos. The downside was that my schedule was unpredictable since my calendar was open and I lived in the pacific time zone with customers in the central and eastern time zones. This made returning to work challenging to schedule time to nurse my baby, help take care of her, and find a quiet space when we both had conflicting (and unpredictable) schedules. I just couldn’t do it anymore. I realized that I also was ready for a change, more benefits and a pay raise (hello I have an extra mouth to feed) so before burning out completely it made since to switch jobs.

Thankfully, I had already started applying to jobs and figuring out what field I wanted to switch to that gave me more flexibility and autonomy. I made sure to find companies that gave benefits to parents and had a more equitable pay scale with completely remote work. I ended up finding the perfect company and role, took a month off before starting my new job, and got a $20,000 much needed raise to support my new life.

Finances and Cost of Living

As I just said above, I got a $20,000 pay raise with my new job and soon afterwards my husband also got a new job. We decided now was the time to leave California and move back to Texas. It was always a part of our plan since we had only moved to the SF Bay Area for work and now that we were both remote….nothing was holding us there!! We were free to move back to the land of no state taxes, breakfast tacos, and mouth watering bbq. Okay, you can tell that we both love to eat. But more seriously, we wanted to position ourselves from a place of power. Even though Texas isn’t perfect (is there a perfect place to live?) we knew that eliminating state taxes, moving to a place where we could eventually buy a house and enjoy a lower price of living made sense to us.

Our move reduced our cost of living which would allow us to save an invest more money than before. Our rent went from $2700 per month for a 2-bedroom, 800 square foot unit to $2200 for a 3-bedroom, 1300 square foot unit. Our electric bills went from about an average of $225 to an average of $115. All of a sudden, we no longer had to pay sky high state taxes to the state of California. The price of gas went from almost $4 per gallon down to about $2.80. This freed us up to both start investing more money in our company’s 401k’s and start to make a plan for how to buy a house in 2022. We couldn’t even dream of ever owning a house in California unless our company IPO’d or we had magically won the lottery.

With a new cost of living and a new job, I decided to try a 50/30/20 budget. If you don’t know what that is, I recommend checking out my blog post describing this budget method to see if it’s right for you. However, I quickly got tired of doing that and went back to the anti-budget, budget. I prioritized investing my money first, and as long as the was done I didn’t worry as much about what I spent on everything else.

In conclusion…

As I plan out my 2022, I have some big goals and small goals that I’d like to accomplish. They aren’t all financial, some are about health, wellness and self development. I’ll be sharing my goals for 2022 in an upcoming block post so stay tuned. 🙂