WHOA thar pardnar...!

Money is a strange thing. It can bring happiness in the form of stability for the family and the acquiring of needful and not-so-needful things. But it can also be the fuel for most evils (just check out the greed of the current administration for PLENTY of examples). No matter how you look at money, though, it is a necessity of modern day life and dictates one’s standard of living.

Where am I going with all this money mumbo-jumbo? Well, it was the money factor that has led me to ultimately turn down the job offer from Trion in Redwood City, CA. It’s not Trion’s fault, for the money they were offering was very reasonable for most areas in the continental US of A. It just wasn’t doable in the overly expensive region known as the Bay Area. And here’s why:

After extensive research, my wife and I found that in order to send my daughter to a good school in CA, we would need to rent a place for $3,500/month within one of the good school districts. That’s $42,000/year basically flushed down the toilet for a ~1,400 sq.ft. house, more than half the size of the house I currently live in AND own (and has a pool), not to mention we’re currently paying a combined mortgage and home insurance of $1,200/month – that’s tough to give up. This is on top of losing ~$25,000 upon selling our Austin TX home in a very poor housing economy. To add to this, because we would no longer have a tax write-off from mortgage interest payments, we would have to shell out an additional $7,000/year come tax time. And the cherry on the money cake is that there is a state income tax in CA, so add another ~$4,000 to that. In sum, we’d go bankrupt in the Bay Area and, consequently, our quality of life would go down the drain.

This saddens me greatly since the project and the people at Trion are both top notch and I wanted to work there like there’s no tomorrow. But I need to think about my daughter, first. It’s a parent’s responsibility to put their children first, and if I moved us out to the Bay Area, I would have flushed our quality of living down the commode – period. Yes, I would have had great job satisfaction, but not home satisfaction, and that is more important.

So, we will continue to have Dianne work full time at her job, (which makes about $7,000 less than what I was making at NCsoft), but it is plenty for us to stay in our house and live comfortably, though a little lean. I will continue to seek out game design employment in the Austin, TX area, in the hopes that things will eventually pick up again in the near future. In the meantime, I’m going to start taking programming courses to make myself more valuable as an employee, as well as get back to one of my passions – writing. I already have a couple of novels/novellas started, so now’s a good time to get back to them. The Mr. Mom gig has been rather enjoyable, too, so I’m not feeling bad at all. I get to know my little girl even better and we have lots of fun together.

So, despite me being bummed that Trion was the right job in the wrong area, life is still good. In fact, it’s all good right now.