[Yes, I'll be explaining both of the terms in the title, at least as I use them. Just give me some time...]
It seems that I'm having regular "Oh shit" moments these days. In fact, they're occurring about once a month. They coincide (and are, indeed, causally linked to) the one point every month when I figure out how much money we need to pay all the bills for the next month.
As I mentioned yesterday, I'm still unemployed, thanks to the horrible effects of the popping of the Internet "bubble" combined with the overall US recession and subsequent "jobless recovery". A major part of the problem is that my specialty (if such it can be called) is systems architecture. This is one of the most important jobs when a company is building new software systems. However, when everyone is in "station keeping" mode, there's less of a need for it. As a result, we're living on my wife's income and our savings.
<tangent> This has given rise to one of the worst psychological effects of everything that's going on. Our primary source of savings right now is my mother's life insurance proceeds. If my mom were still alive, we'd be in pretty desperate straights right now. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to ponder the psychological impacts of that... </tangent>
So, about once a month, I go through and tally up all the bills that need to be paid at that time, or that are going to be coming due within the next 30 days (using estimations for the bills that don't have recurring amounts). I then compare that number to how much is in our checking account and the difference (plus a bit for food and ATM withdrawals, etc) is how much I need to scrape together. I can find some of that total from my wife's account, but need to pull the rest from cash savings.
Pretty much every month, I'm unhappy with how much needs to be transferred. That's the point at which I (internally) go, "Oh shit...". It's not that we don't have the money. Rather, it's that I'm unhappy with how much needs to be made up every month, especially since it's unlikely that some other relative is about to drop off and leave me a bunch of life insurance. [And, yes, that was in bad taste... So sue me...]
It was during last month's moment that I had my latest Crazy Moment™ (henceforth abbreviated "CM" for the remainder of this entry). My CM, which has some reasonable basis, at least at the start, was: "Well, it certainly costs a lot to live here. But, let's also factor in that there's a bunch of stuff about the United States which is making me unhappy, from our current president to just general lowering of standards to increased incidences of so-called 'quality of life' crimes, etc., etc."
From there, my CM took off and started running. It ran, as you might guess over the border. And not just any border - after all, Canada is rather cold most of the time (which would not make my wife happy) and Mexico doesn't make me happy enough about its standard of living for me to want to move there. So, for reasons I still can't figure out, I thought "What about New Zealand?"
<tangent> On the off-chance that there's someone who's reading this who actually lives in New Zealand, please drop me a line (email below). I'm really curious about standards of living, etc., there from someone who's living there, not just internet brochures or travel books. </tangent>
Now, to be clear, I've never been to New Zealand. Have never, in fact, been anywhere in the southern hemisphere. But, the pictures look nice and everything I've managed to research (too many websites to list) make it sound wonderful. Also, I've excluded European countries (good standard of living, costs probably equivalent to the US) and Australia (not quite sure why on this one... have to have some element of a whim about it, I guess).
So, how does this become a certified (as opposed to certifiable) CM? Well, first off, it's darned difficult to just drop everything, pack the house, sell it, and jaunt off to somewhere that is, truly, about half a world away. Secondly (and proving that I'm not completely insane), I wouldn't want to do something like that until my wife becomes a naturalized citizen of the US. I think that travel will be significantly improved if we can both travel on US passports, rather than on passports from two separate countries.
And, finally, the unfortunate bottom line is that we wouldn't be able (as far as I can tell) to just immigrate to NZ. There's a points system in effect through the NZ Immigration Service and, without a job offer from a New Zealand firm, it's unlikely that we'd qualify. [For the record, it looks like we'd get about 26 points and current immigrants need 29 to qualify.]
But it's definitely an enticing thought and one that I'm not quite prepared to discard out of hand... Time will tell, of course, whether it comes to anything (or even can come to anything), but I'll try to talk more about this later, as well as other CMs and what ultimately happens to most of them.
Author: ben@tmk.com