All he wants, he has.

Money is all over the US….its just a matter of where you go and how you want to find it….

By “this date” I will have “this much money” and will be able to pay off my house, cars, etc, etc.

When that is done, he could be free to pursue other more self rewarding goals.

His choice…either he has an end game goal in mind..or he continues running in the gerbil wheel….

The discussions in this thread – who knows, maybe there’ll be someone who is in the midst of one of these work/life balance decisions who will benefit from reading about the various choices made?

After my earlier post a couple of other images popped into my head: 1) a hypothetical 32-year-old still playing single-A ball in hopes of making The Show; and, 2) I read in my local paper a few days ago about an influential local indie band whose latest CD (out on their own label) is probably their last hurrah if they want to stay full-time musicians, after 15 or so years. What do we think about folks like that? (Yes I think there is a connection to traders.)

Btw, I’m in California – not quite ready to buy that Florida house overlooking the fairway, not just yet

Cheers

The only work/life balance that makes any sense is to make as much money as possible with as little effort as possible.

I respect welfare recipients more than I do the middle class. The middle class run around like fools pretending they have the world figured out. But all I ever hear from them is complaints about work, family, and money. If being middle class is the “American Dream”, then what all of the complaining for?

The truth is that being middle class is for losers. The middle class loses because they have all of the responsibility but no authority. They work hard to keep the country going but do not have any power over how their money gets spent. The middle class works harder and harder, but receives less and less protection and benefits.

This is why the rich and poor can continuously get by in life with little repercussions. They are not busy trying to improve the system. The rich and poor are only interested in getting all of they can out of the system. Being poor is no picnic, but I hear much less complaining from poor people than I do middle class people.

Of course you can have both but work and life balance is never 50/50. I moved from the Bay Area years ago to take a step back and and take life a bit slower. I am still at the office on average 55 hours a week and I feel I have a pretty good balance.

Today is a manager or company man ever really “away from the office”? I think you would all agree that work has overflowed into our “life”. I think the way to get balance is to let “life” overflow into work. Take that 10 minute break and call your kids. Meet them for lunch (take a lunch once in a while). Send them a text about the boring presentation and the funny little man presenting it. Take off an hour at 10AM to get to the school program then make it up by staying a bit late (worth the tradeoff).

There still are weeks once in a while when I see my kids just in time to kiss them goodnight. We just have to battle and do the best we can and remember that we always have a choice.

It has been a while since I visited your blog and this is fantastic stuff Bing. Keep it rolling.

People say they have no choices so they stay in the rut.

People are inherently afraid of change……..wrong….change is great….new oppertunities, new adventures and probably more free time and money…

In any job or endeavor attitude is everything. I never play for the money I always play for the game, more fun that way and good fortune always seems to come along.

Floor guys typically have better hours than screen traders. My info is a little dated, but in Chicago the guys trading beans at CBOT only had to work from 9 to 1:30 (plus about an hour before the open and an hour to close out). The financial pits were open from 7:20 to 2:00.

That said, a lot of the guys from the grain room still looked like they had gone a few rounds with Sonny Liston by the time they went home at the end of the day.

“had pleseant conversations with the wife and family, played with the kids and had a family experience that brought me back to my youth…yeah that was what it was like before email, cell phones and hand held communication devices that you wear like a ball and chain in prison…Wow that felt good…”

I have been torn by competition, desire to achieve and goal orientated to make X salary by age X, and the best thing I have done truely that makes me feel on top of the world career and family… 100% commited to getting them and me as much of both cakes as possible with out losing either one. That is called directing-controlling and-managing.

“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy sh*t we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars.”

I have known a few good earners manage to pull that sort of thing off, but they have either been confirmed loners, or childless dual earning married couples, with an almost pathological sense of frugality. And I’ve even seen of few in that category that found out the fortune didn’t quite last as long as anticipated.

Wait til Ryan faces financing his children’s way through some ivy league bastion….they’re certainly not going to find old State U acceptable after the early life they’ve led. He’s gonna have to add even more hours to that hectic worklife, to finally be discarded like the husk of an old pupa. Throw in an ex-wife or two, several mixed families to support, and he might find a heart attack the preferred alternative.

But you know me, always upbeat!

However, the type of trader described by Cliff Tan has to be different, if he has time and energy to read and study all that material mentioned. between trades, I suppose.

I certainly couldn’t do that. Once I start reading the bing-blog, and all the nice comments, too, it takes me a long time to drift back to work ….

I suppose it has to do with wanting to be in the game, and wanting to play that game at the highest level. I think that for most, it is more about the game than a desire for money that starts one down that path.

The trick is to be able to know when to let go of that which no longer serves you, and has made you serve it.