I can honestly say that this thread has changed my entire life for the better over the past year. It's amazing to me how much life improvement one can get just by being able to say NO to unreasonable work demands. I'm not FIREd yet, but I'm close enough that I've already started acting like it when it comes to work assignments. Here are some of the things I've done in the past year. Some might not consider them epic, but they are epic to me.
A background, I have been in some form of IT Consulting for over 25 years. For at least half that time, I've traveled 75-100% to work on projects at customer sites. When I was young and single, all of the traveling was great! Now that I'm older and married, it became a tedious chore.
Over the past 5 years, I have worked and trained very hard to become a certified expert in a particular technology that is very much in-demand right now. My previous job was traveling 100% doing various projects in this technology for various customers. Some of those customers came from the actual technology company, others came thru the medium-sized consulting firm that I worked for.
As some may know, in IT Consulting, the bill rates can be quite high. $250-$350/hour is not uncommon. However, I was only making a fraction of that. Knowing just what my little slice of the pie was infuriated me constantly. *I* was the one leaving my family on Sunday afternoon and returning Friday night every week, yet everybody else actually made more money.
Every month the company would give 1 consultant a special bonus for going "above and beyond". There was one other consultant and I who traveled full time, everybody else got to go home to their families every night or worked from home. Neither of us never got the bonus. Why? Because we didn't put in enough extra effort. They didn't care that we were stuck on planes or at airports 10-20 hours/week.
And on top of that, my manager was constantly trying to get me to do extra work on the side that my company was actually billing for, but I was paid a salary, so no extra money for me. "You're stuck in a hotel room all week, so you have plenty of time to do this extra work" was his constant excuse. So even though I did a lot of this extra work, I still didn't get nominated for the monthly bonus.
After reading MMM and this thread, assessing how financially stable we actually were, and realizing that with my status as an expert in this high-demand technology, I could easily find another job, I decided to just stop taking all of their sh*t.
The first step was that I stopped doing all extra work. At first I just ignored any requests. When my manager asked for the status of them, I politely but sternly informed him that I was already billing 40 hours/week for the customer, and if he wanted me to do anything else, he needed to figure out a way to pay me extra for it. He gave me a hard time, but I simply told him that if he didn't like it, he could fire me and lose all of the billing revenue that I was bringing in.
I then informed him that my 100% traveling days were over. Either find me something local to me, or preferably, work-at-home, or another company would. My company had paid a lot of money to get me trained on this technology, so I gave them 6 months to reduce my travel schedule. Believe me, they've made 100x as much money from my billings as they ever paid to train me, probably more.
And third, rather than having the internal travel agency book my flights and hotels, I started making my own reservations. They were constantly nickel and diming me on flights/hotels. Making me take cheaper flights at crazy times and putting me up at cheaper hotels very far away from the customer sites. No more. When confronted about this, I simply said either I make my own travel reservations, or I don't travel 1 foot outside of my house.
They backed down on everything. My life did improve somewhat, but sure enough, after 6 months, there was absolutely no movement on reducing my travel, so I started looking for a new work-at-home job. I found it in less than a month and am now writing this post from my desk at my own house. My commute is 20 feet from Bedroom 1 to Bedroom 3. :) My wife is so happy to have me home more, and I got a 20% raise to boot!
It's amazing how much better your life can get when you just do what's best for you and your family.
I hope others will read this and get some inspiration from it. FU money is great, but even if you're not quite there yet, having partial FU-money as well as a FU-skillset can go a long way to improving your life.
Thank you MMM Community for inspiring me to make these much-needed changes!!