My wife and I went out for lunch today by ourselves. It’s been a while since we got some alone time so it’s nice to catch up with each other. She’s going back to work in 3 weeks’ time so I wanted to check in on her head space leading up to her return.
Understandably, my wife is worried about leaving our baby at home with the helper and her parents. While they are getting better at taking care of him, there’s still many issues to work through. We just had a big argument with them about different approaches to handling a suspected health issue with the baby.
It’s a work in progress as all of us try to find a middle ground. Where we somewhat agree on how to tackle matters relating to taking care of the baby. To be honest, I rather we fight and try to resolve these issues now. Rather than have them surface later on when my wife goes back to work and it becomes more difficult to manage.
Anyway, my wife and I got to discussing what is our career strategy in the next 3 years. Taking into account the worsening virus situation and upcoming restructuring at her workplace. We have to admit it’s a tough period of time to navigate and there are no good options.
As a start, we have to go into job preservation mode while adjusting to being working parents. This means more networking internally and externally to get ahead of job cuts by maintaining professional and personal relationships while exploring job opportunities.
In a crisis, when banks decide to cut jobs, it’s not evenly spread across all divisions and departments. There’s assessments on benefits versus costs of all the jobs roles and decisions to be made on what positions they can do without. Often, a strong professional and personal internal network is our 1st line of defence against retrenchment.
Because if you know the right people, you can get early warning signs of what’s coming for you. And you can start to navigate to other available internal roles through recommendations. Remember, this is the corporate world and it’s not fair. To get blindsided by a job cut in a bank usually means you haven’t done enough to be plugged into the grapevine.
Which is essentially an informal communication network often misunderstood as office gossip. While consisting of part rumours and part truths, it can be critical in bridging the gaps between what you find out officially and what’s actually happening on the ground.
A strong professional and personal external network means knowing recruiters and friends that works at other firms. People that can recommend you for jobs elsewhere. This is our 2nd line of defence against retrenchment. It takes a long time to build up these 2 lines of defences to be useful and ready for deployment when needed.
It doesn’t happen overnight because strong professional relationships take time to form. Especially when it involves job recommendations since their personal reputations are at stake if things go wrong. You will only stick your neck out for someone you trust at a personal and professional level.
Our plan is to buckle down for the next 3 years to stablise our careers with no risky moves. And spend more time with each other and our baby as a family at home. Perhaps even have another kid during this time. Pushing hard in our jobs now might not translate into any substantial monetary reward and promotion.
If the local and global economies go into a long and drawn-out recession because of the worsening virus situation, it could last for years. Banks are going to respond by reducing headcount, freezing promotions, salary and bonus. Even if we do put in hard work and effort to go above and beyond in our job role, no one is going to care. And it’s not going to amount to any financial reward.
You could say we are being lazy but I reckon we are choosing this time to cruise. A career is like a marathon and you need to know how to pace yourself. Our jobs still allow us to do this for now and we are going to take advantage of it. We need to use this time to build the foundation of our family while our careers are going to plateau.
In the meantime, we are also making preparations for job loss and the consequent reduced or no salary income. We may be investing cash into the markets now but we know things can take a turn for the worse. Having a lot of debt in such a situation will always make things worse.
Our mortgage is the biggest concern even if we could cut down on everything else. Housing loan repayments don’t stop unless you want to be forced to sell your property. Which is why we have refrained from making any transfers from our CPF Ordinary Accounts to the CPF Special Accounts. We have also not invested the balances in our CPF Ordinary Accounts and are willing to accept the lower interest rate returns on them.
The most important attribute of our CPF Ordinary Accounts is that it can be used for mortgage payments. As corporate employees with decent salaries above the ordinary wage ceiling, our employers’ and own CPF contributions can build the balances up rather quickly. We have taken a lot of care to do this and the result has been a 2 year buffer for housing loan repayments.
It’s not much because we do carry a large mortgage. But being able to use my wife’s CPF Ordinary Account to pay for 2 years worth of monthly mortgage instalments without using cash could prove crucial in surviving a recession that has resulted in job loss. 2 years is likely to be the time taken for us to find new jobs.
We don’t plan to use my CPF Ordinary Account balance as a buffer because it is meant for the bigger property purchase. To house our expanded family in the future. Even in times of stress, we must position ourselves well for the recovery. Because things eventually do get better and we just have to wait it out. Survive now to thrive later.
