A hybrid work model and a clean up

It’s Polling Day and a public holiday. Good to get a long weekend before I start my training course next week. It’s related to my field of work and will be conducted virtually for this batch of participants. Given that I’m in an advisory role within the bank, it’s essential that I continue to gain more relevant knowledge to expand my capability on what I can advise on. That is how I can advance my career. The problem is having to find time to attend the training course, especially intensive ones that stretch over a few days. But it’s worth the accreditation if you can successfully complete it.

My advisory workload has been picking up recently as business activity at the bank starts to increase with economies opening up. Not a bad sign because that means I still have a job for now. I had a divisional town hall recently and some of the more important topics of discussion were about the bank performance, areas of focus, transformation projects and the working model going forward. This is how I assess my retrenchment risk and my career prospects. Allows me to do some level of financial planning without having to constantly worry about losing my job. My salary income is crucial to my investing and spending plans over the next few years as we look to move to a bigger place and start thinking about having another baby.

It does look like my current full-time work from home arrangement is going to change as the situation normalises. I didn’t think it was going to stay this way as I agree with my senior management that there is value in going into the office. Based on their tentative plans, I might have a hybrid work model where I work from home for one week and work from office the next week. By alternating between home and office on a weekly basis, it allows us to spend enough time in each place to extract the benefit from both arrangements. When I work from home, I get to spend more time with the family but I’m less productive. When I work from office, I get to spend more time with my colleagues and I’m more productive. By blending them together, it ensures that I’m not overwhelmed by having too much of either arrangement.

I would have preferred the flexibility of being able to choose my work from home and work from office days every week. But I guess giving that choice to every employee would make it too difficult for the bank to monitor our whereabouts. And trying to coordinate in-person meetings to facilitate discussions would be a nightmare if all of us are constantly changing the days we are at home or in the office every week. I’m interested to see how & when this hybrid work model is implemented (no timeline on this yet) and whether it still gives me the job flexibility that I want. I see it as a win if we can even retain work from home arrangement in some form permanently after the situation normalises. For now, I’m just going to keep working from home full-time and spend more time with my family at an acceptable cost of lower productivity.

With banks changing the interest rates and requirements on their bank accounts these few months, it has been tough coming up with new cash management plans. I have also taken the opportunity to clean up our personal finances. For example, OCBC removed the credit card spending interest rate requirement on its 360 account. With my family dining out less because of the whole stay at and work from home, the OCBC 365 credit card (especially the 6% rebate on dining spend) has lost its usefulness to me. Even though it still has the 3% rebate on groceries spend, the minimum calendar month spend of $800 to qualify for it renders this useless. Because I’m better off redirecting my groceries spend to my UOB One credit card. To get to the higher rebate tiers with increased spending. And it’s still tied to the higher interest rates on my UOB One bank account.

I simplified my Net Worth Google Sheet by removing a lot of the income and expenses information. It has served its purpose by providing us with an understanding of our active & passive income flow and pattern of expenditure over the years. We have extracted what we need from it and continuous monitoring is not likely to yield significant new insights other than expected adjustments based on our development as a family. We might restart this if there are major changes such as a job loss or possibly expanding our family. Otherwise, the new Net Worth Google Sheet is more simplified, requires less time to update and provides a more relevant snapshot of our personal finances.