Training and manual Dollar Cost Averaging progress

I just completed 1.5 days of my virtual training course that I signed up for last month. It was recommended by my manager as a good knowledge builder that is relevant to my job. My personal view is that I find higher education such as university degrees less useful compared to professional accreditations and its associated training courses. But it’s tough to study and work at the same time. I did it once when I just graduated from university in my first job and that was difficult even though I had more time on my hands then. I can’t imagine doing the same thing with my 8.5 month old baby now.

Anyway, this training course takes up 3 days of my time and it’s spread out over 2 weeks in the middle with 1.5 days each week. This is not considered intensive and a prelude into what reskilling and retraining is like as a middle-aged professional with a family. Even though I had weeks to prepare my schedule on the job and home front, I was nervous logging into the virtual classroom for the first time. Mostly because it’s been a while since I have attended a training course that I actually had to focus on learning and applying my new knowledge & mind.

While my manager was able to cover me for work over the 1.5 days, it was on the home front that I got surprised on. The stakeholders at my job are more willing to wait for my return to address their issues. But my family’s demands needed immediate attention. My wife had a busy week as well so a lot of the household tasks fell to my helper. She was able to manage it but I could see it was more stressful for her. Juggling between keeping the baby occupied & taking care of him while handling household chores like cooking, cleaning & washing was hard.

We stepped in to relieve some of the burden but that meant falling behind on my wife’s project schedule and on my learning progress. This translated into us having to spend extra time later in the evening catching up on what we missed. If we extrapolate this with more days of training, reduced flexibility in our jobs and additional stress at work, the negative effect becomes exponential. A short 1.5 days learning experiment that has yielded interesting results. I’m going to do a few things differently this time around to prepare for the remaining 1.5 days learning experiment next week. Got to try and improve at this.

Anyway, my manual Dollar-Cost Averaging (DCA) progress is bad. As the markets climbed, I found myself hesitating and delaying my planned ETF purchases. This is why I prefer my automated DCA strategy. It forces me to invest regardless of the market performance for that week. When I have to do it manually, I keep wondering whether I should wait for a lower price before buying in. I just don’t seem to have the discipline to stick to my manual DCA strategy. Not sure whether I should just increase my automated DCA investment amounts and stop the manual DCA. But they are using different platforms and I kind of want to diversify what I DCA into every week. Another thing to improve on.