It has been an intensive 2 days for all sorts of reasons. I finally completed my training course and the learning this week was better than last week. Mostly because there was less material covered and the topics of discussion were easier to understand. And I scheduled the timetable for each day better with improved coordination between my family. Even the baby was more cooperative and that made our lives less difficult. While I may have done the learning part of my training course, I have yet to test my application of what I learnt.

Based on the case studies and examples that were discussed during the training course, my conclusion is that it would take me even more time and effort to be able to apply the knowledge in my job. Which means that gaining knowledge is only the first part and I still have to move on to its application to successfully learn new skills. The usefulness of knowledge is determined by how well I can apply it. Otherwise, knowing more does little for my personal and professional development.

Anyway, finishing my training course wasn’t the highlight of the week. I had mentioned that my wife’s bank was about to undergo another round of restructuring. While the messaging by senior management is that it’s going to be more severe than the previous rounds in the past few years, my wife and her colleagues were hoping that it’s not as serious as it sounds. Turns out it is. The announcement on the new organisation chart and operating model was recently made and it’s a major restructuring. Jobs are being cut everywhere or moved back to the head office location. This is likely to take place by the end of this year.

The big question is how badly my wife would be affected. It’s not looking good but she has a fighting chance to hang on to a job. Even if she could survive, it’s still a negative outcome because all the work remains and flows to fewer people. So any survivors of the major restructuring would have to deal with a lot more work. We always knew it was a possibility that she would have to face something like this in her career but what bad timing. With a 8.5 month old baby and in the midst of a pandemic, both her internal and external job options to find something equivalent are limited.

My wife has been in a number of extensive discussions with her manager, team and colleagues after the announcement. To get more information and a sense of the sequence of events. This is important in understanding what her next steps should be. The clock has started on how long she can stay at her bank with a job. Her priority would be to buy more time so she can navigate internally or externally to another role. I have been doing some strategic planning with her so she can focus her time and efforts on what can yield the best results for her.

Beyond that, I have also walked my wife through how I can support her on my side. While she has the higher paying job, it’s less flexible on the hours and more unstable in terms of job security. I may have the lower paying job but it’s more flexible on the hours and more stable in terms of job security. I’m just going to hunker down at my job to hedge against the risk of her being unemployed. When she makes risky career moves to preserve her job, she needs to know I have the family covered and the household income is sufficient.

I will not be changing our monthly salary income allocation between expenses, investments and savings for now. We hold enough cash buffer to withstand a period of unemployment for the both of us and have never over-invested into the markets. I should only adjust the allocation if she loses her job. But this is something I’m going to monitor more closely to see if I even need to make adjustments before that happens i.e. once her risk of unemployment reaches a certain level.

In the end, it’s important to acknowledge that such setbacks are to be expected in our careers. Tough times are what forces us to hustle, network and plan better. Or even learn new skills and go into new job sectors just to survive. The key is to let ourselves go through the experience and fight with everything we have. That’s the only way we are going to learn and improve from this.

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.