November Mortgage Update

Last month (October):
Balance: $73,085.37
Years left: 5.75
P =$920.78, I = $293.62, Escrow = 613.58

This month (November):
Balance: $71,988.26
Years left: 5.67
P =$925.11, I = $289.30, Escrow = 613.58

One month’s prepayment savings: $0.68

I should be talking a bit about our housing prices (thus property taxes) going up, so pre-payment will be going down (though that hasn’t been reflected in the escrow yet), but here’s an update on DH instead and some wonderings…

DH has been unemployed for a few months now.  He’s been diligently networking and taking care of things and has thankfully been there during the great daycare scramble of 2013.

He had one “client” a month or two back for a small thing who never did get around to signing his contract and thus got some work from DH for nothing (we know we know) and then the deadline passed without having DH complete the work because the project manager put everything off to the last minute and then did it all hirself because it was too late for anyone else to do anything.  So that was a bust, but it was only 1-3 days of work that he missed out on doing and only 3 hours that he wasted without pay.  UPDATE:  They just emailed– the project manager’s attempt was a failure.  Sounds like it is too late to fix.  But they want him to invoice for the time he worked on the project.

Right now he’s got 3 promising leads, all of them from people he has worked with in the past.  One of them is talking about offering him a full-time job.  He’d actually done an informational interview with them back this summer, but they wanted someone local instead of someone telecommuting.  They haven’t been able to fill the position so they gave him a call.  He’s got a second round interview next week that includes a programming test.  They seem to think this will happen.

One of the questions was whether DH wanted to work as a contractor or full-time.  DH said it would depend on the packages offered.  (He didn’t say DUH of course there’s a $ value that would push him towards one or the other; most people don’t think like economists.)

He knows his consulting rate/range.  But he doesn’t know what sort of salary to ask for as his bottom-line.  I don’t know either.

We looked up the salaries on Glassdoor for this company and they’re kind of on the low end, between 75K and 100K, mostly in the 85K range, but there are only 8 salaries listed so who knows how representative they are.   It also doesn’t say much about what the benefits are, though the health insurance package will be a lot nicer than the one I get because the company’s in a blue state.

The company would allow him to work mostly from home, but it would also require him to fly in once a month or once every two months.   The work would be fulfilling and meaningful and he’d be able to work directly with someone he works with very well.  He also fits exactly what they want and can do things that the company needs but didn’t advertise for in this position.  But full-time work is less flexible than contract work and it’s harder to change the terms of a contract when you’re not constantly rewriting it.

So assuming he passes their second-round interview and they give him an offer, he’d like to have an idea of what kind of salary should be his walk-away point for a full-time position.  We don’t need his income (or rather, we don’t need more than 20K), and I have to say that flexibility is really nice to have.  85K seems kind of low to me (though truthfully that’s more than his previous 9-month salary), but is it low enough to walk away from?  I dunno.

Oh, as for the other leads, one of them is sort of iffy– it’s a remote half-time SBIR kind of thing that he’s about 2/3 qualified for (he’d be picking up a new skill that’s not his core competency).   The other is a standard SF/Bay area start-up with funding, similarly offering either full-time or consulting, and DH knows more about some of the technology behind the project than his friend who founded the company, though it isn’t exactly a perfect match for his skill-set.  It’s a new company so no info on glassdoor, just that they offer “a competitive start-up package for the bay area,” whatever that means.  We don’t know as much about this option yet, and he’s set to talk about it more in a week or two.

So anyway, that’s our update.  I’m hopeful that we’ll get a little more income so I can stop worrying about things like losing 4.5K on a daycare prepayment and so on.  But we’ll be ok.  It’s hard to complain when you’re in a situation that 85K sounds like a small salary.