As I have said many times before, I am a planner. Planning ahead is a great way to stay on top of things, but at times it can get you excited about things that never happen. You know, like the planning that I did in my head when we first started to try to make a baby….but that’s a different post.
This potential job in Chicago for CP requires a lot of planning ahead.
*We made a spreadsheet of all of the costs involved with moving and if it made sense financially.
*We made sure that the cost of living would be the same or lower so that we could still afford our lifestyle.
*We contacted our realtor who helped us buy our house for a comparative market analysis to make sure that we wouldn’t lose too much on the sale of our house despite only being in it less than two years.
*We checked into real estate prices in the burbs of Chicago to see what kind of house we would be able to afford.
*We thought about the furniture that we would sell/give away to make moving easier.
*We thought about ALL OF THE FOOD in our freezer (gallons of homemade beef broth, organic beef from our CSA, homemade meat pies, homemade Bolognese sauce, homemade sausage, etc.) and what we would do with it (a BIG PARTY!).
*I spoke to my boss about trying to transfer my job out to the Chicago office.
*I updated my resume and will start to apply to jobs out in Chicago because it may take a while.
*We thought about how to keep the house clean during showings and what we would do with the dogs.
*We bought plants and shrubs to landscape a bit more.
*We cleaned up the backyard.
*We put together a list of home improvement projects that would need to get done before our move.
A couple of these things we had meant to do anyway….but possibly having to put our house on the market pushed us to get these things done quickly.
But…..CP could totally bomb the interview on Tuesday (I don’t think that is going to happen, but you never know). CP could hear more about the job or the company and decide that it is not what he wants to do at all. It’s very possible that CP won’t even get an offer. And then we will have done all of this planning for nothing.
So in the end, is it better to plan ahead for something that may not happen? And risk getting let down from all of the excitement of making a huge life-changing decision? Or is it better to wait until you know more about the potential life-changing event and the possibility it may happen to you before doing anything?
5 comments:
I'm a planner....so my vote is to always be prepared! I am not a fan of the "unexpected" and like to have my ducks in a row. Yes, it makes me a little obsessive and yes it takes time, but for me, having that list makes everything more bearable.
I feel like what you've done makes a lot of sense. If you were already house-hunting in Chicago and planning your goodbye party, that might be excessive. But the planning you've done so far seems to be more along the lines of thinking through what this could mean for you and making sure that it's desirable. Basically like a decision about whether or not to move forward in the process. That seems totally reasonable. Of course I'm a planner myself so maybe I have a skewed perspective...
I prefer to wait until I know whether something is likely to happen to start planning. But part of that stems from the disappointment of IF and all of the plans I made related to parenthood that turned out to be for nothing because the time period I was planning for has come and gone with no baby.
Planning is better than not planning, because chaos is more likely if you don't plan. I'm popping by from ICLW. Making sure of your path is definitely the right thing to do. Good luck to you and CP.
Andrew and I are going through something very similar. There's a chance we could be vastly changing our lives soon too and we keep going back and forth with how far to plan or not. I feel like if I don't plan and it does all happen I will go crazy trying to make sense of it all on the short term, but if we do plan and it doesn't happen, we'll be bummed, but still. I'd rather have a plan than not. Not having a plan is way too stressful for me.
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