So I haven’t posted in a month, I guess looking back it seems that A LOT has being going on in life here, and whenever my usual Saturday morning blogging hours would come up, I had other priorities in mind. Anyways, I suppose I’ll drop the big news up front here, I bought a house yesterday! I’m currently feeling like a big rolling boulder of excitement and anxiety about it, but definitely feeling some relief now that I have key in hand and ready to start packing up and starting fresh in a new space. And yes the dolphin is included.
I realized yesterday it’s been about a year since my ex-wife and I separated, and since then it’s been a cascading series of evaluating big life changing risks. It’s interesting to see how I’ve gotten more comfortable with making really big decisions while being on my own, compared to playing it “safe” before and not realizing how stagnant things were. Really hoping this latest move is a smart one, but it seemed like a pretty great chance for building on what I have going in life at the moment.
You might already know that I quit my full time corporate job a few months ago and have been focusing on creative work/YouTube stuff since, along with selling off the last bits of my game collection to stay afloat. That hasn’t changed, and obviously the house purchase might accelerate the implosion of my remaining life savings, but despite the weirdness of the real estate market right now, I was able to buy outright and not have any mortgage to deal with, and still have enough money left to be able to survive a few more months or cover any emergencies. So my monthly cost of living should be going down, no more siphoning money to a landlord, and now I should have a bit more financial breathing room from month to month, assuming any really big expenses don’t pop up out of nowhere.
If anything this may also crank up the heat in my attempts to make ends meet. Luckily the YouTube channel has been doing really well in the last month, the long horror game compilations videos blew up far beyond what I ever could have imagined. I was confident that they were a pretty good idea to get my stuff out there, but really didn’t expect things to take off this fast, and it’s been a lot to process. Trying to find that delicate balance between continuing to make whatever I want, and whatever the “audience” probably wants, and whatever AdSense “wants.” I think I’m getting more confident in just making whatever content feels right in the moment and just seeing what happens after it uploads. But it’s safe to say I will be needing to diversify my efforts a bit in order to make sure I can keep the lights on, as I’m well aware how volatile of a finanical situation I’m dipping into and can’t be expecting much stable consistency quite yet.
If there’s any big takeaway from all of this so far, I feel like I’m learning a lot about risk evaluation. While I feel a bit like I stumbled upon a winning lotto ticket with this house, there were a lot of carefully calculated decisions here. I spent a good deal of time making a list of all of the pros and cons of the move. I thought about all sorts of outcomes, from absolute worst-case to the best-case, including outcomes of NOT buying. I also did a lot of budget number crunching and brainstorming backup plans to get me out of any of those worst-case scenarios, or how to cover an unexpected repair bill. So after all of that, my gut just said DO IT, and it doesn’t hurt that I’ve been making so many big decisions in life lately that I had built up the confidence to freaking go for it and keep things moving.
I’m not sure where else to go with this post, so I’ll cap it off with a big thanks to everyone for their support in this wild and crazy journey I seem to be on at the moment. It’s been crucial for my sanity to have some online comradery through all these big changes and all the feedback on my creative output has been really inspiring. Let’s keep this boulder rolling!
Awesome news! Congratulations!