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Longtime readers will know my story thus far:\u00a0 after blogging as a hobby for a good five years, I left the world of formal employment back four years ago for a new venture, that of hanging my shingle out as a freelance writer and independent actuary, as my business cards read \u2014 or, rather, that was intended to be a stepping stone to some other employment, though I hadn\u2019t figured out what, yet.<\/p>\n
Did I succeed?\u00a0 Honestly, probably not.\u00a0 I had had several objectives.\u00a0 I had hoped to earn enough money writing with my Forbes platform to consider myself able to \u201cearn a living\u201d in some modest sense, but the initial success I had in building up an audience faded away when Forbes instituted its paywall.\u00a0 I\u2019m not judging their business decisions \u2014 I have no line of sight into what their results look like and for all I know they had been operating at a loss beforehand, and it\u2019s my understanding that covid reduced ad revenues everywhere (even though you\u2019d think that the rise in working-at-home would have had the opposite effect), but it is what it is.\u00a0 To have truly been successful would have required figuring out how to get the attention of other writing platforms and \u2014 let\u2019s face it \u2014 to have developed more skill at in-depth researching.\u00a0 (Ironically, just a couple months ago, I was contacted by someone at another platform offering a different freelance writing gig on personal finance, though that would have required a different sort of skill and a willingness and ability to dash off \u201chow to save for retirement\u201d type pieces instead of \u201cwhat is Congress doing?\u201d)\u00a0 I had also hoped to build the sort of connections that would mean that I would be viewed as an expert source, or someone to involve in the conversation, when it came to issues like public pensions or Social Security.\u00a0 And I really would have wanted the freelancing to be an interim step towards a job in the field, in a think tank or research institute.<\/p>\n
This did not happen.\u00a0 My dream job, as it happens, would have been at a research institute specifically focused on retirement, but the one such entity that exists, is located in Boston and doesn\u2019t have any interest in hiring someone remotely.\u00a0 Other such \u201cdream jobs\u201d really want someone with mad technical skills, and there are so many people who want this sort of \u201cthink smart thoughts\u201d type of job that they can be pretty picky.\u00a0 Near as I could figure, prospective employers were really more interested in the technical skills than the interest in the topic \u2014 and even as I took my classes in earning the Applied Economics degree, it certainly seemed that it was the norm to land in a given specialty not because of a particular interest but because you\u2019d figured out a research method that was achievable.\u00a0 It also became clear that, as far as the public policy piece of it goes, there are simply boatloads of people trying to get into that space.\u00a0 I might think my ideas are better than that of a Zoomer with no life experience, but employers don\u2019t really care.\u00a0 Besides which, there are so few such jobs that generalizing is also a mistake.\u00a0 And in any case, the one-year master\u2019s program was enough for me to learn to interpret economics papers and to know that I did not want to learn the math at the more advanced level necessary to actually write such papers to get the Ph.D. that is a prerequisite to many such jobs.<\/p>\n
So in the midst of my deliberations about what to do next after finishing the program, I ended up connecting with someone at a health insurance company, had a few more conversations and formal interviews, and I am now a reserving health insurance actuary.\u00a0 Is it a job which enables me to Change The World?\u00a0 No.\u00a0 It\u2019s a job that pays well, has good work-life balance, allows me to work from home, and \u2014 key point here \u2014 was willing to hire me based on my sales pitch of \u201cI\u2019m a credentialed actuary with a rudimentary grasp of health insurance and a demonstrated ability to learn new things,\u201d and a month into the job it\u2019s \u201cso far, so good,\u201d though I don\u2019t yet have a strong sense of how my job responsibilities will look over time.<\/p>\n
And right now I feel like I\u2019m trying to figure out, \u201cwhere next?\u201d in other ways.\u00a0 How diligently do I want to keep up with developments in retirement policy, public pensions, Social Security, etc.?\u00a0 I\u2019m already well aware that I had given up on trying to write about every newsworthy retirement topic, but having gone from small-time blogger excited about small-time-blogger level of page views, to Forbes author and sporadic Federalist contributor, leaves me trying to figure out what my future blogging plans are, which I suspect will settle back into the \u201cjust have to write about something that\u2019s bugging me!\u201d rather than \u201cI am going to persuade people by writing this!\u201d<\/p>\n
So stay tuned \u2014 or not \u2014 to see what I end up doing!<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Longtime readers will know my story thus far:\u00a0 after blogging as a hobby for a good five years, I left the world of formal employment back four years ago for a new venture, that of hanging my shingle out as a freelance writer and independent actuary, as my business cards read \u2014 or, rather, that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":10956,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[939],"class_list":["post-18357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-personal"],"yoast_head":"\n