The Decision

Hi guys and gals. I've been AWOL for a while. Life has come at me hard. I will try to keep this post to a reasonable length. It is a surprisingly fitting follow-up to The Teej's post yesterday on the arbitrary ranking of states (which makes me look smart in this post). 

Where to begin? We'll start with the pandemic. As some of you know, I left my last Wall Street job at the start of the pandemic (for non-pandemic reasons). I spent much of the last fourteen months being unenthusiastically underemployed as a fractional CFO for growth companies. I also spent a lot of that time looking for a new gig. I was done with a soulless existence on Wall Street. Better said, Wall Street was done with me. After escaping NJ with the family in May 2020 and riding out some of the pandemic in Hilton Head (three weeks) and the Outer Banks (one week), my wife and I realized we never wanted to go back to NJ. 

But we did return to NJ. That's where our all our stuff was! I began to focus on jobs out of the NYC area. In the middle of the pandemic, I decided to pursue a career pivot to another line of work in another city. Even my Polish grandmother would have shaken her head at the futility of that initiative. My list of acceptable cities was eclectic, but not random: Atlanta, Charlotte, Tampa, Austin or Denver. We wanted a better quality of life and/or lower cost of living. Warm weather was a nice kicker, but not a requirement. We began to gravitate to Charlotte. Lots of corporate gigs, lots of financial services gigs, two hours to Asheville, three hours to the beach, lots of pro sports options, cheap-as-hell housing, mild weather and a great state college system. We planned to head there in late March and start inculcating our kids into the prestige of UNC Chapel Hill.

But something else came together in March. I got back in touch with an old friend from my MBA days in February (Never underestimate the power of a good professional network, my friends).  I accepted a job offer via that friend in March. I started that job in April. I put my house on the market two weeks ago. I accepted an offer one week ago. I got out of attorney review yesterday. No turning back. 

I'm moving to the Denver in July. Come visit. It's tough to leave an area where my wife and I have so many friends, and Zman and Juan Carlos are each a world class mensch. But the opportunity to experience something new, while selling my house at an inflated price, is too good to pass up. As I told my wife, whose heart is set on retiring in Hilton Head, this will be the next chapter, but not the last chapter, in our lives, and we will be empty nesters in less than eight years. Go Nuggets.