Kristen and I are building a house in Westminster, and should be moving sometime around mid October! We're both now in our 30s, and currently have no kids. The house we're building is 4 bedroom, 2.5 bath, an open first floor, and lots of unfinished basement. We do have 4 bedrooms, so hopefully the baby will come sometime in the near future, we're starting to get old!
We've been at our current house in Owings Mills for about 6 years, and unfortunately we do not have enough equity in the house to be able to afford to sell at this point. We're not underwater, but after fees, closing cost assistance, etc, we would most likely have to pay out a chunk of change we just can't handle with the new house. I really hope we're not making a mistake by buying our dream house in a great neighborhood prematurely. We plan on using a management company to rent out our house in Owings Mills. After the companies fees, we'll practically be breaking even with the mortgage. The budget is in no danger as long as we can place renters, but it will be (quite) tight without them.
We'll likely be setting up a meeting with a financial advisor at some point soon, to hopefully help get us on track as far as insurance, retirement, saving, etc. In addition to the financial advisor we'll likely need to get a tax person, as we'll now be landlords - which sounds like it can complicate taxes significantly.
My commute is getting longer in the move, but I don't mind that so much. I somewhat enjoy driving, and it will give me a chance to listen to more podcasts. I've somewhat fallen off the wagon when it comes to my exercise, so the 2x longer commute could be problematic for getting back on. I'm really hoping I'll manage to get into the habit of waking up earlier than I currently do, to get back into my routine - something I'll definitely need to do when we have kids.
I'm enjoying my job at DCCA, and I feel that I have the skills necessary to do my job. However, I still feel like I am behind when I look at the careers of many of the .net guys whose podcasts I listen too. My handle on backend is mostly solid, and I can get done what I need to get done on the front end. Brownfield application development seems pretty solid, but it's the new stuff, with all of the new frontend tech that I'm not sure how to get my foot in the door. I'm not sure what exactly I think I could do in the long run for my career, but I do enjoy helping people and teaching, it's too bad I'm just so anxious around unfamiliar (and sometime familiar) people. :/
I'd like to start learning about angular, MVC, mobile, windows dev, etc, but I'm not exactly sure where to start. I've subscribed to Pluralsight and am going through courses when I have time, (though that time has been limited lately with prepping for the move) but that is very different than actually developing. My StackOverflow reputation has been on the steady increase, which I'm doing for a few reasons. I believe that answering the questions will help my resume, I enjoy helping people, and it helps me actually learn a bit - I would like to do more though. To really get into learning the new things that I'd like to learn, I want to start get into contributing into open source projects. I'm having problems finding something that isn't way above my head, so maybe I'll start with some tutorial apps for now.
I probably won't update this again for a while, but maybe blogging about... something... will help me in the long run; be it from getting some of my feelings out there, or (hopefully) something useful to the programming community - my peoples!
