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Progressive JPEG posted:Not that living next to Californians is great either fwiw Let's be honest, you're in the old-programmers thread on Something Awful, we're all misanthropes here.
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Sep 8, 2019 00:23
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necrobobsledder posted:Working remotely makes it a lot easier to live next to basically nobody though. Who's got two thumbs and is moving to the mountains to work remote in two weeks?
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Sep 8, 2019 02:55
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Seems like all of the good mountains have lovely internet service and no access to grocery stores
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Sep 8, 2019 03:35
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In the mountains you can use nature as your grocery store, duh. Or you can trap tourists and live out every other horror movie trope as the psycho killer and live on a very high protein diet of primarily vegans (meat of meat eaters is not exactly a balanced diet evidently).
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Sep 8, 2019 03:45
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I'm moving to Truckee; there's gigabit internet and a Safeway. 30 minutes from Reno with plenty of options for when that's not sufficient. I've done many short stints remote, but this will be the first full time for me. Advice welcome. I'll still be travelling regularly to our SF and Denver offices.
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Sep 8, 2019 04:50
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Steve French posted:I'm moving to Truckee; there's gigabit internet and a Safeway. 30 minutes from Reno with plenty of options for when that's not sufficient. Try not to catch on fire. Seriously though, the California "wilderness" areas are way less appealing after the last decade.
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Sep 8, 2019 04:56
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Try not to catch on fire. To be clear, we're definitely not aiming for "wilderness"; that said we are for sure aware of fire risk and it's top of mind in terms of specific locations.
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Sep 8, 2019 05:36
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Steve French posted:To be clear, we're definitely not aiming for "wilderness"; that said we are for sure aware of fire risk and it's top of mind in terms of specific locations. At least you got your avatar all sorted out.
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Sep 8, 2019 06:38
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Be sure to also check for flood and mudflow/landslide risk If you're looking to buy in CA, it is 100% valid to meet some prospective neighbors and ask "when it rains, where does the water go?"
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Sep 8, 2019 07:04
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Also the only people I know in Truckee (who have since sold and gotten out) had moved into a gated community whose entire purpose was weekend/summer homes for people who had made it big in the bay area. We visited once in the winter and the entire neighborhood was maybe 10% occupied at the time
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Sep 8, 2019 07:08
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If you can swing a pilot's license, then getting to SF and Denver from truckee airport could actually be very straightforward.
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Sep 8, 2019 07:10
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Progressive JPEG posted:Be sure to also check for flood and mudflow/landslide risk there's maps for this poo poo so you dont have to talk to peeps
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Sep 8, 2019 07:13
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Oh also I hope you don't have a septic system in Truckee, because in CA those are generally $20K and up if you ever need to do any kind of work on them. Prop 13 hosed over the counties so they now use permits as a revenue source. Hopefully the previous owners decided to keep everything permitted/above board, despite the exorbitant costs! bob dobbs is dead posted:there's maps for this poo poo so you dont have to talk to peeps When we looked at La Honda the landslide maps were "a guy flew over the area 20 years ago and guessed where the risky areas were based on what they could see from the plane". Now every rainy season another couple houses get destroyed from landslides, and it's not something that standard home insurance covers so they're basically facing a total loss.
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Sep 8, 2019 07:23
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Progressive JPEG posted:Oh also I hope you don't have a septic system in Truckee, because in CA those are generally $20K and up if you ever need to do any kind of work on them. Those are ludicrously expensive anywhere. I just bought a house with septic in New Jersey, and luckily for me the inspection failed so badly the entire thing had to be dug up and replaced by the seller. It cost them $40k.
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Sep 8, 2019 15:49
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Progressive JPEG posted:Also the only people I know in Truckee (who have since sold and gotten out) had moved into a gated community whose entire purpose was weekend/summer homes for people who had made it big in the bay area. We visited once in the winter and the entire neighborhood was maybe 10% occupied at the time We're specifically looking only in the neighborhoods mostly composed of full-time residents. Appreciate the advice on the move, though I'm very familiar with the area (been spending lots of time there for over 10 years, met my wife there), and rural living (grew up in the country), and we're not first time home buyers, so considering the thread am more interested in thoughts on the "working remote full time" part.
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Sep 8, 2019 15:50
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Working remote full time away from techies in a city was nice but wife couldn’t find a job worth staying at in any rural or even exurb area (with kids a completely different situation probably) and not being able to advance career-wise with the situation made things a bit more bleak. But if those things were settled I’d do it again. Honestly though, I make so much more now and city living costs are yet so much higher that her potential wages aren’t enough to justify things but nearing Bay Area / NYC comp is something I would not be able to achieve at home and especially without a decently connected airport nearby. Asheville’s airport loving sucked for me and its situation wrt the rest of the tech hubs where I am still bound by blood fundamentally cost me dearly a number of times within a matter of a year.
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Sep 8, 2019 16:32
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Steve French posted:I've done many short stints remote, but this will be the first full time for me. Advice welcome. I'll still be travelling regularly to our SF and Denver offices. My big advice for fulltime remote is all about establishing "work time/place" contexts. People always talk about WFH jobs and how you're clearly just slacking all the time. It's just as possible, if not more so, for it to lead to overwork. Especially if you don't work to create boundaries in time and place and you start just working from the couch or in bed. Obviously, having a dedicated space for work (and only work) solves the place part. But removing the commute also removes a "ceremony" that marks the beginning and end of the work day and helps refocus you, and I found it really beneficial to have something else to replace it. For me, it's as simple as sitting down in the kitchen for breakfast/coffee before starting work in the morning, and making dinner in the evening. Whatever it takes for you to make into a practice that just says "I'm starting work now" and "I'm done for the day." Oh, and my one treat to myself (that I justify because remote means making NYC money while living in the Midwest) is I go out to lunch. Seeing people who are not my family on a daily basis is important to me and getting lunch hits that, even if the interaction is just with the folks who are making my burrito at Chipotle. kitten smoothie fucked around with this message at 17:11 on Sep 8, 2019 |
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Sep 8, 2019 17:08
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I wanted to rewind the tape a little...sunaurus posted:I declined, because the amount of money I have left over after taxes and normal cost of living expenses would have decreased to about 10% of what it is right now (taxes over there are about 2x higher and CoL in that city was also much higher than it is for me right now in Estonia). Like, literally your take home money would be one tenth what it is right now?
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Sep 8, 2019 17:52
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:I wanted to rewind the tape a little... Not exactly take home money, I made a rough calculation like (offered salary - taxes - (housing + car + regular shopping + internet + phone)), and the amount left over after that calculation was ~90% lower than what it is with my current salary in my current city. It's not as big of a deal as take home, but it's still quite an insane difference.
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Sep 8, 2019 19:38
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Ah, your surplus after cost of living. That makes a lot more sense. They were offering you more money, but the extra salary didn't compensate for the increased cost of living from relocating. Right?
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Sep 8, 2019 20:04
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necrobobsledder posted:Working remote full time away from techies in a city was nice but wife couldn’t find a job worth staying at in any rural or even exurb area (with kids a completely different situation probably) and not being able to advance career-wise with the situation made things a bit more bleak. But if those things were settled I’d do it again. kitten smoothie posted:My big advice for fulltime remote is all about establishing "work time/place" contexts. Yeah, I've worked from home and for brief remote stints enough to have experienced that. Dedicated work space is a must, and my hope is that kid duties, other household work, and runs/bike rides will serve as a good transition to replace my godawful commute.
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Sep 8, 2019 23:03
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Steve French posted:Who's got two thumbs and is moving to the mountains to work remote in two weeks? been remote 6 years now, but really thinking about a move to the mountains very soon. Downside is that people pay you less working remote, so California is outside my budget. kitten smoothie posted:My big advice for fulltime remote is all about establishing "work time/place" contexts. This is all good stuff. I have the issue that I have only a single great room so I'm at my desk working then I move 10 feet to be "off-work". I hate being closed off in an office, but next house is going to have to have multiple living spaces for working in.
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Sep 9, 2019 05:04
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necrobobsledder posted:In the mountains you can use nature as your grocery store, duh.  Boy did you call that one.
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Sep 9, 2019 15:13
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Dig a 14 ft moat around your house, fill it with GMO water, gluten, and have it blessed by both a Catholic priest and a Methodist, put up a Jehovah’s Witness sign while you’re at it. You are now ready to survive an apocalypse and/or wildfire in the Northern California mountains without needing guns. I had equipment in my back yard to dig a 8 ft hole in the back for drainage and it’s not as crazy as it seems to dig a moat given these guys did it in basically 3 days in a high density suburb with difficult road access. Just make sure that your FIOS or Uverse or whatever line is buried underwater as well.
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Sep 9, 2019 17:42
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kayakyakr posted:This is all good stuff. I have the issue that I have only a single great room so I'm at my desk working then I move 10 feet to be "off-work". I hate being closed off in an office, but next house is going to have to have multiple living spaces for working in. Yeah, we built a new place a few years ago and my wife and I have separate dedicated work spaces on opposite sides of the house. A few months ago the VP over my department asked if we should open a real company office in my city and start recruiting here, and I found myself trying to shoot the idea down as politely as I could, because gently caress if I'm going to commute into an office anymore if I can help it. necrobobsledder posted:Dig a 14 ft moat around your house, fill it with GMO water, gluten, and have it blessed by both a Catholic priest and a Methodist, put up a Jehovah’s Witness sign while you’re at it. Don't forget to toss in some syringes filled with lifesaving vaccines too.
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Sep 10, 2019 01:10
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That work/life separation thing is proving difficult for me too. These days my "work" is making a videogame, and it uses the same computer that I relax in front of. It feels wasteful to repurpose a room and buy a new computer just so I can have a different place for work from play, even if it would let me write off 10% of my house expenses on my tax return.
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Sep 10, 2019 01:26
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Try setting some specific work ours and go through 'going to work' and 'leaving work' routines. When I was working from home regularly, I'd still go through my early morning shower, get dressed, walk the dogs, make tea routine. Then I'd go for a run to mark the end of the workday. It doesn't need to be anything significant, just something to help you mentally separate the two modes.
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Sep 10, 2019 01:32
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Also if you aren't already, consider using separate user accounts on your computer for work/not-work, with different wallpapers and such. Logging in and out of your "work account" seems kind of simple and silly but it can be a good mental boundary-setting maneuver.
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Sep 10, 2019 01:53
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Actually, on that subject, one question I do have for folks who already work remote (but are employees, not self-employed), which factors into housing choice (e.g. how important is a fully dedicated room for office space vs using one as an office + sometimes guest room). Is there any truth to this? https://www.fool.com/taxes/2018/05/20/say-goodbye-to-the-home-office-deduction-unless-yo.aspx It seems inconsistent with https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/home-office-deduction , which seems fairly clear that to be 100% legit that I'd have to have a fully dedicated office room, separate from guest room. Anyone have direct experience with this filing taxes this past year?
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Sep 10, 2019 01:55
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You're not going to get audited for your home office deduction.
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Sep 10, 2019 03:06
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tortilla_chip posted:You're not going to get audited for your home office deduction. Not really asking about audit risk. Did you read the first link? Regardless, maybe in any given year there might be other reasons I'd be concerned about being audited.
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Sep 10, 2019 04:12
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You could always just not deduct your guest room "home office".
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Sep 10, 2019 05:13
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FWIW Home Offices aren't deductible any more if you're an employee.
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Sep 10, 2019 05:18
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I'm looking to understand whether it is something that I _could_ do. I will be house shopping, and knowing whether or not I could deduct a dedicated home office space significantly impacts the economics comparing, say, a 3 bedroom house with no separate office space vs a 3 bedroom house with an additional room that could be a dedicated office. This is getting fairly off topic, so happy to shut up about it, but there's a good reason I'm asking specifically whether that first link I posted is bogus or not, which I figured that at least one person in this thread who works remote full time would be able to answer definitively from personal experience.
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Sep 10, 2019 05:20
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2nd Rate Poster posted:FWIW Home Offices aren't deductible any more if you're an employee. Yes, for anyone who actually read the linked article, this is what I'm trying to determine. Is this definitely true in the Year of Our Lord Trump 2019?
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Sep 10, 2019 05:21
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Ok, my main confusion was that the linked IRS page seemed to indicate that employee deductions were still possible. This, however, says pretty explicitly that they aren't: https://www.irs.gov/publications/p587#en_US_2018_publink1000226299
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Sep 10, 2019 05:26
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For a while, I was taking a shower directly after declaring "done" for the day. Physically washing the day off of myself. And huh, didn't know that about the home office for employees and tax cuts. That sucks. I've been self employed for the last 6 years and haven't gotten to claim it.
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Sep 10, 2019 15:20
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I've discussed the home office deduction with my accountant several times; I've been working from home for 9 years or so. It's not really an option anymore, and he recommended against it even when it was still an option because it's a huge audit trigger. I just have an office space in an extra bedroom, and it's combination work/home. I don't have the same issue with separating work/home that most people have, though. I've successfully mingled the two things and I never find myself over- or under-working.
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Sep 10, 2019 16:29
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New Yorp New Yorp posted:It's not really an option anymore, and he recommended against it even when it was still an option because it's a huge audit trigger. This is what the professor of my business classes told us as well. To qualify (IIRC), the space could not be used at any time for personal use, so it was really not an option for most home offices. The example he gave was something like a mechanic's garage, where the entire square footage was used for business use at all times and could not be repurposed by family in off-hours.
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Sep 10, 2019 16:39
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vonnegutt posted:This is what the professor of my business classes told us as well. To qualify (IIRC), the space could not be used at any time for personal use, so it was really not an option for most home offices. The example he gave was something like a mechanic's garage, where the entire square footage was used for business use at all times and could not be repurposed by family in off-hours. Yeah, that's what I was told as well: "Don't even try it, there's no way it applies to you, you will get audited and it will be a shitstorm."
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Sep 10, 2019 17:12
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