MOVING LINKS 4 YOU

Guest post By Bruce Serven  bruceserven.com

Personal coaches usually advise you to create five or ten year plans, particularly where it concerns your career.  While that is good to help people visualize their goals and overcome their inertia, these plans are effectively meaningless in reality because the world changes so fast, so often around us.  In particular, people are no longer staying in any one career position for very long anymore and are now changing jobs (and sometimes careers) every few years.  How do you craft a relevant five or ten year plan when the target goal is now on a moving platform?

All of this change usually comes with requirements to relocate.  Factor in the frequency of those changes, and the amount of moving involved grows exponentially.  Add in the consideration of family to the mix and it quickly becomes potentially overwhelming.

As a personal example, in the dot com era of the late 1990’s, I was involved with a number of startup firms and thus moved frequently.  Fortunately, at that time I did not have any extra familial ties to complicate matters but it was still quite a chore, as a single man living a stressful, fast paced startup lifestyle, to coordinate and execute all the different required aspects of managing a moving project from breaking leases, packing, arranging movers, terminating utility services, forwarding mail, finding a new home, setting up new services in the new neighborhood, etc.  My five and ten year plans changed so much during those years of aggressive growth that it really didn’t serve any useful function other than as a general “go in that direction”.  A dynamic, evolving, five or ten year plan, will potentially (and did for me) require a lot of strategic moving, whether across the street, across the county, or across the country. 

In recent years, I have seen baby boomers, who have been employed for decades at General Motors and similar nearby legacy employers, who intended to retire in five or ten years, have to expedite their relocation to other areas of the country as their jobs were ceased prematurely (due to plant closings, layoffs, etc).  I have also seen baby boomers who were pursuing too aggressive of a retirement portfolio, with only a five or ten year time horizon in front of them, have to move and expeditiously seek new employment elsewhere around the country because they lost their nest egg in the 2008 stock market reset.

With all this moving under so many different circumstances for so many different types of people, there seems to be a market for someone like Mary to coordinate it for them, especially since this type of service has typically been reserved for high level corporate executives only.  Peace of mind is a beautiful, and valuable, thing, and can easily be attained by the average family man and woman.  Also, when you are under immense pressure and time sensitive demands to focus on being the breadwinner, it helps to be able to off load that stress of minute details and project management hassle to a relocation specialist like Mary to handle it for you. It certainly would have helped me when I was moving around years ago while in the fast lane.

How have your various life stages and circumstances affected your five and ten year plans and how has that influenced your family’s needs and/or desires to relocate?  In hindsight, is there anything that would have made your moving experience easier, more convenient, and involve less stress?  I invite you to share your story below in the comments. 

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Bruce is an entrepreneur who strives to make a difference in the lives of people around him by helping them and their businesses to attain success and be awesome.  As much as he hates the word, he is also a blogger & writes at: BruceServen.com  and on Twitter at: @BruceServen.