Well, people are going to be in different stages of their lives so someone’s 1/5/10 year plan might not inspire change. The best thing to do would be to see what you want out of your life and plan to make it happen. Most people’s plans are also going to include an element of going to work and paying the bills, that’s certainly the bulk of my 10 year plan. What do you want? What do you want from your career? Where do you want to travel? Start there and work your back.
Anyway, my plan is:
1 year - get a new job, hopefully in the next few months. We have our big, fuck it holiday in May and later this year we’ll start trying for a baby. There’s a job I want to apply for which is fixed term for a year, if I got that job it would put TTC back until year 2/3. We are also saving hard and planning our kitchen renovations (lots of structural work needed so going to be expensive) for late this year/early next.
5 year - Hopefully my job situation has improved and I find my passion again. However, I imagine if that isn’t the case, I might drop my hours to part time as DH earns more than me, is much more engaged in his job and we have no family nearby so it would just make life easier. I toy with the idea of becoming a teacher. However, if I don’t get a new job in the next few months, I’ll probably take a year out after (hopefully) having a baby and then look at doing a PGCE. I’ve never wanted to be at SAHM and it won’t be long term but I cannot see myself going back to this job - it’s bad enough getting myself day to day. I also toy with the idea of doing my PhD. I don’t think I’m done learning but my masters was fucking hard and I don’t know if I can do more. So two options that are really low stress and don’t involve long hours at all with a young child, seems sensible
Our plan for the house is to have the kitchen complete, finish the bathroom and have conquered the garden. We have a 2/3 bed now but our third ‘bedroom’ is a pokey little room downstairs off the living room. It’s currently used as a junk room and is too small to ever really be a bedroom for adults to stay in (as a guest bedroom). It also houses the boiler and circuit board so not really a room suitable for a child. It’s more like a large utility room to be honest. We only want one kid so depending on how we’re struggling with parents visiting, we may look to move at the end of the 5 years but I don’t really like the idea of moving as we’d have to trade some of the good elements of our house (large garden, quiet, rustic charm). Current plan is to get a 5 year fixed term next February when our current fixed term ends. We then have 5 years to get our house up to scratch and something someone would want to buy or something that is so amazing it’s worth not having a guest room.
10 year - Hopefully, we will have a primary aged child and childcare costs can be saved and invested for our/their future. I imagine work will have a bit more responsibility for us both. If I go part time during the 5 year plan, this will be when I increase my hours again. The focus will be on saving for the future and doing what we can to get ourselves to retirement, hopefully earlier than the retirement age. We may have bought a new house so hopefully by the end of the 10 years we will have got our house to the point we want it at - it’s highly unlikely we would move again so it needs to be a good house. In 10 years we will have also been together for 20 years (all being well) and be turning 40 so I imagine there’ll be another fuck it, big holiday. Although, we will (hopefully) have a primary aged kid with us so that might make the holiday slightly less fuck it and more sensible but still in a fabulous location with Thailand being my preferred location at the moment and a road trip across Canada being a close second.
Now obviously, I need to throw out the saying that man plans and God laughs, so no idea where we’ll actually be in 10 years time and we’ll just have to work with what we’ve got!