Creating Elite Players: Newsletter Day 18
With a home established, however temporary, the drama surrounding my living situation gently subsides.
There will be some big decisions to make tomorrow again. But tonight, I lodge in Hope, just as I did last night. That is not poetic license or euphemism. I am literally staying at a hotel in Hope, BC.
Staying in hotels, though, is a short-term solution to a long-term problem. Chiefly, the cost is unsustainable. If I tried really hard, perhaps I could find hotels affordable enough to stay at for weeks or months at a time, but some would probably be little more than rat infested holes, and if it affects my work or sleep, it will not be worth the trouble.
Sometimes, problems fix themselves. We've all had this experience, whether it's a puzzle in a video game, or a software application behaving unpredictably. We take a break, and return to it later to find the problem has solved itself, or to discover it was a simple matter of two clicks all along. There appears to be some merit to the idea of "sleeping on it." When I couldn't solve a puzzle in the award-winning 2008 puzzle-platform game, Braid, I literally slept on it, made another attempt the next day, and promptly found the solution.
The looming question is...
Will my bank card begin accommodating online transactions tomorrow? I hope that is the case, as much as we like to say "hope is not a strategy" in the music business. Yesterday, I was informed repeatedly that my card should be working and that there were no issues. Of course, that was diametrically opposed to my experience.
If it doesn't, though, a plan has started forming in my mind. First, I would drop about $500 to $600 on my credit card, whatever the anticipated cost of the Airbnb booking is expected to be, and then a little extra. That's the first step. The second step would be to crash on someone's couch while that transaction sorts itself out in the next three to five days. I do have a few leads should push come to shove. Third, if necessary, I will dip into savings to cover some immediate costs. Then, rinse and repeat. Plan ahead, determine the cost of the booking, and drop the necessary amount of money on my credit card, so that I'm never reliant on one method of payment.
I have taught, for many years, the perils of single-source dependency. Now I get to enjoy a taste of my own medicine. In business, two equals one.
Having a backup plan is a simple and elegant solution. Even simpler would be dropping increasingly larger amounts of money on my credit card so there's always a balance available. In a world where that's not possible, though, I can fall back on the plan just detailed.
Before wrapping up this travelogue, though, I am going to break a cardinal rule of blogging and talk about another subject. It is related to the core topic, mind you.
Having been put in a position of compromise multiple times in the last few months, I've recognized the importance of a) finding a place to rent, and b) focusing on this goal more intently, even if it means letting some things fall by the wayside for a bit.
See, I have been searching for a new home, but I have been doing it haphazardly. It was my intention to live out of Airbnbs for a month or two, but now that I've done it, and I've endured some rocky trails, finding stability feels like the logical next step.
My friends have told me, repeatedly, that finding an apartment is better than living out of a suite, since you never know when the landlord will sell the home, and you have no idea whether the next landlord will decide to keep you.
The point is well-taken, of course. Renting a suite is a position of compromise compared to renting an apartment. But there are risks associated with apartment rentals too. I even had a friend whose apartment got flooded. Quite recently, I heard this happened to someone in my extended network too. So, inevitably, there are other risks and inconveniences you must be willing to tolerate.
If I'm being honest, I'm also not a big fan of elevators these days, and can't imagine myself living too high up. Not necessarily because of the heights, but more so because of my musical gear. It would be very inconvenient indeed having to haul it up and down an apartment building for gigs and whatnot.
I'm not entirely opposed to buying a home either, but know well the financial pressures that can come with it. Being house poor is a different kind of stress. Plus, with a housing crash looming, the best time to buy would be in a few months from now, not now.
The long and short of it is I'm going to start looking more aggressively for rentals in the cities I would ideally like to call home. I'm going to make it a higher priority.
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