Time for a Career Change

I think i'm going to start working on swtiching over to my semi-retirement gig.  The wife and I planned on doing our bread and butter gigs until she hit 50, then we were going to get into realestate appraising for residential property.  Her dad has done that and had great success, he works for himself his wife not works for him doing a lot of the paperwork and he does the site visits and appraisal research.  They both make more money now than they ever did working 'for the man' and they're 'retired'.

I need to work for myself, it's just a conclusion i've come to understand.  Every time there's an economic downturn, i'm usually out on my ass and it's fucking with my long term retirement plans.  I don't want ot have to work until i'm 60' because 'the man' keeps selling his company or mis-managing his company and I get the short end of the stick out of the deal every fucking time.

So i've done some looking into it.  TO be a certified residential appraiser, there's 200 hours worth of specific appraisal courses you need to take.  There's lots of online and specialty school options for getting that done.  You also have ot have an associates degree or certain number of units in specific college courses like stastics, economics, maths like geometry etc.  But i have an Ass degree so i think i'm good.  After you're done with the 200 hours of course work, then you can write an exam to show you know the work and then you can go work at an appraisers office.  You need to work for 2500 hours over  2 years i think it was under a licensed appraiser.  Now this is low end entry level work but since i'm on unemployment, if i make less than what my UI check is for the week, my UI check will make up the difference which is really the enabling part here of being able to swtich careers.  Then the last step with the course work done and the experience under your belt, you can write the state exam and become a fully licensed certified realsetate appraiser. 

With that, then I can start working for myself, start my own company again and I don't need to worry about working for 'the man' anymore.  I get to set my own hours, work when i want for who i want.  Of course starting out you pretty much do whatever whenever just to  build a client base.  But eventually i'll gain more control .  But a residential appraisal here costs 350-450 bucks from my experience of just buying a house so doing like 10 a month would is a decent living, not as much as I was making but it's good enough.  If i can get that to start and grow from there, i think we'll have a winner.

The biggest concerns with only working for myself is that you get royally screwed when it comes to pre-tax retirement savings, no 401k if you're a company of just you.  And the max IRA amount you can put away per-tax for people who work for themselves is way way lower than the max -pretax money you can put into a 401k.  The other issues is medical insurance.  As long as the wife is working for someone we'll be fine since i can just get on her plan but private medical insurance is insanely expensive.  Here's hoping Obama can pull off a universal healthcare miracle :)  But we don't need to worry about medical for a while yet, the more immediate concern is the loss of 401k.  Although i don't put anything into a 401k when i'm unemployeed so anything's better than the current situation.