Some advice about working from older people

[laissez-faire]

I'm 22. I have a choice:

Do I spend the summer working, probably earn 3-4k at the most. Would have weekends free but generally not an ideal time to do the thing I love the most (sailing) because the solent is rammed at the weekends and finding berthing is tough.

Or, I could just spend my entire summer sailing. I'd then not be able to afford a car in the US without breaking into my savings. I don't really want to start depleting my savings aged 22.

So if you are 30 or 40, would you say that money is the most important thing and I should just avoid depleting money I'm going to need for a house or something, or should I just spend my last summer as a free being before getting a job doing something I love?

 

[laissez-faire]

Why not do both? Work for a fair chunk of the summer but take a fair bit of time off as well.

yeah - ideally I'd love a job in September and October. By then the sailing won't be that amazing. Earn a little cash before I go away. But it is remarkably hard to find a job atm for 6 weeks. Using my skills as a graduate everyone wants me to commit to a career (understandable) and for unskilled work, there's a massive oversupply of unskilled labour atm what with the whole recession....

Other options include forgetting this pipe dream of buying a Touareg and go for an Xterra or a Grand Cherokee to save money..... or as per my other thread, finding a job that I can do at night from the marina wifi....

 

[laissez-faire]

You were looking at spending a fortune on some sort of crap Volkswagen 4x4.

Ditch this idea and spend the Summer sailing. Then buy something cheap.

$16k isn't a fortune on a car, the Touareg also isn't crap! It's awesome. I'd get a lot of that back at the end of season. But yes, I'm thinking that an 05 Xterra would be good enough to get me through the snow and they can apparently be had for around $11k.

 

[laissez-faire]

I'm 26 now, on the property ladder and such, looking back... given an oppurtunity like that, I'd go for the sailing every time.

How much of an impact on your CV and career prospects would not working the summer be? Are we talking some type of awesome internship here or something more mundane?

If anything, sailing would be better for my career prospects because I'm going into the Navy, so if I sail this summer I'd have enough miles to do Yachtmaster. Having Yachtmaster basically demonstrates you have pretty much all the skills needed to be in the Navy so AIB would be easier. Working in a bar chatting up women isn't so much what the Navy look for.

It would purely be financial, I'd be 3-4k worse off forever.