u/Big-Fly-9690

I'm a software engineer working with a big software company that may be looking to offload (fire) part of the employees in the next few months (or year).

I have been with the current company for 10 yrs and now looking for some alternative where I can find stable/peaceful environment/employment.

I'm good with numbers, calculation, basic electrical work, some plumbing work, some flooring and paint work.

Where should I invest time and money for my upcoming future?

I'm a software engineer working with a big software company that may be looking to offload (fire) part of the employees in the next few months (or year).

I have been with the current company for 10 yrs and now looking for some alternative where I can find stable/peaceful environment/employment.

I'm good with numbers, calculation, basic electrical work, some plumbing work, some flooring and paint work.

Where should I invest time and money for my upcoming future?

We're in the Vancouver Canada area. We purchased a home that has a large basement. The main panel in the garage is 200 amp (as far as I can tell) and then there's a sub-panel in the basement (looks like 100 amp).

Unfortunately many of the things are not labeled as which circuit breaker is for what. Plus we have been randomly seeing circuits being turned off. (Upstairs the dishwasher was turned off once, and the basement laundry machine a couple of times).

So we called a local electrician, who quoted us $2500 for rebalancing both power panels correctly.

Does that sound correct or should we get some more quotes?

I don't know if I should post this here, maybe I'll get lots of hate comments and down votes, but even if it helps one person, for me I think it will be worth it.

For context - My parents were the first immigrants who moved to Canada in 1993 from India. I was born in 1996 in Toronto and grew up in Burnaby/Surrey BC.

In 2022, my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer (stage 2) here in Burnaby, BC. First of all it took like 8 months of screening/testing to figure out the diagnosis. Then we had to wait another year for treatment to start. It was a frustrating and really sad time period for us.

My uncle (from my mom's side) suggested that we move to India temporarily and get private healthcare insurance, which did cost us $CAD 800/year (we went with one of the premium options).

And with that insurance - we had world class treatment for our mom, really good doctors, nurses, medication on time, no wait time for appointments, and a private healthcare lady who helped my mom recover easily. I'd say the biggest surprise for me was no wait time, whenever the doctor requested any test/screening - it would happen in matter of hours if not then in a few days max.

My parents lived in India for like 16 months, my mom received one of the best medical treatments without any wait time and she's cancer free as of Aug 2025.

They came back to Canada earlier this year, we visited our family doctor to request current diagnosis (test/screening) to make sure everything is good. and we are still waiting for the call from hospital for the last 3 months.

The reason I'm posting this here (even though I fear getting hate comments and down votes) is to tell that there are other options available in different parts of the world (not just India but Mexico, Philippines, Malaysia, etc) where you can buy good insurance and you'll get better/faster treatment.

Hopefully this post will help some people who need or have family/friends who needs urgent attention for their medical treatments.

Edit: I should also mention - not everything was included in private healthcare insurance, some of the tests/medicine we had to pay part of the cost out of pocket (roughly around $7k in canadian dollars in total 2 yrs time) which to us was definitely doable.

And then there was rental home cost, living in a different country, our maids, personal driver, cook, etc which had monthly cost. (This would depend on personal needs - we had budget, so we hired maids/cook/driver for our parent's ease of life).

All in all I paid around ~52k cad that included private healthcare insurance + additional test/medicine + private maids, driver, cook, rental home, food etc for like 2 yrs. But for us it was soo worth it.