Hello, Dear Reader! Welcome to Part II of my unending multipart series of posts on my experience with, and feelings about, money, and how those things and my experiences working brought me to wanting to FIRE. Here’s a link to Part I of the series.
The Beforetimes Part 3
I got my first real job at age 16. My princely wage of $3.35/hour (minimum wage at the time) wasn’t fast-tracking me to financial security. But the experience of getting a paycheck was pretty exhilarating. While dad and stepmom had given me a token allowance before I got a job, the money was barely a pittance didn’t go far. In any event, my main wants were modest. So, I wasn’t necessarily missing out on much. But the paychecks provided me with a sum of money I’d never experienced.
By this point, I’d long since become a hardcore saver. In no small part because of my hardwired scarcity mindset. So, my expenses didn’t increase much beyond the candy, stickers, and quarters to play arcade games that I’d squandered spent my money on in the pre-job days. As a result, my savings account—into which those paychecks were deposited—slowly but surely grew.
The sight of a steadily increasing account balance was almost as exhilarating to me as the paycheck itself. In fact, I saved as much as I did because I became addicted to the thrill of seeing the balance increase. I have that scarcity mindset to thank and blame for this. Why “blame”? Well, this thrill, seemingly innocuous enough on its face, was in fact a little harmful. While it no doubt enabled me to never spend more than I actually had, it reinforced what already was becoming a too-strong saving habit and a too-weak ability to spend money on things that make me genuinely happy.
In time, I took a variety of other school year and summer jobs. None paid well. Frankly, I didn’t know any better or expect any different. As a teenager, I was happy enough.
However, with each new job came an hourly wage slightly higher than the last one. That was yet another new thrill.
The Beforetimes Part 4
In time, I was off to college. Dad and stepmom gave me some spending money each semester. Presumably that’s because they expected me to study, and not work and potentially compromise my grades. By my junior year, I had the college thing down cold—even if I carried a punishing course load—and took a part-time gig. That job was so easy, and absent any supervision, that it essentially was free money. I milked it for everything it was worth.
I also worked during the summer. The best jobs were both fun and, like the job during the school year, essentially without supervision. The worst jobs were mildly soul sucking (even if not unbearable) and were some of my first indications that work was not necessarily always a fun ride.
By this point, my expenses had increased since high school. Out was candy, stickers, and quarters for arcade games. In was beer, an occasional cheap meal out, and random other garbage. While my expenses never exceeded my income, neither was I saving much. By the time that I graduated, I had a small sum of money in my checking account. Probably several hundred dollars if I had to guess. Nothing to write home about, f’sho. But enough that I mostly didn’t have to worry about an overdraft.
My scarcity mindset and broader feelings about money remained largely unchanged during this timeframe. That was a mixed bag. On one hand, my frugality prevented anything resembling a financial crisis. But the fears about not being financially secure that I’d long experienced lingered as prominently as ever. In fact, they likely got further hardwired into me given that I wasn’t earning any sort of money that made a material difference in my well-being or bank account and might have warranted a new way of thinking for me.
A Taste of the Aftertimes
I moved back home after finishing my college studies. I’d greatly enjoyed my college courses (even if they did next to little for my job prospects; thanks for nothing, college industrial complex!). But, as I mentioned, I’d taken a punishing course load. By the end, I was experiencing intense burnout. Not having experienced it before, I wasn’t sure what the problem was. And I didn’t know how to handle it. My relationship with dad and stepmom had also by then grown quite rocky. So, I didn’t dare mention my struggle to them. Wouldn’t have been productive in any event.
In part due to parental diktat, and in part motivated by a burning desire to get out of the house, I took my first full-time job, with Employer #1. The job was rather fun and low stress. I couldn’t have known it at the time, but it was the last job I ever had where once the workday ended, so did my work.
While I liked working at this job, the pay was . . . uuummm . . . laughably low suboptimal. As per usual, given my rigid financial self-control, my expenses never exceeded my income. But I was barely getting by. The occasional lunch or dinner out, and a beer at a bar here and there, were had. But precious little else.
This experience was what I call my Personal Finance 201 class (the 100-level classes having been everything that came before). Although I learned a tremendous amount during this time, the experience of being poor just exacerbated my scarcity mindset and the sense of financial worry and insecurity I’d long felt.
But the job did more than just result in me learning a lot about personal finance and living on my own and supporting myself (I moved out of dad and stepmom’s house during my time with Employer #1). It also marked the beginning of my experience working for a manager who supervised me, and in an organization with a lot of different types of people in a lot of different roles and at different stages of their careers.
My prior jobs all had been low-end jobs typical of a high school or college student. Sure, there were supervisors and coworkers in those jobs. But rarely had that been an issue. I mostly just did my job, hung out with fun coworkers who’d taken their jobs for the job for the same reasons as me, and went home. In any event, I never thought of any of those jobs as anything but temporary. I certainly didn’t have a lot riding on any of them. I took them merely to earn some pocket change, not an income to live on. I’d have considered it unfortunate had I lost any of those jobs. But I’d certainly not have been devastated by any such turn of events.
My supervisor (Boss #1) at Employer #1 was a nice guy. He reported to the head of our office, who was a senior figure in the company. But Boss #1 was nerdy about the industry to a degree that even your self-described super-nerd blogger could only marvel at. Maybe even recoil at. Boss #1 was also a bit rigid. If I asked to deviate from this or that norm in a way that may have made some sense, he’d more often than not balk at the suggestion. In the grand scheme of things, that was no big deal. But it was an early lesson that as an employee—and certainly someone as junior as I was—I had to follow any instructions from my superiors, however harmless or trivial my minor suggested deviation might be.
In retrospect, this was a pretty good first full-time job to have. I never had to work after clocking out, I enjoyed the work itself, which was low-stress, and my coworkers were almost universally great. But aside from the, ahem, lousy low pay and Boss #1’s mild rigidity, there were a few other things that made the job unenjoyable. It also laid the groundwork for my eventually wanting to FIRE, even if that was nowhere on my radar screen at the time.
For one thing, there was the daily commute, which entailed about a 45-minute drive each way, each day, in traffic. Worse, part of the route was a toll road that required me to hand over a few dollars each day. The experience left me thinking that I most certainly didn’t want to have to do that every workday for the rest of my career. And sure as heck not for a wage as meager as the one I then was earning.
The job also was the first one in which I fully realized that I was a small, insignificant, and wholly expendable cog in a big machine. Sure, that goes with the territory in corporate America. But I didn’t then know that. So, this was a new—and unwelcome—realization I’d come to.
Last, I saw little good career progression in the organization. And despite my good work, positive attitude, and excellent work ethic, neither Boss #1, his supervisor, or anyone else at Employer #1 took any interest in my career advancement. They certainly didn’t take much effort to foster it.
As I knew that I’d soon be leaving to go to law school, I didn’t make any concerted effort to explore a promotion. But I was disappointed that no path forward was shown to me or identified by my superiors, who were far more experienced in the workplace and, I think now, should have made the effort to help someone as young and inexperienced as me. Anyway, it is what it is.
I left Employer #1 and Boss #1 on good terms, and sauntered off to law school. Little did I know what lay ahead . . .
And in the end . . .
Whelp, I’ve surely put you through enough that’s all for now, Dear Reader. Tune in next week for Part III of this series, which will cover my first steps in the job world after graduating from law school.
