Hello, Dear Reader! Welcome to Part IV of my tedious multipart series of posts on my experience with, and feelings about, money, and how that and my experiences in the workplace brought me to wanting to FIRE. Here are links to Part I, Part II, and Part III of the series.
Employer #3
Boss #6 or Boss #?
Not long after Boss #5 at Employer #2 was fired, I left Employer #2 to take a job with Employer #3, a company then in rapid-growth mode. I was one of a handful of people hired who started with Employer #3 on the same date. Each week brought ever more new employees.
My salary at Employer #3 was more than 20% higher than that I was making at Employer #2. Translation: I went from a “meh” salary to a “not-bad” salary. For the first time in my life, I had enough breathing room between my expenses and income that I had to decide to what to do with the difference.
In the end, I inflated my lifestyle ever so slightly. Which is to say not much, but enough where I was able to enjoy life a little more than I’d hitherto been able. Smartly, I upped the amount that I threw toward my student loan repayments each month, too.
So, while my scarcity mindset and deeply ingrained sense of frugality and financial precariousness continued to make this Jack a bit of a dull boy, it ultimately paid huge long-term dividends by allowing me to pay off my student loans well before the 30-year repayment period ended.
At Employer #3 I sorta kinda reported to two supervisors. And, for all intents and purposes, also to one of the company’s owners. That entailed at-least-once-a-week meetings with one or all of them.
I’d had check-in meetings with supervisors before. But they’d always been ad hoc and pretty casual. I never minded them. But the meetings at Employer #3 were of a different order. And I hhhaaated them.
First, because I’d have to take time out of my very busy day to prepare for them. Also, because some were meetings with groups of people and I’d have to speak in front of all of the group members, which ain’t my jam. But most of all because, to me, the meetings were like having one or more people always looking over my shoulder. That feeling was one I have all my life detested.
But I also hated these meetings for a reason stemming from something else. Training on this job—which not only involved me performing tasks that I soon came to realize that I hadn’t previously been trained to handle, but tasks outside my core skill set—was nil. My supervisors/superiors never took it upon themselves to provide adequate training when I was hired. Nor, once I started running into problems—which I inevitably did—to help me navigate those challenges and become more knowledgeable about how to effectively address them and others going forward.
My boss(es) also had an expectation of face time. Fifty- to sixty-hour weeks were considered the minimum. Overachievers at Employer #3 were logging even more work hours. It was the first time I’d encountered such a work environment. And I hated this far more than any single feature I’d ever disliked about a job before.
Compounding my unhappiness was that I was so different than my typical coworker at Employer #3. Not just in terms of our academic and/or professional backgrounds. Tho that was part of the reason to be sure. But, also, for other reasons.
My coworkers were young and carefree; I was a few years older than most of them, and “carefree” isn’t something anyone would ever have used to describe me. These whippersnappers also seemed to want nothing more than to be liberated from their money. The quicker the better as far as I could tell, too. I wanted nothing more than to pay off my loans and increase the gap between my income and expenses to (further) provide a financial safety net. What’s more, although I liked a few of my coworkers, most I was merely neutral about. Others I actively disliked. Having mostly been friendly with my coworkers over the course of my career to this point, this new norm was unsettling.
In the end, the job ended up being a pretty classic bad fit in almost every way. But it could have been made far better. Sigh.
Regardless, while Boss #4 and Boss #4.5 (at Employer #2) were my first bosses to really make me think anything but positive or neutral thoughts about a boss or employer, it was my experience at Employer #3 where I first experienced actively not just the work I was doing, but going to work each day.
I faced a confusing paradox. At the same time as my income was as high as it’d ever been and I had financial breathing room for the first time in my adult life, I hated my job far more than I ever had. I also was coming to the painful realization of how devastating a job loss would be for my financial situation, in no small part because The Missus and I had recently bought our first home, largely depleted our emergency fund to do it, and took out a substantial mortgage (even if it was far from the maximum of what a bank might’ve approved us for). This fear of the implications of a job loss, which I’d first experienced under Bosses #4, 4.5, and 5, metastasized and was exacerbated.
Employer #4
Boss #7
I left Employer #3 to take a job with a large company, Employer #4. This new position came with a remote working arrangement, well before the ‘rona made that a common thing. I took to working from home like a fish to water. In part because of my nature, and in part because my time at Employer #3 had left me so jaded about coworkers and bosses.
My salary with Employer #4 was less than that I made with Employer #3, which made me nervous. But as it turned out, between bonuses I was able to secure, lower expenses stemming from working from home, and The Missus’ slightly, but steadily, rising income, our financial position wasn’t much affected by our changed income.
There was, however, one major development that a few years into my time with Employer #4 did affect our finances: the birth of Thing One (The Elder). Although our incomes exceeded our expenses, between significant Thing One-related expenses and our housing payments (which were substantially higher than our expenses for places we’d rented), our financial situation remained precarious. My scarcity mindset and senses of frugality and financial precariousness kept on unabated.
The work that I did for Employer #4 was straightforward. Far closer to work I’d done in the beforetimes, when my tasks were well defined and limited in number.
I reported to Boss #7. My interaction with her was pretty limited, which was just fine with me. It mostly entailed me sending a pretty simple end-of-week report, which put a little more detail on objective data about my performance that Boss #7 had continuous access to.
Boss #7 occasionally would ask me for a more formal, longer, check-in meeting. I had no reason to believe that those meetings would be anything beyond just a pretty low-key check in, and maybe Boss #7 giving me some news about notable doings at Employer #4, And, in fact, that’s exactly what the meetings were. So, I didn’t dread them like I’d dreaded the meetings at Employer #3. In fact, I kind of enjoyed them. They marked a mix-up of the day, and I also liked getting news about Employer #4 that I’d otherwise probably not have gotten.
My time with Employer #4 was not without incident though. A few years in, Employer #4 began scaling back the work that my group did. Periodic layoffs followed. I survived each round, but as time went on, I began to see that there was a strong chance I’d be axed. Not wanting to be caught flatfooted if and when that day came, and also wanting to increase my income and do different types of work, I began looking for another job.
Looking back at my time with Employer #4, I learned a few things that helped ultimately make me susceptible to FIRE’s siren song. One was that I loved getting back to a job where my work hours were reasonable and my work really did at the end of each weekday. But I knew from experience that that was a feature that might not last. Or that I might leave the job for another, where it just wasn’t a thing. And that troubled me and made me prone to thinking that there’s got to be a better way.
Another thing that came from my time at Employer #4 was that I became leery of working for a massive organization. I’d previously had a job where I felt like a cog in a machine. But that was nothing compared to my experience at the sprawling Employer #4. It was a highly impersonal experience. One for which I didn’t care.
The layoffs—which affected groups of people, not individuals based on the merits—were a perfect example of this. They led to me to conclude that I could be laid off through no fault of my own or any issues with my work product. This understanding led me to, for the first time, really adopt an every-man-for-himself attitude toward my employer. It also decimated my natural sense of loyalty to my employer. I concluded that I needed to insulate myself from any damage that might be inflicted upon me by way of a layoff or firing, and to be the one who struck first in the employee-employer relationship (by voluntarily resigning) when possible.
Happening in tandem with me becoming disappointed by those conclusions, was the even further hardening of my feelings about money and saving. Instead of merely saving for the purpose of always having enough to cover my normal expenses, surprise expenses, and some lifestyle inflation, I began adopting a mindset that I needed to build a financial fortress. While I didn’t then fully appreciate this mindset shift, and it wouldn’t be until I discovered FIRE that this mindset fully flowered, the seed was planted.
And in the end . . .
Thank you, Dear Reader, for sticking with me this long! We’re more than half-way done with this series. . . . So, there’s that. Next week, in Part V of this series, I’ll cover my time with the employer with which I ultimately spent the most years, and earned the most income, during my career. I even became the biggest baller I’d ever been during that time. Which probably is something that should be taken with a healthy grain of salt.
