A Little Bit of History

It's been a while since I wrote a post other than the net worth updates I report. Honestly, this blogging thing kinda sucks and I procrastinate whenever I'm supposed to do one of my monthly updates. But I visited Reddit today and saw yet another post by someone sharing their story of how they reached a certain financial goal and, while reading it and the comments, I felt compelled to create this post. Something for anyone who visits and wants to know if I also lucked into a big inheritance or am working a job making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. So, I felt like giving my history in case anyone is interested. If you're interested, I hope you find inspiration in what I have to say.

First, I wasn't always a saver. On the contrary. I was a regular everyday working stiff consumerist. My parents were very different from each other in this regard. My dad was the saver. He would squirrel away money (cash mostly) all over the place. I remember a time when I went with him somewhere. When we returned home, he sat in the driver's seat, messing with the horn cover on the steering wheel (this was a '69 Chevy pickup). The cover came off and beneath it was a wad of cash. I just remember gaping at that roll with eyes so wide I'm surprised they didn't fall out of my head. My dad turned quickly to me and said, "Don't tell your mom about this. It's my mad money." My mom, on the other hand, was a spender and I think I took after her early on. If she had a dollar, she had to spend two. I remember when my parents sold our first home, I heard my dad say he was able to finally pay off my mom's credit card debt. Apparently, she'd racked up quite a bit and my dad eventually got hold of the cards and cut them up.

My dad always advised me to save my money, but I didn't put it into practice. Not until I was older anyway. Boy, I wish I could've started sooner! Instead, I was content to spend the money I made once I was an adult and making my own way in life. I think this had to do with both of my parents being blue-collar workers who didn't make boat loads of money. They bought me and my brothers things (I'm the oldest of three, by the way), but it wasn't like they spent great deals of money on us. I remember my friends having things I couldn't get growing up. Enough so that I knew we were lower middle class. (And I'm not trying to make it sound like I was a poor guy or anything. My childhood was great, in my opinion!)

As I neared adulthood, I realized I'd screwed around in high school and didn't have the grades to go to college like my dad wanted. Instead I joined the military. It was that or start working in a warehouse or something, which I knew would be a drag. I served my time in the military and finally got out. In the Army, I learned self-reliance and that education was important. I moved back home with my folks when I got out. I worked crappy minimum wage jobs until I met my first wife, then I still worked crappy minimum wage jobs, but I did it while living in a shitty apartment with her as we tried getting our lives off and running.

Ultimately, I wanted to be a fireman. So I enrolled in a community college course to learn to be an EMT. I felt this would give me an advantage over other applicants. That took 8-9 months and I paid for it out of my own pocket. I think having paid for the course myself instead of getting financial aid helped motivate me to not wash out of the course. Out of around thirty-one students, twelve graduated and only seven of the twelve went on to become state certified. I was one of the seven. I ended up getting a job with a city fire department making $18,600 a year. After a while doing this (and working for an ambulance company on my off-days for $6/hr) I realized this wasn't the life for me. The pay was shit, sure, but the stress was unreal! I knew I couldn't do this the rest of my life. Especially with a wife, kid, and another kid on the way.

I left the fire department and bounced around working in warehouses (never making more than $7/hr; I remember getting a $0.50 raise that I was supposed to be grateful for!) while I taught myself programming. After a little more than a year, I finally started circulating my resume for programming positions. I got my first programming job making $27k/year. I was in heaven! I could dress nice, not get dirty, enjoyed a climate controlled environment, and no one's life was at stake. I worked at a few companies for a couple of years at a time, learning as I went and jumping ship to earn more elsewhere. Meanwhile, I had a wife and two kids and I was the sole bread winner. My wife was a stay at home mom. I worked my way up to making $83k after 15 years in the IT industry.

During these years, I was chasing the American dream; to own my own home, a couple of new cars, while providing a nice life for my family. My wife was in charge of our finances while I went and earned the money and she stayed at home with the kids. I wasn't concerned with saving for retirement at the time. I only worried about keeping cash flowing so we could eat out and enjoy life in the moment. Little did I know my wife was cheating on me and robbing Peter to pay Paul as far as bills were concerned.

When I found out about her infidelity, my marriage fell apart. We divorced. It was very nasty to say the least. I was arrested twice during the course of this time (long story, but these were due to false allegations my now ex-wife made at the time). I ended up losing my house and everything I owned except for about two weeks worth of clothes. This is another long story, but the judge ordered me to leave my home so my ex and my kids would stay there. I went to live with family while I worked to pay child support and mortgage (and their bills!).

During the transition from being married to being single, I found a sense of renewed freedom and, eventually, an appreciation for managing my own finances. After all, I'd just gotten out of a situation where an untrustworthy person was in charge of my money. Unfortunately, I still hadn't climbed aboard the savings express. With this newfound freedom, I felt comfort by spending money (that wasn't going to my kids) on things I wanted to do for a change. I hadn't been able to do this while working to support my family. My ex-wife always wanted me to consult with her first and, most of the time, she would deny me for some reason or another. (Hmm. I wonder why?)

Flash forward a couple of years and I had finally gotten out from under the thumb of the courts except for child support. I'd lost the house I was fighting to save in a foreclosure (another long story). I met a woman who I started dating (my wife now) and we agreed to keep our finances separate. She actually proposed this arrangement because my finances were in a shambles and she didn't want it to affect hers. I had zero credit and my wages were being garnished to ensure child support was paid. Also, I was paying off probation fines as a result of the charges I'd incurred during the divorce. Still, I hadn't embraced the saving lifestyle, but I was more mindful of my spending and grateful I was in charge of it all.

Not long after my current wife and I were living together (we weren't married yet), I was fired from my programming job where I thought I had job security. This was at the end of 2008. I went from making ~86k to 0. I wasn't able to land a job until the beginning of 2010 because the economy was so bad. While unemployed child support was racking up. I was threatened with losing my license (as a result of a "computer glitch" I did end up losing my license for a few weeks before the mistake was finally rectified). When I finally got another job, my wages were once again garnished until I paid my backlog of child support. My wife helped me financially during this time, which I'm eternally grateful.

With the new job, I met a young coworker who was financially more savvy than I was at his age. I was beginning to come around to saving like my dad had been encouraging me throughout the years. Problem was, I didn't know where to begin other than just sitting on money that accumulated in my checking account. But that was too tempting to spend when I was just starting out.

This new young coworker told me I should open a Roth IRA. He said he had one and put money in whenever he could. I was intrigued by this and we started discussing it more. I had a bunch of questions. Fortunately, he seemed to have the answers. So I ended up opening a Roth IRA with Vanguard in late 2014. I think I managed to put in about $2,000 that first year give or take a hundred dollars.

My dad passed away in 2009 and in 2015 my brothers and I finally got around to selling his house. (My youngest brother lived in it for the years preceding the sale, until it was finally a no-brainer to sell and divide the profits.) My portion of the sale was around $24,000. I used some of the money to buy a new-used car. A Jeep. Yeah, I still wasn't very smart financially speaking. With the rest of the money, I ended up putting it into my Roth IRA and, thanks to advice from that coworker, opened a high-yield savings account with the rest.

Now that I had a nice little stash of cash, it felt good to know I could handle an emergency. God knows I wasn't a stranger to them. They seemed to always arise whenever I managed to scrape together a few extra bucks. I felt empowered with the little bit of money I had. Couple this with the growing cynicism I felt following my layoff in 2009, I began looking for an exit strategy from working until I dropped dead. I still didn't know about FIRE at this point, but I was wondering about whether I'd be able to retire...ever.

So, I started putting aside some money into my Roth IRA and HYSA. Eventually, I stumbled across Mr. Money Mustache (as I'm sure a lot of FIRE enthusiasts do) and read about the simplicity of reaching financial independence. It was like discovering the holy grail. Finally, I realized, retirement was within the realm of possibility!

I took to it like a duck to water. I started aggressively saving as much as I could. By this time, I'd gotten a new job making close to 90k. I enrolled in my company's 401k. I wasn't maxing it, but I was contributing to it as well as my Roth IRA and putting money into my HYSA.

I was 43 years old at this point. My net worth was around 36k and that felt like A LOT! I felt a sense of financial freedom already by just knowing this secret to saving money. I had been a programmer for 20 years by this time and still hadn't broken the 6-figure salary. Nevertheless, I kept shoveling money into my investments and savings. I worked for my new employer for 2 years before I was moved to a new manager. This would be the beginning of the end of that job.

The new manager was a total asshat. Right off the bat, he revoked my work from home privilege, which immediately demoralized me. Additionally, he had a policy of making his employees email him for permission to take PTO, which he would never respond to. I ended up taking PTO he didn't explicitly approve and came back to work to find him fuming. I was fired a week later. Good riddance. By this point, my net worth was closing in on 100k (actually about 93k).

I applied for other jobs, but found it stressful and demoralizing to run the gauntlet of interviews where employers expected the sun and moon only to pay as little as possible. My wife and I were already in the process of selling our house to move to another state where she had accepted a job making much more than me (hers was comfortably in the low six-figure range). With my cash reserves, I knew I'd be okay for a while without any income, but it was disheartening to be unemployed again and spending the money I'd been diligently saving.

When we moved into our apartment in the new state, I relaxed and started looking for employment at a leisurely pace. I was skeptical of some of the jobs I interviewed for. Finally, I accepted an offer with my current employer for 93k, the most I'd ever made. While I hate getting up early to sit in a cubicle and being on call every couple of weeks, I've managed to start saving again and received a couple of raises. My current salary is $98,836. Just shy of the six-figure range I've been chasing my entire career.

Regardless of not making the kind of money I thought I'd be making at this stage, I'm saving aggressively and watching my net worth climb. I've been doing it long enough that my lifestyle has gradually changed to accommodate my goal of reaching FI. I have plenty of low cost hobbies that I indulge in outside of work. This allows me to stash large amounts of my salary into my investments and savings. At least once a year, my wife and I travel out of the country. During the year, we try to sneak in weekend trips to new places locally. I spend money to enjoy the experiences I want to enjoy so the grind to work and save is tolerable.

Moral of the story: I'm not a young person earning ungodly sums of money so I can retire super early. I didn't embrace saving or find the FIRE lifestyle until much later in life after spending much of my income for years. Yes, I'm making a good salary now that I'm older and have been in the industry for a couple of decades. But I'm well behind where I could've been if I'd started down this path sooner. Do I have regrets? Yes and no. Yes, because I didn't start sooner. No because this is just how the mop flopped for me. Things are working out and I'm very grateful to be where I am in life. Now that I know the secret and adapted to it, I know things will only get better from here.

It's never too late to start saving. Even if you fail to reach financial independence, you're still setting yourself up to come out ahead of where you were financially.