How Did Your Finances Change From 2009 to 2019?
In 2009 I was 27 years old and a year later I worked full-time for the first time with benefits. I worked as an Assistant Executive at a think tank in Washington DC, and ended this job after spending the last five years doing telemarketing, temptation, going to graduate school to get a master’s degree in theater, graduating from graduate school # I Wanted No More work in a theater and asked a professor I trusted how I could get a job with a salary of at least $ 50,000 a year.
“With your skills, you would make a great executive assistant,” he told me, “so I went to another temporary agency, told them that I wanted to get an executive assistant position with a temporary transition to a permanent job with a pay of at least 50 thousand dollars. and got printed tests and I was hired.
(It helped that this all happened before we were fully immersed in the sweep of the Great Recession. Timing really is everything.)
Earning $ 50K a year seemed like a huge amount compared to telemarketing and a tempting paycheck. I had no debts for my undergraduate or graduate studies – I coped with both scholarships and scholarships – so once I paid off the $ 5,000 my parents loaned me to cover the cost of the semester I spent teaching Shakespeare at University of Hyderabad, I bought myself enough clothes that I could wear for two full weeks without repeating the clothes, and then started focusing on saving as much money as possible.
I was already very interested in personal finance and knew the path I had to follow: get out of debt, create an emergency fund, start saving for retirement. In 2009, I had no debt and managed to save $ 10,000, which seemed like a huge achievement to me, and it was just a drop in the ocean. How can I save enough to retire, let alone retire early, as all the books in the library have claimed?
That is, I did not want to be an assistant manager forever .
I ended up working as an assistant manager for four years. After that, I quit my job to move to Los Angeles and try to become an indie musician. I wasn’t all that bad at musicians – I played concerts and got together almost every week – but by the end of that year, I had spent all my savings and had $ 14,000 in credit card debt, so I started Mechanical Turking to bring a little surcharge.
Amazon Mechanical Turk, if you’re unfamiliar, is a site where you can sign up for short, repetitive tasks (taking surveys, identifying objects, confirming whether a review is positive or negative) for a penny. There were several Mechanical Turk clients offering higher paying performances at the time, including the content writing company CrowdSource, which has since been rebranded as OneSpace . I started Turking for CrowdSource in late 2012, was hired to work as a freelance writer and editor, and quickly became the fourth largest recipient of the site (although I’m guessing that record is no longer relevant).
I also finished recording an album – like a professionally recorded and projected album funded by Kickstarter money, credit cards and my Roth IRA. (Pulling money out of this Roth is one of the biggest monetary mistakes I’ve made in the last decade, let me tell you.) When I met with the sound engineer to see the final mixes, he said, “You know, you.” you are a good musician. But you are a great writer. Have you ever thought about …
“Yeah,” I told him. “I thought about it”.
From there it was pitching and writing and pitching and writing; spent five years at The Billfold and got subscriptions everywhere, from The Penny Hoarder to Popular Science ; publication of two novels ; become a regular contributor to Lifehacker, Bankrate, Haven Life and Vox .
This year, as a freelancer, I have collected over six figures. I don’t have final numbers yet because I’m expecting a few more checks until December 31st, but my 2019 income currently includes $ 119,831.57 in freelance income and $ 204.30 in publishing fees … I also more than doubled my net worth this year – from $ 84,700.47 to $ 174,809.19 – after moving to a low cost of living area and pursuing what might be called an aggressive savings strategy and investing. FIRE calculators suggest that if I continue like this, I can retire in 2025.
I don’t know what your finances were like ten years ago, but it’s worth thinking about where you were, how much you earned, how much debt you paid, and so on. Remind yourself of your greatest accomplishments; ask yourself what you regret the most. Be honest about any benefits that might have helped you along the way; When, for example, I ran out of 14 thousand dollars in credit card debt, my parents sat me down and said: “We will give you an interest-free loan, and you will return it to us.”
What’s interesting about this kind of thinking (at least in my case) is the realization that my core financial values and interests – being frugal, financially independent, creating and publishing my own creative projects – have remained largely unchanged since 2009. The biggest difference, Over the past ten years I have worked and I have been lucky and have made a career in which I have been able to significantly increase my income. I know well enough to consider my current earning rate as temporary, which is one of the reasons why I don’t trust these FIRE calculators very much (although they are a lot of fun to play with). 2019 could have been six figures, but in 2012 my total income was $ 23,878.
How has your finances changed over the past ten years? Have your financial values changed as well, or do you feel that your values have remained the same and you are simply living on more / less money than you did ten years ago? If you were to tell a story like the one I just told you, what would it include and how might it affect what you hope to do with your finances in the next decade?