Hey folks! This is the third part of my “story so far” series where I tell the story of how I learned about FIRE and all the jobs, school and relevant details that take us up to the current day. If you didn’t start at the beginning, you can do that here! Let’s head back to 2019 and see what young CJ was up to.
2019
Starting the year, I had $7,651.07 and I was ready to win this competition. After a break at home for Christmas, I headed back to college to start the second semester of my sophomore year. When my retail job once again told me they were having problems transferring me, I just told them I quit. I was starting to feel like I wanted my weekends back anyways, since I was working 30 hour weeks at my internship on top of my 18 credit hours.
That first month back I quickly came up with an idea. I was still considering doing their extended master degree program. But when I sat down to plan my summer and fall out, I realized if I took 15 credit hours in the summer and 18 in the fall, I was just… done with college. I’d transferred in a lot of stuff that didn’t do anything but elective credit, but that ended up being fine since one of the requirements of graduating was having 120 credits. I was going to end up with something like 130 once I knocked out the required classes.
Why do this? Well I was thinking a lot about how nice it would be to get paid a full time salary. Trying to gather what I could about what folks were getting paid in the area, I thought it would be possible to make $67,000 out of the gate. That was a pretty significant raise from what I was making as an intern. And I had that goal of wanting to save up $100k by 22. The only way that was going to happen was making real money faster. Also I was just ready to be done with school.
So I took my complex scheme down to the academic advising office to see what my advisor thought. First, she said 15 was way more than what makes sense in a summer semester. Most folks take 9 at most. Most of all she just felt like it might be too much to take on. I conceded that it might be, but that at this point I wasn’t that worried about failing. It would just mean I have to stick around one more semester. I had no margin for error, but I had a chance to making this work. This seemed to somehow assuage her concerns.
Luckily they had a class that let you get 3 credits just for doing an internship, so I got that into my plans for fall. My advisor managed to pull a couple strings so that some classes that she felt should’ve counted as upper div electives knocked out a couple of the required ones. That meant as long as I could finish my 18 credits in spring, 9 in the summer, and 18 in the fall – 45 in one year – I was home free.
I decided not to do my masters, even in their accelerated program. While I could end up with my masters after just 4 years of college, instead of getting my bachelors at the end of 2019, it would push the bachelors completion out to May of 2020. I wasn’t even sure a master’s in computer science was worth it, and I wanted to make money sooner. I was also just tired of being in a classroom.
So the marathon year began. When March 1st, 2019 rolled around, the end of my friend and I’s competition, I was sitting at $14,632.13 and he too had won the challenge. It felt awesome to come so far in such a short amount of time.
When it came time to schedule my summer and fall classes I did it around work again, and I managed to finish spring semester with good grades. I paid for a place to stay on campus in the summer so I could get to my classes and work. I started doing 40 hours in the summer, and I was really enjoying it. It wasn’t a sure thing I was going to stay on with them full time, so I started applying to some bigger tech companies in the hopes of getting out of state like I’d wanted to when going to college. Plus, good lord, some of those tech companies paid crazy money to new grads.
That summer I took a trip that weirdly changed the course of my life. All because of an Uber driver. On my drive back to the airport in early July, he asked me if I was in college. I said I was, and I was graduating this year. He asked if I was going to get my masters. I said that I’d thought about it, but I decided I wasn’t going to. He told me I should get my masters. He said something about having a bachelors in chemical engineering and “I guess it wasn’t enough because I’m still driving for Uber” or something. I enjoyed his other interesting stories, and then finally I was dropped off at the airport.
My overall feeling was like, yeah, okay, this guy has no idea what he’s talking about. He never even asked what my degree was, which I felt was fairly relevant in making this decision. But then I had a couple hours to wait for my flight, so I did some Googling. All I knew was that I didn’t want to do grad school at my current school. Mainly because it delayed my graduation, but also I just didn’t feel it was the highest quality education.
And then within a couple minutes I found something interesting. One of the top 10 computer science programs in the country was starting a new, all online, computer science master’s program. The total cost for the entire degree: only $10k, which was about as cheap as it gets. Getting in was going to be the hard part. But shortly after that, I decided that was just fine. I would apply to just this one school. If I got in, I’d do part time grad school while I worked. If I didn’t, I just wouldn’t go at all.
So that August, studying for the GRE became my new side project. It reminded me a lot of the other standardized testing I did, but this was the first time I was really feeling like I needed to study. To even get the average score on it is harder because you’re taking the test with other college graduates.
I started putting out some feelers for if my internship was going to offer me a full time job, letting them know it was looking like I’d be done at the end of the year. I remember I actually put a countdown on the whiteboard next to my desk of how many days til graduation. Was it a veiled threat that time was running out for them to act? I’ll never tell!
At the end of August, two days before the fall semester began, I took the GRE. And I did good enough that I felt like I would get accepted to the program. I applied that day and then waited. All my summer classes had wrapped up and I’d done well in them. Just one last semester standing between me and freedom. With my internship taking care of one three credit hour class, it was really just a 15 credit hour semester now, five classes to go.
Over the course of the year I’d been jamming enough in my 401k at my internship that it looked like I was going to max it out by the end of the year, and I was super excited about that. By the time that fall semester was starting my net worth was sitting at about $24k. I was starting to see a path to my goal of $100k by 22.
The fall semester plowed onward, and finally in October, my boss called me into a meeting. He told me that had found the budget and wanted to offer me a full time job starting in January. He asked me how much I wanted to make. The only thing I was going off of was what I’d heard from other folks, that starting out of college upper 60s is good. So I said I was hoping to make $67k. He said “we want to pay you more than that” and offered me $78k. The greatest negotiation of all time.
I took it right then and there and I was so excited. I quickly realized $78k was a fun number because the 401k limit was $19k at the time, meaning exactly 25% in there would max it out. Then I started doing all kinds of projections using this new salary number, and figured I could probably hit a million at 32, maybe even 31 assuming just small raises.
So now I really needed to make sure I passed my classes. I kept close track of everything that was upcoming on a whiteboard so I could visually see what I needed to do. When the whiteboard started to empty as we got to the last assignments and tests, I could see I was going to pull this off.
In November, as I was off for Thanksgiving break I got a little more good news. I was accepted to the grad school program! So I’d start that in January along with my full time job. I just needed to take ten classes to finish it, and you could do it at your own pace. Figured maybe one that first semester would be good to start out with.
And then December came, and it was time to graduate. My year with zero margin of error, with 45 credits down, was finally over. I walked at graduation and, despite the pageantry not really being my thing, I did feel some amount of pride over what I’d just pulled off. I found an apartment within walking distance of my new job, and while $700 was a little pricey for a studio, I quick got whatever I could so I could start the new year there.
On December 31st, 2019, I moved myself into that studio, ready and excited for what 2020 would bring. My net worth was now $32,353.32, and I was ready to take my new salary and put it to work. I’m sure there won’t be any major world events that cause any disruption! Find out in part four how the full time job goes, if doing grad school part time is possible for me, and what impact that virus that just started spreading is going to cause! Thanks for reading!