Hey folks! This is the fourth 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 2020 and see what young CJ was up to.
2020
It was the start of a brand new year, and my net worth sat at $32,353.32. My full time job started, and as I’d hoped, it didn’t really feel all that different from before. That was the beauty of having an internship that just gave me real work the whole time. I enjoyed working with my coworkers a lot and the work was interesting.
Grad school started as well, and I decided one class was “too easy” and picked up a second one. I also decided not to pay for wifi in my apartment so I was doing it all off of a hotspot. I got a gym membership, and they also had wifi, so sometimes I could get a signal from the parking lot. Not my finest hour.
I started using the money I was making to reach some goals I’d always wanted to. I maxed out my Roth IRA for 2019, and then maxed out it out for 2020. All while continuing to put 25% aside for my 401k. Overall I kept my expenses pretty low and I lived a frugal life. Since I’d had a meal plan in college this was my first time buying my own groceries and consistently cooking for myself.
Pretty quickly after the year had started, there was news at my job: another company acquired us. And that was because the company acquiring us wanted to be acquired. Just a big ol’ corporate feeding frenzy. This was my first time going through this so I didn’t really know what it was going to mean. My coworkers cracked uneasy jokes about potential layoffs. They even brought in consultants to talk to us. It was straight out of Office Space.
For the moment though, things continued as normal. I started hearing some rumblings about something called the coronavirus coming out of China. People worried it might get to America at some point. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen!
In March, my mom and I had planned a trip to go to a concert in Denver to see one of her favorite musical artists. I took a couple days off work, March 12th and 13th, so we could go do that. Up until then, no one was really wearing masks, and it was business as usual. It felt like on that drive to Denver, everything changed, and the world was ending, all in one day. The WHO declared Covid a pandemic, the government declared it a national emergency, Disneyland announced it was closing, and I remember even worrying that state borders were going to shut down. It was pretty scary.
So we got to our AirBnB and debated if we should even go to this concert at all. With only a handful of cases reported, we decided to go. The concert became the final show of the tour. We enjoyed it for what it was, not knowing how long it was going to be until we got this kind of experience again. On that drive back we stopped at Walmart and witnessed the run on toilet paper firsthand.
Also over that weekend, my job announced we were now going to be fully remote. The scary situation made me want to be home with my family for a while. I took my laptop home, and hopped on at 9 am that following Monday. I saw I had a meeting scheduled for 9:30 am. Seemed like some of coworkers were in it too. But before the meeting we realized that there were actually two meetings. Some of us were on one, and some of us were on the other. That can’t be a good sign.
Well unfortunately I was in the bad meeting, and they informed us we were all laid off. It actually felt like it had nothing to do with the pandemic, it was just awful timing. The silver lining was that they were giving us severance. I got a real kick out of getting a nine-week severance after working full-time just nine weeks.
So it was time to find a new job! Thankfully I’d made good connections during my time there. I started working with some recruiters who were going to try to help. One of my other coworkers who got laid off went back to his old job and was trying to bring me in. A lot of places I applied to were freezing hiring due to the pandemic. And of course, all my money I’d invested was taking a beating. But I knew that it was time to keep holding on, and things would get better. So I stayed the course and bought more when I could.
And then they did get better, a lot faster than anyone expected. I managed to get a contract position in April that I wasn’t excited about but was going to pay a bit better than my previous job even. And then just a day into that contract position, that job my coworker went back to wanted to interview me. A couple weeks later I got the job, and I’d made sure to get a raise out of it. I was now making $85k. I quit the contract position, and ended April with $50,311.30 to my name.
Grad school was going… alright. Being laid off and having more time could’ve helped, but it wasn’t an easy time. I got really sick at one point but continuously tested negative for Covid. Still, there was no reasons to take chances. I quarantined in my room for a while since I didn’t want to get my immunocompromised dad sick. Grad school required a 3.0 GPA to graduate, and some classes needed to be at least a B-, while in others a C sufficed. Right now it was looking like these two were going to be Cs.
Prior to the pandemic, the choice to pick a fully online grad school might have raised eyebrows a little, but now I was effectively doing what everyone else was having to do. And the folks who were paying full price for in person school continued to pay it to do online school. So I felt like I’d certainly made the right choice in not doing grad school at my alma mater.
I started the new job in May remotely, but pretty quickly I got tired of living at home. It’s hard to go back to that after experiencing life on your own. This pandemic wasn’t going anywhere, and I was still paying rent, so I headed back to my apartment to continue on. The new job had an office, and really hardly anyone went in, so sometimes I would just to have some other place to get some work done. And they had a lot of good snacks.
The only downside to the new gig is that they made you wait until 6 months to have a 401k. Not just waiting for matching – they wouldn’t even let me contribute. This dashed my hopes of maxing out my 401k in 2020, and I opened my brokerage account. The stock market continued to recover and hit new highs.
The spring semester of grad school finished up, and if I remember right I ended up with two C+’s. But then the college decided since it was a really weird semester, we were allowed, just this once, to essentially take the classes for credit and wipe the grades off our transcripts. So I did that for both of them, essentially giving me a reset but also with 20% of the degree finished.
For the summer semester I decided to just do one class. But even with that I struggled. I pulled off another C+. The program had a probation system where if your GPA was below a 3.0, you had one semester to fix it. So I figured I’d take the hit now and fix it in the fall. I was no stranger to probation after all! But much like with the last probation, something wasn’t right.
To make a very long and annoying story short, despite offering the classes for credit in spring, effectively wiping my GPA clean, the fact that I had gotten below a 3.0 had actually put me on probation in Spring. I never got an explanation why that made sense, since my GPA wasn’t below 3.0 after taking them for credit. But whatever, after summer was over I found out that, in their eyes, I’d failed probation and now they were going to kick me out unless I appealed. I appealed, I stayed in, and I signed up for two more classes in the fall. Another near miss.
After six months in my first apartment, one of my old roommates had an opportunity to buy a cheap townhouse in town and asked if I wanted to move in with him. The rent: $450. I said yes, please!
I felt like this new job was actually really good. Several folks I’d worked with at my first job had come from here, and I could see that this was where the culture they’d built there had originated. Then I got an interesting call. One of my coworkers at the old job, my friend, had become the manager. And he wanted me to come back. He said he couldn’t really offer me more money than I made now though. I thought about it and decided to stick with the new job. They laid off two-thirds of us that day in March, so only a handful of folks were left. I felt like it was better for my career to stay at the new place.
Around then I got put on a new team at work and was enjoying it, at least for a while. Eventually I got moved to something harder, and less fun, where I was fighting fires in the data using SQL and stored procedures. I was told it was generally a position they’d only give to someone more senior, so I started thinking about how to leverage it for a raise.
In October I challenged myself to spend as little money as possible for the month. I didn’t do perfectly, but managed to only spend $596 for the month. Considering my rent was $450, I felt that was pretty good. Of course money went a little further back then!
The fall semester went a lot better in grad school. I managed to get good grades for the first time, and pulled my GPA above a 3.0, getting me out of probation. Now I was 50% of the way to finishing my master’s degree. And finally Covid vaccines were just around the corner, so things might start looking a little bit more like they used to.
Despite a lot of challenges that year, both personal and professional, it ended up being a good one. I finished the year with a net worth of $96,098.64, just shy of the $100k figure that I wanted to achieve by the summer of 2021. Find out in part five if young CJ gets the raise, manages to stay off probation, and if the world comes back to normal. Thanks for reading!