Hey folks! This is the seventh and final 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 2023 and see what I was up to. Then we’ll finally be all caught up!
2023
I began the year with $255,527.52, and the market was finally heading up again. While on vacation, I had the new ChatGPT write me a resignation letter to the VP, and I sent it, letting him know we could talk about it when I came back if he wanted to. There was no talking me out of it this time. When I did come back, he didn’t even try. He basically said he wasn’t really that surprised, and I handed things off as best I could. I like to think things ended amicably, despite how I truly felt inside.
So with that, my final week passed, and as luck would have it, went on a first date with my now girlfriend on that very last day. Over the weekend I finally replaced my old car with a used, cheap ($10k) electric car. Gas was way too expensive out there. And then the new job started.
The folks I worked with were all older than me, but generally seemed pretty nice. The work was very similar to what I’d been doing before, so it was a smooth transition for me. Almost too smooth.
I generally thrive on challenge, and as much as the last place was a disaster, that level of disaster threw a lot of challenges my way. And those challenges forced me to grow both as a software developer and a person. This job was just easy street. And I was almost having to figure out how to cope with that, oddly.
It’s hard to really complain about making $170k and only having to work a couple of hours some days. But I sorta felt like complaining. I’m not stupid enough to deliberately ask for extra work, I knew better. So I tried to use my time to do some things around the house. Sometimes that meant working out, sometimes playing video games, sometimes just messing around on the internet.
The problem, as I saw it, was that even if there wasn’t much to do, I still needed to be around from about 9 to 5 in case anyone needed anything. And sometimes they did. And there were plenty of meetings. I couldn’t just leave the house and get away with it.
Partly to scratch the itch, I started thinking about side hustles. For a while I got really into thinking about owning rental property, and got pretty close to buying something in the midwest where I grew up. Ultimately I didn’t do it, with how high mortgage rates were. It just didn’t seem too profitable.
I had some other ideas, and my goal was to generate $30k in side hustles, to make my income for the year once again $200k. But anything I could think of for making income on the side was going to get trounced by just using the one skill I already had: software engineering. Folks get paid plenty to do contract work, and I started to look into that.
But then again, there were these other folks I’d heard of in the past. The so called overemployed. These folks would work multiple full time jobs at once, remotely, and do a good enough job at each job to keep them going. I didn’t have the guts or skills to do it before, but felt like I had both now. And I had the golden opportunity of a job that didn’t require much work.
At first I didn’t take the idea too seriously. I applied to a handful of jobs and didn’t hear much back. Almost any friend I asked thought it was a bad idea. Folks cautioned me about the risk. But it didn’t seem all that risky to me. So long as I made sure the jobs were in different industries and didn’t violate any NDAs, the worst result was getting fired from both jobs. And I knew I’d find another one anyways.
I heard back from one company in May that seemed promising. I was targeting easier software jobs, hoping to maybe get $130k to bring my total salary to $300k. After a handful of interviews, I was ghosted. For a while I let the idea lay dormant.
Then that summer, I turned 24. And I came back at the idea with a vengeance. I wanted to hit $300k in income at the end of the year, and this was the way to do it. I sat down one night and applied to 100 jobs in one sitting. Every time I got rejected I’d apply to another. I was only applying to remote jobs.
Oh yeah, one wrinkle that was going to make this harder for me: my current job was hybrid. Luckily it only made me go into the office one day a week, which I’d been doing every week pretty much. It seemed like it wouldn’t be too hard to get out of, but I was taking on that risk willingly.
Pretty quickly I started to hear back from a handful. Most of these I’d pegged myself as willing to take $130k or so. I wasn’t trying to sell myself short but I also knew what I was trying to pull off. Long story short, I didn’t end up having to. My current salary was used as a bargaining chip. I got a job offer with a salary of $175k, with a stock grant that pushed the total yearly pay to a bit over $200k. I couldn’t believe it – I actually got a better job than my current one. That wasn’t what I set out to do, but I took it.
That meant my salary was now effectively $345k. And my total compensation was over $380k. When I say better job than my current, I don’t mean just pay. This place seemed to have a much better culture, and in my mind was now my primary job. The original job was just a side hustle now, though an admittedly well paid one.
The only thing now was to actually do this thing, and I wasn’t sure how that was going to go. There were stories of folks having to have multiple meetings at once, strategically muting and unmuting to seem present in both. Some folks pulled it off for years and other didn’t last even weeks.
The electric car I bought earlier in the year ended up being more trouble that it was worth. With a full charge lasting only 66 miles or so, it proved a great commuter car but awful for everything else. My girlfriend and I once took it on a long trip that should’ve been six hours each way. It took 12 hours each way. I sold it and finally got the used Tesla I’d always wanted. It was the most money I’d ever spent at once, and I struggled with it for a long time, but finally pulled the trigger. I ended up picking it up the day my new job started.
The week I started the new job I took a week off at the old one. That gave me some time to get through orientation and get a feel for what to expect. The week after that was when the rubber met the road. I figured if I could just make it to the end of the year, I’d have made enough extra money to reimburse myself for the Tesla purchase.
The new job offered the dream of any personal finance nerd – the mega backdoor Roth IRA. I started jamming in as much money as possible for the rest of the year. I also started not showing up at the office. Sometimes I’d take a day off at the new job to show up. Once I showed up and managed to act like it was an appointment at the new job. That is to say, it was stressful. And every other day of the week I was handling things just fine.
I started to come up with an escape plan. For one, the state I was in had fairly high income tax. And now I had a ton of income. I was also tired of paying exorbitantly high rent. And lastly, I needed to get far enough away to turn the old job into a remote one. Other team members were remote, I just lived too close to the office to get them off my back.
For reference, with just the one job and how high rent, expenses and taxes were, I was managing to invest about $6,600, which was about a 67% savings rate of my total post-tax income. Once I started the second job, I was able to invest about $15,000 a month. By moving, lowering both the rent, expenses and tax, I was figuring I could invest about $19,500 a month and a nearly 90% savings rate. And that’s before figuring in the stock grants. That sounded like a dream to me.
As the year was reaching a conclusion, my girlfriend and I started figuring out what that might mean. She was graduating college, and that meant maybe we could just break our leases and move in together. We picked a place and got to work breaking our leases. We got off fairly easy overall doing that.
My boss at the old job had no issue with me moving, and that now made the job fully remote. The new job didn’t care at all since it was already fully remote. All that was left was to do it. We packed up and got our stuff moved to the new place before we went on vacation for Christmas.
Overall, the market had a much better year than the last, going up about 25% and ending near the record highs at the end of 2021. Thanks to that and the new high income, my net worth at the end of the year reached $400,918.75, barely passing the $400k mark for the first time.
Most importantly, I made it to the end of year and had kept both jobs happy. Right before vacation, my new job explicitly told me I was doing a good job and they were happy to have me. I couldn’t believe I was getting this to work. I didn’t work more than 40 hours a single week since I started the second job. My only goal now was to keep this going as long as I possibly could.
And that takes us to today. I’m still keeping both jobs happy as long as I can, and seeing where this year takes me. I’m sure I’ll end up writing a year-end review, and there’ll be snippets of what’s going on in my life in other posts and net worth reports. For now though, that’s the story of how we got here. I’m doing what I can to save up as much as possible, as fast as possible, and then hopefully “retire” at least from traditional employment just before I turn 26 (aka retiring at 25). We’ll see how I feel when the time gets closer. If you made it all the way through these posts, thanks so much for reading!