As I alluded to in my earlier posts, it’s gonna take some explaining to get us up to the present day, story wise. So taking a page out of some other FIRE bloggers books (most recently I’ve read A Purple Life’s), I’m going to do just that, one year at a time. I wanted to go back far enough that I cover the important stuff, with my jobs, school, and my FIRE journey, but not so far back that it’s boring. So let’s turn the clock back seven years and see how we got to where we are today.
2017
I started the year with about $1,500 to my name. I didn’t have a dime of it invested, and my retail job was paying about $10/hr. Oh, yeah, and I was in my last semester of high school. Let me give you a little background on the relevant stuff from the earlier parts of being in high school.
I came into high school kind of knowing that I wanted to make video games for a living, which pushed me towards learning to program. My high school offered just one course, on Visual BASIC, but not until your senior year. That was annoying to me! I remember in Fall of 2013, my freshman year, doing Hour of Code, and that was my first time programming. I enjoyed it.
In the meantime I started taking a look at what other classes I could take. My high school offered a handful of AP classes, and I wasn’t even aware that some of those classes offered college credit. I decided I would try to take them all over the course of high school.
For context, that wasn’t really because I loved learning (that’s been an acquired taste for me). I’ve just always liked setting up challenges like that for myself to knock down. While I was always a good student in the sense that I tried to get As, I also was the kind of student who was able to coast through most of high school without a lot of effort. I remember one time in freshman year I’d done the math on whether some final project would knock me below an A, and it wouldn’t, so I just wrote my name on it and turned it in blank. So not exactly a model student, but still doing fine.
After my sophomore year, I started taking some computer science classes online through a community college my dad worked at. A major benefit of that is that the classes were free. So I started by learning Python that summer and moved on to learning Java, C#, and C++. I just kept taking at least one or two classes during the following semesters. I remember doing great in my Java class right up until the final, which I got a 40% on. Before that it was just programming assignments and I was getting good grades there. But that final dropped my grade to a B. For some reason that bothered me enough to retake the class and get an A. Oh you sweet summer child, that attitude will definitely change later!
At some point in the midst of all this, I started on my standardized testing warpath. I’m not sure where I got the idea that any of this was going to matter, but once again, I was just wanting to try to get a perfect score for the challenge. And when I say warpath I mean it – taking the SAT three or four times, the ACT seven times, multiple SAT subject tests, and that’s not to mention the AP tests I would take and almost universally do too poorly on for any of it to matter. While my parents had both gone to college, things were different back then, and I was their first kid. So my mom and I were kinda just figuring this out as we went along.
So fast forward again to that last semester of high school, in my senior year. I succeeded in my goal of taking all of the AP classes. A handful of them offered college credit without having to take an AP test, and whenever that was a possibility I took them up on that. Another handful did require that I take AP tests, which I always attempted, but like I said above – barring one example where I did well, which didn’t end up helping anyways – they basically weren’t worth taking. I didn’t put the time in to study for them at all, so I was just living on a prayer.
At one point in my senior year, my goal had been to go to any college that was far away. I had applied to an in-state school fairly early on as a joke because I knew they accepted anyone. The next day, they did. In December I filled out a form that was like a common app for a bunch of scholarships. You just shipped off your information and it threw you in their pool for consideration. But then I’d heard nothing. And the year wore on, I got wary of the costs of going out of state. While my parents didn’t have much money to help me with college, my dad was making too much for me to get student aid.
So partway through my senior year I’d settled on a different in-state school, and was attempting to get into their special dual computer science and business program. I swiftly got rejected from that, but decided to stick with the school anyways. The deal with the in-state colleges was that if you had a certain ACT score they would cover your tuition for all four years. Mine was high enough to get that deal at any of the in-state schools, and I was picking what was considered the best of the bunch.
And even then I started to question that too. When you’d look at the cost calculators it was still like $16,000 a year besides tuition, so $64,000 by the end. Our town had a decent community college and I started to think that might make more sense. My mom told me not to worry about it, to just go to university and we would figure it out. I did get a couple scholarships but it added up to something like $1,000, and basically wasn’t going to make a dent.
In February the guidance counselor mentioned she thought I’d be a good candidate for a program at that first in-state school. Some kind of deal where on top of the free tuition they’d also pay for everything else, room, board, books – the works. Sounded great to me. Her son was in the program and he came to the high school to talk to me about it. When he got done explaining it showed me the application, it was just the same one I’d done in December. So that was the end of that, I guess.
Now the semester was coming to a close, and I was committed to my choice. And then something interesting happened in late April. That first in-state I’d school called me. If I remember right they left a message saying they wanted to interview me for the scholarship over the phone. I remember sitting in my garage and giving them a call. The craziest part was at the beginning of the call. I vividly remember them telling me that they called me “because someone else didn’t answer their phone”. They asked me a few questions, one being like “if you have infinite funds what would you do with technology to make the world a better place”. I quick spit out some satisfying answer and that was it. The call was over in four minutes and I figured I blew it.
The following week, right before having to make final college decisions, they called me. I got it and I was completely shocked. I called my mom to tell her while she was driving, and she had to pull over because she was crying so much. This was going to alleviate so much financial burden, since my parents were going to try to help me even though they didn’t really have the means. So I finalized my decision, I was going to take the free college while the getting was good.
This was one the luckiest things that’d ever happened to me. I wasn’t an involved student. I did speech and debate my freshman year and then not one, singular extracurricular activity until I attempted to be in the school play my last semester. And I say attempted because I got kicked out for missing practice because I had to work. While my academics were good, I wasn’t even anything special there. In my class of 300 or so kids, my class rank was like 26. My test scores must have helped. My best ACT was attempt 5/7, and I think I needed exactly the score I got to get that call. I knew so many kids that were more involved and smarter than me that didn’t get free college. There’s not much else you can do but chalk that up to luck.
I enjoyed my summer spending time with friends, working a little, and getting excited about going to college. And that summer did go quick. When I turned 18 that summer my dad mentioned that I should open a Roth IRA. I’d never invested in anything before, but it seemed like a good idea. I just didn’t put any money in it yet.
I’d decided that I didn’t want to program video games for a company, and instead make them on the side with the programming skills I learned. So I opted for no special concentration when it came time to decide for college, just going for computer science. Before I knew it, I was working with a guidance counselor at the college to figure out what classes to take my first year. At this point I didn’t really have a great feel for how much the college credits I had accrued so far were going to help me. I did manage to skip English I but even though I’d already gotten credit for Calc I and Comp Sci I, the counselor suggested that a lot of people who skip those classes end up regretting it. I took her advice and decided to take those classes in my first semester.
And then before long college began. I made some good friends, got a girlfriend, and promptly started caring a lot less about school. Around the same time, I missed a Monday of my Calc class and missed a quiz I couldn’t make up. I realized that missing that quiz guaranteed I couldn’t get any better than a B. Rather than take the GPA hit I just dropped the class, since I had that credit I transferred in anyways. So between the Comp Sci I repeat and Calc I being dropped, I did 9 credits in my first semester. Not exactly off to the speediest start! And I was definitely having to adjust to putting more work and studying in.
A lot of my friends were in the same full ride scholarship program I was in. When I told them the story about how they called me in late April for a phone interview, they were all shocked. All of them came in for in person interviews in December, and it was this whole process. So after that I really did always feel like I was their absolute last pick for that years cohort, and I had absolutely no problem with that. Free is free whether you’re first or last.
Finally that October I put my first $1,000 into my Roth IRA. I then remember having a public speaking class and I gave a whole speech on the virtues of Roth IRAs and how important saving for retirement was. I didn’t know about FIRE yet, but I was on the path. This all despite the fact I didn’t realize that putting the money in the Roth IRA wasn’t enough. I actually had to invest it in something. Whoops!
I kept working my job in retail here and there on nights and weekends. And as always at this point in my life money was always burning a hole in my pocket. I was buying a handful of CDs for a collection I’d started, and was buying junk I didn’t need. I’ve also always been a video game fan and those can get expensive!
So I wrapped the year up, with my net worth untracked, FIRE undiscovered, and now $2,326.75 to my name. Hey, at least I was up a little bit! Find out in part two if young CJ figures out how to invest in his Roth IRA, manages to make it through Calc II unscathed, and whatever else might be in store. Thanks for reading!