Hey folks! This is the second 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 haven’t already read the first part, you can do that here! Or don’t -you do you! Let’s jump back to 2018!
2018
Picking up where we left off, I now had $2,326.75 total. And luckily for me, I did finally realize how to invest in my Roth IRA. The mutual fund I was trying to invest in required a minimum balance of $2,500, so I took everything I had in cash (I even remember returning some things I’d bought to get enough), and jammed it all in. Regrettably later that month I had to sell like $150 to pay for something or other, the first and only time I have pulled money out of my Roth IRA. But luckily once I had passed that $2,500 limit, I was still in the mutual fund. I hadn’t gotten turned onto index funds yet so it was probably a technology mutual fund of some kind.
I had another full course-load this semester, with 17 credits including the scary Calculus II. And I was definitely slacking. I was so focused on friends and my relationship that, while I was still doing generally okay, Calculus II started to suffer as I repeatedly didn’t show up to class. I figured I’d be able to pull it off in the long run. Either way, the GPA I needed to keep for the scholarship was a mere 3.25, and after the first semester I was sitting well above that. And I’d done the math and figured out that even I did poorly in Calc II, I would be just above that. So I wasn’t worried about it!
I continued working my retail job that year, and I think at some point I got a raise to $12/hr. Sweet! That April or so there was a career fair for summer internships in computer science that I didn’t go to. I thought that it was more for upper class-men than freshmen. But then several of my friends actually managed to pull internships that were paying something like $17/hr. And I just don’t really remember being that worried about it. Figured I’d find one for the next summer, after I knew a little bit more.
Overall my classes went well for the semester. Well, except for Calc II. I was really bad about showing up and managed to bomb the final. I think I ended up getting a D, my worst grade ever. I’d never failed a class before in my life. Why didn’t I just withdraw from the class considering I was going to have to retake the class anyways? Such a great question! I think at the time, having done the math, I figured it just didn’t matter. So I didn’t withdraw, and just took that big fat L right on my transcript. So this time, I managed to successfully complete 12 credits. Well, I guess at least that’s better than 9.
The scholarship didn’t pay for us to live on campus over the summer, so I went home to my parents place a couple hours away. I basically just kept working and doing plenty of relaxing, opting not to take any classes over the summer. And then the letter came.
My scholarship was putting me on probation, because my GPA had fallen below the 3.25 they required. Wait what? I’d done the math on this! Well, I did do the math, but I’d neglected to factor in that Calc II is a 5 credit hour class, not 3 credit hour class like the rest, which means it has a bigger impact on my GPA. So what did my GPA work itself out to after my first year in college? 3.24! So I really am a moron for not dropping that class. But okay, fine, I figured, they’re just putting me on probation so as long as I can pull to a 3.25 in the fall all will be good.
That setback aside the summer ended up being pretty foundational in my FIRE journey. Getting really into minimalism that summer was changing my perspective on some things. I remember writing a list of goals I wanted to achieve in my life. It started my writing down “retire at 60”. I then crossed it out and wrote “retire at 50”. Then I crossed it out again and wrote “retire at 40”. I think a Google search shortly thereafter lead me to learning about FIRE and these crazy people who actually pull off what I’d written down.
The world of 401ks, the S&P 500 and lots more opened up to me. I read some of the greats like Mr. Money Mustache and realized I’d stumbled on something amazing. Based on another blogger I read (My Money Wizard) I decided to set a goal of having $100k saved up by my 25th birthday. That July I’d put a bit more in Roth IRA so now I had about $4k in there. And then not long after that I had a conversation with my best friend that changed everything.
We were at our usual joint, the local DQ, eating a terrible chicken tender basket and a fantastic Blizzard. Out of the blue my friend says, “you know, I had this idea, by the start of next March I’m going to try to have $10k saved up. Seems like a good goal”. I can’t remember now where he said he got the idea from or if he’d just made it up. I was like “dude I’m totally copying your idea”. Then we both started scheming a little. What if we made this more interesting?
In talking we realized we both had about $4k at the time, so we were both starting from about the same point. We decided that it wasn’t going to be a race per-say: if we both had $10k by March 1st then we’d both win. And if neither of us made it, we’d both lose. But if only one of us won the loser had to buy the winner a $100 Amazon gift card. Just the kind of motivation the two of us needed. We were always competitive like this. I wanted both of us to win, but I was not going to lose. I started tracking my net worth on Personal Capital shortly after.
And then August came and it was back to school. My friend worked at a fast food place, and since he was going to community college, he just stayed in the same town that my parents place was at. Whenever I moved back and forth between towns I had to transfer my retail job. And usually that wasn’t a problem, and I was right on the schedule when I moved back. But this time was different. They weren’t getting me on the schedule quickly. That meant my friend was pulling ahead of me. And then I had to spend $500 fixing my car. And then my girlfriend broke up with me.
By the end of my first week of class I’d had enough, it was time for a new plan. I’d thought I’d wait til next summer to get an internship, but now that bump in pay sure seemed helpful to try to win this competition. So I prepped a resume and threw it in a couple places. There was also a whole tech career fair in September I planned on going to.
Around this time I had to start going to my scholarship probation meetings, which were usually over the phone and seemed to be going fine. I was taking a 17-credit load again, and Calc II was going a lot better this time. It’s a wonder what showing up will do for you! But still, something seemed wrong. Normally when I logged into my school account, the amount due would should an amount at the beginning of the semester and then go to zero a couple weeks in. It wasn’t happening this time.
Well, it was partially. My housing, books, and food all came out. But the tuition didn’t. I let it sit for a few weeks. Until in a rush of panic it hit me. The scholarship that pays for my tuition and the one that pays for everything else FEEL like the same scholarship but they aren’t. And maybe my GPA being too low screwed something up on the tuition one. Even though I felt so sure I knew what was going on, I decided to play dumb and message the lady running the housing scholarship, the one I had my probation meetings with.
Long story short, I was exactly right. The GPA needed to be 3.25 for both, and while the housing scholarship had a probation mechanism, the tuition one didn’t. So I was totally just going to be on the hook for tuition for the rest of college. Now I felt really dumb for not just dropping Calc II.
Knowing I had a 3.24, just under the cutoff, I tried to make a case to my housing scholarship since the tuition scholarship was hard to get ahold of. But I’m pretty sure I remember leaving messages to them too. The housing scholarship lady said she would do what she could. But now there was nothing to do but wait and hope somehow things worked out.
But man, this was really going to mess up my bet and any plans I had for trying to save up some money in college. So I needed a new plan. I always enjoyed planning my class schedules and started thinking about if there was maybe a faster way out of college. I’d considered doing a program they had where you could get your masters in just one year after your bachelors by taking some classes that counted for both. But now I really wasn’t sure what made the most sense to do.
In the meantime the tech career fair came and went and I went to every single table at it, handing out a resume to each one. There were probably 40 different companies there. Then the general career fair came the next day and had just a handful of tech companies that for some reason didn’t go to the tech career fair. My roommate was going to go with my but decided it wasn’t worth it. I passed out another dozen resumes there. Some of the companies wanted me to apply online too so I got busy doing that.
And then, finally some good news. After an interview with one of the companies my friends had worked for, they offered me an internship. And with it, $20/hr. I was so excited. It wasn’t exactly the greatest place to work for, but it’d let me finally catch back up to my friend. I just needed to wait for the offer letter. Luckily, the retail job had started giving me shifts again, but not as many as I’d have liked.
One day around then, I got a message on LinkedIn. One of the companies I’d dropped my resume off at at the non-tech career fair wanted me to interview. I didn’t even remember their name, and when I looked at their website, it looked terrible. But what could I lose by going in for an interview? I figured there was no way I’d take it though.
The place was awesome. It felt like a real tech company. The engineers were throwing NERF darts at each other to get their attention. And unlike the other place, there were no intern teams, they were just going to throw me on a real team to see what it was really like. I felt like I interviewed well, helped by the fact that there was no pressure since I had the other job.
The next week, before the first place could even get me the offer letter, this place had their offer letter ready and also offered me $20/hr. For some reason, I just wanted to have both offer letters in my hand to make my decision, even though I was leaning towards the new place. So I asked them to give me a few days so I could decide. That caused the new place to bump the offer to $21/hr and I promptly accepted. My start date was in October.
In the meantime, I’d finally worked enough hours at my retail job to get access to a 401k there, with 5% matching. To me a 401k was the ultimate hack in the competition with my friend because it allowed me to avoid paying taxes. I started by putting 25% or so towards my 401k and quickly bumped it up to 80%, the highest it would let me go. To maximize my savings I decided to keep working the retail job on the weekends while working my internship.
I started the internship in October, and quickly realized they also had a 401k that I was able to contribute to with slightly worse matching than the retail job. So I promptly started contributing 80% of these paychecks to my 401k too, to help me in the competition as much as possible.
When it came time to plan my schedule out for the first semester of 2019, I did it with as many online classes and evening classes as possible to give myself as much time to go into the internship as possible – 18 credit hours in all.
And then at long last, I got some more good news. The tuition scholarship was willing to reinstate me assuming I got my GPA fixed that semester. It was such a relief knowing I wasn’t going to be on the hook for all of that. Besides getting the scholarship itself, this was another one of my luckiest moments.
In the end, I did manage to pass Calc II with a B this time, and did well enough in my other classes that my GPA pulled back up to a 3.7 or something, giving me some breathing room from ever having any problems again. And I vowed that I wouldn’t.
Between the internship and the continued weekends at Target, my net worth really started to take off. After starting the year with about $2.5k, having $4k in the summer, I closed the year with $7,651.07! And I had two more months to close in on the big $10k. I knew I could do it. And my friend was looking like he was in a good spot too.
At some point I decided to set some loftier goals for myself, like having $40k on the anniversary of the end of our bet, March 1st, 2020. And then I moved up my original big goal of having $100k saved up by my 25th birthday up a few years to my 22nd birthday in the summer of 2021. The latter was a pipe dream really, considering at that point I’d just be a couple months out of college. I wrote it on a card and tacked it on a cork board on my wall, right above my bed.
So I guess 2018 was sort of a rocky year, but it ended up in a pretty great spot. I found out about FIRE, got a good internship, started really attacking my Roth IRA and 401k, and most of all managed not to completely blow my scholarship. I finally became a saver after so many years of spending most of what I earned, thanks to the bet with my friend. Find out in part three the results of that bet, if I manage to not fail more classes, and what new schemes I cook up! Thanks for reading!