After a year of doing that, I moved to Kentucky and negotiated a fat $10k relocation bonus and a raise to $18 an hour. I eventually moved to a desktop support role for $15 an hour. I was already a team leader and trainer within 8 months of starting. I started getting all kinds of certifications sponsored by the work place. For a meager $450 a month I was on my own and living to paycheck to paycheck (which was awesome in my mind, my short 4 year adult life prior to this I was constantly in the red). For months I was commuting over an hour to get there. Without an ex-wife holding me back, I was quickly able to secure an apartment close to my new work place. Overnight I was making as much as both my parents put together for most of my life. $13 an hour?! In my mind, that was the stuff of fantasy. After months of scouring jobs in late 2007 in a failing Michigan economy, I actually found a job doing entry level IT helpdesk work and I didn't need to have a finished degree. With no degree (my academics suffered pretty badly trying to support myself and dealing with all these other semi poor life decisions), I had no choice but to enter the work force. Ultimately, I filed bankruptcy on my 21st birthday. I learned a lot of life skills in that job, for sure but boy am I glad I never have to do it again.
Most of these clients were non-verbal, had down-syndrome or a host of other illnesses and violent tendencies. Changing their diapers, giving them their drugs, cleaning these soiled mattresses and managing their "behaviors".
I married and divorced a high school sweetheart, I bought a cheap $35,000 house and foreclosed on it about 15 miles off campus, $10k quickly became $20k with my ex-wifes spending habits (her family was a lot more middle class than mine was) and her parents had a lawyer to pin all the remaining debt on me, and I just didn't care anymore.Īll the while, I was working 50-80 hours a week between my PC repair job, I also got a job taking care of mentally disabled elderly. By what would have been my senior year, I made a lot of other major financial mistakes. By 19 I had about $10,000 in high interest CC debt and was working part time as a student PC repair tech for $7 an hour. I also had to learn stick to drive it.Ī clutch, a master cyclinder, a transmission, busted exhaust, all these repairs added up between 17-19. But, a car that cheap and that rode had a lot of maintenance issues. I also needed a car to get around, luckily I bought a $150 Honda Civic with 300,000 miles on it, and drove that thing well past 400 until the odometer went out. I hadn't been to a dentist at this point since I was about 13 either and I was very overweight from just eating the cheapest most awful calorie dense food imaginable my entire life.Īnyway, I quickly found credit cards to be the solution to lifes problems. I didn't have any health insurance, and I went weeks trying to just fight this weird freshmen flu, constantly letting infections get out of control. I don't know if it was because I was never exposed to a city or a lot of mix mash of people living in the dorms, but I was sick, constantly, my freshmen year. I did get refund checks, and used those to cover those expenses as much as possible. It turns out there's a lot more costs of going to school, books, fees, dues, all kinds of little things that just added up beyond what I had financial aid to cover. I quickly turned 18 in my first semester and realized I was fucked. My mom gave me $100 when I moved out and sent me on my way. I was only 17 when I started, but I nabbed enough subsidized loans, scholarships, and grants to get me started from being low income. Everybody could smoke, and there were just tiny desks and chairs to sit in, there was a constant haze of smoke like two feet deep floating near the ceiling. The conditions were awful, no cubes, just old computers from the 80's that had this bright ugly green text and a phone. I had a girlfriend at the time that would drive me to and from the job. It was very difficult to get to because it was 20 miles away and I didn't have a car. I started working a telemarketing job for $5.15/hr.
By the time I was 12, my parents divorced and he didn't pay of dime of child support and disappeared from my life entirely (and still to this day.)įast forward to when I was 16.
My dad had a drinking problem and several times he made decisions that cost him months of income, and spent a lot of time in jail and prison. My parents, when they weren't unemployed (which was a lot) were generally working jobs between $5 and $7 an hour.
I grew up in a $8000 trailer in the middle of the woods, in the middle of Amish country in a town of about 200 people. Here is the timeline of earnings balance of debt/income ratios for various points in my life.įor some back story, I wasn't particularly well off as a child and teenager.