getting accidentally hired and finally making enough.
story: every job I’ve ever applied for in tech didn’t work out. I was a dishwasher until right before covid when someone recommended me for a cybersecurity position. Before that I had obsessed about FIRE or living in a car or being careful about too much starbucks or avocado toast… without making enough for a car or health insurance. That job paid ~half of what cybersecurity should pay, but was AMAZING. My next job paid just a hair under average, three years later. night and day, able to afford to exist without help.
financial advice be damned. I couldn’t “find” anywhere with lower rent. I was in the lowest cost of living possible regionally. What needed to change was the PRIMARY job’s income rate, not adding some side hustle. Either make rent cheaper or find a higher wage.
I’m not making enough to consider your next fancy moves like getting a house.
Studying hard on my first year university. My GPA started high so I had a bunch of scholarships and grants. It’s easy to maintain a high GPA than to bring a low GPA to a high level. I religiously apply to scholarships and grants also. I paid maybe 1/4 of my tuition fees.
Things to note:
My 4 year bachelor degree in healthcare only cost $25,000-30,000 including books.
The gov’t even gives 60% back of tuition paid as tax refund every year until the gov’t party changed a few years after I finished.
Also gov’t gives out cheap educational loans especially for low income families back then.
In life it’s been mostly pure luck, but one of the few things I really recommend is to keep in the loop about rebates, programs and services offered by my federal and provincial government. Stuff like rebates on first time home buying, electric bikes, and energy efficient equipment is nice cause I bet I saved at least 3000$ total.
In recent time tho the biggest one has been getting a bicycle. I got an e-bike but even a regular bike helped me stop paying through the nose for gas when I was just burning it mostly sitting in traffic.
Started a small mutual fund and retirement fund when I was just starting out and still in undergrad. I did not have much and was fully self sufficient. But someone came to my job and showed us how retirement plans worked and convinced me to start one. Same with a mutual fund. I never put more than $20-$40 in each because I didn’t have much but boy did that pay off.
I purchased a small condo in the city with some of the money I put away in #1. Just sold it recently (20 years after purchasing it; lived in it for 5 years, rented it out for a profit for 15 years). I made a lot of money off that sale. More money than I’ve ever seen at once.
My spouse and I have always lived below our means. Now we’re not frugal - we go out for nice dinners, travel, have kids. We also have good jobs. But, when we purchased a house we could have afforded to get one that was $600k and instead opted for a smaller townhome in a nice neighborhood for almost half the price. Living this way has paid off more than I could have ever imagined. Both of us don’t have to work. We travel whenever we want. We could technically both stop working in our 40s/50s and probably be fine. It’s a feeling of freedom. We’ve never over-extended ourselves. When our colleagues and friends were buying expensive homes and expensive cars and extending themselves, we just didn’t do that.
Buying a house. Got lucky and bought before the pandemic, and even then just barely scraped together a downpayment by borrowing from inlaws.
It’s crazy how having a mortgage have us access to so much cheap credit. We were able to pay off all consumer debt and even most of our student loan debt. Even with all our debt bundled in the mortgage we’re still paying far less than we would to rent an apartment.
Idk if I really made the moves so much as they fell into my lap but I really made out well off of covid.
In 2020 I had 2 goals, start seriously saving for a house, and have a wedding.
I moved into a much smaller apartment that was closer to work in Jan of 2020, we planned to spend the year mostly outside the house anyway.
But with the excess savings from not doing anything, combined with the weddding money, combined with the absolute floor for mortgage rates and a panic dip in the market, and a seller who was in a big hurry to get out of the house that was clearly too small for their large family we could just barely afford a house. Cost us 800k.
For the next 3 years we put all our money into paying down the mortgage. Then this year we sold for 1.2mil and bought a bugger much more suited to our need house for 600k, far away from both our works.
Now when our mortgage renews* in 2 years and we go to a much higher interest rate we will probably keep the same monthly payment, we have big cash for reno, paid off our ev and had the pocket change for a reception.
in canada the longest you can lock in a rate is 5yrs
Pretty much the same. Bought some Bitcoin in high school in the early 10’s. It was just a novelty and I was a kid, so I didn’t buy much, but if someone was kidnapped or something it would be worth it to go through my old drives.
BTC recently got approved to be traded as an ETF by the SEC, so now’s a good time to find that drive cause the price is only going to go up over the next 5+ years.
Yeah, I’m not going to get rid of any. I was doing everything on thumb drives at the time, though, so it would be a bitch to actually try and find the exact one I used.
Of course, the value of the things will go to 0 whenever Q-day happens, and hopefully sooner when people realise it’s a badly designed cryptocurrency. Maybe I should dig the old wallet up just to move things to an alt coin.
Move abroad, halve my taxes, triple my income, reduce my cost of living by nearly 80%, effectively increased my savings rate by ~1100%, from 500 EUR/month to now >5k EUR/month. That’s 5k in fixed savings (investment plan), plus whatever else I don’t spend accumulates in my savings account.
I guess European citizenship really helped initially. But for most lesser developed countries it’s often sufficient to have special skills that are in demand there. And I’m not talking about academia; there’s also demand for construction skills, meat processing and other stuff out there.
Two of the most successful people I’ve met during my years on the roll were a German butcher who is now running a sausage empire in Asia, and a Swedish carpenter who is now working as general manager for an NGO in Kenya, building schools all over Africa. Neither of them are university graduates.
In fact most graduates I meet are middle to upper level manager who’ve been sent by their respective companies to work abroad, which absolutely means they have a decent income, but they all run into a glass ceiling at some point. And many struggled hard to readjust when they were eventually called home; whereas the more entrepreneurial types just carved a niche for themselves.
All over the world. Germany -> Luxembourg -> Norway -> Liberia -> Tanzania -> Kenya -> Nigeria -> Madagascar -> China; and next month to Malaysia.
Luxembourg was great for starting to build some wealth thanks to the super low taxes, Norway was to improve my career opportunities, and in Africa I really started to make bank since those contracts included living & “hardship” allowances that are untaxed, I invested most of that and also used it to fund an executive MBA.
To China I already came with 15+ years work experience and entered on c-level with a great salary package; and there are no taxes on foreign income here, including foreign capital gains.
Malaysia is a stopover for a few years also for tax purposes, they have no capital gains either and the company I work for is registered in Hong Kong, which in China would be considered onshore and thereby taxable. So in Malaysia I can sell my share package for free after 2 years of residency.
Also much nicer climate and friendlier people than in China.
It wasn’t huge in terms of actual numbers, but it still feels like my biggest win. I bought my first car for like $750. It needed some work, but I fixed it up. Before long, I crashed it. It was totalled. But, it was a 1973 Dodge Charger. I started pulling parts off of it and selling them on this new thing called eBay, and by the time I ran out of parts, I had made more than twice what I bought the car for.
It makes sense the way the system works. For housing and insurance. You go from poor with government housing and insurance and then when you get out of mud you go back to being homeless and not having insurance.
Like it doesn’t make sense for me to look for a job with better pay because if I get better pay I will lose out on the help. I wouldnt be able to afford anything. The pay increase I could get wouldn’t be enough to live off at the prices of non subsidized housing and insurance.
There’s not really incentive for success.
I got kicked off Medicaid for making like 50¢ over their limit iirc. The pay raise set me back.
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