Getting Set Up - The Start of my Journey

The biggest thing I had going for me in the beginning was the example my mom set for me as kid. I didn't think much about it at the time but she was always making sure my brothers and I were aware of money and what we could do with it. Moreover she was teaching us how we could use money as a tool to aid us, and how not to use it.

This ranged from learning about interest and putting money into a bank account to scrubbing dirty bathrooms in one of the condos my parents owned. I never thought much of this sort of thing either. As a kid you grow up not knowing any different from the way you were raised so I thought all kids' mom's shopped with coupons and told them to put some of their birthday money in the bank.

Truly, the extent of my mom's role in my financial education cannot be summed up in a single paragraph. But I do recall it requiring hard work, like the bathroom scrubbing mentioned above, or doing math work books over the summer when I would have rather been playing video games on the computer. Unknowingly at the grocery store, my mom taught me how to shop for groceries and buy things on sale as well as the importance of reusing things or returning them to the store rather than throwing them away. She also gave me a limited budget for school lunches which forced me to choose what I could or couldn't buy, and the value of packing a lunch, or in all reality, a course in financial planning.

In that regard I was unlike other kids. Fast forward to college and I lived in the dorms for the first year. The expectation was always that I would graduate high school, move on to college, and find a good job after graduating. There was no law in my house about this but, that was always the expectation because you 'didn't want to end up flipping burgers at McDonalds or something like that'. Those were my mom's words. So I went to an in-state school and wasn't sure what I wanted to 'do.' That is such a strange thing to think about as a child; you don't need to decide on what to do, you just do what is fun. So I never had a great idea of what I wanted to do.

But when I had to declare a major, I settled on engineering because people said it was good and I had taken a couple of courses in high school that were okay because they involved creating 3D parts on the computer and making them fit together. The classes weren't bad and not only was I going to school that year, but I found a part time job going door to door selling coupons for pizzas, and I walked onto the running team.

I already was following my mom's advice and found a job, as well as a (very small) stipend for housing that second semester. I was extremely lucky with the Mom that I have because she had planned for my brothers and I to go to school and had funds set aside for our college tuition.  By my sophomore year I saw the perks of living off campus as well as the monetary savings and found a place with my new friends. Ultimately I lived off campus with atleast 3 roommates for my remaining college years and beyond.

In college I left the sales job and picked up a couple of jobs to work while going to school. The first was a Math Filmer where I essentially set up a camera and got paid to sit in a room for a hour while a professor lectured. The second was over the summer landscaping for an individual who built a luxury home. That only lasted for a summer so when school started I got a job as valet at a local hospital and worked there for a couple of years. Due in part to my brother who found this, I got hired as a seasonal graduation photographer at the same time(that continued every season even into the first season that I worked as an engineer). I left the valet company for an internship over the summer and during my last semester of school (so I could compete in cross country for my school). I was running for my school the entire time and ultimately it paid for a large chunk of my last semester of college (only two classes). 

After graduation I continued living in the college house and found a career at an engineering company in town. Meanwhile, I continued driving my trusty BMW (one year newer than me) which was going on 22 years old and put most of the money I earned in the bank. After a time of overdrafting my bank account for school books, I had decided I needed a safety net and saved enough to have $3,000 in the bank.

I realize I am very lucky to have parents who planned ahead well enough to pay for my school expenses. So I was able to leave school with money in the bank before I started my new career. After I graduated I had no desire to buy anything or use the money for anything, i was just reveling in the newfound free time that I had. I didn't have to run and I was able to do what ever I wanted on weeknights and over the weekends.

This was the first time in my life where it was not planned out for me and I had control of what I could do (or so I felt!). Still, I continued living in my college house until the lease ran out in the middle of the summer and I found a place with 4 other college aged guys that had similar rent and moved in there. Rent was absurdly cheap and I had no other bills and my bank account just grew. After working at the job for about 10 months I began thinking I should use my money for something and maybe I needed to investigate the purchase of a home as my older brother had done a couple years before.

But that is another story; this story is just a brief history of my childhood and how my parents' thriftiness and lessons came to set me up financially better than most of my peers.