Young, dumb, and foolish with money!  Weren’t we all?

The majority of us were never taught financial IQ growing up.  Heck, it wasn’t even a “thing” when I was growing up.  It wasn’t until I read “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” in 2001 that I started to think differently about money and investing.  Sadly, I had to wait 26 years of my life to get a cattle prod to the you know what.  That book changed my life, although it wasn’t immediately.   It started me on the right path in how I thought about money. Before that, I was just young and dumb and foolish with money, spending money on everything and anything.

Blame Game:

I can’t blame my parents for not teaching me about money growing up. However, it certainly would of helped me achieve FIRE (Financial Independence and Early Retirement) sooner, a lot sooner!   That said, I’m still thankful my mom shared the book with me back in 2001.   At the time I was living paycheck to paycheck but I wasn’t poor.  I will share in future posts my complete financial story, but for now, let’s just say I was making 18/hr @ 26 years old.  This was back in 2001.  The main problem I had was sports cars, and all my money went into making it faster.  I don’t regret those days, I was living.  However, looking back, I wasted 10 good years I could of been investing.  More on that later.

Hard work:

I didn’t go directly to college out of high school like most people.  This was never really pushed on us growing up.  The main thing my dad emphasized growing up was to work hard for what you want.   He did this several ways, but also led by example.  He worked hard for a living and we grew up in a typical middle class family.  Not rich, not poor.  Maybe leaning toward the upper middle class side.  We always had chores to do each week and during summer vacation, we always had even more chores.  We did get an allowance, but that wasn’t much.  Even an allowance didn’t really teach me much about money.  I always had more WANTS than I could afford.  My parents always seemed okay with splitting half of the cost of whatever I wanted as long as I paid for half.   So, I’d pull weeds, dig ditches, mow lawns, wash cars, and even had two paper routes growing up.  I had always had odd jobs until I was around 15 years old.   I got my first real job at 18.  Got my first car at 18.  My dad paid for half of my first car.  I had to pay for my insurance, which at the time, was two weeks worth of work when I was making minimum wage @ $4.25/hr.   Care to guess what I was doing?  “Ding, fries are done!”.

Settle:

When I graduated high school, I almost immediately got a job making double what I was making when I was in high-school.  And that was just during the training period.  After the month of training, I started making around $100 a day on average, some days it took me 4 hours, some days it took me 8 hours.  But for a 19 y/o, I was living good!  I was doing the same job as others that were in there 40’s.  More on how I got that job later.  So, now I have a “real” adult job, and I felt like I had all the money in the world.  I could do anything I wanted, spend it on anything I wanted.  That’s just when my parents came to me and said, “Son, we need you to start paying $150 per month rent”.  Honestly, I didn’t think much of it back then, I might of been a little peeved.  But, it was only a small drop in the bucket I thought to myself.   It wasn’t too long after that, when I decided to move into an apartment with my girlfriend and her friend.

Here I was, a 20 y/o living on my own, making decent money.  Things seemed to be progressing nicely into adulthood until my dad said I have my whole life to work and that I should do something I’m passionate about.

Cheers,

HF