Confession: I do not have a job

March 30, 2020

After job searching since summer 2019, graduating winter in December 2019, and kicking off the new year committed to starting my career, I didn't get a job. I remember when I made my first resume in August of last year, applied to eight hundred jobs, and got an interview at IBM, which I missed. They sent me assesments which I failed to open in a timely manner. In my defense, it was during my holiday party circuit and conflicted with my travel. Who takes assessments on Thanksgiving, and schedules interviews the weeks of Hanukkah, Christmas, NYE, Dia de los Reyes? It's a very busy time. I underwent two 8-week resume and career workshops paired up with a mentor late summer through fall. I went for ($7+) coffees with all my trusted advisors. I volunteered every single week in both related and unrelated fields, and developed new resumes and marketing material every time I was rejected from a subset of jobs. When I got a job offer this spring less than a week ago, the recruiter overstated the salary by $15,000. I was chagrined when I received the offer. Afer I asked about it, negotiated, poof! They rescinded the offer. I will probably write a post about that whole experience since it was so wack. Bottom line for me, since I looked this up at the time and didn't find many useful results in the search index, either negotiate no matter the consequences OR take the offer, no matter your feelings. Don't stress, don't waste your energy. That was such an annoying experience but if I wasn't haranguing myself and getting harangued it would not have been so bad. There were a few other lessons embedded in that one..

So Where Did I Get Most of My Money

To keep this broad-ish I'm claiming to have 6 figures in a diversified investment portfolio. These are my savings and I don't spend from them. I've just been piling them up for as long as I can remember. I wasn't really open about it until this year, for my protection, to avoid questioning, and to keep sharing certain priveleges I get from my parents. For example, we all live in the same city and get gas from the same store. The vehicle I use, which is my dad's car, takes premium gas and when gas is $4 it costs $72 to fill up. Over a month, that's over $300. I've been meeting up with my mom since I moved back to this city in 2016. We rendezvous at the gas station. Filling up the tank every week, or about 4-4.5 per month, is $15,552 over four years. Since the gas price fluctuates but the frequency I fill up remains the same, I would say my parents assumed $14-15k of my transportation costs excluding maintenance over just the last 4 years alone. That's the difference of having 0 and 15k in savings, 15 and 30k, ... , 85 and 100k. It makes a big difference. So thanks, mom and dad, for your support.

The reason I'm keeping it broad is to set the expectation of how much money I have experience managing to my readers. It may be a different world to have savings in the seven figures, but not much different saving up to this point. I also defined the range because I want to convince anyone with less savings or interest in investing of the benefits of both.

People frequently ask me what makes it possible for me to live without a job. I'll address that in a later post, but living without spending applies to whether you have a job or not. It takes discipline, adaptability, and compromise in the name of planning for a future. Sometimes it's embarrassing, and sometimes people think you're poor. Sometimes I open new accounts with $5,000 or $10,000 leaving nothing in my checking account and I actually am poor. Other times it feels like I'm missing out.

This is a good time to come back to the title of my first piece, (The Responsibility of Writing About) Money. For so many reasons, it's a huge responsibility. I was on a run in my neighborhood a few weeks ago and realized I never want to buy a brand new car because I never want to be perceived as rich. I am for the people. The same goes here. I don't want a single person out there judging me for saving and racking up money, and then calling myself poor in the same sentence as "$5,000 or $10,000." No one knows what I've been through, this is my blog, and again I am for the people who are underrepresented, underserved, and special.

I was in school for a long time, without an income. I was eligible for grants and need-based aid. Scholarships were awarded to me and I had a variety of jobs and gigs starting very early. I saved 85% of this over the last 4 years. That's where this really begins, the time I started over in this new city in 2016. I never had a full time job before or after that, and I was still able to do this so far with my life and times. A lot of thanks are in order, but it takes an enterprising individual to achieve this. This is a pretty unique situation but I think anyone can do it with a few basic resources. Congratulations to me.