The Problem: I currently believe that my biggest issue is my income. And probably the car insurance cost, but apparently that will go down in a few months, then again in a few years.
My Goal: Retire with 800K + a house.
Current savings: About 3K.
Debt: None right now.
Education:
I received a bachelor's degree in accounting with 121 hours. I didn't want to stay in school any longer, so I didn't even think to take the CPA exam. Had I known about early retirement, things may have been radically different.
Salary: My take home pay is currently 15K (Update: I got a promotion so it's 18K now) per year. Gross is 19K (and this is 23K). My job title is Accounting Specialist and I work for the government. I plan to stay for a year to see how things go. There's plenty of opportunity for growth here, but even at its peak, it seems to be less than what everyone else seems to make in this forum, even at the start.
Expenses: See bottom of post. To summarize, I hope to spend no more than 6K this year and am on track.
401K: I don't know much about the 401K, but I believe I am contributing at an annual rate of 1.5K right now.
How did you find your higher paying job?
What should I do? Go back to college and become a CPA, incurring debt, but hoping my job situation gets better so I can pay it off? Find a better job after getting a year of experience? Stay at the location? Got any advice for saving more as well? Go ahead and offer it! I want to retire so much sooner than I would at this rate!
Why aren't you making more?
Long story short, I was lazy. This is why I get mad every time I see someone else's income after college. Like I said in my opening post, I am mad at myself, not the people. I guess the way I wrote my post led people to believe that I think I deserve better. No, I deserved what I got pay-wise. I just know that if I worked harder, I could have done much better.
Actual story: I decided to take it easy for about 3 months before I moved to a different state, away from my parents and other relatives, to look for a job. Being really naive at the time, I thought I'd get a job pretty easily since almost all of my roommates were already working there and a position was available. I was wrong, so I spent a few months passively trying to find a job (about 2 or 3 applications per week), getting more and more desperate with each passing week (somewhere around 20 per week, I guess?). It didn't work out in the end, so I was forced to move back home where I continued to apply for more and more jobs (was getting to maybe 30 or 40 per week) until I found the one I have now. It took 8 months. At that point, I didn't care about how much money I would earn or where the job was. I just needed something.
Do I hate the job? No, actually. I think it's a pretty good place to work. It's just the pay is awful.
Could I have tried harder or done more things? Yes. That's why I'm here asking for advice moving forward from where I am now.
Hello. First post here and I am mad. Perhaps I shouldn't be, but I can't help it.
Why? Well, it's because I'm comparing myself to the first page of posts for the case study. I didn't look at them all, but they made me feel ill (Disclaimer: It has nothing to do with any of them so much as myself).
First of all, I turned 23 a few months ago. Found out about MMM two weeks into my job during my free time rotting away at a desk with nothing to do. I always hated the idea of work even as a child. To me, it was 100% negative thanks to all of the stories I heard from my parents and other relatives. My life in contrast before I started working was one of utter bliss. Put simply, I didn't work at all and simply lived most of my days at school or at home. I had a lot of free time and just enjoyed myself messing around with random hobbies (mostly video games) and enjoying time with friends. I guess that makes the following easier to guess, but I live in a middle class income home. Still do, in fact, which is saving me thousands.
So anyway, why am I mad? Because everyone seems to be making at least twice the amount of money I am right now. To be fair, this is my first full time job.
Expenses: Car insurance at over $190 per month (this is just liability coverage). I think gas will cost about $800 per year judging by my current rate. I could probably bike, but my parents are REALLY against me doing this. They're afraid I'll die. I buy things at supermarkets occasionally, staying within a $14 per week budget. Very rarely do I even spend more than $6 on random weeks or more than $10 on weeks I meet with friends (I usually don't buy food even then). Everything else would go to hobbies, gifts for family, and random expenses that I wish I never incurred such as a new battery for my car just after it was given to me. If things go as planned, I hope to spend less than 3K. Doing well so far.
Update:
In the time I've been working at my job, I grew to like it more and more thanks to the people, then less and less thanks to the ones I see the most often. But like how I read about trends in the stock market, a depression is temporary and eventually gets replaced by a boom. The interesting thing about it, however, was that all of these shifts were mostly my fault. This might be a little long-winded, but I think it's worth talking about in more detail.
You see, I'm a person with extremely low self esteem. I believe most people I talk to, see, hear about, etc. are smarter than me. I put them all on a nice, fancy pedestal and generally treat them with kindness and great amounts of respect...as well as envy how much better their lives must be than mine. It seems like they can do everything better than I can, learn faster than me, and remember even the tiniest detail of every single conversation they're in. There's no way I could compete with that, so I just do the best I can and let my coworkers do their work with as few disturbances from me as I can avoid.
This is a really terrible way to think since you can project your opinion of yourself onto your perceived thoughts of everyone around you. Now anything they did or said could be interpreted as me being a bad or stupid worker. I could put myself into an endless spiral this way, constantly putting myself down while keeping my coworkers on those high pedestals. Then I'd grow envious and plunge even further into that darkness until there was no coming back. Thankfully, I never got that far since my coworkers noticed I was acting strange and we talked it over. Since then, I felt a lot happier, which allowed me to think positively. That was when something remarkable happened.
First, I wondered if my coworkers never thought I was a bad or stupid worker in the first place. After all, they keep telling me that I'm smart for some reason (whenever I get this complement, I ignore it or tell the person who said that I'm not). Then I pretended that they actually believed in me and thought I was a good worker. It made me feel happier, so I started to believe it and whoa. My job performance improved drastically! I was making less mistakes, remembering a lot more information I was taking in, and actually thought that I was a worthy member of the team! That meant a lot of my problems were based solely on my perspective!
I freed my mind of a lot of distracting thoughts and could now focus much harder on literally anything I put in front of me. All sorts of skills I had seem to be improving quickly and I even understand that my weaknesses can be fixed. I'm so excited about this new positive attitude, I needed to see just how far it could take me. That's why I decided to try my hand at programming. I have no idea how it works yet, but I know it's a profitable and practical skill to learn that also doesn't cost any money for me to try. If this was me before I changed my mindset, I probably wouldn't try, but now I can't help but give it a shot.
Whenever I think about becoming a CPA, I don't really worry about passing the exam, but about the job opportunities that come out of it. Engineering in general just seems to be more profitable, interesting, and even practical than accounting to me. That's why I think combining my accounting degree with programming knowledge may make me a more interesting choice for an employee once I get back to job searching.
Oh, and despite everything I've said, I think this is only the beginning of healthy thinking. I'm sure if self esteem can be too low, it can also be too high. I need to balance these things if I want to have the best results. If anyone wants to convince me to become a CPA anyway, has advice on programming, wants to talk to me about my self esteem, needs to reply to my replies or comment about them, or anything really. Go ahead! Thanks for reading!