Career advice or insight for a 25 year old.

[trojans10]

Greetings everyone,

I'm new here but have lurked on here and bogleheads for a while now. I'd like to hear some insight or feedback into my career. A bit about me:

I am 25 with a bachelors in information systems and a minor in accounting. Upon graduation I traveled a bit, put myself into debt. Ive always been interested in web design, programming, and mostly online marketing as Id like to eventually create my own business or digital product. I have almost 2 years of work experience under my belt thus far. I work in-house in digital marketing. Mostly paid advertising, ppc, sem, digital anlytics type of stuff. With the experience I have so far, I have the ability to freelance or create my own business.

Right now I work for a small company that has an awesome... work/personal life. I work remotely 3x a week. I can start and end work whenever I want. I make mid-50k right now but live in a very expensive area, so its really not much.

That all said, I live at home and have been saving since I graduated. I have roughly 10k in a roth IRA, 2k in a 401k, and 20k in savings. I will be moving out soon.

Anyway, I am at a standstill with my career. I enjoy my work, and I love keeping up with the industry.. but I'm not sure about the longevity of an 'internet marketing' career especially since its a new career field. I have a BROAD range of skill-sets... but I don't specialize in any one thing. So essentially I feel like the future is very unkown.

I could have went into accounting, or finance... or maybe specialized in web design.

Anyhow, I'm posting this right now because I'd like to hear some opinions on where you guys were at my age? am I wrong to be concerned about the future? Do i stick this out and see where I am in a year or two? Too early to tell? Go backto school? Obviously i'm no doctor, or engineer... but with my current skillsets, is there anyway to finagle into something higher paying?

The end goal is to be financially free, and be able to provide for a future family of mine.

Thanks for reading.

[obstinate]

Mr. Money Mustache's recent post is relevant. You should be working hard right now at getting to where you want to be. At your age I was pulling 10-12 hour days becoming the best programmer I could be, and I was among the least dedicated of the people I knew.

Ever played Kerbal Space Program? When you launch a ballistic vehicle, you go full blast at the beginning of the launch. You can back off the throttle later on when you've established a good trajectory.

[Playing with Fire UK]

By 'digital analytics' do you mean looking for patterns and meaning in data that you get from website use? I think that all kinds of data analysis is going to be a massive growth area and having smart people who can process seemingly meaningly data into messages that they can explain to non-experts is going to be a significant advantage to any business that wants to grow. If you can expand this area of work it might pay off (DYOR).

I do bits of this and am baffled how freqently I blow the minds of clients by telling them stuff that they don't know about their own business, from raw data they gave me.

Also, try to manage a budget and/or people early on. It doesn't have to be huge, but it is a tick in the box (even a small project and managing an intern would be a start). This will initially give you grief, but you don't have to do it all the time if you don't like it.  And as @obstinate says, work hard.

[Apocalyptica602]

Mr. Money Mustache's recent post is relevant. You should be working hard right now at getting to where you want to be. At your age I was pulling 10-12 hour days becoming the best programmer I could be, and I was among the least dedicated of the people I knew.

Ever played Kerbal Space Program? When you launch a ballistic vehicle, you go full blast at the beginning of the launch. You can back off the throttle later on when you've established a good trajectory.

At first I was commenting for no other reason other than to say using KSP as an analogy like that is amazing. Been playing since version 0.7, haha.

To the OP. Your lifestyle is fine and you've been doing well for yourself. You need to make the individual choice about work life balance and income versus stress.

If I had the opportunity to work 80 hour weeks and double my salary from ~80k to 160k. I wouldn't do it, even this early in my career. 60 hours to make 120k?... maybe for a year then re-evaluate.

I have a buddy who works in IT at a VERY small non-startup company. They have craft beer in the work fridge, an office dog, can take long lunches, and can wear jeans and a t-shirt. He also makes ~45k in a MCOL city in the PNW. Oh... and if there's downtime he can play Steam games on his work PC.

He wishes he could make more money sometimes, but he also LOVES the perks of the job.

Think about what makes you happy and optimize on that. MMM has some articles on the topic if you browse.

[Stillwantluxuries]

Agree with other posts around pursuing what makes you happy. To me, that is the goal at the end of the day...doing what I want to do.

In terms of your background with a degree in IS/Accounting, and experience in digital media/marketing, there are a ton of things you can do. Digital marketing is growing tremendously.

Pre-sales consulting with Adobe, Salesforce, IBM, or any of the other big software companies come to mind. You would work from home and attend customer meetings explaining the benefit of the software that gives them a '360 degree' view of the customer, their online behavior, and success of digital marketing/social/etc campaigns.

You more than likely have the technical chops to explain the technical benefits, and the business/financial acumen to provide the ROI for the customer.   

You may lack a little experience at this point in time, but it is a solid career path (imo...always been the sales guy) that provides a flexible schedule, good income, and interesting and challenging work.

I would recommend trying to pick the brains of people doing something similar to see if it would be of interest to you and how to take the steps to get there. I don't post often, so I don't know if there is a private message feature here. If there is, feel free to reach out.

[Retired To Win]

... I'd like to hear some insight or feedback into my career... I've always been interested in web design, programming, and mostly online marketing as I'd like to eventually create my own business or digital product... With the experience I have so far, I have the ability to freelance or create my own business... Anyway, I am at a standstill with my career. I enjoy my work, and I love keeping up with the industry.. but I'm not sure about the longevity of an 'internet marketing' career especially since its a new career field. I have a BROAD range of skill-sets... but I don't specialize in any one thing. So essentially I feel like the future is very unknown... The end goal is to be financially free, and be able to provide for a future family of mine.

Thanks for reading.

If you were asking for input on launching a business, the first thing I would recommend would be that you write up a business plan for that prospective venture.  Since you're asking for input on your career, which you strongly imply will lead to starting a business, I would recommend that you write up a career plan for yourself.  Start from the end goal ("to be financially free and be able to provide for a future family..." and work backwards.  See what makes sense to you when you treat yourself as a business startup.  (And make sure you do your due diligence!)

Good luck.