For the past month or so my mind has been everywhere and anywhere. I work two different jobs, I go to grad school part time, and I somehow find meager time in between for my hobbies and what little socialization I can manage. Clearly, I don’t sleep. I’m convinced that I don’t live in an apartment but I live at work and my bed is the couch in the break room. I just happen to visit an apartment on Saturdays when I don’t have work and I sleep in a strange bed and shower in someone else’s shower but that someone else’s room is being covered by my rent money. Then I realize that it’s my room and to me, maybe this is just me, but it shouldn’t feel or seem like I’m in someone else’s room even though I’m almost never there.
One of my main focuses now is investing. I want to open my own brokerage account and play games with the big boys. I was hired by a company that gives all part-time employees a 401K. Honestly I lucked out in that department because in my head I always knew that it was a good thing to invest and play with the stock market but it was always a paper thought. Nobody really explained, and nobody really explains now, how to begin investing or who you call to buy a stock or the different ways to invest and all those kinds of accounts. I’m blessed to have mentors in the form of trusted minds that have walked me through a lot of these things like the dense verbiage that investing sits in. I’m 23 and the first time I encountered the terms “index fund”, “bear/bull market”, “expense ratio”, and my personal favorite, “dividend” was this month. I feel late to a game that’s already well within its second half but I wanna play alongside everyone else in the game called “Give companies my money so I can see it back in 40-60 years”.
As a millennial, the enterprise of investing is lost on our mentality. Classify my generation all you want with just loving concepts as instant gratification and impatient, you wouldn’t be wrong in doing so. Especially when it comes to money. Investing is glamorized in a way as if it can make you rich just by pressing a button on your phone. Very rarely does it work like that and if it does work like that then I’m sure the SEC would like to talk to you for a little bit. Now, I don’t care much for the whole “impatient” schtick. I’m too patient for my own good. I don’t care for instant gratification. Rome wasn’t built in a day but Rome was being built a little piece at a time every day. Let me enlighten you readers on what a normal week has been like for me while I begin to make my home in Georgia.
Monday: Class from 1:30pm-7:00pm. Leave for work immediately after class is done and get stuck in traffic until I’m almost late for work (thanks Atlanta). Work at night from 8:30pm-11:45pm, sleep at work either on the break room couch, the floor, or in my car.
Tuesday: Clock in for work at 3:55am, when you live 30 minutes away from your job it makes going home seem kinda dumb because you only have not even two hours to sleep before you have to force your groggy bones out of bed. Work from 4:00am-7:30am, go to a second job until 12:00ish, go home (a rare gift that God gives me when He sees me half dead from putting up with people and with a schedule like this) and go comatose for as long as possible. Wake up, do homework, go back to sleep.
Wednesday: Wake up at 2:55am, leave the apartment by 3:15am and drive 30 minutes to get to work on time, work from 4:00am-7:30am, get stuck in traffic (THANKS ATLANTA) from 7:40am-8:40am, class from 9:30am-2:30pm, get stuck in traffic on the way home, get home at 4:00pm, sleep until maybe 7:00pm, leave for work at 7:30pm and get stuck in traffic again (THANKS ATLANTA), work from 8:30pm-11:45pm, sleep at work.
Thursday: See Tuesday. Second job and all.
Friday: See Wednesday.
Saturday: I don’t have work.
Now you may be asking yourself a justified and rational question:
WHY THE HELL ARE YOU DOING THIS TO YOURSELF
WHY THE HELL ARE YOU DOING THIS TO YOURSELF
Ignoring the fact that I was raised by two hard working parents who did their best to instill a Sisyphean (read: Hispanic) work ethic in their children, it’s because part of my paycheck goes to a 401K. So why let a tiny amount go into it when you can have a lot go into it? It reduces your taxable income, it gives you a sense of uniqueness knowing that you’re unlike other people your age because investing hasn’t really caught on to most people age 23 (less than a quarter of people in my age group, 18-25, have anything in the stock market, older millennials are marginally better but that’s not enough to drive a claim about millennials investing in any grand way), and it forces you to talk about your life when you’re in your forties. WHICH IS A BIG PROBLEM FOR ME BECAUSE I DIDN’T THINK I’D LIVE PAST 21. When I was a sophomore at Emmanuel College I tried hard my first year to envision myself graduating and honestly it was just a black screen in my mind. I couldn’t do it. There wasn’t a template for it in my head. There isn’t a template for anything in my head anymore as far as life plans go. Which is why I thought that I’d be dead by now because it’s just the day by day and I can’t stand it. But life doesn’t ask me my opinions of itself and how it chooses to discern its path for me. So actually having some sort of investment strategy in the form of a retirement account forces me at 23 to think of myself at 65 in coherent terms.
I don’t want to work another day in my life past 40, max 45. I don’t yet I’m also supremely jaded from working this ridiculous schedule. I know I can get away with beating my body to shit day in and day out and I can sleep for two hours or so and wake up ready to go for another day and some change. It’s not ideal. I can feel my joints shred and throb whenever something goes wrong and I’m probably going to be a case study for the prolonged effects of coffee and sleep deprivation on the human mental condition when I die from what will more than likely be exhaustion related. I know I have to pay a price for this later and it’s a price I’m willing to jovially pay. Why? Because I know I can find a way to make my work ethic get me to my goal of retirement at 45 or I will make a way to make it work so help me God. Speaking of God, tithing got a lot easier for me when I moved down here.
I’m not someone who is fascinated by lavish lifestyles. I like to eat a lot but that’s really it. I don’t find myself drawn to flashy apparel or cars or anything like that. Money frustrates me to no end. Not because I find it constantly leaving my hands (read: GAS IS A BITCH WHEN YOU DRIVE AS MUCH AS I DO), but because I find it pointless to have money as an endgame. It has to accomplish an objectively meaningful end. Investing is an objectively meaningful end. Money corrupts people but it can’t corrupt God. So honestly if he wants 30% or more of my check then take the damn thing. He can do something better with my money than I can. I can see why tithing is difficult to sane and reasonable people. You’re taking money, money you probably made on that shift that you didn’t want to work because you may have been sick or you see that coworker that’s just too touchy feely for your own liking (or at all) and everything goes wrong and your manager wants to behead you because you might be the easiest target for them to chew out and get away with, yeah that shift? Give some of that money to a God who you believe doesn’t even listen or answer your prayers in the way you want Him to.
My answer to that statement: “OKAY TAKE THE DAMN MONEY I DON’T EVEN KNOW HOW TO USE IT. I BOUGHT A PURPLE HOODIE WITH MY MONEY YOU THINK I KNOW WHAT THE HELL I’M DOING WITH IT?” (Seriously, my thought process at work)
One of my friends told me that they don’t know anyone that works as much as I do even if it meant survival. And I took pride in that. This sort of thing I’m doing is inherently unique. It’s inherently unique in its stupidity. I know it’s hitting some sort of diminishing returns here because I only have so many hours in a day but damnit I’d rather work like hell now and not have to work at all when I’m my parents age (sorry mom and dad, but your jobs and love for them HAS ESCAPED ME. AND I’M GLAD). I’m constantly exhausted and dismayed by people that don’t want to work as much as I do, I have high expectations for people who don’t care to want what I’m after, or don’t care at all in general, and I feel like every passing day I get to see my friends establish the life I’m working so damn hard to make for myself. I’m stubborn, I really am. I won’t quit. Even if it means my manager has to drag my passed out from exhaustion ass off the plane I was helping to load.
