First job after college (part 1)

It was a very simple operation. There was a government program where volunteers would donate time and labor to various government work. In return for their service, the volunteers would receive a small living stipend and would receive reimbursement for child care services. It was our job to take the volunteer’s applications, determine if they were eligible for the benefit, approve or deny the applicant for the benefit, process invoices from their child care provider, and finally mail payments to the child care provider. It was a simple process but involved a lot of customer service.

It was then I learned a lesson about today’s economy. Companies don’t want to hire new staff until it is absolutely necessary. The first few weeks and months on the job, I remember the phones were ringing off the hooks and a hundred different things always had to be done at once. My company had recently acquired the government contract from a different company a few months prior. One of the requirements of acquiring the contract was that every volunteer eligible for the benefit had to submit their paperwork on new forms that we had to send them. Due to this backlog, I was working full time and on weekends for the first few weeks on the job.

It was the week after Labor Day of 2010 when I showed up for my first day at work. Being that it was the first real job I ever had, it really did feel like a rite of passage. At the time, I was no accountant. My boss said that the job title was business analyst. Later, I would realize that the title analyst was almost as vague as a job title as consultant. I sat down at my desk and I was greeted by Denise. She handed me a stack of volunteer’s applications and a stack of checklists. My first task was to look through all of the applications and check off all the items on the checklist to see what was present and what was missing. This is what I did for eight hours that day. It was boring and mind numbing but by God I was eager to do it.

During the first week, they also handed me stacks of invoices from child care providers. My second task was to look at the invoices and check the timesheets for how many hours the children were in child care. After that, I would look at the rate sheet to figure out how much money the provider would receive and then I would calculate the total amount of the invoice. I did this for multiple hours for many days.

I saw the last part of the process also within my first week. My boss handed me a stack of checks and a stack of envelopes. It was my task to cut the checks away from the stubs, stuff them in envelopes, run the envelopes through a machine for postage, and finally mail out the checks. I was using absolutely nothing I learned throughout my four years at college but that didn’t matter. All I cared about was the paycheck at the end of every week.

When I first started out, I wasn’t hired on as a fulltime employee. They started me out as an independent contractor and I realized this when I asked how they were keeping track of my hours. The told me that I would keep track of my own hours and submit it to them at the end of each week. On Saturday of the first week, I wrote down my total hours on a sticky note and handed it to my boss’s wife. I think I worked a total of 36 hours due to Monday being Labor Day. She took my note and wrote me a check for $432. It was the first paycheck I ever had. It was the proudest moment I had for the entire year up to that point. Never before in my life had I earned so much money in such a short amount of time.

Looking for work after college (part3)

At the time, building a professional career was looking impossible. I started sending out applications to fast food restaurants just so I could make any sort of money. Also, without a car, I need to have a worksite where I could walk to. However, before I got started working in fast food, my parents offered me the chance to work with them fixing washing machines so I started doing that instead.

It was July of 2010 and I hadn’t had any luck landing any job despite having my bachelor’s in business administration. Fixing washing machines was good work however it made me feel like I had failed at life. After all, what was the point of having gone to college to become an accountant in the first place? The work was enough to make some money but I wasn’t working more than three or four days of the week. I also had a back up plan of learning how to prepare income taxes. During my miserable job search, I considered picking up some extra skills to make my resume look better and preparing tax returns was one way to get extra experience.

I looked up a big tax preparation company and learned that they offered a 12 week course that would train people to prepare basic returns. After the 12 weeks finished, every individual was guaranteed a job interview and the company advertised that roughly 25% of the interviewed candidates were hired. I figured it was my best shot at trying to make a living for myself. If I got hired, the company would continue to offer any tax class the employee wanted to take an specialize in. After enough experience, a tax professional could become an enrolled agent. And even if I didn’t get hired, just passing the class would make me look like a more valuable employee and might give me a better chance at getting hired.

The tax course started in August 2010 and I continued to work in my parent’s shop to make more money. Eventually, my dad gave me his old car to make life a little easier. Unfortunately, I ran into a headache when I crashed the car and had to pay a few hundred dollars in repairs and fines which effectively cost me all the money that I had saved up fixing washing machines. Back then I used to want to commit suicide by standing next to a busy street, waiting for a speeding truck to come by, and jumping right in front of it at the last second. It would have been faster than acquiring a gun.

I finally caught a break when my dad told me about a job opportunity that his insurance guy had mentioned. I was told that the insurance guy also ran a financial firm and I was excited about the prospects. After a short interview giving me the overview of his company and an exchange of my questions, I asked for the job and I started the following week. I still remember that my heart sank when Rob said that the job paid $12 per hour. It felt incredible, I was never offered so much money before.

Finding work after college (part 2)

This was the biggest problem I had. I needed prior work experience before I could get an entry level job. I sent my resume to that job position but I never heard back. This became a daily routine. I’d log into the college career database, look for accounting positions, and send my resume there. Each day, there were only about two new accounting positions available. Quickly, I had to come to terms that I might not be able to get a job in my field and should just start sending resumes to related positions. I found myself sending my resume out for accounting, finance, management, and sales positions. I even started sending my resume out for positions that I wasn’t necessary qualified for. I figured that if I could at least get some sort of correspondence with another party, they might be able to network me into a job opportunity. After having applied to over 20 different positions, I got a response for a sales position.

Unfortunately, this position sounded terrible. Since it was sales, it paid a base salary and a good part of compensation was based off of sales commission. It paid $8 per hour base. The worst part was that the worksite was located at least 28 miles from my home which was incredibly inconvenient without a car. Online reviews of the company also brought up results of prior employees being incredibly frustrated with the company and in some cases said that the company was a scam. However, since I never had a job interview before, I decided to go through with it. I dressed up in a suit and took the local transportation for over an hour to the job site.

The problem was that it was not a position I really wanted and that was apparent in the interview. The man asked me why I wanted the job and I stated that I needed any job just to start working and building up job experience. I explained that I wanted to fill the role of accountant if an opening appeared later. After about five minutes into the interview, the interviewer said I was not the right man for the job and promptly showed me the door. The whole ordeal took up at least five hours of my day. I came back home very discouraged without anything to show for it.

During the next few weeks, I sent out about a total of 50 resumes and only received three callbacks. One of the positions available was an accounting intern at my state’s university. Unfortunately, this was a position only available to current students, and when I said I had graduated, the man on the other end of the phone said the interview could not go further. I also had a third piece of correspondence by email. I got a short message stating that someone would like to interview me however I never responded back because I was feeling pretty hopeless at the time.

Looking for a job after college (part 1)

The following is an excerpt from a book I am currently working on. I'm currently posting the pending work in process to my blog in case I never finish this piece and end up scrapping the project. Currently, this book is over 60 pages long in Microsoft Word format.

By the time I graduated my state’s university, it was May of 2010 and I came out of it with no student loans or credit card debt. I had a little bit of money left over from scholarships. I started out with about $2000 to my name. I was in a better situation financially than most of my peers however I faced my biggest challenge just trying to find employment after college.

All throughout high school and college, I kept my lifestyle very limited to ensure having the most amount of time to study and maintain a high grade point average. Until the age of 22, I had never worked a real job before, never had a car, and barely even had a cell phone. If I wasn’t studying, I was either playing video games or skateboarding. Both were cheap forms of entertainment and did not require time commitments. It was a decision on my part to avoid part time jobs and vehicles because those required time and resources. This was a decision that hurt me right after college.

During my last few years at my state’s university, business majors were encouraged to network, join a business fraternity, and submit applications for job openings in order to have a better chance to get employed before or upon graduation. I did none of this because I wanted to focus more on my studies to maintain a high gpa and I really hated interacting with people I don’t know. Networking just always felt incredibly phony. Again, these were decisions that hurt me after graduation.

The prior year of 2009 was when the financial meltdown occurred. During my last few semesters at university, I kept hearing my peers talk about how no companies were hiring, current students were competing with older students for the same jobs, and current employees were getting fired from their positions. It really filled me with a sense of hopelessness but I had no real choice but to just keep going.

After college was done, I enjoyed myself for about a week before I started trying to look for work. It was then when I first felt like the training wheels were kicked off. In college, you attended class, studied, and took exams. It was very routine and you knew what to expect on a daily basis. But when all of that is in the past, you realize that you have to figure out what you want, set your own plans up, and see if you can achieve those goals. I didn’t really have someone give me instructions to find a job, I just had to jump in and see what happened.

I logged into my college’s career database, uploaded my resume, and started looking for positions. And immediately, I saw the desperation of the situation I had walked into. As a college grad, I had no actual work experience in the accounting field. My resume just had my name on it, education, and career aspirations. Ideally, I was looking for an entry level accounting position where I could enter a company and the managers would train me how to do my job. As I looked at the positions available, I saw only a total of three positions available that were related to accounting. What was worse was that two of those positions were higher level management positions that required at least 4 to 6 years of experience. Worse still was that the only position that was entry level required 2 years of accounting related experience.

Career Shift: Truck Drivers

Throughout high school, I had a total of one teacher that suggested an alternative to a four year college degree. Unfortunately, I wish she had gone into more details about how to become an electrician, plumber, construction worker, or truck driver. She simply summed all these options up as going to vocational school. Going to a trade school.

She told us that a trade school only takes 2 years and offers paid training. However, being the brainwashed little teens that we were at the time, we were convinced that a four year college degree was the way to go. How naïve we were.

Recently, I've heard a report that the American Trucking Association is predicting a shortage of 50,000 truck drivers in the industry. This article from CNN Money has the title that companies are willing to pay truck drivers $73,000. Stumbling upon this headline was shocking. After all, I did a quick google search to look up the median salary for a truck driver. The statistic was as recent as 2012 and said that the median salary for a truck driver was only $38,200. There seems to be a large disconnect between these two articles.

I listened to Christopher Cantwell's radical agenda last week and heard that this one guy was offered a truck driving job that paid $60,000 a year. On a different episode of the same show, one caller was talking about how desperate companies were for truck drivers that they were taking almost everyone regardless of the quality of their driving.

I talked to my buddy the other day, and he was telling me his dad signed on with a company that is paying him a six figure salary. Of course, my friend's dad had been driving for close to ten years.

On a more personal note, I've seen trucks themselves painted with ads trying to recruit drivers and even stating how much a driver got paid per mile.

I'm not sure what is causing this shortage but I can understand why young people wouldn't want to drive tractor trailers. You can be away from home for several weeks at a time and your entire job is a commute that never ends. If there is a shortage, I can only assume that the workloads are very tough in this economy. But, if you don't have a wife or kids (and don't want them either), this could be the perfect opportunity for any man going his own way.

The training would include getting a commercial drivers license and I'm sure companies might require an extensive training program before delivering loads.

I think that driving trucks might be one of the better job opportunities out there. This might a period of a few years where a lot of money can be made driving trucks. Well, at least until tractor trailers become automated like the self driving Tesla cars.

Tent cities across America

Linked directly from ZeroHedge, I stumbled across this article talking about tent cities popping up all over America. The title of the article alone was alarming enough for me to actually read this article. When "tent cities" in America is mentioned, the first images that come to mind are images of America during the Great Depression. But since it is 2016 (the current year), it is hard to imagine that tent cities should exist in a significant number. At least it should be significant enough to be reported on.

Low and behold, the article states that more than 500,000 Americans today are homeless. Considering the population of America is 320 million, the total percentage of homeless Americans is a mere fraction of a percent.. However, to put things in perspective, 500,000 is about the total population of Sacramento, California.

The article further links to Wikipedia a list of recognized tent cities all across America (with several being in California and Oregon). These tent cities only accommodate dozens of people so it can be assumed that there are far more tent cities that are unrecognized.

By looking at the list of tent cities, it looks like a lot of them cluster around big liberal cities with really high costs of living.

Paradigm Shift

As I was younger, I spent all my time saving up cash in the bank. It was around 2011 when my dad suggested that I'd buy some silver just in case America eventually fell to pieces. At the time, I scoffed off his advice. Should the power grid go off and civilization breaks down, what good would silver do? Father had some very good advice but I wish he could have explained things a little better.

After listening to Aaron Clarey, he explained that silver was not so much an investment rather than an insurance policy. Insurance against inflation. Insurance against stupid people. Insurance against people who vote for higher taxes and printing off more and more money.

There was another reason why I didn't bother with buying the precious metal. At the time, I had only saved up about $10,000 to $15,000. In my mind, cash was king and I had to accumulate it as much as possible. Since my working career started in the Summer of 2010, I had only spent about a year accumulating that money. Should it all get wiped out, I wouldn't have lost that much of my life. In my mind, I didn't have that much to lose.

As I got older, I saw that the problems that caused the 2008 financial collapse had never been resolved. During 2013, Cyprus had some bad money problems and stole money from bank accounts of the average citizen. Also, around that time, it was brought to my attention that several countries nationalized the IRA and 401k programs of the citizens. It was during 2013 when I started feeling more uneasy about the economy. At that point in time, I also had a lot more money. I had invested a lot more of my life in accumulating money and I had a lot more to lose. At that point, I decided to start buying some precious metals.

But during 2015, I had a very good net worth for someone my age. I had accumulated silver, gold, and platinum. But no investment could ever protect yourself from all sorts of risk. Maybe I listen to too much InfoWars but I felt like I had to prepare for the increasing likely hood that our civilization falls to pieces. First I accumulated cash. Second I collected precious metals. Now, I'm stocking up on survival food and bullets.

With more time and investment in a strategy, I've felt like I've had to prepare myself for any disaster that might happen. This was the paradigm shift I experienced and it was driven by the amount of wealth I've accumulated.