First job out of college (part 8)

During July of 2011, I was eating some food at a picnic. I was approached by a man named Jim and we were just talking about financial planning. He was a complete stranger but I wasn’t about to just blow him off. Later, I would find out that he was part of a multi level marketing company and it was his intention to sell financial products to me and recruit me into the organization.

These sort of things happen gradually and these situations only happen when you are too afraid or resistant to say the word no. If found myself having a meeting with Jim and his superior Faye. At the time, I liked to brag about how I was doing financially and since they were stroking my ego, I decided to go along to the meeting. They started giving me financial advice and got a good picture of how I was doing financially. The first step of their plan was to sell me a financial service. All the way through, I was resistant to the idea. And then they told me what the rate of return was and I got interested.

The product they were trying to sell me was life insurance. Upon first reaction, I thought that life insurance was a complete waste of money for me because I intend to never get married or have children and life insurance only provides benefits to beneficiaries, not you. However, they went into more detail about how the life insurance holder could benefit from having a permanent life insurance policy. Unlike term life insurance, permanent life insurance is intended to insure an entire lifetime, not just a few years. For this reason, the premium for a permanent policy is typically far more expensive than term life when you are younger and far cheaper than term life when you are older. The most important thing is that some permanent life insurance policies will accrue a cash balance which can be borrowed against in the future. This idea was not foreign to me. When I was younger, I used to see several commercials on TV that advertised this feature. These commercials were aimed towards parents that either had new born babies or very young children. The commercials advertised whole life policies which are a type of permanent life insurance. Back then, these companies advertised a growth rate of five percent per year.

Faye told me that I could borrow against the cash balance (not death benefit) and I would not necessarily be required to pay back the loan. If I didn’t repay the loan, the amount would just get deducted from the cash balance. Faye told me that the money contributed to the cash balance would be indexed to stock exchanges located in America, Europe, and Japan. She told me that the money was not actually invested in the stock markets however the money was invested in various bonds. A selling feature of the product was that if the markets tanked, the money in the cash value would not be affected because there was a market bottom in the indexes. If the markets tanked, the cash balance would be guaranteed to grow by one percent. The flip side to the feature was that the cash balance had a growth ceiling of 12%. Over the last 20 years, the financial product reported an average growth of over 8% per year.

First job out of college (part 7)

In early 2011, we were pretty overburdened and my boss decided it was a good idea to hire some temporary help. My boss hired three temporary employees from the Department of Labor. Two of the employees were on the job for only six weeks but the third employee was brought on full time for the rest of the contract.

Around March of 2011, I started become proficient at my job and things started to settle into a routine. I’d make sure to print out all the invoices and documents at the beginning of each month when the volunteers sent them in. It was my goal to get as many of those invoices into a check batch as soon as possible. We started to create larger batches to make the process more efficient. At one point, I created a spreadsheet that had all my active members and I would check off which members sent me an invoice and received a payment for the month. Towards the end of the month, I’d call or send an email to volunteers who hadn’t sent me an invoice for the month. If something was incorrect about the invoice, I made sure to promptly call the volunteer back to inform them of the mistake. Probably the most useful thing I did was save the spreadsheets that recorded each of the checks that went out in a check run. Calls regarding if payments were sent were incredibly common so if I kept the spreadsheets, I wouldn’t have to go pull the physical file and check to see the records. On the spreadsheet, I also included the service term expiration date. If the volunteer was getting close to the expiration date, I could check if they were going to enroll in the program again and remind them to send me a new application so their payments wouldn’t get delayed. I do remember a few months where the process was so efficient and things ran so smoothly that we actually finished most of our work by the 15th of the month and we had some time to relax.

That being said, I did work with a good bunch of people. Upper management would occasionally bring us breakfast sandwiches and they took us out to dinner a few times. During March of 2011, one of the co workers encouraged everyone to fill out a bracket for March Madness and we had a few tvs set up around the office to watch basketball while we worked.

By the end of June 2011, I had saved up about $15,000 total. I was still keeping to spending $550 per month but I had a few months where I went as high as $650. My insurance dropped down from $220 monthly to $170 monthly. I spend more than $130 to $150 a month on gas because I was convinced that always buying premium gas was better for my car. I still spent more than $100 on fast food because I enjoyed those sliders too much. Every so often, I’d go out to dinner with some friends and spend $20. I had a prepaid phone and rarely called anyone. The phone only cost about $100 a year for service. For entertainment, I spent some money on DVDs and video games. Life was very routine and  I was content. I didn’t feel an urge to find a different job. I was still saving more than $1000 a month. I was just coasting. I would have stayed with the job for another 40 years if it had lasted that long. However, sometimes opportunities just kind of look for you and they might not always be welcome.

January 2011

I took the average of November and December 2010 and used $550 as the target amount for my average month. I spent a total of $550.86. $222.75 was spent on auto insurance which was debited around the 18th of each month. This ACH debit was necessary to get a small discount on insurance. I spent $101 on gas by filling up four times. I always used cash for buying gas because I didn’t feel comfortable using my debit card. I started buying more fast food as I spent $81.20 on five or six visits. Coffee, hashbrowns, and biscuits are a special reward for myself on weekend mornings. I started buying some groceries as I spent $31.49 on various food. I also spent $47.38 on dumbbell weights so I could start working out again. After leaving college in May 2010, I was lifting weights at a local church which had a small weight room open to the public. That room was shut off to the public in late 2010. I spent $33 at a burger joint after meeting some friends at church there. While it is no major item, I started buying flavored mints and I’d consume them when I was driving. A pack of several mints cost $1.04.

February 2011

For February 2011, I spent a total of $559.22.

I finally got a reduction in my insurance rates so I only spent $167 on my auto insurance. I spent $154.79 on workout equipment. I purchased an olympic bar and weights so I could start doing real bench presses again. I spent $85 on gas by filling up a total of three times. I spent $68.32 on 8 visits to fast food joints. A few times during the month, I would buy a 22 ounce beer from the gas station for about $2.50 each. I wanted to try various brands at least once.

March 2011

For March 2011, I spent a total of $540.12. My auto insurance premium was $166.40. During this month, I started spending money on premium gas because I thought I could get better gas mileage. I spent $176 after filling up my tank 6 times. I spent $55.65 on 7 visits to fast food joints. I spent $23.92 on various groceries throughout the month. During this month, I also spent $23.35 on products related to oil changes (quarts of oil and oil filters). I believed I could save money on oil changes if I did them myself so I asked my dad to show me how to change my own oil. I bought beer a total of five times this month.

April 2011

For April 2011, I spent a total of $636.96. I was close to going over $100 over my target spending amount and I was feeling uncomfortable towards the last week of the month. My auto insurance premium was $166.40. I spent $141 on gas by filling up 6 times. For this month, I didn’t bother packing my lunch as often so I started spending a lot more money on fast food. I spent a total of $134.19 on 17 visits to fast food places. A good reason that I went was so that I could take a full hour off of work. Typically, if I ate in the office, I would finish my lunch within 8 minutes and then go right back to working. To make the day go by faster, I would drive over to the local restaurant. I usually ordered 5 sliders, chili cheese fries, and a medium soda. I spent $42.52 on various groceries for this month. I went to eat with my friends twice this month. The first place was a pizza joint with my two best friends. I spent $28 dollars. The second time, I went to a cheeseburger joint close to the city and spent $29. My bills were only slightly over $20 but I usually threw in an extra $5 for a tip. The last major item I bought was 240 minutes for my prepaid phone. I spent $39.99 for those minutes.

May 2011

For May 2011, I spent a total of $636.76. Again, I went almost $100 over my target spending amount and I felt uncomfortable the last week of the month. My insurance premium was $166.40. I spent $182 on gas by filling up 6 times. I filled up more than once a week because I always paid by cash when purchasing gas. Because of this, I had to estimate how much money it would take to fill up my tank and I only filled up my tank when I got close to ¼ of a tank. I spent $77 on 10 visits to fast food restaurants. I spent $41.90 on some free weights so I could do arm curls. I also spent $45.10 on going to two different restaurants.

June 2011

For June 2011, I spent a total of $584.25. I was glad that my expenses did not exceed $600 for another month. I spent $166.40 on my auto insurance. I spent $135 on gas by filling up 5 times. I spent $90.74 on fast food on 9 different visits. During one of these visits, I actually bought lunch for four people in my office. We spent at least an hour trying to resolve a difference of $.32 before we could print checks. The error was on my side so I bought my colleagues lunch to dispel any ill will. I spent $54.86 on eating meals with some friends. I got some pizza and beer with my two best friends as we did for the last few months. We called this man night. I also took a girl out for a semi blind date. Since it was the first time I ever took a girl out, I took her to a unique restaurant where you could watch planes take off and land while you eat. The bill came out to be more than $60 or so but she actually offered to pay for part of the bill. I spent $40.95 on some more work out equipment. I bought ankle weights so that I could make pullups tougher. I also bought some free weights.

First job out of college (part 6)

In December, the volunteers were desperate for any money they could collect which reminds me of another source of great consternation on my first job. Typically, I had thought that the end of my problems is when the checks were printed. After the checks were printed, I could mail them out and within two or three days the volunteers would receive their payments and shut up for the most part. Often times, I’d hand over a stack of checks to my boss but then we would have to wait for a few days before we could mail them. My boss would then communicate with the government agency, and then the agency would send the money to his bank account. After we received the funding, we could then mail out the checks.

In the first couple of months, the agency was pretty good with sending us money on time. However, as the months dragged on, it seemed like it would take longer and longer for the agency to fund the money into our account. Timely funding would be receiving the money in one or two days however I remember instances where the agency took up to two weeks to fund us the money. During the Summer of 2011, there was a point where we had at least 3 batches of checks that had been printed but were just sitting in queue. And of course, the volunteers would call us on a daily basis asking us about the status of the payments. Now the most frustrating thing about this was that we had done everything on our part to serve the customer. The bottleneck was being caused by the agency. Could we tell that to the customer? No. That would make the agency look bad and they might be held accountable to some sort of standard. We could tell the customer that the check had been processed and printed but we couldn’t send it out because it had to be “authorized” first.

One thing we wanted to make sure to never do was send out any checks before we had complete funding. If that ever happened, then the checks we sent out would bounce. And unfortunately, that very thing happened in either December of 2010 or January of 2011. I’m not completely sure how it happened. Maybe I sent out a set of checks too early in the mail or maybe the boss received funding for one set of checks and gave us the go ahead to mail out a different set of checks. But during that time period, we sent out a set of checks and about half of them bounced while resulted in us having to reprocess the bounced checks and reimburse the volunteers for any bank fees they might have incurred. As much pain and agony as it was, one fortunate thing happened in January. I received a small pay raise.

When I was hired as a full time employee, my boss mentioned that I would receive a salary increase after three months on the job. This was granted to be an incentive to stick with the company. My paycheck increase from $500 weekly to $550 weekly. A 10 percent increase was very nice. I was able to take home $445 dollars each week. During January 2011, I finished the month spending only about $550. I was very adamant about staying within the bench mark that I had set for myself.

First job out of college (part 5)

When I had free time, I went out to the local skatepark to learn new tricks and improve old ones. During the week, I lifted weights to keep getting stronger. When I wasn’t doing that, I still played some video games and watched videos on the internet. It was far from luxury however it was cheap and affordable. It was very much the same lifestyle I had in my college days. This way of life paid off. By the end of 2010, I had saved up a total of $8000 in my bank account.

By the time December arrived, I had already completed my classes for tax preparation. I passed the exams and did well in the interviews unfortunately I lost my interest and ambition to pursue the career path. Already, I was working a full time job so they only time I could really dedicate to tax prep was on the weekends and that was completely out of the question for me. I remembered December being a terrible month at work. Being that Christmas was coming up, a lot of the volunteers were depending on the money to buy gifts for their children. This led to a lot of anger and frustration being directed to me and I remember one occasion where a program director told me that I ruined a family’s Christmas. Had I not needed the job, I would have gladly told the woman that her and her family can eat dog food for all I care. It was very easy to lose my humanity but I really did start to develop a hatred for these people and the poor in general. Constantly, I wanted to tell these people that they shouldn’t have had children that they couldn’t afford. Call me a monster or an inhuman jerk but I don’t care. I just remember being hassled on all ends. Being pulled in all different directions and yelled at by everyone made it feel like I had just voided my bowels and all I had to clean myself with was sandpaper.

The other analysts did have some similar opinions. After all, the people that we were serving had very similar characteristics. We could tell because we were required to look through their tax returns, EBT statements, welfare payments, child birth certificates, and child support payments. Volunteers in this government program could only qualify for the child care benefit if they were in a certain income bracket. These people were very poor. Usually they earned $20,000 a year or less and had at least two children. I would say that at least 95% of the members were single moms that were either divorced or more likely never married. I kept on thinking that these people wouldn’t be poor and destitute if they just made sure not to have children. Children aren’t cheap and I knew for sure that childcare was expensive because I had to look at the schedule of fees for hundreds of child care providers. In a licensed day care center, it is reasonable to pay at least $20 an hour just to keep the child there. Of all the states, California seemed to be one of the most expensive states as I remember sending child care providers in California payments that ranged from $500 to over $1000 per month. With as expensive as California is, I would never want to live there let alone raise a child there.

First job out of college (part 4)

The money made it all worth it. I had to save as much of it as possible because I really didn’t know how long the opportunity would last. By the time November rolled around, the company brought me on as a full time employee. They set me to work 40 hours a week as a salaried employee and I was making $500 a week. After taxes, I was taking home $406 each week which total out to me taking home $1600 on most months and $2000 on the months that had 5 Fridays. This was good however my boss mentioned that the current contract would only last three years. After September of 2013, I didn’t know what would happen. Rob may find another contract for us to work on or he may not. At that point in time, I didn’t know how easy or difficult it would be to find another job. I’d have much more work experience at the time however I didn’t know if the job market would get any better in three years.

For this reason, I made sure to keep my spending to the absolute minimum. In November of 2010, I spent about a total of $500. In December, I spent about a total of $600. Using those two bits of data, I made it my bench mark to try to spend no more than $550 a month. Getting by on $550 would be unthinkable for most Americans however since I don’t pay rent or owe anyone money, I could do it easily.

My biggest expense was car insurance. I had just crashed my car in October and my parents insisted that I get full coverage so I was paying more than $200 a month for coverage. After that, the next biggest expense was gas which ran between $100 and $120 a month. My commute wasn’t far. It was only 16 miles one way and heavy traffic usually wasn’t much of an issue. During that time period, I spent roughly $80 a month on fast food. There was a fast food joint close to my office that is famous for serving sliders. I went there mainly because it was easier to fill up the whole lunch hour. Unfortunately for me, the place didn’t really have a dollar menu so I would spend about $7 on each meal. Each month, I would also spend about $50 dollars on groceries. Even though I was very frugal, I did spend around $50 to $100 a month on miscellaneous stuff that I enjoyed.

I didn’t move into my own place. I didn’t spend money going to bars or clubs to pick up girls. I didn’t spend money on smartphones or expensive gadgets. I didn’t buy a luxury car. I didn’t spend money on going to vacation in Europe. I didn’t go out to fancy restaurants every night or see the latest movie every weekend.

November 2010

This was the first full month when I kept records of all my expenses. I spent a total of $478.20. At the time, my auto insurance cost $222.75. This was the cost of full coverage after a rate increase due to an accident in the month of August 2010. Somehow, I only spent $61 on gas. While driving to South Carolina for a family visit, my dad paid for my gas on both ways so that he didn’t have to drive. I spent $51.79 total on four or five visits to fast food restaurants. I ended up spending $48.50 on going to two sit in restaurants with some friends. I spent a total of $35.53 on one DVD and one audio CD. Since this was the first full month I was keeping track of expenses, I did my best to spend as little as possible. There were several days where I spent no money on anything.

December 2010

For December 2010, I spent a total of $595.79. Auto insurance of $222.75 was automatically debited from my checking account. I spent $108 on gas by filling up a total of 4 times. Gas was about $2.20 per gallon and I bought regular unleaded. I only needed to fill up my tank once a week. I spent $100 on buying a skateboard deck and some extra parts. It was the first big thing I bought for myself. I spent $43.50 on 9 visits to fast food restaurants. Usually, I bought items from the dollar menu. I spent $19.99 on prepaid phone minutes. I could get a total of 120 minutes because my phone gave me double minutes for life. I spent $30 on beer for a party with some friends that month.

First job after college (part 3)

Typically, I’d arrive at the office at 8:30 am in the morning and start working on processing invoices. Sometime around 9 am or 9:30 am, I’d get a phone call from a volunteer needing assistance and I’d have to stop everything I was doing to service the customer. Whatever invoice I was working on got put on hold and things screeched to a stop. After talking to one customer, I’d hang up the phone only to have another phone call waiting for me five seconds later. I’d print out some documents and tell the volunteer I’d send her some corrected paperwork. I’d hang up the phone and start working on her form until 10 seconds afterwards where I’d get interrupted and have to talk to someone about why their check wasn’t the correct amount. After answering that phone call, I’d have to research the rates and payment from a previous month and get to work sending a payment to correct the balance. But before I could do that, I’d have to take another phone call from a program director inquiring about the status of 5 new volunteers. Work environments like that drove me almost to the breaking point and it was quite common when I wanted to start cursing at the volunteers, smash the phones, throw all the invoices out the window, and storm out of the office never to return again. It got so bad to the point where I remember at least one day where I just completely gave up on trying to process invoices and just gave into the fact that I would be on the phones for eight hours a day.

What also contributed to the problem was that most of our system was analog. During the beginning, I didn’t know most of the volunteers by name so when someone called me, I wasn’t sure where along in the process they were. I’d ask them if they were a new applicant, approved, or had received payments from us in the past. After finding their status, I had to physically find their paperwork. If they were a new applicant, I had to search through a giant stack or ask a different analyst if he saw the application. If I misplaced a folder, I couldn’t help the volunteer because we only had one copy of information. I had no database that I could type in a name and find out where all the paperwork was. I had to physically find the documents myself. As I recall, the only electronic trace of anything I had was the emails that arrived in my inbox. Despite all these frustrations and challenges, I had to keep in there because I really needed to save up money. The first few weeks on the job help shaped my worldview in a big way.

First of all, I made the decision to never get married or have any children. I was not happy with my work. I did not enjoy getting yelled at by twenty people a day nor did I enjoy having to juggle twenty tasks at the same time and fixing all the mistakes I made from previous days of work. For what work was, I wanted to make it a goal to minimize the time I spent working as much as possible in my life. This meant that I would need to save up as much money as possible and live as cheap as possible for the rest of my life. Starting in October of 2010, I started recording everything I spent money on in notebooks and I kept track of where every dollar went. Each week, I was getting paychecks of over $500. Since I still lived with my parents, I paid no rent and I was saving at least $1000 per month. At that rate, I’d have enough money to buy a house in a few years. After that was done, I’d have the biggest purchase of my life out of the way and I’d only have to work hard enough just to sustain my cost of living. That was my American dream. That is what I wanted most of all.

First job after college (part 2)

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.

For the first couple of weeks on the job, I was relatively content. Things were busy and I was a little nervous about the fact that the phones were always ringing but I was never asked to answer phone calls yet. Because of the backlog, I was asked to work on Saturdays for the first few weeks. That did bother me a little bit but since I was paid by the hour, I was okay with working six days a week. At the same time, I was also taking classes at the tax company because I wasn’t sure if my job was going to be permanent and I had already spent the $250 on 8 weeks worth of classes. By the time October rolled around, Denise was about to leave. The entire office went to a local rib shack and wished her well after she left.

Before she had left, Denise showed me how to enter invoices into the accounting system. It was simple, I just entered the same amount on both the debit and credit side. The only other thing I needed to do was add vendors when we got new people into the government program. Lastly, she taught me how to reconcile the balance with the other analyst before we printed the checks.

After she left, the entire experience for me changed. With one less staff member, the work load increased for everyone. In my case, I just wanted to process invoices, print checks, and send them out. Members would send their invoices at the beginning of every month and we promised to process the invoices within 7 business days. However, new members would send applications in and most of the applications sent in were incomplete. Incomplete applications would require communication with the member to get them to send in the complete and correct documents. In addition to that, current members would occasionally send in incorrect or incomplete invoices and timesheets and these documents would require communication with the members in order to get the complete and correct documents. And the worst part of it all was that communication was always a weakness for me throughout my entire life. Throw in the minimum amount of job training and the expectation of learning as you go along, and I experienced a whole mess of frustration that made me want to quit the job within the first few months.

Due to my inexperience, if I came across an incomplete application or invoice, I would just set it aside and move on to an application or invoice that was complete and could be processed. We were overburdened with work and it was my intention to get as much of the correct easy work done before dealing with more complicated matters. Unfortunately, this resulted in members calling back after weeks wondering why their applications or invoices were not processed. At that time, I would bring up the checklist of all the things they were missing and they would get mad at me for not calling them and telling them what was incomplete or missing. However, the absolute nightmare was the sheer volume of phone calls in the month of October, November, and December of 2010.