Introduction
As my first post, this blog entry is intended to be an extension of the “About Me” section to tell everyone a little more about me.
Here, I’ll walk you through a condensed version of my life story up until now.
In addition, I’ll show you where I’m planning on heading next.
Birth to College
I grew up in a pretty traditional family and followed the well-trodden path from an early age.
Like many people, I tried my best in school and got a full-time job and a bimonthly paycheck.
Entering the Labor Force
After securing my full-time role in finance, I did everything I was taught to do up until that point in my life – work hard, get pay increases and promotions at the company or through job-hopping (which I didn’t do and just stuck around).
I had a cushy job in retrospect – I got paid well, had great benefits, and climbed up within the company before it shut down its operations.
To this date, I’m thankful for my first experience out of college; I learned a tremendous amount in my first job and met some very talented people.
Thankfully because of my traditional upbringing, I tried to save as much as possible, maxed out my 401(k) contributions, and tried to maximize other employee benefits.
At the end of this chapter, I had a decent nest egg in various investments in my bank, brokerage accounts, and retirement accounts and had a resume with valuable experience that I could speak to.
Second Chapter of Adulthood
The next chapter of my life started with my then girlfriend and me getting married, us purchasing our first place, and me starting a new and current job working in finance role at a small company.
This opened my eyes to some of the inner workings of private funding, remote work, employment statues, stock-based compensation, and many more valuable lessons that weren’t readily available online.
Fast forward, about two years into our marriage, we were blessed with the birth of our daughter, and this qualifying life event life-changing event transformed our perspectives on arguably everything.
In this chapter of our life so far, we have made plenty of mistakes and thankfully learned a tremendous amount from them and at times have tried to share our learnings with friends and family that are similar in age.
The tricky thing that we discovered is that the topics that we wanted to discuss were often too sensitive to discuss as it required going into touchy subjects about personal finances, lifestyle choices, and other private matters.
This was one of the contributing factors to me launching my website – Now, I’m using it as an outlet for my research and creative thoughts.
Kickstarting My Subchapter of Adulthood
From the previous section, it might seem like we had a lot of things figured out – own a house, have a baby on the way, have a nest egg, etc. That is somewhat true – we were comfortable financially. But the expected birth of our child and anticipated increases in our expenses were lit a little bit of a fire under my underpart. Also, it was getting harder to push for pay raises and promotions in my current role. All of these combined, set me on a winding journey in search of more money and eventually more freedom.
Lower expenses
The first step was for me to start budgeting more by taking a closer look at where and how much we spend monthly. This certainly helped but didn’t feel like it would move the needle as much as I would have liked.
I’m leaving a note on this so that I can talk about this in more detail in another post.
Higher revenue
Side gigs
Gig economy – my realization that cutting expenses won’t move the needle much, led me to exploring side gigs. I looked into whether I could deliver Instacart orders next time I grocery shop at our usual supermarket or deliver on DoorDash or Uber Eats in my downtime. While I never acted on these ideas, I realized that the implied rate per hour that I would earn was not worth my time away from my then pregnant wife, additional complexity involved, depreciation of my car, etc.
Independent contractor (IC) work – I wanted to seek other side gigs that could be worth my time, which led me to taking on a “market research” contract opportunity. I thought this would be fun given that I enjoyed doing research and could pay me a higher rate than the gig economy jobs I mentioned above. My lesson here was that most “market research” IC work is outsourced for a reason; the work involved is very manual and tedious and could mean putting in a large amount of time to complete a project, which would mean your hourly rate could be lower than initially expected (since you’re paid on a per project basis).
New job
To be clear, this subchapter was an exploratory effort, and I didn’t feel like I was ready to leave the traditional arrangement of a full-time employee. I also interviewed, from end of 2022 to mid-2023, a lot to see if I could find another role that could raise my total compensation package and/or give me more upward mobility in my career.
Through my applications, explored various fields, geographies, and roles but did not receive offers on most opportunities and the offer that I received was unsatisfactory.
My realization here was that the labor market had shifted meaningfully in favor of employers (I believe it’s become more so since then).
Investing better
It’s perhaps not surprising that I was discouraged that my efforts so far did not result in positive results for me. Nonetheless, I didn’t just quit and go back to complaining about the lack of growth in my current job and instead continued exploring for undiscovered ways to grow myself.
At this point, I realized that investing is something that wasn’t nearly as present in my current life as it used to be. In my previous role, I was quite plugged into the financial markets and took an active role in managing my own investment portfolio. But ever since I switched industries, I did not pay nearly as much attention and made some mistakes as a result.
Also, I realized that investing my money more prudently could be a better return on my time. Investing could be done at my desk at home, and the hours spent could be stacked on top of my regular work hours because I was working remotely (recall my earlier point about low hourly rates in the Side gigs section).
Slowly, I went down a rabbit hole of generating more cash from my investments. This started with trying to find mispriced small/medium stocks and ran the gamut of buying U.S. Treasury bills directly for better yield compared to a high yield savings account or certificate of deposit, selling covered calls on my stock holdings, looking into ways to maximize after-tax returns, tinkering with the thought of managing money from friends and family to start my own investment fund.
In retrospect, I probably did more things wrong than right, but I learned a lot from this experienced and period of experimentation.
This part of my journey to make more money is still very much a developing one, and currently I am trying to maintain a balanced portfolio of U.S. Treasury bills, notes, and bonds; index-based ETFs, stocks, selling covered calls on the ETF holdings and stocks to participate in any upside in the market while protecting my downside through insurance of some form (options, etc).
I’m leaving another note here for me to do a deep dive of my learnings and my investment portfolio in the future.
Contingency planning
For many folks, the last two years have been tough with many people impacted by layoffs, steep inflation, heightened uncertainty, and seemingly more rapid changes as a result of the pandemic and new technologies like generative AI. My situations wasn’t that different from that of others – my employer had at least one round of layoffs that I’m aware of, and I had the feeling that the company wasn’t getting better as a result and that there may be more layoffs in the future. This led me to go on a path to find an alternative source of income that could support my family, in the unfortunate but unsurprising event that I was let go.
Call me stupid, but I have become a day trader. Since November 2023, I have been trading with my own parameters to see if I could consistently produce enough monthly income to pay for my family’s monthly expenses.
So far, the results have been muted, but I have learned a tremendous amount about systems, parameters, risk management, money management, psychology, among many other things, and am encouraged by the progress that I have made each month.
In a sense, this website is also part of my contingency planning that is still very much a work-in-progress. Perhaps, I will look back on this post one day and be able to document my journey in online publishing.
Looking ahead
There’s no question that there are challenges at work and at home for me, and I’m sure every young professional, student, father, or working mother has his/her own struggles.
Despite the setbacks or lack of visibility in our lives, I’m trying to stay forward-looking and invest in me and my family by extension.
As I come across or work on good consumer research, helpful data points, and other resources, I will be sharing them through this website – please feel free to share with others if you find them useful!
My hope is that this exploratory effort of mine will spread any insights that I have accumulated, introduce me to like-minded people, and lead to other interesting opportunities for everyone involved in this new community.