One of the best things my father ever did for me was tell me that when I graduated from college, I was on my own. No more rent money or financial support from my parents—I had to become financially independent, and I had to do it soon.
I had a rather unusual college experience. I went to BYU, one of the most affordable colleges in the United States, and I had a full-ride scholarship for all four years. In addition, I started at 21, so that I qualified for the Pell Grant my junior year. Because I was studying Arabic, I also received the Smart Grant. And as if that weren’t enough, I worked an on-campus job for seven out of eight semesters while I was there. My parents paid for my rent probably just because it was the only expense left that they could help with.
All of those scholarships, grants, and jobs allowed me to graduate 100% debt free, which was extremely helpful later on. But the truth was, as a college student, I knew almost nothing about money. I didn’t know much about the world outside of academia either, since that was where I spent all my time. Even the jobs that I worked were all on-campus jobs that only put me at 20 hours per week, doing stuff that didn’t feel all that different from school. So when I graduated in 2010, I was in for a really big shock.
I graduated in the middle of the so-called “jobless recovery,” which was basically a euphemism for “the worst economic collapse in a generation, but hey it’s getting better, right? Right??” Things weren’t nearly as bad in the US as they were (and to a large part, still are) in places like Europe, but still, it was pretty hard. At the height of the recession, a job ad on KSL (the Utah equivalent of Craigslist) would get hundreds of applications in the first 24 hours, never mind how horrible the job was. People were desperate for some kind of income, and so was I.
Fortunately, I had enough time to see this coming. In 2009, I started keeping a daily budget in order to track my expenses and learn how to manage my money. At first, I used the same spreadsheet template that my father uses, but I soon figured out that that wasn’t going to cut it. So I started from the basics, dividing wants from needs, and made separate categories for things like food, rent, health, transportation, etc. I learned very quickly that I was spending too much on food, so I subdivided that into groceries and eating out. It took a while to organize my personal finances to a place where I felt I had a handle on it, but by the time I graduated, I was pretty much on top of it.
A lot of my peers were (and to a large extent, still are) moving back in with their parents after they graduated. I decided early on that I wasn’t going to do that. First of all, my father told me that if I was going to move in with them, I would have to pay rent. I’m sure that if things were really tough, they would have waived that requirement long enough to let me get on my feet, but the arrangement would not have made anyone happy. Second, all of the people I knew—and therefore, all of my best opportunities for getting on my feet—were in Utah, not in Massachusetts.
Now, a little bit of background. I was raised in a devout Mormon household, where we were all taught about the importance of self-reliance and emergency preparedness. Growing up, we had a modest food storage, and we even ground our own wheat to make bread (the most delicious bread you will ever eat is always homemade!). That said, I had never really connected any of that with my own situation. In college, I figured that I wouldn’t worry about stuff like that until I was comfortably established in my own home.
But then, things got tough. I went from working in a call center to taking temp jobs while looking for other employment. Then the temp jobs dried up, and I had to scramble for paying gigs on Craigslist. At the lowest point, I was distributing phone books from the trunk of my car just to earn enough to eat (it’s a decent paying gig if you have a pickup truck and four or five kids (ie slave labor) to do it quickly, but if you’re just one guy with a beat-up Buick, forget it). Money was drying up fast, and I didn’t know what to do.
I learned a lot from the experience, though. Probably the most important thing I learned was that 90% of the time, “security” is just an illusion. If you think you’re secure because you have a job that gives you a reliable paycheck, think again. Markets change, and your company could go down at any time, taking your job with it. That was a lesson we all learned the hard way back in the Great Recession. And if you think the government is there to help you, think again. In a lot of ways, the government only made the recession worse.
I realized very quickly that the only security I could ever hope to have was the security that I provided for myself. In other words, if I didn’t learn self-reliance, I would never have any control over my future. I wanted control—I craved it. I found myself trapped in a system where I had to trade time, one of the most limited and valuable resources, for money. No matter how much (or how little) value I created, I was still paid the same for it. It was a soul-sucking system, and I wanted out of it.
It was around this time that I started self-publishing. I saw the opportunity to take control of my own career and leaped at it. But I was still scraping by on only four figures a year, and while that’s not as bad as it sounds when you’re a healthy single man with no debts and no dependents, it was still pretty tough. With my books barely selling a dozen copies each month in that first year, I knew I couldn’t keep it up for long.
So I ran away—literally. I left the country and decided to start over.
The Self-Sufficient Writer (Index)
