Investing in myself

Investment Value?

The first and most important lesson I learned on my path to bettering my life through frugality was coming to understand the value in investing in myself. This was also quite possibly the most difficult lesson to learn as it required me to step outside of myself and analyze myself critically. This required me to fundamentally change how I thought, which had, up to this point, been shaped partly through my parents, partly through religion and superstition, partly through the teachings of a dysfunctional public school system, and partly through family and other close people in my life. Kind people in my life tried to help me by explaining this to me, and while I thank them as well as my parents for planting the seeds of frugality in my mind at a young age, the contradictions set up in my mind from my religious and supernatural teachings required real life experience to clear my mind and show me the way.

Living for the moment

Ready to sing in the church choir

Up until the age of 20, I was, like many people, living for the moment. Each day came and went, and I was checking my horoscope and looking for other signs from God which, I now admit, wasn’t really work out all that well for me. My well meaning parents insisted I go to College straight from high school, and I did so to please them. Unfortunately, I went to College having been indoctrinated by a rather unfortunate series of experiences during my thirteen years of mandatory education; from weekly beatings by a leather strap against the palm of my hand for “misbehaviour” in the earlier grades, to not quite fitting in during high school, all the while plagued by poor grades as a result of what modern psychology has come to term, “Attention Deficit Disorder,” it’s remarkable that I managed to survive, much less get my Ontario Secondary School Diploma.

By the time I entered College, I had naturally developed a rather negative attitude towards education. More accurately, I was growing weary of the cycle that just didn’t seem to be working for me. After a couple of months, it dawned on me that I was free to leave, which is exactly what I did when I learned that my grades were by the middle of the first semester so dismal, I was not to graduate to the next year with the rest of my class. I took this as a sign, dropped out, and went out on my own to do what I wanted.

There were massive layoffs in the electrical trade I wanted to get into, so it was fortunate that I had a clean criminal record; this enabled me to work as a part time overnight security guard. I supplemented this income with construction work. At one time, I did overnight security at the same site I laboured at the next day, getting by on a mere four hours of sleep. It was exhausting, but the guard job had two important benefits: One, it exposed me to people active in their vocations of choice, and two, it gave me plenty of time to read and think.

Wake-up call in three parts

One cold, rainy November morning, I was sitting in my bachelor apartment in the top floor of an old drafty 2 1/2 story house smoking a cigarette and gazing out the front window as I awaited a slow download using my old 2400 baud modem on my computer. My computer, the center of my entertainment world, was becoming out-dated; I had not been able to afford to update its hardware and operating system, and now the power supply was making strange sounds as it neared failure. I wondered how much that would cost to replace, and where the money would come from when I noticed movement on the street below. Odd, who would be out on this miserable, cold, rainy day? I studied the man; he was clearly in his senior years with a dirty yellow newspaper carrier bag slung over his shoulder with the now defunct “Oshawa Times” emblazoned on its side. He was delivering the local daily newspaper. The poor old fellow wasn’t dressed for the weather at all, wearing a dripping wet jacket, no hat, with water visibly and miserably sloshing in and out of his cheap tattered sneakers.

As he walked out of my sight, it dawned on me that I was going to be him if I continued to live as I was. I couldn’t afford a car, having failed at the experiment a few of times; I had my bike and took the bus when I could afford it, but the rent, food, and cigarettes were eating up much of my income. When I worked two jobs a day for a couple of weeks, I saved up enough to buy a good quality new bike, but I only did so because it saved me money in comparison to taking the bus, and the bike was certainly cheaper than a new computer. How long could I go on like that? That lead me to ponder, how could I expect to manage to even afford proper outer wear for the weather when, after I’m too old and enfeebled to work construction, I’ll be facing the prospect of delivering newspapers in the cold and miserable rain just to make ends meet? The seed of discontent was germinating and taking root in my mind.

Part two occurred after I managed to attain a full time security guard position in a government office tower. I was still making minimum wage, but the full time hours provided some relief. Three young men around my age worked in the data center overnight, and their shifts overlapped mine. By this time, I was running my own Bulletin Board System from my old computer and was familiar with much of what they were doing. In fact, watching them, I knew I was capable of learning and doing their job, and when I discovered they were earning $15 an hour (a good entry level wage for 1991 well in excess of my own $7.00 an hour) sitting around waiting for a light to come on to get up and change a data tape, I asked them how I could get such a job. One of these fellows was very kind and generous and advised me that I had to prove to an employer that I had the skills to handle such a job, and that proof was by way of certification, diploma, or degree. He explained to me that anyone could claim to be capable of doing a job, and perhaps they were, but employers have no way of knowing if they’re being honest or not. Up until this point, I lived in a Godly world where all was fair and guided by the divine and people were honest. It was at this moment that the true value of recognized education became permanently impressed on me.

Part three occurred in the late winter following part two. I called up an old friend whom I went to school with. We had started the same program in College together before I dropped out. I learned that he had stuck with the program, and was about to start a job placement as a manager. Was it really that long ago? It seemed to me as though I had just dropped out of the course a few months ago; as I thought more about it, I understood that three years had elapsed, and suddenly I realized that three years was nothing, no time at all! That’s when it all came together and I was finally able to step outside of myself. Had I had the proper frame of mind three years ago, I could have surely achieved at least a passing grade without too much effort and I would have had the proof necessary to demonstrate to employers advising them that I was indeed capable of handling a more desirable job that required greater intellect, skill, and rewarded that with greater pay.

Recognizing the investment

Reinventing myself, 1993

I decided to go back to College for a 3 year program. I calculated that, at the time, earning what I was making, I might have been able to gross, at most, $14,560 a year. After taxes, deductions, and downtime, I was realistically realizing a mere $11,000 per year. I knew that, between rent for my seedy bachelor apartment, cheap food bought at discount, and riding my bike everywhere, I could eke by on as little as $10,000 a year if I really had to. If I got an OSAP loan to pay for my education and to help to pay my expenses, I could supplement that money with some sort of part time employment and my lifestyle really wouldn’t change from what it already was. The result? If I attained employment at even $12 an hour, my gross income would increase significantly to $25,000 a year. At $15 per hour, I would gross more than double at $31,200. If I continued my low-rent lifestyle after graduation, it would take me only two years to to pay back the loan at $12 per hour. In addition, I would end up with a much better job free of night shifts and weekend work, and once that loan was paid off, I’d be in a position to put enough money away to not ever need to worry about having to deliver newspapers in my retirement.

My car and new house, 1998

My strategy worked much better than expected as I found that, even working at a summer job at an information systems company in 1995, $12 per hour was easily attainable, and part time work as a lab technician during the school year was really not that difficult to attain now that I was able to demonstrate my knowledge and aptitude with a certification after the first year and a diploma after the second. Upon graduating after the third year, $15 per hour became my new minimum wage. Buying and keeping a car was simple after my second year, I was able to pay off my student loan very quickly, and I was buying my first brand new house with my wife two years after graduating. My investment in myself wasn’t just growing; it was exploding at a phenomenal rate.

To sum up the investment in myself: Recognizing that my own true value will grow, given an investment of time and money. It’s also recognizing that I shouldn’t expect others to commit an investment of time and money in me if I’m not willing to do it myself. It’s a key element that governs my life today, and goes beyond time and money; necessarily, it had grown to include my health and relationships. It was a difficult lesson for me to learn, but it was definitely worthwhile as it paved the way for the rest of my life.