We're not rich, but we're comfortable. I think a lot of people would look at what we make as a couple and say "YEah, that's rich," but it's one of those things that you don't feel rich even though you certainly have more financial security than I did ... 10 years ago and especially ~15 years ago. In truth, I "feel" no richer than I did 5 years ago, or 10 years ago... I never feel "secure" in income, but we are, and we have certainly have more "wealth" than I did 15 years ago. My wife's a teacher so we're not making bank there, but I do pretty well as a software engineer in the Boston area. My yearly income now is a little more than twice what it was 7 years ago.
Still, we have my wife has student loans (~$800/mo or so), we're paying $2000/mo for daycare. Our housing expenses are less than most who live in a major metropolitan corridor. FOr the last 8 years I've compromised on a lower mortgage vs. a longer commute... I spend at least 2 hours a day in the car most days driving in towards Boston from the burbs. The flipside is that our house is about 1/4th the cost of what it would be if I lived within a 15mi radius of Boston. Public transportation sucks in Massachusetts for 90% of residents, so we're part of that 90% where if I took public transportation, it'd take.. ~3+ hours for me traveling and it's just not worth it, especially with an infant that I bring to daycare each day before work.
SO... how I landed my dream job. I don't know if it's a "Dream job," I don't know if I believe in "Dream jobs." I don't believe in the "If you do what you love you won't work a day in your life..." because even when you're in a field that you love, a major portion of your day is spent doing things that you hate... It wouldn't be called "Work" otherwise and you wouldn't get paid for it otherwise. You're doing shit other people don't want to or can't do. I'm a software engineer, I like doing development, I enjoy it most of the time, I like building things ... but 80% of what I do is moving stories around in Jira and updating requirement spec documents, having meetings with senior management, and documenting bugs/features. A lot of the actual coding I do is shitty, frustrating development... Another junior dev is stuck on something and so it kicks over to me to figure out, and it's usually the worst types of problems. Still, this is a field that pays me a lot to do an activity that I like doing -- developing applications -- but the day to day tasks is work.
I've written about this before, but I didn't study computer science in college, but I think I grew up in the right time and had the right access to technology as a kid. I grew up beside the internet in the 90s, started building websites in the mid-to-late 90s, and was doing paid development as a teenager. I never intended to go into technology when I was in college.. I thought I'd do the liberal arts thing and probably become a professor or go to law school. Law school was out of the question for me financially... I had too much student debt after college and couldn't take on $100,000 more. Incidentally around the same time I got offered a job for an organizationt hat I had been working for when I Was a student. They massively undercut me on pay (my first "career" job was $27,500/yr), but I was naive and was just happy to get paid for working. Of course I thought I Was like rich at $27.5... Until I got my first paycheck, paying rent, and it was ~$1336 a month or something and I was like ... "oh fuck... that's... not gonna go very far...." Got into massive credit card debt my first 18mos out of college (~$10,000 in CC debt with high APR), ended up having to move out of my apartment and back in with my parents (my dad was also in and out of the hospital at the time so ... I kinda made myself feel better by saying I was helping out, in truth, my parents were helping me out financially).
Work wise, I always think of myself as lucky... but in truth it's a mix of being lucky, having resources to be lucky, and putting myself in a position to be lucky. I'm an avid self-learner, I've always done a lot of freelance development on the side which has forced me to get out of my comfort zone and learn things that I didn't know otherwise... Which then in turn I spin into new professional opportunities. I also think my basis in the liberal arts has helped me excel at my job faster than if I was a computer science major or technical major. I have strong gaps in computer science, like preparing for a recent interview I had to crash course a Udemy on Algorithms because I just don't have a foundation on such a basic concept in computer science/programming. At the same time, my work and hobbies pushes me into topics that end up becoming relevant... I lucked out by being a JavaScript developed 7 years ago when Node skyrocketed... I was into Ember and Meteor when JS on the backend and frontend became a thing... I happened to follow the founder of 37signals on Twitter and got into Rails when Rails was dominating web application development.
I've had a knack for ingratiating myself with people who then want to bring me onto their teams. When I Got hired out of college it was because I worked with a Web Developer and after I graduated the place he worked for was giving him a team instead of him being a solo guy, so he hired me. That guy was kind of a fuck up, but when he left that organization he offered me a job at his new place (which I ultimately turned down, wisely, but I used that interview to boost my salary by $20,000 or so). He left that other org and then recruited me at that company, where I work now. He was kind of a fuck up and I had to crawl out from under him, but then another person at that company recruited me to his team, etc... and I always kind of say it's luck how this has worked out, but it's a mix of luck and putting myself in the right position to be lucky.
At the same time... I think... like something I feel a lot is that even though we're in good financial position as a family, I feel as though you will never feel more rich than do you at ~25. Or at least, that's how I feel. You make more money but the expectations of expenses go up. I took on my wife's student loans just after I finished paying off mine. I pay for the two vehicles and the bills. I pay for her grad school. She's almost done with grad school now and last year we traded that tuition for daycare. Now that we have a baby the house I bought on my own which I lived in with two roommates for a decade is too small for us and baby so we're moving to a bigger house with a sightly higher mortgage payment. Also this is a weird way to put it but I feel like your financial floor moves up, the base level of expectations moves up. So, like, when I was 23 or 24, my financial floor was... can I pay my rent... can I buy food in the discount isle... can I pay for heat... can I make minimum payments on my credit card... Will my checking account not go negative this month. If those things happened, it was a success for me, and I felt good about it. As time as gone on, my financial floor has shifted, obviously with more expenses, but also with things like ... Am I putting away enough money into my 529 plan for my daughter's education, am I saving enough so when I retire we have enough for monthly expenses, do I have an emergency savings so if I did lose my job, we wouldn't default on our mortgage until I could get a new job...?
Like, now I have an "emergency savings" and "rainy day savings." Emergency savings when I was in my early 20s was like the jar of quarters I was saving to pay for the tolls to go to the beach, and I'd tap into that to buy beans and rice for skinny months. These days I've got a lot more than that in emergency and rainy day savings, but the anxiety of those being low is the same as it was in my early 20s... My responsibilities are higher, the stakes of financial ruin are higher, I've got two people that rely on me for financial stability of their own, where as "when I was broke" financial ruin only ruined me. If you just look at the numbers it'd be so easy to say "wow, yeah, you guys are rich," but ... I dunno, I feel about as rich as I did when I was in my mid-20s; I'm not, I'm absolutely wealthier, but part of me thinks feeling rich is a mindset and I don't think I'll ever have that mindset. Though, I also never complain about what we have and I know that we're a mix of lucky and blessed to be where we are, and so that means giving back because that luck or blessedness was only because others gave to us.
