Writing this post already feels harder than I thought it would.

To make things easy for myself, I will follow up with another one covering the same subject matter to better put things into perspective. Far too much is going through my head right now to be as efficient a writer as I would like to be.

Less than a few hours ago I began to add up every paycheck I received last year in order to get some sense of what future finances would look like. The amount of hours I get from my job varies throughout any year — and stupid as it may be — I never actually got around to figuring out what my total salary even was.

I did know one thing: I was spending less than I was earning, and I thought that was all that mattered.

Things are different now. My living expenses have changed, and the price tag of my ambitions are starting to become clearer than ever. But before I get into detail about what I just alluded to above, allow me to give some context to the cold opening here.

For a while now I wanted to start a blog of some kind that would document my ascent (hopefully) into some kind of specialized profession — whatever that may be. All the careers I revere are rather lucrative, but accordingly exclusive.

In an age in which people attribute the status of such professionals to almost anything but the hard work and innate talent of the specialists in question, I thought I would document my hopeful rise into one of these fields in an attempt to inspire people to rethink their pessimism. If I could convince just one person that upward mobility was possible, and lead them to improve whatever life situation they were in, then documenting my frustrations in addition to successes would be worthwhile.

This brings me to present debacles I hinted at earlier. My current job doesn’t pay as well as I thought it did, and I was recently terminated from a second one I slowly began to find promising prior to an abrupt end. And sadly enough, my aims at ascending into bigger and better things hinge on some requirements that might be outside my price range.

For privacy reasons, I will refrain from giving away specific details about my current employment beyond the salary (entry-level), the hours (can vary a lot), and the fact that it gives me more flexibility than most jobs could ever offer. And to keep things interesting I might make note of any mannerisms or conversations I have with others as a result of the job in future posts.

So about that salary… I made less than $7,000 last year.

For some reason I had the impression that I made a bit more than that, but I guess I was being optimistic. I love the job nonetheless because no two days are the same. A lot more of the region I live in has become familiar to me, and it soon became fun to explore the unknown despite still not having a car to this day.

A salary of barely several thousand dollars is disappointing to have when the credentialing I hope to obtain is well outside that price point. The jobs that I am most interested in are in the tech industry, and the beauty of recent years is that a college degree is no longer necessary to get one’s foot into the door.

Certifications, a Github portfolio, or even “coding camps” are now possible avenues of signaling to employers what someone is capable of. In a future post I will go into greater detail about some of the specifics I am looking to take advantage of.

But for the sake of this post though, I will say that a course I hope to take in the spring (at a coding camp) will set me back about $4,000. There is simply no chance in the deepest trenches of hell that I can possibly cough up that amount before the course starts.

Additionally, I now (as of 2016) pay $200 a month in rent (not bad for the household I grew up in) to my mother and have about $300 in food/miscellaneous expenditures. Just those things (rent and food) come out to $6,000 per year.

In case I failed to make it clear earlier, I only just recently discovered that my expected salary will just barely pay for basic necessities. If I could earn about a thousand dollars more than I did last year, I just might stay in the black financially.

How I actually do that remains to be seen. My best bet appears to involve taking a zero-interest loan of some kind for the spring course and pay that off by the summer before interest actually kicks in, as well as get a second job in the fall when hours tend to drop for my current one.

But I find myself too frustrated and too tired to put much thought into all that right now, let alone continue writing. In a future post, I will continue to add context about my current background by alluding more to what my past education/job experiences were like, as well as some of the courses and credentials I hope to obtain for the dream job I have in mind.

Things are rather terrible for me right now which may prove to be a good thing in the long run: I have no place to go but up from this point on.