Thank you, Brian
How my 1st summer out of college changed my life
In my last corporate job, I was an engineering executive at a Fortune 500 company. I worked 60 hours a week…every week and often more than that. I was married to my career, living an unconscious one-dimensional life.
I’m eight years removed from corporate life. After “retiring,” I began volunteering at a Charter School…I now teach financial literacy for 6 hours a week at that same school. Most of my students are, in many ways, like the kid I was…poor, living in the inner-city, and raised by a single mom. I still lived in the projects when I landed my first job out of college, at the very company I would become an executive at.
I tell the following story to my students on day one of each semester.
Here’s a picture of me. I was about 8 years old. You may notice my eyes are “unfocused” — the kids at school used to call me “cross-eyed.”
I had not seen the inside of a school until I was 6 years old. No kindergarten, no pre-kindergarten, no ABC’s or 1,2,3’s…none of that. My little brother and I had lived somewhere “down south” for the previous 3 years. Fresh off the plane, back in NYC with a deep, deep southern drawl, and it’s time for me to go to the first grade.
Dad often walked me to school. My love for walking must have started there. As we walked and talked, I remember seeing the vodka bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag in his back pocket. My first day of first grade was brutal. I cannot remember ever feeling more lost. All the other kids knew everything, I knew nothing, and no one could understand a word I was saying. To this day, my brother reminds me how I used to come home crying every day…Until I didn’t. By the end of the school year, I was at the top of my class. The merciless teasing must have produced some kind of focus in me. A focus I’m not sure I’ve ever come close to matching.
Fast forward to the financial literacy part. Chemical Engineering degree in hand, I was working alongside my all white, all male colleagues. We were young, engineering interns, fresh out of college, full of energy, and a bit delusional…at least I was. One of my colleagues, let’s call him Brian, was a nice fellow, very attractive as I recall. (He also sold me the very first car I would own and learn how to drive; a Toyota Corolla stick shift…but I digress😊)
Brian’s upbringing could not have been more different than mine. He grew up in the suburbs and his father was a finance executive. During our lunch breaks, Brian droned on and on about the stock market, 401 K plans, and stuff he read in the Financial Times.
I didn’t know anything about finance until I went to Business School many years later, but I pretended to. Every day, forever it seemed, Brian asked me when I was going to open a 401K account. I had no idea what he was talking about. Finally, weeks later, I got so sick of him asking me about it, I opened an account. The ONLY reason I opened the account was, so he would stop talking about it. Don’t ask me about my first portfolio…it was a million years ago, and I didn’t know what I was doing, beyond the basic mechanics of setting it up. It was years before I even bothered to read the monthly statements, I would not have understood them anyway. Until I did.
Maybe the catalyst was the passing of my mom when I was in my mid 20’s. Something about being parentless and husbandless woke me up, I guess. Slowly, surely, I learned; first how to read my statements, then about risk, then how I wanted to set up my portfolio. Slowly, surely. After I went to Business School, I discovered a love for finance.
But the kicker is this…Twelve years after my first lunch with Brian, I bought a house. My 20% down payment was funded ENTIRELY by the EARNINGS (not the balance) in my 401K account. Brian and I had only spent one summer working together and shortly thereafter, he left the company, moving on to bigger and better things, I suspect. I don’t even remember his last name, but I do remember thinking about him as I signed the reams of paperwork at the closing meeting. My students always ask me if I’d ever reached out to Brian to thank him.
If this article somehow makes its way to you, Brian…. Thank you.
I recently started a You Tube Channel for my students, called MoneyBossTV. It’s personal finance made fun and easy.
