How to Have Seven Jobs and still earn less than $40,000 per year (with a baby on the way)

2012: Seriously, what were we thinking?!

Starting net worth: $6,000

Income:

Leslie: $21,400 (Leslie lost two classes, which meant an $8,000 pay cut. But, she picked up a study hall which paid $1,000)

Ben: $18,000

I (Ben) worked half the year as a long-term sub in English. My work life has become untenable. I started work at 8 am as a librarian, running to the English hall to teach five classes throughout the day while catching up on library work between classes. After school, I coached a sport for an hour and headed to the college counseling suite to help kids apply to colleges until 7pm. Four days per week I group tutored starting at 7:30pm and lasting until 9:30pm. On nights I didn’t group tutor, I worked at Kohls until 2am.

I started trading options in the hopes of replacing enough income so that I can get some sort of normal life.

Thank God, after my long-term sub position ended, I was hired to teach creative writing and journalism. This means I could quit much of the extra work!

Then we found out that Leslie was pregnant. Which was great! We had been trying for a long time. But suddenly, we needed to get out of the apartment.

How we spent money

We borrow $60,000 in-high interest loans to buy a HUD home. The house had sat empty for two years, its heating pipes had burst, and well…. it was just a wreck.

The interest rate on our loan was stupidly high (like twice the national average), but it was the only money we could get. See, no bank would give you a mortgage when the house you want to buy is, well, see above.

To get a mortgage on a house like this, you needed to be living in it, then have it inspected and appraised. So, our plan was to repair the home enough to move in on the top floor, apply for a mortgage (interest rates at this point were around 4%), use the mortgage to pay back the loan, and use the rest of the equity to repair the house.

We did all the repair work ourselves (with a ton of help from my dad, seriously I wouldn’t have been able to do it without him), and we managed to move in relatively cheaply.

How we saved money

We were budgeting harder than ever and it was failing us. It seemed like every time we think we have our expenses figured out, something new popped up and blew the whole plan to pieces.

We were still saving as much as we could, but still putting it in cash (emergency fund). I was heavily trading options by the end of the year and making a small profit. Not enough to be worth the stress of watching and adjusting your positions all day, though.

I could see that I would make more money by investing directly, but I knew of no one that had a positive view of the stock market at this point. It seemed like everyone I knew was trying to scare me away from investing.

We only managed to scrape together half of what we did last year, despite all the extra work.

Assets at the end of the year

Cash/Equivalents: $9,000 (emergency fund)

Ending net worth:

$9,000

In 2013 ($9,000 – $0,000)

Back to Income Reports

Closing Thoughts

This is where things started to turn around, but only in spirit. Really, the most valuable part of this whole year was the realization that I could make more money just by investing for the long term than I could in trading.

This was the birth of our rationality-based investment methodology (though it would take a few years to come into its own).

The first prong of our three-prong system was born.

Without that, we never would have dreamed of being millionaires.

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