I saw the student loan hit $30,000 and at that point I realized I
needed to sit back and really think about what I want out of life,
what I want to achieve and what direction I want to go before I stack
up another $30,000, $40,000 in student loan debt.
I'm Jerone Gillespie, I'm 23 years old, I live in Baltimore,
Maryland, and I make $25,000 a year.
So I'm a manager of a tax office and also I do Uber and Lyft.
This year, since I was only doing pretty much taxes, that kind of
lowered my income because, believe it or not, I actually make more
money doing Uber and Lyft a lot of the times than I do doing taxes.
The taxes got extended so I was doing that more often.
But I really like doing taxes though, because it gives me more
knowledge or human capital, so to speak, so that can actually help me
in my future more than doing Uber and Lyft can.
Seeing an eviction notice or like getting the lights or electric
turned off, it didn't really bother me because I knew that they were
going to be coming back on sometime soon.
But to me, I felt like those were just things that happened every
once in a while. Perhaps maybe that was the reason why ever since I
was a little kid, I was extremely frugal and tight with my money.
This is a nice town, has a nice scenery, but the people in that area
were very, very racist growing up.
It did definitely hurt my confidence as a person.
When you were raised there for so long, you start to think that
that's kind of just how everyone is.
And I realized that that's not really the case and that I slowly but
surely over time regained that confidence that was lost from being
there.
I was living with my girlfriend at the time and her roommate didn't
want me there, so to keep the peace, I really had nowhere else to go
because I was waiting to move in with my brother.
I had to sleep in my 1993 Firebird Pontiac.
And it was very small.
The window was broken.
So it kind of started getting cold in August and September.
I was going to class, I was working in the afternoons and I was
sleeping in my car at night.
At the end of the day it gave me a wonderful opportunity to save
money. Another thing I did to save money was I started eating once a
day. So at first I did this just to save money because I just didn't
have a lot of money coming in and I was spending money on books and
stuff like that. And I wanted to save money so I can get my own
apartment, get out the living room.
But what I did with that money that I saved on food is I started
investing in stocks and ETFs and stuff like that, so that money
started to grow. So I wasn't just holding on to that money, but I was
growing that money. And eventually I used that money that was growing
to pay down debt and other stuff like that.
I don't really consider myself as a budgeter, I don't really budget.
I just have a natural tendency to not want to spend money.
But as far as tracking things, I do try to track all of my income and
my expenses on like an income statement.
And then also I do a balance sheet at the end of every month.
I recently started categorizing my expenses and also I kind of track
how much increase and decrease each of my asset categories and
liability categories have grown over the course of the year and I
also track my savings rate.
I had, like, almost no money in the bank.
I had like $40.
That was like in 2017.
I just decided that I was never going to have less than a hundred
dollars in my bank account ever again in my life.
I just started buying stocks and I just started researching companies
and trying to figure out what I need to do to make intelligent
investments. Eventually I learned about a Roth IRA and basically the
Roth IRA was another thing that I started putting money into.
I mean, it seemed like a wonderful deal.
I love making tax-free money, so I decided just to put money in
there.
When I was in eighth grade, I was diagnosed with a heart condition
that was potentially deadly.
And the doctor said that if you exercise real hard, you could die at
any moment. So I continued exercising hard and continued living my
life the way that I wanted to live my life.
I never really thought that I would make it past high school because
in eighth grade they told me that I could die at any moment after
that situation happened.
And I actually got to the point where I was graduating high school.
I was kind of like in shock because I never really thought about what
I wanted to do after high school.
So I kind of just went into college like just empty-handed, not
really thinking about what I had wanted to do throughout high school.
I kind of went undecided.
I decided to go with Spanish because I could graduate in like two
semesters. But I just didn't feel like Spanish was really what was
going to help me get to where I was going in life.
And it just didn't seem like there would be a very good return on
investment. I saw the student loan hit $30,000.
At that point, I realized I need to sit back and really think about
what I want out of life, what I want to achieve and what direction I
want to go before I stack up another $30,000, $40,000 in student loan
debt.
I may go back to college.
I know Uber has this program if you hit 3,000 rides, they might pay
for online college for you.
So I want to see if that's real or legit and see what's going on with
that. And if they do that, I might go back and try to get an
accounting degree. But other than that, I'm not 100 percent sure.
It's very costly and I feel very confident in myself that I can build
a good amount of wealth with or without a degree.
I figured the interest rate was 3.75 percent.
I can almost guarantee, based off my calculations, to get a higher
return on investment than 3.75 percent, either with Uber and Lyft or
some other endeavor.
I plan to stop driving for Uber and Lyft as soon as I possibly can.
I want to move on to something that is probably a little bit more
lucrative and that makes a little bit more money.
I would like to actually get into software engineering and also maybe
somewhere down the line, get an accounting degree perhaps, and work
in that field as well.
I want to have enough investment income to cover my monthly expenses,
plus be able to save 50 percent of my income thereafter.
But another big investment goal is I want to buy my first piece of
real estate. Right now I pretty much have everything that I could
want and enjoy in life.
I have a family and friends that I enjoy and care about.
So I really can't have much to complain.
The only thing I don't have is just financial freedom completely, like
investment income and enough to cover my expenses, or passive income
enough to cover my expenses.
And that's only really my next goal is just to have enough passive
income. But everything else in life I pretty much already have.
The only thing that income could do is help me reach that goal a
little bit faster. Right about now I am thanking myself every single
day for that decision that I made to sleep on that couch, to eat once
a day, to live that lifestyle, so I don't have to live that lifestyle
ever again.