Responsible People Have Pockets

Origin Story

Once upon a time, on a warm New York City evening in 2001 I went out to play basketball in Riverside Park. I was fifteen but well behaved enough (usually) to have a flexible curfew, and got home around midnight. When I got home, it dawned on me that I'd forgotten my keys. Not realizing how late it was and that my family might be asleep, I rang the door bell. When no one answered I rang again. And again. And again. This went on for what felt like twenty minutes with no response. Kids didn't really have cell phones at this point, so the little squeaky doorbell was my only option.

Eventually, my dad answered the door, three quarters asleep, his hair pointing in every direction imaginable, with a very perturbed look on his face. I said I was sorry for waking him up and explained that I hadn't planned to be out so late so I didn't bring my keys, plus my basketball shorts didn't have pockets so where would I have kept keys anyway.

As my winding excuse concluded, his eyes suddenly widened and he said one short sentence to me that I will never forget:

"Responsible people have pockets."

At the time I thought it was the most absurd thing I'd ever heard. I joked about it with my friends to no end and to this day look for ways to slip it into conversations with my dad (he doesn't get why it's funny, but he's a good sport). However, as I've gotten older and a little less stupid, my view on that fateful night has changed dramatically. Whether he meant to or not, my dad gave me a priceless kernel of wisdom. It just took me fifteen years to figure it out.

Though my understanding has evolved over time, what it means to me right now has nothing to do with being scolded for getting locked out of my apartment. As I write this, my latest thinking is that it means being successful requires forethought and planning, and that choosing to not do that is irresponsible. In life, if you can get your hands on a key, grab it, and hang on to it safely in your pocket. If you don't, you might not be able to get through the door of where you want to be in life. See what I did there?

Before I try to convince you of the transformative effect this has had on me, I should confess something - I'm a TERRIBLE planner. In fact, a lot of times, I don't plan ahead at all. My natural inclination is to be a disorganized, all over the place goofball.

I doesn't come naturally to me to plot out a long course with steps and milestones and all of the other things smart, organized, successful planners employ. I tend instead to focus intently, exhaustively, and exclusively on the one thing right in front of my face at that moment. My wife likes to say that I'm a lamp with no dimmer switch. I'm either all the way on or all the way off. I'm so bad at multi-tasking and balancing a lot of competing priorities that I don't even try to do it anymore. I've been able to become a functioning adult because I make lists of actionable tasks, complete them in sequence, and then move on to the next one. Successfully splitting my mind up to handle a bunch of things at once just isn't going to happen for me, but when I have something defined to attack with full effort, I can be pretty effective.

Which brings me to the why I'm writing this blog today. Over the last few years I've developed a growing passion for something I never thought I'd care about at all. In fact, it's the type of thing that probably would have earned an eye roll and possibly a smack in the face from a younger version of myself.

PERSONAL FINANCE!!! 

Wait, where did that come from?

I had a great math teacher I had in high school who taught us about compound interest one day. I was way more interested in talking to the cute girl sitting next to me, but vaguely recall being surprised by how much higher the the final number was than what I would have guessed given the very low interest rate. Someday when I had more than a couple hundred bucks in my bank account I'd need to figure out how to take advantage of this neat trick.

When I went to college, thinking that it was the responsible thing to do, I joined the other lemmings in an intro micro/macro economics course. I hated it deeply and to my core. What was taught was dry, boring, abstract, and theoretical. I couldn't tie any of those charts to my reality so I just kind of plugged my ears, did just well enough in the classes to pass and happily moved on to more interesting things.

Even though economics just didn't click, for as long as I can remember, I've been pretty good at math because it seemed like a great way to understand and bring order to so many things happening in the world around us that were otherwise hard to explain. The more I learned, the more it seemed to me that if you understood how basic math worked and could apply it properly, you could make more informed decisions, both large and small, with a higher probability of success.

I graduated college in 2008, just before the great recession hit. Couldn't plan on that, right? Let's just say employment opportunities weren't a plenty during that time. I struggled to get even informational interviews but eventually found an internship with a tiny tech company in New York City. It didn't pay at first, but with a lot of late nights, a relentlessly positive attitude, and a healthy dose of lucky breaks it soon became a full time job in early 2009. For the first time, I had some money coming in, and since I was living like a broke college student at my dad's house (with no debt - more on that in another post), I was actually saving a lot of my still meager salary.

What was I to do with that money? Now that I had pockets and there was actually something in them, I remembered my dad's advice. I also remembered my math lesson on compounding interest.  I had a checking account with 0.01% interest, which is pretty typical these days. I ran the numbers. That didn't seem like a good way to grow my money unless I was going to live another ten million years.

Coincidentally, a very forward-thinking and generous relative had quietly set up a small taxable brokerage account for me when I was an infant and put a little bit of money in every year. As a newly minted "adult", it was suddenly revealed to me that this account existed and I was given access to it. After I finally figured out what an SSN was and logged in, I learned that it was all invested in Fidelity's Puritan fund (FPURX) fund, whatever that was. More importantly, I saw how much a small initial investment had grown over nearly twenty years.

The lightbulb went on for me that day, and ever since then I've made it a mission of mine to grow that little stack of bucks any way I can. To me, having more money means having more options. Options like buying a house, land, cars, yachts/kayaks, to investing in education and new hobbies, to traveling the world. What's most interesting to me, though,  is earning my freedom from needing to work for others to earn money. That doesn't mean I don't love working, but if I could choose what I wanted to work on, how much time I wanted to spend doing it, and where I wanted be be while doing that work, that would be pretty awesome.

I've already learned a lot of important lessons along the way, many of them by making mistakes, but it's been a fun and successful ride overall. This site is all about sharing the things I've learned with you so you can benefit from what I've been through and so that we can learn new things together.

In future posts, I'll try to cover everything I've found really useful in my journey so far. I'll write about how my investing strategy has evolved over time, things you can do to reduce your monthly expenses, how you can travel for free using credit card rewards points, and much more. I'll try to break it up into short, broadly applicable, and actionable tidbits whenever I can so you can read what interests you, and skip what doesn't float your boat.

Most importantly, I want to hear from you along the way. If there's a topic you want to learn more about, I bet a lot of others are in the same boat, myself included!

Thanks for stopping by. Let's start stacking!

Buck Stacker