On Monday night I met with my financial advisor. Now if that seems like I have lots of money to invest and grow, you're sadly mistaken. My advisor is a friend of mine who I knew before he even was a financial advisor. He basically tells me where I should put the four pennies I have in the bank.
As we were finishing up some paperwork, he told me that engineers that he has as clients that are around my age are worth, on average, a quarter of a million dollars. That is, they have assets that total $250 000. I was amazed... but then I got a little sad. I'm not even worth a tenth of that. I'm like worth... a quarter in total, $0.25. In fact, a year ago, my net worth was in the negative.
I can see how some people could accumulate that wealth though. Say you work hard and graduate with an undergrad degree in engineering by 22 or 23. You immediately get a decent paying job. It doesn't have to be spectacular pay but decent. You work steadily and receive regular promotions and pay raises. You don't blow your money on frivolous things but make decent investments with your cash. Ten years down the road, yeah, that could mean a cool quarter million.
I know a few people that might be in that boat, all of them my classmates in engineering. One of them is a dude named Al. Al hailed from Kamloops I believe. He came to UBC to get his mechanical engineering degree. He had a job lined up even before he wrote his last exam. In fact, he wrote his last exam on a Friday and started his new job and career on the following Monday. He took the weekend to recover from five long years of study. Within two years he was married and had a kid. He's kept on working. Al was balls to the wall and I bet he still is to this day. Quarter mil right there.
I, on the other hand, was balls to wall in getting my degree but had nothing left or didn't want anything left after I circled my the answer on my last exam. Forty-eight hours after my last exam I wasn't reading over the new employee handbook, I was on a plane to Hawaii.
I graduated from UBC when I was 23, which should have given me seven good years of income. I only worked full-time three years of out that seven and two of those were at $12.50 an hour or less. Two years were spent travelling and dicking around. The other two were at grad school (which I do not regret).
That is not to say I'm disappointed with my current situation. I have a great job that many people would knock down old ladies to get. I'm lucky to be where I am but it's hard not to think where I might be if I had figured all this out when I was 23 and not eight years later.
As some of you know, I've been trying to renew my domain for at least four weeks now. If you're ever looking for a deadbeat, piece-of-crap registrar in Delaware, run by a divorced guy that doesn't return calls or e-mails, and runs a cat breeding business on the side, just let me know.
Anyways, last week I initiated a transfer of my domain from the deadbeat registrar to GoDaddy, the maker of fine Super Bowl commercials. Everything was going smoothly until it required some input from the deadbeat's end of things. Surprisingly, it worked, which made me think it must have been some sorta automated script that worked since I don't think that dude actually did a damn thing.
Long story short, we're good to go for another year. I think we're due for another "wang-flies" type series of posts. Go 2007!
It took some tinkering but I think I have a new commenting system! It required nuking all existing comments from the last seven days of posts but there weren't that many to begin with. All previous comments besides those have been retained. So fear not, the first time you entered a comment has been saved for eternity... well, at least until Enetation decides to go under (which should be fairly soon).
I see two chances for irony (or close to the definition of irony): no one comments anyway with the new system and I begin to get spammed by comment spammers.
I looked into fixing the commenting system tonight. Thinking it was going to take me about 15 minutes, I soon discovered I was wrong. It's going to take a bit of work and I don't have the time tonight.
Actually, the whole thing would have take five minutes if I was willing to switch to a new blog template but the ones Blogger aren't to my liking. Besides, so many people use the default templates, my blog would wind up looking at like a lot of others.
