Mentor

As I was driving to work this morning an old mentor of mine popped into my head.

She was assigned to be my official mentor because I was a new teacher and she was a master teacher who had taught for about 7 years at that point. She wasn’t much older than I was then, because I had taken the scenic route to decide I wanted to teach. Anyway, she taught me a lot about managing a classroom, communicating with students and parents, creating lessons and plans, and basically everything a first year teacher needs to know.

I’ve largely forgotten all of those things. (It’s amazing how fast one forgets as soon as one is out of the classroom!) The one thing I will never forget, however, is that she was the reason I began to invest in my 403b.

I don’t have the slightest clue what we were talking about that afternoon, but I remember she mentioned she invested $1,000 every month into her 403b. My eyes grew wide! $1,000!?! Are you serious? “Yea, I wanna retire some day!” She laughed. $1,000!!! That number sounded crazy to me! That means she was living and thriving on $1,000 less than I was!

Now, I definitely did not use up 100% of my income on my living expenses. No, I purposely kept my living expenses as low as I could because I LOVED to travel. In fact, one of the most compelling reasons for becoming a teacher was that I would have so much more time off to travel. I had a goal to visit all 7 continents prior to turning 30 years old and I was going to make that happen, no matter what!

That simple conversation got me thinking I needed to start investing ASAP! Up until then, I hadn’t really invested much other than an average of $844 per year which was less than 3% of my income, so not great. After I got married, I figured once he had a stable job we would turbo-charge our investment accounts so we would catch up. Needless to say, that never happened, so until we divorced my investment accounts looked sparse.

However, it was due to her words that as soon as I divorced, I made it a priority to invest as much as I could! The year of my divorce, even with all the debt I was trying to crawl out from under, I managed to invest $500. The next year: $5,420! That doesn’t even include the retirement savings the state makes you contribute! Including the pension contributions, it was slightly over $10k.

I was unbelievably proud of myself for being able to do so much on my own! And that was just the beginning! The next year, I bumped up that number to $7,650, despite not working for 6 months. The year after that: $15,650! To be fair though, that last one was during COVID so I didn’t take international trips, just short trips around the US after the travel bans were lifted. Also, it was a lot easier to invest more now that I had no more credit card debt. It took me a couple of years to clear that out and after that investing was so much easier because I had a lot of extra money that used to go toward debt.

Also, I did not do this through my main job alone. There is only so much you can cut, but there’s no limit to how much you can earn! (I did get a roommate to save more on expenses.) So I hustled outside of work! I was able to get my teaching so well planned that, unlike my first year, I wasn’t pulling 13 or 14 hour days. I was now able to work 9 hour days and leave work at work. So in my spare time, I worked side gigs. This allowed me to send a large chunk of my paycheck to my investments and use my side gig money for my travels. My side gigs funded all of my travel.

If I had been working to fund my investments rather than to fund my travel…I don’t think I would have worked as much, honestly. My motivation was being able to take off and see the world! For me, trying to motivate myself by telling myself that I’ll be able to retire at 45 when I’m 12 years away…that would’ve just made me quit that goal. 12 years! I can’t wait that long to have fun! However, putting away everything other than my basic living expenses in my retirement accounts straight from my paychecks….made me WANT to work extra to get that money for travel! My brain works differently and since I’ve learned how to work with it, I do what I know will work to motivate myself.

Anyway, I’m very thankful that E happened to mention the retirement thing that day. She is one of the many people who have positively impacted my life and I am honored to have known her.