Summary
My name is Joe. I’m a recent engineering college graduate who works at Boeing as a quality engineer in Everett, Washington. My job is to stop problems before they happen by looking at the data. I also tell people when they can and can’t do things.
I started this blog in August of 2019 as a way to document my life after college. Now I’m using it as a way to teach myself and my readers how to win at personal finance. I want to help ambitious personal finance newbies make the right money and career choices to set themselves up to beat debt, spend wisely, and retire comfortably.
My Story
For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been frugal with my money. I’m not entirely sure why. I wasn’t exactly taught the importance of saving and I wasn’t exactly broke either. My family would always give me a little bit of money for birthdays and holidays, but I would just never spend it.
For the most part, I just kept the cash sitting in my little bank hidden in the corner of my room. I don’t recommend that by the way. By the end of high school, I already had a few thousand saved up from gifts and a few months working a part-time job.
I don’t think I started seriously thinking about money until my freshman year of college. That year I got hooked on investing. Obsessed with the idea that I could turn money into more money, I dumped my savings into the stock market…
…and it’s gone.
Half of it anyways. Mindlessly trying different trading techniques, gimmicks, “timing the market”, and oil stocks, I pretty much cut my net worth in half in the span of a few months. That was a valuable $2,500 lesson I’ll never forget: don’t chase get rich quick schemes.
Luckily for me, I learned my lesson and stayed in the market (without touching it). I then watched my net worth slowly climb its way back to where it was.
I basically doubled my money by doing nothing.
That set me on my path to learn everything I could about the “right” way to handle my money.
That’s what eventually lead me to start this blog. I wanted to document the best advice I’ve found about personal finance in a way a regular guy like me could understand. I also wanted to make it public to help out other personal finance newbies who come across my blog.
If you’re an ambitious, ready-to-learn, youngster (or boomer, no age discrimination here) who wants to set your finances straight, then you’ve come to the right place.
My Resume
I just started my industry career as a quality engineer at Boeing. I work on the 777 program in Boeing’s Everett plant. I help make planes safer, cheaper, and quicker to produce by fixing and preventing problems when building the plane.
Prior to that, I was a graduate research assistant in Dr. Kesong Yang’s research group performing computational material science research on magnetic and semiconductor materials for applications in next-generation solar cell and memory storage technology. If you want to learn more about that, click here. During my 3 years there, I published 3 papers, created data-driven conclusions for 5 different research projects, got 1st place in a poster competition at the Materials Research Society, and identified 20+ high performance materials from data analysis and machine learning tools in Python.
I also spent some time as a chemical engineering teaching assistant for process engineering lab and engineering computation with Matlab, a Scientific Advisor for a concussion prevention technology startup, and an intern at JSR Micro, a photoresist supplier who strives for quality in everything they do.
My Interests and Hobbies
I enjoy being physically active and anything that gives me a good workout including rock climbing, hiking, going for a walk, and lifting heavy things. In my college years, I was really involved with my chinese lion dance team (that’s where I met my girlfriend).
I also enjoy working on side projects for learning purposes (this blog being one of them). Some of these projects include a Zinc/Air battery and thermoelectric engine for ChemE Car, a river pollution filtration mechanism, a sleeping module designed to combat bone mineral density loss in space travel (that reached the finals of the Conrad Challenge), a self-taught AI that plays a side-scrolling fighting game on the NES, and a heirarchical meta-ensemble machine learning model that accurately predicts semiconductor material properties, and teaching myself chinese.
Besides that, I’m a professing Christian who enjoys serving/spending time with my local church and studying the Bible.