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.
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.
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.
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.