How Did I Get Here? How Can I Afford This?
(If you just want to see how can I afford this lovely lifestyle then scroll down to the bolded section, but why miss out on a great story)
As I sit in this lovely lounge in Taipei waiting for my layover to Tokyo, I can already feel this bougie lifestyle seeping into my bones. It’s about 4:45 am here and I am wide awake. My flight from Chicago to Taipei was about 14 hours and I slept for 12 of them. Needless to say I’m wide awake, and this gives me time to get some thoughts out of my head before my 8am flight.
Before I left for my trip, I got a lot of funny looks from people when I told them that I was about to travel around the world for a year (or so) on my own dime. A lot of people thought I was bullshitting (tbh, I can’t really blame them - I tend to enjoy messing with people), but it’s the honest to goodness truth. So lets get some subquestions answered before I let y’all into my business. (Feel free to scroll down to my overall question of how can I afford this, but why not play with me?)
Q: Where will I be working?
A: No where. That’s the point.
Q: What will I be doing everyday?
A: Sightseeing, traveling, eating, making new friends, trying to find a man.
Q: Do you have an itinerary?
A: Kinda, but who knows if I’ll stick with it.
Q: Do yo mama know about this?
A: Nawwwww. I just up and left. Of course she knows! And she’s kinda supportive, in theory.
Q: Ok Pat, stop messing with me. How can you afford this? I know good and well that little job you had in St. Louis didn’t set you up like this.
A: Don’t count my money, it’s unbecoming. I’ll try to explain this in full.
How Did I Get Here?
After I graduated college in 2015, I found myself without a job. This was due to a lot of reasons: protests, mourning/depression, denial. Subsequently, I found myself sleeping on an air mattress in a friend’s spare room for the summer. She was a trooper and let me stay there if I paid my share of the utilities. It was a pretty sweet deal overall tbh for other reasons too. Around this time, a few other friends of mine had won some “hack”/computer prizes giving them a decent amount of money, and I said “I know these niggas and I REFUSE to believe that they are that much smarter than me.” So I decided then and there to go into tech as a career.
I spent the summer learning “to code.” I put to code in parenthesis because I wasn’t learning to compile anything. I was learning basic UX/UI but what did I know. Eventually I got decent enough at HTML/CSS and Java and I took a test for a local “get people into tech” service. I kinda failed the test, but the tester asked me if I even liked coding and my answer was a stale faced “no.” So I went back to being super jobless. Around this time, my friend who was letting me stay on her mattress had moved to a smaller apartment and I was back in Chicago. This was around Auguest 2015.
For a multitude of reasons, nothing in me wanted to be back in my mom’s place in Chicago and I feel into yet another depression. However, this time, instead of it stemming from mourning, it stemmed from an immense feeling of personal failure. How could I have spent all that time at Wash U and came out of it with no job? How could I have spent all that time protesting and organizing and now I can’t even stand to be around direct actions? How did I left myself get here, I’m literally Patrick Easley. I decided to look around Linkedin to see what I could find and those good ol’ college connections paid off!
I found my old entrepreneurship professor on Linkedin and I stalked the HELL out of his page. That led me to see to the page of Jim McKelvey, one of the cofounders of Square Inc, and my future boss. After googling Jim, I found out that Square was hiring for its new St. Louis office and I decided to apply. What did I have to lose? This happened in late September 2015.
To be completely honest, I had no idea what I applied for. I read a description for a “Compliance” job and it looked similar to some work that I’d done before. I sent in an application, a week late I had an in person interview and a week after that I had a job and I was back in St. Louis. They wanted me to help start the department in STL and who was I to say no? My life turned around pretty quickly if I must say so myself!
Now it’s really time for me to explain how I can afford this. Promise.
How Can I Afford This?
(tl:dr. Stock)
After I got the call telling me that I got the job, the recruiter sent me an email telling my how my pay works. I won’t get into my personal details but I’ll try to give a general overview. This is a very simplified rough overview my offer from Square (I change the figures), and this is pretty much the standard at most tech companies:
Pay: $XX/hr or $XX,XXX/yr (I deff wasn’t making over 40k cash a year my first year)
Equity: X shares, vesting over 4 years.
Now, you’re saying, Patrick, there’s no way that you can afford to travel around the world off a less than 40k a year salary. I don’t care how cheap St. Louis is and you would be absolutely correct! Even after a handful of pay raises, I don’t think I ever made more than $55,000 a year cash? I honestly don’t know. I just knew that I had money in my bank account and that all my bills were paid.
But here’s the kicker! Every time I got a compensation, I also got a stock increase that I totally ignored! So let’s say that they’d give me an extra $2 an hours, they’d also give me an extra X shares vesting over four years (this is only illustrative). New pay increase, more stocks that I ignored. Apparently I was supposed to be ok with the low pay because I had a large amount of stocks, but because I always ignored the equity (another word for stock) I was just living off my hourly rate. Also Square let me work a huge amount of OT from home, which certainly didn’t hurt.
Around January 2018, I was pretty comfortable. I knew I had some stocks but I never thought much about them. Then one day I looked at my brokerage account and it really hit me how much I had. Now I won’t say that I completely ignored the ever growing account, but I never thought of it as mine. I know it sounds weird, but life is fucking weird. I don’t know whose I thought it was, but there it was. I was 24 years old making ok money, but I had a good amount to my name, and I was ready to spend it.
I decided that for my 25th birthday that I would convince some of my friends to go to Tokyo with me. I could afford it and it would be a good time. Then I said, well if I’m going to Tokyo, I might as well go to Osaka/Kyoto - Japan’s not that big! Then I said, I have a friend in Seoul, so might as well go there. Then I said, I have a friend in Nanjing, and I know he’d show me a good time. Then it hit me. Why don’t I travel around the whole world? I could afford it. I’d been at my job for a few years and I’d done a lot (by the end of my time there I was over BTC Compliance Operations for the Cash App). And I said that for my 25th birthday, I’d quit Square and travel around world and here I am. In Taipei, eating some onion rings in an airport lounge, waiting for my connecting flight.
And that’s how I got here. Cool, huh?
Eventually I’m going to write more about some of my economic thoughts on income inequality in the U.S., and if a how person on the lower end of the totem pole could make enough money to travel around the world after working for a few years, then how much are people truly making in silicon valley compared to the rest of Americans, or even better how much better the economic outlook of the average American could be - but for now I’m going to enjoy the ride and try not to let my cynicism ruin this trip for me.
Wish me luck!
(thumbnail credit: frankie cordoba)
