$5K to Retirement In 9 Years: Year 2 “Avoiding My Problems With Exercise & Consumerism”

This is part of a series about my journey to early retirement. In case you missed it, here is the previous part:
1. $5K to Retirement In 9 Years: Year 1 “Is This Adulting?”

YEAR 2

I finished up my two weeks notice at my first job ever and was looking forward to some down time. However, that was not to be 🙂 . My first Monday of funemployment, I was working out on the elliptical at the gym when my phone rang. It was an agency I had interviewed with a while ago – and they wanted to offer me a job 🙂 .

And not just any job, but a promotion from my last position and a $48,000 salary (that I negotiated to include one month of free time before starting by saying “I was looking for $50K,” which I knew was a bit of a stretch 😉 ). The cherry on top was that this agency was way more prestigious than my last one – it’s an institution in the industry, as was the client I would be working with. After our brief negotiation, (which I did step off the elliptical for 🙂 ) they sent me the contract for the position and I had one month of freedom in front of me before starting a fancy new job!

In the meantime, we continued looking for a new place to live. We visited the apartment of one of my current roommate’s acquaintances whose own roommates were leaving, so she had open spots on the lease. We checked out the place and thought it looked fine. It was significantly cheaper than our previous place ($687.50/month each) though it was farther from downtown.

While checking out the space, I specifically asked if there’s a lot of noise in the building. The lady’s boyfriend was there with her at the time and their reaction was like something out of a sitcom. They hesitated, looked at each other, looked at me and then said “Nope” at the exact same time. I thought that was a weird reaction and pointed it out to my roommates, but they didn’t think anything of it. So we agreed to join their lease and move in shortly after that (this noise thread will come back don’t you worry…).

The week before we moved in we got some unfortunate news. (CONTENT WARNING: Violence) Someone was shot in the head and killed in their car across the street from our apartment – about 20 feet from our front door. So welcome to the neighborhood I guess… We decided to move in anyway and luckily this is the last gruesome introduction I had to a new apartment.

After moving and learning that it somehow costs more to hire a moving truck to move things a few blocks in Manhattan than it does to move between entire states, we started settling into our new digs. My partner and I continued our weird trend of having separate rooms and paying separate rents for our space. Do not ask me to calculate how much money we’ve wasted doing this in one of the most expensive cities in the world 🙂 .

And before I knew it, my lovely month of galavanting around the city and relaxing had come to a close. It was time to start my new job and I was excited for all the reasons above and because I LOVED my new boss. He was one of the main reasons I put this job at the top of my wish list. He’s amazing and we’re actually still friends to this day.

Like all of my jobs, in the beginning things were awesome because they were new and exciting! I was learning new skills (as always in this industry) and trying to figure out my place in the giant machine that was this new agency. And the cherry on top was that the team that I worked with was filled with some wonderful people.

There was also a very different vibe than I had experienced at Company 1 – everyone seemed to want to help each other instead of viewing each other as competition (which never made sense to me because we are LITERALLY on the same team…). So I met some amazing people that I loved so much that I still hang out with them as well.

Anyway, enough sunshine and rainbows. Let’s see what’s starting to fall apart 🙂 : My new apartment! There were a few things that I already knew about my apartment that I had decided were worth the 30% drop in rent. One was that the building was quite old, the floors were super creaky and my room was VERY small. It was so small that I could almost touch both walls with my outstretched hands.

The previous tenant had built a platform for the bed in my room because without it, the bed would have taken up the entire room. The lofted bed was about 4 inches away from the ceiling so I could hear our upstairs neighbors walking directly above me – it felt like they were walking on my body. Obviously, that was not the best environment to fall asleep. Also, my only window faced a brick wall. Fun NYC times 🙂 .

However, there were a few things I discovered that I didn’t know about beforehand, such as, this apartment was down the street from a music college 🙂 and that meant that it was filled with musicians who (unfortunately for me) liked to practice at all hours of the night (I told you that weird, hesitant “Nope” would come back…).

In addition to the noise, I hadn’t considered that our additional roommate and decreased space would be a cause for concern. For example, we had put up a false wall in the living room to make another bedroom and needed to orchestrate five people using the one bathroom in the apartment every morning before work, which was a headache in and of itself. These discoveries, paired with the realities of living basically in a shoebox with a band playing constantly inside of it, did not make for a relaxing living situation.

So what did I do? I exercised and I spent money. Sounds pretty harmless right? Well unfortunately, I don’t do anything by halves. I started going to the gym for a few hours after work – mostly using the elliptical. Then I started going before work as well and getting up at 5am to do so. Then I started staying at the gym and going on the elliptical for 6 hours after work. A gym worker asked me if I was training for a marathon.

I was trying to manage my stress through exercise as I had heard was a good idea, but in retrospect, I was doing anything possible to not be at home. I went to the gym, went to work, went to the gym and went to sleep just to repeat it all the next day. It was not a healthy level of exercise since I was in fact not training to be an Olympian. I was literally running away from my problems.

At the same time, I looked around at the consumer culture that’s shoved down our throats by American society and the very industry I worked in, and decided that spending money must make people happy so I should try it! I started buying expensive (and uncomfortable) purses and high heels (that I couldn’t even walk in). I bought Business Class flights across the country for Thanksgiving and to the UK for a weekend (yeah – you read that right).

And the icing on that cake was that I bought a $7,000 First Class plane ticket to the Maldives…which I actually don’t regret 😉 . I go into the full details of why in this post if you’re interested, but the fact is that despite having only $9,000 in my checking account, I spent 77% of that on one plane ticket. I was out of control 🙂 .

And of course – it’s got to get worse before it gets better. While my home life was less than ideal, I was still able to count on my work life to be great right? Wrong 🙂 . My beloved boss quit. He explained why the day he left and my jaw was on the floor. He had mentioned the situation a few times in passing, but I had no idea everything that had happened.

Basically, before I joined the team, my boss was told he had been promoted and would receive an increased paycheck to fit that new position (normal right?). He was treated as a boss, did a boss’ work and obviously hired me under him in the same job title he had come up from. Well, after six months…he had never received an increased paycheck. He was still being paid like the promotion had never happened, despite doing the work of the promotion that whole time. I couldn’t believe it.

He had been talking with HR and the SVP that had promoted him all those months ago and they had basically given him the run around, so after half a year he had had enough and quit. Unsurprisingly, when he told the SVP that he quit, we discovered that getting him that extra money he deserved would have taken one simple email from that SVP – and the SVP offered to do that to keep my boss from quitting to which my boss responded basically “Fuck you.” He was out and my favorite part of this new job had just walked out the door.

In my personal life, I finally realized I had gone off the deep end and started to get my shit together since life was falling apart on all fronts. I had had enough. This was unsustainable. I stopped exercising at all hours while basically never seeing my partner or being home. I planned dates and social outings with friends and started heavy lifting for a way to stay fit that takes 30 minutes instead of 8 hours a day 🙂 .

I started seeing people again and lifting 3 times a week while continually making personal bests, which excited me. I also began talking to my partner about the possibility of moving out and getting a place without roommates for the first time in our lives. He agreed that we should go for it. Our lease was up in a few months and we could find something new then.

Things were looking up on the personal front, which was great because they continued to decline in my work life. My boss had left and was never replaced so once again I was doing multiple jobs for the pay of one. On a larger scale, the part of the agency that I worked for was actually in a satellite office with our own space all for one client. There was some kind of childish falling out between the executives and the creative department (I bet money it was the executives’ fault…) and as a result, the creatives went back to the main office…and our job is to wrangle creatives 🙂 . They ARE the product – so we had to go to that new office all the time.

The rest of the agency basically unofficially moved there so we could actually get our fucking work done. It was so ridiculous. Months later it was announced we were officially moving to the larger agency’s space for “unrelated” reasons…riiiiight. I was just trying to do my job, not deal with children on a playground. I started to get frustrated with my new situation. Everything I loved about this job was gone: my boss, our small satellite office and our camaraderie.

I was quickly becoming over it, but luckily I recognized those signs and told myself that if this agency was turning into someplace I didn’t want to work, that I should look elsewhere. I started looking for another job – and then something amazing happened 🙂 . I got laid off.

It turns out that when I was dealing with childish squabbles, our head agency had lost one of their main accounts – one that had been with them for 80 years and apparently brought at least $50 million a year to the company. That’s a lot of cheddar! As a result of losing that client, the agency had to cut a significant part of the entire company’s staff – and I was one of them. And I was so happy 🙂 .

I had already been looking for another job, actually had an emergency fund that I had saved for this exact reason and a lay off meant I could apply for unemployment benefits! So I walked into HR smiling – which apparently freaked them out 🙂 .

Once again, I ended the year jobless and looking for a new apartment, but unlike the previous year, I had enough money saved that I had absolutely no money worries for the near future. What a lovely concept 🙂 .

So here’s where I netted out after my second year of adulthood:

Salary: $48,000

Spending: $30,000*

Net Worth: $29,545

*This spending is estimated. I didn’t start knowing exactly what I spent until 2015/2016.

So what’s gonna happen next? Will Young Purple be funemployed forever? Will she find a new apartment away from roommates? Will she become a hermit in the woods who forages for food? Tune in next week to see what happens 😉 .

Here’s the next post in this series: $5K to Retirement In 9 Years: Year 3 “Discovering FIRE And Ignoring It”