Hello and happy Wednesday Steemit friends! I hope you had wonderful week so far.
Well this post is a continuation of my story, primarily focuses on my professional life here in New York City.
He it goes! If you like it comment and tell me what you found interesting, and if you didn’t like it, comment anyway and tell me how stupid I am.
Like I said on my previous post, I come from Honduras and from a very humble and hard working family. So I always wanted to make it, to have the American dream, even though I didn’t know what it was. I wanted MONEY. Something I never really had or didn’t understand how to use it.
Well at some point in my high school I decided I wanted to be a Chef. It was actually on my sophomore year during art class. Up to this point on my life, I had always been into art, sketching mostly. Dragonball Z anime to be specific. So I thought culinary arts would be a nice transition for me. Well my junior year I got a job at Ihop, as a prep cook and also enrolled to a cooking class in high school. I thought I was the shit, I had real experience and was actually pursuing a career in the field. I quickly got a bad reputation in class, and people didn’t want to work with me. As teenager shithead and with fragile ego, I of course pretended it didn’t matter and doubled down on my behavior.
I got fired from Ihop because they couldn’t afford a part time high school kid that only worked on weekends… whatever!
Got into more classes and more jobs, and eventually found myself going to a paid school in NYC. It was expensive, and it wasn’t even a degree school. I was only given a certificate of culinary art from The French Culinary Institute, now known as the International Culinary Center. I finished it and was throw into the jungle that is NYC workplace, I got a job here and there, but quickly realized that this industry was very taxing my life and health. I had debt now, from school and was stuck in a job that I hated. I was learning a lot, but was surrounded by assholes, now I knew how my behavior felt from the receiving end. After realizing that this feeling wasn’t going to go away, I decided to get a proper education…
I went to a public college here in NYC, Baruch College. Known for accounting and finance. I started well and then not so well. I my grades started to plummet and as I got closer to graduation, it affected my qualifications for internships. I got one in wall street, and well, might as well say that I was mopping the floor in wall street… all I did there was cold call people and try to get passed the receptionist. Once I got to my target, I would give the phone to my colleague, who would proceed to a scripted pitch with the intent of getting a meeting with the trader. I wasn’t getting paid anything there, but I had to show up in suit and ties. All I had was two suits, which I borrowed money to get them in the first place. I told myself it was an investment. I couldn’t keep it up, I was not doing anything I loved or could say it was useful. Everyone there told me to watch the boiler room to get inspiration. I found it, but it was to quit and leave it behind as soon as possible.
I walked away from an internship that had no program or plan, and came out very burnt and disillusioned with wall street and finance. I quietly started to freak out because now I had no plan, no experience, no worthy connections and not so great grades. My morale started to fade, and I graduated college with a 2.8 GPA. I felt ashamed. I didn’t want to apply to any job that would ask me about my GPA because I would have to explain myself, and over sell myself. This is 2011, when unemployment was at 9%.
I went six months without doing anything other than playing video games, I gained a lot of weight and secluded myself from all social life minus my family. All friends that I had made in college got jobs and moved on with their lives. I even erased my facebook profile because I couldn’t resist myself from comparing my life with theirs and feeling like a bigger loser.
I got odd jobs here there that would pay me so little that couldn’t make any payments on my student loans, so my credit scored started to crumbled. I was depressed and of course I was taking it on everyone around me, my family.
I eventually got over that over that funk, and got a job on staff agency that eventually became a full time job as a staff accountant. I had a finance degree and even though I found accounting interesting, it was never my focus, so I never really paid a lot of attention while in class.I overplayed my experience to get that job and my boss saw that. He told me that I had to pick up the pace or I was gone, this is only three months after getting hired as full time and about eight months as a temp hire.
This is when I read poor dad, rich dad. I listened to that audiobook about five times, and I love it. Proceeded to “read” the clash flow quadrant and was forever changed. I wanted to quit my job there on the spot. I was going to buy houses to rent out and live off the income because that’s the real way to make it.... Passive income. Problem is that I am a paycheck away from broke… and my credit score is the tank.
Well I was fired, problem made even worse. Now I had another problem. How the fuck I was going eat. For the next couple weeks, I was desperate to get a job, even though a couple weeks earlier I wanted to quit my job and live off passive income. I went to interviews and some went well and other not so well, but ultimately they went to nothing. I was collecting unemployment, and living off that little paycheck. After a while, I realized that I was wanting to get back into the system that I wanted out in the first place. I wanted security and prestige I guess because I was an unstable and insecure place. But now I was 31 years old and would have to start any career from scratch, while competing with people fresh of college and willing to work way harder than me for way less money. So that was a losing battle. I still had a cash flow problem. If I was going to be a real estate investor, I needed cash and a decent credit score to get started, but more importantly I needed cash to paid for my living and now had my first child coming in a couple of months.
I was in a cab talking to a driver and he told me how much he was making… and of course that was it. This will help my cash flow problem. I started driving after a long tedious process, it took about 3 months to hit road and start earning. I was making decent money for someone whose max yearly income was only 45K a year, and that was only promised because I was fired before I could earn that much. Ultimately life caught up with me. My daughter was born and my time available for work was greatly reduced (I will write my uber NYC adventures at another post).
I worked much less and earned much less, and started to taste what it feels like being in charge of my financial future. I didn’t want to go work, I didn’t want a lot of money, I wanted to be home with my daughter, and not worry about money.
I am still driving with Uber and Lyft, and while I can make a decent money, it requires me to be in the car, driving all the time. I am still trading my time for money. As far Poor Dad Rich Dad goes, I am still in the rat race…
Along the way I discovered e-commerse and websites like shopify and how to sell on Amazon. It wasn’t until this past November that I finally got over my fears and started a Shopify store, well at least starting building the website. I made an Amazon account and sent items to be sold on the fulfill by amazon program (FBA). I made sales! I sent my video game collection that had been doing nothing with for years, and turn it into at least a learning experience. I also made an account with Ebay and sold some games there too. I even bought some items at retail with the intent of reselling for a profit, this is a called retail arbitrage. I bought clearance items on Walmart, Target, TJ Maxx, and Home Depot and sent them to the Amazon warehouse to be sold and shipped within days to Amazon prime members.
I want to get involved this even more, but I need more cash to invest and I feel I need to pay for some kind of training. I seen a lot of youtube videos of people trying to sell me their course and after experiencing what it is be doing it on my own, I am convinced that I need help, even paid help. I will document my journey here on Steemit and maybe meet people that are interested on this venture. For now, it is not my focus at the moment, cryptocurrency is. (if you can recommend a good course, please comment below)
It was mid December when my inventory on Amazon and Ebay started to dry up, and also the time when I got hook with cryptocurrency.
I usually start working at 6 am and work until I make at least $200. I was on my way to the car and I stopped at my corner bodega to get my morning coffee when I hard three guys talking about Cryptocurrency. I asked the guy and he showed me his coinbase app, and told me that the $900 he had there, was $300 he invested a couple months ago. I was floored… how the fuck? I remember watching a documentary on Netflix a couple months ago and remembered looking up the price, it was around $4,000 and now it was $15,000? huh??
I even remembered when I first heard about Bitcoin in 2013 and it was less than $100, this is when I had a shitty job after college that was paying me about $400. I quickly image where I would be if I had invested at least $500 back then… let’s just say say I wouldn’t have a cash flow problem…
I downloaded the the app, bought $50 worth of Ether and proceeded to get verified. I added all my credit cards and debits cards… in the next couple days I had invested $250, the first $50 had doubled in price… and I was jumping in one leg… I bought into bitcoin at somewhere in 18k…. Yep. I quickly learnt the reality of crypto volatility. My almost $300 portfolio went under $200, and that is when I ran to my favorite ondemand university, Youtube. I came acrosses Bitconnect, bitcoin mining and trading. I sent 150 Bitconnect, and the rest to my Exodus wallet. This is all just a little over a month ago, by the way. For every Bitconnect video I saw as testimony of how it changed people's’ life, I saw two describing it as a scam. So since I was sure what to do, I went in with a little bit, I invested only $150 and left my $50 worth of bitcoin on my desktop wallet. I wanted to start mining, so I tried to send my $50 to hashflare, but I was hit with transaction fee bomb. If I wanted to to move $50. I would have to spend $45… huh? I was learning fast… and paying for it. I sent it anyway, along a little more. I got involved with other lending platforms, Davor and Lendconnect. This is before is the bitconnect fiasco. I have double my “money” in Davor and with Lendconnect… well I got a greedy and could have 10X money, but instead was caught with the hot potato on my hands. I am still invested on these platforms and if they make money for me great if I lose everything, then it is part of my education, I am not investing any more my fiat. Might even buy some Steem power with daily payouts to be honest.
And that is how I got into steemit. I put @Trevonjm (Trevon James) as my reference in Bitconnect and I followed him on youtube. In one of his videos he talked about Steemit and how to make $20 a day easy. Well I was again floored. There is this facebook-ish thing that pays me for commenting and voting post I like anyway… let’s go! Made an account… took a whole. And here I am.
This was to show how I have grown in the last couple of years, overcomed my suffering by my own making. In many ways, I am not that much further than where I first started, but now I have an overwhelming sense of hope. I know that just like there is Amazon FBA, Shopify, and Steemit, there hundreds of little ways to make little money online that when put together can become something massive that will bring me closer to my dreams of financial freedom and stability. I fell in love with idea of cryptocurrency especially because when Satoshi was writing the code that would eventually because the blockchain, I was in school hoping to be part of the elite. Crypto, to me, is declaration of independence from that system. A movement that started after our last financial crisis. A movement that will give me and others the power to control our lives they way we want. It is not system where only a few can get a head, it is designed to bring everyone up. Steemit, more than bitconnect or even bitcoin, show me what this system can really do to benefit everyone. I am so happy to have stumbled into this website. I don’t know where I am going in steemit, but I know that if at least one person made it to this paragraph then I have accomplish something. I have successfully convey my struggles and dreams in this post and someone in this world found my story interesting and heart touching. We as people inspire to connect with others more than anything. Weather we know it or not. So thank you!
I really hope you enjoyed this as much as I did. This is exactly the way I want to write in steemit. I want to connect with people and not be guarded. If you feel the same, comment below and tell me a little about you story too. About your suffering and your learning that brought you here.
Have wonderful Wednesday and if you ever want to connect in NYC I am totally down :)
Love,
Marlon C