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IT’S A COMMON BELIEF that a young person’s first job is important because it teaches life lessons about work and the value of money. There’s a reason this belief is so common: It’s largely true.
Still, letting a young person loose in the world to learn lessons isn’t as straightforward as you might think. I learned the following seven lessons from my first job—some useful, some decidedly less so.
Lesson No. 1: Avoid Celery
My first job was picking strawberries.
AROUND 2,800 YEARS ago, Homer’s Odysseus decided that the whole Trojan war enterprise, in which all of Greece would go to war and destroy an entire city because a woman ran off with a guy she liked, was crazy, so he tried to get out of going by pretending to be crazy himself. The Greek allies were suspicious that their cleverest leader was really crazy, so they sent an emissary to find out.
When the emissary arrived at Odysseus’s small city state,
NEAR THE END OF 2019, just before a couple of coworkers and I headed out for lunch together, I said to them, “I’m 26% smarter than I was at the beginning of the year.”
“What are you babbling about now, Johnson?” one of them said.
“The mutual funds where I have my investments went up by 26% this year,” I said. “Clearly, I’m 26% smarter now than I was at the beginning of the year.”
“Guess you’re buying lunch then,” he said.
I TURNED AGE 62 LAST summer and, as with most birthdays at this stage of life, I had a pretty good, but non-spectacular day. On my birthdays, I tend to focus on enjoying the day itself as it stands before me and, for that one day, I don’t worry too much about the future, or all the adult stuff I have to do, or problems I might have to solve tomorrow, or the problems I think up in my head that would probably go away if I just stopped thinking about them.
WHEN SOME FOLKS MAKE the all-important Social Security claiming decision, one worry outweighs all others. Their big fear: The program’s funding will “run out” in a few years and therefore they “can’t depend on Social Security being around,” so the smart strategy is to claim benefits at 62, the youngest possible age.
This is not a big worry of mine—largely because Social Security won’t “go broke.” What’s happening to the program’s funding is that,
NOW THAT I’M RETIRED, I have more time to reflect on the larger shape of my life—a tendency that’s lately been strengthened by the fairly common impulse to ponder what to accomplish in the new year.
The disturbing truth: An objective assessment of my life suggests I’m pretty boring. Of course, I’d long known that most other people were boring. But until recently, I hadn’t realized I was one of them.
I also didn’t realize that my capacity to enjoy what looked from the outside like a boring life is,
AT A DINNER THAT I attended recently, someone pointed out that a high percentage of us were newly retired. That included me, as well as a couple who were just reaching age 60. After the dinner, the wife of the couple told me she was offended by being called retired. She’s writing fiction every day and her husband does some consulting work.
The work they’re doing pays, but it’s not by itself enough for them to live their comfortable,
Comments
Fidelity has a low S&P 500 fund that I contributed to while funding my own 401K. Upsides: low fees, easy to understand, has done pretty well over the last 12 years. Generally it's a bet on the United States economy's capacity to grow, and that's been a good bet. Downsides are that the results of the last 12 years are not a guarantee for the next 12 and though it is a broad offering of U.S. companies, they are not the whole world, and thus the fund is not as broad as might be a good idea to own. Obviously it does not afford the stability of bonds, as would a target date fund. David Johnson
Post: Fidelity Funds
Link to comment from June 22, 2024
A good, well-organized examination of this topic. This year, as I'm older than 59 1/2 but not yet on Medicare, I followed the option you describe toward the end of your article: I withdrew an amount from my IRA equal to my HSA contribution, with the goal of having the increased tax liability of the IRA withdrawal offset by the decrease in tax liability from the HSA contribution. There were ancillary factors I considered before doing this. First, I had been making incremental IRA-to-Roth conversions already in modest amounts that were capped by my desire to stay within my current tax bracket. While this is a relatively pain-free way to bleed off an IRA balance over time, as a strategy it has a drawback: I've been doing these incremental conversions for 10 years but market returns in the IRA have been greater than the amounts of my conversions. That is, my IRA balance now is greater than when I started doing small annual conversions. So, for me, increasing the amounts withdrawn from my IRA without serious tax disadvantages was attractive. Second, I did not need the HSA deduction to stay within my marginal tax bracket. Funding the HSA through current income rather than the IRA would have given me a tax deduction, but in neither case did the decision cause my marginal rate to change. There's a chance that if the HSA deduction allows significant tax savings, it would be better in a given year to fund the HSA another way than through the use of IRA money. This might be particularly true for folks who are older than 59 1/2, but not yet on Medicare, and who are getting their health insurance through the ACA. That's because the insurance premium for ACA coverage typically varies according to your income. For some people, using the HSA deduction might cut income and hence insurance premiums enough that the benefit of lower insurance exceed the benefits of reducing the IRA balance. Third, my HSA allows for various investments through Fidelity, which offers options more wide-ranging than a simple savings account. The better your HSA investment choices (and they do vary from one plan administrator to the next) the more attractive this strategy is.
Post: Roll This Way
Link to comment from August 28, 2023
I agree with you completely. In an early draft of this article--one even more wordy than this one, if you can believe it--I discussed the reason that I knew that the strawberry farm was giving kids a chance to work as a public service was that most of the volume picking was being done by Mexican migrant workers. They were in fields next to ours, and they were living in a tent camp down by the Willamette River, adjacent to the fields. Though they weren't picking in our fields, I could watch them. They were unbelievably fast and hard-working. Even their kids worked and almost all of the kids picked faster than I did. I would pick a couple of kids and try to keep up with them--you could see how many flats they were bringing to the scales. It was not easy and I wasn't fiddling around. I'd been raised to believe that a person's willingness to work hard and the ability to do it well and fast and steady over the shift were critical elements in judging a person's character. Those folks had an intense work ethic by any measure.
Post: Learned on the Job
Link to comment from July 4, 2023
One of the baby sitters for my brother and I lived down the street from us. She was about 10 years older than I was, and she had a brother who was 10 or 12 years older than she was. When her brother moved out, he left boxes and boxes and boxes of comics. Our baby sitter discovered that if she brought over a box and let us read the comics when she babysitted, we'd just sit there and read the entire time and not bother her. About half of her brother's comics were old Superman comics, mostly from the 1940s and early 1950s, I think. I don't know what happened to them, but I shudder to think how much they declined in value from the grubby little fingers of the Johnson brothers as we rifled through them.
Post: Learned on the Job
Link to comment from July 4, 2023
I did restuarant work too, starting with dishwashing. Adds another layer of amusement to watching today's celebrity cooking shows.
Post: Learned on the Job
Link to comment from July 4, 2023
I've tried to stop torturing myself about what I'd have made if I put all my money into comics. It helps that in 1979, the spring of my senior year in high school, my younger brother told me about this company that might go public soon and he thought "it might be a good idea to invest in it, if we had any money." It was a weird thing for a sophomore in high school to say. I've always taken my brother seriously when he talks about money, but I didn't come close to taking his suggestion, because at that point I'd saved almost $8,000 from summer jobs on ranches and logging crews (and comic book sales) for college. I more seriously thought about buying a house, renting out extra rooms to college students to make the mortgage, and seeing if I could find a used backhoe and go into business as a backhoe guy. Went to college instead. Not sure how the backhoe idea would have worked out, but investing 8K, as my brother suggested, in Apple Computers when they went public in late 1980 would have worked out okay. Missed that one.
Post: Learned on the Job
Link to comment from July 4, 2023
I guess I'm a geek as well. For me, a significant pleasure of retirement is being able to have the time to read up on whatever catches my attention. Thinking and learning generally cost very little, which appeals to the inner cheapskate in me, and because nowadays I get to chose what to think about, doing so is really a kind of freedom from boredom. I live close to the Cascade Mountains in Oregon. I grew up here. I finally asked myself questions like, Why are those mountains here? How old are they? Why is the valley I live in here? How did it form? Why is the valley I live in to the west of the Cascades more than 3,000 feet lower in elevation than towns like Bend and Burns east of the Cascades? Where'd 3,000 feet of rock come from? Seems like I should know stuff about the world I wake up in every day. Mountains are pretty big. A little embarrasing to live next to something that big and never ask yourself anything about it. Once I started noticing how many things around me I'm ignorant of, I realized that I have a banquet of choices of things to learn about.
Post: College in Retirement
Link to comment from June 29, 2023
What? Don't engage in resulting? Party pooper. What's next, some theory that bacon isn't good for me?
Post: Begging to Differ
Link to comment from June 10, 2023
Though not the focus of your article, I think the advice to ask parents/older family members about small things is very good advice. I think this because my grandmother had a large, framed photo in her house of a woman circa early 1920s or perhaps slightly earlier. The woman is more or less dressed as a flapper--a large somewhat floppy broanbrimmed hat, scandalously short hair, bare shoulders, bedecked with ribbons. this was a commercial photo, but not of any relation. It was a random woman. My grandmother's family were Kentucky coal miners and they moved west when she was an infant. On one leg of the journey they traveled by stagecoach. The kind pulled by horses. Her parents were essentially Victorian-era people, and they raised her that way. She was upright, in an old-fashioned sense of the word, and though not grim, firmly believed that if it was daylight on a day not named Sunday, you needed to be working at something useful, and you should work hard and fast and keep working until the job was done and then go right on to the next job. A very no-nonsense woman. The photo seemed out of character. So one day I asked her about it. She said "Oh, it was on a box of chocolates that someone gave me when I was young. I saved it because I thought she looked so glamourous." Then she gave me a completely out of character sly smile. To my knowledge she had never in her life worn a dress that exposed her own shoulders. I had the strong impression the "someone" was before my grandfather was in the picture. The brief exchange added a certain dimension to who I thought my grandma was. Grandma died in the late 1980s. The photo is in my livingroom now.
Post: Sharing the Journey
Link to comment from June 9, 2023
It's quite true that the lives of women in ancient Greece were markedly constrained, as you say. And that's even true for the women who weren't outright slaves. I think Homer's male characters are often examples of people who make dramatic errors of excess, even, or especially, when they believe they are acting in pursuit of a principle. So Homeric male characters are often petty, stubborn, reckless, self-important, short-tempered and very likely to treat women poorly. They are prone to hubris. Homer is examining the often disasterous consequences of these character flaws, so a lot of his characters have them.
Post: Plowman’s Lunch
Link to comment from June 8, 2023