Reply to Those of you with 200K+ jobs & are NOT doctors/lawyers: what do you do & how did you find your jobs?

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Reply to "Those of you with 200K+ jobs & are NOT doctors/lawyers: what do you do & how did you find your jobs?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP here. Thank you to all the helpful posters who responded. You gave me a lot to think about.

Someone suggested moving out of the area; I am actually considering doing that. I know that I don't have the skills for sales (or even working closely with the sales team -- it just didn't jive with my personality, which is why I left product management). Similarly, I have worked for myself as a contractor/consultant, but never made more than I am making right now.

I think if I can cut my living expenses and commuting expenses, I will be ok.

As for those in the same shoes, I completely agree about the lack of knowledge/blind, almost fervent belief in education as the answer -- I genuinely believed that getting the most expensive/prestigious education possible would be my ticket out of poverty. (To the person who asked why I paid for my master's degree: my undergraduate degree -- which I also loaned heavily for -- was in political science, so I didn't really have the option of working a great job at a company right after college that would provide generous tuition reimbursement). I still feel as if investing heavily in education paid off, in a way: I'm not living in poverty like my parents, and I actually make more money than most of my friends from back home. But I'm drowning in debt as a result, so maybe I'll move to a cheaper area. [/quote]

Also a person who came from a poor background here with working poor parents with high school diplomas.  They thought any college degree was the ticket to a good salary and had nothing to teach me about saving for retirement or financial planning.  My dad had a government job with a pension and they didn't use credit cards, know what an IRA was or do anything more complicated than balance a checkbook. We didn't even have a mortgage because my dad saved to buy land and then built a house on it himself.  The whole financial world was scary to them.  In college and grad school I choose poorly paid fields because I enjoyed them and didn't know any better.   Too bad I can't go back in time and choose better--they were other things I enjoyed in school I just wasn't raised to think about career planning. [/quote]

We have EERILY the same life- although my mom was always a secret saver and had a good hustle (worked in service industry) so she started "side saving" for herself kind of early one bc divorce was pretty obviously going to happen eventually for them (it did, so she now at least has a modest IRA).
My folks thought going to college and getting a "good job" (meaning just anything in an office setting) was the top- not the bottom. I didn't realize until I was 30 that I started pretty far behind right out of undergrad because I was home working in summers for camps and pools, not interning, since I had no connections after school it would be have been a way to get them. Luckily I was only 20K in debt from school though since I got a lot of scholarships (merit). But man, I can see the huge jump my kids get just from having that guidance- same with my DH in some ways but luckily what he "enjoyed" was engineering![/quote]

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