Rosskevin wrote: Mon Oct 13, 2025 9:04 pm
[moved thread to the Investing – Theory, News & General forum. Thank you to the member that reported – mod moshe]When I had a good job and salary, I knew nothing about investing and I didn’t care to learn. I was making good money and although my savings were growing nicely, I had less than $200 (no typo) in my 401k after 15+ years in the workforce. The then current employer’s 401k didn’t do matching contributions and since I was super dumb, I thought a 401k was just an alternative bank account for people that aren’t good at saving. So my thought was, “if there’s no matching, there’s no benefit to putting my money in this when I already know how to save money.”
Time passes and I get burn out and quit the cushy nice job. Now I’m at the job I’m at today. The pay is half what I used to make for lots more strenuous work, there’s no advancement path I care to pursue, it’s horrendous air quality, and it’s a waste of my expensive education. I could go on and on. However, one day, my boss asks me if I want to meet with an agent from the company that manages our workplace retirement plan. I think about it and come to the conclusion it’s a great excuse to not do any work for a 15 mins or so, so I say yea.
So I go and meet with the agent. She’s got my account pulled up (which I’ve never bothered to peek at after nearly 2 years at this job) and she goes over it with me. She shows me how much I’ve put in (by luck only because they do matching ) and then tells me how much everything is worth. It confuses me why she says “worth”, so I ask and she she points out if I look closely, I’ll see that my contributions are actually less than what the value of my 401k is. In confusion, I ask how it’s possible and she starts to explain how 401ks ACTUALLY work and then points out how much I could be projected to have if I continue to contribute.
With my mind blown, I start asking tons of questions and before I know it, over an hour has passed. I get back to work and my boss is pissed I was gone so long, but I don’t care because now I have a mission. After all this, I start reading lots of info and somehow stumble on JL Collin’s book and from there I learn how all this retirement investing is actually supposed to work. Now I’m on the right path by investing in recommended index funds and working to max out my IRA and 401k yearly instead of only putting away every cent of my earnings in the bank. It’s also helped me see why I need a better paying job again because I see I can’t contribute towards my retirement the way I want without having to severely limit my spending.
If I didn’t get burnt out, I wouldn’t have taken this job. If I didn’t have the frustrations of my current job wearing on me, I wouldn’t have met with the agent. If I was in a better financial position, I wouldn’t have cared to be more attentive to what the agent told me.
This is what amazes me. While driving home frustrated about everything today, everything clicked into place and I suddenly realized getting burnt out and having all these things take place was actually a gift. I still have a lot of time to course correct and without this gift, I’d still be completely ignorant to retirement planning and be on a path to a rude awakening.
Your story reminded me so much of the Taoist story about the Chinese farmer. You should look it up I think you’ll really enjoy it. Ties in well with the realization to had about your investing journey.
