Passion over Paycheck: Asher’s economic profile

Passion over Paycheck: Asher’s economic profile

Grace Wong

From selling candy at an amusement park, manning a cookie stall, to accounting at a tech startup, at twenty-five Asher has held a wide variety of jobs. Besides single-handedly tutoring me through three years of honors math classes, I was interested in Asher’s perspective on millennial financial dreams, work-life balance, and investing in human capital. Despite only being seven years older than me, Asher offered a fresh perspective on pursuing passion over paycheck.

Asher spent the first twenty-one years of his life in sunny Santa Cruz, CA in his family home, taking classes at his local community college as a ceramics major. He would later change to a music major before settling on a math major. After three years of community college, Asher transferred to UCLA where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. During that time, he worked about twenty-five hours a week and his parents helped him with rent and tuition. While initially his parents had committed to paying for half of UCLA, they ended up paying for all of his community college and UCLA, which he notes was “amazing.” Having been able to put all three of their children through college without serious economic burden, Asher views his parents as living solidly middle class lives. While Asher is still very much still in the building stages of his socio-economic class, his childhood and upbringing, I believe, have helped have the tools to build a similarly successful economic future for himself.

In comparing his parents’ lives at twenty-five and to his, Asher sees himself as further progressed in terms of economic and educational progress. While his Christian pastor father and teacher mother both have post-bachelor’s degrees, they are not as high paying as his specialization in math and computer science. Asher’s outlook on his economic future reflects the fifth economic principle, choices have consequences that lie in the future and reshape what's possible, as he predicts he will “be making more money than they will make in their whole lives.” His assertion is not unfounded in looking at BLS data compiled in Figure 1 and Figure 2: the average salary for a computer programmer comes in at $77,550 as of 2014 whereas median household income for the U.S. is just shy of $57,000 as of 2015. While we did not talk about the exact values of his parent’s annual income, on the assumption that they fall into the median household income range, Asher’s economic future and educational progress does look brighter than his parents.

Figure 1: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

Figure 2: http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/computer-programmer/salary

While Asher may have the economic advantage over his parents given his human capital in math and computer science, Asher places a lot of value in his parents’ religious community. He remarked, “religion gives you a sense of purpose and makes you overall a lot happier because you are connected to your community. [My parents] were really finding themselves in religion at this point in their lives.” While he is a generally happy person, as an agnostic, he is sometimes frustrated and annoyed by the world around him. Asher, alone is not losing religion, but overwhelmingly millennials are becoming increasingly secular, and what that means for his and my generation is unknown. If religion, indeed, is a key component to happiness there may be an emerging demand for community-building spaces and activities.

Asher has held all sorts of odds and ends jobs from working at a candy shop in an amusement park, to working as a camp counselor, working in retail at American Apparel, to and suppling ping pong balls to patrons at a ping pong shop. When he first moved to Portland, he worked for Mathnasium, a math tutoring center, for twenty-four hours a week at $12/hour. With the time-cost of taking the bus out to Mathnasium, and the hours they had him work, the gig was less than ideal and he relied on food stamps for about nine months. Afterwards he worked at MobileMinds Tutoring that he calls ‘corrupt’ as they failed to pay him for months; he supplanted his income by working at a farmer’s market selling cookies. After Mobile Minds Tutoring went bankrupt, Asher moved to Fibersphere, a tech startup that provides internet to individuals around the Portland area. While there he says he ‘wore multiple hats’ due to the small staff of eight, working at Fibersphere wasn’t his passion, “I could have gotten promotions and raises but I didn’t want that and I didn’t invest myself fully in that job.” After saving up about $5,000 he quit his job and enrolled full-time in the computer science grad-prep program in pursuit of a graduate degree in computer science.

To pay for Portland State, he has taken out $12,000 worth of student loans and says that it was the biggest economic decision of his life. While going to community college and UCLA were large financial decisions, they were major decisions for his parents, not him. The largest economic decision for him was weighing the opportunity costs of staying at Fibersphere or investing in his human capital. While he has decided to pursue a computer science graduate degree, his decision has come with some economic fears: “One of my legitimate fears is that the computer science field is booming and I think very soon it’s going to become saturated. You hear about all these amazing CS jobs and it sounds like a thing of the past. Something that I’ll be telling my children, anyone with a computer science degree could get any job. And soon computer scientists will have to be exceedingly intelligent to get basic jobs. So my fear is that the field I am going into and making an investment in, is no longer going to be as economically booming as it is at this moment.” The boom in the computer science field reflects individuals responding to incentives in predictable ways; the wealth of articles and media attributed to the promise of technological fields has led to young people, like Asher, flocking to gain expertise. Not only is the field promised to pay well, tech firms like Google are renowned for stellar work places, and it is no wonder that Asher has some fears in investing in computer science. His fears are founded: in that the last ten years there has been an increasing demand in the technology industry for computer science specialists. Knowing the laws of supply and demand, it is logical that the demand for computer science specialists would lead to an increase in supply. The supply and demand curves do come to an equilibrium over time, but given that attaining the specialized skills to meet the demands of the tech industry do take time, it is less clear how much supply there is. Over time, surely, as Asher asserts the most innovate, intelligent computer scientists will be successful and the industry will become increasingly competitive as supply increases. While Asher will probably get a good, professional job after he finishes his graduate degree, he can certainly expect to be going into a competitive field.

Currently, fellow senior and math-struggler, Grace Masback, and I are his only sources of income. At $50 an hour, between Grace and I, Asher makes about $600 a month; a wage he views as unlivable. He broke down his monthly expenses:

-       $360 for rent

-       $70 utilities (gas, electric, water, internet)

-       $40/week on food = $120 per month

-       $50 odds and ends expenses

While he says "I could not die off of this, I would prefer a little bit more.” His view of a livable wage? $1000 per month. At $600 a month, his annual salary clocks in at around $7000 a year putting him in the first tax bracket of 10%, and so he gets most of his money back. Last year, while working at Fibersphere and tutoring, his monthly income was about $950 and his annual income of a little more than $11,000 put him in the second tax bracket. He remembers “Last year, I owed money which hurt a little but it was okay. Everyone should pay taxes and it wasn’t a burden and it was like okay I’ve done well enough this year that I have to pay into the system.” 

Looking at Figure 3, he is well below the median salary for males on the West Coast, however given his current ‘building’ stage of his economic status, he should be able to exceed the median income in the next five years.

Figure 3: http://www.economagic.com/em-cgi/data.exe/cenincome/MdMcWE

In the future, Asher hopes to have a family he can support, to own a car, and have some savings. His first economic priority will be paying off his student loans, which he plans on starting as soon as he starts graduate school. While he could imagine living in a commune with a bunch of families, he will probably own his own house. His primary goal is to have a mild amount of economic freedom, “I’m not looking for a nice house or fancy car, I would prioritize my own mental health and free time. My dream is to be able to retire when it’s time and to have the things for my lifestyle, which is pretty basic: family and some transit. $60,000 a year would be way more than enough.” I was surprised by this– as someone going into the computer science world, I did not imagine that $60,000 would be sufficient and was equally surprised by his commitment to his own hobbies, mental health, and free time. While he has not started saving for retirement yet, he does believe it is important and will start at some point. While currently he is certainly well below middle-class in terms of income, the fact he can imagine and plan for saving for retirement speaks volumes about his socio-economic foundation. Given his age, there are not as many social inequality factors that are immediately apparent in economic profile; however, many people with Asher’s same current income will never be able to save for retirement. The fact that he has the luxury of being able to quit his job, take out over $10,000 in loans, and plans on saving for retirement speaks to a level of socio-economic privilege.

His advice to young people? “If you are going to go to college, choose a degree you want.”  In reflecting on his own experience, he was grateful for his time in community college as he pursued his various passions from music to ceramics to math. By giving himself the time between high school and UCLA, he discovered what he really wanted to do in life: math and computer science. He advised me to think about my future not only in terms of economics and what others expect of me, but what excites me and gets me up in the morning. In conducting our interview and delving in to the economics of Asher, I was inspired by his commitment to investing in himself; the choices he has made and his economic dreams reflect intentionality in preserving a healthy work-life balance and pursuing authentic passions. Given his commitment to his passions and interest over his paycheck, an image representing Asher includes things he enjoys: playing the guitar, listening to music, riding his bicycle, going to school, and spending time with those he loves.