Who is Max Prosper? (part two)
The Man Behind Free Range Finance
I don’t post much about myself because:
I’m not that interesting
I’m a private person
I’m not into self-promotion
However, I know most people want to hear from and about authors because it makes the content more relatable. I get that, so I try to share my own experiences in the posts. Still, I’m sure many of you are curious how exactly I learned all the advice I post!
I posted part one previously and covered my childhood. Today I’ll move forward in the timeline and address my early career before I discovered FIRE.
I am not going to list specific dates because:
I prefer digital subscribers to having an in-person fan club
They don’t matter!
Max’s Life by Decade
Born: 1980s (covered in part one)
Childhood: 1990s (covered in part one)
College: 2000s
Work (+Grad School): 2010s
Financial Independence: 2022
College
First, yes, I have a Bachelor’s degree. In the 2000s, the “return on college” was about 12%. That’s better than the stock market! That 12% is calculated by taking the college wage premium and dividing it by the cost of college. The New York Fed has an article on whether college is still worth it in 2025. I’ll go into more detail on college in a future post, but let’s just say it was a more clear cut decision twenty years ago. Tuition has since skyrocketed, but the wage premium hasn’t kept pace.
I attended a well-regarded regional private university. In other words, if you lived in the area, you had heard of it. If you lived 1,000 miles away, you probably hadn’t. I earned a sizable scholarship that allowed me to attend. Otherwise, I had been offered a full scholarship to an out-of-state public school and would have attended the free option in a rural southern state. In summary, I wasn’t debating Harvard vs Yale. I was debating more of a Tulsa vs Texas Tech.
During school, I worked three jobs. First, I was a server at a pizza joint. Second, I officiated recreational youth soccer games on the weekend. Third, I worked at the university help desk. The pay probably averaged out to $15/hr and I used it on gas and food. I also had a summer internship after my junior year at a real company and earned about $10k.
Lesson learned: I don’t like manual labor. “Thinking” jobs pay more.
First Job
Starting Out
OK, now we’re moving to the more important part of life. I accepted an offer out of school to work for a consulting firm. My starting pay was $57,000, which was an astounding amount of money to me at the time. After graduation, I had gone to Europe for a month with friends and came back with $2,000 of credit card debt, a car I owned outright, and my clothes. Zero dollars in the bank account. Remember, I had no idea what financial independence was back then!
The Good
My new job involved full-time travel, so my flights, hotels, and food were free. I moved into a 2-bedroom apartment with a friend and paid half of the $600/month rent. (This was the 2000s in an LCOL area, so $600/month was very normal.) I drove a 10-year old paid off car. I took advantage of my free food at work to bring it home and eat leftovers on the weekend.
I wasn’t trying to save money at this point. I was just lucky that my job had some nice perks and I didn’t know anything about jewelry, fine dining, or concert tickets because they weren’t part of my upbringing.
Lesson learned: swipe the company credit card whenever possible!
The Bad
I mentioned this in a previous post, but I managed to spend a small fortune on combustion engines.
I purchased a motorcycle because a friend had one. It was fun and I could afford it, but it was a terrible financial decision. Motorcycles are expensive toys for someone who already owns a car.
I purchased a Honda S2000 (used thankfully) because it had been my dream car. Remember, I was out of town 5-6 days a week. Why own a nice car?
I purchased a 1993 Honda Civic Del Sol because I was worried about door dings at the airport on the S2000. (If you’re keeping track, I now have two cars and a motorcycle and am home 2 days per week.)
I purchased aftermarket parts, stereo equipment, motorcycle gear, and all sorts of other completely unnecessary items. I later lost money selling all of these things and the vehicles themselves. Aftermarket parts usually decrease the value and are effectively worth less than zero.
Lesson learned: vehicles are deceptively expensive!
The Luck
I had zero dollars in the stock market in 2008. I never learned much about stocks and I didn’t have much money anyway. However, there was a huge crash in 2008 (maybe you heard about it?) and in early 2009 I read an article about how cheap stocks were. I took my life savings at the time ($15k or so) and put it all into Berkshire Hathaway at ~$51/share because I figured Warren Buffett was smart. Today those same shares are worth ~$142k.
Of course, instead of putting more money into Berkshire Hathaway, I bought a Motley Fool subscription and tried to beat the market for three years by investing in the stocks they told me would do well. In fact, they did generally terrible and I under-performed the market until they cancelled the “Hidden Gems” newsletter around 2012 because even they couldn’t justify nearly every pick losing money.
Lesson learned: the stock market can make you really wealthy, but paying someone to tell you how to beat the market doesn’t work.
Report Card
In four years of work, I had earned about $260k total. My net worth was about $50k. I saved roughly 10% of my salary and the stock market recovery of the early 2010s did the rest. For the average person in their early 20s, that was pretty good!
Of course, if you’re reading this, you already know 10% is pathetic. I was spending money left and right that could have been invested! I was firmly on the path to a comfortable retirement at age 65. That’s better than most, but so much more is possible. I look back at how much I could have made had I just kept my original car and invested every dollar I made in 2009 and I cost myself hundreds of thousands of dollars in today’s money to expand my lifestyle. My original mindset was: “I’ve already set aside money for savings. How am I going to spend all this extra in the checking account?”
Next Time
As you can see, there was some learning, but I was far from the path of financial freedom in my early 20s. The good news is that means there is hope for you too! It’s never too late to start. The best day to start was yesterday. The next best day is today!
When I eventually post part three of my journey, I’ll explain what changed after my first job, how I discovered the FIRE movement, and the steps I took to supercharge my finances.