Telling My Friend My Salary — A True Story of Financial Education

I think it’s funny that most people always wonder how much money their friends and coworkers make, but rarely talk about it. It may just be an American thing, because in China my parents and grandparents tell anyone they know how much money they make. I think because of them I am usually pretty open about how much money I make when people I trust ask me about it, but really, very few people ask. Here’s a story of how a friend reacted when I told him how much I was paid.

So I have known this guy for more than ten years now. He was a year above me in high school and we had several classes together. We went to different colleges but studied the same major and still kept in touch online and played games together. We never really talked about money very much because finances didn’t really matter when you’re young and in school and your parents paid for most of it. Our conversations mostly consisted of him making up funny nicknames for me and random stuff. So after he and I both secured our first real world full time jobs after college he asked me how much I was paid. As I stated in a previous post I made $60,000 a year when I graduated from college. It turns out that he was making a bit more than $40,000 per year and I told him he was definitely underpaid. He was outraged and went straight to his boss for a raise even though he had been working there for about 3 months. His boss definitely knew he was underpaid because the company immediately gave him a $13,000 raise and bumped his pay from 42,000 to 55,000 per year. I think he was happy about the raise, but still a bit miffed that I made more than him and he was doing a job he hated. But now he was definitely more confident about his skills and worth, because he went on to look for a new job and got a lot of interviews, and finally he took an offer at that ginormous search company which rhymes with oogle.

So we’re still friends after that, but now he feels rich because he has a lot more income. He looked into buying a condo in 2006 because a coworker was into real estate investing. He asked me about it and I told him many reasons why I thought it was a bad idea to buy at that time. He was thinking of putting 5% down and buying a 499k condo in Fremont that was less than 900 square feet. He was throwing all those arguments such as “I will have equity” and “housing will go up” at me. Then I said to him, “You know that equity means the amount of money you have paid on a home and not the price of a home, right?” To this he replied, “What? That sucks!!” I think that at the peak of the housing bubble a lot of people just repeated what the realtors said without really researching what each of the buzzwords meant. My friend isn’t stupid, and he didn’t buy the condo. Now more than a year later he is gladly renting an apartment with a roommate and recently he told me he probably would have bought the house if I wasn’t against the idea so much. I also told him about other investments such as mutual funds, bonds, and stocks and just explained what each of them were and he realized on his own that the investment gains on a home probably isn’t more than investment gains on stocks in the long run. He bought some money market funds, treasury bonds, and stocks on his own. We both agree that we want to be homeowners, but a home shouldn’t be an investment vehicle, and the current Bay Area prices are way out of line.

Now after less than a year he is totally debt free and has saved a substantial amount of money at the age of 24. According to him he is learning about capitalism and he needs to understand capitalism to beat it. So I’m glad to see that his basic ideals has not changed by having and saving more money. In fact, he has grown much more responsible just by learning about finances.

What is the moral of this story? I guess one important thing is that you shouldn’t be afraid to discuss finances with your friends and family. You learn a lot about a person by how they deal with their money and you can also get tips on how you can manage your money. It’s also possible that you will find a friend who is really in need and an opportunity to help someone. Another thing is that twentysomethings really need to have a guide on how to manage their lives when they’re thrown in the real world. It’s pretty hard to transition the talks of fun and games to serious financial issues when you have friends that you’ve had silly conversations with for years and years. And finally there is the cliche lesson of believing in yourself, because ultimately my friend did whatever he wanted to do without compromising his values. I fed him information, and he made his own choices to save and invest for his future. My friend wanted me to write this story because he’s quite proud of where he is now, and I think anyone can do what he did if they choose to.

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