Okay, throwaway, because a little lot too close to home. My parents were both smart, but not even close to well off. My father had a passion for music that he didn't follow because his father said that a music degree would be useless. He got an English degree that turned out to be equally useless. (He worked on Capitol Hill as a speechwriter for a brief period and then quit because he couldn't take the stress of almost being severely late due to BS traffic on the beltway.) Keep in mind, this is before cell phones, and he had a presidential candidate's speech with him for a speech that had to be delivered shortly.
He went into real estate but went about it like a kind genuine human being rather than a businessman (my father is in some ways a better man than I will ever be, which is one of the few things I feel ashamed of in my life). He would give up half or more of his commission to help a broke family buy a house in what was almost a ghetto in the northern Virginia area close to DC, and make practically zilch on the deal. His coworkers wouldn't even touch those deals and wouldn't ever put part of their commission on the table, and only dealt with $400k+ home sales.
My mother was an emotional and psychological mess due to a rape when she was a child that her father covered up because those sorts of things didn't happen to decent families and never allowed her to get any kind of counseling for or even acknowledge it.
When I was in elementary school, I would walk home from school and not know what to expect when I got home. Would we have power? Maybe. Would we have water on? Maybe. No one would be home of course, so I would let myself in and cut on the TV (assuming we had power that day). (A 13" Lyntron with bunny ears.) Before that, I remember standing in the line with my parents for the big tub of peanut butter (food assistance).
I'd usually see mom within a few hours of getting home, after she got off work at Walmart. Most days (sometimes weeks) I wouldn't see dad, because he was working 16+ hour days and gone before I was up in the morning and home after I was in bed. (Later, mom wasn't even able to cope with holding on to a Walmart job, and would lock herself in their bedroom and cut herself.)
I decided at an extremely young age (about 7, I think) that I would not put my family through that. That I would find a way to earn a living and still be home when my family was awake.
Okay, all of this is backstory. And I realize it's a somewhat significant one. The key takeaway up to this point is that I know what it is to be broke. I know what it is to not have food to eat, or electricity, and be worried about the rent. (We actually lived with my grandmother for a few years before she lost the house.) But what that did for me was light a fire under my ass.
I took to computers pretty early. Started programming on the Apple IIe around 4th grade (through a school Signet education program). Later, we bought a Kaypro knockoff of an IBM 286 used from another family. I was completely isolated in school as a poor kid with 10+ year old hand me downs from my dad's friend's kids, but the computer did what I told it to, if I said it right.
I knew to a certainty that I wanted to be a programmer by the time I was 8. I studied programming in essentially all my spare time. Fast forward to sophomore year of high school, and I got Lyme disease, only the doctor didn't diagnose it, despite the classic Bulls-eye rash. Went to late stage 3. I had insomnia so bad that I could go 8 days without sleeping. Didn't mean I wasn't exhausted, but I couldn't sleep. Then I would, for 36 hours.
Taught myself assembly language during that time. Not much you can do when you need to be quiet because the rest of the family is sleeping.
I failed out of high school. With the Lyme disease, I managed to make it to school about once a week. Now mind you, I was pulling down a 4.1 GPA with AP classes, but I lived in VA, and they had a state-mandated minimum number of days of attendance for a year of schooling to count. No medical exception or waiver.
So that meant that despite pulling a 4.1 GPA, I would have to retake my Junior year and then pay out of pocket for my senior year of high school (which is insanely expensive, apparently, if not paid by the state, like 30k+ per year). Yeah, we didn't have that money.
So I said "fuck it", and dropped out, and took my fucking GED, and scored in the 99th percentile. Which didn't mean shit. Because I couldn't afford college. College had been a dream based on a great graduating rank and SAT score (I had a 1430, back when it was a two-part Math and English test), hoping for scholarships. No one gives a fuck about a GED though.
I gave up on anything real, and went full time at Staples (hell, I'd been pulling 34 hours a week since I turned 16, and signing my paychecks over to my Dad towards the rent).
I decided to try to make something happen, and went to an AFCEA TechNet job fair in DC. Happened to meet up with a lot of recruiters, all of whom knew the chorus: "Degree?". Nope. Nope.
One guy was impressed by the degree though, a Director from a major defense contractor. They had a software system for the Army Signal Corps that was about half a million lines of C code, and ran dog-shit slow. He saw the assembly language on my resume and thought maybe I could speed things up.
Long story (somewhat) short, they set up interviews with me and three other candidates, and all three other candidates canceled or no-showed. I got the job.
I was a complete retard with how I managed my money. I didn't know what the fuck to do with making $40k/year at 18. I bought silver chain necklaces, played pool, got drunk (the local pool hall bartender somehow thought I was over age), and generally acted like a dipshit for a while.
A year goes by, I'm doing great, I buy a house on an FHA loan, helped by my father in real estate. And then the .com bubble comes crashing down.
18,000 people got laid off in that same week in that area, myself included. The few open positions had people with a decade or more experience on me willing to work at the same wage just to have a job. I had no chance of finding anything. I lost my home to foreclosure and moved back in with my parents. I had to get rid of my dog (a German Shepherd, only a few months old) because he was too hyper for my mom to deal with. I had to drop him off at the shelter myself; It broke my heart.
I decided it might be time to try to go back to school, because I sure as shit wasn't going to get a decent job anytime soon. I managed to land a job and enrollment at a Texas state university. It was supposed to be 20 hours a week for the job. I enrolled for 21 credit hours of hard math and science (Calculus and advanced CS courses and such).
I finally get to meet with the school Management and Information Systems department manager to discuss the position I had been told I had. At which point I was told that "well, we've reworked the position, and it's now 40 hours a week full time, and it's take it or leave it". After I had moved 2,000 miles cross country for this job and school.
I had no other means of support, so I took it. I made it through about 3/4ths of the first semester and then collapsed under the weight of 40 hours a week of work and 21 credit hours. I'd been trying to go on 4 hours a night of sleep for months, but it just wasn't enough.
The department head fired my boss for reasons that I will probably never know. (She was awesome, that was probably the problem.) He then wanted me to complete a project that wouldn't have been any real problem given proper time.
He sent me a PO to review for a server purchase for an upcoming project. I made one small revision, substituting hardware RAID-1 of smaller drives for the single large drive he originally had spec'd. He then sat on the PO for a couple months.
Long story shorter, when the hardware finally arrived there wasn't time to do the job right. He left me with about 5% of the time I told him it would take. I cut every corner I could and rushed it. Open enrollment started and the Web For Students came crashing down.
He tried to hang it around my neck but I refused to wear it. I made him stand tall in front of the dean. He waited 7 months until I got sick as a dog. I called him each day for 3 days telling him that I wasn't going to be able to make it due to illness. He claimed he never heard from me and terminated me due to job abandonment.
I was forced to move back in with family again. Initially it was a relief, but then the housing market collapsed and my father's real estate company went under. So I had to get real, and start earning.
I got a defense job I utterly hated. It earned. I went from that contract to another one that I despised, where I was converted to full time. I climbed the ladder through a series of promotions that I later came to regret accepting.
Because apparently there is a character limit on posts, and I am guessing I'm straining attention spans, I'll skip forward a bit.
After bouncing through a few dead-end positions, I landed a position with a company that I work for today, despite my best intentions.
I am 34, have a completely paid off house worth ~$115k, around ~$100k in my 401k, roughly $45k in vehicles, $40k in my IRA, $50k in a non-advantaged brokerage account, and about $15k in checking.
I have a long way to go. But I'm getting there. And if I can do it, so can you. And if we are both really lucky, it will have been worth it.