I wake before dawn each morning and stumble out of my warm bed and into the cold morning for money. I leave my wife and kids for most of the day in its pursuit. I give the best hours of my life to a corporation in exchange for it. And then at the end of the week I don’t even get to lay my hands on the money I’ve been working for. I don’t get to see it or feel it in my hands. Instead, it’s ushered away where I can only access and confirm its existence through a screen. Small black numbers on my smart phone signify what I can and can’t do in life.

Money.

The word rolls off the tongue in the English language in a gentle two syllable tone. It’s a light word with a heavy meaning. This ancient invention we use to transact for services and goods never feels dull or old. It means so many things to so many people that it can be hard to describe. Is money good or bad? Like love, money evokes emotions that can make humans act irrational. Like a drug, money can become addicting and all consuming. Everyone is a fan of money. Maybe not spending money, but getting it is a universal human pursuit.

From an early age I knew I had to make money in my life. I teach my daughters the same thing. They are old enough to know that going to the store to acquire goods isn’t free. They know that the home they live in costs money. And they know that their parents get up and leave each day to get this “money” so that we can survive and maybe have some nice luxurious items too.

If you count my first job at a car wash at 16 years old, I’ve been doing things for money as an adult for 24 years now; a quarter century…and I’m getting tired of it. My first high school job I made a California minimum wage: $5.75/hr washing cars after school in 1999. In the Navy, back in 2001, I made around $1,042 a month as an 18 year old E-1 . As a 1st period carpenter apprentice I started out at $19/hr in 2005. And its continued its upward trajectory since.

While the wage of a carpenter has been good, the struggle in my 20’s was getting enough hours to make that a full 40 hours–the roughest patch being the 2008-2010 times, 25-28 years old.

As I work my way through 2023–money wise–I’m realizing that I’ve reached a point in my life where I have reached a confluence of experience, opportunity, net working, and self education. With this combination, money has never been easier for me to deal with. It’s as if tiny streams in my life that have been going in different ways and directions for some time have combined to become a single river pulsing through the country side with a swift current heading out to sea.

Inertia from 24 years of making decent (by no means perfect) decisions is now behind me, thrusting me forward. I’ve made the right sort of connections in my industry. I have decades of experience to back up my current position. And I’ve moved companies around just enough to push my salary upwards beyond what I would ever have expected ten years ago. I didn’t go crazy taking out loans for new cars or toys or home improvements in the previous two decades. I currently have no debt but my mortgage. To top it off, I’ve spent hundreds, maybe thousands of hours listening to financial podcasts, reading books, and blogs about investing methods, personal finance, and interviews with successful people.

All of this has come together in a perfect storm of wealth generation.

Personally, I could have never experienced this perfect storm in my twenties or early thirties. For me, it took time to gradually build up to where I am. And so now my late thirties, nearing 40 this year, seems to be, not just peak earning, but peak wise money decision making.

All of this comes with a trade off of course.

I’m not as young as I used to be. I have a bunch more responsibility that wears on me in unhealthy stressful ways, my grey hairs and anxiety issues can attest to that. People say millennials have had it tougher than most generations when it comes to wealth generation, but I more than beg to differ on this opinion. I believe millennials have had an extreme advantage over other so called generations.

The Great Recession of 2008/09 was tough, no doubt about that. But that recession taught me so much about money and risk. I did get laid off in that recession, and struggled, but it was for the greater good. The recovery was a fantastic opportunity to get money. The period of deflation and low interest rates that followed allowed a huge bull market to last a decade, allowing millennials the opportunity to invest in this raging stock market. Buying a home between 2011 and 2021 was a win. Anyone who did so is enjoying a low interest rate on their mortgage, gigantic equity gains, and a locked in pre inflation mortgage rate.

I’ve also had the good fortune of living in the Bay Area where the economy has been booming for some time, and still continues to thrive despite all the out of touch news stories and media about San Francisco and remote work.

So millennials have had it good if the right choices were made, like simply investing something, anything, into the stock market during the good times was likely to have a great outcome. While the 2020’s have yet to play out, I find it hard to believe that it will be better than the ‘teens when it comes to ripe personal finance conditions. Looking back, the late 90′ and early 2000’s were tougher time for those older than me, taking into account the lost decade and then possibly losing a home during the real estate market crash.

It takes years for some people to get their money making machine humming at optimum performance. I don’t take my situation for granted only because I’ve struggled the past. Not too far down my family line is poverty. Some of my grandparents swam across the Rio Grande for better things, worked the fields of California, and that keeps things in perspective for me.

At some point in the near future this money making machine will slow down and be decommissioned. What took two decades for me to accomplish and achieve will be unplugged, dismantled, and taken out to pasture.

It’s kind of sad to think about. But exciting as well. To keep holding onto a job that one no longer needs simply for the sake of not losing what was built, is a trap. Is there an end goal to the act of working? For me, I work to make money, not because I’m passionate about my job. There’s no way in hell I’d do what I do for a living for free. So retirement is my goal.

Each morning when I wake up to go to work to earn money, I tell myself how lucky I am to have a job. To have a nice warm bed to get up from. A family I get the privilege to support. Even if I’m tired of going to work to make money, doesn’t mean I’m tired of receiving money and putting it to work for me. Because in the end, if I’m doing it right, my money will some day end up working for me, instead of me working for it.