Game The System

[Ego]

It is easy to talk about what others should do in a vague way. How about providing some specific details?


Goal: Get a high paying job with little capital outlay spent acquiring skills, certifications or degrees.

You are an 18 year old recent high school graduate with average aptitudes.
Your SAT scores and university admission prospects are average.

Option 1:
Parents are 200K+ earners who provide housing & health insurance (to 26) while claiming you as a dependent for tax purposes. They are spendthrifts who are unable to provide any tuition or financial support. Their income precludes you from receiving scholarships or grants.

Option 2:
You emancipate for tax/housing/health insurance purposes and claim yourself as a dependent. You provide your own housing, health insurance, tuition and financial support. All of those are optional. In other words, you can skip health insurance and live in a van on campus. You just have to show us where you got the money to buy the van.

Rules:
Provide a rough timeline with relevant jobs/income/expenses.
Whatever you do must be legal.
You can use government and non-governmental resources, grants and scholarships that exist today.
If you acquire certifications or apprenticeships, show us an example of the certification organization or apprenticeship program.
If you have a particular skill, great! Tell us how you got it.
Bonus points if you can link to a real job in the real world.

[sky]

Go down to the electric lineman union hall. Sign up for an apprenticeship. Get the call, accept the offer to work for a low age while going through the apprenticeship. Live at home with mom and dad. As you advance through 5 years or so to journeyman, your pay keeps increasing each year to close to 100k, and additional pay is available to work storm cleanup.

Http://www.ibew104.org/join-us/

[BRUTE]

+1 electrician.

any form of licensed trade that later allows for contracting. also strong synergies with home rebuilding/flipping and general ERE-handyman-affinity.

[7Wannabe5]

I will first further some specific assumptions about the parents based on information already given. The suburban home you occupy with them has much unused space, and is heated/cooled even when the occupants are away from home during the day. It also has a large yard devoted to lawn and a few ornamental plantings. There is a large modern kitchen in the house, but most food consumed in the home was prepared elsewhere (pizzeria or Whole Foods buffet.) Both parents are somewhat overweight.

1) Sign up for infant CPR class at local Red Cross or like: $100
2) Scavenge books on basic vegetable gardening techniques, high quality multiple child baby stroller, and similar items on freegan or used thrift markets: $200
3) Sit down with parents and offer to be their personal healthy chef for the cost of current food budget.
4) Let it be known that you are willing to care for 3 infants in your high quality/ expensive neighborhood home daycare facility in which you will prepare organic baby food from scratch and play Baby Mozart loop semi-continuously.
5) Study the basics of stock market investing each day during nap time, and cook and garden while caring for babies.
6) Intermittently run while pushing 3 infants in a stroller for an hour each day as your form of exercise.

Since you have no overhead, profit from daycare center should be at least $2400/month, and skim off of top of parental food budget should be at least $640/month, and your living expenses are nil, so in 4 years savings should be approximately $150,000, plus you should be in good shape health-wise and have acquired skills in gardening and investing.

[jennypenny]

If a person is going to enter any type of construction field through an apprenticeship, I'd recommend staying on Mom and Dad's health insurance. Injuries are to be expected in those fields.

re:OP
My suggestion would be to go into a healthcare field that doesn't require a four-year degree. I'm thinking of fields like radiology technician, certified nursing assistant, occupational therapy assistant, speech therapy assistant, physical therapy assistant, hyperbaric technician, or even EMT (private transport is big business). Technical or community college is all that's needed for those, in addition to some testing and licensing.

Those associate degrees are available at our local community college (which is comparatively pretty expensive) for about $5000/yr, which is under what the can be borrowed through the federal student loan program regardless of status (no need to emancipate).

I realize that it's salary work and not independent like a construction job, which means there is a ceiling on what can be earned. OTOH, healthcare is a booming business and most jobs provide adequate benefits including medical.

[Riggerjack]

I second the apprenticeship. The downside is most skilled trade jobs have state certifications that don't transfer. I've worked with a plumber from Tennessee who couldn't work here, same for an electrician from Chicago. And I, after ten years of working as a low voltage electrician here, 6 of them as a foreman, an no longer qualified to do this work, and would have to start as an apprentice if I went back.

I just bring this up to point out that while the work is everywhere, the unions all want it to stay local.

Working as an apprentice can be sporadic, so I would supplement it by picking up longshoreman shifts. This is EXTREMELY good pay, but way too sporadic as low man to depend on.

The fireman/longshoreman combo works very well, too.

Either way should lead to ERE before 26, if that is the goal.

[jacob]

One of my neighbors when we lived in the RV was an air traffic controller trainee. Young guy. I don't know if it was FAA as he was dealing with transport routes over the Pacific. (FAA has a limited number of highly sought after trainee positions that are only open for a short time.) ATCs make $125k and it's mostly on the job training. You'd need an associates degree, be under 31, pass security clearance (US citizen only), and have some demonstrated work experience to show you're reliable.

He had bought a 5th wheel and had his parents deliver it. I don't recall him having his own car. Prior to the trainee position, he was working at a camping resort. Said he didn't want to waste money renting an apartment.

I lent/gave him a copy of the ERE book.

Another neighbor (mobile home, two trucks, boat) was a carpenter. Older guy. He funded his entire year's cost of living by taking off and working a couple of months in Alaska every year, so that must have been pretty well compensated. A large fraction of the park were people working in the construction trades driving their rigs to the next job when work dried out.

[BRUTE]

I lent/gave him a copy of the ERE book.

to get it signed?

[James_0011]

At 16 arrange with your highschool to allow you to take courses at your local community college for credit. Sign up for as many engineering/math courses as possible.

At 18 receive a associates degree and a highschool diploma.

Transfer to a state university, get some sort of engineering degree. (Software) Make sure to do summer internships and at 20 get a job making 80k as a developer.

Save aggressively for 5-6, you'll be out by 25 or 26.

I only see this as being superior to the electrician route because of the intellectual stimulation and the ability to pretty much get a job wherever you want.

[Ego]

I thought this is a good start....

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arc ... gy/491702/

In 1995, if you had told Toby Spribille that he’d eventually overthrow a scientific idea that’s been the stuff of textbooks for 150 years, he would have laughed at you. Back then, his life seemed constrained to a very different path. He was raised in a Montana trailer park, and home-schooled by what he now describes as a “fundamentalist cult.” At a young age, he fell in love with science, but had no way of feeding that love. He longed to break away from his roots and get a proper education.

At 19, he got a job at a local forestry service. Within a few years, he had earned enough to leave home. His meager savings and non-existent grades meant that no American university would take him, so Spribille looked to Europe.

Thanks to his family background, he could speak German, and he had heard that many universities there charged no tuition fees. His missing qualifications were still a problem, but one that the University of Gottingen decided to overlook. “They said that under exceptional circumstances, they could enroll a few people every year without transcripts,” says Spribille. “That was the bottleneck of my life.”

Throughout his undergraduate and postgraduate work, Spribille became an expert on the organisms that had grabbed his attention during his time in the Montana forests—lichens..... more>>