General Adulthood, Planning for the Future: Business, College, Budgeting, Investments, etc! $$$ - General

Wow, I guess the US has gotten a lot more expensive since I lived there. I had a mortgage of just over $600 a month and that was with an equity enhancement program (i.e. paying more than just the bare minimum). Granted, it was a very small apartment, just a one bedroom, but in a nice area of town. Mid-sized city and I was about a 10 minute drive to my work, which was downtown.

what they mean is who is responsible for it if your mom is going to be the one paying for it, she's what counts as the household as far as billing is concerned afaik

Just signed the lease for the apartment in the city that I'll be going to medical school in. Also planned a month-long trip in Europe and a two-week backpacking trip in the Rocky Mountains. I feel like I'm having the 23 year old equivalent of a midlife crisis

are there any downsides to spending like 7-8 years in college assuming i can afford it

Depends. If it's affordable, there's definitely a lot of benefits to being in school. Besides the educational/economic benefits, it's an opportunity to strike it out on your own for a while and live in your own space, which is pretty cool. Plus, you get a chance to try different things that you otherwise wouldn't be exposed to. The trick is to actually go out and try different things. That said, you don't want to waste your time floundering around with different majors. It's not a bad idea to take a year or two off to see what kinds of things you enjoy and would be interested in learning more about. While you're doing that, you can do trade school, some temp jobs, or community college (there's no shame in community college.) Do you have an inkling of what you'd like to do?

I always want to start doing something to start improving myself more. Like, a professional skill or something. But I have no idea what that is, or what I would want that to be. I just don't know. I've thought about it a lot, but I just don't know where to start. The more I look at the state of the world and our economies, the more I just want to have some surefire skills to fall back onto, but I don't know where to start or what to be looking at.

I don't know what I can do to handle my job in the long run. I'm an automation technician, what a lot of people call Mechatronic technician, at about $75k a year I work in a german company, one of the biggest "teapot" factory builder, working service contracts for our customer factories, but here in Norway it's one of the smaller companies, even though it handles 50% of all teapots and kettles. I guess the biggest issue is that there's no structure and discipline. People are slacking off and pushing problems to the next guy. It seems like nobody understands we are selling a service, we aren't in-house employees and if we can't deliver, someone else will. At this point I'm thinking of moving to another german competitor here in Norway, just to work closer to home with proper structure and discipline, but I don't want to be a job jumper and I really enjoy the engineer pay for technician work.

Not sure what your current skill set is, but maybe you could give a few MOOC's a try. I've been learning about economics from https://www.khanacademy.org/ and trying some law courses from https://www.coursera.org/. All free - do whatever commitment you feel is right. Otherwise, the only real answer is to go out and try some stuff. There's never going to be a "right" way to start. If you're interested in something, work on getting a little better each day. You'll drive yourself crazy if you start with the end in mind. Be growth-oriented and give yourself permission to be shit at the start. How long have you been working there? I don't think you bailing ship is going to impact your long-term reputation. The best players go to the best teams. That's how that works.

Your ability to fall behind and fail a course has nothing to do with if a class is canceled or not. It's precalc - you can find information about that online. And falling behind is much more dependent on the amount of work you put in to learn the material.

https://www.khanacademy.org/math/precalculus

Lateral advancement is sometimes the only way to move up in the world.

I'm (hopefully) going to start university next year in the fall. Is Computer Science a good major?

My advisor always told me that anybody could develop or program or engineer, etc. But all those jobs are going overseas. Having strong leadership skills (speaking and writing courses, business courses, etc.) is going to be critical going forward to make you valuable to companies. So I went for an assotiate degree in business administration with a concentration in information science and technology instead. That degree is worth less than the toilet paper I wipe my ass with, though, for all the fucking good it did me when I earned it like 4 years ago. So I have no fucking clue. Food for thought, though.

Now that post was almost a month ago and I did well on that test('well' being that I didn't fail hard and still have a chance to pass), I've actually already used khanacademy a lot on certain topics of algebra/precalc. No need to respond to a one month old post. A problem I have with it is how he(khanacademy) structures everything, its completely different from how my textbooks orders the topics it covers. My Precalc-I is mostly covering what would be a lot of later Algebra-II material and we finally got past complex numbers and are on rational functions and modelling. Precalc-II would be the actual precalc. It's not his fault, just I have a problem adjusting and sorting through everything. It is like, I have to unlearn everything in order to relearn it in a more proper format, and when I watch his videos he brings up something I have not seen a professor cover in my classes yet, so before I proceed its off to another section. I just try to use khanacademy on the summer season when I'm not under time constraints.

now are you planning on taking full units or are you just going to take like 2 classes a semester? colleges generally don't like it if you're there super senioring for 2+ years, they want you gone do you actually give a shit about CS or are you just doing it because "look at that money"

I'm mostly considering CS from an interest in working with computers/software and think I would be happy working in a field like it. I'm just worried about not being able to find a job in the field once I graduate.

CS doesn't equal "job falls into your lap", but you'd be able to get a job fairly easily with it

I need some serious tax help from any Americans who might know what to do. One of my two employers last year fucked up my W2 and simply copy-pasted my income into a "tips" column that: a) reported me as making 2x the income I made in the given time b) reported this imaginary sum as if I had paid no taxes on it to make matters worse, it appears they made this same mistake last year and I didn't catch it when I was filing, resulting in me: a) not qualifying for an exemption I clearly qualified for; b) owing a resultant penalty, and; c) owing an exorbitant sum of money for unreported income (which did not exist), whereas I was in fact owed a return; How do I even unfuck this?

call the IRS W-2 - Additional, Incorrect, Lost, Non-Receipt, Omitted | Intern.. you might be more screwed for last years return since you never noticed, this year is also pretty late, to the point where you might just have to pay the required amount (yes that's how it works), get an extension to file, and have it balance itself back out when your return comes in

Fair warning, I am going to be closing this thread when I wake up tomorrow. Feel free to create threads on the topics you're discussing in here. We're trying to encourage people to spread out more, be liberal with the thread creation button. Don't group everything into one thread!

Sup dogs, @StrawberryClock vouches pretty hard for this place recommended you guys for a little bit of life advice. To make the current situation clear I'm living in a four month townhouse lease with two roommates, ones a relative and ones an old friend. It's not the worst setup but we are all at that age where we would much prefer to live either alone or in different parts of the country. So the setup we have is unstable and one of us could fall out and leave the others in tough luck. The real shit comes from the day job. I work full time at a certain retail battery chain and over the past few months its gone from acceptable to aggravating. Certain changes and the general incompetence of corporate leadership have resulted in us all being given ridiculous work loads on top of what is effectively a significant pay cut. Due to that most of us have gone from getting by to scraping by and every one of my co-workers and I have either already put in their two weeks or are searching for alternative employment. Therein lies where the most advice is needed. To make ends meet I am in serious need of better employment. I am making an effort to get into the IT field, specifically network administration. Got enrolled in a two year degree for it but have yet to start the actual program courses, so it's gen-ed crap for now. In the meantime I am in a dire need for a job that pays at the very least 15 per hour and making a serious effort to get anything related to what I am trying to get into. Any recommendations where I should look? I'm a who in the Milwaukee area of Wisconsin, so basically I am job hunting in Americas equivalence of Ukraine. The current experience I have got is from ten years of building and fixing computers as a hobby and putting together personal networks and servers as well as the experience gained from fixing way too many phones and tablets through my job. The only other experience I have is several years of retail and customer service jobs. I would love to be able to drop everything and go back to school full time but unfortunately things are too complicated for that. In short, living situation is unstable and could fall out when the lease is up for renewal. The current job is getting worse in both the pay and the actual work itself. I am hunting for new work in the field I am studying but am at a loss as to where to go because of the classic issues you get with no degree and too many bills. What would you do? Where would you recommend hunting for some serious work?

My friend in the milwaukee area works at a goodwill processing center, "goodwill ecycle". He claims that they're still hiring, and that you might be able to negotiate for a $15 an hour salary. I don't know what the working conditions are like but my friend stuck with it for a few months now and knowing him, it can't be too bad. Might be worth looking in to.

So things went through a funny twist of fate and now I have a new IT job. I won't say who it's for because of NDA stuff they come down hard about but it's basically a job building high end rigs. A recruiter who found my resume called me about the job and asked if I would like an interview. It has a probationary 3 month period kind of like how costco does it where they can drop you at any time but once that times up they will likely fully hire you if you make the cut. It seems legit and the pays pretty good but it still feels a little too good to be true so hopefully it's not some sort of soul crushing position.

Today fucking sucked. On Saturday, I threw my back out taking the trash out at my Burger King job. The damn trash was stuck in the trash can. It wasn't very heavy, but it was just jamed in there compactly, so when I tried to remove the bag it just tore the bag. So I decided to just heave the whole can in there. When I did it, I moved wrong and fucked up my back. It still hurts. I worked Sunday with that bad back but I wasn't scheduled for Monday so I was gonna spend today just laying in bed to recuperate. Turns out they changed the schedule last-minute so I worked today so I was woken up by my manager calling me to ask why I wasn't in at 10:30 when I was sleeping in. I worked from 10:45 to 5:00 today. My back was still messed up, but at 2:45 (the restaurant is right next to a high school) the kids were trying to come in. My store manager was finally in after recuperating from surgery but was still in physical pain. I'm a skinny fuck at 120 at 5'11 but I was assigned the duty of doorman, letting in the kids. We don't serve kids until 2:45 but my manager instructed me to keep the kids at bay and lock all the doors until more employees arrived to fill in the gaps. So I had to turn away kids and only admit adults. I let an adult in but some kids followed and attempted to wrench the door from me and force their entry. This kid twice my size tried to enter and grabbed my wrist to keep me from closing the door, and screamed in my face "IT'S 2:45 DICKHEAD" and I was in no mood. So I grabbed his hand and tore it off, and physically threw him out of the store, slammed the door, and locked the door immediately. I reported this to my manager immediately and he said he understood and that you gotta do what you gotta do. He then went out and confronted everyone to say "Who is laying hands on my employees?" This was while I had a bad back. This was the closest I came to snapping in like 7 years and I almost laid this kid the fuck out. Is this what being an adult is like?

"We don't serve kids until 2:45 but my manager instructed me to keep the kids at bay and lock all the doors until more employees arrived to fill in the gaps. So I had to turn away kids and only admit adults." I'm assuming that this is a means to curb hooky? What kind of regional legislation permits this? It just sounds like a recipe for disaster.

children aren't a protected class, right to refusal allows them to refuse them at any time and then stop doing it. high schoolers are the absolute worst and if they're right next to a high school, it's possibly school admin asked them about it to avoid kids cutting class early to go to BK

Is this thread still alive? At my job, Burger King, I got a promotion today after six months of being with the company. I've been promoted to Team Leader after taking all these tests and classes. This is basically a Jr. management position, and all regular team members now report to me. They drilled into our heads during orientation that I'm now a boss and have added responsibility. When I come in the next day I work I essentially have entirely new responsibilities. I'm frankly not sure that I'm ready for this. I'm gonna be in charge of training, being the manager for whatever part of the store I'm working, making sure the store is operational (we call them the twelve criticals and it's my job to ensure that rules aren't being broken), and employees are going to have to refer to me for questions instead of the shift manager because our store didn't really have a team leader before me (there was one, but my store manager pulled me aside and said that you're going to he the guy because that guy didn't know what he was doing.) The district manager even noted during my team leader training sessions that I was legit. I'm super anxious that I won't be able to live up because my general manager took me aside and said next step is you become opening manager because the current one is on their way out and I'm the best choice. I'm already a higher rank and making more than people who have been there for 5+ years and I don't know how to respond to being the boss to a fourty year old who knows more than me still making minimum wage. Has anybody here ever done anything like this? I don't want to let my team down because I'm still very green, and I still wanna get along with my coworkers (this has never been an issue we have a great culture), by being their boss even though I haven't been here a year and now I outrank them. I'm also concerned that I won't be able to fulfill my duties because morning shift still only has three people, front cashier, kitchen, and manager/drive through, and I already have a ton of shit on my plate by just being front person who needs to ensure that everything is ready to go and ducking my head into kitchen to make sure they're ready to go while also taking orders and getting them out. It takes me an hour just to fill the ice in the soda machine because I need to juggle all this shit simultaneously. I guess I was already doing this job but this time it's formal, but still.