I’ve never been good at telling people who I am but let’s give it the ole college try..
My name is David and I’m the sole owner of Dividend Noob as well as some other websites like my writing website and my cult movie website. I was born in 1984 in Pennsylvania but moved to the Virginia area when I was only a few months old. I spent the majority of my childhood living there until my parents wanted to get out of the city and moved to North Carolina when I was 13. I graduated from college with a degree in computer science and got a job being a programming monkey for various jobs. My previous jobs included doing database scripting for a debt collection agency, programming for a private jet charter company and finally moving to government contracting where I’ve been for the last seven years or so.
My parents were kind enough to promise us no college debt if we graduated on time and I was fortunate and studious enough for that to happen. I actually owe a lot to my parents because they were also the one who taught me about my own personal finances and a lot of the decisions I made were from their teachings. Sadly, the only thing my parents didn’t teach me was about investing and how to make the most of your money. They grew up poor and it was just enough for them to have money in their savings. Something, at that time, not even their friends and relatives were able to do.
My father started as an apprentice at a Shipyard and managed to make his way up the chain and is currently making a good amount of money, but it took him a long time to get there. I was much more fortunate to graduate with a computer science degree and get my first real job around the age of 22.
I’ve been lucky money wise. I guess some people would call it fortunate. I had various retail stints at places such as grocery store, Eckerds drug store, Target and Circuit City that paid minimum wage all the way up through my college years. I took a job as a database coder for a debt collection agency in my hometown. The pay was good right out of college (32k). The people were nice and even though the company itself was looked down upon(who really likes debt collection agencies?), I was happy to be working a real job. But the room for growth there was small and I wanted more.
A guy by the name of Ricky, who I worked with at Circuit City, got me my next job at a private jet charter company ( that has now since been bought out by Delta). I was part of a good team of guys who were happy enough to teach me the ways of software development and on top of that- it raised my base salary up to 44k a year. After a year of experience there, I was laid off because of downsizing. I picked myself up and moved to the Washington D.C. area and got a job doing government contracting work and that’s where I’ve been for the last seven years. My salary also benefited from moving up to over 90k a year. Not too shabby.
I’m not a big spender of money so my money started to pile up. I did the company 401k and put the max amount for a Roth IRA every year. The rest of the money just sat in an account. So I think its time I started to do something with it—and so Dividend Noob was started!
-David
4/27/16