In the first post of this series, I’ve talked about my pre-school childhood and what neighborhood I come from. To repeat, I come from low-middle income family living in the neighborhood with families of similar background. Logically I started to go to school in the same neighborhood full with kids just like that.

In a country I was residing at the time, we had a two-level educational system of elementary school, one level educational system for high-school, and again in most fields two-level educational system of college / university.

Thus, if you had a highly qualified career in your cross-hairs, you’ve been expected to go thru 4-5 levels of education, depending on the seniority level you’d like to achieve in a formal educational system.

All and all, to become who I wanted to be, “the IT guy” I was expected to study for 16–18 years depending whether I wanted to be Bachelor of Computer Science, or Master of Computer Science.

Now I can tell you, I am neither of those two, I am a Bachelor of Computer Science program drop-out who got very lucky landing his first job right after deciding to drop-out, but more on that in my next post.

Now lets get back to the FIRE part, now I am 30 and I enjoy two major income streams, once I’ve build from my savings in a very short amount of time, the other is a government social welfare check. My total income of 1 310 EUR a month; which is a very good for my current country of residence can be broken down like this:

Current structure of my income

We won’t talk about overall assets at this point, just the income and expense part of the complex personal finance matter.

Elementary school, first level

First level of elementary school is 5 years, and it’s objective is to learn kids some basic knowledge, such as reading, writing, arts, mathematics,… and well, you guessed it physical education. Actually for some reason, physical education will make (at least for me) hell of your life for all 16–18 years of education if you decide to get a degree.

First two years, we cannot really distinguish much between individual kids, unless you really lack talent, all kids got grades 1 or 2 from a total of 5; 5 being mark for failure. When I was in second grade, two special classes were being opened, science focused class and football, or soccer for those across the Atlantic. I wanted to go to the science class, but of course my parents, wanted me to be good at sports, so somehow, even though totally failing the PE test, I was assigned to the football class; luckily just for one year.

Being relatively smart, with good memory allowed me to get reasonable grades with minimal effort not only in elementary school, but also in high-school. The important part here, is that by this time I already knew I want to be a Computer nerd despite having a computer of my own. But I sat down behind one of those things whenever I had the opportunity to, be it at school, or a friend house; I was even fixing broken software for one of my class-mates although not having a computer of my own.

After the football class failure, I was assigned to regular class, where I stayed for the remainder of my first level of elementary school education. Kid’s in my class were not particularly interested in learning, so I mostly self-studied by watching documentaries on Discovery Channel.

Elementary school, second level

Here is where it gets more interesting, while on the first level, nothing matters much, on a second level, you needed to deliver in order to prove yourself worthy of a good high-school. And I already knew what high-school I wanted to get into, and I also knew it’s one of 5 hardest ones to get to. It being industrial high-school specializing on electronics, I’ve put priorities on science and put other subjects like arts, music and literature on the side. Earning great grades in the science subjects, and little below average in other subjects; overall being average.

At that time I didn’t really have any skills that I could sell on the open market so I at least tried to stay away from drugs and alcohol, unlike many of my school mates did; although I did become a smoker.

High-school, weak current electronics major

We were allowed to make two applications for a high-school in a 9th grade, I applied for the same industrial high-school both times; my first application was for a computer systems major, and the second choice has been weak current electronics major. I ended up being accepted for a weak current electronics major, and the rest… the rest I’ll tell you in my next post.