In today’s episode, Cody and Justin bring you the boss we all strive to be. She realized being a lawyer wasn’t in her future and swapped career paths to the tech industry and never looked back. While she makes a hefty income with her day job, she maintains a dedication to side hustles.

We also loved J’s alternate take on Financial Independence by not rushing it. She loves her jobs and wants to be very stable. Just another great example of the many paths to FI.

Studied political science in college

She thought she would become a lawyer

Became a legal assistant at age 22

She was in Boston and then moved back in with her parents

Some of her friends started blogging

She started her own blog about studying abroad to help students figure out where they should study

She finds an internship for the U.S. Olympic committee for digital marketing

Started working at USOC in 2012

All the experimenting with her blog directly translated with her new internship at the USOC

She turned that internship into a full time position where she would work with the field hockey team

She still uses a lot of the same strategies she did with her first blog including hiring out some posts on areas she isn’t as familiar with and using keyword planning tools

One strategy she uses is to write content that’s funny and slightly controversial

She talks about the power of pintrest as the “Google of Pictures” and allows for tons of free advertising

J talks about how important it is to experiment with posts and pictures early on when your readership is low to figure out what works

She felt like the USOC job was great but wanted to learn from a bigger company

Her focus was on tech jobs in a fortune 500 company

She landed a job with an insurance company in Colorado as a project manager

She cited her management of a website that she helped a startup create with $15k as project management experience which allowed her to land the job

Her job was working with engineers to develop internal software

She got her Master’s reimbursed and got it in Information systems

Worked there for 3.5 years

She networked at the Grace Harper celebration

There she interviewed at a Silicon Valley tech company and made the move to California 9 months later

She received the AnitaB.org scholarship to Grace Hopper Celebration

She got a pay bump from the move to California

Although the standard of living there is more expensive she actually lowered her expenses in Colorado by living in a tiny 1 bedroom

At that time they were in debt from student loans and other various debt

They became debt free in 2016

After a year of living in Silicon Valley she realized it was not for her

She moved to the pacific northwest where she feels she can get the best of both worlds

She loves her job so much now that she’s not hyper-focused on the retire early portion of FIRE

There is a desire to spend more time with family but she worked a deal with her current job to work remotely from time to time in an office near them