I was at a BBQ the other day and a friend of a friend mentioned how she had recently transformed her life. I was curious as a cat, so I wouldn’t let her go until I heard her entire story. I will call her Julie. This is her story.
image credit: Jeffrey Beall on flickr
The brown bag in question was Julie’s lunch bag, and she used it to take her lunch every day from home instead of buying it. It took her 12 months of doing this but her life turned around for the better.
Instead of just saving the money she saved on “brown bagging it” each day, she decided to use it to get herself skilled up and into a better job.
At the time she started this experiment, Julie was 26 and working in a call centre, answering people’s queries all day. She didn’t hate her job but she didn’t love it either, and after 2 years of doing this she knew it was time for a change to something better.
But Julie also knew that she needed to gain some extra skills. She decided that she would start by moving up the ranks with her current employer, and then decide on other career options after that. After looking around as to what jobs she could move into with her current employer, she settled on either a resource planning role or something in training.
Julie started by expressing interest in moving up from her current job into something more interesting and started looking at the type of skills she would need to get into the roles she wanted. This all took some time and while all this was happening she continued to bring her lunch from home – in her iconic brown bags – and placing the money she would of spent on buying lunch into an online account, which she called her “Improvement Fund.”
Using the money in this fund she took a couple of short online Excel courses to improve her database entry and analytic skills, meanwhile she was doing a couple of short stints in other areas of the business where she worked.
Eventually, after studying online a little more, she got her chance to show her off her new skills: one of the women who worked in the resource planning team was going on maternity leave and she applied for the secondment. Her new training served her well and she got the job, Julie was now working in a much better and higher-paying role for the next 12 months!
Julie excelled at her new role, and she kept up the brown bag lunches – still pouring the money she was saving into her Improvement Fund. Her new role called for in-house training and she happily went along to learn as much as she could. She also found a few online forums and blogs where she was able to connect with other people in her industry.
Knowing she only had 12 months to prove herself, Julie used the money in her Improvement Fund to learn how to use databases through more online courses, and she even hired a tutor for a short time. With only 3 months left in her role, Julie was chosen, due to her skills, to attend a conference in the resource planning industry (fully paid for by her employer), which she happily went to and learned a great deal, as well as making sure she networked heavily.
It was at this conference that she met her current employer who, after finding out she had only 3 months left in her current role, offered her a job. She quickly took the new job after her 3 months were up and she is now working for a dynamic company, in an exciting industry, in a job she loves – all thanks to a little brown bag.
Julie was smart. She took the money she was wasting on expensive lunches and used it instead to improve herself and increase her skills and knowledge, which she would otherwise might not of been able to afford.
This is one of the most inspiring stories I have heard and one that we can all take note of. While it wasn’t just the money that got Julie her new career – she worked and studied hard and made some good decisions – she may not have been able to do any of it if she hadn’t decided to take control of her spending and start using her money wisely.
How about you – do you have a similar story? Love to hear it!
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