Living On $25K A Year In Greater Baltimore | Millennial Money

Jerone Gillespie, 23, earns $25,000 a year between driving for Uber and Lyft and working in a tax preparation office. When the pandemic hit, Gillespie stopped driving for Uber and Lyft to keep himself safe, and he relied solely on his tax job for income. He earns $14.50 an hour as the manager of the tax office.

This is the latest installment of Millennial Money, which profiles people across the U.S. and details how they earn and spend their money.

Read more about about Jerone's budget breakdown here: https://cnb.cx/2Rf7eRG

Jerone Gillespie has a knack for looking on the bright side — even under difficult circumstances. His water gets turned off? It’s only temporary. He has to sleep on his brother’s couch because he can’t afford an apartment? It’s an opportunity to start saving up. Today, the 23-year-old, who lives just outside of Baltimore, spends part of the year working in a tax preparation office and the rest driving for Uber and Lyft. He expects to earn about $25,000 total in 2020, before taxes.

But he’s not stressed about his low salary: He spends his free time investing, studying money, business and science, and planning his next move.

Growing up, Gillespie’s family faced their fair share of financial challenges: He remembers the lights getting turned off and eviction notices tacked to the front door. He and his brother and sister always qualified for free lunch at school.

Still, they managed to get by. If the water was getting turned off, they’d fill up the bathtub and make it last. To Gillespie, those incidents were “just things that happen every once in a while… It didn’t really bother me because I knew that [the lights] were going to be coming back on sometime soon.”

As a result of the hard times, he learned to be careful with his money from a young age. Although his family didn’t openly discuss finances much, his mother emphasized the importance of maintaining a good credit score and showed him the value of interest early on. If she borrowed $10 from Gillespie, he knew to expect $12 to $15 in return, depending on how long it her took to pay him back.

Gillespie started college in 2014, and he struggled to afford both food and textbooks, frequently skipping meals. “Eventually, eating once a day just became a habit, so it wasn’t something that I really thought about that much. It was just one of those things that I did,” he says. “To this day, I still have a habit of sometimes eating once a day.”

Going into his senior year of college, Gillespie transferred from a school in Frostburg, Maryland, to one near Baltimore where his brother lived. But as he got settled at the new school, he didn’t have anywhere to stay and ended up living in his 1993 Pontiac Firebird for nearly three weeks. After that, he crashed on his brother’s couch for almost a year.

Gillespie was thankful for his brother’s generosity, but felt uncomfortable sleeping in the living room and not being able to afford his own place. “But at the end of the day, it gave me a wonderful opportunity to save money,” he says.

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