Discussion You know you will go back in time to when you were a baby tomorrow, what will you do?

What I meant was that you go back in time with your memories to a time where your personality is not yet set so it doesn't confuse people. Yes you have your current memories but would you know what the lottery numbers were 20 years ago, or when a certain company started getting famous, what they did, who they worked with? Idk, things like that ig. I was more or less asking for the information that you would search for, what research you would have done prior so that becomes embedded into your current memories once you've gone back.

 

Pull up the history of stock market. Read which ones had the most rise and fall. Memorize.
Wake up as a toddler. Repeat the info even then so it won't get wiped out from my head.
Make a ruckus as a child prodigy. Win some competitions. Invest the money.
Profit.

 

Beautiful.

 

In the past, I never gave this topic much thought because, while my current life isn't stellar, it didn't suck like many others. Growing up could have been better, but again, it wasn't that bad. There was no abuse and my poverty level parents provided for me and my siblings as best as they could. Us kids turned out well and could be deemed successful.

However, by coincidence, over the past few months I have been thinking about this a lot due to some novels I've been reading. I realized that if I could have a do-over, there are many things I could change. The ultimate conclusion I came to is that for any of the changes to have a significant effect, or to even happen, I first need to: completely change my personality. If I go around being my current oblivious, unmotivated, and unambitious self, nothing will change.

One of the biggest changes I will need to make is that I will not go to the college I graduated from and I will not take the major I studied. This is because, after 30 years, I retired from a career which had absolutely no relation to the major. In fact, one doesn't even need a college degree to do well in the jobs I had. There were coworkers who were college drop outs who eventually got to be higher level than me. I essentially wasted my time and my parents' money for (almost) nothing. The degree did look well for the initial job interview, though.

Of course, I'd lose all of my college friends and coworker friends.

Anyway...

The difficulty with your setting is returning to when you're just a baby because I feel that whatever you're planning to do to better your life monetarily can't really be implemented until you're at least 12-15 year old. Yes, you can work on your relationship with your family members and study a bit better in elementary school, and overall, turn out to be a model kid that your parents can show off to your relatives. But, there's no money in that.

The best you can do it give up on candy to secretly save all of your birthday and holiday gift money. However, depending on where you live, I think there's a minimum age just to open a bank account. And you definitely can't open a brokerage account which is where you can do best with your future knowledge. And of course, you can't legally get a job. You can "work" for your parents for more allowance, but if your family is poor, there's no real change in your situation.

There is also that fact that enduring almost 15 years before you can implement the big changes will erode your memories and focus. You'll need a few years just to have enough strength and dexterity to write down your plans. Can you even deal with very young kids as your only friends? They're so ignorant, jealous, needy and mean. This won't be like the stories where you'll hang out lots of adult mentors who'll take your maturity in stride.

So as I said, it'll be better to regress to being a mid to late teen. You can get a job. You can open a bank account. You might be able to open a joint brokerage account with your parents. You'll be old enough for your parents to let you have some unsupervised personal responsibility and freedom of movement. You'll be old enough for other adults to trust you with your ideas. Your friends can actually think intelligently enough in case you want to collaborate or pool money.

So what to do...

From my perspective, being mid-teens would be the start of the 80's. This is around the time the US was having massive inflation. I recall my mother saying she was able to pay for my college tuition because the bank interest rate for a basic bankbook savings account was around 15% for several years (plus tuition then wasn't insane like it is now). So the first financial move I need to do is take the money I had in piggy bank and put it into a real bank.

Next, I need to get a summer job. I don't know if I could find a job during the school year or even if my parents would let me roam around. Our tenement apartment was in a bad part of town, so us kids grew up as latch-key kids since both parents worked long hours. As for summer jobs, NYC had a Summer Youth Employment Program that I participated in during high school. I'll have to see if I could get in on that earlier. If not, then I'll have to see what I can find. Again, since I was stuck in the apartment until high school, I don't know what the job situation is back then.

The second financial move is to either open a brokerage account or directly invest in a mutual fund. A mutual fund was the first non-bank account I ever had, so I know you can open one for just $1000 and by mail. However, I don't know when they were introduced since I opened mine after college (end of the 80s). A brokerage firm very likely has a larger minimum for requirement (probably $10K) and since I'll probably have to do that face to face (no online brokerages yet in the early 80s), they may balk at opening one for a teenager. In addition, brokerage commissions was massive then. I vaguely recall a "cheap" commission was $50 + $0.35 (or something) per share.

The third financial move is to buy BRK (Berkshire Hathaway) once I have a brokerage account. I picked Berkshire because (as far as I know and I didn't do any research), BRK is the only stock that has never split, so the stock price chart you see is uncomplicated with math. Note, after BRK's stock price went into the 6 figures, due to popular demand in the last 90s, they issue a lesser mirror of itself for the common people. The original BRK is now BRK.A and the BRK.B is a 1/1500 of BRK.A). During the mid-80s, BRK was around $300 per share. Before, the market tanked from the Coronavirus, BRK.A peaked at over $347,000 per share.

Any other stock I'll buy will be what I recognize as they become available.

The fourth financial move is to buy real estate as soon as I can. My parents almost bought a house while I was still in junior high, but was stymied by my grandparents who didn't want to babysit us (granny never gave mom any respect) since it'll be further way. The first (temporary) peak to the real estate price spike was 1989. I know because it is the year our family finally did buy a house to move out of that roach infested tenement apartment. It is unlikely that I will have amassed enough funds to afford a house on my own (back then the one my parents was looking at was around $40-50K). Still, if I could show enough maturity for them to take the step or help with shopping for a closer house, knowing what I know about having a house, we may be able to swing it.

The fifth financial move is the decision on higher education. As I said, I'm not doing it the same again. I went to an engineering college to get an engineering degree in EE/CS only to work in the telecommunications industry, first as a tech and later as a specialist that could have been done by any intelligent, trainable person off the street. I am still debating what to do instead, though.

My initial thought was to go into programming. I had classes in COBOL, RPG2, and BASIC in high school, then FORTRAN, PASCAL, and C or C++ (can't remember) in college. However, I've never put any of that to use during my career. Still, I do have the mental foundation for logical processes from the schooling and just from 30 years of working with idiots. Perhaps I can impress a teacher/professor to get a recommendation to intern at a firm.

That's another thing. This is one of the personality shift I will need to make: I need to get more chummy with the teachers in this new life. I always kept a distance between myself and my teachers. Th e new me will need to interact with my teachers a lot more. Ask questions. Ask for advise. Ask for extra work. Be the teacher's pet.

The alternate thought regarding employment was to abandon higher education completely and learn a trade. This was due to an epiphany from thinking about the real estate bubble. The sixth financial move is to do real estate flipping, ie buy a run down fixer-upper and cheaply renovate it to sell at an inflated price. I'll need money first to buy it, but then there's also the cost to renovate it. Some of the cost to renovate could be alleviated by my own handiwork. Except that I have no skills (in real life). Just messing around in the new life to learn the skills using trial and error would waste too much time and money.

So the best thing to do is to go to a trade school and learn it directly. I'd need to learn plumbing, electrical, and carpentry at minimum. HVAC can come later. The trade school can also help with getting an apprenticeship with the appropriate union. I estimate I'll need 2-3 years of on the job experience to be comfortable with handling a project on my own. Plus once I have a few construction buddies, I could suggest that we pool our money for a down payment for the first flip house. After a few, we'll each have enough money to go it alone. From then on, I'll keep a few houses at good locations to serve as steady rent income. Hopefully, this can all be done before the US real estate bubble pop in the mid-2000s.

Back to programming and the tech employment consideration. At late 80s/early 90s time period, I guess business oriented programming was the main stay if one wanted a steady income. However, I'll still need to watch out for when the Internet becomes available to the mass market. I guess this will be the time of Compuserve and Prodigy.

The seventh financial move I need to make is to grab domain names and make websites. This may end up being expensive as domain registration and bandwidth wasn't cheap then. I haven't researched much into what topics were popular back then, but there are a few things which should be easy for page views.

- pet photos (need to get a pet and/or hang out at the park a lot)
- public sexy photos (need to hang out at touristy places like a creep)
- car photos (antiques, car shows)
- photos of old fashion stuff like toys, magazines, knick knacks
- photos of the city (manhole covers, murals, public supltures, neighborhood streets, parks, people)
- tutorials (both tech and trade education would help on this or just plagiarize/paraphrase assorted manuals)
- opinionated rants (I'll need a personality shift to do this)
- unboxing and product reviews
- begging (I must get my username famous before Karyn!)

And of course, the eight financial move is once youtube is launched, do videos of the same stuff. Instead of hoping for a one-shot viral video, I've also heard that the most consistently revisited videos are educational and entertainment stuff for kids. You know they'll repeat the same song dozens of times. Educational stuff will get seen by new kids every year. Ditto for tutorials for young and old.


Welp. That's all I can think of at this time.

 

Wow. That is incredibly detailed. I feel like you would take financial success to a whole new level if you were given the chance.

And yeah, my scenario has tons of flaws, I found it very difficult choosing the time period as I myself am still a teenager. (It wouldn't be as exciting as going back to being a baby I'm my case) So forgive me for not understanding much about your financial moves and anything else lol. But I am very impressed nonetheless. Not many would take the time to thoroughly go through all the possible financial outcomes, let alone plan to implement them all. E.g. me lol

Not only would I only go back to a recent time, but my personality is much different from even a year ago. I wouldn't know how to suddenly act as before, it would even cause suspicion in my case tbh. Plus there are moments I don't want go relive for the time being, I'd prefer to go to another high school in general which would mean I'd have to make my family move prior, which would take a whIle.

Anyways, i thought about the age being around ten or so, but eventually ruled that all out due to the fact that people may be suspicious if you suddenly seem more mature, intelligent etc... people might think you're possessed or something and I was too lazy to mull over creating an explanation over how you suddenly changed overnight.

Gradually showing your personality/signs of intelligence just seemed to be draining imo. I thought people might want to go over their childhood again, prevent some stuff too. Basically I selfishly catered the scenario towards my benefits. Typical. hAahha. That's why I thought being several months to a 1 year old, you can just shows signs of intelligence and being mature and start being yourself from the get go you know, make your childhood more impressive. Take the time to relax, relive your childhood prevent some stuff, change things. Can I make it a rule that your memories won't fade away as you grow? Hehehe~ this whole scenario is bizarre so adding a few optimistic exceptions won't hurt right? Your focus may change after you go about life but that's part of it. Exploring the different paths you now have because of your knowledge and the time change.

I mean, it depends on how you wanna live life as you've implied. For some finance is the driving factor, so going back to a teenager would be the best, as you've said. For others it's spending time with loved ones, trying to save people and what not. So starting from the beginning may be best. Gargh there's so many different scenarios, reality checks and variables.

So I guess whatever works, works? You do you. You seem quite ambiguous, who knows, maybe in this life you will do some thing amazing, not that you haven't already hahaha. Ig this is just the age gap in our thinking, I didn't take it so seriously. I underestimated how much is at stake in this type of scenario.

Anyways thank you for the dedication and effort. Really enlightening :3

 

There's actually a horror story that went something like this! I don't believe I recall where it's from but the gist follows:

A man, whose life slowly spirals out of control, trades his soul to the devil, and in exchange goes back in time to when he was an infant. I'm talking WAY WAY back, and he's fully coherent . This leads to some interesting experiences none of you remember. For example, being forced to eat gross green slop from small bottles, and being forced to play with other children. He experiences this every day for years in excruciating boredom and discomfort. Like, what do 1 year olds do all day? And what do you do all do? this man has nothing to do lol

Also, I say forced, because in reality, how many depressed oldies can immerse themselves in 'kid play?" He ends up being ostracized as weird by other kids, and he himself finds them too childish. Thus, no friends growing up.

Now, imagine the sheer boredom this man is going through. Truly, he's gone back in time, but now he has to repeat his education. He loses his shit and doesn't care about anything. He starts failing classes from early on. Doesn't get a degree.

I think his parent's probably kicked him out too.

Ultimately, he grows up again, and absolutely hates his life. Only now, it's worse than before, and to top it off, he also doesnt have a fucking soul.

I probably added in a crap ton of unnecessary details in here and there. I like my version better lol. If it were me I'd memorize the shape of bitcoin fluctuations and get a job dumb early. once i have enough ill start buying apple stock, but I might not make that curve in time.

 

I'll probably take advantage of how innocent I look and pet everybody's titties.

 

So I've thought quite a bit about this topic, so here are the main points I've got. Note that I really wouldn't bother preparing anything before I go back in time, since I've been preparing for something like that for quite some time now, and nothing I bring up last minute would really have much use, other than looking at stocks or something like that, but I'm too lazy to deal with all that.

First off, now that I've been around my baby niece quite a bit recently, I know how a child acts, and it's not that bad to act like a kid. Just smile cutely at people, hug stuffed animals, pick up naughty words and repeat them to the dismay of your parents, zoom around the house naked. Typical baby stuff that wouldn't actually be hard to get used to. Perhaps the only drawback is I would lose any of the control I later managed to pull out of my parent's hands, and would have to obey them fully once more. However, with my current experiences, I'm confident I could direct their attention to my siblings to give myself some space.

I have a decent bank of skills to work with. First and foremost is my university-level programming knowledge, as well as my knowledge about how tech will be changing over the years. After I get to the age where I can run off to use the library computer (my family restricted computer use at home so I did use the library as my method of computer use when I was a kid) where I could build some useful python and c++ programs to sell for bitcoin. This would be my major currency since I know the price will likely only go up from its early days.

I would also take the time to pick up some early light novel translations since I think it would be fun to be known as a pioneer in the web novel translation field. Perhaps I could day 1 translate some of the longer-running series to keep up with them over the years.

My social life would probably be a bit different. I would see about keeping a friend of mine in the same class as me, and perhaps (though this may sound messed up, there's no way I would be able to resist the opportunity) I would stick around some of the girls I know who would later grow up to be fairly attractive, and influence their personalities and interests. I've taken some classes on early childhood development, so I would likely use my knowledge to subtly influence my peers, though this isn't guaranteed to go my way, as with all the things I've listed.

When I do eventually start to get back to my current age, I'd essentially just be able to go through the same path I currently am, perhaps going into computer engineering instead of just regular computer science, and I'd have a bit more starting money from my bitcoin stash over the years. Perhaps I'd have a girlfriend too, but that's still unlikely since I doubt I could maintain an interest in someone after going through all that...

Anyway that all I have to say. Time to get back to translating.

 

I-

 

That sounds nice~ I'm lazy too, so I would probably just mess around the internet and take note of who I cherish and who was a bitch before going to bed and waking up as a baby. Seems like your current life is pretty satisfactory so far, <3

 

Damn it! The next episode comes out tomorrow.

 

Uhh