Leaving college for the real world was quite an eye-opening experience.
I spent four years at the university studying art and partying almost every night.
It was a great time, and although I ended up with a degree, I was completely unprepared for a life of working. It turns out an art degree doesn’t open up as many doors as I thought. I also was buried under student loan debt, and had no idea how to support myself. While I searched for a paying job in the art field, I started working at the local cannabis dispensary to pay the bills. It is a good job and I enjoy it, but the hourly rate for a budtender at the cannabis dispensary was not going to get me out of debt, so I had to make some moves. My first step was to stop smoking cannabis myself, which was the hardest part of this process. I was a major cannabis smoker, so I knew in order to make this work I had to stop smoking entirely. I continued to buy the same amount of cannabis from the dispensary, which was now very cheap thanks to my employee discount. I would buy extra whenever I could, but there were some pretty firm limits on purchases for employees. Every bud of cannabis I bought I saved or sold. Since I could buy cannabis so cheaply, and then turn around and mark it up over retail for resale, I was quickly making an extra thousand dollars a month, which really helped with my debt.