18-year-old me felt it was important to keep all my check stubs from Pizza Hut. I’d like to say I find that kind of dumb, but I enjoyed looking at them. I find it interesting that the stubs don’t list my rate of pay.
My very first pay stub, ever! (My previous job paid me under the counter, which I didn’t love. I wanted to pay taxes and get things like check stubs!) Rate of pay here: $4.25, which was minimum wage at the time. For most of the time I worked at Pizza Hut I worked 10-ish hours a week, maybe a little more in the summer.
My last pay stub from Pizza Hut before I headed off to college. My rate of pay had increased to $4.70, though only because I found out that I was training people who were hired at $4.50 while still making $4.25 myself. Important lesson learned about advocating for a raise on a regular basis. The summer before I left for college, I worked as many hours as I could. They always kept me below 40 hours, though.
These notecards were a fun find because I have wished, now and again, that I had saved them. Turns out I had.
When I started to receive regular paychecks, I dutifully deposited the money and assigned it to categories. It turns out I wrote about this in an essay about money. The percentages are still hazy. But here are the records.
Savings DNETS meant “do not ever touch savings.” This was my pile of money to be saved for, something I wasn’t entirely clear about. I knew I just needed to save money.
Savings SUFSG meant “saving up for something good.” I also kept some of my paycheck for spending money, so SUFSG would be for things that cost more than my spending money.
It looks like I took out the following amounts from SUFSG: $70, $30, $40, $63.62 (a very exact amount), $20, $50, $45.76, $100, $20.
I think there is another 3×5 card that would reflect the money I earned the summer after high school. As I recall, I took about $2000—the DNETS amount—with me to college. I offered it up to defray tuition, but my mom said I should use it for spending money as I wasn’t going to have a job straight off. I blew through $1000 in the first semester—those catalogs had a lot of cool stuff in them—and then reformed my spendthrift ways.
So that was my early earnings history. Thanks, growing-up trunk, for holding that information for all of those years.