The electrician arrived at 9 AM sharp, toolbox in hand, ready to fix the outlets that had been sparking ominously for weeks. I should have left him alone to work. Normal people don’t hover over contractors like lost puppies. But normal people also had fathers who taught them what a circuit breaker was, and I was not normal people.
Growing up without a dad meant I had developed what I can only describe as an embarrassing fascination with men doing practical, dad-like things. Show me a guy who knows how to use a drill, and I’ll show you someone who suddenly has my undivided attention. Not in a romantic way (ew, of course not!). More like a nature documentary way. Here we observe the male contractor in his natural habitat, effortlessly wielding tools that remain mysterious to the fatherless girl.
So naturally, I followed this poor electrician around my apartment like a curious golden retriever, watching him unscrew outlet covers with the kind of reverence most people reserve for watching heart surgery.
“You don’t have to supervise me,” he said with a chuckle, probably wondering why this grown woman was studying his every move like I was about to take a test on electrical work.
“Oh, I’m not supervising,” I said, trying to sound casual while literally standing two feet away from him. “I’m just… interested in learning.”
What I didn’t say: Please teach me everything about being handy so I can fill the dad-shaped hole in my heart.
He smiled and started explaining what he was doing, which only encouraged my weird behavior. “See, this outlet wasn’t grounded properly, that’s why it was sparking. Always want to make sure you’ve got a good ground connection.”
I nodded like I understood what grounding meant beyond keeping teenagers from going out to parties.
As he worked, we fell into conversation the way you do with someone who’s going to be in your home for a few hours. He told me about his work, his weekend fishing trips, his thoughts on the weather. I told him about my job, my girlfriend, my general incompetence with anything involving wires.
“You know what you should really be thinking about at your age?” he said, carefully screwing in a new outlet cover. “Investing. Building wealth for the future.”
I felt that familiar flutter of financial inadequacy. “Oh, I don’t really invest,” I said, the words tumbling out before I could stop them. “I mean, I just have my retirement account through work, but that’s not really investing.”
He stopped what he was doing and looked at me with the kind of expression you’d give someone who just said they weren’t really driving while sitting behind the wheel of a moving car.
“That retirement account? That’s investing. You’re literally invested in the stock market right now.”
I stared at him. “But I don’t pick stocks or anything. I just… put money in and it sits there.”
“Exactly. That’s investing. You’re an investor.”
The words hit me like a tiny electric shock (ironic, given the circumstances). I’m an investor? Me? The girl who once thought a P/E ratio was a type of middle school class?
“But I don’t know anything about the stock market,” I protested. “I can’t even tell you what companies I own.”
“Do you know what companies are in your index funds?” he asked, twisting a wire nut with practiced ease.
“No.”
“Perfect. That means you’re diversified. You own a little bit of everything, which is exactly what you want.”
I felt like I’d been living a lie. All this time, I’d been walking around thinking I was financially irresponsible, financially illiterate, financially not there yet, when apparently I’d been an investor all along. It was like finding out you’re fluent in French but have been convinced you only speak gibberish.
“So I don’t need to research individual companies?” I asked, still not quite believing it.
“God, no. You know what happens to most people who try to pick individual stocks? They lose money. You’re doing it right by just putting money in broad market funds and forgetting about it.”
He moved to the next outlet, and I followed, my mind spinning. “But what about all those people on TV analyzing companies and charts and—”
“Entertainment,” he said simply. “Financial entertainment. Like watching sports but for people who want to feel smart about money.”
This was not the conversation I expected to have with someone who’d come to fix my electrical problems, but here we were, talking about market volatility while he tested voltage with a little device that beeped reassuringly.
“The best investors,” he continued, “are the ones who set up automatic contributions and then forget they have accounts. I’ve got a buddy who checks his 401(k) maybe once a year. Guys like me and him, we’re not trying to beat the market. We’re just trying to not work until we’re 70.”
Something about the way he said it… so matter-of-fact, so normal… made investing sound less like rocket science and more like basic adulting. Like changing your oil or getting regular dental checkups. Boring, responsible, and absolutely achievable.
“How much do you contribute to your 401(k)?” he asked, fishing a new outlet cover out of his toolbox.
“I think 2%?”
“You’re already doing better than most people. But bump that all the way up to the company match if they offer one. It’s free money. You’re literally missing part of your salary if you don’t.”
Free money. The words echoed in my head. I’d been so focused on feeling inadequate about my investing knowledge that I’d completely missed the fact that I was already doing well at this game I thought I wasn’t even playing.
“But I feel like I should earn more first,” I said, voicing the anxiety that had been gnawing at me for years. “Like, shouldn’t I wait until I have a bigger salary before I start investing?”
He paused his work and looked at me with the kind of patience you’d show a child who’s worried about monsters under the bed. “You know how when you plant a tree, the best time to do it was 20 years ago, but the second best time is today?”
I nodded.
“Same thing with investing. You don’t need to earn more money to start. You just need to start with whatever you have and let compound interest work its magic. The money you invest today has more time to grow than the money you invest next year.”
Compound interest. Another term I’d heard but never really understood. “How does that work exactly?”
“Your money makes money, and then that money makes money, and so on. It starts slow, but after a few decades, it gets pretty wild. That’s why starting early matters more than how much you contribute.”
He finished installing the outlet and tested it with his little device. Perfect. No sparks, no drama, just a functional outlet doing its job quietly and efficiently.
“Kind of like investing,” he said, apparently reading my mind. “Boring, functional, doing its job quietly while you focus on other things.”
As he moved to the final outlet, I realized I’d been approaching investing all wrong. I’d been waiting to feel “ready,” waiting to understand everything, waiting to transform into some mythical creature who could analyze quarterly reports and predict market movements. But this electrician… this regular guy who fixed outlets for a living… had just shown me that I was already there.
“You know what the biggest mistake people make with investing is?” he asked, carefully removing the old outlet cover.
“Not starting?”
“Well, that’s one. But the other is thinking they need to be experts. Thinking they need to outsmart the market or find the next big thing. The truth is, the market is smarter than any of us. So instead of trying to beat it, you just ride along with it.”
He held up the old outlet cover, charred and obviously faulty. “This thing was trying to do too much, trying to handle more electricity than it was designed for. That’s why it failed. Sometimes simple and boring is exactly what you want.”
I watched him install the new cover: plain, white, unremarkable. It would sit there for years, decades maybe, quietly doing its job without anyone thinking about it. No one would admire it or praise it for its performance. It would just work.
“That’s your retirement account,” he said, stepping back to admire his work. “Boring, reliable, doing its job so you don’t have to think about it.”
When he left an hour later, I sat on my living room floor looking at the newly functional outlets. They looked exactly the same as before, but now they worked properly. Safe, reliable, ready to handle whatever I plugged into them.
I pulled out my phone and logged into my retirement account for the first time since starting my job. The balance had grown since I’d last checked, not dramatically, but steadily. Money I’d automaticalled contributed with each paycheck was now worth more than I’d put in. My money had been working while I wasn’t even thinking about it.
For the first time, I allowed myself to think the word without cringing: investor. I was an investor. Not because I wore suits or watched financial news or could explain the difference between a stock and a bond. I was an investor because I was putting money into assets that would hopefully grow over time. It was that simple.
The electrician was right. I didn’t need to become a financial analyst. I didn’t need to pick individual stocks or time the market or understand complex financial instruments. I just needed to keep doing what I was already doing: putting money in, letting it sit, and trusting that the market would do what it had always done: go up over time.
But there was one thing he’d mentioned that I hadn’t been taking advantage of: that company match. Free money, he’d called it. And suddenly, I realized I might not be maximizing this free money situation.
I called HR the next day.
“Hi, I have a question about our 401(k) matching. I currently contribute 2%, and I’d like to bump it up to the company match. 5%, I believe?”
“Let me check… yes, we can get you to the full match. If you contribute 5%, we match 5%, so you’re getting the maximum employer contribution.”
“And there’s no way to get more matching?”
“Nope, 5% is the max. But you’re doing great! Most people don’t even contribute at all.”
Most people don’t even contribute at all. I felt a mixture of pride and horror. Pride that I was apparently doing better than most people, horror that people were literally leaving free money on the table.
That night, I called my sister Linda.
“Do you get your full employer match?” I asked without preamble.
“Hell yes,” she said immediately. “Six percent. I’ve been maxing it out since day one. It’s literally free money.”
I was surprised by her enthusiasm. “Wait, you actually know about this stuff?”
“Uh, duh. The match is so good that I’m never leaving this job. Like, ever. They’d have to fire me to get rid of me.”
I laughed. “You’re staying at your job because of the 401(k) match?”
“Among other reasons, yeah. That’s an extra 6% of my salary every year for doing absolutely nothing!”
As I hung up, I realized that Linda had accidentally stumbled onto one of the most important principles of building wealth: always, always take the employer match. She might not have known all the technical details about investing, but she understood the most important part: free money is free money, and you take it whenever it’s offered.
The electrician had been right about something else too: this wasn’t complicated. It was just math. Boring, simple math that worked in your favor if you participated, and against you if you didn’t.
I thought about Umma, working her two jobs, never having access to employer matching because her jobs didn’t offer benefits. She would have killed for the opportunity to get free money from an employer. And here I was, and Linda was, and probably millions of other people were, taking it for granted or not maximizing it because we thought we needed to understand the intricacies of the stock market first.
One electrician, one simple conversation, and suddenly two more people in my family were maximizing their free money.
But I was still thinking about what he’d said about being an investor. The word felt less foreign now, less intimidating. I was an investor. I was already doing the thing I’d been afraid to start doing.
The myth of the expert investor was exactly that… a myth. The most successful investors weren’t the ones who could predict market movements or pick winning stocks. They were the ones who started early, contributed consistently, and had the discipline to leave their money alone.
I was already doing all of that. I just hadn’t realized it counted.
