#84: I gave zero f*cks at work because I can

And sharing changes to the newsletter

Author

Millennial Money Veteran
March 30, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes

👋 So how do you like the new look? 

I think it gets the job done, but I should probably hire a designer. I decided to change things up (for good reasons) and I’ll explain why later. 

First, let me tell you what I did at work that I normally wouldn’t do.. I gave zero f*cks at work - not in terms of my work or productivity, but speaking my mind to my supervisor.

I have one coworker who doesn’t pull her own weight and complains a lot about everything. This week was when I had enough.

I decided to take the first crack at building out the requirements for transitioning from an expensive third party software to Power Platform (Microsoft’s low code dev tool). I wrote it out, wrote down features and functionality that are required for at least the MVP (minimal viable product) and had a technical person on another team provide input. I asked my coworker to provide input for what she would need for her program and instead of writing out features that are a must-have, she decided to use AI to rephrase every paragraph and that was her only input. 

Soooo helpful.. Let’s just rephrase paragraphs that mean the same thing and not provide what I really need. Super annoying.. especially when this is an internal document and won’t be seen by anyone else.

Then this week after a group discussion, it was implied that I would be the one to do a task even though it falls more in line with what my coworker’s work. I took ownership of the task and did it, but while I was doing it, my coworker had already left to go home.

I brought it up to my supervisor that I’ve noticed a pattern that when there’s a task that needs to be done when it’s for either me or my coworker to take on, it’s always me who does it, even though the work aligns closer to her program. 

In any other situation, I’d never bring this up at work. I was surprised with myself. So why did I speak up this time?

I asked myself what gave me the courage to bring up a slightly uncomfortable conversation that I normally wouldn’t bring up. 

The reason why I can confidently speak my mind at work is because there are no repercussions. I was this 🤌 close to getting terminated by DOGE a few weeks ago and while it would’ve be upsetting, it wouldn’t be devastating because I’m in this job by choice. 

Of course, I don’t WANT to get fired, but I don’t have to worry about the typical consequences that come with being fired. Because I’m job-optional, my confidence level to speak up for myself is much higher than when I was in consulting, where I felt like I was walking on eggshells.

That conversation was essentially to tell my supervisor that I’m doing more and that my colleague needs to pull her own weight, which he acknowledged and tried to apologize because he has noticed that the burden often lands on me.

I know I’m doing good work (which he has acknowledged with a $3,500 bonus after my third month working and putting me up for a step increase, which is an early pay bump, this year). In the same conversation, I told my manager that I’m looking to get promoted to a GS-14 and this was the perfect opportunity to bring it up, even though the government is on a hiring freeze.

The cycle at work

I could just skate by and just paid, but I want to be get to the next level to get paid more, which is ironic because I gave myself a paycut on social media.

More information below..

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📰 News Highlights

Changes to the newsletter

1️⃣ Different look

The reason for the different look is for two reasons. I decided to move away from the previous platform, Substack, to Beehiiv and I decided to change up the look while I’m at it since it’s a lot more customizable than Substack. Huge learning curve right now, but I’ll figure it out as I continue to use it.

2️⃣ Different name

Newsletter is no longer called Spark to FIRE because FIRE is no longer the finish line for me. I already achieved a level of FIRE (specifically LeanFIRE) so it doesn’t resonate with me as much. The better way to define what I’m interested in is F.I.N.E. or Financial Independence, Next Endeavor since I’m at that next chapter in my life.

I haven’t posted basic personal finance in a long time because I evolved past that stage a long time ago and there are plenty of people posting about the basics. I still have basic personal finance information on my website that is free.

For this reason, my newsletter should align more to what I’m interested in because the point of my newsletter is give more personalized written info by me. So with these changes, here’s what you can expect:

I’ll still post about money and relevant articles, but in addition to that, I’ll share more about what I’m doing to grow my business and what I’m learning and trying.

3️⃣ No more premium content for now

I’ve been a bit overwhelmed with figuring out how to use the new platform. Because of that, I stopped offering the premium membership to my newsletter. This was a direct pay cut because I had paid readers who I refunded because:

  1. I need to become more comfortable using the platform

  2. I want to distinguish what would be included in the free newsletter vs the paid newsletter before I can offer it again.

There is a lot of customizability with this new platform that I can use to leverage the paid subscription feature, but I want to first master the basics.

In addition to that, I’m building an online business around memberships. You might have noticed that I’ve been sharing posts from this account:

This is the start of that business with the website currently in development.

I’ll share more in future posts but for now, I’d greatly appreciate it if you could give it a follow!

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🔍 What I’m Exploring

(This is a new section to the newsletter which is about interesting things that I’m currently exploring)

Right now, I’ve been super interested in artificial intelligence and the more I use it, the more I’m convinced that it will make many jobs obsolete. Here’s why:

At one point, an occupation as a typist existed. My supervisor told me that during his career, there was a time when the company had a section just for typists who would just type up things that people sent them. That was literally their function in the company - to type things onto paper. 

Just like how that job became obsolete and skills that used to be niche became the norm (like building PowerPoints and using Excel), AI will do that for many jobs.

Right now, there are AI apps to do specific kinds of tasks, but eventually, I can see there being AI agents at work in a team’s Slack. You will tell the AI agent to do X, Y, Z and just like a remote teammate, it’ll do it (except much faster). 

Not to be a doomsdayer but this is a storm that is really coming and most people are not ready for it, which is a bit frightening.

🔧 Toolbox

This section will showcase the tools I use for anything. I love trying new things so I’ll share what I’m using and why:

  • Website hosting (link): I use this hosting provider to host 3 different websites on ONE plan. I initially started hosting my website on Bluehost but if you do a little research, it’s the worst hosting provider… super slow hosting and they increase the price every time. With this hosting platform, I get really fast speed (like 10x faster than when I used Bluehost) and I can host as many websites as I want on my server. If I get more traffic where it’s slowing down my website’s load time, I can just increase my server size.

  • Newsletter platform (link): If you want to eventually monetize your newsletter, this platform makes it the easiest to do just that. That’s why I decided to switch from Substack. If you want to just publish a newsletter and not bear any cost, I would say go with Substack. If you want to grow your newsletter and monetize it, this is the better place to do it.