This was my final year of teaching. After the Gavilan house had burned down, I changed the listing to just the land. It still took some six months before someone bought it. I sold it for about $460,000. That level of money was such a new thing for me, and I felt that perhaps it could make me free and independent for the first time. First I opened an account at Bank of America, but the growth rate they offered was at best five percent. That would never do. This money had to last the rest of my life; it had to take the place of a husband and family to care for me. With no husband, no children and no good relation with my siblings, it was vital that I make this money grow. I hoped to, in fact planned to, live to be 100 as my great aunts in Mississippi had. I had a meeting with Edward Jones Investments, but the man there could not even get my name correct. He kept calling me Mary Jo, and addressed letters to me the same. How good could he be at anything, especially wealth growth, if he could not even get a name right? In disgust, I opened an account with Scottrade, an online brokerage. They advertised only a seven dollar fee for each transaction and I felt that I was at least as smart as that stupid man at Edward Jones. Furthermore, I trusted no one, and decided to keep charge of my money myself. After all, who would have my interests at heart than myself? I had read and heard of investment brokers who cheated and stole money from their clients. Certainly they were all in the business to make money for themselves; any money making efforts for the client were second in importance to their own need for an income. So began my investment efforts. I had never traded stocks before, but was excited about the possibilities.
The land sold in early fall of 2006, September, I think. By November I put the money into a Scottrade account and within a few weeks asked for margin trading capabilities to be granted. I signed paperwork that Scottrade gave me, regarding the risks of such trading, but told the brokers in the local office that I had not traded margin before. When they asked about my prior experience, I told them truthfully that I had picked six stocks to invest in with my IRA from a former teaching job and had left them to grow, which they did well. I had not done more than choose the companies to invest in; I had not traded them and the money was still in those companies. (Later, I closed that IRA and transferred the account into another IRA I held, which had grown to about $150,000. Then I put all that money into a second account with Scottrade, which was not a margin trading account.)
I did my own stock trading in that IRA account.
In January of 2006, I paid heed to the old advice to invest in what you know. I bought 12,000 shares of Albertson's stock. I did all my grocery shopping at the local Albertson's and thought it made sense to buy the stock. To my surprise, after holding the stock for just a few weeks, one morning in the pre-market news an announcement was made that SuperValu, a British company, was going to buy Albertsons markets for a price of $24 per share. I had paid $18 per share, and I was sitting at the computer, logged onto the Scottrade trading site. It was just five minutes before the premarket trading session opened. I prepared the sale order, and submitted it just seconds after the trading period opened. It executed and I made $72,000. It was a Friday morning. I was astonished at making so much money so easily. Never in my life had I dressed to go to work with such elevated spirits. At the school, when the Economics class I taught was to begin, the students drifted into the room. They had been also doing "mock trading", learning the stock market and reading the stock pages in the newspaper each week. They had a competition going to see who made the most gain in money. As the got seated, I smiled a smile as wide as my entire head, and said "Kids, I made $72,000 this morning." They stared at me, in shock. I told them how I had made the gain, and one of them said to me : "That's great, Dr. Peters, but why are you still here?" I laughed and said "That is a very good question. But of course I had to be here today to tell you." Another one of them said that they would quit and take a trip if it had been them making that much money. It made me think.
Two days later, I called the superintended of personnel and asked him point-blank:
"How soon could I be out of here?" It was not really as harsh a question as it seemed, nor unexpected, because the school district had been pushing hard to try to get all of us long term experienced, higher paid, teachers, to accept an early retirement package. I had not taken it, as it was an awfully meager one, and I was one of about four who declined. The principal currently in charge of the school had undertaken a program of harassment against me and though I had taken legal action against him and prevailed, it was no longer a friendly atmosphere. In addition to that, the year ahead was going to be more difficult because the class schedule was changing back to six classes per day instead of five. The class times would be shorter and the number of classes to teach would be more. I did not have the spirit nor desire to endure another year of the hard work of performing six times a day. Few people realize that a teacher is a performer, conducting a multitude of performances each day for much less pay than performers in the entertainment industry. Stand up comics in Las Vegas can give six one hour shows a day and make millions; we teachers do the same thing for just one percent of that amount. The work was just as hard, if not harder, for little money.
In short, I wanted out. I wanted to never work for anyone ever again. In the years since I was twenty, I had gone through enough injustices and abuses in the world of working for other people, under someone's supervision, and wanted no more of it. I decided to make my living the rest of my life in the stock market as a trader. With the money I had, certainly I could become a multi-millionaire in just a few years. So I resigned on February 2nd, 2006. That first week was marvelous. I had my little Sun City house, my little dog, and complete solitude. I also had complete freedom, with no husband nor children, and lots of cash to do what I wished. Suddenly the power of wealth opened my eyes.
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