3400: How Much of Personal Finance is Luck? By Jen Hayes on Fortune in Finance

Get more for your business with Northwest Registered Agent. They help you launch an LLC for just $39 plus state fees, while helping protect your identity by keeping your home address private. Don't wait. Protect your privacy, build your brand, and get your complete business identity in just 10 clicks and ten minutes. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com/paidofd and start building something amazing. Get more with Northwest Registered Agent at northwestregisteredagent.com/paidofd. This is Optimal Finance Daily, How much of personal finance is luck? By Jen Hayes of jenhays.me. I'm going to say something that might irritate some personal finance bloggers. A sizable portion of your net worth is based on luck. Some of the best financial decisions I've made in my life were simply a matter of being in the right place at the right time, And some of the worst choices I've seen others make were due, at least in part, to some truly horrible luck. How much of personal finance is luck? My story. Two of the best financial choices I've ever made were deciding to move back in with my parents during my junior year of college and accepting a job that paid well during my first year of grad school. I would like to tell you that those decisions were the result of hard work, perseverance, and careful consideration of all my options, but that isn't entirely true. A big part of both of those decisions was luck. When I was a junior in college, I shared an apartment with my then boyfriend, now husband. My hubby was going to a community college at the time, and he applied to a few different universities. He was accepted into an out of state college and of course, I was devastated by this at the time. Looking back on it, this was the best thing that could have happened for us financially. Instead of continuing to live with him and spending my student loan money on our apartment, I moved back in with my parents and saved tens of thousands of dollars. If he had been accepted into the school I was attending, we both would have wasted a small fortune on apartment rent. The other excellent decision I made was accepting a well paying job for my first year of graduate school. Again, this was due in large part to good luck that seemed like bad luck at the time. The summer after finishing my undergrad degree, I was working as a part time HR assistant for only slightly more than minimum wage. Needless to say, I was barely scraping by financially. I was crushed when I was laid off unexpectedly. I assumed it would take me a while to find a new job, but it actually ended up being one of the shortest job searches of my entire life. I applied for a job that seemed like a long shot. It was a research assistant position at the university's Department of Mechanical Engineering. I seemed to meet the basic …