Despite earning well over six figures, Clinton Stamper still looks for coupons for his food.
The 26-year-old tries to keep his food budget to $5 a meal and uses>Post-grad lifestyle inflation
Stamper began earning his own money in middle school by tutoring and selling things to classmates. He learned about basic economics playing the video game Runescape and developed a code that he sold to other players>How he spends his money
Here's a look at how Stamper typically spends his money, as of March 2022.
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- Investments: $8,929 including contributions to his 401(k), traditional IRA, health savings account, stocks and cryptocurrency
- Mortgage and utilities: $3,529 for a 5-bedroom, 4-bathroom house
- Transportation: $764 for his Tesla payment and maintenance
- Discretionary: $589 for entertainment, shopping and education
- Food: $590
- Donations: $221 toward the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, Cheyanna Foundation for Children, Twitch
- Subscriptions: $215 for his gym, Netflix, cloud storage, Spotify, Amazon Prime, Discord Nitro
- Insurance: $177 for dental, vision, car, home, group legal plan
- Travel: $159
- Business expenses: $145 to create personal finance content>Buying a home during the pandemic
After investments, Stamper's biggest expense is his housing. In June 2021, he moved to the Austin area to take a new job with Google and decided to buy a home.
"Buying a house here was crazy," he says. Stamper and his girlfriend, Lexi Followill, 22, saw about 40 places, put in offers>Looking ahead
Stamper eventually wants to bring his tech and financial savvy to the health-care field.
When Stamper was young and his aunt was sick, he and his mom would visit her at the Akron Children's Hospital. (She's since made a full recovery.) While there, Stamper became friends with a lot of other cancer patients around his age and became passionate about cancer research.
In the future, Stamper hopes to invest money into developments in automated surgery.Will Snyder | CNBC Make It
Stamper thought he'd become a neurosurgeon before his pivot to tech. He still hopes to contribute to cancer research and treatment in the future by funding developments in automated surgery. He spends about six hours a week reading up on artificial intelligence, and it's part of the reason he invests so aggressively — he hopes that in a few decades, he'll be able to lead or back a company developing this technology.
Robotic-assisted surgery exists, but he hopes automated surgery machines will enable a patient to step into a machine, get a diagnosis, undergo surgery or receive treatment and recover all in one place.
"For example, in war zones, we wouldn't need doctors or surgeons being out there," Stamper says. "We could have this machine that does everything to standard and doesn't get tired and doesn't make mistakes. To fund that idea, I need to start saving now."
