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If you’re struggling to stay afloat in today’s economy, working long hours and barely making ends meet, you’re not alone. According to MIT’s “living wage calculator”, a “living wage” for an adult living in Miami Dade would be around $11.68/hr. Minimum wage, on the other hand, is $8.05 per hour. A minimum wage worker here in South Florida would have to work very long hours, sacrificing health, relationships, and sleep, in order to actually “make a living.” Many people in this situation end up losing hope that they’ll ever experience true financial freedom.
The numbers get even worse for working people with families to support. Having even one child to support raises your minimum requirements to around $25 per hour just to make ends meet. Obviously, this is impossible to do while earning minimum wage, even if you were to work 20 hours per day. Even people with “good” jobs, making $15-$20 per hour, will run into problems when they start having children.
The problem is — for most people in Miami, it’s very hard to find jobs that pay more than minimum wage, let alone the $25 – $30 per hour needed to comfortably support even one child.
Median hourly wage in Miami is currently hovering around the $11 or $12 mark, or around $30,000 per year. According to this recent analysis, Miami has the biggest gap in the United States between what people actually make ($30,858 on average) and what they would need to earn in order to live “comfortably” ($77,057).
This leads to a situation where a huge number of people in Miami are stuck in dead-end jobs, and have no real hope for improvement in the future. They can barely make ends meet even before having kids, and after having kids, earning a living becomes, literally, humanly impossible.
People are left in desperate situations, where they have to work long hours at multiple jobs, and often still have to rely on government benefits to keep them afloat.
A New Hope for Financial Freedom
But there is a ray of hope now for people stuck in this kind of situation!
Over the past twenty years, technology has progressed to the point where computers have gone from big clunky machines for nerds, to laptops and pocket-sized devices that everybody needs to use, everywhere, all the time. There is now an enormous, urgent need for workers who can program those computers and design websites & software for consumers to use.
Companies are scrambling to scoop up anyone with coding and/or design skills, to build all kinds of websites, apps, and software applications. There is such a shortage of skilled coders. Employers are literally competing with each other to offer bigger and better packages to potential employees. That’s why Miami coders, even those with relatively low-level coding skills, make so much more money than the average Miami worker. They’re in much, much higher demand.
Not only can coding skills help you break out of a dead-end job by helping you get you higher-paying ones, but it can even help you attain true financial freedom, by taking away the need to even have a job at all. Many “entrepreneurial” minded coders make a good living without having to “go to work” or answer to a boss. Some work leisurely, taking high-dollar-per-hour freelance gigs, working from their laptops at home or while traveling. Others break out of the middle class entirely, reaching the upper echelons of society by inventing new things, building their own tech companies, and making millions of dollars.
And learning basic coding skills is much, much easier than people think.
Since the times of bulky monitors and computer nerds, there’s been a stereotype: “computer jobs are for geeks and geniuses”. This stereotype isn’t mitigated by the fact that Best Buy and Apple call their computer technicians, well, “Geeks” and “Geniuses.”
Nowadays, though, all kinds of people, from Chris Bosh to Karlie Kloss, Jimmy Fallon, Will.i.am and Ashton Kutcher, are jumping on the coding wagon.
You don’t need a computer science degree to learn how to code. Even high-school kids can do it! “Hour of Code” proved that people of all ages can grasp the basics of coding in under an hour. 10-Week coding bootcamps, which have have popped up all across the country over the past few years, have proven that people can actually get real, high-paying jobs after only a few months of learning to code.
But how can I learn to code if I’m working 60 hours per week just to survive? I barely even have money to put food on the table right now!
For many people in Miami, taking ten weeks off work to learn to code is just not going to happen. Even if the bootcamps were free (which, spoiler alert: they aren’t), losing one’s income for ten whole weeks can lead to big financial problems, really fast.
That’s why we’ve created our programs here at TechLaunch with people like you in mind. Our programs qualify for financial assistance, for those who can’t afford the high fees charged by coding bootcamps. Our classes are specifically designed so that you can take them in the evenings, while still keeping your day job(s). Even with this light, evenings-only schedule, it takes less than a year for students to learn to code well enough to get their first, foot-in-the-door coding jobs.
From there, the sky’s the limit. While most jobs cap out at $10-$20/hour, coding can take you from zero to a billion, depending on your drive. Consider coders like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and many others. They’ve become, quite literally, the richest people in the world by coding new tech products and building companies around them.
Instead of struggling with long hours and low wages just to make ends meet… take the smart way out. Learn to code. Escape the rat race, into real, lasting financial freedom.
Miami is the perfect place to break into tech.
Over the past few years, Miami has been emerging as one of America’s great developing tech hubs. A new report from the Missouri-based Kauffman Foundation, released just last week, confirms that San Francisco is no longer the country’s hottest city for startups and entrepreneurship — Miami (increasingly earning its nickname as Silicon Beach) has finally, officially taken the top spot. If you’re stuck in a dead-end job here in Miami, you’re in the wrong industry. Learn to code and get into tech now, while our tech scene is just taking off. You’ll be glad you did.
We’ll leave you today with some parting words from Peter Vegliante — a US Marine Corps veteran who, after bouncing from job to job here in South Florida, working long hours at low wages to support his family, is now learning to code at TechLaunch.
If you’re interested in learning more about what we can offer, contact us today at 786-574-3350 | info@fvi.edu
