I am an investor of people, and real estate.
This website exists because I started to create financial freedom through real estate investing and I knew my story could help other people. I've also found that I can give other people an opportunity to make money with me on my deals. What an incredible journey!
Freedom is more than financial
I am driven by pure freedom—not just the "I work for myself and make my own schedule" type of freedom, but a pure undeniable hyper individualism.
True autonomy isn’t just freedom from financial dependence—it’s freedom from the world’s influence entirely. I want to think only my own thoughts, to create without care of an algorithm. I want to create wealth without a product or service. I want to write with blood, not borrowed ink. I want to live without the manufactured urgency of social pressure.
I hated being broke, as I think most broke people do, but as I learned financial responsibility and money management my eyes were opened to a new host of problems. I met thousands of other creators, investors, entrepreneurs, and read a stockpile of books all of which taught me that true freedom requires difficult and consistent choices of individuality. Money is a real constraint, I will never say otherwise, but as I made money I realized that money only fixes money problems and life comes with a large variety of types of problems. I know some very wealthy people that are stuck in jobs they don't like working for companies that they own and are in charge of, crazy. Is that freedom? I know plenty of financially successful people who have never left the country nor have ever read a difficult book as an adult. What kind of freedom does a person really have if they haven't seen the world or even read about it? What is financial freedom if you still live in a small, boring, complacent life that you're not sure you even chose for yourself?
True freedom demands that you live a big and often scary life that you've chosen outside of social influence.
Why is it called "Broke is a Choice"?
The name is blunt and a bit harsh but also factually correct, which is a decent reflection of my personality. We don't choose the financial situation that we are born with but at some point in life we have to take responsible for our outcomes and our financial management. I started this journey very late in life. I was in my 30s before I started getting things together and I was so mad at myself when I finally decided to change that I wanted to name this story something that would embed an uncomfortable level of responsibility in my brain
I was broke because of my bad choices, once I accepted that, then I could make better choices and start making money.
My money story
In 2001 I enlisted in the Army and saw a bit of the world, jumped out of some airplanes, went to war twice, and it helped me grow up a little bit. Then I learned how to build houses with my uncle, I spent some time in car sales, went to college for finance, and then I spent nearly a decade as a drunk and a drug addict – which were not my proudest years.
In my early 30’s I began a journey towards freedom. Freedom from jobs I hate, tyrannical bosses, projects I don’t care about, and just the dull complacency of working for the weekend.
In 2010 I made some particularly bad life choices and ended up broke with no income and a lot of debt. I quickly realized that I had always been broke but never really understood how bad things were because like most Americans I avoided thinking about it or looking at my bank account and just assumed I was destined to be broke. This is when I realized an important lesson: humans really only learn when the lesson is painful, and when life is not painful we learn nothing at all.
This pain made me start learning about personal finance. I calculated my total net worth with a calculator online and it told me I was about 40K in the negative. I had zero money in savings, I had just lost my job, and I wasn’t broke because I didn’t make enough money I was broke because I misspent what I made. I had a nice car and nice clothes and went out to eat often. This problem was from me making bad choices constantly and taking zero responsibility. This is incredibly common and it’s why most people live month to month.
Luckily, I respond very well to pain.
I got fed up with constantly being stressed out over money, I was sick of being broke, and swore I would fix this problem forever.
I still remember distinctly what it was like to have my life choices guided by insufficient resources. Not being able to afford to quit a job I hate, not being able to move to somewhere with more opportunity, being tied to the wrong people due to financial limitations. So I began to sacrifice every single material thing in my life that to start paying off my debt and saving money, it worked, and I documented all of it on this site.
Financial freedom isn’t just not worrying about paying the bills, it allows us to design our entire life around what we enjoy, rather than what most people do which is work just enough to fund their already existing commitments that they aren’t really that excited about. This is a problem that can be fixed and it’s not too hard.
As I started getting better at this I realized that I really enjoyed my new found freedom, and I know others would enjoy it as well. I don’t have any desire to be the most successful investor on earth, I just want to live a life I designed, doing things I love, challenging myself, and helping the next person find the same for themselves.
Stats on Alex
I’m an off-the-charts extrovert, and ENTP, an enneagram 8, a photographer, I love people more than anything, I'm obsessed with dense philosophical texts preferably written by long dead authors (and a bonus if they committed suicide), I am an Army veteran and paratrooper (Kabul 2003 & 2004), I've been doing heavy deadlifts and squats since I was 19 years old and I'm convinced they fix 99% of problems, Tool is the greatest band of all time, and I'm a world class shit talker.