I was 31 and broke as fuck with no plan for my life living paycheck to paycheck then one day life came alone and smacked took away more than I thought I even had. From then on I have been on a rampage to take radical responsibility for my life, financially and otherwise, and as I've done so I began writing this blog in 2017 as a means to document my journey and occasionally help other people.
Why Broke is a Choice?
The name is blunt and a bit harsh, which is a decent reflection of my personality. It's also factually correct. We don't choose the financial situation that we are born with but at some point in life we start becoming responsible for our outcomes and our financial management. I started very late in life and I was so mad at my self when I finally decided to change, I wanted to 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.
Freedom is more than financial
I hated being broke, as I think most broke people do, but as I learned financial responsibility and money management my my eyes were opened to a new host of problems. I met thousands of other creators, investors, entrepreneurs, and read a few hundred 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 provides 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. 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.
Stats on Alex
I’m an extrovert, and ENTP, an enneagram 8, a photographer, I love people more than anything, I'm obsessed with dense philosophical texts preferably by long dead authors (and a bonus if they committed suicide), I've been doing heavy deadlifts and squats since I was 19 years old, I think Tool is the greatest band of all time, and I'm a world class shit talker.
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.