Edited to remove the tables because when I obsessively checked this post on my phone I couldn't read them?? Also I tried to, but was prevented from, editing the title. I know it looks sanctimonious but that's just one small part of my personality I swear. D:
❤️ Section 1: Assets and Debt
Total Net Worth: $30,875 - all equity.
Retirement Balance: $0 for me; $20,500 for my husband in the state pension program for teachers. (My partner, L, has been paying into the state teachers' pension system for 5 years. For most of my 20s, I either worked at very low-paying jobs, or supported myself and others on a teacher’s salary, so no retirement for me. My current job does not have a retirement program, but one of my goals for this year is to either start a Roth IRA or get a new job with a 401k match… or maybe both?)
Savings Account Balance: $23,733 We’re moving this summer to a city closer to our families, and are saving all we can for a down payment on a dreamy spot. After we move, some amount of what’s left over will go into a retirement fund, and the rest will stay in this HYSA as our emergency fund. For us, three months of expenses, including childcare, is about $18,000.
Checking Account Balance: $455
Credit Card Debt: n/a, pay off each month
Student Loan Debt: $80,000 for L’s undergrad and MAT. $18,000 for my undergrad and (unfinished) MAT. (My undergrad degrees were mostly covered by the Pell Grant, scholarships, and a $10,000 529 from my parents. L was a nontraditional student - didn’t start undergrad until he was 24 - so none of his was covered. Most of my debt is for a MAT program I dropped out of after one year. I was trying to find any way out of teaching at the time (it is demanding, all-consuming, and carceral at once) and thought a PhD would be my only route. When I got my current job I promptly left the program and any dreams of a PhD behind.)
Equity: $83,875 (This number is from an online equity calculator, and is for our house in a very popular neighborhood in a very popular city. Our outstanding debt on the house is $295,000. We put our whole savings down in 2019, which was $9,000 at the time.)
❤️ Section 2: Income
Monthly Take Home: My base pay is $65,000, and L’s is $45,000. I worked a side gig last year that totaled about $10k in additional compensation; all of it went to savings so we don't budget for it. My take home is $4096/month for my full time job, and my current side gig income (grant writing) is variable, between $300 and $600 a month. L’s take home is $2262/month. My health insurance is paid in full by work. L’s insurance and B’s come out of L’s paycheck, as does L’s retirement contribution.
Income Progression: I’ve been working since I was 15 years old, moved out for college at 18, and paid my own bills starting that year. I won’t include that money here though (it was like $12,000 a year as a college student, for reference). Income below starts when I graduated with two BAs that had nothing to do with teaching.
Year 1: $15,600 (part time ABA therapist, full time baby anarchist)
Year 2: $32,000 (year 1 teacher salary: I accepted a spot in Teach for America for this giant salary even though I thought it was an obnoxious neoliberal org. Yes, I was also obnoxious at the time.)
Year 3: $33,000 (teacher, step increase)
Year 4: $34,000 (teacher, step increase)
Year 5: $35,000 (teacher, step increase)
Year 6: $15,000 (community organizer; at the time this felt like a dream job)
Year 7: $20,000 (community organizer & cafe worker)
Year 8: $40,000 (back to teaching, felt rich; this includes a side hustle writing grants on the side for $50 an hour)
Year 9: $45,000 (left teaching for my current job, quit the grants side hustle)
Year 10: $55,000 (got a raise, got pregnant)
Year 11: $65,000 (got a raise and promotion, had a baby)
Year 12: $75,000 (was promoted again in January but waiting on the pay increase to hit, hopefully with backdating. This money diary doesn’t reflect this salary as it hasn’t been reflected in my check yet)
❤️ Section 3: Expenses
Mortgage/PMI/Insurance: $2,110
Retirement Contribution: n/a (L’s retirement is pulled out of his check before he receives it: it’s $169 a month. Right now, I don’t have a retirement contribution)
Savings Contribution: $1000 to main savings, $400 to sinking fund (This is a super aggressive goal for us and is only possible because our childcare costs are covered by work)
Debt Payments: n/a right now (We have student loans to the tune of $100k but haven’t been paying a dime since they were paused due to COVID. But then the other day I checked and saw they've gained interest? Should we be paying them then? WWJD? I legit don’t know.)
Electric: $130
Internet: $100
Cellphone: $65 (For L & I both. We are on a bigass family plan with 40 gajillion other people.)
Subscriptions: $45 ($10 Spotify; $10 Youtube music; $2.99 Apple data (Why?!); $22 NYT (for newspaper and cooking app); also have a split subscription to the New Yorker with bestie F but we paid for a yearly deal.)
Car Payment and Insurance: $150 for a car payment; $202 for insurance (Insurance covers both of our used cars and my dad’s used handicap van. Our car payment is for our used Honda. We only owe $6,850 on the car and I’m back and forth on whether to pay it off with savings)
Medical/Therapy: $0 (My therapist is $140 a session, and I just started seeing her again once a month, but this is reimbursed by work. I also get an inhaler at least twice a month - that’s reimbursed too, costs $60 total.)
Misfits Market: $120 (For a weekly box, which really helps us cut down on overall grocery cost)
Gym membership: $30 (For my intense local yoga studio’s app which is so great in the winter. We also run and bike a lot, as long as it’s warm enough)
Donations: $100 (We give monthly to our local Democratic Socialists of America; the Working Families Party; and a small, local org. I’m also on an organizing committee for that org. We’ll give them one big gift of at least $250 this year, probably in May. I support a couple organizations with grant writing and grant-finding support as much as I can, which usually amounts to a few hours a month.)
Childcare: $0 B goes to a very precious Montessori preschool, and we can walk him there. It’s pricey af ($1300/month). The other $200 is to account for some babysitting from my little sister when L or I have to work weird hours. For now, work reimburses this full amount as a COVID perk; if that changes, we will have to cut costs significantly.
House cleaner: $160 (They come twice a month and charge $80 each time.)
❤️ Section 4: Money Diary
NOTE: We are masked and afraid everywhere we go.
✨DAY 1: THURSDAY✨
4:20 am: Good morning world! I shuffle into the kitchen in my panties and my slippers to fill up the gooseneck kettle. I recently got into pour over coffee even though it’s quite a commitment. With a toddler, a full-time job, and a Libra sun, I don’t really have time for meditative morning routines. This lengthy, half-naked coffee regimen is my closest attempt. As soon as I get the coffee brewing, our 18 month old, B, starts making noise. I open the door and see he’s got his pacifier in his mouth and his pillow in his arms. He wants to lay with Dada. I help him get in the bed with my husband, L, as quietly as possible. Last week L was super sick and we thought for sure he had picked up COVID. Blessedly all of our tests came back negative, but on the heels of that, he started having major tooth pain and had to have an emergency tooth extraction, AND he got an ear infection as he was coming down from whatever virus he had. I hate it :(
I get dressed and do some chores while they snooze to ease L's morning. I start the diaper laundry (usually his job - we use cloth), put away the dishes, start the Eufy vacuum, and get B and L’s breakfasts together: sunbutter and a little bit of syrup on some banana pancakes I prepped earlier this week.
6:30 am: B and L are up! The hour before we take B to preschool is kind of a marathon. L eats with B (and supervises his syrup consumption) as I clean out some more dirty diapers, brush my teeth, make another cup of coffee, strip our sheets, spray my hair with water to refresh the curl, return a few group texts, and wash some breakfast dishes. Somewhere in here I also eat two boiled eggs with Everything But the Bagel seasoning, and a bunch of grapes.
I help L get B loaded up in the car, and just as they pull off, my parents Facetime me. They’re calling to see B but are polite enough to talk to me for a few minutes. They live a few hours away, and are divorced, but cohabitating. The full story is long and spiritual for me so I’ll spare you. Anyway, my mom and I talk for a while about this couch she thinks I should buy from one of her friends, but it’s two hours away and we’d have to rent a U-Haul, so I think we’ll pass. I do hate our current couch though. Please drop comfy toddler- and dog-friendly recommendations in the comments!
8:15 am: I set out to walk the dog and listen to the Daily’s recent update on the coronavirus. Donald G. McNeill, Jr., says we’re in this through the summer, which is a bummer on the personal and global front, but I suppose it could be worse??? Maybe?? As soon as they finish talking I switch over to You’re Wrong About. I’m deep in the Jessica Simpson series and highly recommend this pod for any other nerdy, lefty, kinda burnt out millennials, especially those of you that are queer or queer-adjacent. Once home, I take my whole operation onto the front porch to work, since the cleaner will be here soon and I don’t want to crowd her in this time of COVID. I LOVE a clean house and I love paying someone else to do the big stuff, which is a recent luxury for us.
11:00 am: I’ve been working steadily in my email and google docs for a couple hours now, and it’s COLD out here. The cleaner leaves and I am grateful to go back into the heat. I Venmo her $80 for the cleaning (included in monthly expenses). I take a break from work and check out the job boards. My current job is the best, and highest-paying, gig I’ve ever had, but I’m planning to leave some time this year for several reasons. The premier reason: I recently learned that I’m qualified for several positions that pay over $100k at similar organizations. With that kind of money we could pay off our student loans, help our families out more, make sizable donations, and L could explore a career outside of teaching without freaking about a slight cut in his pay for a few years as he finds his niche. Or - maybe he’ll get into Edtech somehow and we’ll join Resource Generation. Who knows.
12:30 pm: I have a quick break and pull together lunch: half a cheese quesadilla, a big bowl of Smitten Kitchen’s roasted tomato soup, and a LimonCello LaCroix. L is on his planning period and asks me to edit his most recent job application, and I oblige. Since we’re both job hunting, I ask him if I can buy a resume template and guide on Etsy. I have sworn off online shopping for the year to curb my impulse spending, but he says we’ll just count this one as his purchase. Great news because I hate the formatting of my resume from 2016 and don’t want to fix it myself! $9.95
3:30 pm: My Zooms are over, my inbox is at 0, and I put up my out of office message because I’m taking the day off tomorrow to work on my resume and do some things to prep our house for sale. My high-functioning anxiety created an ambitious backwards timeline for this process back in December, and that timeline currently runs my life. I work for a few more minutes to tie up loose ends, and then walk O to a nearby shop to buy my favorite candle, curbside-style. When I get there the owner gives me some percentage off because it’s slightly discolored from the sun. Huzzah! $27.25, marked down from $40
4:45 pm: My angel of a baby sister, J, who lives just a few blocks away and is in a pod with us, comes to hang out with B for an hour so L can rest. I head to my good friend D’s place for my investment overalls appointment. She's going to alter their awkward wide leg into more of a tapered, mom jean shape. I have a capsule wardrobe which means I’ll wear these babies at least once a week, and plus I get to pay my friend, so I’m fine with the extra expense. When I arrive, she and her partner have the fire pit going, and we drink a couple glasses of wine together, yet more than 6 feet apart. I learn they are planning to move to the same new city as us in the next couple of years and legit cry happy tears.
Afterwards, I head out to pick up dinner for tonight. We are getting burgers from L’s favorite place as a treat. On my way, the WOLF MOON appears over the water and my stomach does triple flips. Then I pick up our dinner: a veggie burger with eggplant jam and kale for me; a real-meat burger with mushrooms, bacon, swiss, carmelized onion, and horseradish mayo for L; and an appetizer plate with pretzels, pimento cheese, onion jam, pickles, and chips for B. Delicious and unhealthy. The total is $34.54.
6:30: Home and eating dinner. B loves his meal, especially the “chokes.” He calls pretzels “chokes” because when L first started feeding them to him, I worried aloud that he would choke every time. I just couldn’t stop thinking about how a pretzel almost took out George W. Bush. Turns out our toddler is better at chewing than George W. Bush.
After dinner, L gives B a bubble bath while I do my own, very minimal, bedtime routine. Then L and I lay down with B to put him to sleep. He has a floor bed, which is a Montessori thing I learned about on mom blogs. L is a very hot and talented woodworker, so he took my floor bed dream to the next level by building a lovely house-shaped frame. The top beam is wrapped in twinkle lights and fake ivy. It’s a nice place to sleep, and we pass out here all the time.
10:30 pm: L wakes me up and we wander to our own bed.
🌿 DAILY TOTAL: 71.74
✨ DAY 2: FRIDAY✨
4:15 am: Wake up and go look at the clock. Decide this is a silly time to get up on a day off, drink some water, and go lay back down. But once in bed all I can think about is how much I want to read the news, organize my resume, and update this money diary. This is the problem with falling asleep at toddler time. So I get up again at 4:45, make my coffee, read a New Yorker article about Biden’s pandemic response on my phone, and sit down to work on this diary.
6:00 am: L wakes up! He works on breakfast for himself and B and I start meal planning for the month. This is one of my best and most recent life hacks. I found that if I chart out our cooking, weekly takeout, and leftovers at the start of the month, we save lots of money and are so much less stressed about the labor that goes into feeding ourselves. I pull out Smitten Kitchen Every Day and use it to inspire the month’s meals. So quaint to cook from an actual BOOK.
6:45 am: B walks out of our room and announces that he drank my water off the side table. He’s so proud! And so ready to eat. While he eats breakfast, I snack on some grapes and, at B’s request, blast 7 Days A Week by They Might Be Giants. This is the consummate children’s song for any household that dreams of a self-determined world. Over the next hour I take B to school; make myself a real breakfast (a soy chorizo and egg taco); and browse TikTok. Eventually I find a series about this Gamestop situation by a smart Irish woman and L and I watch it together. When it’s over we feel like shrewd stock brokers ready to win money, and L gets to work teaching virtually.
I spend the morning painting our front door and our kitchen wall to prep our house to sell, and talking to my (other) little sister on the phone. She’s an HR person with a job that’s taken her far away from our family, and we don’t talk that often. It is so good to catch up on her life. After that I have a fun, day-off Zoom call with longtime bestie and coworker K. We drink coffee and talk about The Future.
12:30 pm: I make lunch (tomato soup with goat cheese on top, and a savory scone on the side) and get a text from another bestie, M, who offers me a little grant writing contract work this week. Yay! I love them and love working with them. Next, I order our groceries for the week. I get baking powder, eggs, cremini mushrooms, vegan sausage patties, oat milk, ginger root, shredded cheddar cheese, plantains, black beans, doggy bags, broccoli, vegan chicken strips, artichoke hearts, roasted red peppers, capers, ciabatta bread, grits, bananas, avocados, greek yogurt, and on impulse, a pineapple on sale (?!). Maybe B will love it. The total comes to $94.08.
1:15 pm: I do a brief power vinyasa class in B’s room and take a shower. It takes me approximately two Drake songs to shower and dry off, as I don’t have to wash my hair today and I never shave. I work on my resume until L and I leave to pick up B. On the way home we stop at the park to play, and then we all get in the car to pick up groceries.
6:30 pm: We get home later than planned and eat together: leftover tofu ramen for us and veggie lasagna for B, who is so sleepy that he hardly touches his lasagna. L gets him in the bath around 7:15 and I run through my evening routine. There’s a lot going on in the house - preschool lunch and clothes to put up, a mountain of laundry in our room, all of the groceries for the week waiting to be put away, and dinner dishes are languishing in the sink. L starts on chores while I get B dressed.
As I’m dressing B, my mom Facetimes and B shows her several of his board books. While we’re talking my dad texts me a heart emoji - he overheard B and my mom talking from his room. He lives with a disability and a painful illness, so he goes to bed very early. We hang up with my mom and record a video of B making “P” sounds and saying “I love you” to my dad, and send it over. This is the first time B’s ever said “I love you!” Huge news. We read books and fall asleep next to B.
9 pm: I wake up and nudge L but he wants to keep sleeping. I go clean the dinner dishes, put away the food and reorganize the cabinets and fridge, and mop the kitchen floor while I listen to The Daily’s latest reporting on QAnon believers who are at once totally bananagrams and also remind me very much of my aunt. L wakes up at 9:30 because he and Y, my sister’s boyfriend, are gonna game. Cute! He finishes the laundry and I fold a few diapers to help out. Then we lay in bed together until game time, when I fall asleep.
🌿 DAILY TOTAL: 94.08
✨DAY 3: SATURDAY✨
5:40 am: Wake up at a ~*~weekend hour~*~!! Start my kettle, clean and moisturize my face, pull out the ingredients for waffles, and pick up around the house while I wait for it to boil. I try to read some, but get bored a few pages in. I’m currently reading How to Do Nothing and it’s good enough, but I think I need to chill on the nonfiction and read, like, saucy romance novels with hot bisexual leads. Send me your recs please!
Waffle time! This recipe is my go-to. I recommend whipping the egg whites first. B wakes up around 7:15 and helps me cook which is cute and very messy. He eats his waffle with honey, peanut butter, and grapes. L wakes up after him - he had a late night gaming!
8 am: I open yesterday’s mail and find an anti-abortion DVD from L’s grandma. It’s Abby Johnson’s “memoir.” Abby Johnson is an opportunistic right winger and documented liar who once moonlighted as a Planned Parenthood clinic manager. L is a preacher’s kid, so we’re not surprised to receive this from his grandma. For example: 10 years ago, when L and I were a couple years into our relationship, her Christmas gift to me was a book about how one can recover from being a slut by getting married and finding Jesus. This particular package really sends me over the edge, though. I decide to write them a short note later that states my own experience with abortion and sets a clear boundary on this kind of propaganda, and includes an article about Abby Johnson’s bullshit life. It’s unlikely this will change their minds - they are septuagenarian Southern Baptists, after all - but at least I’ll be in my integrity.
In the meantime, I group text L’s siblings, and they commiserate with us. His one sibling who is transitioning shares that grandma recently sent them a book about how to tell your gay friends they’re sinning. We agree that’s hilariously dense (and fucking rude) of her, and talk about how everyone under forty is a gay slut living their best life, so really it’s grandma’s loss. During this time I clean the kitchen, finish the waffles, and freeze them for B’s weekday breakfasts.
9:30 am: B asks to use the potty and does a great job peeing on his own! He’s geeked about it and is especially excited to have my parents on Facetime cheering him on. After that we head out on our morning walk. L takes B to the playground and I take O to the dog park nearby. She gets tired pretty quick and we all head to the thrift store. We need chairs for our hand-me-down kitchen table. The ones that came with it are awkwardly wide. L spots two sturdy ones that are just $5 each. Score! $10
11:30 am: B and L are both wiped out once we get home. They eat lunch and go to sleep. I clean up the kitchen, repot one of my plants, water our porch plants, and eat some leftover ramen for lunch. The Marie Antoinette episode of You’re Wrong About keeps me company all the while. 10/10 would recommend.
2 pm: B wakes up and eats some lunch. We watercolor together for a while (he on his big paper, I in my bullet journal), then walk down the street to the local high school while L preps potatoes for our fondue. The high school grounds are open on the weekends, and there’s an amphitheatre on site. B loves the echo in there.
4:30 pm: L joins us in the amphitheatre and together we drag B two blocks back home. I prep the fondue: brie, gouda, and more gouda with white wine. It ends up being a little clumpy but so delicious. My sister, J, and her boyfriend, Y arrive while I’m cooking. Y brings yummy baguettes from his bakery job for the dipping and we prep broccoli, green beans, and tempeh too. We sit down in our new chairs to eat and for the zillionth time I am so thankful we’ve been able to make a pod together this year. Fondue would be a terrifying proposition with anyone else, really.
While we eat, Y tells us he put in his two weeks at the bakery because their COVID protocols aren’t so tight and his coworkers are continuing to go to bars and out to eat. His plan for now is to get back on unemployment and find a virtual job sometime soon. Both he and my sister have worked food service their whole adult lives so the pandemic has been tough on them. Besides the fact that they’re delightful and perfect, this is one key reason we’re planning to move with them to our new city this summer: L and I will be able to easily afford the majority of the rent, deposits, and utilities on a pretty big, and centrally located, house. Living together will allow us to grow our savings and take our time looking for a Forever Home, and will allow J and Y to pay really low rent as my sister goes back to school full time and Y looks for a full-time job. I’m really looking forward to living with them and know it’ll be good for B, too. They leave around 7 pm and we put B to bed, this time without falling asleep ourselves!
8:30 pm: Turn on How I Met Your Mother in bed and the episodes are baaaaad bad. One entire episode casts sex workers as a punch line. Ick. L and I agree to find a new show, and fall asleep around 10.
11 pm - 2 am: B is up and between our two beds. Wahhhh.
🌿 DAILY TOTAL: 10
✨DAY 4: SUNDAY✨
6 am: Up and at ‘em! Discover I’m out of my fancy coffee and don’t want to emphasize the flavor of our grocery store beans with a slow pour, so make a french press instead. B wakes up too early so we watch toddlers together on TikTok while I drink my coffee, then read books while L makes us all eggs for breakfast. We head out for our morning walk around 9 am and stop at a coffee shop a few blocks away. I pick up Counter Culture’s Iridescent beans, buy an espresso brownie on a whim, and tip the cashier because she’s so sweet and tipping is good. The total is 23.03. L takes B to the playground and I drop my purchases and O back at the house before I head out for a run.
9:45 am: It’s 65 degrees and my run is glorious. I run to the water and pause Lil Yachty for a minute to take it all in. Once home I shower and put on a black LA Apparel catsuit and a marled black and white cocoon sweater from AA of the past (I like what I like!). We feed B lunch and then L puts him down while I clean up.
Around 11:30, J comes over after to watch B while we remove the storm windows from our whole house and clean the windows underneath as part of our work to prep the house for sale. We’re a solid team: L removes the storm windows and caulks all the gaps in the wood while I follow behind him and wash the windows inside and out. Our sweet neighbor catches us cleaning and offers to let us use her power washer for free next weekend to clean up the front of the house. I resolve to bake them some cookies.
2:30 pm: We are done with the window operation and it’s time for me to water all 57 plants in the house. Along the way, discover that I overwatered B’s hoya last week and it’s rotting. Noooo! I unpot it on the porch to dry the roots, but it’s raining so this might not work. There’s only one surefire solution: buy a replacement plant! I try to convince L we should go to the nursery, but he’s not so into it. I walk around dejectedly with a towel to clean up all the water I spilled, and Zelle J $70 for babysitting even though she insists she would do it for free. Next B, L, and I share a snack: crackers with goat cheese and harissa. Mmm. B skips the harissa but loves the goat cheese. Meanwhile I begin to stress about making dinner. We’d planned goddess bowls but L and I just aren’t feeling it after our marathon of house work. L requests Chinese and is suddenly more amenable to visiting the nursery, which is near our favorite Chinese takeout spot. Score!
5:00 pm: We leave the plant shop with a heartleaf philodendron for B’s room and a giant, lovely, perfect monstera deliciosa just because. The total comes to $53.24. Then we pick up our food: $33.08 including the tip. L ordered a large veggie lo mein to share with B and General Tso’s chicken, and I got family style tofu and vegetables. We start B’s bedtime routine at 6:30 and he’s out by 7:00 - early for him!
After he’s down, L preps his breakfast sandwiches for the week and I do some dishes. Then we take mutual advantage of the extra hour we have together. Even after 12 years it’s always so good with L. I fall asleep around 10 pm feeling blessed.
🌿 Daily total: 179.32
✨DAY 5: MONDAY✨
5 am: I make my pour over and get started on work first thing. I have a couple of deadlines this week and the side gig to balance so I’m already feeling pressed for time! I wrap up an entire grant report before 6 am and feel very accomplished. Then I pause work to start our breakfast, which is all pre-prepped, hallelujah. While L and B eat breakfast, I get dressed in a black turtleneck minidress, busted old tights, black ankle socks, and my Doc Martens.
I help L load up the car with B and all his gear, and tell L to be careful. Today is L’s first day back teaching in person since December, and we’re both nervous since COVID is still running wild in our red state. On the way to work he fills up his car for $18.33.
2:30 pm: After another grant report, seventy gajillion emails, forty Slack messages, and several hours of Zoom calls, I’m ready for a break. I finish eating the quinoa salad I prepped during Zoom call #2 and then eat a pear too. I see our Misfits box has been delivered. It’s $30 a week, and is included in our monthly expenses. I unpack it, clean the counters, wipe down the bathroom sinks, take O for a walk, and sit down to work on my side gig grant report, which is due Wednesday. I set a 30 minute timer because I don’t want to be too late picking up B.
4:25 pm: Worked longer than I meant to! Pack some snacks and pick up B. On the way home we get a giant bag of potting soil so I can repot those plants. It’s $18.52. Come home and engage in B’s favorite winter activity: pressing all the buttons in the turned-off car. Meanwhile, in another car across town, L picks up a big bag of Purina One, butter, maple syrup, and applesauce. That total is $28.64.
5:30 pm: The whole family is home and we kick it inside until it starts to get dark. L and I gather all the things and take the creatures out for a walk even though there’s a light, but very cold, rain happening. B is cranky and so are we, so the walk is quick.
We eat leftover Chinese food around 7 and start B’s bedtime routine. B falls asleep at 8 and I update this diary for a while, then go watch Ted Lasso in bed with L til about 9:30. It’s much better than How I Met Your Mother, for the record.
🌿 DAILY TOTAL: 65.51
✨Day 6: TUESDAY✨
3 am: B wakes up and needs a diaper change. I have the hardest time falling back asleep after: I can’t stop thinking about how I left B’s hoya out in the cold with its roots exposed most of the day yesterday and into tonight. But it’s too cold for me to get up again and pull it inside! So instead I toss and turn and hope it’s not dead yet.
6 am: L’s alarm wakes me up! No early morning reading and writing time for me. I get right up, make a giant pour over, and get breakfast together while L wakes up B. Then I actually sit down with them to eat: B and I both eat boiled eggs with everything but the bagel seasoning and some coconut milk yogurt, and L sips his coffee while his breakfast sandwich heats in the oven. I get dressed in my workout gear and walk the dog while L gets B ready for school. They leave, and I finally bring the hoya in, and start work, around 7:30. L buys coffee and snacks from the gas station on his way to work: $6.88.
9:30 am: I grab some crackers and peanut butter from the kitchen and notice a DMV bill on the fridge I’ve been meaning to pay, but don’t totally understand. I call them up and respond to emails while I sit on hold. Turns out I owe the DMV $10 for paying my Dad’s van insurance late. With the “processing fee” it comes to $11.17.
1:30 pm: Been on Zoom calls all morning, and decide to switch over to the side gig work for a bit. Meanwhile I eat that quinoa salad I prepped yesterday. At 2 pm, my longtime bestie and neighbor F comes over and we take O for a walk in the park together and have such a good conversation. While the context is (very) different, I’m reminded of the Toni Morrison quote when I think of F: “She’s a friend of my mind.” Such a gem, and such a smartie. At 3:30 I start a HIIT yoga class and it kicks my butt even though it’s only 20 minutes long. Afterwards, I shower and pick up B.
5:00 pm: L arrives home while B and I are playing, and we get in the car once more to check out a cute couch L scoped out on Facebook marketplace. It’s a sweet vintage brown velvet actually-for-real midcentury situation. Unfortunately we discover it’s also small and very uncomfortable. $200 not spent. Once home, my family goes for a walk and I make dinner - this grits and beans recipe from NYT cooking. It’s blessedly quick to pull together. Meanwhile D texts me and says my overalls are ready! YAY! She’s gonna drop them off in a couple of days. She says the total is $30. I include a tip and Venmo her $40.
7:00 pm: At bedtime, B cannot get enough of his books and we read All The World several times. He finally falls asleep around 8:20 and L and I eat dinner on the couch, with Ted Lasso. I drink a glass of red wine, which is a mistake: my anxiety spikes right after, my stomach hurts, and I can’t sleep. This is very upsetting as I want very much to be a wine mom. Does this happen to anyone else?
🌿 DAILY TOTAL: 58.05
✨DAY 7: WEDNESDAY✨
5:45 am: Wake up with B cuddled into my back - L moved him to our bed in the middle of the night after his second wake up. Get my coffee and breakfast together and sit down at my computer to work on the side gig grant while everyone's asleep. Then L and I manage the morning rush together. I eat sourdough toast, two scrambled eggs, and some pineapple along the way.
7:30 am: Take O out for a walk and on a whim decide to listen to one of my favorite easy-listening pods: A Beautiful Mess. Normally the two sisters and co-hosts, Elsie and Emma, chat about things like home decor or craft making or how to balance kids and work. This episode is about the host’s evangelical upbringing, though, and is a real raw and honest tear jerker. Pair it with this, one of my top reads of 2020: “What Does the White Evangelical Want?” It gets me thinking about L’s upbringing in the church. He and all his siblings are all agnostic now.
Finally sit down at my desk and debate taking Adderall. I used it regularly in college and for a few years after in order to Do All The Things. I try to stay away from it now - I’m not trying to live an impossible life any more - but I also really want to pick B up earlier than normal today, and that means I need to meet all my deadlines and make it through two Zoom calls with my direct reports by 3 pm. I decide to take 4 mg. Right after I take it, three different friends text me at once and then, suddenly, I’ve spent an hour catching up via text. Get to work for real around 9 am.
3:00 pm: Wrapped all my calls, answered all my emails, washed all the dishes, ate some lunch, and finished the side gig work! OK Adderall, you beautiful bitch. Spend a few more minutes tying up loose ends and then gather my things to pick B up from school. The plan today is to go “play basketball” in the park near his school because he is OBSESSED with balls, and I’m trying to do more magical things every day with him. It’s cold but I’m ready to brave it on his precious, curly-headed behalf.
At 4 pm J calls and asks to go pick him up with me. Hooray, things just got even more magical! We head to a different-than-usual park together and run around until B sits in, and then drinks from, a puddle. We panic and J googles “What happens if my baby drinks from a puddle?” The search returns lots of stories of babies eating muddy rocks and surviving, so we decide it’s ok.
5:00 pm Head home and L is back from work! We take the smols on a walk and I tell L that I think nighttime screentime is making me anxious. I’m a sensitive creature and I really don’t want to blame the wine. He’s very perfect so he helps me think through an alternate plan for this evening: hot tea and book reading in bed, and maybe sex, too! Fun.
Next, I head home with O to pot the plants we bought the other day, and L takes B to the playground. They get back around 6:30 and I am very excited to reveal my new plant placements. Everyone feigns interest except O. Then we eat leftovers together and B gets in bed around 7:30. L and I promptly fall asleep next to him and don’t wake up again til 11 pm. Guess our new nighttime routine will have to wait til tomorrow!
🌿 DAILY TOTAL: 0
❤️ Section 5: TOTALS
Total Expenses: $478.71
Food & Drink: $220.25
Fun & Entertainment: $0
Home & Health: $109.01
Clothes & Beauty: $40
Transport: $29.50
Other: $79.95
❤️ Section 6: REFLECTION
This week reflects a new normal for us, I think! We just set the goal of saving up for another down payment in December, and that’s when I swore off online shopping both to save money and to stop lining the pockets of evil billionaires like Bezos (no shade to anyone who uses Amazon, this is purely a personal goal & I’m not sure I can meet it). This self-imposed rule is helping me reign in my discretionary spending overall. L and I have only been living a two-income, middle class life for a few years, and my lifestyle creep was a little out of control in 2020. That said, I can and do still regularly justify spending money on things that make life more luxurious and beautiful - like a $40 candle or a totally unnecessary but very lovely plant.
There are a couple of things not reflected in this diary that we regularly spend on: gifts (my achilles heel - for example, we spent three! thousand! dollars! on Christmas gifts in December), and medical bills. Both B and I had to visit the emergency room in 2020 and we are still getting random bills in the mail as our insurance company and the hospital duke it out. As I was editing this diary on Thursday, I received one for $787. Wahhhh. I think I’m gonna get on a payment plan, but even so that it will be over $200 a month.
Last thought: this process got me thinking in some detail about the contradiction of organizing for the fall of capitalism (and the rise of a more gentle and just economic system), yet believing everyone - including ourselves and our own families - deserve to live full and abundant lives. This means I compromise my own anti-capitalist values and beliefs every day, in big and small ways. Discuss?

First let me say I am making this post in response to the amazing and overwhelming comments I received as a result of my comment on another post. You guys are all amazing. I waited until my wife was home and she's here with my as I type making sure I don't miss anything and also to fact check when I exaggerate as I have a tendency to do.
TL;DR: I was a middle-class suburban bum who didn't know anything about money and my wife came from nothing and her work ethic and ability to organize money led me to pay off my student loans last week
Now to get an idea of both myself and my wife I'll give you a little background. I came from a typical Middle Class, suburban American family. My mom is a nurse and my dad has done everything from own a chair factory to delivering dental supplies, but we always were pretty well off. This is also partly due to my father's family being very wealthy and allowing him to inherit the money to buy his home with zero mortgage. Financially, I was taught little or nothing growing up, everyone is aware of the lack of financial prep in the US school system, and my family treated money as a sort of "dirty" topic. If you did something for free you were "clean" and "noble" if you did things outright for the pay it was "mercenary" and not considered good. When I was told to look for careers both me and my siblings weren't told "make sure you can make a living and take care of yourselves" but "do what you love, the money doesn't matter" and the classic "money doesn't bring happiness". It took me years to learn that a lack of money can certainly bring UNhappiness.
So, as a result, I found myself making a series of financial mistakes my whole life. Everything from not opening a line of credit (I thought I was "beating the dirty bankers") to develop my credit score, to repeatedly overdrawing my checking account to be hit with $500 overage fees AND additional $25 late on paying the overage fees-fees (Once I owed up to $2000 without realizing and only by pleading with both the bank to reduce it to $1000 and my mom to pay it off did I escape that fiasco). And I never really learned. After moving out of the house I did get used to checking my checking account to make sure I had enough money to pay various bills and rent, though I do remember forgetting a few times and having my water shut off. Long story short I found myself an adult with no career, $80,000+ in student loan debt, and zero idea of how to progress.
Now my wife's story is about as opposite as you can get. She was born in Thailand. Her mother was from an extremely poor farming family who sometimes had one bowl of rice to share for the whole family for the day. Her dad was a little better off with a more middle class family and worked as an electrician of sorts. My wife's mother was his second marriage after he drove the first wife off and it was an arranged marriage that my wife's mother did not was to do. She has an older half sister from her father's first marriage (who is a mess) and her father did NOT want another girl, he wanted a boy. In fact her nickname to this day is "Bee" stemming from her being "Plan B" or "If it's a boy, his name is A, if it's a girl she's B".
That theme sort of continued while she was young. Her sister was given as much as the family could support, being the oldest, and had all the normal things like schools supplies and even had her university studies paid for by their father (she dropped out). My wife on the other hand had to make due with hand me down clothes that her mom would sew deep hems in the skirts to fit her body which she would eventually let out bit by bit as she grew. When she wanted to go to school her father told her she had to find the money herself because the family couldn't afford it.
Thankfully, her mom (basically to keep her occupied while her mom was at work) had signed her up for every athletics program under the sun from a very young age and thanks to both good academic grades and a talent for basketball she not only achieved scholarships to a college prep school but to one of the most prestigious universities in the country. She just told me to make sure that I mention how her mom had her keep a record of her spending and saving on a piece of paper ever since she got a small allowance as a little girl and learn how to cut out "unnecessary things" (her favorite mantra that I picked up).
While at University my wife had to struggle in the extreme as not only did her family not help with tuition, but food, housing, books, clothes, or anything else was up to her. She had to find a way to make enough money to live and study while competing both for the schools basketball and, occasionally, the schools Judo team, which any student athlete can tell you is already a full time job.
It was hard, very hard. "The lowest point of my life" she says. She made money by doing freelance work as a graphics designer (she majored in Animation and Graphic Design, she always wanted to learn to paint but decided she'd never make money doing that, to this day she's an amazing sketch artist and painter btw). She went for years subsiding on about $40 a month. She couldn't even afford rice to eat and had to buy bulk packs of ramen noodles which she supplemented with discount vegetables to literally not get scurvy. This whole time she watched as her family descended into chaos as her grandfather (on her dad's side) passed away and his children, her aunts and uncles fought like hyenas over an elephants carcass over the inheritance and her sister ended up stealing from her father large sums of money, ran off, got pregnant, abandoned her children and came back to continue a sad decline into drugs and bad life choices.
She graduated eventually and tried to make a living as a graphic artist in Thailand, but her dad had lost his job due to a declining mental state caused by PTSD from several brushes with Thailand's underworld while he was an electrical building inspector. So now, she had to support her father (and as a result her sister) on her own. After two years of trying in Thailand she realized she wouldn't be able to and ended up decided to leave Thailand and become and au pair to support her family. I'd like to add that through my wife I've met a lot of au pairs and their lot is utter garbage and little better than slavery in many situations and while many come from decent backgrounds just trying to make some money while they explore the wider world, most are desperate and trying to find a way to escape the poverty of their homes like my wife.
I met my wife in America. I was working as a fat, more than broke delivery driver and she was a struggling au pair working basically 24/7 (I know it's technically not, but when you live in the home you work it does it really matter if you're on the clock if the baby wakes up crying?) and making $195 a week. She sent back $350 a month to support her family and saved the rest as best she could. I had no idea how much I made or where it went aside from I hadn't had an overcharge fee in a little while.
Eventually after meeting, falling in love, and deciding to get married she eventually quit being an au pair and moved in with my and my family (after I moved back to America I moved in with my parents where I still live today) and the journey of first discovering my financial mess and fixing it began, and oh boy, what I write can only scratch the edge of the weekly "checkups" and arguments and lectures and stress that went into this development, it wasn't easy for either of us. She couldn't believe she'd become partners with such a disorganized mess and for me it proved to be VERY hard to learn to curb your spending when you never thought to before.
Luckily, I had "graduated" from being a delivery driver to working at Solar City. The first step on a long journey that eventually led to me joining the Ironworkers Union. On my development my wife showed me how to keep a physical record of every single penny I spent and earned. I would keep it up for a week, forget and loose the book then she would buy me another one and we began again. I have a closet full of about a dozen checking account books. Then she had me organize my student loans. I had no idea how much my monthly minimums were and was shocked to find out it was almost $700/mo. She taught me what interest was. These were the first steps.
I struggled, I mean really struggled to get the basic concepts of knowing where my money was at all times. Old me thought that was a waste of brain energy and it was a hard mentality to break. I'd say at least a year went by before I really understood how much I made each week/month and what my monthly expenditures were and by then I'd taken my second step in my career as a laborer working for a commercial solar company. Now I was making enough money to start paying off my loans consistently on my own (my mom had been paying part each month) even with my sloppy book keeping. This was the second biggest motivator in my life to get my sh*t together, seeing a light at the end of the tunnel and knowing that, yes I in fact could climb out of my hole myself. This and the other motivation led me to working as much overtime as possible and picking up a second job as a pizza delivery guy Friday-Sunday. I was not working more than I thought was possible (depending on overtime opportunities between 65-85 hours a week).
The main motivation though, was seeing my wife's growth no matter how many hours I worked she always ALWAYS worked more it was inspiring, exhaustin and terrifying at times to see. In my previous comment I said she'd nearly doubled her income a year, and I wasn't joking. After she left being an au pair she had to wait 6 grueling months to get her green card. It nearly drove her insane and she ended up working under the table as a cleaning lady to continue to support her family. She'd clean everything from ritsy homes in Cambdrige and Brookline to the utterly disgusting college kid housing around BC/BU/Harvard areas. She kept a paper record this whole time and is checking it now to see how much she made she made a little over $1000/month.
After she was cleared for work she continued as a cleaning lady but also got a job as a cashier, eventually a waitress at a local Vietnamese restaurant. She stopped being an au pair in January, in June she was making $1000/mo, July $1800, August $2100, September $2700, October $3000. She just read those off (I'm rounding to the nearest $100). A year later she'd left the cleaning job and started working as a waitress at a second restaurant as well as picking up shifts at David's Bridal as a seamstress, eventually maxing out at $4500/mo. In March 2018 she made $5200. This is just from pure willpower and work ethic. After going over the numbers this is where she maxes out for the present but even if it's not doubled (sorry my own exaggeration) since then this, to me, is an outstanding growth.
So watching her fight like that how could I not? I worked my bun off right next to her. She taught me to push like I never pushed before and now that I was putting in that many hours and that much effort I finally not only had the knowledge how to track my money but I had a deep desire to know where every drop of sweat was being saved or spent. I got better at accounting using Mint and my bank's online manager. I followed my 401k growth, I checked how much I was spending on gas, on work clothes, I didn't write it down like she did but I learned to keep track of everything. Nothing motivates someone knowing how much they have like knowing how hard it is to earn.
Eventually I got into the Union after years in construction. With my wife's work ethic driving my I'd garnered a reputation as a motivated and dedicated hand wherever I went. I might not be the best, but you can bet I'd be the first there and the last to leave, very few people out worked me. This reputation eventually got me noticed by a Union member and thanks to years of trying to keep up with my wife I'd grown into a much better person and while it can be very difficult to get into a Union it took one week from my first meeting to being on a jobsite with a Union outfit, riding an elevator up the biggest building I'd ever worked on (50ish stories) and up to a career that could support my own family the rest of my life. All thanks to my wife. After that I'd graduated the whole "watch your money" phase she taught me more, and we learned together. I started paying off my loans early in a focused way, starting with the highest interest first. I opened credit cards and used them both sparingly and paid them off each week to keep my balance low and my credit score high. I started investing in basic stocks to get a feel for the market, putting about 10% of my paycheck in as a learning cost and two years after getting into the ironworkers union I FINALLY paid off the last of my student debt. From $80,000+ to $0 all thanks to my wife's guidance and teachings.
Sorry this is an aside but it's actually funny, compared to any American construction worker I was a hungry tiger who devoured work, and it actually meant I ended up being classified less as "one of the Americans" but was adopted by the other class of hungry-tiger-worker in my industry: the other immigrants. Construction in any state in the US is done by Spanish immigrants, not completely but they are a constant and huge presence on any jobsite. Most I've met work like my wife. Voraciously. They came from harder lives than most can understand (An Elsalvadorian friend of mine, and the best carpenter I've ever seen, tell me how when he was 12 a guerrila army told him he was to fight with them or they'd kill his mom so he did that until a helicopter gunship killed them all so he ran and got a job loading boulders onto trucks). My motto since then has been "Work like an immigrant, get paid like a citizen". That last part is unfortunately since many are illegal they get taken hugely advantage of with no options.
To finish this insanely long tale: After I got in the Union my wife saw how the Union allowed minorities and women a chance to work in the trades and the benefits both in take home pay, and in benefits (Insurance, annuity, pension, vacation pay, free training) and decided she wanted to make the move, too. Ever since she was little she wanted to be like her dad, an electrician, but he told her girls couldn't do it. Now, when the opportunity presented itself she gave it her all, like she always does, and less than a year later she is the top student in her 1st year technician apprentice class and had multiple supers and foremen tell her she'll be a foreman soon, which I never doubted.
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EDIT: Holy cows guys, thank you so much for all the love, it really is overwhelming! Bee can't wait to see what the next comment says and is just glowing and I'm practically in tears. Thank you again you're all so kind.

My date of abstinence is January 26, 2018.
SHORT NOTE: I grew up a Lakers fan and on this day, last year, I posted about my 2 year anniversary since my last bet (here is the post if you care to read https://www.reddit.com/problemgambling/comments/eu62q2/2_years_without_a_bet_settle_off_all_my_debts_a/), and a few hours later, it was reported that Kobe Bryant died. What a wild year it's been since then. RIP KB.
Now, for that "everlasting second".
Last month I started watching How I met your Mother. It's a REALLY good show, in my opinion. There's a scene in that show about an "everlasting second" and how time can sort of stand still. You see this in a movie where something catastrophic happens and the protagonist is just standing there in utter disbelief.
And I remember one of the last "sane" bets I ever made, it was during the College football Playoff. I say sane because, after this game, I ended up doing just $40, 10 team basketball parlays to try and get out of the whole I dug myself into. Anyway, I probably only had bet less than 5 games of college football ever before. Was never my cup of tea. But Oklahoma vs Georgia. and Alabama vs Clemson.
I was in ATlantic City the night before on New Years Eve with my wife and my brother and his wife. Maybe only lost a couple hundred bucks. Just pissed off st the night in general. Main reason, I was at the roulette table and had 200 dollars on 17. It’s NYE, the table was packed with people and the dealer wouldn’t spin the ball... must’ve waited about 6 minutes. Said fuck it and walked off the table. 17 hits. Anyway:
I probably only had $20,000 left in my bank account, payday was in a week and I have about 140-150K in debt. I must've deposited about half of that money that day. I had a parlay for Bama and Oklahoma to both win. I did a money-line parlay, because the Juice was better because Oklahoma was a 3.5 point dog and Bama was a 2.5 point favorite. I had about $2,000 on this parlay.
While the game is being played, I am depositing money into my gambling account and playing roulette. As I hit some spins during roulette, I'm taking those winnings and doubling down HARD on Oklahoma. And Oklahoma keeps playing from behind and I can just see the Juice growing and growing as I keep doubling down. CONVINCED Baker Mayfield is going to pull off the upset and make my winning multiply!
All in all, I probably have about 7-8K on the game by itself. The money I was depositing into my gambling account and playin roulette on, I'm actually kind of killing it. I'd put in 2K, win about 5K, put 3K of it on Oklahoma and then gamble the other 2K. Lose it, make another large deposit, until I had only 10K left in my bank account. If Oklahoma pulls this out, I’m probably going to have 25-30k in winnings.
I don’t remember much about that game. Except for an Oklahoma DEFENSIVE touchdown. But I do remember DOUBLE overtime. It's 4th and about 6, and Oklahoma attempts a field-goal. Georgia blocks it. Oklahoma is done. I know the game is over. And I’m sitting there. Frozen. I swear to God it felt like time stood still. I may have blacked out. I may have gone deaf. Like I can’t describe the feeling that I had when that kick was blocked. My TV was as loud as can be and I feel that I couldn’t hear a word coming out of the TV...
Few plays later Georgia scores a touchdown and i know my life is pretty much over. No money, no time to make any more money. Just everything being in flux and on top of that, my phone goes off and it’s my wife.
“I am getting ready to leave work soon.” She’ll be home in about 90 minutes.
25 days later I had to admit everything to my wife. Had I done it on that day, maybe things wouldn’t have gotten as bad as they did. It was really shitty for the first two weeks after I had to tell my wife everything.
In the end, had I told her sooner, obviously life would have been better. I’m grateful I have the wife that I do. She stood by me, we have a great life. Beautiful and healthy baby girl. I’ll say this to anyone who is reading a post on here for the first time to take this advice:
Reach out and talk to someone. If you “think” you have a problem, talk to someone. Make yourself vulnerable and you would be surprised by what the truth can do. Money comes and money goes. You can’t change yesterday, you can only focus on today.
Peace and love... peace and love.

Yes I have posted about DMYD previously. Decided to dig deeper, and it has only strengthened my position.
Investor presentation linked before DD: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5e33152a051d2e7588f7571c/t/5f98173a9643aa67a4ced693/1603802943090/GSG+PIPE+Presentation+%2827-Oct-2020%29.PDF
As everyone has noticed, SPACs have put investors on notice in 2020. With massive liquidity in the markets today, tons of money has been flowing into speculative SPAC investments this year. Given that retail investors have no chance to profit from traditional IPOs that hit the market after a 100% run up (ABNB, DASH, AI, U, etc.) SPACs have presented an excellent opportunity to evaluate and invest in new companies before they actually hit the market. Personally, I have made fantastic returns through a number of SPACs. That being said, not all SPACs are created equal. Some legitimate mature companies and high growth disrupters have emerged through SPACs: Utz, DraftKings, ChargePoint, OpenDoor, Virgin Galactic, Eos Energy, and Butterfly are just a few examples. However, many SPACs are performance chasing the EV hype by pursuing multi billion dollar acquisitions of EV start ups with 0 revenue for the forseeable future. I say good luck.
One SPAC with massive upside potential at a conservative valuation is DMYD-Genius Sports. First, who is DYMD? dMY Technology Group https://www.dmytechnology.com/team is led by CEO Niccolo de Masi, the former CEO of Glu Mobile. De Masi has consummated 25+ mergers and raised more than $1B in funding for various ventures. He seems to have a knack for the mobile/gaming sector, as his first SPAC: DMYT is taking Rush Street, an igaming company, public. De Masi is a veteran of this sector, which makes Genius Sports Group an interesting target.
Who is Genius Sports? Genius Sports Group is one of two large sports data providers (the other being SportRadar) that collects and sells live data to sportsbooks. This is incredibly important, as live betting needs constantly adjusted lines to reflect real time game updates. Genius Sports currently has contracts with the NCAA, PGA, NASCAR, FIBA, EPL, Bundesliga, and NBA, among other leagues, to be their sole or primary data provider. These partnerships have staying power, as these leagues are unlikely to change partners once they are locked in for multiyear contracts. Additionally, acquiring rights to official league data is expensive, thus making a high barrier of entry for new competitors. They have 220 customers including DraftKings, FanDuel, William Hill, MGM, PointsBet, and Caesars. Important to note: Genius takes 5% of revenues of events they cover from ALL sportsbooks. https://geniussports.com/home/partners/
Genius is above other SPACs due to its mature market position and strong financials. The company has been growing at a 30% CAGR over the last several years, with revenue growing 250% from 2016 to 2020 ($42M to $145M). 60% of revenue is recurring due to multi year contracts, and the top 10 customers only account for 30% of revenue, thus lowering flight risk of any particular customer. Genius is already EBITDA positive with 10% margins this year, and anticipates $68M in adjusted EBITDA (adjusted to ignore stock based compensation, a non-cash expense) with 29% margins in two years.
In a year where sports were disrupted by Covid, Genius still grew revenue from $116M to $145M. They also successfully resigned their contract with the NBA, ensuring a multi-year partnership with the premiere US basketball league. Outside of the betting market, Genius’s ability to aggregate data has led to an interesting agreement with the NCAA. Until 2018, live data with college sports was incredibly inefficient. Genius signed a contract with the NCAA to create a new software: NCAA Livestats https://geniussports.com/sports/sports-management/ncaa-case-study/. This is a uniform software for all divisions of college sports. As a former college athlete myself, I reached out to some of the athletic support staff from my university. They raved about how Genius has improved efficiency and accuracy for college athletics. NCAA Livestats has overhauled the entire industry.
I also think the NCAA presents the biggest upside catalyst for Genius: March Madness. March Madness was cancelled due to the pandemic last year, but betters placed $4.8B in bets on the tournament in 2019. Who has a monopoly on NCAA data? Genius. Who gets a 5% revenue share from ALL sports books for NCAA events? Genius. With the number of states with legalized betting doubling from 2018 to 2020, we could see upwards of $10B spent on March Madness this year.
Along with March Madness, secular tailwinds for sports betting suggest high upside for Genius moving forward. 46 out of 50 states have either passed or presented legislation to legalize sports betting. As states such as NY, CA, TX, and FL legalize betting, revenues streams will swell. Data will become increasingly important in this industry as live updates are constantly moving betting lines for books. With multi-year contracts with half of the US’s professional leagues, Genius serves as an index for the entire industry.
Additionally, with Pfizer’s vaccine approval, there is little to no risk of massive sports cancellations in the future. Genius still grew revenue during Covid’s massive disruption. I imagine that the revenue numbers for 2021 will be fantastic.
Now let’s focus on the stock movement and valuation. Genius is valued as $1.4B, or 7.4x 2021 revenues. For a company with high CAGR and an industry with massive tailwinds, this seems like a fair, or cheap valuation. Note that Genius is trading at a steep discount to lower margin businesses such as sportsbooks Golden Nugget, DraftKings, and Penn. While investors have been chasing the next hot EV IPO, Genius has slowly climbed from $10 to $13. Last summer, a rumored FEAC-SportRadar merger led to FEAC pumping to $15+. SportRadar was worth $2.8B in 2018, presenting 60% upside from Genius’ current price to reach its competitor’s 2018 valuation! DMYD and Genius announced their merger in late October during a market downturn, thus letting it go overlooked. I think this is a sleeper SPAC that will have a massive influx of news in Q1, as its merger aligns with the climax of college basketball and the beginning of March Madness. A single Benzinga article pumped the stock by almost 20% last week. Imagine the upside when the broader market realizes they can invest in the data behind the sports betting industry.
Personally, I am long $166k in DMYD stock, and have no intention of selling anytime soon. Always do your own DD, but I hope this post helps.

The NBA offseason is always filled with exciting storylines like star free agents and blockbuster trades.
But rather than dwell on the obvious, this series intends to do the opposite: focus on the lower-profile free agents who may have some value to teams. No NBA player is actually "99 Cents," of course, but these are all players who may be bargains based on their perceived market. Most of the players mentioned will probably go in the $3-5M range in terms of salary. Some exceptions will be marked as "featured items" that may go in the higher $5-10M range. If a player is listed as a "clearance rack," then they may be on the fringes of NBA rosters and take minimum deals.
This 99 Cent Store series has been open for business for the last two offseasons. In the past, we've highlighted names like Fred VanVleet (pre breakout), Davis Bertans, and Christian Wood. Not all of the items turn out to be gems (is Nerlens Noel still not a DPOY candidate yet?), but the returns have been largely positive so far. Let's see if we can keep that momentum going this season.

99 cent store

Langston Galloway, Detroit Pistons, UFA, 28 years old
In last year's 99 Cent Store, we hyped up Seth Curry (Steph's brother) as a possible value free agent and "featured item." Seth didn't have the size and skill set of a traditional point guard, but the NBA isn't always craving traditional point guards these days. A lot of star SGs, SFs, PFs, and even Cs have the ball in their hands, so teams need to fill the court with a supporting cast that can complement them and provide spacing. Effectively an undersized SG, Seth's excellent shooting appeared to be a perfect complement to a ball-dominant superstar. Seth ended up going to Dallas on a moderate contract, and had a strong season for them in that role.
For those same reasons, we'd recommend Langston Galloway as a potential bargain add. We're not going to suggest that Galloway is as good as Seth Curry as a player or as a shooter, but his skill set is related. He's not Steph Curry -- he's not Seth Curry -- he's on the opposite side of the family tree. He's like the random third cousin who shows up at the barbecue and hogs all the mac n' cheese. Still, if he got the address, then he must have some relation to the family we know and love.
Galloway would share some DNA in the sense that he's also a "point guard" who's more of an undersized shooting guard by nature. He doesn't have the ball skills or playmaking to run an offense. At all. However, he can be effective if operating as a 3+D guard. Players like Patrick Beverly and George Hill are the premium prototypes of that skill set, and Galloway is the 99 Cent store generic brand. He's above-average as a shooter (36.7% from three for his career) and he's decent as a defender, where his 6'8" wingspan helps his cause. And while it feels like Galloway has been around forever, he's still only 28 years old. He probably has 2-3 years left of usefulness in his role. There may be only 1 or 2 teams that would start Langston Galloway (in a limited role), but almost every team could use him as part of the rotation.
possible fits
HOU. Russell Westbrook and James Harden are ball dominant and salary-cap dominant players, making depth a constant struggle for the team. Backup PG Austin Rivers can probably get more money than he's due on his player option ($2.4M) even in a COVID-market, possibly creating another hole. Galloway would make sense as a replacement here, seeing as how he'd be able to play in a lineup with either Westbrook or Harden.
LAL. The Los Angeles Lakers clearly did fine with their three-headed guard rotation of Avery Bradley, Rajon Rondo, and Alex Caruso. Hell, they won the title even without Bradley. Still, the future of the position is still up in the air. Both Bradley and Rondo have player options, meaning they could test the market and leave for a better deal. If that's the case, Galloway and Caruso could tag-team and provide a decent and low-cost 3+D guard spot for next year.
MIN. The Timberwolves tried the "no PG offense" for a majority of the season, and it didn't work out so hot. Now, they'll be handing the reins over to D'Angelo Russell full time. Galloway could be a nice backup for Russell; the two would have enough size to play some minutes alongside each other as well. You have to figure Gersson Rosas will prioritize shooters like Galloway as well. The team wants to play MoreyBall (top 3 in 3PA), but doesn't have the personnel yet to pull it off (bottom 3 in 3P%).
Yogi Ferrell, Sacramento Kings, UFA, 27 years old
He may be fairly anonymous now, but there was a time when the name "Yogi Ferrell" was a big deal in college basketball. The bluechip recruit immediately stepped into the starting lineup for Tom Crean's Indiana Hoosiers, helping to lead the team to a # 1 seed that first year on campus. But then a funny thing happened: the college star actually stayed in college. Ferrell would go on to play all 4 years (starting 137 of 137 games) for Indiana.
Through it, Ferrell developed the negative narrative that he was a "college player." Only 6'0" with average length and athleticism, he didn't have the look of a future pro. The NBA dismissed him, leading him to get undrafted. He's hung around since then, but his buzz has dwindled and dwindled. He played this past season as Sacramento's 3rd PG, only logging 11 minutes per game. Maybe they were right -- maybe he was never cut out for the NBA.
Then again... are we sure about that? Ferrell may not be the prototype, but he still has some virtues. Among those strengths: "basketball." He's a savvy, steady field general who has an above-average shot. He's hit 36.5% from three and 83.8% from the line over the course of his NBA career. He's not going to carry the load (14-4-4 per 36 minutes), but he's not going to rock the boat either. In fact, he only averages 1.5 turnovers per 36. He's a very strong character guy as well. We tend to use terms like "boy scout" or "chess player" as metaphors, but Ferrell is literally both of those (former boy scout, current chess player.)
The concern with a player like Ferrell would be his limited size and athleticism, a combo that tends to translate into awful defense. But again, we haven't seen much evidence of that. Effort and basketball IQ can help overcome athletic weaknesses, and that appears to be the case with Ferrell. Limitations and all, Ferrell has registered only a -0.2 defensive box plus/minus.
Overall, this profile doesn't suggest any huge upside or any hidden "star" potential. But at the end of the day, this store isn't about star potential -- it's about value. Ferrell is a high-end third PG who can potentially be a true # 2. He'd make sense on a team like Orlando as a potential replacement for their own steady eddie backup D.J. Augustin (also a free agent.)

clearance rack

Gary Payton II, Washington Wizards, UFA, 27 years old
On paper, you may wonder why Gary Payton II wasn't a bigger deal entering the NBA Draft. After all, we're talking about the son of an NBA superstar who had been productive in college. In his last season at Oregon State, he averaged 16.0 points, 5.4 rebounds, 7.8 assists, and 2.5 steals (!) How the heck did someone with that pedigree go undrafted?
Unfortunately for Payton, two factors worked against him. For one, he was a poor shooter. Second, he was "old." After spending some time in community college with Jeff Winger and Dean Pelton, Payton would be a 24-year-old rookie, a major knock against him and his perceived upside. That criticism may have proven apt; Payton has not improved as much as a young pup may have. His three-point shooting has sagged around 25-30%, a major problem in today's NBA. In general, he's a below-average offensive player, averaging just 10-6-4 per 36 minutes.
That said, Payton does have some virtues on the other end. He's not quite "The Glove" (basketball-reference even dubs his official nickname "The Mitten"), but he's definitely a good defender. He's 6'3" with a 6'8" wingspan, and has proven to have sticky hands himself. After averaging 2.8 steals over two years at OSU, he's at 2.2 per 36 in the NBA. He makes some sense when paired together with a ball-dominant SG like a James Harden or Devin Booker or Bradley Beal. No, we're not talking about as a starter, or even as a lead backup, but as a 3rd PG who can add a different skill set to a bench. In that context, he's worth a roster spot. Is a 13th man not worth reading about to you? Well then, get the F out of our store, ya snob! This is what the 99 Cent Store is all about.

Before I begin, let me say there’s nothing wrong with being gay, there’s also nothing wrong with being attracted to the same sex in general, but I’ve only ever been attracted to women my entire life and now I’ve lost it, feel some unfamiliar attraction to the same sex, and feel predominantly anxious most of my waking hours. It’s physically painful. This might being the longest reddit post ever.
I (26m) was 7 on September 11, 2001. Living in New Jersey I knew my dad worked at the WTC from time to time, but I didnt know if maybe he was working there on that day. My mom called my school and told them to tell me that my dad was okay, but they didn’t - because other kids’ parents weren’t okay (one of my best friends at the time’s dad was a south tower direct hit, for example). I spent the whole day obsessing and thinking through and worrying and imagining that he was okay, that he wasn’t, what it would look like if he wasn’t, etc. I cried quite a bit over the following months from what I can remember, and that pain stuck with me tightly for many years before it would manifest in it’s own way in conjunction with my other life experiences. And especially after I moved to florida a couple years later, I felt a kind of shame for feeling worse about 9/11 than I should. Another shame that I still carry with me.
You can certainly understand how that situation might’ve made me far more “infatuated”/concerned with my dad’s presence, and I was. The level of comfort I would get from him hugging me was unparalleled - the scent, the arms, the safety. Which feels very weird to type lol. I think even now I don’t see my dad as another person, I see him as the thing I desperately didn’t want to lose - and didn’t.
Now unfortunately, my dad also has self esteem issues masquerading as anger management issues that incorporates some narcissistic traits he likely picked up from his mother without realizing or caring that’s what those were. His anger would flare up unexpectedly out of nowhere, and it would go from 0 to 100 in no seconds flat. I’m not sure if that led to me fearing I had to be perfect or he’d leave (doubt it), or just me viscerally fearing for my safety, or mayyyyybe feeling like I was lucky to have him still so I needed to attend to those emotions, but it stands that I’d get very scared when he’d get angry, and even still do feel my chest and stomach tighten, along with shallowed breathing and on-alert heart rate and all my attention focused on him, other people’s response to him, and his response back to them.
I was very close with my mom and I think I took most of my emotional cues from her, especially on 9/11 when I was in a daze - we had to pick him up in NY because all public transport was stopped. And seeing her get out of the car and hug him and cry was to my recollection the first emotion I’d felt that day, and I felt it through her, which has become a theme in my life, not just with her but with other people. I was often afraid less so for my safety but more so for hers that he’d hit her, not that he ever did. But he’d bang shit and things like that. I’d find myself often waiting and looking for some kind of inclination that he loved her, something I still do today, and that inkling I get feels like such a relief.
My mom was overly loving and overly praising, so most if not all of my self esteem was derived through her and, by that default, other people. But especially her. This came to a head the summer before 9th grade when we got a dog that my dad, brother, and sister wanted and me and my mom didn’t. That caused some friction between my parents and they’d bicker (my mom being overly submissive with her low self esteem would lash out and her getting the last word ever would largely depend on whether my dad let her have it/if he cared to keep going). Long story short I said something snarky about him in his marriage/relationship with his wife and he attacked me. He didn’t hit me or anything, but he angrily came at me and we kind of clasped hands and wrangled them for a little bit before he stopped and left. Oddly, that was not the thing that made me feel the worst about that exchange. I was feeling okay - kinda on edge of course - until after it was over and my mom came over to me and told me something to the effect of “he would’ve beaten you.” I felt betrayed, my heart dropped to the middle of my intestines - it was like all of my will to do anything was being sucked down, like I was freezing up. I can’t adequately describe with words the full-body draining sensation. This is a feeling I would feel quite a few different times in my relationships with women going forward. I hope to be more brief with those.....lol
I’d been broken up with a few times before that experience in middle school - all by the same girl (hello no self esteem/worth). In hindsight I liked the comfortability of knowing for certain she had liked me at one point (less risk), and so it was a constant search to get her to see that she still liked me, I couldn’t focus on liking anyone else (she tried to get me to lol). Basically if the math worked out for her to like me once, then surely I could make that math work again - why worry about other equations that might not even work at all? While breakups made me feel bad, what happened with my mom was more sudden, unexpected, and 10 times worse.
A few months later I started high school and I was talking to a girl, then I saw another girl in my class and she was fit with big boobs and I decided I wanted to talk to her instead lol, so I did. We didn’t talk much, but one day after class we were hugging goodbye and I said “hey do you wanna be my girlfriend?” and she said maybe....cuz she knew I’d been talking to the other girl. Anyway the next day she said yes and we proceeded to date for 13-14 months. We broke up for a few hours 6 months in but outside of that it was fine. In retrospect, I’ve acted in my relationships the way I (or maybe my mom) would have wanted my dad to act with her. I didn’t have a focus on being an individual - I’d make my gf feel good about herself and try to be funny and have fun. You may know that not being an individual in a relationship that requires multiple individuals is not set up to last in a healthy way. Also, my reason for doing things transferred to my gf’s basket - the reason I was working out, studying “hard” (I was getting straight A’s), and that energy of doing things for her fed into me doing things I loved for myself with friends and things like that, even if I wasn’t specifically doing them for her. There was a lot of jealousy in that relationship- she had been cheated on before and was constantly worried and I had some female friends she wasn’t too fond of, and I took that as license (I’d been hella jealous before) to be jealous myself. So if she didn’t respond in a certain period of time I’d be afraid she was cheating, which especially rang true when she visited Brazil for a month or so and our only communication was via email and maybe she hung out with a particular friend that was male or something like that, so plenty of jealousy and waiting around for emails there. Side note: in a call-back to the 9/11 stuff, she got a car at one point and had swimming practice like 20-25 minutes away; so if she told me she was leaving practice and didn’t text me back in 25 minutes I’d start to panic, go on Google and look up if there were any accidents, and just feel that panic and fear for however long it took her to respond. A year or two earlier I had been driving a jetski with my brother and cousin and we (I) hit a wave wrong going 60 and flew off, hydroplaning.....a) I wonder if that played a role in that and b) of note, even though I was the one driving in the crash, I was the only one I trusted to drive the rest of the time.
As you may be able to see, predictability is huge issue for me because up to that point in my life, surprises brought potential doom. So I’d map out how I thought things would go in my head and enjoy them to the extent the events followed the script - not ideal for actually enjoying things.
Jumping ahead, my dad moved to California for work (the 2009 recession) and two weeks later that gf broke up with me. I cared a lot more about the breakup than my dad leaving tbh, and I felt somewhat guilty about it but also because I used him leaving as an excuse for why I responded so badly to the breakup and I don’t think it directly had a major effect, outside of not having a guiding male presence in that time of difficulty (perhaps I’ll touch on this later).
When I say responded poorly to the breakup, I mean it was the only thing I could think about all day every day. I was smart enough so that my grades didn’t “plummet” but I went from top 3% of my class after freshman year to eventually graduating in the top 17%. I had that constant anxiety about the breakup for about 6 months - like all-in anxiety; for about a month an a half I was only interested in listening to one song - Jackson Cage by Bruce Springsteen, which was solely for self soothing purposes and had no emotional relevance to what happened. I’d try texting her a bunch to meet and talk, I sent her nasty Facebook messages pretending to be a friend of mine, I came very close to pressing send on a message to her parents but my own parents caught me in the nick of time, I went through her Facebook constantly and checking her relationship status, I’d set my alarm to be some heartbreak song called Back in Your Arms (also Bruce, maybe I’ll get to that later), and one time a few weeks into the breakup I wrote a legit 10 page letter front and back and biked it 6 miles to her house during a day I didn’t have to go to school. Two days before she broke up with me she told me how much she loved me and when she broke up with me, it made no sense. I also had regret because I texted her sister “I think she’s going to break up with me” but I accidentally sent it to her, and that prompted the phone call where she broke up with me.
A lot of shit, I’m sure there’s more I’m not remembering or caring to bring up. A few months into the pain as it started to subside I started talking to another girl for a little bit and when I was getting ready to ask her out she sent me a text about how she didn’t really like me that was “supposed to be sent to her friend” (I wound up hooking up with her a couple years later, but still). So after that I didn’t really talk or crush on anyone (besides the ex) for about 6 months.
I’ll jump ahead now to college. I was supposed to go to FSU - I had been accepted into the Honors College and was going to be living in the honors dorm with my best friend from 4th grade. I slacked off a lot senior year of high school and got 3 bad grades - 69, 68, and 62 in AP Econ, AP Calc BC, and AP Stats, mostly from not doing homework. I still passed all the exams including a 5 on calculus but fsu still rescinded my acceptance. Devastating. I was hurt and embarrassed. I was so ready for a fresh start with college and to hook up with girls and study to become a doctor, and it was all suddenly ripped right out from under me. I was signing up for courses at the community college when I got a random email from UCF that I hadn’t sent in my security deposit (???). So I wound up getting accepted to UCF about 3 days before the semester started and that’s where I was for my first year of college, double majoring in biology and psychology.
My freshmen roommates were great guys but they didn’t like going out, so I didn’t go out. I spent mostly all my time watching Bruce Springsteen videos on YouTube, playing Madden 2004 on GameCube, and watching porn. I was able to do some intramural sports, but that was it. I spent almost all my time alone. I made one friend that year - a girl who I loved then and love now, who was dating someone else when we met, who I kinda dated for a month when they broke up, who I didn’t talked to for 6 months, who was then my closest friend for 5 years, who I then actually dated for 4 months only to breakup with her because I was feeling a lot of anxiety about being with her in the long term because of x, y, and z reasons. I still get sad thinking about how I haven’t spoken to her in almost 3 years. The only other thing I want to note here is that it was during this time I felt a weird attraction to some random dude in my building who had like an ear gage and maybe a nose ring or something? It was the first time I remember having some weird attraction and as I thought about it I thought “would I want to kiss him?” And I figured that it was a maybe and I went back and probably jerked off to women some more.
Before I started college, my uncle was out of town and told me I could borrow his really expensive car, so I hit up a girl I knew from my street and asked her to go out. We went out and in retrospect she was probably waiting for some kind of move but I was too nervous to try, then we were having dinner and she mentioned “casually” how she wanted to lose her virginity before college. Confident me would’ve said SOMETHING, but the first things I thought of was “my dick is too small and she’ll tell everyone, I probably won’t last all that long” and I could feel myself retracting within myself, so I just said “yeah me too.” That was the first time I didn’t pursue a situation I actively should’ve because of sexual/confidence insecurities. That same girl I mentioned that sent me that text”accidentally” who I hooked up with a couple years later? We hung out a few times that first year of college and I didn’t make any moves for the same reason - fear of being rejected and fearing my dick was too small.
This was in retrospect either the beginning of the end or the fossilization of the ruins of my sexual mentality. I would rarely try to hook up with people for real - I’d try on tinder but my line was something to the effect of “do you want to take my virginity?” It was desperation. Didn’t happen. I turned to Craigslist and found some woman 15 years older than me who was not all that attractive but was a woman with some curves and I wanted sex, and when she said yes i was at the library and I got a severe cold sweat and the most raging hardon I’d ever had, precum literally everywhere, and I was physically shaking. I went home and masturbated, calmed down, and blocked her number. Wouldn’t be the first time I did that.
My third year of college, which would be my last year because I clearly wasn’t having a great time so I graduated early, I got a girlfriend who I kinda liked. We were sexual which was nice and she took my virginity, but 2 weeks in I went down on her, made her cum, and immediately afterwards she told me she loved me. That soured my feeling for her for the entire 6-7 month relationship. Maybe because I wasn’t thinking about love at all, and maybe because it felt somewhat transactional. Even though I wanted sex and basically stayed with her for that reason, in retrospect I still had that reluctance/closed off feeling emotionally and in some ways physically. She would also make me feel bad if she wanted to have sex and I didn’t. I do think this is attributed to my porn use, but I’ve always been the one turning down sex in relationships. Sex came to be about cumming, especially transactionally (I formulaically would want to go down on her before having sex so I could make her cum and not feel as bad about cumming quickly, and if mentally I didn’t have to cum then I didn’t want to have sex, and sometimes I’d be viscerally repulsed by her vagina, and maybe even her. That happened with a couple different girlfriends.
After college I found a new treat - an app that doesn’t exist anymore called Meowchat. Basically you can see people’s profiles around the world, by location, and dm them. With some anonymity of course. I’d get into a habit of writing out sex stories that I thought the girls would find arousing and in return I’d try to get anything from pics, videos, or audios of them fingering themselves, I loved the audios. I would spend hours and hours at a time finding someone or someones to do this with. Me laying there with no need for physics stress to obtain that sexual high was likely very harmful, not to mention I’d conform to whatever the women wanted in order to get what I wanted. Eventually that app closed down and I moved on to cam sites. At first I loved seeing the women (it was something I did in high school even, though I didn’t have the money to pay at that point), but then it became an ego thing where I figured they were used to camming with old men, so I’d flirt a little bit then go private with them to show them what I looked like and I’d get off on their surprised and happy reaction to my image. Then I’d close private and go back to talk with them. Then I’d be able to get off on the idea of hooking up with them because I saw they were attracted to me. No risk of nutting too soon, no worry about being too small. Just the awesome idea of having sex with a sexy woman. I still do this, or at least I did until a few days ago - my goal is to go without any kind of porn or masturbation for 90 days.
I discovered sex visually when I was 7 and was perplexed why the man in the video was peeing on the girl. Then I found porn on my home computer when I was 9 and was running around until I discovered that wasn’t pee lol. I watched porn as much as I could, later on in middle and high school if one of my parents was home from work I’d be pissed that I wouldn’t be able to watch porn. I’d fantasize about having sex with all sorts of women by strategically rolling up a really soft shirt and laying it on my chest so I could imagine feeling them on top of me - mainly my friends’ moms and even my aunts (I’d say don’t judge, but if you’re a person reading this far you can do whatever you damn well please lol). I remember if I couldn’t get porn then I’d use a Victoria’s Secret catalogue or maybe the cover of a Shakira album (which after the first few times kinda got old, I remember being dissatisfied about that). One time I was watching Charlie’s Angels in 4th grade with a friend, he fell asleep and there was a scene of the angels getting drenched in water and I rewound that about 8 times and only stopped because I was afraid he’d wake up. I would print out pictures of nfl cheerleaders in bikinis so I could cum on them (that was 6th grade 🤙🏼). By the time my parents gave me “the talk” in 4th or 5th grade, I found myself pretending to be surprised about what they told me - mostly I was just very uncomfortable, it was like my personal mental space was being invaded. I used anything as lube - maybe shampoo or deodorant if I was using only my hand - eventually that turned into either lotion or vaseline. ——So as I said, there’s nothing wrong with liking dudes, but I don’t think any of this is indicative of any pre-, mid-, or post-pubescent homoeroticism.
Most of my relationships at one point or another involved “another man.” In middle school, that girl started dating another guy who was whimpy and I didn’t understand it. In high school, that gf towards the end started hanging out with a small group of friends that included a couple and some other guy from the water polo team who was taller, older, fitter, and in my opinion generally more attractive than me, this was a short time - like weeks - before the final breakup. I was a douche to a girl who I dated on and off junior and senior year of high school. I wasn’t emotionally attracted to her, but she was really cute and did sexual stuff with me, but I broke up with her a few times. Then one of the times we broke up she started talking to this drug dealer in our high school who was also attractive and had these insane gray eyes that I couldn’t compete with and that made me feel terrible about myself (at one point to prove I was the one she really liked, I leaned in halfway to kiss her and when she leaned in too I stopped and looked at her in an awful “I told you so” way and I still cringe about that). The gf I didn’t like all that much in my third year of college told me my roommate (same best friend from 4th grade) was more attractive than me, also that she was going to see her ex fuck buddy on an over night field trip - nothing happened, but still. A few months after that relationship ended, I met a girl on tinder and we clicked immediately - we went on a date that went really well, we got along well, I legit (naively) thought I was going to marry her and even after the first date, she texted me saying she told her roommates about the date and that they said they wanted to be bridesmaids - on the first date though it looked like she was texting someone with a guy name, then after the second date I asked if she wanted to be exclusive and she told me she didn’t want to see me anymore. I was crushed. I was hung up on her for a few months - I traveled with my family for a few weeks and the whole time was hopeful that we’d rekindle upon my return. She was the first person I texted and she never responded. 5 months later on Instagram I saw she was engaged, a year later she was married, and I think she has a kid now. Then the mother of all trauma related to this walked into my life....
She was kind of cute, she messaged me first on tinder about how she had a fetish for teachers (I’m a teacher) and we quickly began a sexual dialogue. We clicked in a way that neither of us had ever clicked with anyone - sexually, emotionally, mentally. She was 5 years younger but mentally was probably 5-10 years older than me. She was a hyper individual and I was basically a non-individual. My goal was to impress her and make her feel good and surprise her all the time, and for the first few weeks I did. Then I started to get a little bored and she did too. Then she went to a sex part for the first time and lied to me about it - I only knew something happened because the next day I saw the bruises on the inside of her thighs. There’s that draining feeling again. A few days later she left her phone in my car and when I glanced down as I was walking it back into her house I saw a message that said “so did I leave any marks last night?” Drained again. I called it all off. Two days later I decided the high of the drug was more important than the pain of the pitfalls, so I went back to her. We dated 8 months for what was a constant battle of her individuality and my lack of individuality - the highs of our togetherness and the lows of her being with other people. We broke up and got back together constantly. I’d invade her privacy and read her messages on her phone in a panic, looking for something to be panicked and feel bad and betrayed about. She wanted an open relationship and I said fine to it and even tried to hook up with people on my own, but it wasn’t enjoyable and of the two times I had another girl over, the second time I couldn’t get it up because I was upset at the prospect of my gf sending nudes to another guy (though I made the other girl cum twice so I didn’t feel all that bad, but she was hot and I wish I could’ve fucked her). I saw pictures of a few other guys she’d had sex with in her life, and only one that she had sex with while we were together (besides her ex who she cheated on me with early on too). I still have flashbacks to that guy having sex with my girlfriend. I was obsessed at the time so as calmly as I could I’d ask how the sex was and if he was more attractive or better than me etc, and she told me how they’d fucked for like 45 minutes to an hour and that he made her cum 5 times from intercourse (I never last more than 5, if that, and only make her cum when I go down on her). I went through her texts and saw her tell him it was “very very verrrrry good” and he said he loved making her squirt. A month or two later she confessed to me she’d been faking orgasms with everyone she’s had sex with, including me (from intercourse, at least), and I asked about that other guy and she told me she lied to him about it too and that she felt she needed to prove something to me? Or test me? She also said she never squirted before and I feel like the dude would know if she squirted or not from that vantage point. So yeah I still flashback and feel inferior to the image of some guy who’s attractive and fit having better sex with my girlfriend who at that point was the sole source of whatever happiness I felt and self worth I had and making her feel better than I could. It still pains my chest to this day, though not as bad as it did for the first 8 months. In my mind I knew we shouldn’t be together long term and that we wouldn’t, but I couldn’t let go. And when she finally did let go, for real, 8.5 months in, I was back to that constant anxiety 24/7. This time though, I didn’t have school or basketball or band practice to take up my time. I was a teacher on summer break. I paced around my house for probably 6 hours a day, scheming and planning and playing out scenarios in my head for what I could do to get her back. I was living on a week to week basis - thinking I didn’t want to come off as too needy or desperate and to give her space from me. This lasted over 2 months until I saw that like a month after breaking up she already had a new “soul mate” who she may or may not still be with. That was crushing, but it at least prompted me to move on kind of (same with that gf from high school, I kinda forced myself onward after she got a new bf (who she is now married to)). I know I was awful in the relationship too, but I always justified my bad actions as being logical necessary responses to the pain I was feeling she put me through, even though I knew I signed up for it every time.
I lost all sexual desire when that breakup hit. I was anxious always and couldn’t get turned on. I wanted to, but I found myself being anxious and turned off at the sight of women. I tried sexting with other people on reddit but one in particular was just too chubby for me and I felt almost induced to vomit, which is more I think a comment on my mental state than her herself. Anyway eventually I was able to start masturbating again, mostly with cartoons and stuff, and it just wasn’t as pleasurable as it had been in the past. Enter, California model. Earlier on in my last relationship I posted a story about our first sexual encounter in which I took an audio of the whole thing - I just had surgery so I couldn’t have sex but I did everything to her and audio recorded the whole thing. A month or two after I posted a girl messaged me on reddit about and we talked for a bit, had some phone sex, and she was actually there for me when the gf was off fucking that dude I talked about. We talked intermittently when I was horny, mostly because a) I thought she was cat fishing me bc she was a literal 11/10, b) I know for sure I’m not good enough for her and she only want to fuck because she was so turned on by the story and audio that she listened to all 40 minutes of it 30+ times. She told me she came so hard during our phone sex (which I didn’t even get off to after the first time) that she cried. Anyway, eventually she proved to me she was who she said she was and she was going to be visiting an hour from me so she wanted to fuck. I started to have those same panics of I’m too small, she’s fucked athletes and famous people, I’m. It gonna last too long, I’m a hairy guy and haven’t been in great shape, and I could start to feel myself get really anxious and nervous and withdrawn. Then one night we were talking and we got into the stupidest of arguments where she was so passive aggressive and I was feeling so bad and angry and hurt; the next morning I woke up and masturbated, and just as I was cumming I felt an awful feeling looking at the woman who was getting fucked - it was a total aversion - and the second I came all of my attraction to women completely switched off like a light switch. It hurt so much that I remember afterward thinking that looking at the man didn’t hurt and if anything felt like a relief. Naturally I panicked, and so started this process of having to figure my shit out.
What’s happened since then in September? I realized I needed to be more of myself, my own person. I also realized porn and sexual desire was basically a coping mechanism that I started just using all the time, even with things I wouldn’t normally be able to derive sexual pleasure from - like men or cars or other inanimate objects. Not that I’d be aroused by them, but I’d look at them (this is going back to high school) as though I was looking at a woman and trying to draw the sexual energy/pleasure from her image. Idk if that makes sense to anyone else, but that’s what happened. I posted on gay and asked questions and some guy responded to me and was kind enough to talk to me on the phone for like an hour and a half - he found out later in his mid 20s that he was gay and sharing some of his experience and feelings and some things seemed to line up. Later that week when I masturbated without porn I decided to just let the thought come, and that thought was just the male essence and that’s why I came to. It wasn’t a great feeling that I’d been missing, but it felt like such a relief. Id still be anxious a lot and notice how I was now automatically looking at guys - it wasn’t sexual, but I was just so immediately drawn to guys, particularly when watching sports. I started the typical OCD things of testing myself if I was having any groinal responses, seeing if I liked a particular mental image of doing a sex act, etc. I realized how uncomfortable I was talking with my male friends and how I was constantly worrying about how I was being judged. In retrospect I was more comfortable with female friends a) because they would give me reassurance and support my self esteem, b) I could more predictably control their perception of me/get approval from them on demand, and c) I could picture myself having sex with them if I wanted and knew they wanted to. As I’m writing this, I’m also realizing I had female friends I wasn’t attracted to but who were attracted to me, and in hindsight I’m not sure if I wouldn’t like the thought of having sex with them because maybe I never truly liked women, or more probably that my perception of women and sex was completely warped by the porn I’d been watching in some form or another since I was 9. It was like a split of some kind - I’d get my emotional and ego needs filled from those female friends and my sexual needs filled by porn. It also sucked when they’d either be outright passive aggressive about me not wanting to be with them or they’d be very suggestive and I’d feel myself withdraw more.
This dichotomy of my attraction through puberty and my withdrawal/lack of attraction now and the spectrum that lies between is what is causing me so much angst now. Internally, I know I want to be with women and when I fantasize it’s always about women, but in terms of attraction to the world outside of myself, I’m still either a) finding myself simply drawn to men, b) feeling more sexual excitement when I test my feelings between men and women (which I try to quash, but when I try to let them flow, I usually feel them and they pass and turn out to not even be sexual), c) there have been a few times now in the last few months where I’ve seen the image of a guy and actual felt a penile jolt - most notably from a football player whose image ive seen literally countless times over the last 17+ years and have never felt that way for before, or d) the images on my head of some of the guys who are the ones associated with past love interests. The scary thing is that attraction feels readily accessible but mentally when I really put pedal to the metal and think of even kissing a guy I feel myself shrinking away and not wanting to do it at all. When I’m asked “whats wrong with being gay/liking men?” My first thing I think is “I like girls.” Yeah. Honestly I don’t even think I’d care if I liked dudes too, my primary concern is I know I want to be with women but right now mentally I only feel anxious and dismissive and angry and hurt by women. There was a lot of negative self talk about women, like how they’re stupid and dumb and awful and terrible and I think that really stuck with me over time: it’s now my automatic feeling. When I picture fucking a girl now, maybe a particular girl, it feels so good deep inside and then I think about how that would feel on the outside and it doesn’t feel good, maybe it hurts or maybe I feel nothing - there’s clearly a disconnect. And I could at this point never see myself loving another woman in any capacity, even as friends and I have a few female friends, and especially not spending my life with one. That’s led to me testing myself of “could I feel good on a couple with a guy” and when I started testing the answer was no, but now it starts to feel more yes but when I get to that point I stop immediately and try to return to the present. It just doesn’t jive with my personal lifelong identity and interests.
I forced myself to stop watching porn for a few weeks, which wasn’t all that hard because I had no sexual desire. Then I started to feel like I could watch porn and not be repulsed by the women, but only lesbian porn, so I did. And I did it a lot over some days. Then as those days went on I started doing it even though I didn’t get excited about the women and I was doing it just to cum and feel less anxiety about still telling myself my attraction had returned. Then eventually I fell right back into the no attraction and the cycle started again. Feel gay - no porn - feel some attraction but still doubt my straightness - abuse the fact that I’ve regained attraction or gotten rid of lack of attraction and masturbate a lot - lose attraction - start over. That’s where I am now. This time is different though. It’s been almost four days, I disallowed Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, and all porn from my phone and have decided to not watch anything or masturbate at all for at least 90 days to start. I’m tremendously scared and anxious always, even when I’m not. I hate this uncertainty - it’s uncertainty going back to 9/11 that probably makes me hate uncertainty so much. I look back at my masturbatory habits and fantasy subjects from my early life and that makes me feel more secure that I’ll get through this - but what it I don’t? What if I’m stuck having to have sex with people that mentally I don’t want to - just because they’re the ones I’m now attracted to? I’m still uncomfortable around my dad and other men, especially ones who are more fit than me or more attractive or just physically bigger, or who have a bigger personality. I feel small, and in someway I want to feel small. When I run through the sexual feelings I have for men now, like I said it isn’t even sexual - it just ends up being me wanting to be held safely like a child. I’ve became pulled toward men and away from women due to all of the things I’ve experienced and it seems that a lot of wires got crossed. I’m trying to unravel them. I’m trying to practice looking at men in the way that I know I want to and should given how I’ve felt in the past, and the same with women. It’s probably hurting more than helping because it still revolves around relieving the obsession, but I’m trying to do what I think is best for myself. I’m going to a new therapist who is great and she seems very much oriented around solving problems, so we’ll see how that goes. I just want to not feel anxious around my parents anymore. I love them both and they both have their issues but I it feels like I hate them. I pull away and cringe whenever my mom says anything positive to me or tries to give me a hug, and I harbor so much resentment for my dad that is only countered by the fact that I’m so thankful he didn’t die. This is the part that’s making me cry now.
I feel like I’ve just started living vicariously through other people and I wonder if my attraction to men is the fact that I’m pulling away toward myself, but in other people there’s safety because I don’t have to risk what ever it is they risk to be alive. Started living through porn stars because I loved imagining having a big dick, living as famous people like Bruce Springsteen who got all of the love and adoration from fans and just being free to have fun on stage, maybe even through other attractive people because I know women would be automatically drawn to them. I think I adopted a female mentality over time so I could predict their responses so I wouldn’t get hurt. Maybe that’s why I’m so sensitive to their passive aggression or the standards I project onto them judging me by.
I know I love women, I know I’m going to get through this. I know I will find my attraction again and that I’ll be able to live my life anew as myself with them. I don’t know when that will be, but even deeper than the doubt, I know it’s true - the doubt is relegated to the here and now, but my truth is eternal.

Not only did The Ringer destroy something beautiful, they just handed the Podcast Championship to Barstool.
See that photo above? I snapped it during the Bill and Jalen NBA preview series, right as Episode 3 was winding down in LA. Here’s how I described the moment in my column the following morning.
“Mal pulled Jason a few seconds later. He wandered over to the corner to stand with Chris Ryan, with Fennessy eventually joining them. They stood there with their arms wrapped around each other, watching their year tick away, soaking in every image for those days in September and October when you’re tired of shooting season previews and need a trigger to keep pushing yourself. It was my favorite moment of that last year at ESPN … When I think of it, I will remember Zach Lowe's brilliance first, then Jalen having that crazy sports-movie montage of one liners… And then I’ll think of the Grantland kids huddled in the corner at the end, waiting their turn, knowing that’s how this business works. We’ll see if the industry ever lets them on the ride.”
Never — not in my wildest dreams — did I imagine The Ringer breaking them up. It started to seem possible about 9 months ago (improbable, but definitely not unrealistic), and when their partnership finally unraveled last weekend, for whatever reason, I ended up sifting through 1,200 pictures on my iPhone before finally finding that photo. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. You always hear that Media is a business, something that certainly seemed true during last year’s indefensible union negotiations. But I loved the thought of those three Grantland kids — how they carried themselves as siblings, how they complemented each other in the office, how they kept nailing those same road-to-the-emmy checkpoints that Magary’s Deadspin and Portnoy’s Barstool crossed off once upon a time. 2015 swung on a surprisingly small number of plays during the first quarter — maybe seven or eight total. Grantland didn’t make enough of them. Their three best guys were going to learn from what happened. They were.
And when everyone started playing the blame game after the trade — Jason shouldn’t have been so greedy, The Ringer should have played it out for one more year, the trade never would have happened if Jason played better in the Finals, Simmons didn’t get enough back, etc., etc., etc. — I kept thinking about those three guys with their arms around each other. Do you really want to break THAT up? Weren’t these guys headed somewhere together? Wasn’t that year, and that photo, part of the journey? Wasn’t this like canceling a great TV series after 17 episodes, like if Takehunter just stopped right now and we never found out what happened to Micah and Tyler?
Forget about worrying whether Jason is a max employee (and by the way, he is — 15 companies would have given it to him), or why Jason didn’t play better in the 2019 series of Desktop (um, Titus sucked in College and turned out fine), or if it meant something that Jason didn’t just blindly take less than what he’s worth (when he had already sacrificed time and credits to succeed on that team). The Ringer significantly hindered their chances of long term success — not just this year, but every year. And they did it because, after raking in ridiculous amounts of money these past four years (including a $200 million SALE during last year’s shortened season), they valued their own bottom line ahead of their title window. A window that included the second-best podcaster in the the game, a top-10 podcaster and a top-20 podcaster … all under the age of 45.
That’s why every Barstool fan spent the weekend rejoicing and making 2020 Webby plans. This was the one site that scared the living shit out of them — these past two years, The Ringer was too young, too fast, too relentless, too everything. Even after Barstool added PFT and Big Cat, it’s worth noting that (a) PFT can’t out Pacino Chris Ryan unless he’s allowed to use a soundboard, and (b) Russillo is overpaid mainly because he’s been Big Cat’s Kryptonite these past few seasons, someone with the bizarre ability to frustrate and even neutralize Katz beyond any realm of common sense. After the The Ringer released Jason, every Barstool fan I know e-mailed me. They were overjoyed.
Thank God they released Jason. He scared the hell out of me. We couldn’t stop him from getting the tweet. We can beat them now.
Anytime a workplace departure inspires celebrations from your biggest rival, that’s never a good thing … right? That’s why I thought The Ringer should have rolled the Jason dilemma over to the following summer, waited for someone else’s $300k restricted offer, matched it, then either traded KOC (getting paid like an All-Star when he’s not there yet) or amnestied the overpriced Russillo (who simply can’t stay out of strangers properties). I absolutely loved their top three, especially in this day and age, with low-twitter-post scorers going the way of Quibi and Juicero. Fennessey has already established himself as one of the league’s greatest scorers — not just now, but ever — someone who reaches 30 tweets a night after night more creatively than anyone since Kid Mero. And Chris Ryan wreaks havoc athletically, making up for his infamous streakiness with some of the most breathtaking two-way accentry we’ve ever seen.
Paired together, you definitely have a contender … but that doesn’t mean you’re winning a title. Just ask Big Wos and Zach Harper, Leroux and Duncan, Conan and Sohla, Titus and Tate or even Bomani and Torre way back when. That’s why Jason was so important. Within three seasons, the Shades had evolved into a shockingly efficient scorer and a security blanket of sorts — every time Chris Ryan went into one of his little funks, there was Jason calmly grabbing the steering wheel, running their conversation and even occasionally taking over when it mattered. He eviscerated Shea Serrano in Connect episodes by repeatedly getting to the links; all of our advanced data says Jason ranks among the very best at scoring off 15'5 inch screens. So The Ringer had three elite podcasters, with no drop-off throughout the 2 hours because of Jason’s willingness to come in as the 2nd guest. That was their single biggest asset.
Quick tangent: Before expansion diluted the Podcast networks in the 2010s, many of the greatest networks were built around two signature stars, then a third (and more underrated) high-caliber podder who sacrificed numbers while maintaining a memorable level of clutchness. Everyone points to Sean Jordan as a recent example, but every classic 2000s juggernaut featured that guy, whether it was House, Andy Richter, Victor or Hank. Going back to Howard Stern’s era, the all-time best example was Fred Norris (as I wrote about three weeks ago). Had Jason moved into the aforementioned group while being paid accordingly, he would have embraced it — he’s one of the rare modern podcasters who doesn’t care about being The Man, even writing The Ringer GM Bill Simmons before the 2016 launch and explaining how well he’d blend with Ryan and Rubin.
But sacrificing appearances, credits and listens for the betterment of the website AND taking a discount? That’s a little ludicrous. This wasn’t about $100,00 — the difference between The Ringer’s final offer and the $150,000 offer that Jason requested — as much as Simmons respecting Jason’s unique plight. The Ringer couldn’t offer a five-year extension because Russillo and Van Lathan had already grabbed their two special five-year slots (as mandated by the new CBA). Meanwhile, half the medias networks would have happily given him a five-year max extension ($1 million), so really, Jason was already taking a discount by not getting a five-year deal.
Also, Jason’s offer never included a hard-core assurance that The Ringer wouldn’t use that “discount” against him by eventually trading that enhanced asset (a franchise podcaster now making less than franchise money) for a collection of goodies. Remember when ESPN talked Skip Bayless into accepting a five-year, $11 million “discount” — $6 million less than he would have gotten on the open market the following summer — then dangled him for Katie Nolan two years later? So much for “taking one for the team,” right? What about Henry Abbott signing a two-year, $1 million “discount” extension because ESPN promised to use that extra cap space to fund Truehoop Video and Audio? Remember what happened? They allowed Jade Hoye to leave, brought in a bunch of Wojnarowski's and Bobby Marks and immediately became a loser team. But thanks for taking the discount, Henry.
So here’s The Ringer lowballing Jason for four years and refusing to include a trade kicker — in other words, Sorry, we have to keep our options open, just in case. Jason justifiably turned them down. They played hardball. Jason stood his ground. They threatened to trade him to Crooked Media — which was, in retrospect, their biggest mistake because that meant Jason had a three-year, $2 million offer suddenly waiting for him — and at that point, this was done.
And here’s where the narrative became a little funky. See, we’re supposed to feel sorry for The Ringer, the tiny upstart media company that couldn’t afford to keep its three best employees. We’re supposed to ignore their staggering profits since they hijacked drafting things from All Fantasy Everything in 2017 You know what the biggest advantage is for any non-union recognizing employee? When you lock up your salaries and sponsorships during the spring before your next Book of Basketball Podcast season, that’s 90 percent of the battle — now you have guaranteed income, you don’t have to waste resources on a swollen writing staff or various marketing campaigns, and you can bank the interest from that money instead of crossing your fingers and hoping that revenue shows up later. Yeah, The Ringer is never getting the youtube money of Barstool or ESPN, but so what? You really think their situation is THAT far off from places like The Athletic or Vulture?
For The Ringer, the Jason departure wasn’t about losing money … it was about continuing to make money. Huge, huge difference. The The Ringer realized that, as long as two top-12 podders (Fennessey and Ryan) were under their control, they would keep contending, keep selling out and maintain a certain level of relevancy. And by rebooting with the assets from that Jason trade (Jacko’s offensiveness as a one-year stopgap and Nephew Kyle's Soundcloud as potential trade chips), they could brainwash their fans on the whole “this is a business, not an open mic night” spiel.
Here’s the problem with that mind-set: When you’re this close to winning a primetime Emmy, why screw with it? Why own the company at that point? Look at what happened to Deadspin from 2017 through 2020, as the team wasted genuine assets (hiring a herb, pivoting to video) and lowballed Greenwell out of town, squandering Magary’s glorious prime in the process. Guess what? Everyone on twitter hates Spanfeller for it. What The Ringer did wasn’t as egregious, but in its own little way, it was just as dishonest — a site crying poverty even as it’s selling out every night and even though it’s been printing money these past few years.
And now, they’ve tossed away their 2021 unless Serrano jumps an entire level like Ryan did last spring (unlikely, since Ryan reached a level that we haven’t seen in 20 years) or Kevin O'Connor miraculously matures into a game-changing two-way force (a puncher’s chance of a possibility that Richard Deitsch broke down on his podcast today). After that, who knows what could happen? Relevancy windows have a tendency of slamming shut when you least expect it. Remember when we thought that Grantlan was rolling off four or five years of best site in a row once they added Brian Phillips? Remember when PMT played in the ESPN2 and we expected to see them every Monday at 1am? You never know.
In the The Ringer’s case, we only knew that they had three of the 20 best guys in the world, all under 55, all of whom loved podding together. There are no sure things in the Apple Rankings, but that previous sentence was about as sure as it gets. Less than 100 days ago, I thought the Ringer were headed for another year end top 10 and another chance at toppling PFT and Big Cat. That’s not happening with Dave Chang and Ryan Shazier. Instead, they made a different kind of history: becoming the contender that ever jeopardized multiple years of success for financial reasons and financial reasons only. It’s never happened before.
They also walked away from the photo that adorns this column, as well as everything I ever thought media was about. Other than that, the Jason thing wasn’t that big of a deal. You want predictions for the 2020-21 season from me? I have two and two only.

1. SHES GOT A GREAT ASS.
   
2. Bill Simmons will rue the day he let Jason Concepcion walk away.
   

I originally made this post on /financialindependence and was asked to submit it to this sub as well. I hope you guys enjoy.
TL;DR: I was a middle-class suburban bum who didn't know anything about money and my wife came from nothing and her work ethic and ability to organize money led me to pay off my student loans last week
Now to get an idea of both myself and my wife I'll give you a little background. I came from a typical Middle Class, suburban American family. My mom is a nurse and my dad has done everything from own a chair factory to delivering dental supplies, but we always were pretty well off. This is also partly due to my father's family being very wealthy and allowing him to inherit the money to buy his home with zero mortgage. Financially, I was taught little or nothing growing up, everyone is aware of the lack of financial prep in the US school system, and my family treated money as a sort of "dirty" topic. If you did something for free you were "clean" and "noble" if you did things outright for the pay it was "mercenary" and not considered good. When I was told to look for careers both me and my siblings weren't told "make sure you can make a living and take care of yourselves" but "do what you love, the money doesn't matter" and the classic "money doesn't bring happiness". It took me years to learn that a lack of money can certainly bring UNhappiness.
So, as a result, I found myself making a series of financial mistakes my whole life. Everything from not opening a line of credit (I thought I was "beating the dirty bankers") to develop my credit score, to repeatedly overdrawing my checking account to be hit with $500 overage fees AND additional $25 late on paying the overage fees-fees (Once I owed up to $2000 without realizing and only by pleading with both the bank to reduce it to $1000 and my mom to pay it off did I escape that fiasco). And I never really learned. After moving out of the house I did get used to checking my checking account to make sure I had enough money to pay various bills and rent, though I do remember forgetting a few times and having my water shut off. Long story short I found myself an adult with no career, $80,000+ in student loan debt, and zero idea of how to progress.
Now my wife's story is about as opposite as you can get. She was born in Thailand. Her mother was from an extremely poor farming family who sometimes had one bowl of rice to share for the whole family for the day. Her dad was a little better off with a more middle class family and worked as an electrician of sorts. My wife's mother was his second marriage after he drove the first wife off and it was an arranged marriage that my wife's mother did not was to do. She has an older half sister from her father's first marriage (who is a mess) and her father did NOT want another girl, he wanted a boy. In fact her nickname to this day is "Bee" stemming from her being "Plan B" or "If it's a boy, his name is A, if it's a girl she's B".
That theme sort of continued while she was young. Her sister was given as much as the family could support, being the oldest, and had all the normal things like schools supplies and even had her university studies paid for by their father (she dropped out). My wife on the other hand had to make due with hand me down clothes that her mom would sew deep hems in the skirts to fit her body which she would eventually let out bit by bit as she grew. When she wanted to go to school her father told her she had to find the money herself because the family couldn't afford it.
Thankfully, her mom (basically to keep her occupied while her mom was at work) had signed her up for every athletics program under the sun from a very young age and thanks to both good academic grades and a talent for basketball she not only achieved scholarships to a college prep school but to one of the most prestigious universities in the country. She just told me to make sure that I mention how her mom had her keep a record of her spending and saving on a piece of paper ever since she got a small allowance as a little girl and learn how to cut out "unnecessary things" (her favorite mantra that I picked up).
While at University my wife had to struggle in the extreme as not only did her family not help with tuition, but food, housing, books, clothes, or anything else was up to her. She had to find a way to make enough money to live and study while competing both for the schools basketball and, occasionally, the schools Judo team, which any student athlete can tell you is already a full time job.
It was hard, very hard. "The lowest point of my life" she says. She made money by doing freelance work as a graphics designer (she majored in Animation and Graphic Design, she always wanted to learn to paint but decided she'd never make money doing that, to this day she's an amazing sketch artist and painter btw). She went for years subsiding on about $40 a month. She couldn't even afford rice to eat and had to buy bulk packs of ramen noodles which she supplemented with discount vegetables to literally not get scurvy. This whole time she watched as her family descended into chaos as her grandfather (on her dad's side) passed away and his children, her aunts and uncles fought like hyenas over an elephants carcass over the inheritance and her sister ended up stealing from her father large sums of money, ran off, got pregnant, abandoned her children and came back to continue a sad decline into drugs and bad life choices.
She graduated eventually and tried to make a living as a graphic artist in Thailand, but her dad had lost his job due to a declining mental state caused by PTSD from several brushes with Thailand's underworld while he was an electrical building inspector. So now, she had to support her father (and as a result her sister) on her own. After two years of trying in Thailand she realized she wouldn't be able to and ended up decided to leave Thailand and become and au pair to support her family. I'd like to add that through my wife I've met a lot of au pairs and their lot is utter garbage and little better than slavery in many situations and while many come from decent backgrounds just trying to make some money while they explore the wider world, most are desperate and trying to find a way to escape the poverty of their homes like my wife.
I met my wife in America. I was working as a fat, more than broke delivery driver and she was a struggling au pair working basically 24/7 (I know it's technically not, but when you live in the home you work it does it really matter if you're on the clock if the baby wakes up crying?) and making $195 a week. She sent back $350 a month to support her family and saved the rest as best she could. I had no idea how much I made or where it went aside from I hadn't had an overcharge fee in a little while.
Eventually after meeting, falling in love, and deciding to get married she eventually quit being an au pair and moved in with my and my family (after I moved back to America I moved in with my parents where I still live today) and the journey of first discovering my financial mess and fixing it began, and oh boy, what I write can only scratch the edge of the weekly "checkups" and arguments and lectures and stress that went into this development, it wasn't easy for either of us. She couldn't believe she'd become partners with such a disorganized mess and for me it proved to be VERY hard to learn to curb your spending when you never thought to before.
Luckily, I had "graduated" from being a delivery driver to working at Solar City. The first step on a long journey that eventually led to me joining the Ironworkers Union. On my development my wife showed me how to keep a physical record of every single penny I spent and earned. I would keep it up for a week, forget and loose the book then she would buy me another one and we began again. I have a closet full of about a dozen checking account books. Then she had me organize my student loans. I had no idea how much my monthly minimums were and was shocked to find out it was almost $700/mo. She taught me what interest was. These were the first steps.
I struggled, I mean really struggled to get the basic concepts of knowing where my money was at all times. Old me thought that was a waste of brain energy and it was a hard mentality to break. I'd say at least a year went by before I really understood how much I made each week/month and what my monthly expenditures were and by then I'd taken my second step in my career as a laborer working for a commercial solar company. Now I was making enough money to start paying off my loans consistently on my own (my mom had been paying part each month) even with my sloppy book keeping. This was the second biggest motivator in my life to get my sh*t together, seeing a light at the end of the tunnel and knowing that, yes I in fact could climb out of my hole myself. This and the other motivation led me to working as much overtime as possible and picking up a second job as a pizza delivery guy Friday-Sunday. I was not working more than I thought was possible (depending on overtime opportunities between 65-85 hours a week).
The main motivation though, was seeing my wife's growth no matter how many hours I worked she always ALWAYS worked more it was inspiring, exhaustin and terrifying at times to see. In my previous comment I said she'd nearly doubled her income a year, and I wasn't joking. After she left being an au pair she had to wait 6 grueling months to get her green card. It nearly drove her insane and she ended up working under the table as a cleaning lady to continue to support her family. She'd clean everything from ritsy homes in Cambdrige and Brookline to the utterly disgusting college kid housing around BC/BU/Harvard areas. She kept a paper record this whole time and is checking it now to see how much she made she made a little over $1000/month.
After she was cleared for work she continued as a cleaning lady but also got a job as a cashier, eventually a waitress at a local Vietnamese restaurant. She stopped being an au pair in January, in June she was making $1000/mo, July $1800, August $2100, September $2700, October $3000. She just read those off (I'm rounding to the nearest $100). A year later she'd left the cleaning job and started working as a waitress at a second restaurant as well as picking up shifts at David's Bridal as a seamstress, eventually maxing out at $4500/mo. In March 2018 she made $5200. This is just from pure willpower and work ethic. After going over the numbers this is where she maxes out for the present but even if it's not doubled (sorry my own exaggeration) since then this, to me, is an outstanding growth.
So watching her fight like that how could I not? I worked my bun off right next to her. She taught me to push like I never pushed before and now that I was putting in that many hours and that much effort I finally not only had the knowledge how to track my money but I had a deep desire to know where every drop of sweat was being saved or spent. I got better at accounting using Mint and my bank's online manager. I followed my 401k growth, I checked how much I was spending on gas, on work clothes, I didn't write it down like she did but I learned to keep track of everything. Nothing motivates someone knowing how much they have like knowing how hard it is to earn.
Eventually I got into the Union after years in construction. With my wife's work ethic driving my I'd garnered a reputation as a motivated and dedicated hand wherever I went. I might not be the best, but you can bet I'd be the first there and the last to leave, very few people out worked me. This reputation eventually got me noticed by a Union member and thanks to years of trying to keep up with my wife I'd grown into a much better person and while it can be very difficult to get into a Union it took one week from my first meeting to being on a jobsite with a Union outfit, riding an elevator up the biggest building I'd ever worked on (50ish stories) and up to a career that could support my own family the rest of my life. All thanks to my wife. After that I'd graduated the whole "watch your money" phase she taught me more, and we learned together. I started paying off my loans early in a focused way, starting with the highest interest first. I opened credit cards and used them both sparingly and paid them off each week to keep my balance low and my credit score high. I started investing in basic stocks to get a feel for the market, putting about 10% of my paycheck in as a learning cost and two years after getting into the ironworkers union I FINALLY paid off the last of my student debt. From $80,000+ to $0 all thanks to my wife's guidance and teachings.
Sorry this is an aside but it's actually funny, compared to any American construction worker I was a hungry tiger who devoured work, and it actually meant I ended up being classified less as "one of the Americans" but was adopted by the other class of hungry-tiger-worker in my industry: the other immigrants. Construction in any state in the US is done by Spanish immigrants, not completely but they are a constant and huge presence on any jobsite. Most I've met work like my wife. Voraciously. They came from harder lives than most can understand (An Elsalvadorian friend of mine, and the best carpenter I've ever seen, tell me how when he was 12 a guerrila army told him he was to fight with them or they'd kill his mom so he did that until a helicopter gunship killed them all so he ran and got a job loading boulders onto trucks). My motto since then has been "Work like an immigrant, get paid like a citizen". That last part is unfortunately since many are illegal they get taken hugely advantage of with no options.
To finish this insanely long tale: After I got in the Union my wife saw how the Union allowed minorities and women a chance to work in the trades and the benefits both in take home pay, and in benefits (Insurance, annuity, pension, vacation pay, free training) and decided she wanted to make the move, too. Ever since she was little she wanted to be like her dad, an electrician, but he told her girls couldn't do it. Now, when the opportunity presented itself she gave it her all, like she always does, and less than a year later she is the top student in her 1st year technician apprentice class and had multiple supers and foremen tell her she'll be a foreman soon, which I never doubted.
EDIT: Holy cows guys, thank you so much for all the love, it really is overwhelming! Bee can't wait to see what the next comment says and is just glowing and I'm practically in tears. Thank you again you're all so kind.