“I just need to out-earn the problem.”
These words carried me from my mid 20s and throughout my 30s. If you knew me back then, everything was generally great in my life - on the outside.
But behind the smiles and laughs, I was being absolutely crushed by a metric fuckton of personal debt. I had amassed a staggering amount of credit card debt with nothing much to show for it, and a disgusting 6-figure load of variable-interest rate, private student loans. At that time, my student loan monthly payments would have been the equivalent to a 30-year mortgage on a $300,000 home. I dropped out of college. Never got that degree. Brutal.
Every morning I woke up… I knew that I had to out-earn the problem.
With much help from friends, working my ass off, meeting the right people at the right time, and a copious amount of good luck, I am now largely debt free in my early 40s. Most importantly, my wife Sarah was instrumental in helping me forge the correct path forward. She saved me from myself.
This isn’t intended to be a flex. It’s an admission of guilt. I see so many young people headed down this same path and it just ripples through me like bad Taco Bell. I’ll tell more bits and pieces as we go along, but my entire current self was constructed from the ashes of my debt-ridden past. This will inform every single entry going forward.
This is my life after debt…