Like millions of Americans: The extra money I received via unemployment benefits during Covid was not only life-saving but life-changing. My story wasn’t all that uncommon from most. I was getting thousands of dollars, but because so much of the economy was either unopened or unavailable (for safety reasons) I was not out spending it. This led to my bank account swelling taller and wider than ever before.
I had so much money that I didn’t know what to do with it. It’s a cliché — mainly reserved for the workingclass, who isn’t used to being in such a comfortable position — but it was true. Most days I would log in to my online banking simply to admire how healthy it looked. Seemingly overnight Bank of America upgraded me to a new class of member and offered me a handful of extra benefits and I remember realizing how silly and opposite it felt that the more money a person had the more perks (such as lower credit card rates and no penalties for over-drafting) they got. It was the first time I was reminded tangibly that financial institutions literally punish poor people for the crime of being poor.
Alas, one night I did what I did all those other nights and logged into my BoA account and for whatever reason I didn’t get a bang out of the inflated number I saw. I got bored and tired of looking at it. Because while my checking and savings accounts were plumper and stronger than I had ever known, I also had like seven or eight thousand dollars worth of credit card debt outstanding. And so I got drunk one night, and had one of my drunk like epiphanies — which occasionally did some good for my life — and decided on the spot that I would obliterate a large chunk of the checking account number that made me feel so good.
A few years later I had a similar drunk epiphany. I still owed like $9,000 on my Mercedes and it was all very sudden but I transferred almost everything from my checking account and paid the sumbitch off. A month later, the engine gave out, and I had to get a new car. I had exactly one month without a car payment.
I say all of that to say this: A couple weeks ago I did my taxes, and because I get a return every year I do the incredibly lazy thing where I don’t merely want to get two or three thousand back per year; I wait three years so I can get all three returns at once. I do that because I want to really feel it when the direct deposit hits my bank account. 2023 and ’24 were what was expected. 2025, on the other hand, was the first year where the so-called No Tax On Tips was a thing, and so that year was pretty fucking great as far as my tax return went.
In my professional, adult life, I can count on two fingers and two fingers only the amount of times the American Government has done something beneficial for me: The extra unemployment money during Covid, and the Big Beautiful Bill that featured no taxes on tips. It is no coincidence that those two events have spawned the two-most lucrative individual moments insofar as my bank account was/is concerned.
I am pretty transparent regarding my feelings towards money. I love money more than I love just about anything, and I equally hate it more than I hate just about anything. I love the way it looks; I love the way it feels in my hands; I love all the things I can imagine doing with it; I love the power, even if it’s minimal, that it gives me.
And I hate it because it’s so goddam necessary.
More than anything what this post-taxes influx of capital has allowed is the ability to really think about what I want to do next. The potential. Since I am no longer drinking, I am not in any rush to party and/or blow off five dimes at one of the local casinos. I have no new toys that I desire. I have almost nothing that I want to do with it.
But I am dreaming about it. That’s honestly what makes me happiest. I’m dreaming on the idea that this, right now, might actually be the best time to start law school, if it meshes with my work schedule. I’m dreaming on the notion that the best use of all this extra money is just to keep it stashed away for the elusive down payment which is certain to eventually come on the first house that I buy. I have dreamed about a great many things, because that’s what having money allows people to do.
I do love that, but equally I hate it. I hate it’s not even that much money and it still gets me excited. I hate that I have a good job, and the ability to save more than most Americans, and that in any normal society I would have bought my first house a long time ago, and been able to pursue my actual longterm dreams without the economic anxiety of wondering how I could make it work, and that these thoughts and realizations are all part of my reality and calculus as a 36 year-old.
My immediate feeling of ecstasy once I did the back-of-the-napkin math, adding up my three years of tax returns, was to think about my parents. I thought about how they worked hard and owned multiple houses (individually, at various points) and raised three boys and did everything the so-called right way. They were so good to us (their kids) that, privately, I considered us spoiled. We never wanted for much.
Yet, neither of my parents have much of anything to show for themselves via retirement savings or ownership of property. They worked their whole lives and were never, like, broke. They weren’t stupid. They were just victims of not knowing what they didn’t know, and the somewhat fruitful economic times of the 1990’s and early-2000’s lulled them into never having to seriously consider 401K’s or IRA’s. Then in 2008 the economy tanked and my parents’ money situation was never really the same.
And so it’s a thing, and has been for several years — since I began saving in any meaningful way — that my conception of money has never been about having enough to survive personally, but to obtain enough of it to ensure the survival and wellbeing for all of us. It sounds dramatic, I know. But I have to keep dramatic the idea in my head or else my fear is that I will fall victim to believing I have already done enough.
Anyway, what I wasted all that time saying was this: Right now is not a time for dreams. Having extra money is nice, but just as during Covid it means nothing to me if I am still strapped with debt. As such, the most prudent thing is pay off my car — of which I still owe like $9,500. At the end of every avenue, or every dream, is that number: 24 terms (or months) at roughly $400 a pop that I could wipe away in one fell swoop. A house can be saved for. Law school, too. But if I can do it without the millstone of debt dangling around my neck, I’m gonna do it that way.
I’ve never been much of a mystery when it comes to lamenting all the mistakes I have made with money. My original sin was going to Virginia Tech for, in retrospect, mostly cosmetic reasons, which set me back about a decade because my student loan debt added up to about $40,000. Back then money wasn’t real to me. I figured by the time the bill came due I would be a household name and it wouldn’t matter how much school cost.
Then in my early-20’s I was punting off most of my (humble) disposable income at the casino, but there were enough winning nights to make it a vice I could live with. By the time I was in my mid-20’s I was working for the other side — the casino — and so it sort of exacerbated my gambling problem because not only was I playing substantially more money, but I was making more money and thus it was much easier to offset my losses. At any rate, money still was not real to me.
When I turned 27 there was a veteran craps dealer named Sue who told me I should start a Roth IRA — because apparently those were good for young people — and so I did that and then realized the stock market was just another version of a casino. I could gamble on stocks as my vague attempt at predicting the future. It went well for a time. Lifetime, however, I am losing about $30,000. If I had just kept it in the account as cash I would present-day be $30,000 richer.
I never threw much of my weight around in the crypto currency streets, and neither did I ever listen to any of the wannabe day traders who said I should invest in this or that — mainly because it’s really hard for me to respect financial advice from people who know only as much as I do. The market is a rigged game for billionaires and multimillionaires, as they possess all the information as it filters down. So-called retail investors (i.e. poor people) basically just have to get lucky.
If I have learned anything over the last decade, at least insofar as becoming literate in the stock market and retirement savings, it’s that cash has been my best form of retaining my money. Because cash is guaranteed. My most profitable account has undoubtedly been the 401K I contribute to through work, but I’m not a fucking dipshit and I’m aware that one of these days, or months, or years, the market is going to take a dump and I will be at its mercy.
In the meantime I have found that what I look forward to most is simply taking out money every week from my checking account at the local BoA ATM and putting it in a piggybank. Only then is the money safe. It’s real. I can touch it, I can see it. I know it’s there. Everything else — my Roth IRA, my 401K — are just commas and decimal points sure to fuck off one day at the whims of a bunch of wealthy people who are better off crashing the economy so they can rebuy all the stocks at a cheaper price so they can all increase their wealth while the rest of us eat shit.
I’m not mad about it. I promise. While I do take a lot of pride in the amount of money I have been able to save over the last decade, the overwhelming majority of which came in the last 2-3 years, my attitude towards it is that it doesn’t really matter. After all: It’s not enough to buy the kind of house that I desire. It’s not enough to pay for law school without absorbing another five or ten years worth of debt. It’s not even enough for me to feel like my life would be ruined if the stock market took a dump.
What’s more important to me is the process. I know that, right now, my process is clean, and I can continue using good process moving forward. When I compare that to all the abhorrent financial choices I have made since I became of age, I feel like I’m well ahead of the game. Especially considering I am the only one in my family with any ability to save. I feel almost as if it’s my like responsibility to maintain what I have started.
I am nobody’s fucking dad, so it isn’t my place to tell anyone what to do about much of anything — let alone finances. For most of my life I was under the impression that saving money was something that old people did. That I am young, and I always have been, and that my time to begin saving would arrive… eventually. It has only been in this most recent blink of my adult life that I have come to terms with the fact that I am actually not all that young anymore, and that the future is coming whether I like it or not.
It is thus how I am no longer relying on a get-rich-quick worldview, whether it involves gambling inside a casino or gambling on volatile stocks within the comfort of my laptop or cell phone. I thought for so long like a poor person (which I am), in other words. And one reason poor people like me remain poor for so much of our lives, and so many of our family’s generations, is because we never really learn how to identify, as is, what we are. We instead picture ourselves as being on a path to the lives we aspire to, believing perpetually that one day we will pull on a proverbial slot machine and hit the jackpot.
I have conceded that there will be no jackpot to save me from myself. And further, I concede that I don’t want to win at life in such a way. If what I am truly on is a path of some sort, what lesson would I glean from making a shitload of money on a blackjack or craps table? What cosmic truth would reveal itself if I simply invested a few thousand dollars into a penny stock that shot up to a couple hundred dollars per share? People say it’s better to be lucky than good, and I’m certainly not big enough of a man to turn down a little luck if- and when-ever it finds me, but what I really want — or, like, need — is for this so-called path of mine to mean something in the end.
The way I have to make it mean something is by accomplishing the long game. Where all of these dominoes were knocked over in a specific way in a specific direction and at a specific speed during various junctures of my life that led me to this exact moment in time. And it is at this exact moment that I became sober, and stopped gambling, and stopped speculating regularly in the stock market, and began saving as many acorns as I could while I tried to understand what I wanted to do with my life, and where I want to be when I inevitably buy the farm.
It’s a drastic hundred-and-eighty-degree alteration from everything I ever was and every way I ever operated. Dispiriting is a word that comes to mind. Unromantic is another. It feels almost as if I have capitulated to the unavoidable and necessary ways that adulthood demand of me.
I quite miss the kid who felt the burning excitement in his stomach each night he left with his best friend their one-bedroom apartment in Colton CA en route to San Manuel Casino. I envy how little he worried about withdrawing hundreds of dollars at an absurd penalty via a cash advance from the credit card he wouldn’t bother paying off for another decade. I long for the confidence he exuded while dumping thousands of dollars into Canadian pot stocks circa 2018 only to see over the subsequent years something known as a reverse stock split — signifying a company in distress. We’ll get ’em next time, he thought. I’m still young, he figured.
Yet while I was doing almost everything imaginable to give my money away by choice, or lose it by chance, economic factors well beyond the control of the workingclass made it so nobody could really save the money they had. This naturally affected my own personal family — my parents and brothers — and eventually made its way to me and the good times of being able to afford making so many bad choices.
I think I always saw flashes, or like glimpses, of what I knew my future needed to look like. I fought against it for several years, but I always knew. You know? I knew that alcohol impacted deleteriously my ability to save the relative abundance I had been earning at work. I knew that my version of fun could not be obtained through spending mere nickels and dimes. And I liked to have my fun.
The liberation I feel now — the fun, you could call it — is by witnessing day-by-day, week-by-week, and month-by-month, the real fruits of my labor. I haven’t been doing it by getting lucky; it’s by simply removing myself from having all the fun that consumed my 20’s and the majority of my 30’s. I finally realized what would happen if I decided honestly to follow through on all the flashes and glimpses I once saw.
That’s why the road it took to get here means something, because it has to. It would have been easier if I didn’t have to learn on my own how to save for retirement. If I didn’t have to go through with the trials of losing so much to learn how not to lose. If my parents were those people who took me aside and had a quick conversation when I entered the labor force about saving. If, and if, and if some more, and so on.
The cycle of being poor ends with me. It is my goal to win for all of us — for my mom and dad, for my two brothers, for the ghost of my once-girlfriend Niña who came to America looking to realize the American dream — and to one day pass along all the information and knowledge I have at my disposal to my children, so they can pass it to theirs. That is my dream.
Future Bets 
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