Who is Alex
Labels are difficult
I am a reader, or more appropriately, a student. I am a husband, an investor, a life long gym rat, a photographer, an adventurer, a world class friend, and before any of those things happened I spent a lot of time as a broke alcoholic.
I started this blog in 2018 after I had spent a few years of learning how to create financial freedom from the FIRE movement and BiggerPockets, a real estate investor community. I turned my life around in such a dramatic fashion in such a short amount of time without doing anything special. I don't sell anything here, and I barely promote this website, but my hope is that by that sharing my story transparently it could help transform other people's lives as much as mine had transformed. I use this place to write about finance and wisdom that I think will be useful to you.
Why the fuck would you call it "Broke is a choice!?"
The title is a reminder to myself. I spent most of my life like most Americans - living paycheck to paycheck always broke hoping one day it would end. Unfortunately hope is a bad strategy, what really had to end were my bad choices.
I stopped living the way most people live and started doing what most people will not do: endure painful sacrifice, take on radical responsibility, and accept tedious patience.
This worked. Even making a very small salary I was able, over time, to build wealth and design my life the way I wanted it.
I name this site as a test. The road that one must traverse to create financial freedom is far more difficult than the discomfort of a few sharp words. If you can't handle the name of website, you stand no chance of succeeding at this journey.
But is it true? Is being broke really a choice?
It may not feel like it, but probably yes. The majority of Americans live beyond their means, they live on debt, and they overspend. Our quality of life should be dictated by our resources, and we should live underneath our resources in order to create a better future - by saving and investing. Instead, what most people do is set a standard for their lifestyle and if their resources don't match it, they borrow from their future to pay for today.
There are certainly people who live in true poverty and are born with the deck stacked against them, but that's a rarity. The average income in the United States is $65,000, meanwhile if you make $30,000 a year US you're in the top 1% global earners. I created a multimillion dollar portfolio on 50k a year. Anyone can work harder to increase their income and live on less than they make and invest in their future. They just don't want to.
If you are broke it's because you make bad choices and your situation won't change until you make better choices consistently.
Admission is the first step to recovery and once you realize that your financial situation is a reflection of your personal choices, you can very quickly make good ones and create financial freedom. This is a good place to start
My money story
In 2001 I enlisted in the Army and saw a bit of the world, jumped out of some airplanes, and to the war...twice. The ordeal helped me grow up a little bit. Then I learned how to build houses with my uncle, I spent some time in car sales, went to college for finance, and then I spent nearly a decade as a drunk and a drug addict – which were not my proudest years.
In my early 30’s I began a journey towards freedom. Freedom from jobs I hate, tyrannical bosses, projects I don’t care about, and just the dull complacency of working for the weekend.
In 2010 I made some particularly bad life choices and ended up broke with no income and a lot of debt. I quickly realized that I had always been broke but never really understood how bad things were because like most Americans I avoided thinking about it or looking at my bank account and just assumed I was destined to be broke. This is when I realized an important lesson: humans really only learn when the lesson is painful, and when life is not painful we learn nothing at all.
This pain made me start learning about personal finance. I calculated my total net worth with a calculator online and it told me I was about 40K in the negative. I had zero money in savings, I had just lost my job, and I wasn’t broke because I didn’t make enough money I was broke because I misspent what I made. I had a nice car and nice clothes and went out to eat often. This problem was from me making bad choices constantly and taking zero responsibility. This is incredibly common and it’s why most people live month to month.
Luckily, I respond very well to pain.
I got fed up with constantly being stressed out over money, I was sick of being broke, and swore I would fix this problem forever.
I still remember distinctly what it was like to have my life choices guided by insufficient resources. Not being able to afford to quit a job I hate, not being able to move to somewhere with more opportunity, being tied to the wrong people due to financial limitations. So I began to sacrifice every single material thing in my life that to start paying off my debt and saving money, it worked, and I documented all of it on this site.
Financial freedom isn’t just not worrying about paying the bills, it allows us to design our entire life around what we enjoy, rather than what most people do which is work just enough to fund their already existing commitments that they aren’t really that excited about. This is a problem that can be fixed and it’s not too hard.
As I started getting better at this I realized that I really enjoyed my new found freedom, and I know others would enjoy it as well. I don’t have any desire to be the most successful investor on earth, I just want to live a life I designed, doing things I love, challenging myself, and helping the next person find the same for themselves.