Debt and Becoming Debt Free: Jerry Banfield's $600K Story

For most of my adult life I have been in debt, and the honest answer to whether debt is a trap is that it depends on whether you feel you have enough. By October 2026 I was about $223,000 in debt, with roughly $80,000 of it parked on 0% credit cards through balance transfers, the first promotion ending in February on about $13,000, the next in May, and most of the rest toward the end of the year. When one card raised my rate 7% overnight, I laid out the whole plan on a live stream: the promo calendar, my roughly $4,000 a month in income, the $7,000 I lost in my own meme coin, why I skip a new car, and my best year back in 2016. That is the newest section, My Credit Card Raised My Rate 7% Overnight.

In short, I borrowed heavily from my early twenties on, carried a family's worth of debt into 2019, asked the public to help me pay it off in 2022, and in 2026 borrowed again to restart my YouTube channel. In July 2026 I described my net worth as minus $200,000 and about $60,000 to $70,000 in new credit card debt. In 2022 I told people I was roughly $600,000 in debt and wanted to get to zero, and I compared that debt to slavery. My view now is more mixed: I still want to be out of debt, but I no longer think debt decides whether I am free.

One of the posts below is an excerpt from my memoir about 2019, when our family owed more than $600,000 and I had not been honest with my ex-wife about how bad it was. The divorce that reshaped my finances in 2025 is covered in Divorce: How It Ended and What Came After, and my day to day in the same months is in June and July 2026 Vlogs.

In 2019 I was taking cash advances on credit cards to pay bills, borrowing at rates that climbed from 8 or 9 percent to 22 percent, and coughing all the time. A Louise Hay affirmation stopped a coughing fit in the car, and that pushed me toward the realization I had been avoiding: I had to tell my ex-wife everything. That is the story in How I Buried My Family in $600K of Debt.

In September 2022 I went public with a goal in Will You Help Me Become Debt Free. The debt was about $600,000: a mortgage near a quarter of a million dollars, student loans close to a couple hundred thousand, and SBA business loans of about the same size. Because roughly forty percent of anything given gets taken by taxes and platform fees, I asked for closer to a million, and I pledged that I would never borrow money again. A couple of weeks later, in I'm Asking For A Million Dollars While I Give What I Have Away, I made the argument at its most intense, comparing debt to slavery while giving twenty-dollar bills to people on the street to show that generosity and debt can coexist.

By August 2025 the tone had shifted. In A $3,800 Car Bill and Zero Stress I described a dealership estimate of $4,500 for my 2006 Corolla that came down to $3,800, and how I paid it without any anxiety at all.

Then in March 2026 I had no income and started borrowing again. I put a new camera, a gaming PC, two consoles, lights, a green screen and a monitor on zero-interest credit cards to restart YouTube, and I ran up at least $60,000 in card debt in six months. In I'm a 42-Year-Old Single Dad With a -$200K Net Worth I argued that I felt rich, and that the slide into negative net worth started with a feeling that I did not have enough.

So what do I think now? In Advice You Need to Hear if You Want Financial Freedom I wrote that I went through this same cycle about a decade ago, borrowed everything I could, and made millions over the next couple of years, and that what destroyed my finances was switching from feeling wealthy to feeling I did not have enough. At one point that cost me about $300,000 of net worth in a single year. I pledged in 2022 never to borrow again and did not keep that pledge, so read the rest of this page with that in mind.

The posts below run newest first, so reading from the bottom up shows the arc. If you are carrying debt and want me to look at your own situation, you can get a personal video review at https://jerrybanfield.com/review/.

My Credit Card Raised My Rate 7% Overnight. Here's My Whole $223K Debt Plan, From 0% Cards to My Best Year. (October 15, 2026)
Advice You Need to Hear if You Want Financial Freedom (July 11, 2026)
I'm a 42-Year-Old Single Dad With a -$200K Net Worth (July 3, 2026)
Debt and Becoming Debt Free: Jerry Banfield's $600K Story (June 21, 2026)
A $3,800 Car Bill and Zero Stress (August 21, 2025)
I'm Asking For A Million Dollars While I Give What I Have Away (October 2, 2022)
Will You Help Me Become Debt Free (September 21, 2022)

My Credit Card Raised My Rate 7% Overnight. Here's My Whole $223K Debt Plan, From 0% Cards to My Best Year.

From my live stream on October 15, 2026.

One of my credit cards raised my interest rate by 7% all at once, and that was the thing that sent me spiraling. I talked through the whole picture on my live stream after one of the lowest days I had all year: how much I owed, what I was paying in interest, when the 0% promotions ran out, where my income was actually coming from, what I lost in my own meme coin, and why I still was not going to go get a job. Someone in the chat asked how much interest I was paying on those credit cards, and the honest answer started with that rate hike.

The 7% Rate Hike and Debt Maxing

The card that raised the rate on me was not even a low rate card to begin with. Maybe my credit score dropped, I do not know, but the rate just got jacked up 7%. I only had the one charge on there, and then I put the Mons Venus charge on there too, and right after that they raised the rate. I was like, come on, man. I could have put that on another credit card and paid 0%. Instead I was paying 25% interest on it. Dang. I joked that I was debt maxing at this point, and that maybe debt maxing was the niche I should be working.

The bigger picture was a lot less dramatic than that one card. I was not paying much interest on most of my credit cards. The vast majority of what I owed was sitting at 0%. I probably had $80,000 sitting at 0%, and most of it got there through balance transfers that cost me something like 3% to 5% up front. I played this masterful game of charging one card, getting another card, and transferring the balance over. Over and over. It is perfectly legal to borrow all the money I borrowed, and that is exactly why I borrowed it. I had huge credit lines from before and a credit score well into the 800s from paying my cards off for years, and I used all of that.

But that game has an end. By the time of this stream I had run up most of the 0% cards, and the next cards I could use had minimums around 12%, going up to 18% and more from there. I had had my grace period. That is what put me into a panic the day before. I thought, I do not have much more time.

When the 0% Promotions End

Once I calmed down and actually looked at the dates, the calendar was not nearly as scary as the panic. The first 0% promotion was up in February, on maybe $13,000. I did not think the next one was up until May. After that, most of the rest of them ran toward the end of the year. So I had plenty of time to just pay minimum balances. What I needed was more cash coming in.

Someone asked how much money was due in November. I had at least $15,000 in cash, maybe more, and I also had tens of thousands of dollars more in crypto. At the rate things were going, about $5,000 to $6,000 was going to go out in November. Another person in the chat pointed out that all my debt would be repaid if the ICP price went up to $50 to $100. That was true. If ICP got there, I would be completely out of debt.

For context, I already had $120,000 in debt when I started borrowing to do YouTube again. Somebody else in the chat said that when you are $220,000 in debt, what is a trip to South Africa? I corrected him: $223,000 in debt. That was the number. And I believe in investing where things matter, which is the whole reason the number got that high.

Where My $4,000 a Month Was Coming From

Right then I was making about $4,000 a month, and I was very grateful for it. About $1,000 to $1,500 a month came from you all, depending on what you gave, plus the views from this channel, which was incredible because this channel made nothing about two months earlier. The crypto channels brought some income in too. And I had a crypto sponsorship from MaxFi. MaxFi gave me a $1,000 a month sponsorship, and after my wallet got hacked they paid a couple of months in advance. So I was at about $4,000 a month, even while I seemed unable to sell anything else.

When I looked back at the last month specifically, it might have been closer to $5,000, because I had been calculating it monthly. I had made something like $4,000 or $5,000 in 28 days. The super chats were the single largest increase in my income over that last month, which is why I made sure I read and thanked every one of them.

The part that hurt was the goal. I had set out to make $100,000 in 100 days, which I wrote about in my 100K in 100 days vlog, and I had made maybe $5,000 of it in 20 to 25 days. So I kept telling myself, come on, I need more, I need to grow faster. It felt like it was not enough.

Then I looked at how much I had actually grown. In the last couple of months, so many people had done episodes about me, reacted to my videos, and put me on their podcasts. So many of you had given so much money on the live streams. One guy bought the Queen video for $2,000. One guy paid $350 for a call, and he even told me to keep the money when the call did not happen because he just wanted to support me. I got at least $3,000 or $4,000 from crypto sponsorships. All of that started from zero. I was making nothing doing this in March, and it started coming in April. So all I had to do was keep going.

If I could isolate one skill I have that is really valuable, it is that when I am really down, I look for the opportunity. I tell myself, okay, I feel horrible, yes, everything sucks, but where is the opportunity? Where do I learn? Where do I grow? Where do I become flexible? Somebody in the chat told me I should be proud of myself, and I am, lots of times. The day before this stream I was just thinking, you are such a loser, man, and if your income does not keep growing at the rate it has been growing, you are in deep doo doo.

Another viewer said they could not imagine how stressful all this was. The truth is maybe one or two days a month I have a day like that. Most days I think, this is awesome, this is an adventure. To me it is proof of how mentally healthy I am that I can borrow all this money, take on all this financial danger, and still have fun and feel abundant most days. Even in the fear I reminded myself how rich I already was. I had a whole house to myself that my kids love, in a neighborhood with so many nice neighbors. I was extremely healthy. I had all these people following me online. And I still did not even know what to sell yet. Once I figured that out, I thought we should be able to get over $10,000 a month.

The $7,000 I Lost in My Own Meme Coin

Someone asked whether I had dollar cost averaged into my JERRY coin. Here is what actually happened. I lost $5,000 that I had put into JERRY when the social engineering cyber criminals stole my MetaMask credentials through Google and drained my wallet, which I covered in the vlog about getting hacked for $20,000. Then the MaxFi team sent me $1,600 more of my meme coin that they had bought. Then I bought $3,000 more of it myself. So I had over $4,000 of it again, and then it went down to about $2,700. I managed to lose several thousand more dollars. Altogether I had personally lost about $7,000 in my own JERRY meme coin.

It was not going so well so far. That said, if I made some more money, I planned to buy more of it, both to help bail out the others that lost money on it and to strengthen my position. My break even point was rough. With about $2,700 left, the coin would need to roughly triple from where it was just for me to break even on what I had put in. For me to have the same amount in my wallet that I had when it was stolen, it would need to go up something like five or six times.

So yes, I have probably lost more than anybody else in my own meme coin. And here is the thing: the MaxFi team was the one encouraging me to launch it. They put liquidity up on it. I had been opposed to meme coins. I hated meme coins. I thought meme coins were stupid and I was not going to mess with them. But people already trade meme coins, so the idea was, let us just experiment and see what happens. Boy, did it get wrecked so far. The full story of how it started is in Jerry Is the Harry Potter of Meme Coins. One day I may be sitting on a million dollars worth of it and say, look, I am a millionaire off this meme coin. Or not. Either way, there was not much further down to go. The most I could possibly lose on it was about $10,000 total, and I had already lost $7,000, so I could not lose much more than another $2,000 to $3,000.

Somebody asked if the FBI had any leads on the hack. When you file a report for stolen crypto, the IC3 report, they make it clear you should not expect them to get back to you directly, though in some cases they may pass it on to somebody. I had not heard anything back, and I did not imagine I would. What I did need to figure out was whether I also had to make a local police report, just for my taxes. The local police were not going to be able to do anything, but I might need a report saying I lost this much. The Ethereum that was stolen had been worth $20,000, and by the time the thieves actually sent the ETH out of my account it was worth $13,000. So on paper there was something like $8,000 of short-term capital gains and about $5,000 lost on the Ethereum, and I needed to see exactly what I had to do for my taxes. That money was gone.

A Tesla Roadster, an Ableton Push 3 and My 20-Year-Old Car

Derek Dabbles said he was $85,000 in debt and wanted a Tesla Roadster, and asked if that was a good idea. I do not intend to give anyone advice. Clearly the best I can do is figure things out for myself, and sometimes that is a bit of a struggle. But here is how I think about it. If having your dream car is going to leave you feeling a whole lot more abundant, that has some validity. The trick is to find what is essential.

I was facing my own version of that question. I was thinking about an Ableton Push 3, which costs $1,000, and I actually had a 0% offer I could get it on. But was I really going to take more time to make music while I was paranoid about whether I could pay the rent in a couple of months? Maybe it was time to just leave that credit card space open, in case I needed to take a cash advance, or in case I needed a $1,000 gift card so I could buy groceries.

It depends on how much of an asset something will be. Me making these YouTube channels from scratch can build into something that makes tens of thousands of dollars a month. If you could use your Tesla Roadster to make more income, that is one thing. But buying something that is going to drop in value when you are already in debt only makes sense if it is going to help you feel super abundant and really love your life. And I will admit, if you are planning to use the car to pick up women, I have seen those Teslas work for guys.

For me personally, I have had the same car for 20 years. I think a car is one of the most unnecessary expenses there is. I was going to use some nastier words than that. I paid for this YouTube studio setup, the PC and the camera, because that helps me make better videos and have a better camera than my critics do. Meanwhile, all I do with my car is maintain it. I keep putting money into it and keep it running. I think it is pointless to spend money on a car. I would pay off all my credit card debt, get a lot more money in the bank, and buy a house before I would buy a new car. I would not buy one unless my car got totaled and could not be fixed, and even then I would really shop around.

A lot of these new cars, like a Tesla Roadster, I can just imagine the maintenance costs. Electric cars are difficult to work on, and you can get hurt working on one if you do not do everything exactly right. I would definitely be hesitant. I did enjoy the electric car I rented in Dallas, but it felt cheap. The Bluetooth would not work properly, and it only had about 20,000 miles on it. Driving it made me want to go home and drive my own car.

I was watching a guy do a video about how much he loved this Ferrari. He wanted the Ferrari, so he built a business while working a job full time, stayed up late, sacrificed his health and got overweight, all so he could get this Ferrari. His family is living nice, but he sacrificed in important areas like sleep and health. That Ferrari was his dream car. I do not have a dream car. I love the car I have. I bought it with my dad 20 years ago. Maybe someday I will put some money into a car, but I know it might sound ironic for someone with the debt I have: I do not piss money away on a car.

My Best Year Was 2016, and Every Year Since

Derek Dabbles also asked how much I made in my single best year. My top year so far was 2016, and I hope we can top it. I would have to look at my tax return, because it has been a while, but I made at least the high $300,000s in revenue, maybe around $360,000 or $370,000. I made something like $240,000 to $250,000 in profit. That was also the year I got banned on Udemy, so I would have made much more than that if Udemy had not banned me.

What is cool is the climb into that year. In 2014 I barely made anything, maybe $10,000 to $30,000 in profit; I am not sure off the top of my head, since that was 12 years ago. In 2015 I borrowed and spent like crazy. I cranked my expenses up by hundreds of thousands of dollars to run all these ads, and because I spent so aggressively I made only about $70,000 to $75,000 in profit. Then I made a quarter million in 2016.

The next several years I coasted and made six figure profits consistently. Then I crashed in 2019. I made a small profit in 2020, made a hundred grand in profit again in 2021, and then hovered in the mid tens of thousands after that. In 2026 I was minus tens of thousands, like 2019 again. But in 2026 I had started from scratch. I made no money and spent money for most of the beginning of the year. By the time of this stream my business was actually profitable for the last month or two, because my business does not spend that much. My personal life is what spends. I wrote more about that pattern of earning a lot and still ending up in debt in how I made millions and still ended up in debt.

I wanted to make a profit in 2026 and not take a loss, and to do that I was probably going to need to make $10,000 to $20,000 more by the end of the year at a minimum. If I took a loss in 2026, it would be the first time since 2019. Before that, I do not think I had a loss since about 2011 or 2012.

Why I Still Did Not Get a Job

Yes, I even considered getting a real job. I went through the full math on that in Everyone Told Me to Get a Job, so here are only the parts that were new on this stream. I have a master's degree and a bachelor's degree, and there is a good chance I could get a six figure marketing job with all my experience, something like chief marketing officer at a startup, doing a whole lot of content and supervising their paid ads. I could probably pay all my bills that way.

But what I keep thinking about is where I matter the most. Is it going to some startup and competing for a job against other people who really want that job? I do not really want a job, and there are other people who do. I thought, maybe I will just apply to a job and give up on YouTube, because I know if I take a job I will not be able to do YouTube. But I did not borrow $90,000 on credit cards to apply for a job at the end of the year. I am not even sure how I could give up at this point. They say in Alcoholics Anonymous, do not quit before the miracle happens, and I had just come from an AA meeting.

Some of you told me to get a job, and over those few days I thought about it honestly. I am absolutely willing to get a job if I become certain that YouTube is not the best value I have to offer. But when I deleted my YouTube before, a lot of people were sad and missed me, and collectively you all paid me around $4,000 to $5,000 in the last month. I do not see a whole lot of jobs where I would very easily make more than $5,000 in a month starting from scratch. If there is a job that would be better for humanity than YouTube, I am down.

Some people said I could have a job and still do YouTube. For me personally, I know the value of essentialism and focus. I would not take a job at this point unless it paid six figures, covered all my bills, and paid down my debt. If I could not get that, I might as well do YouTube until there was no other option. And I know that with a full time job I would not have any desire left to make YouTube videos.

One viewer told me I had lost six figures in 2026 and that any job pays more than that. In the short term, yes, I borrowed a lot of money to do YouTube. In the long term, my YouTube could make $10,000, $20,000, $30,000, $50,000 or $100,000 a month, and a job is not going to be able to pay that much. I do not know how long that is going to take. But I know which bet I made, and I made it with my eyes open.

If you are carrying debt of your own and want me to look at your situation, I have a personal video review for exactly that. You can send me your YouTube channel or any situation you have in your life, as a video, an audio voice memo or a long written email, and I will spend a total of 20 minutes on it. It is like a cameo, but much more detailed.

Advice You Need to Hear if You Want Financial Freedom

From my video published July 11, 2026.

Here is the best advice you will ever get if you want financial freedom. The bottom line is that I feel wealthy today. I am living this right now. A lot of people with money always feel like they never have enough, and that is why, if you can get anything out of this, it is to feel wealthy now — to feel the power you have now and the choices you have now.

The biggest way you affirm that you have enough money is that you are willing to say no to doing anything you do not want to do to make money. This is the gateway to financial freedom, and it is what I have today. I do not do anything I do not want to do to make money. That means I do not sell my soul, go to a job, and just do whatever they tell me to. I make YouTube videos whether I make a lot of money or a little money doing it. I do what I love, I try to help other people, and I always have enough money.

Being Willing to Leverage Credit and Debt

A big part of financial freedom, in my experience, is also being willing to leverage credit and debt if you need it. A lot of the advice people give you is that you should be debt free and pay everything off. I have come to believe otherwise, because of inflation and the ability to buy assets. There is a time to take on debt, like to buy a house. There is a time when you can take on debt if you need to get yourself into a position to earn. There is a time to rebuild your life and not get into a desperate situation financially, and for me, using debt has been a perfect mechanism for that. Now, it is better to minimize borrowing, and it is better to cut your expenses when possible — that part is obvious.

Spend Money on What Makes You Feel Wealthy

It is also important to spend money on anything that leaves you feeling wealthy — anything where, when you spend money on it, you feel like, man, I just feel so wealthy because I can spend money on that. For me, it is massages. I get a 90-minute massage every week from a professional, licensed therapist, and it costs anywhere from $190 to $230. My body feels so good and so relaxed, and I really enjoy the time. I only go to therapists where we can have a really great conversation and build a bit of a friendship in the context of doing the massage. It ends up being time hanging out with a friend while my body gets to relax and feel great — and especially for a guy who is sober, that is such a luxury.

What has been amazing is that no matter how busy I have been making a whole bunch of money, or how bad I got into debt at various times, I have always had money to pay for a massage. And that is wealth. Where I see most people struggling with money is that they trade their time doing something they would not do for free, and then they resent it. And because they resent it, they often will not treat themselves in ways that are healthy, like massage.

People look at me and say, that is crazy — you spend like $800 a month on massage. That is almost $10,000 a year, and after tax, I often need to make $15,000 or more a year just to pay for massages. And I say yes, because it is worth it. Sometimes, when finances were the tightest, I went every two weeks instead of every week. But no matter what has happened over the last 12 years — whether it was kids being born and business blowing up so I had so many things to do, or business collapsing so I had nothing to do and hardly any money — I still pay for massages. When you go through your life and focus on how much wealth you have, you will see that you have so much. That is financial freedom. It is not something you have to get in the future. It is here right this second. If you want financial freedom, you have got to see how you have it now.

My Friend Who Just Quit His Job

For example, I have a friend I am so proud of. He is quitting his job this week. I talked to him a month ago — I sat and talked with him for an hour and a half, and my main advice was: you need to quit your job. He is in his early 20s. He has enough money saved up. He lives in a van, so he has almost no expenses. He has thousands saved up and no debt. Yet he was dumping his time into a job he did not like, and then he was falling into coping and escaping behavior. He resented being at that job. He felt he had to be there, and he was only staying out of fear. Then he would overeat and feel bad, or go into other addictive behaviors and feel bad. I said, what you need to do is quit that job, face the unknown, and look at what kind of life you could make — because when you see and feel and enjoy that freedom, from that point of freedom and wealth, you will create more. But if you go to a job you do not like just to get money, you are not in financial freedom.

If you sacrifice today trying to get financial freedom in the future, you will find that in the future you will not be able to enjoy it. It will not be enough, or you will not be in a position where you are healthy enough to enjoy it, or you just may not be around at all. I see so many people who throw time away into things they do not love, and then they have no opportunity to enjoy the future. When their financial freedom finally comes, it means nothing. They are too sick because their body is bloated and overweight from all the overeating they did to comfort themselves from the annoyance of what they dealt with at work, or their body is broken from the job they did, or their mind is all screwed up and they are in the middle of alcoholism and drugs. When the financial freedom finally comes, it is not actually enjoyed or experienced.

If you can experience how wealthy you are today, you will see how much freedom you already have. In fact, I have never had a day where I missed financial freedom in my entire life. There were days I could not see it. There were days when I did not appreciate that I had food to eat and a place to sleep — there were many days like that. But I have never had a single day in my life where I could not afford food or a place to sleep, or where somebody would not give me those things for free. That is a level of wealth that is financial freedom.

Setting the Bar Way Too High

Many of us set the bar way too high for financial freedom. We think we need to have this big retirement, and people tell me the most ridiculous targets. If your life looks fine on the surface but does not feel good, and you want to talk with me about your exact situation, I have got a community — tell me specifically what is keeping you stuck, because I cannot see it from here, and I will work with you to make sure you have a life you thoroughly enjoy, where you are constantly aware of having enough money. And at the end of this post, I am going to give you the ultimate example of this, which is going to blow your mind.

What I was saying before that is that I know so many people who go around not appreciating that they have enough every day. I have had so many times in my life where I felt the most broke because I was not paying attention to the fact that I had enough. Like in college — I had hardly any debt in college, but I also had very little cash. When I went to the store, I was very price conscious and I bought cheap food. I would sit there and eat Goldfish — the crackers — for dinner. I felt like I could not afford to really buy stuff and feed myself properly. But then I would spend money on alcohol, because I felt broke and I wanted relief from feeling broke. And then when I drank, I would actually make myself lose money and time.

What I see with a lot of people is that this feeling of not enough plays out in money by trying to stockpile the most ridiculous amounts of it, especially as they continue going on in life. I know someone who worked five or ten years at something because they felt they needed to, and from what I saw them experience, their health suffered from it. That was my analysis of the situation — I am not a medical doctor or a financial advisor or a lawyer. I am just a YouTuber. I have a master's degree in criminology, and I have got something like a billion views online. I am good at communicating — that is my skill — and I am good at applying the things I learn.

What I have seen so many people do is make these ridiculously high freedom numbers. Like, well, when I get a million dollars in the bank, then I will be free. I see people amass huge amounts of money in things like retirement accounts, and they do not even count it. They go around feeling broke because they do not want to touch their retirement account. In my view — and this is just what I do myself — I do not have a retirement account. I have no intention of retiring, because I have no intention of ever doing work I need to retire from. I just do what I love every day.

I have set things up to make money doing what I love so I can give you what I have. I get YouTube ad revenue, and some people direct message me about things like one-on-one calls or deeper coaching, where there is a whole group of like-minded people who are there to support you and give you feedback on what you have to say. I have enough money.

You Are Financially Free Today

And here is where this gets incredible. Most people think you have to have a big net worth, or you need to be a millionaire to be financially free, or you need to be debt free, or you need to have hundreds of thousands in the bank. Most people do not realize you are financially free today. If you can refuse to do any work that you are not interested in, you are financially free. If you have somebody else supporting you and you have a cooperative relationship, you are financially free. If you have enough today, a positive outlook for the future, and an abundant mindset now, you can be confident more of that will come in.

And I am living the ultimate example of that. I made millions of dollars online, and then I blew it all up in a business idea that did not work out very well. Then I built up a whole bunch more — I was back to making six figures in 2021 — and got canceled. Then my wife at the time took over. She got a six-figure job, so I was living off her, although I resented living off her, and I often felt like I did not have enough money regardless of what she made. Then we ended up getting divorced last year.

How I Handled My Divorce With an Enough Mindset

Even though she had a much higher income, I told her she could do whatever she wanted with our money. I told her she could take the house — I would give it to her for a dollar and sign a quitclaim deed, even though it had something like $100,000 in equity. I wanted to make sure she was okay, because I have enough. When you are in a place where you have enough, you do not need to nickel and dime other people. You can do whatever you want, and you can support other people having enough also.

For example, everybody told me in my divorce, you could get more. Make your wife sell the house. Take your 50 grand out of the house. You could get some of her retirement — because at the time, I was making less money than her with my business. And yet I said no, I am not doing that, because I have enough, and I am not going to take from my ex and set her up for a life she does not want to have — having to move in with her parents even though she has a six-figure job. If I had made her sell the house, she would not have been able to afford to live in the neighborhood she lives in now. So I did not ask for anything from her. She offered to give me a quarter of the value of the house, and I said yes. She expressed confidence that I could easily make as much money as her, if not more, very soon once I was out on my own.

Acting As If the Money Is Coming

So I took the $25,000, and I rented a house for $1,700 a month with no income, because I had just deleted my YouTube channels. Then I started writing books and trying to sell books, and I made no money doing that. And then I rented a house for $2,700 a month — yes, $1,000 more a month, still with zero income — because I would not be able to have my kids overnight if I lived in some crappy little apartment that was just $1,000 a month. I figured, I am certain that I can make a lot of money. I have enough money now to pay for it, and I am going to act as if more money is going to come in. That, to me, is true financial freedom: when you can operate with perfect confidence, when you have the confidence to leverage debt and go forward without fear.

I went forward with such extreme confidence that I rented a $2,700-a-month house while still paying for massages — see how crazy the massage habit gets now. A $2,700-a-month house, $500 a month in utilities — mostly the electric bill, but also gigabit internet — plus a cell phone bill. Throw the massages in there, and I buy whatever I want at the grocery store. I do not even worry about price. But I do not spend much money besides that. I hardly go out to eat, and I hardly spend money outside of that besides taking women out on dates. So that is about $5,000 a month I have in expenses.

In March 2026, I had zero income, so I started borrowing on credit. I had made a lot of money before, so I had big credit lines — hundreds of thousands in credit — and they all had zero-interest balance transfer offers. I just started borrowing all of that, and I ran up at least $60,000 in credit card debt in the last six months. This is what I did myself, not advice — but it is exactly how I have chosen to live this.

Restarting YouTube With the Nicest Setup I Have Ever Had

I decided to start YouTube again in March 2026, since I was making $0 from writing books, could not figure out what else to do locally, and it seemed people wanted me to come back to YouTube after I deleted all my views and all my platforms the year before. Do you think I started up with some cheap studio? No. I bought the nicest camera I have ever bought — a $2,000-plus Sony with an f/2.8 lens; I think it is the MX30 or something, and it is all in my Jerry Banfield equipment video where I went through and showed everything. I bought a brand new $2,000 gaming PC. I bought an Xbox Series X and a PS5 so I could stream all those games. I bought about $500 in lights, a couple hundred dollars in a green screen, and a nice brand new $300 monitor. I put all of that on zero-interest credit cards, and I have the nicest YouTube setup I have ever had.

And you know what has happened? I have so much that I have enough. I have got two channels monetized and I am getting about $500 a month in ad revenue. In the first hundred days or so, starting brand new channels, getting $500-plus a month on average right away from ad revenue is real nice. That is me living in financial freedom.

Now, some of you with closed minds will look at that and say, that is not financial freedom — that is delusion. I say to you that it is delusion to go around with enough food to eat, free to choose what kind of work you do, with a place to live, and not see that as financial freedom. So many people go around with what looks from the outside like absolute perfection — tons of everything they could want — and they still feel like it is not enough. I have enough, and because of that, I feel very wealthy.

My YouTube has incredible momentum right now, and I am documenting every day of building it. I estimate I am going to be making $10,000-plus a month on YouTube within the next few months, probably by the end of the year — $10,000-plus a month on YouTube by the end of 2026. My Skool community will be a big part of that. I have also got crypto — I am in the one coin that has the real tech. I have got six channels. And I know people locally, with all the stuff I do and show how to do and know how to do, where I could find one person who would pay me thousands of dollars a month on retainer to coach them. I could literally find one or two people a month who, with my skills, would be happy to work with me.

Mindset Advice, Not Financial Advice

So this is the best advice — it is not financial advice, it is more general mindset advice from my own experience. If you want financial freedom, you need to really zoom in on the fact that you have enough money. At all times, you should be acting like you have enough. Never act broke. Never act like you do not have enough. Spend on things that really bring you value and joy, and do it for someone else too. Cut the expenses that hurt you — alcohol is poisoning your body, and vacations to places just to escape because you are so unhappy. I do not take many vacations, because I am happy right here. I do not need to go somewhere else to be happy over there. If you build a life you love, you do not need to escape it.

I watched another video talking about advice you need to hear if you want financial freedom, and I think that one is super basic. I have given you something much higher level here, and this is how I have actually done it. I went through this same process a decade ago — the same feeling, the same mindset, and the same debt I took on. I borrowed all the money I could, and I made millions of dollars over the next couple of years.

And I can tell you what destroyed my finances: switching from “I have enough and I am wealthy” — even when the outside world might have said the opposite — to “I do not have enough.” The craziest thing is when you have made millions of dollars and you feel like it is not enough. The times I destroyed my income and my net worth, it started with a feeling of not having enough. In 2018, objectively, according to anyone else, I was in the best financial situation I had ever been in — and it was not enough, because I thought I ought to have more. I lost track of the financial freedom I enjoyed. I started to resent everything and everybody. That played out over the next couple of years, when I drained my net worth by about $300,000 in a single year. But I have also brought my net worth up by more than that in a single year.

If you have appreciated this, I would love to see what we can do working closer together — join the family, where you can share videos and help us really get to know you.

And if you want to see how this plays out day by day as I build everything back up, I am sharing the whole journey in my Life playlist.

I'm a 42-Year-Old Single Dad With a -$200K Net Worth

From my video published July 3, 2026.

I am so rich right now, but what's funny to me is that most of you wouldn't think so if you were in my position. Or maybe you would. Because I am a 42-year-old single divorced dad, and my net worth is minus 200,000. To a lot of you, you would think, oh, this guy's so poor, he's so broke, he should be desperate, he should get a job. And I'm like, no, I have no intention of ever getting a job again. I do YouTube. I have a community. I run weekly live calls in Jerry Banfield Family. And if that doesn't work out, I'll be happy to be homeless, because there are many forms of wealth. And I am very rich today because I have time.

I have credit. I didn't realize this before, but having credit matters. I have hundreds of thousands of dollars in credit because I've been a millionaire twice, in 2016 and in 2018. And what I can tell you is that my feeling of being rich, of feeling like I just had fantastic wealth and I had everything I wanted, that feeling turned into financial abundance. And on the flip side, going into a bunch of debt and negative net worth started from a feeling I had when I had some of the most money I'd ever had in my life. It started with a feeling that I don't have enough. So if you can get anything out of this, that is so critically important.

So Many Ways to Be Rich

If you want real wealth, there are so many ways to be rich. For example, there's time wealth. I have a friend I haven't seen in a little while, but he's homeless. And this guy is like a time billionaire. He has nothing to do. He has nowhere to go. He has nobody that expects anything out of him. Just sitting next to him feels like you would imagine going to sit next to some rich person that has a huge bank account and a big house. It feels the same, except the rich person often feels like they're in time poverty, where they don't have any free time, depending on what kind of rich they are and how their life is structured. Whereas you sit next to this guy, and yes, you can feel the lack of financial wealth, but you feel this time wealth, where time just stretches out, this freedom that so many of us don't even know.

I know a lot of people can relate to this, and I hope this is helpful if you're a guy in your 40s especially, or anyone else. You might look at me and think, I'd hate to be in his position, a 42-year-old divorced dad with a negative 200,000 net worth. Like, what have you done with your whole adult life? Well, I've had an awesome, fun adult life. And I'm setting up the best wealth-producing situation I've ever set up in my life. And it's because I feel so wealthy. I'm so grateful for what I have.

I have a $2,700-a-month house all to myself, and I literally just wrote my rent check out on a credit card cash advance check. It's 5% to write that check, and it's 0% APR for a year and a half. I feel so rich that I can afford this house, and that I'm not stressed about money. Not only am I not stressed about money, I've gone on like 20 dates this year. I've paid every time, and I felt great about it. I drop a big fat tip on credit. I'm so rich because I live and feel abundant. And even in the middle of what you might look at as a negative 200,000 net worth, which a lot of people are like, oh my God, this is so terrible, and you would imagine I'm stressed, I'm not. I'm having fun.

Health Is the Number One Form of Wealth

This is the fifth live stream I've done today. I've been live for close to three hours today. Look how much energy I have. I went into a class of mostly 20- and 30-year-olds and sweated out a hot yoga power flow at Beach Town today. Oh my God. It was hot. It was crowded. There were some people that needed to lay down and stop. And I'm in there. Doing a hot yoga flow like that used to leave me feeling like I had no energy the rest of my day. This time, I literally immediately finished that, came home, ate, and started doing live stream after live stream. And then I'm going to go to an event later. Look how much energy I have after I got up and dumped all that energy out, and then dumped all this out live streaming. Look how strong my voice is. My body is fantastically healthy. I woke up this morning and I'm like, nice. Nothing hurts. Everything feels great. Full, 100% energy, ready to go after life. Strength.

A lot of times, some of you all are getting way too tied up on little tiny data points and you're missing the big picture of life. Like, 42-year-old single dad, minus 200K net worth, and you think, this guy is so hopeless. But being healthy is one of the top forms, if not the number one form, of wealth. In my experience, I wouldn't trade any amount of money for being sick and feeling bad and having mental health problems. There's no amount of money that's worth it. And that's why I refuse to work for anybody else. Because you aren't telling me what to do. You're not telling me how or when to come to work. I am self-sufficient. I will get out here and do five hours of live stream a day, or whatever I'm doing lately on YouTube. I will get out here and do what I can to give to humanity, but you are not going to be my boss. And in a relationship, my woman is not going to be my boss and dictate my house and my home either. I am rich because I love what I have.

When I Had the Money and It Still Wasn't Enough

There are so many people who have a lot of money and they don't appreciate it. And I know what that's like. I know what it's like to have tens of thousands of dollars in a bank account, to have people wanting stuff out of you all the time because you have a business that just prints money. I know what it's like to give my wife, now ex-wife, $5,000 a month in an allowance, just money she could do whatever she wanted with, while I paid all the bills and worked from home and didn't even have any employees. I know that. And that started with feeling rich. But the crazy thing is, I got to a place where I had all that stuff and I felt like it wasn't enough. I felt like I'm not getting enough, that I should be getting more, that I should be making even more money, that this other person is making more money, and everything I have is not enough.

What's crazy is my net worth was hundreds of thousands of dollars higher than it is now, but I felt broke. I felt like I had to hustle and grind at a whole new level. Right now I have run up like 60, 70 thousand dollars in credit card debt in the last six months. At the beginning of 2019, I had no credit card debt. I had everything automatically paying full statement balances. And I started to feel like it all wasn't enough. I started to get into fear. And from there, I went negative $200,000 in net worth in a single year. Now, I then dug my way out of that, and then I went through a divorce. My net worth has dropped significantly because of the divorce.

Why I Gave My Ex a Favorable Settlement

I gave my ex a very favorable settlement. I let her give me like a quarter of the equity in the house because that was all she could afford to give me. And I didn't touch her retirement. Almost all my friends are like, dude, that's crazy, this is way too generous. My friends said I could get 20 to 50 thousand more out of my ex-wife. A lot of that value I built, by paying all the bills, by buying us that house and putting the down payment on it, paying the mortgage for years. And I also supported my ex getting a six-figure job. I helped her believe in herself. I gave her a pep talk to ask for 20-plus thousand dollars more than she thought she was worth. I did all the dishes and all the yard work and the laundry, and did a whole bunch of stuff taking care of the kids so she could have time to work.

And my friends are all like, you could get 20 to 50 thousand more out of your ex. And yeah, my net worth would be higher. But I'm like, no, I am so wealthy. I have so much that I'm not going to destroy my ex's lifestyle. I'm not going to wreck her lifestyle when I could have made her sell the house and move in with her parents. And the kids did not want to do that either. So I'm like, yeah, I'll take whatever you want to give me. I didn't demand anything. I said, look, you do whatever you want and I will take it, because I'm so rich. I feel so wealthy, so abundant, that I will not take anything from you that you would not happily give.

Having a mindset like that is priceless, and it tends to attract wealth, and it allows me to act courageously. Wealth is priceless, but there are many forms of wealth. Relationships are one of the highest forms of wealth. Health and relationships. When you pass on, nobody's going to say, I wish I'd made more money in that lifetime, especially if you already had enough. The only amount of money that matters is enough versus not enough. You can be a billionaire and have not enough. And you can be my homeless friend on the street, and I give him $20, and he's got enough.

I'm so rich because I have people all over the world who watch my videos and love what I do. YouTube has shown my videos four and a half million times in the recent stretch. Probably a few hundred thousand people saw a bunch of videos. And yes, I am so excited to get out of debt. This is actually the least amount of debt I've had, because my ex came with a lot of school debt, like hundreds of thousands.

I've actually paid more off of her school debt than she has, because I paid a bunch off when I was a millionaire making lots of money. I paid a bunch off of her student debt, and I paid all my debt off, and I paid for everything else. I am so excited that, for the first time since 2018, I'm going to have a positive net worth soon. And I'm really excited about that.

The way I talk blows people's minds. There's this guy, and if you put the two of us together, you'd look at his car and his boat and his lifestyle and his house and think, well, that dude looks wealthy and Jerry looks broke. But if you look at how we think and how we feel, he feels broke. He always doesn't have enough. He never has enough. He's chasing. He's constantly stressed, and then he has to use all this stuff to calm down. And me, I'm happy. I love where I'm at. I'm passionate. I'm proud of what I do. I am healthy. I have relationships with so many people I love. My life is stable. You look at the two of us and go, okay, this is why you can't judge wealth based on just one factor.

The 12 Forms of Wealth

Especially if you read the book Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. He lists 12 different forms of wealth. Health is a form of wealth. Relationships are a huge form of wealth: having friends, family, a wife, a husband, parents, children. My children are a massive form of wealth in my life. One reason I've borrowed so much money and got this house is so I could have more time with my children. People have been critical, saying I should have gotten a little apartment and lived as cheap as possible, instead of renting a $2,700-a-month house. When I rented it, I was making $0 a month. I literally used up all my money from the divorce, which was 25,000, and then I borrowed like 60, 70 more thousand off my credit cards to afford my lifestyle. And yet I feel like a pile of money is just about to get dropped on me.

I can see it from my community. In the first three weeks of my Skool community, I'm grateful you all have brought in like $1,000 or so, from annual memberships and from the monthly memberships, because people love being able to direct message me. You get a private one-on-one call with me every week, and it's beautiful. You can join Jerry Banfield Family here. So I got this bigger house so I could have overnights with my kids, because having time with my kids is priceless.

And I have faith. Having faith is a massive form of wealth. I trust that when I go out and do useful things for people, when I help make your life better, life will take good care of me. Yes, it is definitely better to live as simple as you can, and I do have a pretty simple life. I spend money on my rent, and I spend money on massages. If I need something for my business, I'll spend money on it. And then I give money to people. But once I start making like 10-plus thousand a month again, there's not going to be much extra I spend it on. I don't need to travel. I go visit my family once or twice a year. Now, I may end up with a woman who wants to travel or spend on some things. But I personally have a pretty simple lifestyle that I love and enjoy. And that makes it easy whenever I do have some significant income come in. Going from zero a month to now 1,500 a month, that's an awesome increase in just 104 days on YouTube. That is a big deal. And what's driving this is how wealthy I feel.

A Great Time to Join the Community

Somebody in the chat was thinking about joining the Skool community. Well, it's a great time, because there are only like 12 of us in there right now. So I've got a lot of attention focused on a relatively small amount of people. The next group call is Tuesday at 10 a.m. And the bigger it gets, the more my attention gets split among other people. So it's a great time. For those of you in Europe, I'm on the East Coast, USA, so 10 a.m. would be mid to early afternoon in Europe, depending on how far east or west you are. One of our members, Alex, is in Romania, so it was like 4 or 5 p.m. his time when we had the call.

Self-Discipline in Food and in Dating

Paying off student loan debt is awesome, and it takes self-discipline. I have a massive amount of self-discipline. When it comes to eating, I do not eat anything outside of whole plant foods. I eat foods intended to nourish my body. I've also got enough self-discipline to stop putting my heart out to women who have not demonstrated that they're very interested in me. I just sit back. I'm very ready and interested, as I talked about on my dating live stream. I'm ready for a wife, but at the same time, I'm not just throwing my energy around trying to hunt or any of that.

I've noticed that when I talk to people in person, a lot of people just can't hardly even understand my mindset. And that's what I'm really trying to share, my mindset. Because at this point, people are like, oh my God, you should be getting a job. You should stop paying for massages. You should downsize your house. And they ask, how are you going to make money? I'm like, the community is making it pretty clear. Whenever you launch something new and it gets pretty much immediate adoption and people love it, that's a really good sign. At the same time, there are all kinds of other things that can happen. When I feel very rich and I think about how grateful I am for everything I have, things just keep coming to me, and I don't have to struggle for it. All I have to do is show up and try to help people.

I Don't Live in Fear of Six Months From Now

My friend was talking to me and asked, what are you going to do in six months if your credit runs out? I'm like, I don't even think about that. I am so focused on giving and loving and enjoying exactly where I'm at. I'm so focused on giving what I have to give. I trust that I don't know what I need to know yet to make appropriate calculations for six months from now. I know that even if I didn't hardly make anything, I can continue using my credit for six more months and everything should be great. I've also set up other things, like I got ICP, and the price for that could go up. A lot of times you don't have the data in life you need to make the call. I've been stressed out in my life a whole bunch of times since I was born, and almost everything I was stressed out about didn't even happen. And some of the stuff that did happen, it didn't go the way I thought it would.

What surprised me are some of the things I dreaded and was stressed about. Like when I was a police officer, I was so stressed about, well, what happens if I lose my job? Because I was drinking a lot off duty and getting crazy, and the job was stressful. And then the day I quit and went to stay with my parents and started moving back home, I was so relaxed. I had been in law enforcement for years, and my whole mindset was law enforcement and leveling up, corporal and sergeant and lieutenant and retirement. And I was so stressed, and I couldn't hardly see outside my tunnel vision of anything besides a life in law enforcement. Yet I was so scared and stressed about losing my job, even though I'd drink and do stuff that would set that up and encourage them to ask me to quit. But then when I did quit, I found gigantic relief waiting for me.

Right now, I remember six months ago, I was like, I'm not sure how I'm going to finance myself to even get toward the summer. Well, what I didn't know was that I would get 30-plus thousand dollars in new 0% interest credit cards. Every single credit card would offer me a balance transfer, and some of the credit cards would increase their limits. I got at least 25,000 more in 0% interest credit. I didn't figure I'd be able to get that. But because I've always made every single payment throughout my entire life, I've never missed a payment, and my credit score was in the 800s at the beginning of the year. And I've been a millionaire in the past, 2016 and 2018, and made hundreds of thousands some years since then. So they just gave me all kinds of credit. They're all hoping to get the most interest out of me, and I'm hoping I'm going to pay everything off.

I borrowed out more money in 2019, managed to get loans from the SBA, and paid almost all the cards off by 2021. It was amazing. And yet I would love to be in a place where I would never be in debt again, because having all the payments and the interest is a lot. I have been in debt almost my entire adult life. I don't have a house right now, so I don't have a mortgage. And I'm very grateful that getting divorced, I was also divorced from my ex's massive multi-hundred-thousand-dollar student loans. I am so grateful that once I pay off my business loans and credit cards, I will be debt free. And that sounds great. This is the fifth live stream I have done today. And man, what kind of wealth is it to have that much energy and excitement and enthusiasm for life? I'm going to go hang out with a community of people who know me, where I have friends, where maybe there's a woman or two that'd be interested in dating me there.

Where there's music, where there's affirmations, where instead of me putting on a show, I can sit back and just watch the show. Instead of me putting out energy, I can just relax and chill. And then I've got video games to play at night that I enjoy. I've got friends. I've got family. Man, life is good. And I am obsessed with sharing my mindset. Because most people I talk to can't even hardly understand how I'm thinking. They just don't have that magical thinking component that I have.

Setting It Up Now So I Can Look Back Later

What I'm seeing is that I'm getting some amazing ideas for live stream titles and thumbnails. I'm putting on a show that brings people in, that people love and enjoy across all my different channels. And from doing that, I see I'm setting this up now. My income currently is about $1,500 or so in the last month. I'm setting this up now, so that whenever it is in the future, when I've got a month where I made $10,000 or $20,000, where I'm showing all that off, I can look back and say, look at this live stream, look at how I made those plans, look at how I was thinking, because that's what created this. Look how I was talking about feeling how rich I am as a single 42-year-old divorced dad with negative 200K in debt. Go back and watch that live stream. That's the secret right there.

Because a lot of times, all we see is people after the fact showing off, but what you don't see is where they were thinking differently. Some people would call this reality distortion or delusional thinking. But look how differently I'm thinking right now. Most people, when they talk to me, have said, get a job. And I'm like, no, I have no interest in getting a job. I have no desperation or fear or scarcity around money. I feel so abundant with what I have today. I am so certain I'll be taken care of. And even if that doesn't play out, even if I end up having to sleep on somebody's couch, I have at least one couch I've been explicitly offered. A few others might be available. And that would be interesting. Like I remember from being a police officer, I'm not scared about facing the "what if it doesn't work out," because that would be an entertaining and interesting story too. All I need is space to put a desk somewhere, and I can do my work.

Now, I'm very interested in the scenario playing out where I start making five, 10, 20 thousand a month and I get all my debts paid off. That's my top scenario. And I obsess over one question: how may I serve? So instead of asking, what do I need to do to get people to give me money, I ask, what do I need to give? What can I give that's so powerful that someone will get so much value?

Giving Value Is Where It All Starts

I want to give a hundred thousand-plus dollars a month in value. Somebody came on my gaming stream last night and said, Jerry, I read your blog post from a year or two ago. It was from a deleted YouTube video where I was playing basketball, and I used AI to take that video and put it into a blog post on my website. They went and read that blog post and said it motivated them to get back and try playing basketball for the first time in 15 years. And I'm like, man, that's the kind of value I'm giving out. I love helping you have the best life you can have. I love helping you get a different option for a way to think. I love giving and helping and serving. And that's how I have so much energy, because I'm so excited to share with you. My whole life is about being a person who can authentically just show up here. This is just the truth of me. And giving that out is valuable. And from there, it's easy. When you give a lot to people, people want to give back.

Some of the people who have joined my community, one guy joined and dropped like 390 bucks. He's like, I've been watching your videos for years, I love your videos, they help me so much, I just wanted to give back and support you. And I'm like, man, that's awesome. That's the kind of energy I'm putting out. Then other people jump on calls with me, DM me, post, and ask questions. The community is just an amazing place to have connection. I treasure having connections with people who think differently. When I say I'm obsessed with giving value, helping people, having fun, feeling wealthy, and enjoying my life, and somebody else understands that, that's the good stuff. So when somebody comes to me and says, you should be getting a job, you can't keep doing what you're doing, what are you going to do, coming at me with that fear energy, I'm like, look, I'm not thinking that way. And because I'm not thinking that way, I'm going to get the outcome that I'm looking for.

I'm really excited for where life is going. I'm really excited to see the future of my life. And I'm really excited to point back to this and say, look, I set it up here. I said this is where I was going, and I got there, and this is how I got there. I intend to teach and lead by example, because some of you have much more challenging situations than I do. Some of you have much more difficult things you're facing. And I want you to be able to think your way out of those situations too. If you want to follow more of this journey, you can watch my Life playlist.

Come Join Me in the Community

I'm going to go hang out with real people in person now. Somebody in the chat said we have so much in common it's not even funny, and that they're going to join the community. All right, it's easy. Just join Jerry Banfield Family and pop in. Sign up, and what's awesome is that Skool has an app you can have directly on your phone. You can do video calls with us directly on your phone, right in the app. I have it set up on my phone, so direct messages you send go straight to my phone, and I get a notification for every DM I get. I would love to find somebody else that I'd like to get to know better who has the same setup as I do. I'm looking around on some communities to see if there's anywhere I would also fit in, but I already have a community, so that gets my full attention.

Thanks for being here. Have a great day, and I'll be live again tomorrow.

Debt and Becoming Debt Free: Jerry Banfield's $600K Story

Originally published June 21, 2026.

For most of my adult life I have been in debt, and the honest answer to whether debt is a trap is that it depends on whether you feel you have enough. In 2022 I told people I was roughly $600,000 in debt and wanted to get to zero, and I compared that debt to slavery. My view now is more mixed: I still want to be out of debt, but I no longer think debt decides whether I am free.

The short version is that I borrowed heavily from my early twenties on, carried a family's worth of debt into 2019, asked the public to help me pay it off in 2022, and in 2026 borrowed again to restart my YouTube channel. In July 2026 I described my net worth as minus $200,000 and about $60,000 to $70,000 in new credit card debt. Whether that is a disaster or a plan depends on which post you read.

A couple of weeks later, in I'm Asking For A Million Dollars While I Give What I Have Away, I made the argument at its most intense. I compared debt to slavery and said that debt limits your freedom to refuse work. At the same time I was giving twenty-dollar bills to people on the street and tipping generously, and I used that to argue that generosity and debt can coexist.

So what do I think now? I still want to be debt free, and I say so plainly. But I no longer treat debt as the thing that decides whether I am free. In Advice You Need to Hear if You Want Financial Freedom I wrote that I went through this same cycle about a decade ago, borrowed everything I could, and made millions over the next couple of years, and that what destroyed my finances was switching from feeling wealthy to feeling I did not have enough. At one point that cost me about $300,000 of net worth in a single year. I pledged in 2022 never to borrow again and did not keep that pledge, so read the rest of this page with that in mind.

Advice You Need to Hear if You Want Financial Freedom

From my video published July 11, 2026.

Being Willing to Leverage Credit and Debt

Spend Money on What Makes You Feel Wealthy

My Friend Who Just Quit His Job

Setting the Bar Way Too High

You Are Financially Free Today

How I Handled My Divorce With an Enough Mindset

Acting As If the Money Is Coming

Restarting YouTube With the Nicest Setup I Have Ever Had

Mindset Advice, Not Financial Advice

If you have appreciated this, I would love to see what we can do working closer together — join the family, where you can share videos and help us really get to know you.

And if you want to see how this plays out day by day as I build everything back up, I am sharing the whole journey in my Life playlist.

I'm a 42-Year-Old Single Dad With a -$200K Net Worth

From my video published July 3, 2026.

So Many Ways to Be Rich

Health Is the Number One Form of Wealth

When I Had the Money and It Still Wasn't Enough

Why I Gave My Ex a Favorable Settlement

The 12 Forms of Wealth

A Great Time to Join the Community

Self-Discipline in Food and in Dating

I Don't Live in Fear of Six Months From Now

Setting It Up Now So I Can Look Back Later

Giving Value Is Where It All Starts

Come Join Me in the Community

Thanks for being here. Have a great day, and I'll be live again tomorrow.

A $3,800 Car Bill and Zero Stress

Originally published August 21, 2025.

This is my journal entry from August 21, 2025, part of my daily autobiography Author in St. Petersburg — my real, unedited days, published in order.

I began the day at the Toyota dealership to service my 2006 Toyota Corolla. The car was due for an oil change and tire rotation, and it needed new brakes as well. While I waited, I set up my laptop and went to work with ChatGPT. Using my minimalist editing process with around a ten percent trim, I took a two-hour dating video transcript I had recorded a few years ago and turned it into a 12,000-word manuscript. That breakthrough lit me up with excitement. If I can process a few more of those old dating videos, I’ll have a short book ready to publish. It feels incredible to realize that the thousands of hours of content I’ve filmed can be salvaged and transformed into something more permanent and physical. ChatGPT strips away the parts that tie a video to its original moment and leaves behind something timeless, something evergreen.

After a couple of hours, the dealership handed me a repair estimate: $4,500. My first reaction was, holy shit, I could buy another car for that much. Yet I love my Corolla, and I’ve taken meticulous care of it. The service advisor reassured me that if I invested in these repairs, the car had a solid chance of running another 100,000 miles. At 207,000 miles already, that was comforting. I approved everything except the cabin filter, which I’ll replace myself, and the AC refresh, which I don’t see the need for. By the time I picked the car up later, the total had come down to $3,800.

The dealership loaned me a brand new rental Corolla for the day with just 33 miles on it. I drove it home and made myself a perfectly portioned lunch of kale from my hydroponic garden with store-bought vegetable slaw, dressed with my homemade vinegar and oil mix, tahini, and taco seasoning. It was simple and delicious—exactly the right amount.

At noon I went to a massage therapist friend’s house for a two-hour massage. The massage itself was outstanding, but what really made the time special was our conversation. We covered many of the same themes I’ve been writing about here—life, growth, and possibility. A massage therapist friend is thirty-two, and I’m blown away by how open and comfortable she is discussing such deep topics. I left feeling like I’ve made a real friend.

She’s brand new to areas that I know inside out—marketing, branding, websites, book publishing—and I’m excited to help her. At the same time, she shared insights from her field. We talked about the Sarasota school, where she mentioned graduates can return to sit in on classes anytime. That struck me as a brilliant way to keep learning, since so many graduates discover just how much they still don’t know. I suggested we ride down together occasionally, which would be both fun and motivating. I’ve had to let go of some friendships recently, and it feels like she’s filling that space with something fresh and positive. If you’re rebuilding your own circle with people who actually lift you up, I’d love to help you think it through on a call with me.

From her place, I drove directly to pick up the kids in the loaner Corolla. The car itself left me grateful for my own. For some reason, the engine setup in that model required flooring the gas just to get a decent start at a light. My 2006 Corolla, by contrast, responds instantly, zipping forward with the lightest touch. The loaner reminded me how much I love my nineteen-year-old car, how committed I am to caring for it, and how that loyalty spills into the rest of my relationships. If I’m willing to invest thousands in maintaining an old car rather than replacing it, I know I’m just as unwilling to discard people. The thought even made me laugh—trading a long-term partner for a “newer model” might be as disappointing as switching to a new Corolla. If I ever did buy another car, the only one in the showroom today that appealed to me was the Camry hybrid, with its forty-plus miles per gallon.

The kids wanted McDonald’s on the way home, and since they had their own money and were being cooperative, I agreed. I rarely eat fast food myself—I haven’t ordered a meal from McDonald’s in years—but parenting isn’t about imposing my habits. It’s about building goodwill. Doing something small and easy for them, even when I disagree with their choice, balances out in other ways. They’re more likely to listen, cooperate, or go to bed on time when they feel respected.

My son especially made me proud today. He’s been eager to tell stories like my daughter does, but he isn’t ready to type them yet. I gave him my business phone to use the voice memo app, and he dictated a couple of stories from our summer road trip, focusing on the auto train from Lorton, Virginia, to Sanford, Florida. We listened to the first one together on the couch, and I played the second while washing dishes. Hearing his voice recount our trip filled me with joy. I’d love for him to dictate stories I could listen to during my own commutes.

A massage therapist friend had also shared a smart study tip: record passages from textbooks into voice memos and replay them during the drive to school. That struck me as brilliant, a way to turn the commute into study time. It only deepened my excitement about massage school. I’ve inventoried every reason not to go, and none outweigh the benefits. Yes, I’ll have less time to dictate books, but with two and a half weeks left before classes begin, I’m confident I can publish at least one book and order author copies. My first will likely be this diary. I’ve gone back and forth on how much to trim, but I’ve decided not to overthink it. This book will be raw, only lightly edited for obvious repetition. It will capture the start of my life as an author in St. Petersburg. Alongside it, I hope to publish an AA speaker-style book and a dating book pulled from my old transcripts, all while continuing to develop I Was Famous on the Internet.

This evening, after time with the kids and a light meal of hummus, carrots, and celery, I returned to the dealership to pick up my Corolla. The whole process left me feeling grateful rather than stressed. Spending $3,800 on repairs might upset some people, but it doesn’t bother me. We have the money, and I can’t think of a better investment. I’m thankful for the Toyota technicians who gave my car a thorough inspection and put in the hours of specialized labor to keep it running strong. If it buys me years before I need to buy another car, it’s worth every penny.

I talked with my sponsor on the phone, and the call left me feeling grounded. My life coach has been helping me to appreciate the small wins, and today felt like a big one. Getting a $3,800 car bill from the dealership without experiencing even a trace of stress was huge. Not once did I feel anxious. Instead, I enjoyed myself. I had fun writing in the rental car, fun sitting at the dealership working on my book, and fun laughing with the specialist handling my service order. What could have been a miserable, stressful experience turned into an ordinary day filled with joy. That feels like real success—learning to find contentment in the simple things that would crush someone else. If money or an unexpected bill still hijacks your peace, I'd be glad to talk it through with you on a call with me.

From the dealership, I drove straight to meet my friend for tennis. He had to fight Tampa traffic, while I arrived early enough to warm up with a few minutes at the clinic. One of the guys asked if I could play tomorrow morning. That means canceling my meeting and skipping yoga, but I said yes. They were desperate for an extra player, and I won’t have another chance to play with them for the next seven and a half months once massage school starts. Even though those Friday doubles games aren’t as competitive, they’re always fun, and the guys couldn’t play without me this time. It felt worth it—for the laughs and for the chance to let them know what I’ve been up to.

Meanwhile, for serious competition, my friend and I battled through three sets. We started around 6:15 p.m. under clear skies, thankfully avoiding yesterday’s rainout. In the first set, I was unstoppable. Everything clicked, and my friend grew frustrated as I hammered him 6–3. The only other set I had ever taken off him was on a brutally hot day when he’d had a bit too much to drink the night before. Otherwise, he always wins. Tonight felt different.

At one point my friend shook his head and said, “You’re not missing anything. You’re not hitting errors.” That’s when everything collapsed for me. Somehow, that comment flipped a switch. The energy shifted, and suddenly I couldn’t find the court. My friend noted that it would be something for me to win our very first ladder match at the club. For context, the men’s singles ladder hosts some of the most competitive players around. My friend had been stuck at the bottom, and then I joined, pushing myself into that last-place slot. He had joked before that the first time I beat him “for real” would be on the ladder. Tonight looked like it might happen. Instead, I fell apart.

In the second set, I started feeling like I was losing even before the score turned against me. My friend, on the other hand, shook off his frustration and dug in. He played with the consistency he’s known for—relentless topspin, endless endurance, sprinting after every ball, running down shots that should have been winners. I tried rooting for him as I unraveled, shouting encouragement like, “Your serve’s going to come in. You’re an awesome player,” and I think it helped him. Once he locked in, he dominated.

From 1–1 in the second set, he rattled off eleven straight games. He crushed me 6–1 in the second, then rolled through the third while I watched my confidence collapse. I kept making errors while he returned nearly everything. Even though I stayed relaxed from a massage therapist friend’s massage earlier, by the end of the third set my inner game was shattered.

That said, I keep perspective. I’ve only been playing tennis recreationally for about a year. I hardly touched a racket as a kid. I’m 41 years old, and the fact that my body can even rally with competitive players is a miracle. There were points tonight that were breathtaking—30- or 40-ball rallies, drop shots, angles, athletic scrambles where we both refused to quit. My friend finished the match so soaked in sweat, his shoes and socks were squishing like he’d gone for a swim. Losing 11 games in a row stung, but the reality is I played incredible tennis, and my endurance was bottomless. We went three sets totaling 22 games, and I still had enough energy to keep playing for hours afterward. Even now, at 9:36 p.m., I feel like I could lace up and run miles.

I came home after tennis, ate a Larabar, a couple of homemade chocolate chip cookies, and one of our all-fruit popsicles. The whole day had been clean—perfectly portioned meals, tons of movement, nonstop energy. The only snag was me crashing at bedtime 20 minutes after the kids went down. Still, my ex-wife handled it gracefully, as she always does, and the kids were already sleepy when I came home to say a quick good night.

Reflecting on the day, I’m struck by how much of a win it was. Even the frustration on the court is valuable. If it takes losing eleven games in a row just to feel any real defeat, that means life is going well. Tomorrow I’ll play again, and I’ll play as often as I can until school starts.

Last night before bed, my ex-wife and I had a great conversation. I had been wound up after tinkering with ChatGPT, testing whether it could really take a transcript and turn it into a book. When my ex-wife came to spend time with me, I was still buzzing with work energy, frustrated that our window felt so short. Sometimes intimacy feels reduced to a twenty-minute block: cuddle quickly, have sex, and fall asleep. I told her how I was feeling, and instead of clashing, we connected. She understood immediately—she often feels the same way about time. Just voicing it brought us closer. We ended the night in sync and in good spirits.

I stayed up until about 11:15, later than I’d like. Once massage school begins, I intend to be in bed by 10:30 so I can wake early and focused. For now, though, I’m grateful. Today was one of those days where everything seemed to fall into place. From the car service to the massage to tennis and family time, every moment was satisfying. Recording this diary ensures I can look back years from now and remember how full of life I felt.

If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.

I'm Asking For A Million Dollars While I Give What I Have Away

From my video published October 2, 2022.

My friends, are you confused by all the different conversations I have about money? You are in good company, because on Twitch, Owen has been asking, look, why are you asking for a million dollars? Very seriously, I want to be debt free. Before taxes, it will take about a million dollars. The IRS takes 40% and does God knows what with it, perhaps to fund secret bunkers and secret space programs and all kinds of crap. They don't tell us what they do with it. After that million, in order for me to be debt free, I need about a million dollars before tax, which after tax will be about $600,000 to pay off the house, the student loans, and the small business loan debt.

Now, that by itself might sound like, cool, okay, you want a million dollars to be debt free because you haven't been debt free in the last year or so. Ever, honestly, as an adult, since I went to school. But at the same time that I'm asking for a million dollars, I also have a policy. Basically, any time I run into someone in person, I've set clear boundaries around it, but if somebody on the street is homeless and needs some money, I'll give them $20. Some days I get hit up and give $40 or $60 to homeless people in a single day. Other days I don't give anything. I'd say on average I probably drop, at least depending on which homeless people I see, hundreds of dollars every month that I just give away to homeless people.

Simultaneously, if I go out to eat, I'm giving a nice tip, a minimum of 20%. If you were having a really bad day and the food was terrible and you didn't even come around, I'll still give you 20% because I think it's nice you showed up to work, even if you didn't do a very good job. I get it. I kind of lose followers and lose money if I show up and don't do a good job sometimes. Sometimes I'll make the news for showing up and people think I didn't do a good job. Anyhow, where was I going with this? Oh, you might look at it and say, why would you ask for a million dollars to get out of debt, and then just piss it away giving it to homeless people on the street? And if I actually get great service at a restaurant, or I think I will get great service, I'll drop 30% on a takeout order, because these people are out there working Thursday night so I can have some sushi to bring home to my wife. I think they deserve a nice tip for that.

Why Helping Others While In Debt Makes Sense

So you think, well, why would I help you be debt free? And especially, why would I give you anything when you're not debt free yourself? I'm going to make an analogy here, in fact several analogies, and explain how this makes perfect sense. And at the same time, you might even look at it and say, you want to be debt free, but you're using my money to buy crypto. Yes, I've got $5,000 in crypto right now, because I don't believe in holding everything in cash. It looks like my portfolio just went up a little bit since I looked at it. So you might wonder, how does this all make sense? How does it make sense that you want a million dollars to be debt free, that you're buying crypto and giving to homeless people?

Here's the thing. I'm fully transparent with my money. And just because I have $600,000 in debt doesn't mean I can't help somebody. If I have $600,000 in debt, but I also, as is the case, have something like $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 in cash between my wife and me, then I can still help. When you've got a lot of debt, it's a really good idea to have enough cash in case something goes wrong. Because when you have debt, as long as you make the minimum payments, everything's fine. But if you start missing minimum payments, at least on the things you owe, there can be severe consequences. Thankfully, we have no more credit card debt. I just paid the last credit card off. But if you start missing payments on stuff, and especially if you miss payments to the federal government, they can get real unhappy and take your money from you straight off. Miss the payments to the mortgage company and you might get kicked out of your house. In my experience, you really need cash on hand when you've got a bunch of debt, because you need more cushion for uncertainty and you don't want to have to borrow more money at a higher interest rate.

The Homeless Question

So let me answer the homeless question first. If I've got $50,000 in the bank, regardless. Now, I don't personally hold most of it. My wife has the majority of the cash. I have five grand in crypto and maybe ten or so more thousand in cash. So if you add my crypto to my cash, plus what my wife's got, it's somewhere around $30,000, $40,000, $50,000, something like that. If I've got all this money in the bank and I could, within reason, have almost anything I wanted, my wife and I could buy a car in cash right now, even though we've got $600K in debt. And if I see somebody on the street who is so desperate they're holding up a cardboard sign asking for money, and I've got a wallet with $300 in it, it's just selfish and self-centered if I drive by. That's how I look at it.

Now, I used to look at it that these bums should go get a freaking job and not ask for money. And you know what? I never had any money and never felt financially secure when I had that mindset. What I've come to believe is that the mindset you operate with often doesn't even match your material reality, but it usually does. Today, I operate with an abundance mindset. And even though I have a lot of money, me having $10,000 in cash and $5,000 in crypto is way more than most people in the world have. That's more money in cash than most people in the world have. In certain countries that would be a lot more money. That would make me probably close to the top 10%, for sure, maybe the top 1%. So it's all relative. Your point of view is all relative with these things.

So if I've got all this cash, even though I do have debt, I'm not in any real risk of anything bad happening. But what really sucks is when you're living on the street and nobody is going to loan you money. The only way you can get money is to ask for it, because you're in such poor condition, who's going to want to give you a job? And what kind of work are you even going to be able to get? If others are in desperate need today, then it feels wrong for me to just drive by and ignore that.

Now, I have had to set some boundaries with people reaching out online, because there are 7 billion people and probably at least a billion of them have the capacity to reach me online. People can drop into my Discord chat or my Telegram. I've gotten a lot of requests for money online, and I've actually sent random people money. Some guy in the Philippines randomly sent me an invoice for $50 before, and I actually paid it. And then his friends heard about that and they started sending me invoices, and I'm like, yeah, this isn't going to work. But one guy got lucky. I've sent lots of people money from my live stream. I've done tens of thousands of dollars of giveaways. I believe in always helping someone less fortunate than I am, even if it slows me down in becoming debt free, even if it slows my own progress down.

Debt As A Modern Form Of Slavery

Because I'll make an analogy that, to me, just makes this very clear. If you're in debt, your freedom is more limited than everybody else's. Now I'm going to make a more drastic analogy. Since I changed my race in February 2022 from identifying as white and Caucasian, I now primarily identify as a being that has no race, no body, no consciousness, or just as pure I-am consciousness. That's my primary God identification, if you will. I identify as a servant of a collective. But if we really want to fill out a form and check your race, or which race you feel you most belong to, I feel that black or African American most resonates with how I feel in my mind now.

To me, I see that people are able to change their gender, and I support this, as I've made very clear. As a guy who's worn tube tops on stream and gotten a lot of views doing it, I support you defining yourself however you want to be defined. And I appreciate everyone who respects me and my own definitions. So I changed my race to identifying as black in February. Ironically, I then experienced the most discrimination I've ever experienced. According to Facebook, I was not black enough to identify as black. Can't possibly be serious. That's okay. We've all learned valuable lessons, them and me. The more I've identified as black, the more I've thought about slavery, and the more I've learned about slavery. And I think everyone should change some big characteristic, because your learning will be greatly accelerated. I did not think that much about slavery before I changed my race, although I felt black a long time and I felt a lot of kinship with the civil rights movement for most of my life. Even though you might not have logically wondered that based on my appearance alone, at what point are we going to stop judging people purely based on appearance and more on the depth of their character? I hope we're in the process of doing that now.

So the more I've identified as black, and the longer and more I've thought about slavery, the more I've seen that what we have with our system of indebtedness is like a present-day form of slavery. Most people around, if you are in debt, you are in a small level of slavery. You are not free anymore. If you've got cash in the bank and you don't owe any money, you're free. If you have zero money and you can't borrow any, I would say that is much less free than being able to borrow some money. However, when you and your wife owe $600,000, you can't stop working, or you face severe consequences like getting kicked out of your house, losing your car, and potentially being homeless and on the street, at the mercy of many of the worst things that can happen. And I see that getting out of this debt-slavery system is something that is very important for as many of us as possible. I made an analogy when I asked for the million dollars that, hey, in the past, slavery was something that was all over the globe.

Slavery Was Never Just One Place

The history of slavery was not as you might have been taught or focused on in school, that it was just something that happened from Africa to the US. No, Africa had slaves all over the place. Africans enslaved Africans, Asians enslaved Asians, Europeans enslaved Europeans, Americans enslaved Americans. Everybody was enslaving everybody, all over. For most of human history, if you lost a war you were enslaved, and some people even voluntarily sold themselves into slavery in order to get a place to live and some consistent meals, because life was that hard.

At a certain point in our spiritual growth, we collectively decided that slavery was not right, and we collectively got strong enough to stop one tribe from taking us over and enslaving us. Slavery in many places naturally went away. The US was one of the few places where there was an actual war.

Escaped Slaves and Self-Sacrifice

Now, in the US, one thing that really helped the war and helped accelerate the end of slavery was escaped slaves. And in order for you to have slaves escape, you had to have both slaves and people who weren't slaves actively collaborate to help each other, and often self-sacrifice to do so. For example, if you're on a plantation and there are 10 slaves, not all 10 are realistically going to be able to get away. Finding 10 people is much easier than finding one person. Hiding 10 people is much more difficult than hiding one. So I imagine that in many cases, for slaves to escape, there would be cooperation, like, hey, there are 10 of us, somebody needs to get out of here and have a better life, let's talk about who that should be.

In some cases they'd keep it secret so that nobody even knew, and one person could just slip away. In other cases everybody would work together and help one slave escape, so that the one who escaped could go tell all the free people what it was actually like to be enslaved. You wouldn't have likely had the North go to war with the South without a bunch of escaped slaves saying, hey, slavery is absolutely brutal, this is what they're doing down there. Instead of slavery being this problem that was over there, that they shouldn't do because it's wrong, but it doesn't really affect me. If you're living in the North in the 1860s, and really throughout the 1800s, every escaped slave who came out in the North helped convert a bunch of free non-slave people into a mindset that slavery is absolutely intolerable and unacceptable.

Many of the slaves who helped others escape never got to be free themselves, or had to wait a really long time. So I'm driving home the point of self-sacrifice. Maybe on a plantation nine out of ten slaves work to help one escape, and all of them take a beating for it, and none of them ever get to get away. Or maybe only one lives long enough before emancipation. But all the rest working to help one get free makes a positive difference for everybody.

Correlating This Back to Debt

I'm going to correlate this back to debt now. If you look at today, we certainly have nothing like that, although some people say we do have human trafficking, that there are 40 million people in slavery today on this planet. I realize there are a lot of differences, but in life, finding what things have in common will usually be more valuable for you than finding differences. Today we have a ton of people in debt who are not truly free, or who are living in such poverty they can't even borrow money to begin with and have a chance to make some moves.

97 percent of people on earth live in the same country they were born in, and the country you were born in is the number one indicator of how your life will go financially. It looks to me like we have a system of finance that is based on debt and keeping people enslaved or poor. In the wealthy countries it's primarily done through debt. In the countries that are not wealthy, people are so poor you don't even need to get them into debt, they have nothing, they're stuck living paycheck to paycheck, unable to escape, unable to get out of where they're at or to get into a better situation. This is why there's such a small percentage of people who essentially, in many ways, own all the rest of the people on earth.

In some ways it was more honest to have a system where this specific person owns you at this specific place. Today, you probably don't know exactly who owns you, but there are people who feel that they own you, that you will do what you're told by them or you will suffer the consequences. That's not freedom. Freedom is not: you take this shot or you lose your job and you're homeless. Freedom is not: you wear this mask or you're going to get fired. Freedom is not: you have to come in these hours or you're homeless. When you have to work or you face being homeless and starving to death, that is not freedom. That is slavery. And it's intelligent slavery that you can't see very easily.

When you've got people in bondage that everyone can see, that is very in your face, brutal slavery. Certainly it's not freedom. I'm glad we've evolved past that, but we're in a lighter form of it today.

Getting Out Helps All of Us

What I'm saying is that any of us who can get out of that system helps all of us. So if you've got debt, you may have debt the rest of your life, and you may die with debt. But if you can help somebody else get out of debt, that makes a difference. Even if most of us are stuck being in debt, the more people we help get out of debt, the more we have people who are truly free and can help work on making a more fair financial system. This is exactly why I've built my community around conversations like this one, and if it speaks to you, I'd love for you to join the Jerry Banfield Family and work on it together with me.

Combine that with the other mindset I have, which is: ask for exactly what you would like, and be clear about it. I want to be debt free. I would love to be debt free. I am tired of being in debt.

Why This Conversation Is Uncomfortable

I very much realize this is uncomfortable. Someone told me I was way off comparing the racial stuff to debt, that it's not the same thing, and that I'm going to get banned for saying stuff like this. Well, one, I already got taken down on Facebook just for changing my race in a very loving way, they took my profile down completely. And two, if I can't make an analogy between the way slavery was and the way debt is today, the way our current financial system is, then we're in trouble, because we need to talk about things like this that are uncomfortable. Some of us are too scared.

Our system now has a lot in common with slavery 200 years ago. The difference is it's almost purely mental, which is much more intelligent and evolved than having people physically in bondage. And unfortunately, because it's purely mental, it's also much more effective and easy to put the masses into. If people are too sensitive and too offended, then you don't deserve to have a better system than you have today. You deserve to be exactly where you're at, stuck in debt, having no freedom, while a small amount of essentially slave masters rule over the 99 percent on earth and tell people exactly what to do.

I'm grateful that Twitch and YouTube and my podcast have all proven effective platforms to deliver this message, because these platforms are more sensitive to free speech. We need to have tough conversations. I see people are having conversations like this online, and we need to have conversations that matter. If I can't use Twitch and YouTube and my podcast to say the things that really need to be said, then I'd rather not use them at all. When I was a Facebook partner, I had to shut my mouth and be much more careful on all of these things. I will never shut my mouth on things that need to be said. Because if we go around with this learned helplessness, like, hey, this is just the system we're in and we can't do anything about it, then you deserve to stay in that system.

It's when you do something about it that things change. It's when the people who were in slavery said, look, we're not just going to sit here and be slaves anymore, we're going to do whatever it takes to get out of here. Even if nine of us have to get beaten so one person can get out, then we're going to do that. That's what I'm talking about. We need to break down this debt-slave system we have.

My Own Illusion of Freedom

I've had the humbling realization that I am under the illusion that I'm free right now, because my wife has a full-time job that pays for our bills. If my wife lost her job, things could get interesting, and my Twitch stream might suddenly end so that I could go deliver garbage, or just get any other job to pay our bills. I want to be out of debt. I really, really want to be out of debt. Because me being out of debt gives me the ability to help others out of debt, just like an escaped slave helps the entire collective free all the rest. Every escaped slave who made it to the North helped the North win the war, both by being able to fight and by getting more people to join the fight.

We need to get as many people out of debt and out of poverty as possible on this planet. We need to do whatever it takes, anything it takes, to get people out of poverty and out of debt on this planet. The way to do that is to be clear and talk about it, and to make the most powerful analogies you can. You know why it's scary to have these conversations? Because of how accurate they are. Who wants to look at their life honestly and realize, wow, I go to work doing a job I hate just to pay my bills, and if I don't do that I'm looking at being homeless?

That's not the exact same thing as the slavery that went on this planet in the 1800s and earlier. It's not the exact same. But it's got a lot in common, unfortunately. With slavery, you don't get a choice whether you show up to work or not, you don't get a choice of what work you get to do, you just get whatever is given to you after the masters have taken everything else. Can you say that our system is much different from that today? You get whatever is left to you after everybody who's powerful is done with it. Do you do a job you love? I do, but that is fragile. My life could easily change in a way where this whole livestream I do, I couldn't do it anymore, and that's been very obvious.

Changing my race out of love, and what it cost me

There were a lot of people whining and complaining to Facebook about me changing my race, and a lot of people laying a disingenuous narrative over top of it, a fake one that was of their own creation. My changing my race has been done purely out of love, purely out of joy, purely because that's what's true for me, purely because that's what I have to share and what I have to say. Other people made up messages of hate, and those messages resulted in me losing 95 percent of my income overnight. This year has shown me how fragile my streaming is, and how easily doing this labor of love could be replaced by me doing something just to make money. Thank God my wife has a job, so I can afford to just do this and not need to make money today.

We need to get as many other people in that position as possible, because when everybody is scared to lose their job and heavily dependent on their employer, employers have a huge amount of power. That power can easily be focused and centralized into a very small amount of people telling everybody else what to do, with serious consequences if they don't do it. I mean, what else is that? A small amount of people tell a bunch of other people what to do, and they have to do it or take a beating. You don't take a physical beating today, but you might take a physical beating if you're homeless. You might take a physical beating from being malnourished on the street. It's brutal.

Freedom is something we build collectively

This is where someone might say people are slaves out of their control. No, people were not slaves out of their control. It's something that's collectively happening in the collective consciousness. There were very much people in control who were making these decisions, and there were very much a lot of people just going along with them. It was an entire collective thing. It's so easy for the whole financial system today to want you to feel powerless, to feel helpless, like, hey, this is out of my control. No, it's not. What's in your control is what you ask for. That's why I'm asking. I want a million dollars, I want to be debt free, and I want to show you how much tax impacts things along the way. If I could get 600,000 without paying tax, however that would happen, I'll take it. But at a certain point that's enough, it's too much, and you have to set some boundaries.

Yes, I realize I'm saying things that are an analogy, and of course it's not a perfect one. I've said there are differences. I identify as black, and I very much feel that slavery is wrong. Is that not clear by now? I feel that what's happening today has so much in common with it that we need to make some serious changes. Look around at the challenges. Often you can't easily look around and see, because a lot of the people who are in the worst conditions, you don't get to see them. But we all are participating in this thing collectively, we all are contributing something. You never want to go around with this helpless, I'm a victim, people are doing things to me mindset, because you can control what you ask for. That's why I'm asking for a million dollars. I want to be debt free, and yes, I need a massive amount of money to be able to do that.

Asking to be free, and helping others get free

I bet a lot of the people who were freed were praying and saying, please let me be free, or let me help someone else be free. That's how we got to today. Yet according to some, there are over 40 million people still in slavery today through human trafficking. As I've changed my race to black, this has become very important to think about and talk about, and it goes very closely with money. In my experience, the money system as it's used today is one of the biggest things used to control people's freedom.

So I think it would be a really powerful story if I, collectively through all of your help, however it comes, am able to get out of debt, and I can say, look, people collectively gave me a million dollars, thousands of others helped, and now that I'm debt free I have the ability to help free people. Until then, I still help others. I help others become debt free however I can, whether it's making educational videos or giving a homeless person twenty dollars on the street. I do whatever I can every day to help someone else, even if I don't get the result myself, even if helping someone else means I stay in debt for longer. That's why it's important to have these conversations, that's why I use the slavery analogy. Those people helped others get free, they helped others escape, they helped the whole system collectively collapse and improve.

I know this doesn't all make sense very easily, but I've explained it for thirty minutes now, and I hope it can make a little more sense. The vision I have is of a future where people are debt free. I hope that in the process I have helped others escape and helped others get free, and I hope we get to a place where people are not stuck in poverty, because people stuck in debt and stuck in poverty are easy to control and manipulate.

The kind of society I want to live in

I want a population of people that's not easy to control and manipulate, because that's a free population. People who aren't living paycheck to paycheck. People who aren't looking at being homeless if they lose their job. Those are strong people who can help others and lift others up, and that's the society I want to live in. I don't want to live in a society where everyone just goes to work and puts their head down because they can't afford to lose their job. I want to live in a world that's as free as possible.

I see that we've made a lot of progress in the last 200 years. We've made a lot of progress, and we could go a lot farther. There's a lot more we can do, and it helps us to look at where we've been and where we're going, and to see that maybe we're only halfway to where we want to go. That's what makes some people uncomfortable, getting off this idea that, well, this is just how things are and I can't do anything, or that, hey, we're at the pinnacle of progress right now. No, there's a lot farther we could go. If you want to follow more of this journey and how I think about it day to day, you'll find a lot of it in my Life playlist.

We can lift people out of poverty just as we lifted people out of slavery. We can lift people out of debt just as we've given civil rights to people who didn't have them before. We can do a lot of things. Let's put our energy and attention on doing that.

Will You Help Me Become Debt Free

From my video published September 21, 2022.

My friends, today I want to talk about something I set a goal around: becoming debt free. I know this is a tough subject for a lot of us, and that is exactly why it is worth talking about. Any subject that is sensitive, that we feel defensive about, that we feel hesitant about, is the one we really need to bring out into the open. So I am going to lead by example here and be completely honest about where my family and I are financially, because I have come to believe this is a chance for us to work together.

Long story short, in order for me and my wife to become debt free, we are in the ridiculous position of needing about a million dollars. Now, the actual debt is closer to $600,000. We have a mortgage on our house that is around a quarter of a million dollars. We have student loans that come to close to a couple hundred thousand more. And we have government business loans that were given by the SBA during the disaster loan programs, which are approximately a couple hundred thousand more on top of that. Rounded off, that is about $600,000 in debt.

So you might ask, why say a million if the debt is $600,000? Because between taxes and platform fees on anything given, roughly forty percent gets taken before it ever reaches me. That is just the reality of how it works, and it is something worth looking at honestly.

Here is why I think this matters for all of us, and not just for me. To some people, $6,000 in debt feels like the end of the world, and they do not even know where to start. But $6,000, to me, is an incredibly small amount of debt. That is no big deal at all. And the beautiful thing is that the less debt you have, the easier it is, collectively, to fix. In my experience, one of the traps we get stuck in is telling ourselves, "I am not going to help you because I need help myself, and if I help you it takes away from helping me." I have come to believe the opposite is true, and this is where we really can work together and help each other. If this speaks to you, the best way to do this with me today is to join the Jerry Banfield Family, where we work on exactly this kind of thing together.

How I Came Up With This Goal

This idea actually came to me at three in the morning. I woke up and could not sleep for about an hour and a half, which is very unusual for me, and this whole thing was on my mind. So let me explain how I got here.

The night before, I was watching a musician's stream on Twitch, and she had a goal set up for about $1,500 to mix and master her second album. I thought, I would love to help release her second album, and someone else dropped $296 toward that same goal. I have received a lot of big donations and tips myself over the years. And it hit me that people like to give in context. Nobody wants to just throw out money for no reason. What people prefer is to give toward a goal, with a bigger picture in mind. Why give if it is not part of something meaningful?

So I asked myself, what do I actually want? Do I want a new mic? No, I am fine. This is a $100 mic and I have another one just like it, and it works great. What else? I already have an Xbox Series X and a PlayStation 5. I do not really need anything for my studio. So I really sat with it and asked, what is the one goal I most care about? And that is how I came up with it: I want to be debt free. My wife is currently paying the bills and many of the minimum payments, and my job is to help us get debt free. But at the rate she is going, and at the rate I am going, this could take the rest of our lives.

Debt Since I Was Eighteen

I have been in debt since I was 18 years old. That is 20 years in debt now. The first loan I ever took was a student loan. And I will tell you what I have learned from it: if you do not want to be in debt, do not take the first loan. Do not borrow money for anything. It is taking that first loan that gets you into debt. It is taking that first student loan that leads you to take another student loan, and another one. Then you are out of college, you do not have a job, and you get a credit card because you are already used to having debt. Now you do not have a car, so you need one, so you buy a car. And all of a sudden you have student loans, credit card debt, and a car payment, and now you are a debt slave. You do not have the luxury of financial freedom. You have to work, or you get everything taken from you.

Think about how ridiculous this gets. I originally took a student loan for something like $4,000. Then my wife and I bought a house and took student loans, and we both took graduate school student loans, which got really expensive, up into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. And then anything bad happens, you mess anything up. I messed my business up quite a bit. I had this really ambitious startup that did not work, and I wound up with a few hundred thousand in government SBA loans. So I find myself in this ridiculous position where 20 years ago I borrowed a few thousand dollars in student loans, and 20 years later I am sitting on around $600,000 in debt. It is ridiculous, and at times it feels hopeless.

At this rate, we are looking at being debt slaves for at least the next 20 years, if not much longer. Meaning that if we stop working, we lose our house, we lose our car, and we may end up homeless unless we can find somebody to live with. And this is what happens to a lot of people in one of the richest countries in the world. It is stupid, and it is not right.

Even a million dollars, like my goal, is an incredibly ambitious target. To most people it would look impossible that I am even talking about a million dollars, and it does not need to happen all at once. This might take six months, a year, five years, whatever it takes. I am setting an ambitious goal on purpose, because I am imagining what it will be like when this is actually done. It will be an incredible story. If someone with $6,000 in debt sees that people helped me pay off $600,000, they will realize, man, if this guy could pay that off, I can definitely pay off my $6,000, or my $20,000. That is the hope I want to give people.

I will say, too, that support shows up in strange ways. I am demonetized on Facebook and do not do anything there anymore, yet for seven months people were still sending money and supporting me, even after I asked them to stop and move over to Twitch. People are generous when they believe in what you are doing.

Debt as a Modern Form of Slavery

Here is where the real point comes in, and I am going to use an analogy that means a lot to me. This year I changed how I identify, and I identify as black or African American. The truth is that, according to our scientists, no matter where any of us came from, we all share a common ancestor in Africa. It is only a question of when your line left. And according to our history, all people everywhere have enslaved each other in one form or another. Africans enslaved Africans, which is how the slave trade got started. Enslaved Africans were sold, already prepared as slaves, to Europeans, who then took them to the Americas and other places. Europeans enslaved Europeans. Asians enslaved Asians. Native Americans enslaved Native Americans.

Slavery was something done all over the world for thousands of years, and it was all about power and control over others. If your tribe raided the neighboring village and killed their warriors, you then got to keep all the other people as slaves in your tribe. Slavery finally stopped due to developments in human consciousness: people finding it disgusting to hold others as slaves, people no longer being willing to be slaves, and nation states organizing so they could protect themselves and stop being raided. We do not have as much of it today, although some people say there are still millions of actual human trafficked slaves on the planet right now.

But I want to make an analogy here with debt, because in my view debt is pretty much a modern form of slavery. You are not held in bondage with physical chains, and you are not one specific person's property. But if you look up the definition of slavery, one of the meanings is "a condition compared to that of a slave in respect of exhausting labor or restricted freedom." That definition starts to sound a lot like where many of us are today. So many of us are essentially living in debt slavery, where we have to go to work or we are looking at being homeless, looking at being in poverty, and very often doing jobs we do not even enjoy. How many of you are doing jobs you do not even enjoy?

You feel you have to do that job or you are going to have nothing. You will be out on the street. Human consciousness is going to be the most important thing here. The treatment of slaves has developed a lot in 200 years, and over the thousands of years of previous human history versus now, it is much better. And yet it is a lot discomforting how, especially after changing my race and identifying as African American, I have thought a lot more about slavery in 2022. I see that it is still very much going on today, albeit in a more gentle and less obvious form. Today it is in the form of debt. When you owe money, you are not free anymore.

By owing money to somebody else, if you do not pay that money, you are looking at consequences. My wife and I now have been in debt 20 years, and we have to work or we will lose everything. We will lose our house, our car. There is nothing we will get to keep if we do not keep working and making thousands of dollars a month, something like five thousand dollars a month in minimum payments, or we lose it all. If we did not have friends and family, we would be out on the street. If we did not have other people in our lives who were financially secure and free, we would have nowhere to go.

This is why, when I see somebody on the street even though I am in debt, if I see somebody desperate enough to be homeless with a sign on the street, I always give them twenty dollars. I gave forty dollars out yesterday, twenty dollars out the day before. They start to figure out where I am going to be at what times of the day, and they know, up here comes Jerry, here is 20 bucks.

The slavery analogy: debt as a form of bondage

Now this is where it gets into the slavery analogy, and it will be extremely effective to see how we can help each other. When I ask for a million dollars, a lot of you, especially if you already have a million dollars, and a lot of you have a million dollars plus some debt, you think, "Man, F you, I have got debt, why do not you help me get out of debt?" And we need as many of us out of debt as possible, because every person who is out of debt is in a better position to help others.

My wife and I pay thousands of dollars a month in interest. If we were not in debt, we could simply give that money to other people. And then without the principal payments, we would be way ahead. With no principal payments, we would have thousands a month to give to other people, and we would have thousands more a month for ourselves. Instead, the US government and banks are getting thousands of dollars a month out of us, and we are paying thousands in principal.

Now you could say whatever you want to. You were stupid for taking out student loans, you should have paid them back faster, you should have bought a cheaper house. I did buy a cheaper car, and I am still driving the same car I originally took my loans on, now that I have one car that is paid off. But you can say whatever you want to. Our society promotes consumerism, promotes getting you into debt, and then you get stuck in it once you are in there.

So I will make an analogy: debt has a lot in common with, and of course a lot different from, slavery in the early 1800s in the South. We will say everyone in debt is equivalent to a slave. Today it is not like you are in your face physically getting abused, owned by a specific person. It is obviously not like that. But it is less personal. You do not know exactly who owns your debt today, but you do know there will be consequences if you do not make those payments. And you do know that the stuff you have is really not yours. As long as you owe debt to somebody else, they can just take whatever you have got.

What kind of a person are you? A free person, if the stuff you own is not really yours? If your house is something you can just get kicked out of because you do not make the payments, if your car is something somebody can just take if you do not give them the money, that is not freedom. That is a gentle, a light, a flight form of slavery. Today it is equal opportunity. People of all races, from all nationalities, all over the world are going to be forced to pay a lot of debt, forced into a job you hate, thinking, "I cannot quit this job or I lose all my stuff and I am homeless."

Certainly in a lot of ways it is much better today than it was a few hundred years ago, and I think almost all of us would choose this over that. That said, I think we have got a lot farther to go, and there is way too much in common with how it is now versus how it was 200 years ago, in terms of the majority of society being in debt and therefore not free, in a form of debt slavery where if you do not work, you lose stuff.

The Underground Railroad and how we get out

This is where I am going to make an analogy that will show how we can get out. During slavery in the South, the Underground Railroad was a network of people and slaves who cooperated to help slaves escape the South and get to freedom in the North or Canada, wherever they could get to. The Underground Railroad helped conductors and thousands of slaves get out of slavery and into free places.

Now, in order to get to the Underground Railroad, sacrifices had to be made. Sometimes, for example, if there were 10 slaves on a particular property, in order for anyone to escape, the 10 slaves could work together to help one slave go undetected and escape long enough so that one slave could get away, get to the Underground Railroad, and then get out to the North. And often, if 10 slaves worked together to successfully help one slave escape, there would be punishments, and it could be severe, and everybody else would suffer so that one slave could escape. Often none of the others would ever get to escape. But they all sacrificed so that one person could get away.

Through the Underground Railroad, thousands and thousands of escaped slaves and freed slaves came to the North. And while people could live in the North without seeing slavery in their face, when they saw an escaped slave and got to hear their stories, slavery went from this thing that is happening somewhere else to, "I see this person, I have heard their story, and this is disgusting, and we need to do something about this."

I would say that the Underground Railroad was one of the biggest reasons, a huge contributing factor, to the North going to war with the South and finally saying, "No, we are not going to allow slavery in this country anymore," and being willing to go to war over it. If you do not have all those escaped slaves sharing their experience with all these people in the North who have not seen slavery, you do not have all these people getting all upset about it and getting mad enough and being willing to go to war and sacrifice their own lives in order to free everybody. So you could see that the Underground Railroad was essential. The slaves who were willing to work together to help a few escape, where for every 10 slaves that worked together maybe one slave could escape and the other nine would take a beating over it, well, the nine who were willing to sacrifice and help the one get away eventually helped everybody get freedom.

Why we free whoever we can

This analogy is extremely relevant in our debt scenario today, because so many of us are in debt, and this debt brands us with a selfishness of, "I cannot help you until I pay my own debt off." And that is like one slave saying to another, "I cannot help you escape unless I get to escape too." The thing is, it does not work very well for all of us to just sit there on the plantation and complain and say, "I am not helping you escape if I cannot escape." The key is we need to figure out who among us we can most easily free from this debt, and get as many people free from debt as possible. Because people who are free from debt are more able to help others and are more in a position to change big, huge policies.

If you have got a whole country full of people who are in debt, and this is just how things are, and people accept it, then people give up hope. I imagine there were a lot of slaves who gave up hope. "Man, this is just how it is. Nobody is ever getting free. Nobody is ever escaping." But the ones who had hope said, "Look, we can do something about this. Why do not we help somebody escape? Why do not we pray for freedom?" And that is what we can do today with debt. Every one of us who has gotten out of debt is a huge asset to all the others, to get everybody collectively freed, to get policies changed, to get debt forgiven. The more people who are debt free, the more lucrative it is to forgive all the remaining debt, and the more people are financially independent enough to push for policies to help others.

This is why it is essential we help as many of us as possible get out of debt. And in order to do that, we need to ask for the help we need. We can all ask for the help we need, and with all of us asking for the help we need, then we are in a position to change things. The slavery analogy just works so well with this because it has so much in common. Of course, it is different. And I am glad I will not read the comments on this, because I am sure people will be nasty, but I am not going to see them, so it is like it never happened.

In the slavery analogy, if you had all 10 slaves sitting around saying, "Look, one of us needs to escape, which one should it be?" Well, should we have this person who is really sick and probably not going to make it through the difficulties of escaping? Should we have them go? Should we have this young, very strong person who is a great worker, who might be really missed if they escape, so we will not get away with having them escape? Or should we have this person who is healthy enough, who is kind of not noticed that much, that we can probably slip them away for two or three days? Nobody even notices they are gone, and they give us the best chance of having one of us escape.

How Trees in the Forest Negotiate

I hear this is how trees in the forest handle their group of trees. The trees look around at each other and say, which trees among us should we help to thrive and grow large? And which trees among us should be sacrificed, the ones that just don't get the nourishment they need and die and fall? The goal is to have a very healthy, strong forest. So it is with debt. If we all open up and say, hey, this is where I'm at, this is how I'm living, then we can work together, help each other, and figure out who among us is in the best position to escape where we're at and to become debt free.

This is why I submit exactly where I'm at. My wife and I live reasonably. We live within our means. This is how my wife is able to pay all the bills, including our huge minimum debt payments. We have a house next to her family, and my mom is moving next door. We buy groceries each week. We don't live extravagantly. I'm driving a car that I've had for 16 years, a Toyota Corolla. My wife and I have a RAV4 that we've had for six years. We're not planning on buying any new cars. We just want to get out of debt, and we spend the least money we can.

Take my studio. I have a very nice studio. Perhaps I don't need an Xbox Series X and a PS5, but y'all bought all that stuff for me last year. Over the last two years I've been through a big change. Instead of buying everything I can, I take pride in spending the least money I can. I have two iPhone 8s here. One is my wife's old iPhone that I'm using for a camera. I got the cheapest quality camera I could get. I'm focused on spending the lowest amount I can on things that are purely consumption.

Giving Back Every Month

And I'm constantly giving back all the time to people in a worse position than me. Right now I'm making through my business in total maybe around $1,000 a month on average. And I probably give $300 to $500 away to homeless people every month. Anytime I see anyone with a sign, I'll stop my car, roll down my window, get honked at because the light's green, and give somebody $20 every time, because I only carry 20s in my wallet. I gave a guy yesterday $20 and he said, thanks, man, I'm really hungry. I owe somebody some money at the gas station because I accidentally didn't see the price tag and only had $2, and I gave him $20. He feels great. I feel great. And I gave another homeless person who was in real rough shape physically yesterday $20, because $20 is a lot of money if you're homeless. It's not that much money for me.

What I see in offering myself to the collective is this: by paying my massive amount of debt off, it will be a very inspiring story for the rest of us. When you see somebody who has $600,000 in debt, them and their wife, and the collective pays that off, you can see, wow, there's hope for me. So I'm offering that paying my debt off is an opportunity to have a story that is inspiring and useful for people. And for the rest of my life, I'm already committed to giving back to those who have less than me, the people who really benefit from having $20 here and $20 there. With my wife and I being debt free, we will have thousands and thousands of dollars every month to give back to others.

For example, if I were debt free, I could single-handedly pay off the Blonde Mamba's debt in two or three months of interest that my wife and I are currently paying. The Blonde Mamba has $6,000 in debt, and my wife and I could single-handedly pay all that off because we're paying that much in interest right now. That's money the banks and the federal government are getting. And what are they doing with it? What exactly are they doing with all this interest? There's almost no accountability.

If We Stop Living Beyond Our Means

There's a view that there's a class of Americans who are in debt and want others to bail them out. I believe if we stop living beyond our means, we solve a lot of problems. We solve a lot of debt issues. This is why, when we're asking for help with our debt, we need to be transparent about how we're living. If we're living by consuming and buying a whole bunch of stuff all the time, then that is essentially asking for more debt. The problem is that our entire culture has programmed us and lured us into taking on debt.

If I had never taken any debt on, I could easily have all the same stuff I have now, except maybe not a college education, which really didn't do hardly anything for me financially. By this point, my wife and I have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in interest. We could have just saved up money, worked regular jobs, learned a trade, saved up and bought a small house, and then maybe bought a bigger house in cash. Started off living in a mobile home, then bought a small house, then saved up and bought a bigger house in cash. If we hadn't been tricked into student loans, we probably could have all the same exact material things today with no debt, and have thousands of dollars besides.

I think we easily have the ability to provide a free education to everybody in this country and worldwide. We have enough money where everybody could get a college degree, or even an advanced degree, for free. And the more people who get out of debt and demand that others get out of debt, the better position we'll be in to stop people from getting into debt in the first place. Because an ounce of prevention is worth a whole lot of treatment. In medicine, if you can prevent getting cancer, that is so much cheaper than trying to pay for cancer treatments. That's my whole philosophy of medicine: I want to prevent cancer, to prevent getting it in the first place.

Have I ever worked a job that I went to college for? Yes, I was a police officer, and I made a maximum of $40,000 a year from being a police officer. Laura has worked some attorney jobs that she went to law school for, but she could be making the same money she is now without having gone to any school, or by having gone to a specific trade school. We have enough money in this country to easily pay for everybody to go to school.

Breaking the Debt Slavery System

But our system is almost set up intentionally to get people into debt slavery. You get tricked into borrowing this money, and then you have to do all this kind of work, and then you're easily manipulated and controlled. In my experience, the fear of losing your job when there's pressure to comply with something is so great that a little bit of manipulation goes a long way against people who are carrying that much debt. So we have a lot to gain by breaking this debt slavery system. We need to help people. We need to do whatever it takes to get out of it.

We need to look at this as the 21st century equivalent of the slavery that was in the 1800s. You are not free if you are in debt. You cannot contribute as much. You cannot help others. Forgiving debt is very good, and we need to do whatever it takes to get people out of debt. Of course, you don't want to pay for somebody to get out of debt who immediately then gets another credit card and gets back into debt. We need to permanently break the debt cycle.

This is why I am committing to no more borrowing money ever again in my life. No more home loans, no more car loans, no more debt. Never again borrowing any money at all. If you want your debt paid off or forgiven, I believe you need to make a commitment that no matter what, you do not borrow more money in the future. I'm imagining a society where we don't have any debt. If you want something built and you've got money, you just pay people to build it. I'm imagining a future society where there's no lending or borrowing money. You just give somebody money, and if they want to give things back to you, that's up to them.

I've done the credit card thing myself, still paying it, a horrible cycle. It is a horrible cycle. When my wife and I are out of debt, if you've got less than, say, $5,000 in debt, just a few thousand, we could single-handedly pay off somebody else's debt every month with just the interest we currently pay, and still take thousands of dollars a month and put it aside to save or buy some assets in case of an emergency. Because the people who get in debt use debt as an emergency plan. They spend on the edge of what they can afford, and if any emergency happens, their backup plan is just to borrow more money, because they don't have the money to pay for it.

My Pledge: No More Borrowing

So I'm pledging that I will never borrow any money for anything again, because it's like drinking. It's taking the first loan that gets you into the debt cycle. I'm putting this goal front and center from now on, and I'm committed to helping others who are less fortunate than me constantly, however I can. If you want to walk this out alongside me, the best way to do it today is to join the Jerry Banfield Family, where we can open up about where we're really at and work together to help each other get free.

What I've been faced with is setting a bit of a limit and a boundary, because when I see people in person, that's manageable. I've also given tens of thousands of dollars away online myself, probably $30,000 or $40,000 to other streamers to help other people pay off their debt. If I had put it all in one single video, maybe that would have gone viral and paid for itself, but I've given tens of thousands of dollars to other streamers to help other people get out of debt.

Giving what I can and still getting away with it

Part of why I do all of this is to help people do work they love. I am constantly giving what I can give and still get away with it. Honestly, I would have less debt if I had not given so much to others. But if I can help somebody else get out of debt, then that makes a positive difference. So from now on, this debt-free goal will be top of mind on my stream every single day. And I am amazed. I imagine this will help us all collectively, and I imagine this will get paid off one day. I do not know when, but I know that if you want something in life, it really helps to ask for it. If you want to be debt free, ask for it. Pray for it. If you want to do work you love, I am already doing work I love.

Fortunately, for the sake of honesty, I have looked at my situation and I have the luxury of being able to do work I love because my wife can pay all the bills. When Laura and I get debt free, I will be able to keep streaming just like I am now, indefinitely. Right now I have enough money in the bank because of what I have borrowed and because of Laura paying the bills, so I do not have to make money on what I am creating. But if anything happened to Laura's job, I might need to quit doing work I love and just do something to make money, to make sure I am not homeless. I do not know if I would do that or not, though. I might just refuse to do any work for money and let our house be sold and move in with my mom or Laura's parents. Laura really, really does not want to do that. I am willing to do it. I would much rather work and do work I love than have money.

Why becoming debt free lets me give more

I keep imagining what a powerful example we can set by helping me and my family become debt free. In the long run, whatever I am given will be able to be given much more to others, without thousands of dollars in interest to pay every month. If you do the math, over the course of a lifetime, my wife and I would be able to give back. If we got a million dollars in the next couple of years, just off the interest alone we would be able to give all of that back to other people by the end of our lifetime. And not just that, but we would be free ourselves and a living example of, hey, do not ever borrow money. Let's change this society so that school is comfortable and completely free. If you want to be a doctor, an engineer, a lawyer, a gamer, whatever it is you want to do, you should be able to go to school totally for free, all the way to the highest levels of education. Let's forgive the debt we have and let's educate people about how hard it is to get out of debt once you get in it.

If you want to be part of this with me, the best place to do it today is to join the Jerry Banfield Family, where we work on doing work we love and building a life that is free. Thank you very much for hearing this, whether you caught it live, watched a recording later, or listened to it on the Jerry Banfield Show podcast.

Generosity helps everyone, so nobody loses

The last thing I want to wrap up with is this. On the surface it might sound like a win-lose. Like it is a win for me if people give me money, and a loss for every person who gave me money. But according to the studies I have seen and my firsthand experience, an act of generosity helps both the giver and the receiver. When you help me and my family become debt free, you feel good doing it. I love when I give a homeless person twenty dollars. I love how I feel, and I love how they feel. And here is the real amazing thing: a third party who observes an act of kindness gets the same feeling. So my daughter watches me give a homeless man twenty dollars, he feels good, I feel good, and she feels good, and all she did was observe. When someone gives while I am live, I feel good, they feel good, and everybody watching feels good too. That is the beauty of this. That is all of us working together. Nobody loses.

What is beautiful is that I am patient. I put this goal on every single stream I do, which then turns into every recording I do, and I mention it on most of my podcast episodes, which come straight from the recordings. I am going to focus on this every single day. I am going to show up and share it every single day. And once this goal is completed, I will not take on any more debt. I will set up some kind of system to give back, because I am going to have a lot to give at that point, and I want to help as many others as possible online. You can follow the whole journey in my Life playlist.

Right now I have set a boundary. I give to other streamers and people I watch. What does not work is that there are so many people online who reach out. If I know you really well, and you have watched my stream for a long time, and you are in debt, I might be able to help you out. But if I do not know you that well, and you have not been watching my stream for years and years, and you have never given anything yourself, and then you drop your Cash App in the chat and ask, I have given in that context before and I have found it is a bit too much. I can end up giving so much that I can barely make my own minimum payment. So the better position I get into, the better equipped I am to help other people, and all of us benefit in the process. I appreciate you hearing this message, and let's make a world that is debt free.

Debt and Becoming Debt Free: Jerry Banfield's $600K Story

On this page

My Credit Card Raised My Rate 7% Overnight. Here's My Whole $223K Debt Plan, From 0% Cards to My Best Year.

The 7% Rate Hike and Debt Maxing

When the 0% Promotions End

Where My $4,000 a Month Was Coming From

The $7,000 I Lost in My Own Meme Coin

A Tesla Roadster, an Ableton Push 3 and My 20-Year-Old Car

My Best Year Was 2016, and Every Year Since

Why I Still Did Not Get a Job

Advice You Need to Hear if You Want Financial Freedom

Being Willing to Leverage Credit and Debt

Spend Money on What Makes You Feel Wealthy

My Friend Who Just Quit His Job

Setting the Bar Way Too High

You Are Financially Free Today

How I Handled My Divorce With an Enough Mindset

Acting As If the Money Is Coming

Restarting YouTube With the Nicest Setup I Have Ever Had

Mindset Advice, Not Financial Advice

I'm a 42-Year-Old Single Dad With a -$200K Net Worth

So Many Ways to Be Rich

Health Is the Number One Form of Wealth

When I Had the Money and It Still Wasn't Enough

Why I Gave My Ex a Favorable Settlement

The 12 Forms of Wealth

A Great Time to Join the Community

Self-Discipline in Food and in Dating

I Don't Live in Fear of Six Months From Now

Setting It Up Now So I Can Look Back Later

Giving Value Is Where It All Starts

Come Join Me in the Community

Debt and Becoming Debt Free: Jerry Banfield's $600K Story

On this page

Advice You Need to Hear if You Want Financial Freedom

Being Willing to Leverage Credit and Debt

Spend Money on What Makes You Feel Wealthy

My Friend Who Just Quit His Job

Setting the Bar Way Too High

You Are Financially Free Today

How I Handled My Divorce With an Enough Mindset

Acting As If the Money Is Coming

Restarting YouTube With the Nicest Setup I Have Ever Had

Mindset Advice, Not Financial Advice

I'm a 42-Year-Old Single Dad With a -$200K Net Worth

So Many Ways to Be Rich

Health Is the Number One Form of Wealth

When I Had the Money and It Still Wasn't Enough

Why I Gave My Ex a Favorable Settlement

The 12 Forms of Wealth

A Great Time to Join the Community

Self-Discipline in Food and in Dating

I Don't Live in Fear of Six Months From Now

Setting It Up Now So I Can Look Back Later

Giving Value Is Where It All Starts

Come Join Me in the Community

A $3,800 Car Bill and Zero Stress

I'm Asking For A Million Dollars While I Give What I Have Away

Why Helping Others While In Debt Makes Sense

The Homeless Question

Debt As A Modern Form Of Slavery

Slavery Was Never Just One Place

Escaped Slaves and Self-Sacrifice

Correlating This Back to Debt

Getting Out Helps All of Us

Why This Conversation Is Uncomfortable

My Own Illusion of Freedom

Changing my race out of love, and what it cost me

Freedom is something we build collectively

Asking to be free, and helping others get free

The kind of society I want to live in

Will You Help Me Become Debt Free

How I Came Up With This Goal

Debt Since I Was Eighteen

Debt as a Modern Form of Slavery

The slavery analogy: debt as a form of bondage

The Underground Railroad and how we get out

Why we free whoever we can

How Trees in the Forest Negotiate

Giving Back Every Month