In 2025 I got divorced, moved out, and took my net worth down to roughly negative $200. Someone left a comment on one of my videos — "people get what they deserve" — clearly meaning I deserved to watch my marriage end and my income collapse. I want to answer that honestly, because the way I see it is almost the opposite of how he meant it.
The settlement
First, the facts, because they matter. I gave my ex-wife what nearly everyone who knows the details calls a very generous settlement. No child support. No alimony — even though she earns six figures and I'm currently making about a thousand dollars a month. I gave her 25% of the equity in the house as a payment, didn't touch her retirement, and chose not to force her to move out when I could have. Several friends told me it was unfair to me. I told them it was fair. I meant it.
You get what you create
So did I get what I deserve? Yes — but not the way the comment intended. I believe you get what you create, and what I deserve is the life of my dreams. In the short term you can look at the wreckage and say, "Jerry's life got destroyed, he had it coming." I see it differently. Sometimes you need destruction in your life to make room for the things you actually want.
Why I burned it down on purpose
Here's the part the comment missed: I did this voluntarily. In 2025 I realized the business wasn't the business of my dreams anymore, and the marriage wasn't the one I wanted. So I deleted everything I'd built on YouTube, agreed to the divorce, moved out, and signed the house over. I want a healthy partner to have more kids with, and my ex didn't want that — I spent seven years after I knew, trying to change her mind, and couldn't. To honorably build a new relationship, I needed to be single. To build a business I love, I needed to stop grinding out work I'd come to resent. Crossing out the marriage, the old business, and the home wasn't life happening to me. It was me choosing character over comfort.
Clearing the old makes space to rebuild
After that I took about nine months off — writing books, even going door to door dropping off thousands of envelopes pitching everything else I could do. The only advice that kept coming back was to return to YouTube, which annoyed me at the time, and yet here I am. Clearing out the old gave me the space to start fresh. And I genuinely appreciate the critics along the way — even the harsh comments are feedback, and there are a lot more people thinking about me than I think about them.
This is the same honesty I bring to dating again after divorce. If you want to follow the rebuild, you can watch my newest videos here on the Jerry Banfield Show.