What do you recommend, and what's your advice? This question just came up live on Twitch, and I'm stopping the gameplay so we can have a dedicated answer to it. Believe it or not, here's the example: you have a family member, and if they don't get a few thousand dollars within a month or so, they're going to lose their house. This is a fairly common situation that people find themselves in. I'm going to unload a whole bunch of advice that I hope will be really helpful for you. This is also on the Jerry Banfield Show podcast, like my shirt says. If you want to just listen to these without any of the gameplay, you've got the podcast.
Ask as Many People as Possible
First, if you're chatting about this and asking for advice, that is the first key thing to do. In my experience, I suggest you ask as many people as possible. Our minds and our conditioning have told us that these are shameful things. You need to keep them secret. You shouldn't tell anybody. You've failed if you're in this situation. Really, if you want to get help and to have it get better, it's the exact opposite. The challenges we have in life are an opportunity to ask each other for help.
The situations we're in often reflect our thinking, both individually and collectively. Here's the simple truth as I see it. There are plenty of places for people to live on Earth. There are plenty of resources to construct a nice place for everybody on this planet to live. There's plenty of food for everybody on this planet to eat. The only reason there are tens of thousands of people who will starve to death today, and that there are people who are homeless and living in poverty, is because, collectively, we're not paying attention to them. There are a lot of us who have tons of resources, like in the USA, and we put our attention on these fairly meaningless things. These news stories that don't matter. These fights. These politics that don't matter. Instead of putting our attention on issues where we really could help, where we really could make a difference. Or we wait for the rich people. They should do something. Well, no. The people are rich because we've made them rich.
Making the Picture Bigger
So I've started off with this to help get a bigger picture, because where life gets really painful and turns into a struggle is when we're stuck in a small picture. When it's just me and my family member, and they're going to lose their house or their car or whatever it is, that gets so small. And when you make it bigger, you can see the bigger system. It's an opportunity to learn and grow and ask for help.
So given that there are plenty of places to live, if you're looking at a family member who might lose their house, you can let go of all this fear of it. If somebody loses their house, that's okay. There will be somewhere else for them to live. What makes things so difficult and uncomfortable is that we get into this fear. Like, oh my God, if they don't pay this and they lose their house, it's not going to be okay. Well, that's not true. It will be okay. I've been in a lot of different places before. I've shared a bedroom in a four-bedroom apartment, split a bedroom with somebody. I've lived with my parents as a kid, and as a grown-up I moved back in. There are lots of places to live. There are lots of people who have places to live. It's okay. Everything's going to be all right. Even if the money doesn't get paid and the house gets lost, it's fine. There are opportunities to learn. There are opportunities to grow.
The Value of Community
Now, the more we ask for help in life, the more we ask for advice, the more there are opportunities to work together. For example, I would prefer not to lose my house. If I was in a similar situation, I would ask everybody for help. But I'd also let go and realize that even if I do lose the house, I'll live with somebody else. It's fine. I'll move in with my mom. I'll move in with Laura. As far as parents, I'll move in with a friend. This is why it's so valuable to have connections and relationships with lots of people. Not just family, not just friends, but your community. Because sometimes your family and friends are not in a position to help out, but somebody in the community might have an extra bedroom. Somebody in the community might have a mother-in-law suite. The more people you're connected with, and the more people you ask for help, the more you can tap into all that humanity collectively has to offer. There are people right now who have two and three houses, and nobody even lives in their houses the majority of the year. There are all kinds of arrangements that are possible. This is exactly why I put so much energy into building community, and today the best way to be part of that with me is to join the Jerry Banfield Family, where we help each other through situations just like this one.
So my main advice is, if you're stuck in some fear of what's going to happen if somebody doesn't get this money, is to look at that fear inside you. It's there because you're looking at things and saying, I don't want it to be this way. It shouldn't be that way. And all of your reactions are generating all of the discomfort. It's possible to just accept the situation and say, look, if this family member loses their house, they're going to be okay. They can move in with me. They can move in with somebody else. It's fine.
Trusting the Collective
This is about trusting in the collective and a conscious desire to serve and connect with the collective. Some of you would call the collective God. Seven billion people are effectively a God over any of us individually. Seven billion people, if even a small fraction decides what should happen to one individual, that's God-like power. So I interface as a human being with the collective. I say, dear collective, please educate me. Please help me understand how I may serve you. What can I do? What can I offer? So I'm interested to know if you have any follow-up questions for that.
This is the same situation if you've got a money issue with a medical bill. Oh my God, we have to pay this. No, you don't. You don't have to pay it. It'll all work out. I open myself to infinite possibilities. When I open myself to infinite possibilities, I can't be open to them if I'm stuck on the fear of one thing that's going to happen. And sometimes things that in the short term look bad, in the long term will actually work out good. When my life collapsed in 2009 and I lost my job, I could no longer pay my rent. I simply asked my parents if I could move in, and it was no big deal. Now, in my mind before this, it was a big deal. But after this, it wasn't a big deal. So some of these situations, there's no situation that's worth stressing yourself out over, putting yourself in fear over. None. Especially with finances. The world is full of trillions and trillions of dollars. The world is full of plenty of places to live. The world is full of a lot of food to eat. If you will connect directly with the collective, ask how you can be of service, ask for your needs to be provided for, as I do, things will come up. And then talk to people. Ask people for help. It all works out. It's not so big and it's not so scary.
Letting Go of the Fear of Losing People
My mother is moving next door to me, and I'm really excited that she's able to buy a house next door. I'm really excited for the chance to help her. I remember when my mom nearly died, what I did really well was that I didn't get into fear. Oh my God, what if she dies? I didn't do that. I said, if she dies, I'll be okay. I would prefer that she lives. But if she dies, I will be okay. I will be fine. I will have loving memories of her. I will do my best to take care of all the stuff she's got. It was amazing that when my mother was in the hospital and fell off her horse, and we didn't know if she was going to live or not, I was not in fear. I was not all stressed out and like, oh my God, what if she dies? What will I do? I didn't do that, because my father already died, and I had gone through that before my father died. It was a long, painful process seeing that my father was going to die, waiting for him to die, him being on the edge of dying, and then he died. I went through all that with my father. So when my mother was on what could have been a deathbed several times, I was at peace. I said, I sure hope she lives. If she dies, I'll be okay.
Once you get to that place with it, every experience you get to have with people you love in your life is sacred. You don't have to be afraid of what's going to happen to them, because you'll help however you can. Other people are willing to help. The world is actually full of people who can get a lot of joy out of helping you. Each of us, when we have a need, it creates an opportunity for somebody else to feel good.
So the situation can be heightened in the case of the conversation we're having on Twitch. The person whose family member may lose their house if they don't get the money, you live together. Okay, well, there's an opportunity to be excited for what's going to happen next and to just ask for help without being afraid of where this is going to go. This is why it's so important always to double down and have deeper relationships and connections, to not keep secrets, to open up with people, and to help people all the time. Because I'm in a place where I help people so much, and I'm so connected to people, I'm not afraid of things happening. If I lost my house and I lost my family, if I lost my streaming, somebody would help me. Somebody would let me live with them. Even if I was on the street, somebody would give me money to get food. I'm sure I could find something to do. I just have this peace of mind that I know it'll be okay. And even if it's not, even if I just die on the side of the road, I'm immortal, I'll grab another body and have another adventure. It's not a big deal.
What You Give Is What You Get
Some of us have these things, like finding decent people who aren't some form of shady. This is where it comes into the law of attraction, and it's a lot of fun. What you give is what you'll tend to get. Some of us are very hesitant to ask for help, and we're afraid of losing a place to live or losing a job or having financial trouble, because we think people are going to exploit us. On a collective level, this absolutely has happened quite a bit. You look back, and things like slavery were, from what I've seen, not at all about skin color. It was about voice.
Exploitation, power, and where it really comes from
What we are looking at, when you strip it back, is vulnerable, weak people being exploited because others had taken power and control over them. Think about the history in Africa, where one tribe would fight another tribe. The tribe that won would take the whole losing tribe as slaves, and then they would use those slaves and sell them to whoever wanted to buy them, whether it was another tribe next door or people from another continent. It had nothing to do with race. It was about power over other people, and about taking people who were vulnerable and needed help and exploiting them for profit. That dynamic is very much still in play in our society today.
However, in my experience we are growing spiritually, and people are learning that having power over others and having lots of material possessions does not lead you to feel good. It is helping others and lending a hand to someone else that leaves you actually feeling good. I have come to believe you do not need all these medications and all this crap to fight depression and all these things that just look so silly to me. If you are struggling with depression, why not go out and try to help somebody else have a better day? Next time you see somebody with a sign on the corner, give them $20. Next time somebody asks you for help, lean into it and help them. In my experience we get a lot of things in our life like depression because we are just selfish and self-centered. And like it says in the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous, when we get out there and help somebody else, we feel good.
Why we attract the people we are afraid of
A lot of us do not ever want to be in the position where we need help, because we are afraid of getting sucked into some exploitive situation. That is exactly why it helps to always be out there helping other people yourself, and to not have secrets, to be open with people. Because then you will start to be attracted to people who are truly helpful and are not going to exploit you or take advantage of you. The more selfish and self-centered you are, and the more you keep secrets and are scared of other people, ironically, the more you will be attracted to people who are acting the same way. You will be very likely to get into a situation where somebody does exactly what you are afraid of. Whereas when you are open, when you are loving, when you are trusting, you often will not, though not every time. This is where we have the opportunity to learn and co-create our life experience. What really helps is to think about what exactly you would like and enjoy.
Somebody just said that the exploitive kind of person is almost every person you run into. It is not. Almost every person, every person I run into, is loving and caring and supportive and considerate of others. Yes, some of them struggle with more degrees of selfishness and not helping others than others do. But almost everybody I run into is very caring and loving and supportive. If I asked everybody I know for help, in person, I have asked. I asked people when I started streaming in 2020. I would say, as broke as I have ever been, I had the crappiest little streaming setup, and people gave me thousands, tens of thousands of dollars to upgrade my streaming setup, to get myself a better streaming PC, to get rid of my Xbox One and get a gaming PC.
People have the potential to be many different ways. The question is, what kind of people are you attracting into your own life? You will generally attract people with a similar way of thinking as you have. This is why taking responsibility for one's own thoughts and one's own actions makes such a big difference. I attract a lot of people into my life who think like me, and I go around looking for opportunities to help each other as much as possible. Every time I see a homeless person, I stop. Like last night, there was a lady on the couch, sitting in the corner with a sign. At least ten or twenty other people drove by. I stop, I roll down my window, I give her $20. Yes, most of the people might have driven by, but that does not matter, because I stopped and I gave her some money. Now, selfishness and self-centeredness will tell you that she is just going to go spend that on drugs, that she should get a real job. Those are selfish and self-centered thoughts. If you were in a situation where you were so desperate that you were on the corner with a sign, wouldn't you think somebody ought to give you something?
Reincarnation, lessons, and repeating the cycle
Thank you for helping me get to know your situation. If you were homeless for a few years, I can see how the thought of being homeless again could be very scary. What I have noticed in my life is that I know reincarnation for a fact. I remember incarnating into this particular life. And when you know yourself and you ask, who am I? I am God. I am the creator of my experience. Then you can start to look at this life as more of a game, more of a lesson that you have chosen to have. It seems that our collective selves, our bigger self, who I really am, chooses certain lessons or experiences for me to have, and often will repeat those until they are completed satisfactorily. Like how I kept trying to get sober, until I really did a great job getting sober and opened myself up to as much help as possible in order to make that happen by going to Alcoholics Anonymous each day. The repetition: I kept getting drunk and going through the exact same cycle of events over and over again, until I became willing to accept absolutely any help and break the cycle.
Somebody said they could care less about themselves as long as their family member is safe. Think about it from your mom's point of view. You should care about yourself at least as much as your mom does. Maybe that is part of the lesson that is happening here. Lisa, you were homeless for nine years? Yes, and that is the thing: your thoughts and intentions can attract people into your life who can fix almost anything for you. This is a really powerful thought to focus on. Your thoughts and your actions can attract the people. For example, if you have a bill coming up that you cannot make yourself and you do not know how it is going to happen, there are people who could fix that for you without barely noticing the money gone. If your mom needs a few thousand dollars to make her house payment, there is somebody out there with a million dollars who could give your mom a few thousand. They could buy your mom's house for her and give it to her. There are people with so much money out there. You could think of it individually or collectively. Collectively, a million people could give a dollar, or one person could give a million dollars.
I would love to be a millionaire someday. My wife and I barely have a net worth over zero. We are very vulnerable. If a few bad things happened, we might not be able to pay for our house anymore. But I know that somebody would give us a place to live, and somebody would give us a nice place to live, not some crap hole where we would all be abused. Somebody would give us a nice place to live. If you own your home and just have to pay the lot rent, to me that is very easy to fix. Now, the trick is, you do not know exactly what is going to happen with it.
How my hopeless finances turned around
I will give you an example from my own life. At the end of 2019, I saw a bankruptcy lawyer after I had borrowed hundreds of thousands of dollars to start a really ambitious startup that failed. Long story short, I put my whole family's finances in jeopardy by borrowing so much money. I ran up hundreds of thousands in credit card debt at like 16 percent interest. I literally put us at risk of losing our home. I borrowed money against the cars and everything. My financial situation looked completely hopeless. My wife drained all of her finances and her reserves so that I could just make the minimum payments, and all she asked in return was that I get my stuff together. She hoped I would declare bankruptcy. I said, look, I will make the same changes bankruptcy would require, but declaring bankruptcy would only have gotten rid of $50,000 out of $600,000-plus in debt, and it would have required time, effort, and discomfort.
So at the beginning of 2020, I hit my financial bottom. My wife's and my net worth, thanks to my actions, was in the negative $200,000s. I was borrowing money just to make the minimum payments. I cried. I had all kinds of pain. My mind raced. I asked so many people for help. I had asked a lot of my friends for loans, and most of them had said no. I felt frustrated because some of them had $50,000 or $100,000, and some of them I had helped make that money, and they said no, they would not give me a loan. I hit my bottom, and I opened up. I said, look, I really would like some low interest rate loans. I thought about how much I would love some low interest rate loans, because I was currently paying as high as 16 percent interest.
Then in March 2020, however you want to discuss what happened then, and I will avoid discussing it in any particulars, the clear thing that came out of it was these emergency injury disaster loans. Long story short, the government gave me $120,000-plus in loans at 3.75 percent interest. Now, two and a half years later, I have that loan, and I have paid all my credit cards off. I have paid all my debt off except for the one car loan at 5 percent. On the student loan, I have like $1,500 left at like 1-something percent interest. I just paid the last credit card off, $10,500. I just paid that off. My wife's and my net worth has gone up more than $200,000 in over two years. A financial situation that two and a half years ago looked very hopeless has made a dramatic turnaround, and many of the ways it happened were completely unexpected, like the government making it very easy for anybody to borrow massive amounts of money at very low interest rates. Before 2020, that looked nearly impossible. How would I get an SBA loan with my credit the way it was? And now it is a fact.
So the key thing to do is to open our minds to what is possible. Because when I look at almost everything that has ever happened in my life, I thought it was possible first. I thought maybe this could happen. I started to think maybe there is a way I could get a really low interest loan.
The world is full of people who want to help
Then I heard from a family member that they got rejected for a loan because their business income was too small. And I thought, man, I definitely have enough business income for that loan, even though I'd lost a lot of money anyhow. Somebody who didn't even get the loan themselves told me about it, I applied for it, I got it, and it made a huge difference in my life. So the more you can open up to all these possibilities, especially financially, the better. The world is full of money. The world is full of people who'd like to help. And the best part is that somebody else helping you gives them the ability to feel better too.
For example, when I was new and I went to Alcoholics Anonymous, me being new and struggling and suffering gave a bunch of other people a chance to help me, to feel useful, to make their lives more meaningful. I go to Alcoholics Anonymous almost every day now to do the same thing. I look for new people, because every person who's new, who really needs help and is desperate and struggling, gives me a chance to feel good by helping them. So you can completely turn the finance thing around instead of it being this thing to be afraid of, full of shame.
Instead of taking these negative mental projections and picturing, okay, we're going to lose our house, I'm going to be homeless again, I've failed my mom, you can take a positive mental projection and say: I don't know how this is going to work out, but I know I'm going to have somewhere to live, and I know that this situation will give somebody else the chance to feel good and to be useful. Maybe they give you money to make the payments, maybe they forgive the money that you owe, maybe somebody else gives you a place to live.
Ask for advice, not for money
What's really nice is to not expect certain people to do certain things. For example, if you owe money to a specific trailer park on lot rent, it's nice to not expect the owner to forgive it, or to let you rack up more debt. It's nice to not go to certain family members and friends and say, hey, you've got this money in the bank, you should give me this. It's better to just ask people for help and ask everyone for advice. Ask people for advice. Don't ask people for money. Ask people for advice. Like Pitbull says: ask for money, get advice; ask for advice, get money twice.
When my financial situation started to make a difference, this is what I did. I started asking everybody for their advice. I said, look, I blew my finances up. My wife and I have over 600,000 in debt. Some of it's high interest. What do you suggest? People gave me a lot of suggestions that were kind of crap, but a few of the suggestions were really good. And then when I started doing my livestream, I asked people on Facebook. I said, what should I do with myself? Nothing I'm doing is working to make money online. I'm utterly frustrated. I don't know what to do. What do you want me to do? And people said, you should start livestreaming again. I'm like, seriously? They said, yeah, start playing video games again. I said, seriously? That didn't make any money last time, and y'all weren't even watching.
I started streaming video games again. And last year, thanks to what other people did, other people collectively gave me over 100,000 in profit. Two years before, that would have looked impossible to just about anyone. Not to me, though. When you're open to all possibilities, if somebody in 2020 had asked, Jerry, do you think you could make over 100,000 in 2021 streaming games, before I'd even come back to games, I might have said that seems pretty unlikely, but I wouldn't rule it out. That's what's beautiful. If you can get anything from listening to me, it's this: open up what's possible, and let go of focusing on what you don't want to happen. This is what worked for me, and I've come to believe it deeply. If you want to walk through this alongside me and other people doing the same work, that's exactly why I built a place for us to gather, and you're welcome to join the Jerry Banfield Family.
Whatever you think about is what you get
Never focus on what you don't want to happen, because in my experience the way prayer seems to work is that whatever you think about is what you get. So if you're saying, God, please don't let me be homeless again, for some reason God seems to say, oh, you're just thinking about being homeless all the time? You must really want this. I'll let you have what you've asked for. It's about turning it around and being grateful now, saying, I love having a place to live now, and I'm sure I'll love having a place to live in the future. Do you see the different energy of that? Saying please, I don't want to be homeless, versus switching it over to something you love.
For me, instead of I don't want to have no views, it's: I love each of you who's here watching today. I love that people watch and listen to everything. I love everything I do, and I'm sure that will continue in the future. I love having a place to live today. After all, most of our fears don't even come true. We are afraid of things that never even happen. And if you've got a place to live today, you can say, thank God, I've got a place to live today, and I'm sure I'll have one in the future. If I've got one today, I'm sure I'll have one in the future. It might be this one, it might be a different one, but I'm sure I'll have one. If this way of looking at life speaks to you, you can follow more of these conversations in my Life playlist.
Thank you very much for this topic. I think we'll wrap it up here; we got over 30 minutes on this one. We talked this live on Twitch, the video goes on YouTube, and then I put it out as a dedicated episode on the Jerry Banfield Show podcast as well. You can post something anytime in my Discord server and get notified when I'm live on Twitch.