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.