I'm $200,000 or so in debt today, even though I've made more than $2 million online. You would think, how is that possible? How could you make all this money and still be in debt? And I have not had some extravagant lifestyle, according to me at least, with a yacht and flying all over the world. For years I literally just paid for everything for the family, bought a pretty average house, and I drive a car that's 20 years old. I did buy my now ex-wife a car. But I'm still baffled today: how did I make this much money and end up in debt now? This is me taking inventory of everything that's happened, starting with the idea that just being able to generate money, which is what almost everyone focuses on, does not equal being able to have a positive net worth.
However, the entire world runs on debt. The United States, the country I am from and live in, has crazy amounts of debt. Our entire financial system is based on debt. I've been in some form of debt ever since I went to college at 18 years old. And while I have had a positive net worth at various times, I've always had debt ever since those first student loans. It looks to me like the majority of people, at least in the US, are in some kind of debt, whether it's a car with a car payment or, in many cases, debt with assets against it. A big part of my debt is against my business. I had a couple of bad years with my business, but that came after the years when I made the most money. So first let me start with the money I made.
How I made more than $2 million online
I made over $2 million online by obsessively focusing on doing whatever it took to make income and constantly chasing the best opportunities, learning valuable skills like Facebook marketing in 2012, getting into crypto in 2014, getting into live streaming games in 2015 and 2016, getting into AI and being able to do a whole bunch of stuff with AI, and being in content creation. I've consistently been a technology geek, a nerd. I'm very intelligent; I've taken the test in the past and had a Mensa membership that was active years ago. I've used my intelligence and my knowledge of technology to always be at the forefront of what's going on. Then I sold online courses, I pumped crypto coins, I made hundreds of thousands of dollars streaming video games online, and I put all these skills together, sometimes to make incredible businesses. I used all that knowledge and dedicated my entire life to having my own business online: building views, selling products, making money.
That's brought me more than $2 million in the door, and it's brought me a number of years where I've made more than $100,000 in profit in my business. My highest number is around a quarter million dollars in profit in a single year.
Where the money went
First off, I paid gigantic taxes on my profits because I didn't have everything perfectly set up. I went from making almost nothing to $75,000 in profit to hundreds of thousands in profit very quickly, and I just got destroyed paying taxes.
I also, for years, was the sole income provider for my family. I paid for the house. I paid all the bills for everything. I gave my wife thousands of dollars a month for an allowance. She was able to take care of the kids, and I covered everything. She didn't have to work, and that went all the way through private school, et cetera.
I also hooked up all of my friends. I paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to my friends to do work for me when I was making the most money. I put out huge amounts of money to try and keep making more money, which sometimes worked. Other times I'd pay my friends $5,000 a month to do almost nothing. So I hooked several friends up, I helped several friends start businesses, and I brought in a whole bunch of money for myself and spent lots of it to help support other people.
I also would always give to people who are in need. If I see a guy with a sign that says he's homeless and hungry, I'll give him $20. I've given tens of thousands of dollars away to homeless people, but I've never filmed it and stuck it all in one video to make it viral and sensational.
Then there are massages. At this point I've spent $200 a week times 50 weeks, which is $10,000 a year, times another ten years or so. I've spent around $100,000 at this point on professional massages: Massage Envy, MassageLuXe, and then independent therapists. These are no happy ending massages. These are just regular massages. They've helped me calm my body down and be more relaxed, and they've provided all kinds of benefits that I have enjoyed in my life, from being able to connect and make friends with some of my therapists to the fact that, to me, massage is often preventative. In my experience, if things in my body are relaxed, I find I hardly get injured, and it helps take the edge off of little things that then don't turn into big things. So I've spent about a hundred grand on massage.
I also paid interest. I paid over $50,000 off on my wife's student loans, and I paid off my original loans from college.
The business that failed and the divorce
But then, after years and years of winning in my business, I felt like I couldn't lose. So I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on an incredibly ambitious business that failed, and I racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. The bulk of my debt today is still business debt that I racked up in 2019 and 2020. It's six years later, and that is on a 30-year payment plan with the SBA. Most of my debt right there is still paying for a business mistake. The interest rate is so low that it doesn't even make sense to do anything but make the minimum payment on it, because I'd rather invest the capital in the business I have today.
Then, in the last year, I got separated and then divorced. I gave my ex 80% of the assets without any fight, including the house, which I took my name off of in a quitclaim deed. And I didn't touch or ask for any of her retirement.
Why my earnings dropped when I got more ethical
I had a few years of not making much money online as a content creator because I prioritized trying to do the best I could for my viewers. I made millions of dollars online by not being that concerned about anything except how much money my viewers were paying me, how many views I was getting, how many minutes I was getting watched, and how many courses I was selling. I honestly thought only about how do I get my viewers to do what I want. In the short term, that's often to give the viewer what they want: oh, here you were learning about hacking, here's a hacking course; you want to get coaching on this, here's $300 and I'll tell you about it. What I noticed is that lots of times, the things that worked to make money were things the viewers would think were good for them, and essentially they'd get tricked into them.
So I stopped making as much money online the last few years because I started being more ethical and considerate and empathetic toward my viewers. I started thinking, how can I just give my viewers the absolute best information and cut out me making money on it? Why tell viewers about 50 different crypto tokens I like, sell a $300 course, and then have them get on a call with me to try and find out which is the best one? Why not just tell my viewers exactly what I like best, out in public? That crushed my earning capacity, because I've come to believe a lot of what our capitalistic system does to make money is complicate things, confuse things, and sell you stuff you don't need.
It sells things that are sensational in the moment, like junk food, which then can contribute to screwing up your health, as has been documented in all kinds of books. Then it sells you health insurance, and then the health insurance gets you to go to the doctor and spend all this money, when in many cases, if you had eaten the way a book like How Not to Die by Dr. Greger lays out, you wouldn't need to. I follow that book. It works fantastic. My body works amazing, feels amazing, looks amazing. So I don't need to go to the doctor, and I don't pay for health insurance. But in this capitalistic system we're in, people are often sold things that are sensational. They can be tricked into eating ultra-processed garbage food, tricked into buying online courses or crappy junk crypto coins, tricked into giving a bunch of money during gaming streams, tricked into watching a bunch of content, even into dumping a bunch of super chats while I'm live. I love it and I appreciate it, but is that genuinely good for the viewer?
So I stopped making as much money in the last few years because I started saying, hey, I don't feel right doing this. It doesn't feel good, even if I succeed personally and make a bunch of money, to say whatever I need to say just to extract as much out of my viewers as possible. Now, it seems most people, most creators, most capitalists, most everybody in business is comfortable extracting as much out of people as possible using almost any means necessary.
Borrowing to rebuild
My earnings dropped in the last few years when I tried to get more ethical, and then I tried to find a way besides creating content online. After getting divorced, I spent months trying to find any alternative that could feel like I was doing something actually useful for people, and I found nothing. People said get a job: just sell your soul, it doesn't matter if you like the job or not, go wait tables, go work for somebody doing marketing, just sell your soul to make money. That's what almost everyone told me. And everybody else said just get back on YouTube. You know what to do on YouTube, so just get back on YouTube.
So I borrowed money so that I could take the time to really lay a foundation for YouTube and content creation that would then have time to actually pay the bills. Now I'm making thousands of dollars a month again in content creation, and I'm finally starting to stabilize, where my debt is not getting bigger. I'm taking in enough income and my net worth is stabilizing, which is nice. It looks like I'm on a trajectory to start bringing this net worth back up and to start making more money. But again, the ethical considerations come in. Am I going to say whatever I need to say to get paid? At this point, I'm desperate to try and find something that is ethical and good for my audience that also monetizes, because that seems to be the needle in the haystack, the most precious thing.
Unfortunately, it seems much, much easier to just go talk positively about a whole bunch of crypto coins and print a whole bunch of money, or do the other similar things like that: try to make myself an authority on something and sell a course on it. But is that truly needed today? I am looking for things that are fun and interesting, and I'm coming up with some creative ways. One guy said, why don't you take these shirts that you buy, sign them, and then sell them on eBay? Okay, is that good for somebody? I guess so. I'm happy to do it. I'm testing. I also sold a video I sent to a woman for $2,000. Somebody just paid $2,000 for a video I sent to a woman. Was that good for them? I'm very happy to have the money, and I hope they really enjoyed spending that $2,000 on that video.
Would you rather die with a positive net worth?
After everything I've done and everything I've seen with money, to me the key thing is to enjoy the wealth you have and to say thank you. And yes, to focus on the earnings coming in is, to me, primary. At the same time, though, in my experience it can be difficult when you start making a lot of money to not start spending a lot of money at the same time. Would you rather die with a positive net worth, zero, or negative? I don't know. If I passed away with a negative net worth, I'd kind of feel like that worked in my favor: awesome, I got to spend much more money, and I'm never going to have to repay it. It almost feels silly to have a whole bunch of money and net worth and then pass away and have your family all fight over it and mostly just piss it away. What's the point of that? I might as well give you all nothing to fight over and let you deal with my debts.
However, I do love making money. I do love spending money. I do love enjoying having wealth. I am extremely grateful that I'm able to borrow money and give myself the chance to start a business back up and build this whole thing I do as work. I'm really grateful, because without debt, I couldn't have done that. And yet at the same time, maybe it would have been better if I hadn't gone to college in the first place. To me, with debt, once you take that first loan against something that's not secured, that's a big step. If you take a loan against a car, at least that has some value to it. If you take a loan against a house or a business, at least that has some value to it. But taking that first unsecured loan is, to me, the big step toward being in debt.
24 years in debt in a debt-based system
It's been 24 years at this point. As soon as I took that first student loan, there has never been a day since that I haven't been in debt. At this point, I hope I can get out of debt at some point. I also hope that our country can get out of debt. But our entire financial system seems like it's a debt-based system intended to keep as many people as possible in debt, and many of the people who have the largest amounts of money seem to profit off of exploiting or extracting from others. Which makes me ask: is that even someone I want to be, someone with all kinds of nice stuff and big materialistic success built off of a bunch of other people's labor that they essentially stole from? This is a crazy world we live in.
I'm glad I'm here today and in the position I'm in. I've got enough money for the foreseeable future. I can afford to take several more months where I don't have to depend on my YouTube income, and it looks like we've finally hit a point where I should be self-sustaining indefinitely. With any kind of growth, we can actually start to get the debt down, and I'd love to be debt-free one day.
Why I disagree with Dave Ramsey
At the same time, I'm not going to sacrifice today to be debt-free. I don't agree with the Dave Ramsey kind of advice of just cut all your expenses, sacrifice, and do anything to be debt-free. No, because life's too short to move in with my mom and get a job waiting tables. Although maybe that'd be better. Maybe I could meet some women there instead of being in my house doing YouTube and hardly meeting any women. So what do I know? But I'm not a big believer in doing anything to get out of debt, because of inflation. Inflation essentially reduces the cost of debt. With my 3% SBA loan, there's no reason to ever do more than pay the minimum payment, because inflation is essentially several percent every year. The money I pay that loan back with is more and more worthless every year, so there's no reason to make any effort to pay it back any faster.
If you'd like to talk with me about any of this, go to jerrybanfield.com. I've got a Skool community, a chat you can hop into, calls I'm available for, and books, games, all kinds of products. I'm going to start putting the shirts I wear on eBay, so if you want one you can get an autographed, unwashed copy.
This is all so interesting to me, and I'll keep sharing the rest of my money story, the debt, the earnings, and everything in between, in my Money playlist.