Sean Ongley

Category: Writing

Past and Present examples of the writing of Sean Ongley.

  • Could “Intellectual Apartheid” Be a Thing?

    Could “Intellectual Apartheid” Be a Thing?

    Those not watching our planet becoming a mess of conflict may be too embroiled in their own concerns to see it happening. Some people, not just social scientists, journalists, and the like, make it their personal concern to see how the world and its leaders are managing their business. If someone has been observing this conflict over time, it is clear we are in a period of great tension. It is not yet civil war, but threats are made. We fight over the same reality, the same world, because from our own eyes it is somehow different from one person to the next.

    Because there is not a consistent honest narrative across media platforms, which are ideologically fragmented, those differences lead us to fight amongst each other, rather than observe the common threat, which is unfettered power over the people.

    Some argue that it is in fact the consolidation of corporate media, from hundreds of local and regional media companies, and broadcasters, to just a handful. This is a valid argument, however complicated by the new media ecosystem evolving out of podcasting. I think we would be remiss not to analyze the phenomenon of literacy and self-liberation from intellectual oppression.

    The United States has produced more citizens with college degrees — sometimes multiple degrees — than ever before, by an incredible margin. The gender gap narrowed and crossed over in 2015 so that women are now better educated than men. This is an incredible reversal since 1940, when women also first entered the work force.

    The percentage of Americans with four years of college education or more has improved from 5% to 35%, which doesn’t sound so impressive until I point out this represents a 700% increase since 1940 — we had already become a modernized nation with world leading literacy rates and universities across 48 states.

    Without getting into the weeds, we also know that literacy rates have improved globally, while ethnic minorities and immigrants enter higher education at increasing rates. Speaking as a White Male, I am not threatened because I believe in a diverse world where gender roles and ethnic cultures are celebrated in a political-economic system that cherishes everyone’s inherent contribution. That is not what we have now.

    The dominant class demands specific social attitudes and economic adherences or you and your business will not be able to survive. Millions of Americans reflect the feeling that they have to compartmentalize their real opinions and feelings from one relationship to the next. I believe this is natural, to some extent. You should not be intimate with your boss, or submissive to your spouse. What I am concerned about is people conforming their behavior to accommodate those that hold power over them, be it their boss or their spouse. We should all be nice to each other, polite, and considerate, out of genuine concern, not fear of repercussion. Civility is disappearing as a symptom of what I am analyzing here.

    I watch the privileged white liberal class going around calling their opponents racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and xenophobic, while the number of white males in positions of power, their educational advantage down to their share of labor jobs, all declining.

    Let me tell you what I am: I am arachnophobic, and I’ve been one step ahead of the spider my entire life. The spider is the global elite, friends, and their webs are in the media, the education system, politics, and they drive the economics. 

    When your identity is rooted in economic class, you are together with the 90% of Americans. Only the upper 10% have seen any kind of wage increase since 1970, while the 1% enjoyed an incredible period of wealth accumulation over the same time. The average CEO was paid about ten times wealthier than their lowest paid employee in 1950, whereas today they factor in the hundreds, and that is on average. If you compare Warren Buffet to his janitors, or Jeff Bezos to his fulfillment clerks, we’re looking at an easy thousandfold disparity. Everybody is marginalized in today’s economics.

    Nobody wants to study the decline of the American white male out of fear of repercussions from the dominant liberal class. I could be labeled alt-right just for observing this even though my personal ideology puts all genders and ethnicities into an anarchist-libertarian cooperative society that would make it impossible for any single identity to become dominant, because power is not held in leaders, rather, in cooperative bodies.

    I do not get to live in that world, I am required to abide by the neoliberal capitalist framework in America regardless of the cognitive dissonance this puts me through, regardless of the mediocrity of my superiors, and the failures of their systems.

    Why is the steady decline of workforce participation among white males totally ignored in the narrative of white privilege? Because narratives aren’t facts. Facts educate the mind. Narratives entertain and condition the mind. You are better controlled by narrative. They give us the facts, but very few people study them. I suggest you study them.

    Women and ethnic minorities competed for wages, won the jobs. Employers got away with reducing salaries for all.

    It is good to see wealth transferred from the few to the many, but that is not what happened in the period following civil rights and women’s liberation. The total share of earnings was diluted by workers accustomed to less pay, in a system where entry workers cannot negotiate their wage.

    The American workforce participation rate declined, most sharply in 2009 when President Obama supposedly saved the economy, and it never recovered. Important to understand when unemployment goes down but the workforce participation rate remains flat, then the percentage of remaining unemployed transfers over to workforce participation rates. Lo and behold it was down 5% from 2007 as President Trump touted the best unemployment rate of all time.

    Corporations hired women for decades, improving their wages to the detriment of total household wealth. See this clearly, because it is good that women and non-whites are getting better jobs and pay on a positive trend line since 1970, but it is unfortunate that average wages have flattened over the same curve, thereby reducing household wealth over time, stealing from everybody, installing the two-income paradigm.

    I am not even discussing the extraordinary drag on American wages resulting from free trade agreements with China and Mexico. Millions of good paying jobs were exported. The whole phenomenon is complex, but to simplify, we no longer compete only with American laborers and immigrants, we also compete where we cannot even access the labor market.

    The few have become less and less a group of white men. The 1% would prefer it that you not see that they are also becoming more diverse than ever, because they know they have an effective narrative at play when the people fight amongst each other for scraps.

    All you have to do is look at the Forbes Billionaire List to see who the billionaires actually are. They belong to a special club, and they know one another. It is the billionaire scene. It is far more classist than racist, or sexist. The foundation of identity politics, few understand, is class identity.

    I am a white male, but my history shows a combination of factors that are comparable to communities of color. I graduated high school with a D average. I worked hard after that, earning a 3.65 GPA for my Associates Degree at community college. I have never earned, in my best years, the median individual income. I have been fired from several jobs due to personality conflicts. I rarely get called for job interviews for anything paying more than $12 per hour. I have experienced housing insecurity. My Father has a felony on his record, a problem that haunted our household. They cleaned homes and offices for a living for ten years. Half of my public school classmates were non-white in the Mexican immigrant neighborhood I grew up in. I was latchkey, they rarely helped with schoolwork because they usually worked themselves into the night. By Junior High, I did most of the house cleaning. We moved to Arizona to fend off rising costs in California, and because my parents had no risk management skills, because finance is an upper class trait that nobody taught them, and they went bankrupt. Their parents were gambling addicts and alcoholics. I was a first-generation college graduate, again, from community college.

    Add to the balance that I was born into the Church of Scientology, making me a weirdo at school. I am permanently traumatized from being identified as the outsider, ever year K-12, because that identity was instilled so early on. My parents bypassed personal responsibilities by funneling me through Scientology coursework, further alienating me from them, from myself, and the average person at once. My entire adult life can be observed as a struggle from one position to the next, never quite fitting in, often feeling dismissed on personal grounds, then emotionally lashing out from it, bringing myself down and burning bridges all the time.

    I struggle to find my privilege. I am a highly marginalized individual with a story that doesn’t fit into the logic of identity neoliberalism, just because I am a white male does not mean all the doors have opened for me. Mostly they have slammed shut. 

    Don’t tag the victim card on me, because this is not the point. The point is, if personality is what gets you passed the job interview, that enables people to be taken seriously in debates, that makes you a social media influencer, a television journalist, then personality is exactly what makes me unprivileged, rather, I am disastrously marginalized. And it demonstrates class privilege above all.

    If our world is a cult of personality, then those folks who do not match up will be prevented from sharing their talents and contributing their genius. This is the world I believe we live in. It is driven by a global financial order, not a white one. It infuriates me to see the white liberal class turn the truly marginalized artist class into a mouthpiece for the global elite.

    My argument is that personality has become the number one factor for marginalization today. What matters is your orientation to authority. This is why China and the Chinese people are close to knocking the United States off the global pyramid. Again, I am not threatened, because I know the people of China want liberty too. The more educated they become, the more they will demand liberty. That is why Xi Jinping has consolidated power and control using internet technology, in addition to good old brute force. That is why the Occupy Movement was shut down in brute force. That is why we have been quarantined.

    As more and more folks are educated, there are personalities that don’t fit the mold who take their genius into manual labor, doing rote work, where they are stuck with their brilliant ideas for which they cannot access capital. If we are lucky, we get to listen to podcasts at work, while yearning to interject that conversation rather than pack boxes for Amazon. We are deeply frustrated. Some folks are inclined to fall into depression and addiction, so lo and behold, we have the opioid epidemic at play. Then the liberal elite solution is just to give them safe injection sites and to selectively enforce trafficking laws while continuing to deprive people of universal health care, the only thing that would actually prevent rampant self-medication.

    I suppose the bottom line I am making is that most people now are smart enough to see that the narratives are not adding up, the stories we’re hearing are not real, but we blame and shift our trust into different authorities rather than awaken our powers of discernment. We seek enemies of convenience when we fail to see the common enemy. I know that folks are smart enough to realize when they have been duped, so I worry about that day coming, because I think it is a little bit backed up by now.

    We are smart enough to develop arguments and have opinions, but we are not cautious enough to hold off before pointing the finger. We are deliberately placed into this social media industry as willing tools of their profit to become addicted to the fear and anger that it generates in us. This is a clearly understood, documented marketing strategy. It is disgusting.

    I believe that someday we will come to realize that we live under the invisible regime of intellectual apartheid. If this is a form of apartheid, where the most intelligent people in the country are told what to think by the media, by the politicians, and by social media influencers, there will not be conformity without resistance. I believe we are watching right now the divide reach unprecedented tension, and it will snap.

    With the most educated populace ever, the pressures will continue to mount until our workplaces are democratized, our financial systems are democratized, our scientific discourse is democratized — a whole revolution of liberalization within the American constitution. I believe that our constitution and our system can accommodate extraordinary progress over time. All advancements can be made peacefully.

    I don’t know if we need to be led out of this, or if we need to wake up individually. If I am right, we’ll see authoritarianism rise to be challenged and defeated, or completely defeat us.

  • Before Going Zero to Sixty, Get Out of the Negative

    Before Going Zero to Sixty, Get Out of the Negative

    Let us imagine you’re fifteen years old and you have a drivers permit. Your parents are middle-class and they have two cars: a Ford Mustang GT Shelby revival series with a six-speed manual transmission, a 250hp V8 motor, but the other is a Ford Focus 125hp 4-cylinder automatic with safety alerts. As a new driver, you may just be excited about the horsepower, but little do you know how to drive it, and your lack of experience could run you off the road. The Focus is a better bet. You should learn to drive with that, then move onto the beast.

    Take this scenario as an allegory for finance. The basis of your financial plan has to be the long run. If you’re driving cross country, you’ll be glad for the fuel economy of that Focus. If you’re trying to get somewhere fast, you might need that Mustang. In other words, you’re used to being in the negative financially speaking, so if you’re in a hurry to go 100 MPH, you need to stop going backward first.

    My allegorical Mustang is an old one that needs a lot of work, and I’m the one doing that work.

    In my previous blog posts, I discussed the importance of changing habits, developing a budget, and broadly changing your outlook. You need to investigate your spending patterns and conform it to a budget. Do a quick search for a budget template and fill it in by looking at your expenses. If you are unbanked, you have to get banked. This makes everything much easier. No doubt you’ll find a place you can reduce your spending when you look at your bank statements. Usually this involves cutting back on entertainment, services, and conveniences.

    You might have dozens of specific line items in your budget, but they can fall within four broad categories: Housing, Food & Bills, Transportation, and Discretionary. Part of the budget needs to be a 5-10% savings rate of your gross income. This needs to land in your discretionary budget. All vacationing and entertainment has to fall into that budget as well. I think this is a good psychological way to handle it, for me at least. Because I consciously connect my impulse desires to my long term wealth. Maybe I can grow that money before spending it. Maybe I don’t need that right now. But that is a little advanced, you have to build the structure. The structure is all about banking. It is possible to literally own your bank using cryptocurrencies, but this is risky, advanced, and most likely, you’re paid in fiat currency.

    The ideal middle class budget splits the income four ways evenly, with 25% for each of those four categories. That would mean the individual median income of about $50K annually would have a monthly budget of $1,100 available for housing (mortgage or rent), $1,100 for transport (cars, fuel, repairs, taxis, bicycles, public transport), $1,100 available for bills (utilities, taxes, loans), and $1,100 for discretionary spending (vacation, travel, savings, investment). An adult earning the median income with no kids can quickly step into that Mustang. Most folks blow their money on the nicest apartment and car their money can buy. They are foolish.

    I personally have never earned more than 50% of the median income. So you can take those figures, cut them in half, that is my budget. It means I spend more on housing and less on transportation, more on investments and less on entertainment. My split is more like 45/15/30/20. I ride my bike and walk most of the time. I bought a cheap house. I repair stuff. I don’t buy new stuff. It is a tight squeeze every month, and yet, I have been able to buy a house, fund an IRA, invest in stocks and cryptocurrencies. My allegorical Mustang is an old one that needs a lot of work, and I’m the one doing that work.

    Next, look at where you are banking. Do they charge maintenance fees? Do you get surprised on a regular basis by fees? How about their overdraft policy? Is it straightforward and in your favor, or is it against you? Generally speaking, you are better off with any Federal Credit Union than a standard corporate bank. You will find they don’t have tricky minimum balances, and they will pay you tiny little dividends in your checking rather than charge you every month. One thing I have found is that corporate banks have better online platforms, so I like to use both. It is just a matter of doing your research to decide where to move your money.

    I do not endorse any banks, and I’d rather not reveal where I bank. There are interesting features at all banks. Credit Unions were consolidated after the 2008 bailouts, so they are more accessible than ever, but they are State-based. CapitalOne is a tech-based national bank, ideal for those building credit, or prefer mobile services, but branches are hard to come by. Other corporate banks may have unrivaled branch access in your region. Charles Schwab offers standard checking and saving accounts plus brokerage services. Robinhood now offers debit cards and you can trade cryptos there. You must evaluate your needs and select the most advantageous banks for your needs.

    My recommendation is to keep two different checking and savings accounts, one for processing your regular income and one for managing your savings and investments. Here is how this works. Suppose you have $1000 coming in every two weeks. You set your direct deposit up in the corporate bank, manage all of your bills, and make sure that this account holds $2,000 after every paycheck. Most folks have a wave of bills every two weeks. If you have no income for a month, this account should hold for as much as two months before going negative.

    After you have this amount and you have trained yourself not to spend it, then you can take that savings budget and put it into the credit union account. Here you should also have at least another $1,000 in savings before you start contributing into investment accounts. Moreover, if you’re managing at this rate, your credit has probably improved, so you can also manage emergencies with credit lines. This is a future blog topic, however.

    If your goal is to become a first-time homebuyer, the IRA is where I recommend you stage that down payment money. These accounts are great. Every dollar you put in is tax deductible. You get another tax credit if you’re a low-income earner when you make IRA contributions. When I was saving for a house, I didn’t know this, and unfortunately I could have earned a massive tax refund for both 2017 and 2018, but I was just learning how to save my money — to get out of the negative.

    In my next post, I will analyze how I could have maximized my savings during that time using storages of value such as Bitcoin, while comparing that to other growth options, their risks and advantages. This will be applied directly to our current situation economically speaking. This is one of the best moments in the last thirty years to maximize investments if you are starting from scratch. 

    A thriving stock market recovering from shock, low interest rates for real estate, and cryptocurrencies: This is a rare moment to step into investing. Not everyone is positioned to jump into that, and one should expire their driver’s permit before moving into risk management. Because that is what volatile investments are, a game of risk management.

  • Setting Your Stride from Rock Bottom

    Setting Your Stride from Rock Bottom

    A Look at Personal Struggle and Social Inequity in Finance.

    In my first two posts in this series of short articles grappling with the preparatory steps required to embark on the path of financial planning and investment, my personal story was revealed for the purpose of discussing how we get ourselves into the rut of hand-to-mouth living — with a buck earned a buck is spent. I want to dig into that a little further to demonstrate how to get out of it.

    I am still in the process of becoming an Investor, and I am starting from a position that anyone can relate to, because I grew up with one foot in the door to the middle class, but we never really escaped the lower class. That door ultimately closed on my family again, as they are retired and still possess more debt than cash. 

    The fact is, if you are born poor in America, you are privileged compared to Guatemalans born equally poor in scale to Guatemala. And it gets worse from there — god bless whomever is the poorest person in the world. Every American has access to financial tools far greater than that person can probably conceive of. The financial markets are a public, democratic tool that anybody can wield. 

    I live in Philadelphia, we have a third world within the first because these folks were abandoned by their employers in the name of profit. Blight and unemployed men are a volatile combination. While I assert we have to hold ourselves accountable for job creation and community building, we also have to adapt, and for the folks living there that have to work at Wal-Mart, I have a financial strategy for them.

    It was my personal choice to live in chronic poverty as an artist and activist from 2003 to 2016. The consequence of that included the same kind of discrimination any poor person deals with: Unable to get credit, build credit, secure home leases, auto leases, and all that. 

    Folks are discriminated against on the long pathway to the bank loan, but not at the bank branch, where truthfully, the final decision is made by computer systems, and most of the employees considering your loan are from minority groups or working families themselves, and they understand discrimination. You just have to have reliable credit behavior and an income to get good, non-predatory loans.

    Generational poverty and social biases can set one on the wrong path from day one. However, once a person lifts themselves up and out of the situations that keep them down, they cannot learn to present themselves to the financial system toward their own advantage. 

    It is interesting how there are moral implications to good credit behavior, you know, like paying your debts rather than stealing from your debtors, being honest about your income on tax returns, on public assistance applications, rather than lying, and so on. If we abide by it, life seems to open up. 

    There can also be crippling repercussions to our financial system, it broadly produces social inequity. But how to reform the system is beyond my scope, and beyond our personal control. I really believe however that mass adoption of stock trading would improve inequity. One way to achieve that is worker-ownership through stocks, either by law, or by strike. But these are the weeds of political-economy, again. So it is indeed another discussion.

    I do feel that finance can be applied to my own Buddhist morality. The code that we go by is “Right Living.” This means that earning your money can be earned in a wrong manner. It won’t matter how generous you are with your profits if you are making your living in a rapacious way, hurting others in the bullheaded drive for money, or investing in companies that behave that way. My moral compass determines how I invest and from whom I seek employment.

    I cannot tell you where your compass will direct you. I am not saying outcomes will be equal under our system, but that won’t be a problem if we can, together, through self-determination, pull wealth back from the upper-upper-class and end this era of deep inequity. You, as an individual, making the system work for you, realizing that a better democracy and economy depends on your cooperation with others, can improve the world.

    The more of us that own stocks, the closer we are to real democracy. That is how we literally own the corporations and make demands of the Board. This is a radical endeavor that I’m embarking on, not one that will make me soft, or turn me into a Republican. You may however break from the spell of party-line thinking. That would be good, because when you associate securing your financial health with greed, then they win, by planting this negative seed in your mind. They have tooled your mind to keep you out of the game.

    This series of financial articles is for people like myself, starting with, maybe a hundred bucks, zero investments, no credit cards, no direct experience. That is how I started three years ago. I am not wealthy, but I broke from a 15-year streak of hand-to-mouth budgeting, securitized my savings into retirement and brokerage accounts, became a property owner, raised my credit score at least 100 points, and bought my first house. My income has averaged just $23K per year.

    All that said, in this article, I can just outline the main structural points that build credit and financial strength: Income, Debt, Budgeting, Banking, Insurance, Investment.

    Without income, you cannot (or you should not) take on debts. You cannot budget without an income, and you cannot manage debt without a budget. You really cannot manage all of that without banking. When you have your cash flow keeping your bank account well above water, then you can begin the path of investment. Finally, to protect your assets, and your debts, you must have insurance. Let’s go through that again with a simple story. 

    Someone, lets call them Ra, is born urban poor and managed only a high school education. Ra starts working at age 16, but other kids in the neighborhood, even Ra’s own family members, hustle Ra out of every extra dollar, so that by age 18, everyone in the community is still broke. Ra loves the family but realizes they will never let money accumulate in the household. Ra strikes out with their next paycheck before anyone can hustle it. 

    Ra struggles but gets it together in a new place and after several months of work finds there is an extra paycheck sitting on the dresser — it wasn’t cashed because it wasn’t needed. Ra opens a bank account and realizes that this bank can grow with a little budgeting. After putting together a budget, saving receipts and looking closely at spending habits, Ra settled on a savings rate of $100 per month. 

    It has been a year since leaving the house, so Ra takes a vacation. After two weeks off, travel costs, and gifts for the family, Ra notices that they still have one month’s budget leftover. They research investment and secondary banking options to begin taking that $100 a month directly into investments.

    About a year later, Ra has $1,200 invested at an average growth rate of 5%, so the portfolio is now worth $1,323. But during that time, Ra earned a first promotion at work, taking home an extra $200 per month after health benefits. They got their first credit card, and have researched first-time home buyer opportunities in the area.

    Over the following year, Ra saved $200 per month and advanced through the home purchase process with a down payment partially funded by homebuyer grant. Nevertheless, that savings is stored in the value of the home and that position improves month over month.

    As a new homebuyer, Ra is also spared almost two months of bills, as mortgage repayments and utilities are delayed. By the first mortgage payment, Ra has returned $1,200 into investments.

    One year later, investing $200 per month, the home down payment has been restored plus 5% and is now valued at $3,843. With compound interest and more aggressive strategies, Ra doubles the growth rate to 10%, holding now $6,483.

    Over the next twenty years, the portfolio improves to an average return of 15%. Some years are better than others. Ra never increased the original monthly contribution because they started a family, and expenses have kept up with every increase in pay. 

    Ra and spouse are now in their mid-fifties, the kids are gone, they paid off their house, and the assets have grown. They do market research and determine they can sell their house for $250,000, and relocate somewhere to buy a smaller home at half the price, and enjoy their retirement. The portfolio has grown to $58,920. Meanwhile the spouse who worked after raising the babies also squirreled away $50,000 in an IRA account.

    They become semi-retired Investors with a capitol I, spreading that $308,920 toward a house, putting 50% down to maintain low payments, but also to keep substantial liquid capital. Ra takes a more aggressive approach toward stocks, diversifies brokerage accounts, accumulates precious metals, and keeps an eye out for unique investment opportunities. Altogether Ra and spouse are spending maybe 15 hours a week managing the portfolio. The growth rate of their capital falls flat, because their new home is being paid down again, and the good life is being lived without new income. So they make do for the rest of their lives with about $250K, living on quarterly returns.

    This is not ambitious. It is responsible behavior — basic risk management. I never said Ra didn’t party, have fun, have family emergencies and all that. That is what budgeting and credit is for. They just managed risk. Ra learns to save money, only a little, to build that into an early, comfortable retirement. It is an average story, not a perfect one. Your story is more complex. Your story is yours to realize.

    Each post will get into those specifics: Income, Debt, Budgeting, Banking, Insurance, Investment. They will be more research driven than narrative, although I’ll continue sharing personal experiences. 

    Thanks for reading. You can support me by joining Robinhood using my join link here, as well as by joining Coinbase here.

  • Doing What You Want

    Doing What You Want

    Not everything in life comes as planned. You can favor your life heavily in the unexpected or try to control the events surrounding you. William S. Burroughs said that control cannot be used toward a practical end, it only leads to more control. I suppose his principle is true, that control leads to more control. So my lesson actually is that you control and release in life so that you have certain predictable, stable factors, and try to enjoy the remaining chaos.

    How do you do what you want to do, with your life? By choosing control, you can be like Frank Underwood and go up against the world, manipulating it, deceiving, controlling the chaos like a dark wizard. Most of us are just trying to play by the rules and achieve optimum outcomes for ourselves and those we care about, without interfering with the will of others.

    The question however goes round and round: How do you do what you want to do? It has been asked and struggled over by countless souls forever. I’m finding some semblance of a solution in this control and release strategy.

    I’m approaching middle-age, but thankfully my generation has extended youth by ten years. Most folks say I’m young enough to start over. I have started over. I moved out of Portland where I lived, built and destroyed my career, over fourteen years. I live in the more dangerous, more dense, urban, and lawless Philadelphia, now. Very different, very new, although I’m coming up on two years here.

    I never had a career. In fact, only recently have I put on my to-do list to write a full and complete professional CV, tracking every position I’ve held in my life. Looking back, it is kind of amazing. I’ve done quite a few things. 

    I spent six months as an insurance claims investigator for a private investigation firm. I was assistant manager for a small café until it shuttered. I volunteered as a broadcast engineer and programmer for radio. I started a bonafide 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation and directed seven music festivals. I installed 200 televisions and audio systems in people’s homes. I installed extensive professional audio systems in a haunted house and historic prison. I was “the best suites bartender ever” for Portland Timbers and Thorns matches. I did the same work in a horse track. I have practiced hundreds of hours of yoga and meditation. I delivered weekly magazines throughout the entire Portland metropolitan area: That city is mapped in my brain forever. I launched and failed with a media startup, but in the process wrote hundreds of articles and produced dozens of podcasts. I operated two art galleries with public exhibits. I restored a rental property, learning permaculture 101. I bought a house and learned all there is about home maintenance. I lived on a farm for altogether four years, learning gardening, forestry, carpentry, how to manage sheep and llamas. I developed prototypes for combustible hydrogen, retrofitting several cars. I rebuilt two engines, one a ford truck and one a Volkswagen, with very different engineering. I managed two music projects, taking the groups on four west coast tours at notable venues. I was in a metal band for a while, and they became a notable band. I was certified in Audio Engineering under the great Brian Ingoldsby, and was blessed with brilliant teachers at one of the best community college systems in the country, Portland Community College, where I earned a degree with honors. I spent a full year as a music student at Portland State University. I was a depressed, D and C student in High School, smoked pot and became an intellectual overnight. I have taken heroic doses of mushrooms and other natural hallucinogens. I trained myself how to manage diet and weight by age 12. I made goofy videos with a boy that became a genuine Hollywood Film Editor. I survived the cult of Scientology. And I’m still learning how to speak spanish.

    With a story like that, you want to feel special, accomplished, but when you’re broke and nobody cares, its not exactly the wind beneath your wings. There are people who deserve their story to be told far more than mine. But mostly we need to take the spectacle off the pedestal, break the hypnosis of celebrity culture, and return to a localized way of life, because individuals are struggling despite having alot to offer. They cannot find jobs commensurate with their intellgence earned through a variety of experiences, simply because it doesn’t fit into a recognizable box.

    I have always done what I wanted to do. I have run a fools errand or two and lost momentum gained in one area by pursuing another. I have been beaten by taking on too much risk. I have learned all the dumb lessons that one can learn — especially now that I’m in Philly where I’m finally getting the street sense knocked into me. However, I have always done what I wanted to do.

    To make sense of all this experience, I really just have to keep going like this. Things that I could see doing for the rest of my life: Media, Music, Real Estate, Finance. All of this can be done by taking up jobs as needed while managing finance really diligently. I just onboarded with the United States Census. That is perfect for me at this moment. Life has a way of bringing you opportunity.

    Not every career has to look like a career. Approaching 40 years old, I definitely have goals in mind toward my long term financial health that would connect my experiences much like a career. Probably, I’ll take that farming experience and enter mid-life in the bliss of rural Pennsylvania, close to the greatest American cities of all time, all grouped together in the Northeast. No offense Portland and Los Angeles. My heart was left there but the blood pumping through it is Pennsylvanian.

    So what is the answer to doing what you want to do? It changes for everyone. That is why you cannot prescribe a how-to. My personality was fucked for twenty solid years. Probably because my parents raised me in a cult. I mean, don’t underestimate the mindfuck of being even a low-totem Scientologist family. It is pretty much behind me though, I mean all the trauma, all the mistakes. I feel vastly more mature and capable of taking on a whole new range of jobs over the next twenty years, to keep funding my 20-year financial plan. Why I bring all this up is simple: Your starting position is not equal to anyone else’s starting position. The outcome of your efforts will vary. My advantages went against my disadvantages and it led to a fairly chaotic scene.

    I am more level-headed, loaded with lessons and skills and things I’ve learned, hoping to just reinforce those skills rather than take more on. I’m looking at a more focused plan, a steadier course, and a less foolhardy approach to whatever thing I want to do next.

  • Start From Where You Are

    Start From Where You Are

    Image of Newberry Road taken on my iPhone, January 2017.

    Nobody has an identical story. This applies to every human being and their finances. Even though we share a common system, currency, and world, your story is your own, so you have to start from where you are.

    It may be that you were born into a trust fund, or poverty, or somewhere in between. There are hardships for everyone in this life, in this world. You may find yourself wealthy one year and broke the next. Everyone has a different rock bottom. If you never had any money in your life — your parents were broke and you never built a steady career — then you might be in the best position to grow wealth.

    I am pretty much talking about myself in that last observation. I will share my story so that you understand how a low-income person can dig out of chronic poverty.

    My folks were cleaning service workers in Santa Barbara, California. They built a small business and started poking through to the middle class for the first time in their lives. Neither of them finished college. They both grew up in rural towns of the mid-west. My father’s parents always rented. My mother’s parents bought affordable property. One side gambled, the other side drank.

    To cut to the chase, my parents ended up selling the cleaning business, finding middle-class jobs, migrated the family to affordable Tucson, went bankrupt, and dug themselves back out of that, now retired and barely meeting costs.

    They were not drunks or gamblers — they lost extra money to other bad habits. They didn’t have enough financial sophistication to manage risk. It was tough on all of us. Look, they did better than their parents, but they instilled a poor understanding of finance. They are not totally to blame, it ought to be a major aspect of public education.

    It took until roughly age 35 for me to begin the journey of financial planning. All the years between age 18, when I first moved out of the parents house and began living on my own, I felt good about having $100 leftover at the end paying bills. I slowly ratcheted that up between about age 30 to 35, but I was not holding money, not investing, it would always cross back to zero and I’d have to get on the phone to fight overdraft fees far too often.

    There is one valuable discipline I learned in fifteen years of being a poor adult, starving artist rebel character: Austerity. I do not need much. Earning less than a thousand a month for years at a time will teach you how to live on less than a thousand a month. If you have not read Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, do it. You will understand.

    When you understand how the poverty mentality forces you to buy things with the only extra money you have, before you have even saved up an emergency fund, then you will cease to do this. You will prioritize much better. Knowing how to be poor is an amazing skill when you’re making yourself rich on a low income.

    My credit history comprised mostly of student loans. I had defaulted on them in 2010. I did not understand what had happened. I got my Associate’s Degree, then dropped out of University studies without buttoning up the loans. I was a punk. I thought nothing could touch me. I started changing my habits and attitude at this time, very slowly.

    First thing was first, I consolidated my loans in 2011 under the Income-Based Repayment (IBR) program. This is a fair deal — if you can call our regressive student finance system fair at all — because if I do not cross a reasonable figure considered excess income, I do not owe any payment on a monthly basis. If I continuously reapply for the program then all debt will be forgiven after twenty years. So far, in eight years, I have made all my payments on time. What is the payment? Zero dollars per month. There are drawbacks, but we’ll table that.

    In 2018, I began making overpayments to my student loans, to ramp up my credit score. The more payments you make, the more months in a row that your debt figure goes down, the more credit points you accrue. Also, you get a tax break for those overpayments. Because they are just paying down interest, you get to deduct that from your tax burden.

    January of 2017, I was living on a farm on the northern edge of Portland, Oregon, in discussion about a two-year live-in caretaker position there. I would be able to save money fast, the plan was to sock away capital and move to the east coast where property was cheap. Then, a massive snow storm came in, held ice for two weeks, and collapsed the road in a mudslide on the day of the big melt, literally splitting access between the two halves of the property straddling Newberry Road. The job was cancelled and I was asked to move. 

    My seasonal job at the soccer stadium was not restarting for months. The snow storm stopped my other travel-based income for two weeks. I had spent extra money over Christmas. I was flat broke. I moved into a basement room with my girlfriend, who was also broke, at her bosses’ house. Our lives were insane.

    By the end of the year, we were driving away from Portland with about $15K between us. In a world where people of our income bracket statistically speaking don’t have $400 to cover an emergency, where even fewer can maintain a 4-figure balance in their bank account, I would say we did an incredible job turning our situation around.

    I want to look at that year of my life in pinpoint detail, because I believe we could have had $15K each if we were only a bit more adept and considerate of the opportunities in front of us. Nonetheless, we pulled it off. We pulled ahead and neither of us have been down to $100 after bills since.

    Through 2018, I learned about how to buy a house and changed my life by moving to Philadelphia. Through 2019, I learned how to properly save money. The lessons I learned last year have serious implications on my failure to grow my savings toward buying a house in 2018.

    Anybody with as little savviness as I had then can learn from my mistakes and develop their assets immediately. One of the big boats in that equation might be sailing now: Bitcoin. Right now it is surging and I think by July, BTC will settle at a new resistance point far above the $20K high of 2017.

    Having told my story, I want to get into the financial weeds next time I post. I want to show how great our financial opportunities are compared to our parents, even in an economy that is garbage.

    Until then, good luck, talk to you later.