This morning, the first message I read came from a 75-year-old widow. A scam had talked her out of her retirement savings, and now she was borrowing from family just to keep the bills paid. She ended with one line: “I am typing this through tears.”

I’ve been getting messages like that since 1994. First it was phone calls, then letters, then email, then comments on a website. The messages were never the problem. I was. There’s only one of me, and I sleep.

People don’t fall apart on a schedule. They fall apart at two in the morning, at the kitchen table, with a collection letter in one hand and nobody to call.

So this year I built Ask Steve.

It’s a free AI chat on my site. When someone types in what’s going on, it starts from what I’ve actually written: more than 25,000 posts over the years, my 250 podcast episodes, my five books. It knows my voice and positions and answers the way I would in person. And behind those posts sits a research library I keep adding to, 114 books and nearly 19,000 passages, so the facts get checked against something real instead of repeated because everyone else repeats them.

I hear a lot about AI slop. Fake photos, junk articles, bots arguing with bots. That’s real. But I’ve watched something else happen.

Since late February, Ask Steve has had 1,385 conversations. Some are two messages long. Some run past twenty, somebody working through it one question at a time, at their own pace, with no salesperson on the other end waiting to close.

It’s private. I’m not selling anything. It won’t shame anybody, because shame never paid off a single debt. And when someone is in real danger, it points them to free resources and people who can help right now. Plus it gives people compassionate, actionable roadmaps they can follow themselves.

User feedback has been some of the most gratifying of my decades of helping people.

It isn’t perfect. I read the conversations, the good ones and the ones where it got something a bit off. Every miss becomes a fix. The misses are few and far between these days. That part still takes a human, and I’m glad it does, because it takes experience to know what AI has overlooked or assumed incorrectly from internet training.

What gets me is the hour. I suspect some of the people typing to it would never say these things out loud to another person. Some of the anonymous chats sound a lot like what people have shared with me in my Debt Confessional. Telling it to something patient, at midnight, with nobody watching, is how they finally start.

That’s the kind of AI I want to be part of. Not the kind that people bitch about. The kind that makes sure nobody has to sit alone with it until morning.

If you, or somebody you love, is carrying something heavy right now, Ask Steve is here, day or night. It won’t judge, and it won’t try to sell you anything.

And the Ask Steve chat, powered by AI, was only the start of how I’m using AI for good. I’ve put together a big list of free tools you can find in the footer of my site.

— Steve

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The question

“So no, I didn’t learn about money growing up. I learned about life, in what economists call a transition economy.”

— Vy Nguyen, The Economics of Everyday Money

I asked Vy Nguyen a question I think about more the older I get: what did you learn about money growing up? Vy’s answer is below, in full.

Vy is a PhD economist who spent nine years inside finance, and writes The Economics of Everyday Money about how the economy, the money industry, and our emotions shape everyday money, for people tired of jargon, noise, and being underestimated. Every Sunday there’s a five-minute story and a “Know & Do,” something to understand and something to act on. Vy only started writing it in August, so this is a chance to find a good one early. You can follow Vy at @vyezpz.

I come at the question from a very different childhood, and from the other side of the desk.

Vy’s answer comes first, then mine. Neither of us read the other’s before writing. Read both, and tell us which one sounds like the house you grew up in.

Vy’s answer

I didn’t learn about money growing up. Not until I came to the US for college. For me, a childhood without thinking, worrying, or learning about money was the happiest part of my life.

Everything before my first younger sister was born, I know only from my parents’ stories.

My parents met in their last year of university. There were only a handful of universities in the country then, and getting in was harder than getting into Harvard. University was also my dad’s ticket out of being drafted into the war, so he studied hard to get in. He still likes to tell the story of eating one banana in the morning and then running 10 kilometers to qualify as a “national athlete.” He won a marathon. My sisters and I still see that trophy, a symbol and maybe a reminder of how hard he worked for something that didn’t earn him any means to survive in an economy that was barely working.

After they married, my parents lived in my dad’s older sister’s home, who was also supporting my elderly grandparents. When there wasn’t enough food for everyone, he drank the cooking oil my aunt had bought for the family, and got yelled at for it.

I was born into a country still recovering from war and still trying to reunify its land and its people. Cut off from the capitalist economies, the government was still figuring out how to run the country. When I was a few months old, we moved to Sai Gon, into my dad’s older brother’s house. We slept on a wooden bed a foot or two above the floodwater. My mom says she was constantly afraid I would fall in at night and drown.

Less than a year after I was born, my dad made his third attempt to escape by boat, one of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese looking for a safe place to live and a chance to earn a living. He was arrested for the crime of leaving his country, spent a month in a labor camp, and came home still having to figure out how to survive and support us.

My own memories start around age 3 or 4, when my maternal grandfather used his savings to help my parents buy land to build a house in Sai Gon. My mom still remembers how hard my dad worked, hauling tons of dirt to raise the floor so the floodwater couldn’t come in. That house held the first ten years of my life, and my happiest memories are all in it. It had one open space for living and sleeping, with two wooden beds in front, a yard with four fruit trees, and a charcoal or wood fired kitchen (simply a bare concrete countertop to cook) and squat toilet flushed with a bucket of water in the back. I played in the yard while my grandma cooked. I still remember her slaughtering a chicken we had raised in that yard, climbing the trees and teaching my younger sisters to climb, and how excited I was to run out into the yard whenever the rain poured down. We had no toys and no playground, so we played with whatever was in and around the house: a handful of rocks, a dozen chopsticks and a tennis ball, a rope braided from rubber bands. The yard and the sidewalk were our playground.

In 1986, Vietnam launched a reform called Đổi Mới, or “renewal,” loosening the government’s grip on the economy and letting people buy and sell again. My mom saw an opportunity in a few yards of fabric that a government co-op couldn’t sell. She bought them in bulk and resold them, and my dad helped carry the fabric to buyers. That was the start of the business that fed our family, the one she still runs today.

I was lucky never to think about money growing up. Maybe my parents were that good at absorbing the worry. Or maybe, after everything they had lived through, money was just paper to them. Relatives who took us in, a house without floodwater, a bag of rice, a chicken: all of it was worth more than money. Did money buy us those things? Or did a functioning economy finally let my parents trade their sweat and labor for the things that kept us alive?

So no, I didn’t learn about money growing up. I learned about life, in what economists call a transition economy. Now I understand why.

Steve’s answer

I can still hear the sound. My mom would sit at her desk to pay the bills and balance the checkbook, and every time she pressed a button on that electronic calculator it made a big chunking noise as it printed onto the paper tape. Chunk. Chunk. Chunk. That desk is mine now.

When I go digging for what I learned about money as a kid, I only come up with two memories, and they’re both core memories. One was that we had enough. The other is that we had stretches when we didn’t have much, and we struggled.

Here’s something about me that might be unusual. I honestly never registered when we were tight and when we had a little extra. I never cared about having the latest or the greatest, or about what other people had. I was never jealous of anybody.

Even when we moved to Potomac, Maryland, a very affluent area, it didn’t register. I went to high school with the kids of celebrities and the kids of rich families, and I never gave it a second thought.

The one time it did land was at the house of a rich friend of a friend, when the kids there made fun of me for bringing cheap beer. That was my “what did I learn” moment. It wasn’t really about the beer. It was the first time I felt what somebody else thought about what I spent.

That’s the lesson nobody taught me, and I didn’t start to understand it until I was about to graduate high school: how peer pressure, self-esteem, and worrying about what other people might think can steer your spending for years to come.

The math was never the problem. Everything I needed to logically learn about handling money, I had by the fifth grade. Add, subtract, multiply. That part was well seasoned by then.

So would a financial literacy class have changed my thinking? I doubt it. It would have felt like one more math class, tolerable and then forgotten. Ironically, years later I wrote about how financial literacy classes don’t have the impact people hope for, and how the measured results show they aren’t the solution. But I digress. If you want the research, it’s in Why Financial Literacy Classes Fail: What the Research Actually Shows.

What I did get was a chance to watch, and maybe that was the best lesson. Not a lecture. Just the chance to observe. I watched us make deposits into savings accounts. I watched us shop with a list, never buy on impulse, and plan ahead for the things we were going to get.

All of those lessons were good ones. They still didn’t stop me from learning my own dumb money lessons once I was old enough to legally make stupid decisions.

If I had a magic wand and could go back in time, I’d ask my parents more questions about our family and how we dealt with money, credit, and debt. I’m not sure how much they would have shared. But if I had shown an interest, I think they would have happily had those conversations.

So, to answer the question directly: my parents taught me as much as I was willing to observe and process. I learned more about handling money by watching them than from any other resource, except for my own bad choices. And those bad decisions wound up teaching me a lot, because I have always believed there is no sense wasting a perfectly good mistake.

Where to go from here

Two people, one question, and neither of us read the other before writing. Vy grew up in Sai Gon, in a country still recovering from war. I grew up in Maryland. And we landed somewhere close: neither of us learned money from a lesson. Vy’s parents carried the worry so completely that money never came up. Mine let me watch, and I mostly didn’t notice it until some kids noticed my beer.

What we both got instead was a front-row seat to how our parents lived. Vy calls that learning about life. I’d call it the same thing.

So what did you learn about money growing up? Vy and I would both like to hear it. Comment, reply, or forward this to whoever taught you, whether they meant to or not. And if Vy’s half stayed with you, go subscribe to The Economics of Everyday Money. Newer writers grow one reader at a time.

Steve

A joint post with Anthony B of Cashflow Living Standards.

The question

I asked Anthony B a question I keep turning over: do you think you can build a better financial and income-earning future without embracing AI? His answer is below, in full.

“No, you cannot build a better financial future without embracing AI—but you will lose everything if you embrace it without common sense.”

— Anthony B, Cashflow Living Standards

Anthony writes Cashflow Living Standards from Hong Kong, and he has only been at it since June. His approach is what he calls a dual-mandate portfolio: money that pays for the life you are living now while it protects the one you will need later. His line is that you don’t have to wait until 60 to live. And he shows his work: the actual funds he holds, the math on covered-call ETFs, and how he handles sequence-of-return risk, the danger that a crash lands in the first years you are drawing income. If you want a working investor’s view rather than a sales pitch, he’s worth finding early. You can follow him at @cashflowlivingstandards.

I come at the question from the other side of the desk. Since 1994 I’ve mostly met money after something went wrong.

His answer comes first, then mine. Neither of us read the other’s before writing. Read both, and tell us which one sounds like you.

Anthony’s answer

My brain split in two when you asked that question, Steve.

Personally, I use AI for research, but I use it to test my logic, never to make my investment choices.

AI is powerful.

It is like having the entire world as a single, common brain—a friend sitting in your pocket, working 24/7 to answer your questions. But within that crowd of “friends,” many are full of crap.

Since the beginning of time, common sense has been the ultimate filter to spot the difference between a real expert and a fake one. Common sense is the one thing AI cannot bring to the table.

AI is trained by flawed humans who have their own biases and interests. It does not give you absolute truth. It just mixes massive amounts of data to give you the most satisfying answer. AI is great for quick learning. It helps you grab big concepts and look deeply into how things work.

For example, I am using AI as a tool to clean up this text right now. But if I asked the AI to answer your question entirely on its own, it would just write 1,000 words of boring, generic pros and cons. It would have no real human judgment.

Every tool has its limits.

As an investor here in Hong Kong, I can use AI to find a great list of cheap, diversified ETFs that fit my local tax bracket. But the final decision is mine. I am the one who has to sleep at night when the market goes up and down.

I would never give my hard-earned money to a “pseudo-AI trading robot.” Think about it: who actually wins with those big, easy promises? The person selling the dream, or you? Is there any long-term success story to prove they work? No. If someone found a magic machine that prints money, they would not share it with you. The big fund managers just see everyday investors as a pool of cash to trade against.

The world has always been unfair. The smart benefit from the weak. Once you accept that, you can see AI for what it is: a tool to learn, compare, and adapt to your own life.

AI will never replace common sense.

But there is a second part to my answer.

As an industry, AI is an unstoppable economic wave.

Technology companies are spending aggressively, with a recent Gartner Report forecasting that total global AI spending will surge to $2.7 trillion. The market data firm Statista reports that the core AI industry revenue will cross $1.2 trillion by 2030.

To put that massive scale into perspective, the cash tech giants are pouring into AI infrastructure represents the largest infrastructure project humanity has ever undertaken.

This spending trajectory completely dwarfs traditional asset markets like the entire global smartphone sector and matches the total standalone value of individual corporate empires like Apple or Microsoft.

And why is this money pouring in?

Because AI holds the promise of infinite possibilities. This goes way beyond my daily understanding of what is possible. We are talking about the technological singularity—the moment machines help design even smarter machines, accelerating human progress at a speed we can barely grasp. Think about the grand scale of it.

We are looking at AI calculations that will guide human travel into deep space, chart new galaxies, and operate heavy machinery completely free of human error. In medicine, AI is already solving the laws of biology to permanently fix and eradicate cancer.

What better promise is there than a tool that unlocks infinite innovation?

It is fundamentally redefining our performance ceilings and human longevity. That massive future is worth the financial excitement today.

Yes, people are talking about an AI bubble and a market crash. Honestly, I cannot advise you on which specific company will be the ultimate winner. The current consumer bubble might even burst because average people simply do not need to buy a $20 ChatGPT Premium subscription right now.

But the underlying technology is a guaranteed growth engine.

Look back at the 1999 Dot-Com crash. Back then, early internet companies like pets.com went totally bankrupt because regular people “didn’t need them yet,” exactly like the consumer AI market today. But the underlying technology—the Internet—still survived the crash and completely conquered the global economy over the next two decades.

This industry is just the beginning of a brand-new era for humanity. Even if the market corrects, the technology will not just survive—it will thrive. Tomorrow, AI will be absolutely everywhere and way beyond our wildest expectations.

In the market, optimism wins over the long run.

I am not playing this sector for the next few months or a couple of years. I am in it for the next decades. AI is the next big revolution. It will completely change our economy, our habits, and what it means to be human.

So to directly answer your question, Steve:

No, you cannot build a better financial future without embracing AI—but you will lose everything if you embrace it without common sense.

Steve’s answer

I hate to ruin the surprise and skip straight to the punchline, but here it is: AI didn’t make me a better investor. It made me a better earner and a much harder guy to fool. And no, I don’t think you can build a better financial future without it.

That isn’t a new idea, either. AI isn’t all that new, at least not in the money business.

The kind of software that flags your credit card when a strange charge pops up at 2 a.m. has run on neural networks, an early form of AI, since 1992. By 2017, JPMorgan had software reading commercial loan contracts in seconds, work that used to eat 360,000 hours a year of lawyers’ and loan officers’ time. And Bank of America’s chatbot, Erica, has now handled more than 3 billion customer conversations.

So the banks and brokers you deal with have been using it for decades. The only new part is that you can use it too, for about the price of a streaming subscription, from the phone in your pocket.

Like anything else, it can be used sloppily, unwisely, or with some thought. You’ve heard plenty about the slop. There’s good news buried in all of it.

Every major AI learned what it knows by reading the internet. Shocker: not everything on the internet is true. That means some of what an AI tells you with a straight face is wrong, and it needs checking before you lean on it. Since 1994 I’ve watched wrong money advice spread because it got repeated enough times to sound right, and AI learned from that same crowd. The answer isn’t to walk away from it. The answer is to check it. I wrote about that for my fellow retirees in Don’t Turn Your Back on AI Just Because You’re Retired.

And let’s not fool ourselves that using AI means you have to become a day trader. For a lot of people, that kind of investing is just gambling with an excuse.

I know because I tested it with my own money. I built a trading engine with AI, gave it real dollars, and let it hunt every single day for the hidden gems with the most opportunity. Right beside it, I tracked what the same money would have done sitting in a plain S&P 500 index fund. Three months in, the boring index fund has done the same, and even better. A fund with almost no fees and no cleverness at all.

As I write this, the AI’s $1,000 is worth $1,013. The same $1,000 left sitting in an S&P 500 index fund is worth $1,029. And here’s the kicker: after three months of hunting for hidden gems, the AI now has 60 percent of the money parked in… an S&P 500 index fund.

Another non-shocker: the tortoise still wins the race.

Where AI changed my life wasn’t picking stocks. It was earning a living.

At one point I had 70 employees. I was just away on vacation, running my three companies with AI and my phone. No employees. AI keeps a research library of more than a hundred books on money and debt that my writing can pull from and cite. It keeps a watch on consumer complaints, court filings, and government enforcement actions around the clock. It helped me clear more than 25,000 posts I’d written since 1994 down to the 14,000 or so still worth reading. Work that used to take a payroll now takes curiosity.

But it all comes back around to where I started. There’s a lot of good in AI if you use it wisely and check its work. So I built myself a way to check it. I call it my AI gang.

It’s three different AI systems from three different companies. When something matters, I ask each of them the same question on its own and tell them to find what’s wrong with my answer. When they disagree, I dig. When they all agree, I still go read the original source, because three machines that learned from the same internet can be wrong together. Agreement feels like proof. It isn’t.

So no, I don’t think you can build a better financial and income future by ignoring AI. And I say that as an old dog who took his first computer class in 1975, feeding punch cards into a machine and waiting for a printer to tell me what I did wrong. I’m still learning new tricks every day.

You don’t need to learn prompt engineering, and you don’t need to write code. You need to know how to ask a good question, how to doubt the answer, and how to dream a little. It’s no joke that a future of real abundance can be sitting at the edge of your keyboard. It was for me.

Where to go from here

Two people, one question, and neither of us read the other before writing. We agree on more than I expected. We both say yes to AI, and we both say it should never make your investment choices for you. Common sense stays yours.

Where we part ways is where the money goes. Anthony is betting on AI as an industry for the next few decades, and his reasoning is worth sitting with: the internet survived the dot-com crash and went on to reshape everything. My three months of receipts say let the plain index fund do the investing, and use AI to earn more and to check what you’re told.

Which one sounds like you? Nobody can hand you that answer, because it depends on your money, your age, and how well you sleep when the market drops.

If you have a view of your own, Anthony and I would both like to hear it. Comment, reply, or forward this to the person you were thinking about while you read it. And if Anthony’s half made you think, go subscribe to Cashflow Living Standards. Newer writers grow one reader at a time.

Steve

I’ve also listed places I like that pay me nothing at all, so you can see the difference.

Cash that actually earns something

Betterment — their Cash Reserve account is the closest thing here to a plain high-yield savings account. (my referral link)

Robinhood’s cash sweep pays competitively too. The good rate sits behind their paid Gold tier — I pay for it myself — so on a small balance the subscription can eat the gain. It’s under Investing below. Do the arithmetic before you subscribe.

And one where nobody pays anybody: TreasuryDirect is the government’s own site. You buy Treasury bills straight from the Treasury with no broker in the middle — $100 minimum, in $100 increments, terms from four weeks out to a year. There is no app, no bonus and no referral link in existence for it. I mention it because for money you know you won’t touch for a few months, it’s usually the honest number the others have to beat.

Saving without having to think about it

Acorns — rounds up your spare change and invests it automatically. I pay for it, and the reason is simple: it saves money I’d otherwise spend without noticing. (my referral link)

And the version that costs nobody anything, me included: a standing transfer out of checking on payday, at the bank you already have. Acorns works because it moves the money before you notice it; a transfer you set once and forget does the same thing. If you’d rather not open another account, do that instead — I’d genuinely rather you saved something than used my link.

Investing

Robinhood — the platform I run my own experiment on. Uninvested cash is swept to FDIC-insured program banks, so it doubles as a cash account. The competitive rate requires their paid Gold subscription, which I pay for myself — worth it at my balance, but do the arithmetic on yours. And note Robinhood doesn’t pay that interest itself; the program banks do. (my referral link)

And three I recommend on merit, where I get nothing at all: Vanguard for low-cost index funds, Schwab for a full-service brokerage, and American Century — I was a happy customer there for decades.

Rates and terms move, and each of these has its own conditions. Go look at today’s numbers before you move a dollar.

A free conversation about your situation

Damon Day is an independent debt coach, and my co-host on Get Out of Debt Guy — you can also hear us on Spotify. I want you to know that before you decide anything. I receive no payment for this referral.

The consultation is free. The only time money changes hands is if you decide you want to hire him as a consultant. Go to DamonDay.com and schedule — he doesn’t cold-call anybody, and neither do I.

Or ask me, anonymously

Ask Steve — free, private, and I’m not selling anything. No account, no email, no sales pitch at the end of it.

A lot of people my age have made up their minds about AI. It’s slop. It’s a fad that will fizzle out. It’s the end of real writing. And underneath some of that, if we’re honest, is a quieter worry: I’ll never catch on to this, so why try?

I’m retired, and I’d like to offer you a different view — one that might surprise you.

I took my first computer class in 1975, feeding punch cards into a machine and waiting for a line printer to tell me what I’d done wrong. I’ve been writing online since 1994. I’ve been on the leading edge, the bleeding edge, and at least once I fell right off the Google edge.

So I’m not a kid who fell in love with a shiny toy. I’m an old guy who has watched a lot of shiny toys come and go. This one is different.

Here’s the part most people miss

Every major AI learned what it knows by reading the internet. Have you seen the internet? It’s full of junk, half-truths, and flat-out wrong information. So if you take whatever AI hands you and post it as is, guess what — some of it will be slop.

That doesn’t surprise me one bit. I’ve fought the same battle my whole career in the money world. So much of what “everybody knows” about money, credit, and debt is just plain wrong. But hear the wrong answer enough times and it starts to feel right.

AI has the same problem, because it learned from the same crowd. The answer isn’t to walk away from it. The answer is to check it.

You already have the skill that matters most

Here’s the good news. The most important AI skill isn’t technical. It’s healthy skepticism, and you’ve been building it your whole life.

You’ve heard a salesman’s pitch and known something was off. You’ve read the fine print. You’ve asked, “Says who?” That’s all checking AI really is. When it tells you something that matters — a number, a deadline, a rule — ask it where that came from, then go look at the original yourself.

I do that every day. Anything I publish gets checked against the original source — the actual law, the agency’s own announcement, the court filing — not somebody’s article about it. If AI can’t show me where a claim came from, I don’t use it. On my true crime podcast, the AI has one standing order: if a name or a detail is unclear, flag it for me. Never guess.

That’s not slop. That’s the opposite of slop. And it’s a habit you already have.

Start small. Tonight, even.

You don’t need a big project to begin. You need one small win. Here are three things you can type in, word for word, the first time you open it:

• “I’m new to this and a little nervous. Explain things to me like a patient friend, one step at a time.”

• “Here’s a letter I got. Tell me in plain English what it’s asking me to do, and what questions I should ask before I do anything.” (Leave out account numbers and your Social Security number. It doesn’t need them.) You can snap a picture of the letter and share it with the AI engine.

• “Help me write a short, warm note to my granddaughter about what I was doing when I was her age.”

That’s it. If the answer isn’t clear, say so. Tell it, “I didn’t follow that, try again more simply.” It will, as many times as you ask. It won’t sigh, it won’t roll its eyes, and it won’t make you feel old.

What it grew into for me

Once I got comfortable, it snowballed. I’m not telling you to do any of this. I’m telling you how far a curious retired guy can get by starting small:

• I filed a provisional patent. AI helped me search existing patents, compare my idea to the closest one out there, and draft the specification.

• I cleaned house on everything I’d written since 1994. My GetOutOfDebt.org site had grown past 25,000 posts, every one of them written by me. With AI’s help, I cleared out the outdated posts and the dead wood and got it down to about 14,000. I’d have died before I finished that by hand.

• I built my own research library. More than a hundred books on money and debt, broken into nearly 19,000 searchable passages my writing tools can pull from and cite.

• I set up a watchdog. It keeps an eye on consumer complaints, court filings, and government enforcement actions for me, around the clock — for under two dollars a day.

• I made it prove itself before I trusted it with money. In my online selling business, a new pricing rule ran quietly alongside me for almost a month, so I could see whether it would have made the right call before it ever touched a real price.

• I design things. I sketch out an idea, and AI helps me turn it into a 3D-printable design I can tweak and sell.

None of that required me to become a programmer. It required me to be curious, patient, and skeptical — which, if you’ve made it to retirement, you probably already are.

It’s not too late, my retiree friends

You don’t have to be the most tech-savvy person you know, or the fastest.

I learned that once. Back in my web-building days, I decided this thing called CSS would never catch on. Well, it did. I can still build you a terrific page the old way, but when it comes to CSS, I am not your guy. The folks who jumped in early had more fun with it than I did.

That’s the only real cost of waiting: you miss some of the fun. It’s not too late with AI. And the sooner you start, the more of it you get to enjoy.

You don’t need to buy a class, a book, or a course. Open ChatGPT or Claude — the free versions are a fine place to start — and type in one of those three questions above. See what happens.

If you know someone who has written off AI — or someone who believes every word it says — send this their way.

I’m not a financial advisor, a lawyer, or a tech consultant. This is one retired guy’s experience. You know your own situation better than any newsletter can.

The best tools I ever picked up were the ones I was a little afraid of at first. You’ve learned harder things than this. The next chapter might not look like the one you pictured — and it might turn out to be better.

— Steve

The premise

I asked Greg Downs a question I’ve been circling for thirty-plus years: what do addiction and money trouble have in common?

We came at it from opposite doors. Greg spent his career as a financial advisor to some of the wealthiest families in Palm Beach, and then got sober — and found that recovery taught him more about money than Wall Street ever had. He writes Financial Sobriety on Substack and is finishing a book, 12 Steps to Financial Sobriety. If you want a voice on money that comes from the recovery room rather than the trading floor, he’s the one to listen to.

I’ve been on the other side of the desk since 1994, sitting with people whose money had already gone wrong, trying to figure out why.

So here are two answers to one question. Neither of us read the other’s before writing. Read both, and tell us which one sounds like you.

Greg’s Answer

I love this question!

Three years ago, I would have told you not much. But then I got sober.

I’ve spent countless hours in 12 step meetings and on therapy couches talking about all the reasons I drank:

I never felt comfortable in my own skin.

I never felt good enough.

I carried shame and guilt over things I had done.

I was bored.

I was happy.

I was sad.

I was angry.

I wanted to celebrate.

It was Saturday.

You get the idea. And perhaps you can spot the similarities.

I drank to change the way I felt, and I spent money for the EXACT same reasons.

How many of us have purchased something on Amazon late at night because we had a bad day and wanted to cheer ourselves up only to regret the package as soon as we see it on the doorstep? Or hid a purchase from our partner because we didn’t want them to know the real amount we spent? Or completely ignored a credit card statement when it came in the mail because facing reality was just too hard at that moment?

The goal being to change the way we felt or avoid the problem. See it now?

I grew up on a dirt road in the middle of Florida. We didn’t have much money, but we survived. When I started working in Palm Beach, I felt so out of place. I didn’t go to boarding school or have a grandfather that built railways. But if I spent like they did, then I fit in. And if I drank enough, I was funny enough to fit in. And I needed to fit in.

Both of those behaviors were just masking what was really going on inside of me. I never felt like I belonged. I lacked any sense of self confidence. I didn’t want anyone to know the “real” me because then I wouldn’t be invited back. The problem is both of those behaviors were temporarily good enough that I had to keep them up to continue getting the same fleeting relief.

The financial services industry treats money like a math problem when it’s actually a human problem. We are the most financially informed generation to ever exist yet are in worse shape financially than ever before. We don’t need a new budgeting app to format the numbers in a different way or another YouTube video explaining what compound interest is. What’s keeping us stuck is our internal beliefs around money.

That’s where sobriety comes in. The first step is getting honest about what’s actually happening and why. The 12 step rooms taught me to look at myself, without shame, and trust a framework that has helped millions change their behaviors for close to 100 years. I believe that same framework is what can make lasting change in our financial lives as well.

Money troubles, like addiction, don’t discriminate. I’ve worked with clients making $600,000 per year and clients making $60,000 per year that both spend more than they are bringing in so they appear more successful than they think they are. The extra zero doesn’t matter when we haven’t looked at the root cause.

If you know someone recovering from addiction, you’ve probably heard the phrase “one day at a time.” It means not worrying about tomorrow’s problems and instead focusing on not drinking or using today. I am proposing that we work on our money troubles one dollar at a time.

If you would like to subscribe to Greg, visit Financial Sobriety.

Steve’s Answer

I’m not an addict. I’m not one of those troubled people who can’t handle a substance and sacrifice everything in life just to have it.

But is that really true? No. It isn’t.

Plenty of people are addicted to all sorts of things — and not the things that leave you in a gutter with track marks, bottles in a trashcan or wondering how you threw your life away. The ordinary kind. The kind with a receipt.

I’ve been helping people with money troubles since 1994, and when I tell you I feel like I’ve seen it all, it sure feels that way. But one woman summed up her financial problems in a way that answers today’s question better than I can.

She told me shopping was her heroin and her credit card was her needle.

Debt is just math wrapped in emotion. It’s the evidence that we made decisions for reasons other than logic and common sense. When you shop to soothe your anxiety, you’re feeding something. When you lose a small fortune day trading, your brokerage is your pusher. When you hand your paycheck to a casino, the casino isn’t your entertainment — it’s your dealer.

I wrote back in 2002 that money is an over-the-counter drug — a legal tool we use to make ourselves feel different, with a fix available 24 hours a day. When my organization surveyed 1,000 adults, 40 percent said their mood changes before or after a purchase. Sixteen percent spent to escape problems or relieve stress. Seventeen percent felt alone or empty inside and bought things to feel better. Just over half had repeatedly tried to cut back or stop. That was before the store moved into your pocket.

The researchers see the same thing. Asked to finish the sentence “I am most likely to buy myself something when…”, almost three-quarters of compulsive buyers answered with a negative emotion — I’m depressed, I feel bad about myself. They describe the buying itself as a “high,” “a rush,” feeling “powerful” or “out of control.” That’s not the language of budgeting. That’s the language of the substance. (Faber & Vohs, 2011)

A clinical comparison of compulsive buyers with people treated for gambling and other behavioral addictions found the same engine underneath: buying to lift a mood or cope with stress, then regret, shame, guilt, financial trouble — and repeated failure to stop (Granero et al., 2016). A meta-analysis across 16 countries puts compulsive buying at roughly 5 percent of adults. One in twenty. It isn’t rare. It just isn’t talked about, because nobody holds an intervention over a closet.

So this isn’t a moral failing alone. It’s your imprinted money personality (find yours here), the reward machinery in your head, and the plain fact that the behavior keeps happening because it works — it serves you in some way, right up until the bill arrives.

Take the man who was wildly overspending on the woman he loved because he could not imagine living without her. He was addicted to everything she was and represented. When he went bust, she left. His need to keep her drove every decision until he hit bottom.

Here’s the good news about being an addict: you have the hope of recognition, the possibility of change, and a real shot at getting out of the loop.

Chemical addicts have something the rest of us should borrow. They meet and cheer each other on. They hold up a friend who has fallen. They can look back from a better life and say: I saw what my addiction was doing to me, I hit bottom, and I clawed my way back.

Money addicts mostly hide. A study of more than 9,000 people found that shame — not guilt, shame — makes financial hardship worse, because shame makes you look away: skip the statement, dodge the call, avoid the bankruptcy that would actually help (Gladstone et al., 2021). The hiding is the disease talking.

So yes, addiction has a great deal in common with money, credit, and debt. But being broke is the symptom, not the problem. The problem is whatever is driving you to steer your own finances into a hole. Fix the driver and the math gets easy. Skip the driver and you’ll dig the same hole again with a fresh shovel.

You can go from hopeless to at peace. I’ve watched it happen more times than I can count. It starts the way it does in every recovery room: by saying, out loud, what’s really going on.

Where to start

If any of this sounded like you, the first step isn’t a budget. It’s telling one honest person — a doctor, a friend, Greg, a counselor, or me. If you can’t face that yet, write it down somewhere nobody will see it. The silence is the part that keeps you going back. That is exactly why I built the anonymous Debt Confessional: say what you are really feeling, with no name attached.

If you’ve got a story of your own, Greg and I would both like to hear it. Reply, comment, or forward this to the person you were thinking about while you read it.

Steve

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If you're feeling stupid, ashamed, full of regret, or just out of hope today, this one's for you. I've been all four. I'm writing this from a first-class lounge waiting on a flight, and I'd like to tell you how I got from there to here, because the road is shorter than it looks from where you're sitting.

The creek wasn't a creek

My dad worked for USAID when I was small, and we lived in some of the poorest countries on earth. I learned early that the creek by the house was not a creek. That was my introduction to open-air sewers. Lesson learned.

Back in the States I watched him have great jobs and lose them — once when a government contract ended, and once because his boss asked him to lie at a congressional hearing and he said no.

That Christmas he went to work at the local mall demonstrating the Veg-O-Matic, in front of people who used to work for him. He told me years later he felt humiliated. My mother took me to see him. I was about ten. She says I pointed at him and announced proudly to the whole store, that's my dad.

There were times in the late 1960s when my parents had to borrow from my piggy bank to buy groceries. They were open with me about it, and I was a proud kid to help. We had a black-and-white television with four channels. No phone in a pocket, no streaming, no YouTube. Frontier days.

Potomac, and the lawn chairs

The family finances came back, and then some. We moved to Potomac, Maryland — one of the wealthiest places in the country, where a lot of famous people lived. And I got my second education. A lot of outwardly successful people there were miserable humans. As a teenager, I was invited inside by friends. Some of them slept on lawn chairs or in sparsely furnished rooms inside the house, because all the money had gone to the outside and cars.

I didn't have words for it at twelve. I do now. One of my core beliefs came out of that experience: we learn more by observing than by judging or worrying. BE AN OBSERVER.

And here is where I want to stop and say something to a particular reader, because a lot of you found me on Substack and you're carrying a different kind of balance, an emotional balance.

You have a number on a dashboard that isn't what you hoped. You've refreshed it today more times than you'd admit. You look at the writers with the big numbers and feel behind, and a little stupid for caring, and then you care anyway.

I have two publications. One has more than 16,000 subscribers and adds about fifty a day on its own, because the network hands it readers for the category it's in. The other, this one, has about 2,200, grows slowly, and is the one I actually love writing — and in a few days I'm going to cut that number roughly in half on purpose, by removing the people who never open it. Life taught me not to care about the numbers. If you'd asked me which publication I'd keep, I wouldn't need to think about it. It’s this one.

That big number is the lawn in Potomac. You can't see who's sleeping on the lawn chairs. Your small number is measuring the category you chose and the people you're proud to call subscribers — friends, really — — it isn't measuring you, and it isn't measuring whether the thing you're making is any good. The people who did subscribe did it because of who you are. That is the only part of this you get to keep, and you already have it.

My first emergency

Let's jump ahead to my first credit card. It was for emergencies. Who knew that my turn to buy the beer would be my first emergency.

Then I got my PhD in life. In the late 1980s I left a comfortable, stable job in medicine to chase my dream of a real estate development business, using the method of the day: other people's money. I did not see the economic headwinds coming. In 1990 I filed bankruptcy.

It was the lowest point of my emotional life. It was also the best thing that ever happened to me.

Don't waste a perfectly good mistake

Another of my core beliefs: there's no sense wasting a perfectly good mistake. So instead of hiding, I got curious. Why wouldn't creditors take my money after bankruptcy? How does a person actually rebuild? Within a couple of years I'd bought a house at market rates and financed a new car at prime. Bankruptcy didn't destroy my finances. It did play with my head.

And out of that experience I started helping people who were where I'd been. That was 1994. I've never stopped. I give away everything I know for free — every weekday I write about what people need to know about their money, I do a weekly podcast and a daily deep dive on credit and debt, and I sell no services. My biggest financial failure became the thing I've spent thirty years being useful with, through television, syndicated columns, books, and GetOutOfDebt.org, for more people than I could ever count.

But I don't want you to hear a miracle story, because it wasn't one. I spent four years after that bankruptcy feeling sorry for myself, being depressed, calling myself a loser, and holding on to the shame like it was mine to keep. Then one day I just thought: F that. And I got busy with another core belief — if you do good things, good things happen.

From four channels to the lounge

So flash forward from the kid with the black-and-white television to the guy in this chair, running three companies from his phone with AI, waiting for a flight. Everything else is doing well too.

What I'm clumsily trying to say is this: your lowest point deserves to be celebrated, because it is going to be the biggest and best learning moment of your life. It is all up from here — once you learn the magic of saying F it, stop caring what you think other people think of you, and get on with the wonderful, glorious, amazing life waiting for you around the corner.

That goes for the balance on the card and the number on the dashboard both.

Five mottos that have served me well

1. Don't be a dick.

2. As long as you are not on fire, it is a good day.

3. There is no sense wasting a perfectly good mistake.

4. Do it now.

5. It's much better to fail than to never try.

And two things I heard along the way that still hold me up. From a movie: it's better to get busy living than to get busy dying. And from I don't remember where: I'd rather be seen than viewed.

Life is a one-way journey, and the future is yours to write. Go do it.

If today is your bottom, I'd like to hear about it — reply, or comment, or just tell one person. That's how mine started to turn.

Steve

P.S. I believe in you.

This publication has 2,199 subscribers. That is the number Substack shows me, the number I could put in a bio, the number that looks like a real audience.

Here is the number that is actually true: 874.

That’s how many of you have ever opened an issue or clicked a link. The other 1,325 — sixty percent of the list — have never done either. Not once. Not the welcome email, not the dad jokes, not the day I put a thousand dollars of my own money on the line in public. Nothing.

I am going to send those 1,325 people one plain email asking if they still want this. Then, about two weeks later, I am going to remove everyone who didn’t answer.

I want to tell you why, because the reason is the same reason I’ve spent thirty years telling people to open the envelope they’ve been avoiding.

A number you don’t look at is not an asset

When I ran a nonprofit credit counseling organization, I watched thousands of people walk in carrying a number in their head that had nothing to do with reality. The credit limit they had “available.” The house that was “worth” what the neighbor’s sold for. The retirement account they hadn’t logged into since the market did something they didn’t like.

Every one of those was a real number. None of them was a true one. And the gap between the two is where people get hurt, because you make decisions based on the number in your head, and life bills you based on the one on the statement.

My subscriber count is exactly that kind of number. It’s real. It’s on the dashboard. And it is not true.

If I plan around 2,199, I’ll write for people who aren’t there. I’ll read a 17 percent open rate as a failure of the writing, when the honest math is that roughly 45 percent of the people who actually receive and see this thing open it — which is a completely different problem to solve, and a much happier one.

What the 1,325 are actually costing me

Not money. Substack doesn’t charge me by the free subscriber, so this isn’t a bill I’m dodging.

What they cost me is signal.

Every time I test two headlines against each other, the results come back muddied by 1,325 people who were never going to open either one. Every time I ask “did that issue land?” the answer is diluted by sixty percent noise. I’ve been trying to steer a car while looking at a speedometer that’s stuck.

There’s also the conventional wisdom in the email world — and I’ll label it that, because I haven’t tested it myself — that mailbox providers watch how people treat a sender’s mail, and a sender whose messages mostly sit unopened starts landing in more promotions tabs and spam folders for everyone, including the people who want it. If that’s even partly right, the dead weight isn’t neutral. It’s pulling the live readers down with it.

Why not just leave them? Bigger is bigger.

Because I know what the temptation is. I’ve felt it every time I’ve looked at that dashboard.

It’s the same temptation that keeps a person paying the minimum on a card they’ve stopped looking at. The same one that keeps a family in a house they can’t carry because selling would mean admitting the number. Nobody wants to be the person who makes the total go down on purpose.

But a smaller true number beats a bigger false one every single time, because only the true one can be acted on. I would rather know I’m talking to 874 people and get better at talking to them than keep telling myself a story about 2,199.

How I’m doing it, so you can hold me to it

1. One warning email, plain, to only the people showing zero activity. Not to you — if you’re reading this, you’re not on that list. It says: still want this? Open it, click anything, and you stay.

2. About two weeks of waiting. Some mail apps hide opens from the sender, so I’m giving people a real window, not a gotcha.

3. Then I re-run the filter live — never from an old list — and remove the addresses that are still at zero.

4. Then I watch what happens to the open rate on the next five issues. If I’m right, the true number goes up. If I’m wrong, I’ll tell you that too.

Your turn — the same audit, on your own money or even your own subscribers

You have a 2,199 somewhere. Everybody does.

It might be a subscription you haven’t used since spring. A savings account earning a rate you’ve never actually checked. A “budget” that lives in your head and has never once been compared to a bank statement. A debt balance you’ve rounded down for so long you’d be surprised by the real figure.

This week, pick one and look at the true number. Don’t fix it yet. Just look. The looking is the hard part, and it’s the part that turns a number you carry into a number you can use.

If this was useful

Send it to the one person you know who is proudest of a number they haven’t checked lately. They’ll know who they are.

I’m Steve Rhode. I’ve been helping people with money trouble since 1994, I ran a nonprofit credit counseling organization, and I filed bankruptcy myself in 1990. This is what I’m seeing and what I’d tell my own family — take it as input, not instruction. Only you know your whole situation, and nobody, including me, gets to tell you what to do with your money.

The smaller, truer list starts in a couple of weeks. If you’re still here after that, I’ll know you meant it. That’s a better thing to build on than any number on a dashboard.

Let me do it here. I sell nothing, so I’ve got no reason not to.

Start with a simple question: who’s actually on your side?

Walk the debt world and count the widgets. The credit counselor sells you a five-year payment program. The settlement rep sells you a program with fees on every dollar you “save.” The bank sells you the balance itself — and quietly hopes you carry it as long as you possibly can. Three storefronts, three pitches, one thing in common: every one of them makes money the longer you stay in the situation you’re trying to leave. None of them profits from you doing the fast math. So none of them does it with you.

Why it’s so hard to see from the inside.

When you’re under the weight of debt, your brain genuinely isn’t running at full strength — and that’s measurable, not a character flaw. Researchers Mullainathan and Shafir found the mental load of financial pressure produced a cognitive drop comparable to losing a full night’s sleep, or a 13-point drop in IQ. Sit with how unfair that is: the debt is taxing the very brain you’d need to think your way out of it. And that fog is exactly the moment someone slides a contract across the table.

So let me hand you the calculator.

Say you carry $25,000 on credit cards. The average rate people actually pay on balances they carry is 22% — that’s the Federal Reserve’s number, not mine. That balance charges you about $5,500 a year, roughly $458 a month, just to stand in place.

Now put $600 a month against it. Here’s the gut-punch: at the start, $458 of that $600 is swallowed by interest — only $142 actually shrinks what you owe. It takes 6.6 years to clear the balance if you keep the same starting monthly payment, and along the way you hand the lender about $22,700 — nearly the size of the original debt — just in interest.

Here’s the part none of those three storefronts will frame for you: every dollar of that 22% you stop paying is a dollar you effectively earn — guaranteed, risk-free, and tax-free. A guaranteed 22%. Warren Buffett compounded at about 20% a year and it made him one of the richest people alive — and his returns were never guaranteed, never risk-free, and always taxed. There’s no honest investment on earth that safely pays 22% tax-free. Except one: being done with that debt.

Now the flip — this is the whole game.

Compound interest is the most powerful force in your financial life, and right now it’s pointed at you, at 22%. You’re running the world’s best wealth machine in reverse, at full throttle, and you’ve been told that’s just adult life.

So imagine you could stop that bleed fast — and then point the same $600 a month at your own future instead of a lender’s. Watch what happens to that identical $600 over a 30-year working life, earning a long-run 8%:

Grind the debt down first, then invest: your money doesn’t start working for you for 6.6 years, and you end up with about $491,000.

Stop the bleed now and invest from day one: your money works for all 30 years, and you end up with about $894,000.

Same money. Same monthly amount. The only difference is when the clock starts — and the early years are the ones that compound the hardest. That gap is about $404,000. Four hundred thousand dollars, decided entirely by how fast you got out of the way of your own money. It shows up on no statement, in no sales pitch, in no monthly minimum. And that’s the optimistic version — it assumes you actually start investing the day the debt clears. Most people never do.

A note, so I’m not doing to you what they do: that 8% long-run return isn’t guaranteed — nothing in the market is. The only guaranteed return in this whole picture is the 22% you stop paying.

I’m not going to tell you what to do about it.

That’s not my job — and honestly, anyone who leads with their answer before they’ve shown you your math is probably selling something. The math was always sitting there. The fog kept you from doing it, and the people paid to fill that fog had every reason not to hand you a calculator.

So before you sign anything, sit with the only question that really matters: three different industries are lined up to profit from how you handle this, and every one of them does better the longer you stay put. Who, in that whole picture, is actually putting your interests first?

If you can’t find them in the room, that’s your answer about who to trust with the math.

This is a thought to sit with, not instructions to follow. Do your own math — really do it, with your own numbers. And if it changes how you see the plan someone’s selling you, forward this to the person you know who’s staring at a balance right now and calling it normal.

I’ll admit something. For years I had a quiet theory about the people who are genuinely good at trading money — the ones who buy when everyone else is running for the exits and somehow come out ahead.

My theory was that they were just… wired differently. Maybe a little autistic. Able to stare at a spreadsheet the rest of us find mind-numbing, and — this was the part I fixated on — able to feel nothing while doing it. No fear. No greed. Just cold math while the rest of us sweat.

It’s a comforting theory, honestly. Because if they’re built different, then I’m off the hook. I’m just not one of the special ones.

So I finally went and checked whether it’s true.

It’s not true. And the truth is better news for you.

There is no real evidence that autistic people make better traders. When researchers actually studied it — a 2025 study looked directly at autistic adults and money — they found the opposite of the myth: more caution, less investing, not some hidden superpower. The “autistic trading genius” is a story the internet tells itself, built out of a couple of famous names and a lot of repetition. I’d believed it for years and never once checked it. That’s on me.

Now, one of those famous names is real: Michael Burry, the investor from The Big Short who saw the 2008 crash coming. He does describe himself as being on the spectrum — he recognized it in himself after his son was diagnosed. And there’s a great line, from Michael Lewis’s book, where Burry says only someone with his wiring would sit down and actually read a boring mortgage-bond prospectus that everyone else ignored.

But here’s the part nobody quotes. Burry himself refused to treat it as a gift. He said he was glad he never got to use it as an excuse. He didn’t think his brain made him win. He thought it made him willing to do the tedious, unglamorous work — and then he did the work.

Read that again, because it’s the whole thing: it wasn’t the wiring. It was the willingness.

The real trait isn’t a brain. It’s a skill.

Here’s what the research does show, clearly and repeatedly:

The single biggest thing separating people who do well with money from people who don’t isn’t intelligence, and it isn’t a special brain. It’s whether they can stay factual and calm at the exact moment their gut is screaming at them to do something stupid.

And your gut will scream. That’s not a flaw in you — it’s the deal. The market is the one place in life where your survival instincts betray you. Everywhere else, “run when you’re scared, grab it while you can” keeps you alive. In money, that same instinct makes you sell at the bottom, buy at the top, hold onto a loser hoping it comes back, and dump a winner too early. The researchers have measured it: the people who trade the most, driven by exactly those emotions, lose to the plain, boring market by around six and a half percentage points a year. Every year. That’s the tax on the screaming gut.

I know this one personally. I’ve told you before — I’ve never been dispassionate enough to make excellent money choices in the heat of the moment. My gut screams too.

So here’s the part that’s actually good news

If cold-blooded calm were a gift — something you’re born with or you’re not — then most of us really would be out of luck.

But it isn’t a gift. It’s a system.

The most reliable finding in this whole field is that you don’t have to become an emotionless person to make emotionless decisions. You just have to move the decision outside the screaming moment. You decide the rule when you’re calm, and you let the rule carry you through when you’re not.

That’s not a personality. That’s a checklist. It’s the person who sets up their savings to move automatically on payday so they never have to “feel like” saving. It’s the investor who writes down “I sell if X happens” before X happens, so the decision is already made when their hands are shaking. It’s why, over twenty years, a plain index fund that just sits there quietly beats something like nine out of ten highly-paid professionals who trade on their judgment. The boring rule beats the brilliant gut. Almost every time.

You were never competing with a special brain. You were competing with a habit — and habits can be copied.

Which is exactly what I’m testing right now

This is the whole reason I’m running the experiment some of you are already following: I handed an AI $1,000 of my own real money and let it trade, in public, for a year — with one hard requirement. Every decision has to be written down, with its reasons, before the outcome is known. No acting on a gut feeling. No rewriting the story afterward to look smart.

That written log is the dispassion. It’s the calm-moment rule, put on paper so the screaming moment can’t override it. Watching an AI forced to be factual and disciplined turns out to be the clearest way I’ve ever found to show what that discipline actually looks like — and to prove you don’t need a rare brain to do it. You need a rule and the honesty to follow it.

If you want to watch that play out — every move, the good days and the ugly ones — it lands chapter by chapter in my free daily email.

Follow the experiment free: getoutofdebt.org/subscribe

No pitch, no upsell. Just me finding out the truth out loud so you don’t have to risk your own money finding it.

— Steve

As always: my take is only ever input, never instruction. You’re the one who decides what to do with your own money. I’m just running the experiment out loud so you can see how the calm-decision-on-paper thing actually works.

Last Thursday the government told you the unemployment rate went down. It fell to 4.2%. On paper, that’s a good number — the lowest it’s been since last spring.

I want to show you why it might be one of the most misleading good numbers I’ve seen in a long time. Because the rate didn’t drop because people found jobs. It dropped because people stopped looking for them.

Here’s the part nobody explains at the kitchen table.

When you lose your job and you’re out there applying, sending résumés, going to interviews — the government counts you as “unemployed.” You’re in the statistic. But the day you give up — the day you decide there’s no point, the jobs aren’t there, nobody’s calling back — you don’t get counted as unemployed anymore. You get moved to a different pile called “not in the labor force.” And here’s the strange part: moving you to that pile makes the unemployment rate go DOWN.

Think about that. A person who quits looking out of pure discouragement makes the headline number look better. The math rewards despair.

So what actually happened last month? In June alone, 720,000 people dropped out of the labor force. Gone. The count of people “not in the labor force” jumped by 832,000. And the share of working-age Americans who either have a job or are looking for one — a number called the labor force participation rate — fell to 61.5%. That’s the lowest it’s been since the pandemic. Strip out the COVID years entirely, and it’s the lowest since the mid-1970s. Fifty years, give or take.

There’s an even sharper way to see it. The government runs two separate surveys every month. One asks businesses how many jobs they added — that one said the economy gained 57,000 jobs, a weak number but still positive. The other survey asks households how many people are actually working — and that one said the number of employed people FELL by 507,000. One survey says “we added jobs,” the other says “half a million fewer people are working.” When the two disagree that badly, something’s off, and it’s usually the household one telling you the harder truth.

And before you think this is just retiring baby boomers — the explanation everyone reaches for — look closer. The biggest drop last month came from prime-age workers, people between 25 and 54. The ones who are supposed to be in the thick of their careers. Their participation fell to the lowest level since the end of 2023. These aren’t retirees. These are people in their working years who, for whatever reason, aren’t in the game right now.

One economist I read put it plainly: it was shocking to see over 700,000 people stop looking for work entirely in a single month. Another said the participation number worried him more than the unemployment rate ever could. I agree with him.

Now let me be honest about what I’m NOT saying, because I don’t do panic.

I’m not telling you the sky is falling or that a depression is coming. The job market is still, in a lot of ways, better than it was a year ago. One month of data can be noisy, and there was an unusual drop in restaurant and hotel jobs that might be a fluke. I’m not going to pretend one report tells the whole story.

But I’ve been watching these numbers since 1994, and I’ve learned to read past the headline to the number underneath it. And the number underneath this one is telling me a lot of people looked at the job market and decided it wasn’t worth trying anymore. That’s not a statistic. That’s a mood. And moods like that show up in debt long before they show up in the news.

Here’s why this matters for your money, and why I’m writing to you about it at all.

When people stop earning, they don’t stop spending — at least not right away. They lean on credit cards. They dip into savings they can’t afford to lose. They tell themselves it’s temporary, that something will come along, that they’ll catch up when things turn around. And the whole time, the interest is compounding in the background, quietly, every single day.

So if you’re one of the people in that 720,000 — or you love someone who is — here’s what I’d actually do, and it’s the opposite of what fear tells you to do.

Don’t drain your retirement account to stay afloat. That 401(k) is protected money, and it’s the one thing a future bankruptcy can’t touch. Raiding it to pay this month’s bills is trading your future for your present, and it almost never pays off.

Don’t empty your emergency savings down to zero, either. That cushion is what keeps a slow month from becoming a payday-loan spiral. If the only way to keep up with the credit cards is to strip yourself completely bare, then the credit cards aren’t the emergency — they’re a problem to deal with deliberately, not to feed with your last dollar.

And don’t let shame keep you frozen. A gap in your income is not a gap in your worth. The single most expensive thing you can do right now is nothing — sit still, hope it turns around, and let the interest do its work while you wait. Waiting is not a plan. It’s just fear wearing a calm face.

If you’re staring at debt you can’t see your way out of, and you’re not sure whether the answer is a payoff plan, a consolidation, or something bigger, you can just ask me. I built a free Ask Steve chat over at getoutofdebt.org — it’s there 24 hours a day, it won’t ask you for a phone number or an email, and it won’t try to sell you a thing. Maybe it’s two in the morning and the worry won’t let you sleep. Come tell me what’s going on. I’d rather you ask me a question than sit alone with it.

The unemployment rate going down should feel like good news. This time, it isn’t — not really. It went down because a lot of people quietly stopped trying. And if the numbers stop counting people the moment they give up, then somebody has to keep paying attention to them.

I guess that’s my job.

Take care of yourself. And if this helped you understand the news a little better, forward it to someone who’s out of work right now and thinks nobody notices. Somebody does.

— Steve

I spent this spring doing something I’d wanted to do for years: I sat down and honestly researched every famous way people say you can grow your money in the markets. Not just one. All of them.

Day trading. “AI trading bots.” The “funded trader” challenges all over your feed. Momentum strategies. Value investing. Low-volatility funds. Gold. Foreign markets. The $5,000 guru “academies.” Dozens of strategies, across decades of data — the academic studies, the regulator filings, the court records.

I had one question, the one nobody selling you a strategy ever answers honestly: after all the costs and all the hype, which of these actually beats just buying a boring index fund and leaving it alone?

Here’s the short version. It sorted into three tiers, and the tiers are the whole story.

Tier one: the stuff that’s sold the hardest is the stuff that hurts people the most. Day trading, the bots, the prop-firm “challenges,” the guru courses — these aren’t strategies, they’re machines for moving money from hopeful people to the sellers. The statistics behind them are brutal and consistent, and I’ll show you the actual numbers and court cases. Not opinion. Receipts.

Tier two — and this is the one that surprised me — even the legitimate clever strategies mostly disappointed. The real, academically-respected ideas — momentum, value, quality, low-volatility — they look great in a textbook. But once a regular person can only do the honest version (no shorting, no leverage), pays the costs, and waits a few years for the crowd to catch on, most of them quietly trailed a plain index fund over the last decade. The famous “value” strategy had a lost decade. The clever stuff underperformed the boring stuff.

Tier three: there was exactly one honest edge — and it’s not what you’d expect. It isn’t a way to make more money. It’s a simple, boring trend rule that makes roughly the same money as the market while dramatically cutting the gut-wrenching crashes — turning a stomach-churning 50% drop into something closer to 10 or 15%. Less return, far less pain, and — this is the part that matters — far more likely that a scared human actually sticks with it instead of panic-selling at the bottom.

That last finding is the most useful thing in the whole study, and it’s pure good news. Because the barrier to building wealth was never the math. It’s the fear. And the calm, honest answer turns out to be simpler and gentler than anything anyone’s trying to sell you.

I’m publishing all of it, chapter by chapter — every strategy, every number, every place I was wrong (including a couple of bugs I caught in my own work, which I’ll show you, because that’s the part the gurus never do). I sell nothing. There’s no course at the end. There’s just what the evidence actually says.

If you want to follow the whole thing as it rolls out — every strategy, as I publish it — subscribe here: getoutofdebt.org/subscribe

It’s free, it lands in your inbox, and by the end you’ll be able to look at any “get rich in the markets” pitch and know — calmly, with the receipts — exactly what it’s worth.

Talk soon,

Steve

A little while ago I handed an AI $1,000 of my own real money and told it to trade stocks for a year, against a plain S&P 500 index fund. I wrote the whole thing down before the first trade so I couldn’t move the goalposts later. (If you missed it, that’s the pre-registration post on the site.)

Here’s the part I didn’t expect to be writing about.

A friend ran my experiment past ChatGPT, and it said something that stuck with me: don’t just compare the ending balances. Anybody can show you a number that went up. The honest question is what that number cost you to get — how far it fell along the way, how much risk it took, what the trading and the taxes quietly skimmed off.

So I did something that probably sounds strange. I asked five different AIs — not one, five — how I could accidentally lie to you about how this experiment is going. Where the traps are. How a person shows you a “win” that isn’t really a win.

Three of them, on their own, landed on the same trick. And I want you to know about it, because it’s not really about my little experiment — it’s about every “I turned $1,000 into $30,000” screenshot you’ve ever been shown.

The trick is this: you can look like a genius just by sitting in cash when things get scary. If the market drops and you happened to be holding cash, you didn’t outsmart anything — you just weren’t all the way in. But the chart makes it look like skill. The index fund was fully invested the whole time and took the hit; you dodged it by accident and took the bow.

There were two more. “Commission-free” isn’t “cost-free” — there’s a quiet skim on every trade that never shows up on the receipt. And if you change the rules halfway through, you’re not testing a strategy anymore, you’re just steering toward whatever looks good. All three are the same family of thing: the result can be technically true and still completely mislead you.

I’m telling you this before I report a single result, on purpose. The whole point of doing this in public was to be honest about it — and being honest means showing you the worst day, not just the best one. So I’m building the scoreboard now to catch all three of those tricks on myself, before there are any numbers around to tempt me.

The bigger lesson is one you can use today, with zero dollars at stake: the next time somebody waves a return in front of you, ask the boring questions. What was your worst day? How much of this was you being clever versus you being lucky enough to be in cash? What did it cost you to trade? Anybody who won’t answer those isn’t showing you a result. They’re showing you a highlight reel.

Follow the experiment as it happens. I’m posting every move, every worst day, and the honest scoreboard — subscribe to the site here so you don’t miss it.

More soon — including the actual scoreboard, worst days and all.

This is my honest read, not a recommendation. You’re the one who decides what to do with your money.

You’ve seen the ads. I know you have, because I can’t get away from them either.

“Let AI grow your money.” “Turn $1,000 into a nest egg while you sleep.” “The smartest minds on Wall Street are using AI — now you can too.” Slick video, a chart that only goes up, and a quiet little button that says get started.

Here’s the thing nobody selling that dream will ever do: put their own money where their mouth is, in public, and let you watch what actually happens — win or lose.

So I’m going to do it.

What I’m actually doing

I’m taking $1,000 of my own money — not yours, not a sponsor’s, mine — and I’m handing it to an AI to trade. A real brokerage account. Real stocks. Real buys and sells, made by the AI, not by me. And I’m going to show you every single move it makes, the good days and the ugly ones, for a full year.

This isn’t a backtest. It’s not a simulation. It’s not “imagine if you’d invested.” It’s a thousand actual dollars that can actually disappear.

And I’m not picking $1,000 because it’s safe. I’m picking it because it’s the exact amount the ads aim at — the person who doesn’t have much, who’s told that a little money plus a smart machine equals a way out. If the promise is real, it has to be real for them. So that’s the size of the bet.

I called my shot — but I won’t fake the answer

Here’s the honest truth: I don’t know how this ends. Neither do you. And — this is the important part — neither does anyone running those ads, no matter how confident they sound.

So before a single dollar moves, I did the one thing the people selling the dream never do. I wrote down the question and the scoring rules, in public, time-stamped, in advance: at the end of one year, after every fee and every tax and all the friction nobody mentions, did the AI actually grow that $1,000 — and did it beat the plain, boring option of buying the whole market and never touching it again? I locked the finish line in place first, so I can’t move it later to make the AI look good or bad. Whatever the number says, the number wins.

That’s what makes this worth watching instead of just reading. I’m not going to tell you the ending, because I genuinely don’t have it. We’re going to find it out the same way — one trading day at a time, together — and at the end we’ll both know the truth instead of a sales pitch.

Maybe the AI surprises us. Maybe it stumbles. Maybe it has a brilliant week and a brutal one and we white-knuckle the whole thing. I don’t know yet — that’s the entire point. I take the risk; you get a front-row seat.

Why I’d trust me on this and not the ad

I did something like this before — years ago, with crypto, when everyone swore it was free money falling from the sky. Instead of guessing or repeating what everyone else said, I tested it honestly and let the result be whatever it was. That one experiment taught me more than any guru ever did, and it’s part of why I’d rather run a real test than hand you a confident opinion.

I’m not an emotional trader chasing a thrill. I’ve spent over 30 years — since 1994 — watching people get hurt by money promises that sounded too good to be true and were. This is me running the experiment so you don’t have to risk your own grocery money finding out.

Here’s how you watch it with me

The whole thing plays out chapter by chapter, and the chapters land in my free daily email, The Daily Money Brief. Every trading day I’ll tell you what the AI did, why it claims it did it, and where the score stands against the boring buy-the-whole-market option. Up days, down days, and the “it just sat in cash and did nothing” days — all of it, no editing out the parts that don’t flatter anyone.

Subscribe free and follow along: getoutofdebt.org/subscribe

It’s free. No credit card, no pitch, no upsell — just the experiment, delivered straight, so we can both find out together what an AI does with a thousand real dollars.

The first move is days away. Get in now and you’ll see it from the very first trade.

— Steve

My advice is only ever input — you’re the one who decides what to do with your own money. I’m just doing the experiment out loud so you can see the math the ads hope you never run.

There is a man who gave away enough money to buy a house and two good cars. He has no house and no cars. He got nothing for it. No product. No photo. No date. Not even a conversation. He simply sent the money to a stranger — and the sending itself was the entire point.

That’s not a scam victim. That’s a fetish called financial domination — “findom” — and the men who practice it hand over cash, sometimes their whole paycheck, to receive absolutely nothing in return.

Your first reaction is the right one for the wrong reason. You want to laugh. Or wince. Or close the tab.

Don’t. Because almost everything you just assumed about that man is wrong, and the corrections are what should stop you cold.

You assumed he’s being scammed. Mostly, he isn’t — he chooses this, eyes open, and would do it again tomorrow.

You assumed it’s a sex thing that has nothing to do with you. It’s a money thing, and it has everything to do with you.

You assumed he could just stop. He’ll tell you himself he can’t: “for me, it’s an addiction. I’ve tried everything to get past it, but nothing works.”

Here is the part that genuinely unsettled me, after thirty years sitting across from people drowning in debt. Strip away the kink and findom isn’t strange at all. It’s the most honest picture of debt I’ve ever seen — because there’s no car, no vacation, no thing to point at. There’s only the feeling the money bought, and the receipt. It’s your debt with the disguise pulled off.

The man who gave away a house can see exactly what his money bought him: nothing but a feeling. You can’t see yours, because yours came wrapped in groceries and gadgets and “I earned this.” Same feeling. Same machinery. He just can’t hide from his receipt, and you can.

I spent this week working out exactly how that machinery runs — the four stages it moves through, why “just stop” is useless, and the one thing that actually gets a person free. It’s more hopeful than it sounds, and it is almost certainly running in some corner of your own life right now.

I put all of it in two pieces. Read them with one question in mind — not “how could anyone do that?” but the one that actually changes your life: where’s my disguise?

Findom Took My Savings and I Couldn’t Stop — for the person living it right now and too ashamed to say so out loud. The gentlest first step I know how to build.

The Four Stages of Sexual Financial Domination — the full map of those four stages, and the way out, with the research behind it.

— Steve

If this made you look at someone — or yourself — a little differently, forward it. You might be the one who hands them the door.

Let me tell you what almost nobody stops to ask first.

Just because the SBA says you owe the money doesn’t mean you actually do — or that you owe what they say.

Millions of small-business owners took an SBA EIDL — the Economic Injury Disaster Loan — to survive COVID. Those were a lifeline when the world shut down. Now they’re in repayment, the SBA’s hardship break has wound down, and defaulted loans are getting handed to the U.S. Treasury to collect. As of April 2026, the SBA had shipped 562,000 pandemic loans off to Treasury, and it’s been sending delinquent EIDLs over since last fall.

And in the rush to collect on that mountain, the details get sloppy. I’ve spent 30 years watching how collection machines work — I ran a credit counseling organization, and I’ve documented financial predators the whole way. When a government agency processes hundreds of thousands of files at once, mistakes happen. The amount can be wrong. They can try to collect from the person when only the business was on the hook. They can come after you for a personal guarantee you never actually signed.

The detail that changes everything

Here’s the one most borrowers don’t know: on COVID EIDL, a personal guarantee was only required for loans over $200,000. If your loan was $200,000 or less and you didn’t sign a personal guarantee, the SBA’s claim is generally limited to your business assets — not your house, not your personal savings, not your retirement.

So when a collector implies they can take everything you own over a $90,000 EIDL, the right reaction isn’t panic. It’s: “Show me what I actually signed.” That’s not splitting hairs. That’s the difference between losing your home and losing nothing personal at all. And it’s exactly the kind of thing a scared person, staring at an official-looking letter, will never think to question on their own.

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This is too nuanced for a general lawyer — or for you alone

This is why I keep landing in the same place: you don’t want just any attorney, and you definitely don’t want a “debt relief specialist” who isn’t a lawyer at all. You want someone who actually does SBA and federal debt-collection work — who knows how to read the loan file, challenge the amount, demand the documents, and force the SBA to prove its case instead of just accepting the number on the letter.

The questions that matter here are specific: Was a personal guarantee even required? Was it actually signed? Is the balance right? Has the debt been properly transferred to Treasury? What are your hearing rights, and what’s the deadline? A generalist won’t know to ask those. A specialist will.

The good news nobody mentions: your lawyer can be anywhere

And here’s the part that’s a genuine relief, because it means you’re not stuck with whoever happens to be in your town:

Because this is a federal matter, the attorney usually doesn’t have to be licensed in your state. Under the Agency Practice Act (5 U.S.C. § 500), a lawyer in good standing in any state can represent you before a federal agency like the SBA or Treasury. So the best SBA-debt specialist for your situation might be three states away — and that’s fine. (The one exception: if your case lands in a specific federal court — say, a bankruptcy filing — local court rules can apply, and your attorney handles that.)

That matters. It means you can go find someone who does this all day, instead of settling for the only lawyer in your zip code who’s even heard of an EIDL.

And about those “we’ll make it disappear” calls

The moment Treasury started collecting, a swarm of “SBA loan relief” outfits appeared, promising to wipe out your debt for an upfront fee. I know this playbook cold — it’s the same advance-fee con, rebranded for a new crisis. Three quick gut-checks before you pay anyone:

First, confirm they’re actually a lawyer. Look them up at your state bar — status, year admitted, discipline history. A “consultant” or “specialist” who isn’t a licensed attorney can’t represent you before the SBA, Treasury, or a court. Period.

Second, run from upfront fees and guarantees. Nobody can promise to settle your loan for “pennies on the dollar.” And the FTC rule that bans advance fees protects consumer debt — your EIDL is business debt, so those outfits may not be covered at all. You have weaker protection here, not stronger. Scrutinize harder.

Third, remember who the SBA is. It’s the creditor. It will never charge you to apply and will never represent you against itself. Anyone emailing from an address that isn’t an official sba.gov one, promising “forgiveness for a fee,” is telling you exactly who they are.

I wrote the full playbook on GetOutOfDebt.org — every attorney type, the bankruptcy and settlement reality, your Treasury hearing rights and deadlines, and the complete scam-spotting checklist. You can read it here: How to Find an Attorney to Help With Your SBA EIDL Loan.

If you took an EIDL and you’re lying awake over it, hear me on this: a letter saying you owe money is a claim, not a verdict. Make them prove it. You ran a business through a once-in-a-century disruption — that took nerve, not recklessness. Don’t let a scary letter or a smooth-talking “specialist” rush you into paying something you might not even owe.

And if you know another business owner getting these notices, forward this to them. The reminder that “you might not actually owe this” could be the most valuable thing anyone tells them this year.

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— Steve

Everything here comes from 30 years of helping people through exactly this. But it’s input for your decision, not the decision itself. Talk to a licensed attorney who knows SBA debt, look hard at your numbers, and choose what serves your future.

Last month the Federal Reserve Bank of New York put out its quarterly numbers, and for the first time in a long time I read them and felt something I don’t usually feel.

I felt stuck.

Let me show you what I saw, and then I’ll tell you honestly where I’ve landed — because I’d rather be straight with you than pretend I have a tidy answer.

The numbers

Total household debt hit $18.8 trillion. A record. Both halves of it — the mortgage you carry to keep a roof over your head, and everything else: the cards, the car, the student loans — both halves are climbing, quarter after quarter, like a tide that doesn’t go back out.

Credit card balances are sitting at $1.25 trillion, up almost 6% from a year ago. But here’s the number that actually stopped me: 13.1% of credit card balances are now ninety or more days past due. That’s the worst it’s been since 2011. We were still crawling out of the last financial crisis the last time people were this far behind.

And while all of that climbs, the thing that’s supposed to pay it down — your wages, in real terms, after inflation eats its share — keeps slipping away. The personal savings rate just dropped to 2.6%. People aren’t saving. They’re spending down whatever cushion they had left just to stay even.

There is a name for it, “survival debt.” Not vacations. Not splurges. Groceries. Utilities. Prescriptions. People are putting food on credit cards at 21% interest because the paycheck doesn’t reach the end of the month anymore.

The part that’s eating at me

Here’s the honest truth, and it’s why I’m writing this the way I am instead of giving you my usual five steps.

The math I’ve spent thirty years explaining assumes there’s room. It assumes that if I show you the numbers clearly enough — what the interest actually costs you, what bankruptcy actually does, why protecting your retirement matters more than your credit score — you can make a move. Cut here, restructure there, file if you have to, and come out the other side.

But you can’t restructure your way out of wages that don’t cover the basics. You can’t budget your way out of math that was broken before you ever swiped the card. When the gap between what life costs and what you earn keeps widening, there is no clever spreadsheet that closes it. I can teach you everything I know and it doesn’t refill the well.

And the people who’ll get hurt worst aren’t the ones reading a newsletter like this. They’re the ones in denial — the ones who genuinely believe next month will be the month it turns around, who are one car repair or one medical bill away from the whole thing coming down, and who would never in a hundred years open an email about debt.

So what warning do I give someone who can’t hear it yet? That’s the question I keep turning over. I don’t have a good answer. I’m not going to insult you by inventing one.

Where I’ve actually landed

Here’s the most honest thing I can tell you, and it’s smaller than I wish it were.

I can’t fix the economy. I can’t put real wages back where they were. I can’t make the tide go back out. What I can do — what I’ve decided is still worth doing — is be the person who’s standing there when you fall. Not to shame you. Not to sell you anything. Just to catch you, and to make sure that when you’re ready to look at it, the real information is here and it’s honest.

Because the cruelest part of debt has never been the math. It’s the shame. It’s the voice that tells you this is a moral failing, that you should have known better, that everybody else is fine and it’s just you. That voice is a lie, and it’s a lie that keeps people in denial right up until the crash. The data could not be clearer: this is happening to millions of people at once, and almost none of it is about character.

So if you’re reading this and the numbers describe your life — you are not your debt. You did not cause the gap between wages and prices. And the day you’re ready to stop pretending and start looking, I’ll be right here with the real math and no judgment. That’s not nothing. On the hard days I have to remind myself it’s not nothing.

If you know someone who’s pretending everything is fine — someone you’re quietly worried about — maybe don’t send them a lecture. Just send them this, with a note that says “no pressure, I’m just here.” Sometimes that’s the only warning that ever lands: knowing somebody’s ready to catch you.

I’ll keep showing you the data and letting you decide what to do with it. That’s the deal. It always has been.

— Steve

This is one man’s honest read after thirty years, not instruction. Only you know your full situation, and nobody — me included — gets to tell you what to do with your money. I’m just here.

Beth Ford runs Land O'Lakes — a farmer-owned cooperative whose network touches half the harvested acres in America. Last week, she described farmers calling her in tears.

People whose families have worked the same land for four generations, saying: "I'm going to be the one that couldn't make it."

I hear those exact words every day. Different people, different debt, same shame. The farmer losing the family land. The parent who can't explain the credit card balance. The retiree watching the numbers not work. All of them convinced it's their fault.

It's not.

The number that should stop you cold

The median American farm — the one right in the middle — lost $1,830 last year. Negative. The typical farm in America does not make money from farming.

I want you to sit with that for a second, because it changes everything about how you think about your food.

Ninety percent of family farms and ranches rely on off-farm income just to survive. The farmer growing your wheat is probably also working a second job to keep the lights on. Less than 5% of farms are profitable. And farm bankruptcies jumped 46% in 2025 — 315 Chapter 12 filings, with the Midwest up 70% and Wisconsin up 700%.

Total farm debt? Heading toward a record $624.7 billion in 2026. Interest expenses: a record $33 billion. Farmers are taking out 40% more operating loans than last year — and those loans are 30% larger.

The math is broken. And I can tell you exactly when I've seen this pattern before: every single time I've sat across from someone at their kitchen table, watching them realize the debt got bigger while they were trying to make it smaller.

What broke the math

It wasn't one thing. It was everything, all at once.

The inputs got more expensive. Since 2020: interest costs up 71%. Labor up 47%. Fertilizer up 37%. Chemicals up 25%. Seeds up 18%. Tariffs raised fertilizer costs $100 per ton and made steel parts for tractors more expensive. The tools you need to farm cost more — and the markets you used to sell to closed.

The labor disappeared. Two-thirds of U.S. agricultural workers are noncitizen immigrants. Immigration restrictions created staffing gaps so severe that produce rots in the field because there's nobody to pick it.

The safety net got thinner. USDA programs designed for exactly this kind of downturn have been reduced at exactly the moment they're needed most.

And the people selling seeds don't have competition. Four companies — Bayer, Corteva, Syngenta, and BASF — control 60% of the global commercial seed market, 75% of plant breeding research, and 76% of agrochemical sales. In U.S. corn and soybeans, two of them hold 75-80% of the market. That's a textbook duopoly. Corteva raised seed prices 4-6% last year and grew royalty income by 40%.

The FTC sued two of those companies in 2022 for running illegal "pay-to-block" programs that prevented generic pesticides from reaching farmers even after patents expired. The lawsuit is still active.

John Deere and one competitor control 90% of the large tractor market. Deere paid $99 million in a settlement this year for restricting farmers from repairing their own equipment.

This is the modern company store. You can't farm without seeds, chemicals, and equipment. A handful of corporations control all three. And they're raising prices while their customers go bankrupt.

Follow the money

Here's the part that made me write this.

While the median farmer loses money, the NCREIF Farmland Index has delivered 10.15% average annual returns since 1992. Farmland is one of the best-performing asset classes in modern history — with half the volatility of stocks. Bill Gates owns 242,000-275,000 acres. Nuveen (which manages retirement savings for teachers) controls $13.1 billion across 3 million acres. Private equity investment in U.S. farmland doubled to $16.6 billion between 2020 and 2023.

Seventy-nine percent of all rented farmland is now owned by non-farmers. Land values hit a record $5,570 per acre in 2024. The investors earn the appreciation. The farmer pays the rent and loses money.

Four beef packers control 85% of the U.S. beef market. Five grain traders buy 87% of the corn crop. Crop producers received 2.5 cents of every food dollar last year. Less than three pennies.

Farm subsidies? The top 10% of recipients received 65% of commodity payments. The bottom 80% split 9%. Agribusiness spent $178 million lobbying in 2023 — more than defense or oil and gas.

I traced all seven groups that profit from this collapse — institutional investors, seed monopolies, the financial sector, food processors, foreign buyers, subsidy captors, and commodity speculators. Every claim is sourced from USDA data, GAO audits, FTC lawsuits, and SEC filings.

The part nobody wants to talk about

Farmers die by suicide at 3.5 times the rate of the general population. The male suicide rate among farmers: 52.1 per 100,000, compared to 32.0 for working-age men overall.

The contributing factors read like a debt counselor's intake form: falling income, rising costs, mounting debt, and the suffocating feeling that you're the one who failed.

Michigan just cut funding for its farmer suicide prevention program. Farmers now pay $150 an hour for counseling — while losing money farming. If you or someone you know is in crisis, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 (call or text 988). The Farm Aid hotline at 1-800-FARM-AID connects farmers to financial and legal resources in every state.

Why I'm telling you this

I write about debt. That's what I've done for 30 years. And what's happening to American farmers is the clearest, most thoroughly documented example of how systems create debt — and then profit from it — that I've ever seen.

The farmer can't choose a different seed company (there are only two that matter). Can't choose a different equipment manufacturer (there are only two). Can't negotiate with the four companies that buy 85% of the beef. Can't compete with institutional investors paying cash for land at $5,570 an acre.

The math was broken before they planted the first seed.

And the part that connects to your life? When farmers go under, food prices rise. Food prices are projected up 3.6% in 2026. Coffee and tea already up 12%. Meat up 5%. One in four Americans are putting groceries on credit cards and carrying the balance.

The farmer at one end and the family at the checkout are caught in the same broken math. Neither one failed. The system did.

Debt is math, not morality. For the farmer losing four generations of land. For you, watching your grocery total climb. For all of us who were told this was personal

failure when it was structural design.

Steve Rhode has been helping people get out of debt since 1994. He founded one of the first nonprofit credit counseling organizations in the U.S. and has been featured in the Washington Post, New York Times, and on NBC, CBS, and NPR. Read more at GetOutOfDebt.org.

Read the full investigation on GetOutOfDebt.org:

American Farmers Are Going Broke — And It's About to Hit Your Wallet

Seven Groups Exposed Who Profit When American Farmers Go Broke — Follow the Money

I’m not going to tell you what to believe about tariffs. I’m going to show you where to look, and you can decide for yourself.

I still run into people — good, smart people — who believe that foreign countries paid the tariffs. They believe it because they heard it repeated so many times that it became background truth. Not because they investigated it. Not because they read a study. Because repetition is powerful, and most of us don’t have time to chase down Federal Reserve working papers on a Tuesday afternoon.

So I did it for you.

What follows is every major study I could find on who actually pays when the U.S. government puts tariffs on imported goods. These aren’t opinion pieces. They’re from the Federal Reserve, the Congressional Budget Office, Harvard, Columbia, the University of Chicago, Yale, and the American Economic Review — one of the most respected peer-reviewed economics journals in the world.

Every link in this email takes you to the actual study. Not a news article about the study. The study itself. Read the abstracts. Read the methodology. Reach your own conclusion.

I already reached mine.

How a tariff actually works

Before we get to who pays, let’s establish something simple that isn’t controversial.

When the U.S. government imposes a tariff on Chinese-made goods, a U.S. company — the importer — files paperwork with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). The importer writes a check to CBP. Not the Chinese company. Not the Chinese government. The American importer.

This isn’t disputed by anyone. It’s how customs law works. The importer then decides whether to absorb that cost or pass it on to you through higher prices.

In fiscal year 2025, CBP collected $216.7 billion in tariff revenue. Every dollar came from a U.S. importer of record. That’s not my analysis. That’s the government’s own accounting.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confirmed this on MSNBC in August 2025. When asked who pays tariffs, he said: “Well, the check is written to the person who receives it at the dock, in the U.S.”

So the mechanical question — who writes the check — has a clear answer. The more interesting question is: does the foreign exporter lower their price enough to offset the tariff, so the American consumer doesn’t feel it?

That’s what the studies looked at.

The Federal Reserve studies

Not one study. Seven.

1. The New York Federal Reserve — “Who Is Paying for the 2025 U.S. Tariffs?” (February 2026)

Researchers Mary Amiti, Chris Flanagan, Sebastian Heise, and Columbia economist David Weinstein analyzed trade data from January through November 2025. Their finding: U.S. firms and consumers paid 94% of the tariff costs from January through August. By November, that dropped to 86% — meaning foreign exporters absorbed at most 14%.

Their words: “Our results show that the bulk of the tariff incidence continues to fall on U.S. firms and consumers.”

For every 10% tariff increase, foreign exporters lowered their prices by only 0.6 to 1.4 percentage points. The rest landed on American buyers.

2. The Federal Reserve Board — “Detecting Tariff Effects on Consumer Prices in Real Time, Part II” (April 2026)

Researchers Robert Minton, Madeleine Ray, and Mariano Somale tracked consumer prices through February 2026. They found that tariffs raised core goods prices by 3.1%. Their phrase for the pass-through rate: “full dollar-for-dollar.” Meaning: if the tariff added a dollar to the import cost, the consumer paid a dollar more. At approximately seven months after implementation, the pass-through was “effectively complete.”

Their most striking finding: tariffs “explain the entirety of excess inflation in the core goods category.” Without tariffs, goods inflation would have returned to pre-pandemic levels.

3. The Federal Reserve Board — “The Slow Climb: How Tariffs Gradually Raised Retail Prices in 2025” (March 2026)

This one used item-level retail price data from 200,000 U.S. households. Chinese imports rose 8.5% year-over-year. Goods from other countries rose over 5%. U.S.-made products stayed below 2%. The pattern was gradual — “prices of everyday household items began increasing a few months after tariffs were implemented” — but relentless.

4. The Dallas Federal Reserve — “Effects of Realized Tariff Changes on PCE Prices” (May 2026)

The Dallas Fed looked at what actually happened to prices using realized tariff rates — meaning the duties that were actually collected, not just the rates that were announced. Their finding: “If retailers’ acquisition costs for a good rise $1 because of 5. The San Francisco Federal Reserve — “The Effects of Tariffs on the Components of Inflation” (March 2026)

A 10% tariff increased goods prices by approximately 1.2 percentage points, peaking at year two. And here’s the part that surprised me: tariff costs eventually bleed into services too. Services inflation showed a delayed response, peaking at year three. Tariffs don’t just raise the price of things. They raise the price of everything that uses things.

6. The Richmond Federal Reserve — “US Import Tariffs in 2025” (Working Paper 26-08)

Pass-through of tariffs into import prices was “close to one hundred percent.” Foreign exporters made “negligible adjustments” to their prices.

7. Federal Reserve Governor Waller — Speech, April 17, 2026

Governor Waller said that after removing tariff impacts from published inflation numbers, underlying inflation was approaching the Fed’s 2% target. Tariffs were the primary reason inflation stayed above target. Without them, we’d be where the Fed wanted us to be.

The peer-reviewed academic research

These went through the full academic review process — submitted, critiqued by other economists, revised, and published in top journals. This is the gold standard for economic evidence.

Amiti, Redding, and Weinstein (Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2019): Analyzed the 2018 tariffs. “The full incidence of the tariff falls on domestic consumers, with a reduction in U.S. real income of $1.4 billion per month.” Complete pass-through.

Cavallo and Gopinath (American Economic Review: Insights, 2021): “This nearly complete passthrough of tariffs to the total price paid by importers suggests the tariff incidence has fallen largely on the US.” Gopinath later became Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund.

Flaaen, Hortaçsu, and Tintelnot (American Economic Review, 2020): The washing machine study. This one’s worth pausing on.

The washing machine that explains everything

In 2018, the government put tariffs on imported washing machines. University of Chicago and Federal Reserve economists tracked exactly what happened.

Washing machine prices rose 12%. But here’s the twist — dryer prices rose 12% too. Dryers weren’t subject to tariffs at all. Manufacturers figured that if everything’s confusing, they could raise prices on both.

The tariffs created 1,800 American jobs. Good.

They cost American consumers $1.5 billion per year. The Treasury collected $82 million.

That’s $820,000 per job created. Per year. Paid by American families buying washing machines and dryers.

This was published in the American Economic Review. It’s not an opinion. It’s math.

The non-partisan institutions

The Congressional Budget Office — “Updated Projections of Tariff Effects” (November 2025): U.S. consumers bear 95% of the cost of 2025 tariffs. The CBO is the non-partisan scorekeeper Congress relies on for budget analysis. They don’t have a political agenda. Their job is math.

The Yale Budget Lab — Tariff Tracker: Estimated $1,800 to $2,400 per household in 2025. And they found something important about who gets hurt most: the bottom 10% of earners lost 2.7% of their income to tariffs. The top 10% lost 0.8%. Same tariff. Three times the pain if you’re poor.

The Tax Foundation — Tariff Tracker: $1,000 to $1,500 per household. The Tax Foundation is widely respected by both parties.

The Tax Policy Center — Tariff Tracker: The bottom 20% of earners saw their federal tax rate rise by 1.9 percentage points from tariffs alone. The tariff is functionally a sales tax on imported goods — and like all sales taxes, it takes a bigger bite from smaller paychecks.

The Joint Economic Committee — “Families to Pay $2,500+” (March 2026): Using Treasury revenue data and CBO methodology, they calculated that if tariff collections continued at January 2026 levels, American families would pay over $2,500 each in 2026. Their earlier report documented that families had already paid $1,745 each through January.

I should note: the JEC reports come from Democratic staff. But their methodology is transparent — they used Treasury’s own revenue numbers and CBO’s pass-through estimates. You can check their math.

Here is a video I made in 2024.

Why I’m writing this

I don’t write about politics. I’ve spent 30 years sitting across the kitchen table from people who are scared about money, and politics is rarely the thing that helps them.

But I write about financial literacy. And financial literacy means understanding where your money goes, who took it, and whether what you were told about it was accurate.

You were told foreign countries would pay the tariffs. Every major research institution in the country — institutions that span the political spectrum from the American Enterprise Institute to the Center for American Progress — found that you paid them.

This isn’t about blame. It’s about the habit of accepting financial claims without checking. And that habit will cost you far more than tariffs ever will.

The next time someone tells you a policy “won’t cost you anything” — whether it’s a tariff, a tax plan, a new fee structure, or a debt relief program — I want you to ask one question: where’s the study?

Not the press conference. Not the tweet. Not the talking point you heard so many times you stopped questioning it. The peer-reviewed, independently verified, show-your-math study.

Every link in this email is a primary source. I’m not asking you to believe me. I’m asking you to read them and decide for yourself.

That’s financial literacy. That’s what nobody profits from teaching you.

Steve Rhode has been helping people get out of debt since 1994. He founded one of the first nonprofit credit counseling organizations in the U.S. and has been featured in the Washington Post, New York Times, and on NBC, CBS, and NPR. Read more at GetOutOfDebt.org.

Primary sources referenced in this article

Federal Reserve Studies:

• NY Fed: Who Is Paying for the 2025 U.S. Tariffs?

• Fed Board: Detecting Tariff Effects, Part II

• Fed Board: The Slow Climb

• Dallas Fed: Realized Tariff Changes and Prices

• SF Fed: Tariffs and Inflation Components

• Richmond Fed: US Import Tariffs in 2025

• Governor Waller: Tariffs and Inflation Speech

Peer-Reviewed Academic Papers:

• Amiti, Redding, Weinstein — 2018 Trade War (NBER/JEP)

• Cavallo & Gopinath — Tariff Passthrough (NBER/AER:Insights)

• Flaaen, Hortaçsu, Tintelnot — Washing Machines (AER)

• Flaaen & Pierce — Manufacturing Employment (Fed Board)

Government & Non-Partisan:

• CBO: Tariff Projections

• CBP: $200 Billion in Tariff Revenue

• JEC: $2,500+ Per Family

• Yale Budget Lab: Tariff Effects

• Tax Foundation: Tariff Tracker

• Tax Policy Center: Who Pays

I’ve been writing about money for over 30 years. I’ve uncovered scams, exposed debt industry tricks, broken down policy changes before they hit the news. But every once in a while I come across something so simple, so obvious once you see it, that I genuinely get mad nobody talks about it.

This is one of those.

Your cell phone bill. The one that’s somewhere around $96 to $141 a month depending on whose data you believe.

You’re paying for a signal. Radio waves hitting a tower, bouncing to your phone. That’s literally what you’re buying.

The person standing next to you in the grocery store is getting that exact same signal — from the exact same tower, on the exact same network — for $25 a month.

Not a worse signal. Not fewer bars. Not some second-rate network cobbled together in a garage. The same physical towers. The same 5G. The same coverage map.

They just know something you don’t. And now you’re about to know it too.

How Is This Possible?

I need you to learn one term. Just one. MVNO. It stands for Mobile Virtual Network Operator. And once you know what it means, you'll never overpay for your phone again. An MVNO is a company that leases space on Verizon, AT&T, or T-Mobile's network and sells you the exact same service at a fraction of the price. Some of them are actually owned by those same carriers.

Here’s who runs on whose network:

On Verizon’s towers: Visible ($25/mo), Xfinity Mobile, Spectrum Mobile, Total Wireless

On T-Mobile’s towers: Mint Mobile ($30/mo), Metro by T-Mobile ($40/mo), Boost Mobile, Google Fi

On AT&T’s towers: Cricket Wireless ($35/mo), Consumer Cellular ($40/mo), US Mobile ($25/mo)

Cricket is literally owned by AT&T. Metro is literally owned by T-Mobile. Visible is literally owned by Verizon. These are not off-brand knockoffs. They’re budget lines run by the same companies that charge you double on their main plans.

Let Me Show You the Math

Here’s what a single unlimited line costs on a major carrier versus the same network through an MVNO:

Verizon $65/mo → Visible $25/mo (same Verizon network) = You save $480/year

T-Mobile $85/mo → Mint Mobile $30/mo (same T-Mobile network) = You save $660/year

AT&T $76/mo → US Mobile $25/mo (same AT&T network) = You save $612/year

And those MVNO prices? Many of them include taxes. Your major carrier’s advertised price? It doesn’t. Wireless taxes just hit a record 27.6% of the average bill in 2025 according to the Tax Foundation. That “$65 Verizon plan” is really $71 to $80 after taxes. That “$25 Visible plan” stays at $25. Everything included.

For a family? WhistleOut estimated in 2025 that the average American family overpays by $2,200 a year compared to what they’d spend on the same networks through MVNOs.

Twenty-two hundred dollars. A year. For the same signal.

"But Won't the Service Be Worse?"

This is the question I hear most. And I understand the hesitation. It feels too good to be true.

Here’s what the data actually shows.

J.D. Power launched their first-ever study measuring MVNO customer satisfaction in 2025 — surveying 56,450 real customers. The result? MVNOs scored high marks. Consumer Cellular has been ranked #1 in customer satisfaction among value wireless carriers 18 consecutive times. Mint Mobile topped the prepaid category.

The only real difference is something called “data deprioritization.” During heavy network congestion — think Times Square on New Year’s Eve or a packed stadium — the carrier might temporarily slow MVNO customers’ data speeds to prioritize their premium postpaid customers. In real-world testing, Visible users on Verizon’s network experienced this slowdown only about 10% of the time. And even then, speeds were still usable.

If you live in a rural area, a suburb, or frankly anywhere that isn’t the middle of a downtown at rush hour? You will almost certainly never notice a difference.

You’re paying a premium for a priority you’ll rarely need.

Why This Matters if You’re Dealing With Debt

Let me connect this to something I care deeply about.

If you’re carrying $5,000 in credit card debt at 24% interest, and you switch from a $141 monthly phone bill to a $25 plan on the same network, you just freed up $1,392 a year. Put that toward your debt and you’ll eliminate it roughly two and a half years faster.

But here’s what really gets me. People who are struggling with debt often have damaged credit. And you know what major carriers do? They run a credit check. If your credit is shot, you either get denied or you pay a deposit.

MVNOs and prepaid plans don’t run credit checks. You buy the service. You use it. If you stop paying, you just lose service — it doesn’t go to collections, it doesn’t further damage your credit. There’s no contract. No early termination fee. No penalty.

For people rebuilding their financial lives, this isn’t just a cheaper phone plan. It’s a phone plan that can’t hurt you.

The Prepaid Question

People ask me whether prepaid plans are really cheaper than monthly billed plans. The answer is yes, and it’s not close.

AT&T’s own prepaid unlimited plan starts at $35 a month. Their postpaid equivalent? $65.99. Same company. Same towers. Same everything. Almost double the price if you choose the “regular” option.

Across the industry, prepaid plans run 40 to 60% cheaper than postpaid. Consumer Reports found that 60% of people who switched providers in the past year saved money, and nearly a third saved more than $40 a month.

The trade-offs are real but manageable. Most prepaid plans don’t offer device financing — but that’s actually a feature, not a bug. Device financing is what turns a $25/month phone plan into a $95/month payment. Bring your own phone (most carrier phones unlock after 60 to 90 days or when paid off) and you keep the savings.What I’d Tell My Own Family

If someone in my family came to me and said they were paying $100+ a month for their cell phone, I’d sit them down and show them exactly what I just showed you.

I’d say: look up who your carrier is. Then find the MVNO that runs on the same network. Switch. Keep your number — it transfers for free. Keep your phone. Keep your coverage. Keep your 5G.

Just stop paying the markup.

Metro by T-Mobile even launched a 5-year price guarantee — your rate on talk, text, and 5G data won’t increase for five years. That kind of certainty matters when you’re trying to build a budget you can actually stick to.

And if money is truly tight — if you qualify for SNAP, Medicaid, SSI, or your income is at or below 135% of the federal poverty line — the FCC’s Lifeline program still provides a $9.25 monthly discount on wireless service. Some carriers offer completely free basic plans through Lifeline.

This Is Why I Do This

One of the patterns I see over and over is this: people assume that spending less means getting less. That cheaper means worse.

Sometimes that’s true. But sometimes — and this is one of those times — cheaper just means you stopped paying someone else’s marketing budget.

The towers are the same. The signal is the same. The 5G is the same. You’re not downgrading anything. You’re just not overpaying anymore.

This is the kind of thing I live to find. It’s why I write this newsletter. Not the obvious stuff you can Google — the stuff that’s hiding in plain sight, costing real people real money, and nobody’s connecting the dots. That’s what Your Money Actually is for.

Now you know. And that’s worth something.

As always — this is what I’m seeing and what I’d tell my own family over dinner. Only you know your situation, your priorities, and what matters most. Take this as input, not instruction. Then do what makes sense for your life.

You know someone who’s paying too much for their phone. You’re thinking of them right now. Send them this. Sometimes the most helpful thing you can do for someone is show them an option they didn’t know they had.

Steve Rhode is a consumer debt expert who has been involved in helping people since 1994. If you’d like a free, confidential conversation about your financial situation, talk to Damon Day — he’s the person I trust most for honest, unbiased guidance.