A joint post with Robin Finney of Confessions of a Bankrupt Dreamer.

The question

“Did I fail? Yes. Was I a failure? No. That distinction matters when you’re feeling like the lowest person on earth.”

— Robin Finney, Confessions of a Bankrupt Dreamer

Robin Finney and I asked ourselves the same question: what advice do you have for someone feeling like a failure and struggling for years to avoid bankruptcy? We’ve both lived it. We both filed.

Robin writes Confessions of a Bankrupt Dreamer, “lessons and tales from a cash-poor, rich-in-experience nomad.” She’s a coach who lives out of a suitcase and travels the world, and she writes about her own bankruptcy under her own name, a topic, as she puts it, that isn’t widely talked about. She came up with the name for her publication while she was finishing her own bankruptcy, and she spent years moving through the shame before she shared it publicly. You can follow Robin at @wanderingaunt.

My bankruptcy was in 1990. Robin’s was discharged in November 2024. That’s thirty-four years apart, and you’ll see how much of it still sounds the same.

Robin’s answer comes first, then mine. Neither of us read the other’s before writing.

Robin’s answer

In 2022, my debt became uncontrollable. I had nearly maxed out every credit card I had, and the little income I was making was going straight to minimum payments, which were mostly interest at that point. I wasn’t making a dent in my debt. I felt so much shame towards myself. How could someone who was known to be responsible be in a position like this?

I was also carrying a lot of animosity towards the programs I invested in that hadn’t paid off financially in the way I believed they would. Most of all, I was embarrassed and afraid for people to know how bad my situation had gotten. I had a few close friends who knew the raw details. And I knew my energy was carrying the weight of it.

I was traveling to Vermont to support a retreat. My travels were paid for, which helped, and I had a free place to stay. When I arrived at the bus station, I started talking to a curious couple who began asking questions about my life. I mentioned that I was a nomad and had just left my sister’s house, which had been my home base for 4 years.

The woman looked at me and said, “Oh, so you’re homeless.”

It hadn’t even occurred to me that what she was saying had some truth to it. No, I did not have a house of my own. And at that point, I no longer had a home base. I was truly living the suitcase life, drifting from one place to the next, sleeping on whatever couch, blow-up mattress, or bed a friend would offer me.

I was a nomad by choice, and hearing those words struck me differently.

While talking to a close friend on the phone, I started having an anxiety attack thinking about all the bills I had due. And then she asked me the question I was afraid to ask myself. “What if you stop paying your credit cards?”

That question felt like a dagger.

How could I stop paying my credit cards? The worst scenarios ran through my mind. Collectors would start calling, someone would try to sue me, they’d confiscate what little things I had, take my passport, and then I would be stuck in the U.S. forever. Would they have actually taken my passport? No. But my fear believed the worst-case scenario.

I realized while talking to her that I was at the point of continuing to pay credit cards or eat. When your basic needs are at stake, you start to see things differently.

So I made a choice. I was going to stop paying my bills. At least for a few months until I could figure out what I was going to do. A few months turned into 15.

The collection calls began, but I wasn’t dying from it.

I spoke with a small-business lawyer whom a friend recommended. She was in a different state but took the time to listen to me and advise me. She recommended bankruptcy as an option for me. An option that I had been brushing off for 2 years. It felt like the nuclear option.

Maybe there was a safe, efficient way to move through all of this without my worst-case scenario coming true. Once I finally chose this path for myself, I felt lighter. Naming the truth of my situation and making an empowering choice that was best for me gave me a boost.

The bankruptcy process wasn’t smooth by any means. I was considered a red flag case because I had accumulated significant debt without having assets to show for it. I didn’t own a house or car, and I didn’t have investments or savings. Much of my debt came from coaching programs I’d invested in for my business, which weren’t tangible assets. The court wanted to understand where the money had gone, especially since there was nothing of significant value to sell to repay creditors.

In the end, it all worked in my favor.

When my bankruptcy was finally discharged in November 2024, I felt freedom for the first time. It was truly one of the most empowering choices I’ve made, and one I wish I had made sooner. We’re not ready until we’re ready, though.

Bankruptcy is not a light decision, and it may not be for everyone. For me, it was the decision that set me free. And not just from my debt, but from all the shame and stigma I was carrying.

I spent years believing that bankruptcy meant I was a failure. What I came to realize was that choosing bankruptcy didn’t make me a failure. Did I fail? Yes. Was I a failure? No. That distinction matters when you’re feeling like the lowest person on earth. I was finally making a choice for myself rather than continuing to live in fear of what might happen or what others might think.

If you’re in a similar position, I want you to know that your financial circumstances do not define your worth. You can make mistakes, lose everything, and still have a future filled with possibility. You may not see a way forward right now, but that doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist. Give yourself permission to explore your options, ask for help, and make the choice that’s best for you. You are so much more than your debt.

Steve’s answer

You Are Not a Failure. Your Math Is Broken.

I filed bankruptcy in 1990. Around then, when my daughter was little, we went without so we could afford amoxicillin for her ear infection. After I filed, I spent about four years carrying the shame around like a second job.

So when someone tells me they feel like a failure after years of fighting to avoid bankruptcy, I don’t hear a stranger. I hear me. Here’s what I’d tell you, and it’s what I wish someone had told me.

You are not your debt.

Debt is math wrapped in emotion. The math is usually simple. More is going out than coming in, or something happened: a job loss, a medical bill, a divorce, a business that didn’t make it. The numbers broke. Debt is what’s left over when the math is broken. It’s a symptom, not a verdict on your character.

The emotion is the hard part. In my experience, money trouble is about 90 percent emotional and 10 percent arithmetic. That’s why smart, responsible, hardworking people stay stuck for years. It isn’t because they can’t add. It’s because shame tells them that if they just tried harder, sacrificed more, picked up one more shift, they could make it work. And if they can’t, something must be wrong with them.

Nothing is wrong with you. Something is wrong with the math.

Shame is a tool, and it isn’t yours.

I learned this one from the inside. After my own bankruptcy I founded Debt Counselors of America, and for years we told people what the whole industry told people: bankruptcy is the last resort. Pay what you owe. Do the responsible thing.

I had to unlearn that. A lot of what “everybody knows” about debt was shaped by the people who profit from you believing it. “Bankruptcy ruins your life.” “Honorable people pay their debts.” “Credit counseling is the responsible middle ground.” Say something often enough and it starts to sound like a fact.

Shame and guilt keep people paying on debts long after paying stops making sense. They keep people from asking questions. They are very effective collection tools. That doesn’t make them true.

Count what avoiding bankruptcy is costing you.

People who struggle for years to avoid bankruptcy usually believe they’re protecting something. Ask yourself what. Often the years of avoidance cost more than the thing being avoided.

I’ve seen people cash out retirement accounts that would usually have been protected in bankruptcy, then file anyway. I’ve seen people borrow from family, run up new cards to pay the old ones, skip the doctor, lose sleep, lose marriages. They spent five years trying to repair the past when they could have dealt with it and spent those five years building a future.

That isn’t a moral victory. It’s an expensive way to end up in the same place.

I’m not telling you to file. I don’t know your situation, and anyone who tells you what to do without knowing your numbers is probably selling something. What I am telling you is to stop treating bankruptcy as the thing you must avoid at any price and start treating it as one option on the table. Then compare the options honestly.

Get the information, then decide.

My approach since 1994 has been simple: get all the information so you can make the decision that’s right for you. Not right for your creditors, your brother-in-law, or the internet. You.

So talk to a bankruptcy attorney. Many offer a free consultation. It’s not a commitment. It’s information. Ask what filing would actually look like for you, what you’d keep, and what it would cost. Then set that next to what you’re doing now: how many more years of payments, how much more interest, how much more of your life. Look at both with clear eyes.

You may find you don’t need to file. You may find you should have filed three years ago. Either way, you’ll be deciding from facts instead of fear.

No sense wasting a perfectly good mistake.

If you got here partly through choices you regret, fine. Join the club. I have a lifetime membership. The question isn’t whether you made mistakes. It’s whether you learn from them or just keep punishing yourself for them.

Punishment isn’t learning. Four years of shame didn’t fix anything for me. What changed things was the day I decided I was done letting it define me. I had dealt with it. It was over. I was going to look forward instead of back.

Bankruptcy wasn’t the end of anything for me. It was the start of nearly everything I’ve done since. It was a catalyst, not a failure.

Redefine what winning looks like.

Plenty of people telling you how to succeed with money measure success in ways that may not fit your life. Paying off every last dollar no matter the cost isn’t the only honorable outcome. Neither is a perfect credit score.

What is success without some peace of mind? Without sleep? Without being present for the people you love instead of lying awake doing math that won’t work?

The future you end up with might not be the one you planned. It can still be the one you need. Better days are ahead, and I say that as someone who has been at the bottom, not someone looking down at it.

If it’s gotten really dark

If feeling like a failure has turned into feeling like you can’t go on, call or text 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. Do that and talk to the attorney. You don’t have to pick one. You deserve help with the feelings and help with the numbers at the same time.

You are not a failure. You’re a person whose math broke. Math can be fixed. And you are worth more than what you owe.

Where to go from here

Two people, one question, and neither of us read the other before writing. Robin filed in this decade, while living out of a suitcase. I filed in 1990 with a little girl at home. And we both landed in the same place: you can fail without being a failure. Robin put it in eight words.

We both carried the shame for years, Robin before she filed and me after. If that’s where you are, you don’t have to carry it alone or decide anything today. Get the information, and let it be your choice.

If you’ve been there, or you’re there now, Robin and I would both like to hear from you. Comment, reply, or forward this to the person who needs to hear it. And if Robin’s half stayed with you, go subscribe to Confessions of a Bankrupt Dreamer. Newer writers grow one reader at a time.

Steve

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People ask me if AI is actually making anyone money, or if it’s all chatbots and hype. Here’s my honest answer, from my own business.

I’m a 67-year-old retired guy, and I run a small Amazon FBA business. Just me. No employees, no office, no team. I’m not going to tell you what I sell, because that’s not the point, and frankly it doesn’t matter. What matters is this: my business now gets work done every day that, not long ago, would have needed a room full of people or a stack of expensive software subscriptions. Most small sellers can’t afford either. I don’t have either. I have AI, and I have the right partner on the warehouse floor. Between the two of them, I spend about three hours a week on the business.

If you haven’t heard the term, FBA stands for Fulfillment by Amazon. You send your inventory to Amazon’s warehouses, and Amazon stores it, packs it, ships it to the customer, and handles returns. It’s how a one-person seller can offer Prime shipping to millions of buyers. But FBA only handles the last mile. Everything before that, what to buy, what to charge, and when to send more, is still on you. That’s where AI comes in.

This isn’t a how-to. It’s a look at how far one person can go right now, what I’ve actually built, and what I’m still working on.

Everything used to be done by hand

When I started, every part of this business was manual. I’d read a supplier’s catalog line by line. I’d look up each item’s sales history. I’d guess at what to buy and how many. I’d set prices and then forget to change them. I’d check stock levels when I remembered to, and build shipments in a spreadsheet.

Today, almost all of that runs on its own. On a normal day my system runs 79 different scheduled jobs, about 1,950 times. Every night it checks itself with more than 940 automated tests, and it tells me if anything is wrong before I’d ever notice.

Running my Amazon FBA business used to take me a full week of effort, and then some. Today it takes me about three hours a week. That turned out to be the biggest surprise of all, and I’ll come back to it.

I still make the calls that matter. I decide what to buy, and I approve every order that goes out. But I’m making those calls with information I never used to have, and I’m not spending my days doing the grunt work.

Buying smarter

Buying is where a business like mine lives or dies. Buy the wrong thing and your money sits on a shelf.

Now, when a supplier sends me a catalog, the AI reads every line. It pulls the sales history for each item, how prices have moved over time, how many other sellers are competing, and what every Amazon fee would be. Then it works out the most I can pay for each item and still make the return I want. Items get sorted into buy, make an offer, or skip.

And it doesn’t stop at the purchase. Every buy gets graded afterward. Did that item sell the way the analysis said it would? If it didn’t, that’s a flaw in the analysis, and the analysis gets fixed. That feedback loop is something I could never have done by hand.

Pricing with a gut feeling, not a rulebook

Most Amazon FBA sellers price with repricing software. You set rules like “beat the lowest price by a penny” or “never go above this number,” and the software follows them blindly, all day, for every product the same way. I don’t do that.

Instead, my AI and I worked together, product by product, on how I thought each one should move strategically. I’ve been doing this a long time, and I have opinions and painfully learned experiences. When should a product hold its price because buyers will pay it? When is it worth stepping down to get a sale moving? When should you sit tight and let the competition sell out first? I didn’t hand the system a list of rules. I taught it how I think about those calls.

Now it has its own trained gut feeling about the right move. It reads each product’s situation the way I would: how it’s been selling, who’s competing, what buyers have actually paid, and where the market is heading. Then it makes a judgment call. Not a formula. A gut feeling, built from mine. It does that for around 440 products, around the clock, which is something I could never do by hand.

It does have a couple of hard safety lines. It will never sell below what a product cost me, for example. But inside those lines, the decisions are judgment, not rules.

And I don’t just trust that gut. I check it. A lot of the “everyone knows” advice about selling on Amazon turns out to be wrong when you test it against your own sales, and a gut can be wrong too. So right now seven controlled experiments are running, where some products follow one approach and a comparison group follows another, so I can see which one actually makes more money. When the results come in, the system’s gut gets better. That’s the kind of thing big retailers have data science teams for. I have one AI and a laptop.

Restocking just in time

This is the part that would have been unthinkable for me a year ago.

My system watches stock levels in Amazon’s FBA warehouses against how fast each item sells. When something is about to run low, it builds the restock list, works out how many units to send, checks that Amazon will accept them, creates the shipping plan, and sends the order straight into my fulfillment partner’s system. No email. No spreadsheet. No phone call.

For the holiday season I’ve moved from one big weekly truck shipment to small orders on any weekday, so popular items get back in stock fast. When it makes sense, I still send bigger weekly shipments by freight truck, which costs less per unit but takes longer to be checked in. The system tracks how long each one takes so I can pick the right option instead of guessing.

Then, when the order ships, the shipment details flow back on their own, usually within the hour. This morning I got an email that an order was complete. By the time I asked about it, my system had already recorded the shipment, matched it to the plan, and logged it as on its way to Amazon.

Why the right fulfillment partner is everything

Here’s the part people underestimate. All the AI in the world doesn’t help you if the physical side of the business can’t keep up.

Carolina Prep & Ship is my fulfillment partner. They receive everything I buy, count it, store it, manage the inventory, prepare it to Amazon’s standards, and ship it out, to Amazon and to my other sales channels. They’re the yin to my yang. I handle the decisions. They handle the physical world. And it only works because both halves talk to each other.

For the record: CPS isn’t paying me anything to say this, and nobody asked me to write it. I’m a paying customer. I’m bragging about them because together we’ve been an awesome team.

I asked Matt Weschler, who owns CPS, why they built their own system instead of running on email and spreadsheets like a lot of warehouses do.

“Because email and spreadsheets lose things. A count lives in one person’s inbox, a shipment lives in another’s, and nobody sees the whole picture. … If Steve’s system can read our numbers directly and send orders straight to our floor, nobody retypes anything, and retyping is where most mistakes come from.”

That system is called Mission Control, and they opened it up so my system can talk to theirs directly. It can see their live inventory of my products. It can send orders. It gets notified when goods are received and when shipments leave. Their system and mine are, in a real sense, working together.

I was curious what it’s like on his end, having a one-person client whose orders come from an AI.

“Honestly, it holds us to a higher standard, and that’s a good thing. Orders show up complete and already checked. … What surprised me was how closely it watches. If a count is off by two units, it notices, and it asks. Early on it found problems that were ours, not his, like products we had received without the right identifier on file. We fixed them and told him so.”

Two systems that get better every day

This is the part I’m proudest of. The two systems don’t just pass data back and forth. They make each other better.

When my system notices that a number on my side doesn’t match a number on theirs, it flags it, and we sort it out together. When I needed shipping paperwork to come through the system instead of by email, their team built it the same day. When I wanted to route other kinds of orders through it, they built that too. I send them ideas. They send me ideas. Every week the whole thing gets a little tighter.

And some of what we fixed together now helps everybody they work with. Matt again:

“And the identifier problems his system caught changed how we receive: API clients now need a barcode on file at receiving, and every customer’s record flags stock with no identifier, so we catch it instead of the customer. That one helps every client, not just Steve.”

That’s not a vendor relationship. That’s a partnership. And I don’t think a one-person business could do what mine does without it.

How fast this has moved

What still amazes me is the speed. The system I vibe coded and run on today has had more than 8,800 changes since January. Things that were “someday” ideas in the spring are running every day now. Linking my system directly to CPS went from a request in September to live orders a few weeks later.

Here’s a number that still stops me. The software behind my business is now more than 500,000 lines of code, across nearly 1,900 files. I started it about nine months ago. That works out to roughly 2,000 lines of working code a day, every day, including weekends. No one person could write that by hand at that pace. The AI wrote the code. I decided what it needed to do, and checked that it did it.

And almost half of those lines aren’t the business logic at all. They’re tests: code whose only job is to check that the rest of the code is doing what it’s supposed to. That’s the part that lets me trust it with my money.

Before our system, I paid up to $700 a month for different software packages. I don’t pay that anymore. And that doesn’t even count the custom programming I used to pay for. In my life, I’ve paid over $100,000 for custom programs that specifically met my business needs. But here’s the thing: because of AI, I did all of this myself. It’s a great time to do something like this with AI.

What I am still working on

• Making my buying even more accurate, so every purchase is graded against what was predicted.

• Sharpening the pricing gut by testing its calls against real sales results.

• Shortening the time from a restock decision to the product being sellable on Amazon.

• Tightening how my system and CPS’s system stay in sync, so neither side ever has to chase the other.

The surprise benefit: I got my week back

Here’s the part I didn’t see coming. I set out to make my business smarter: better buys, better prices, fewer empty shelves. I wasn’t trying to get my time back.

But that’s what happened. Running my Amazon FBA business used to take a full week of my time, plus outside employee hours, specialty software packages, and more. Today it takes just me about three hours a week. That’s more than 90% of my working time back, while the business does more than it ever did when I did it all by hand.

I didn’t build this to step back from my own business. It just turned out that way. And honestly, that’s become the best part.

Would I sell it to you? No.

People ask if I’d sell access to the system I’ve built. The answer is no.

Frankly, I don’t want to provide support for other people’s issues. That might be a bit selfish, but it’s honest. This system was built around how I think and how I run my business. Turning it into a product would mean turning myself back into a full-time employee, just of a different business.

And I’m enjoying having my week back too much to give it away again. I’m going to enjoy the quality of life. Or maybe I’ll go start the next business.

But if you begin now, study how to vibe code, practice, fail, and learn, then you can do this too.

The honest part

AI isn’t magic, and it makes mistakes. It can be confidently wrong. So I built a lot of checks around it, and I still approve the decisions that spend real money. AI didn’t replace my judgment. It gave my judgment better information and took the busywork off my plate.

Matt put the limit better than I can. His team uses AI to build and run their own software, and he still says:

“But people still matter most on the floor. Somebody has to open the box, see the crushed corner, count the units and pack it right. AI can tell you a count is wrong. It can’t go find the missing case.”

If you’re running a small business, here’s what I’d tell you: the tools are here, they’re getting better by the month, and they’re within reach. But pick your partners carefully. The best AI in the world can’t fix a warehouse that loses your stuff. I found one that’s as serious about getting it right as I am.

And if you think you’re too old, or not technical enough, for any of this: I’m 67 and retired. If I can do this, a lot of other people can too.

You’ll notice I haven’t told you how much I sell. That’s personal, and I’m keeping it that way. But for one retired guy working about three hours a week, I’m proud of what I’ve built.

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Matt Weschler owns Carolina Prep & Ship in Apex, North Carolina (FBA and Walmart prep, order fulfillment, receiving and storage): carolinaprepship.com. CPS didn’t pay for this post and didn’t ask for it. I’m a paying customer.

I sometimes hesitate to tell people how much I use artificial intelligence.

Which is a strange position to be in when I use it all day, every day, and it’s become part of how I run multiple companies by myself.

I feel like a closet success story.

Say “AI” and some people picture made-up facts, lousy articles, and a threat to work they’ve spent years learning to do. I understand why. There’s plenty of evidence to support those concerns.

But I’ve also had an experience worth sharing.

Nothing I write is going to change the rotation of the earth or convince the neighbor’s dog that my front yard isn’t the best place in the world to take a dump.

But maybe we can have a conversation.

I Wasn’t Impressed Either

I’ve worked with computers since 1975. That doesn’t make me right about everything that comes next. It does mean I’ve seen a long line of advancements, disappointments, and things that were supposedly going to change everything.

When I first started using the current generation of AI tools, they got a lot wrong. The outright hallucinations were ridiculous. It was like dealing with someone who had an answer for everything and didn’t let being wrong slow them down.

There was a lot of room for improvement.

Then the tools improved, and I got better at figuring out where they helped and where they needed supervision.

I use them to explore questions, organize research, challenge ideas, and help me move projects along. Working on my own means there are limits to how much I can personally get through in a day. AI has become part of how I deal with those limits.

That doesn’t settle anyone’s concerns about jobs or how these systems were built. If you’re worried about your livelihood, my telling you that I’m getting more done probably isn’t much comfort.

Have You Seen the Internet?

One criticism of AI is that it produces things that aren’t true.

Yes. It does. Sometimes with astonishing confidence.

These systems learn from vast amounts of material, including material from the internet. Have you seen the internet? We weren’t exactly starting with a spotless collection of verified human wisdom.

That’s not an excuse. It’s a reason to check what comes back.

If I ask an AI tool something, accept the answer without checking it, and publish it under my name, I’m responsible for what I publish. “The computer told me” isn’t much of an explanation to a reader I’ve misled.

That responsibility is part of using the tool.

About Those Woodpeckers

Research is one area where I’ve found AI useful.

To explain how I approach it, let’s use woodpeckers. They’re pretty amazing, except when one is hammering on the side of my house. Then my appreciation of nature turns into, “Are you kidding me!”

I could open ChatGPT or another tool and type, “Tell me about woodpeckers.”

There’s nothing wrong with starting there. But if I’m researching something for an article or a script, I need to go further.

I ask for research, source links, and an explanation of where the evidence is strong or where there’s uncertainty.

Then I bring in my gang.

I’ve set up different AI agents and reviewers with different jobs. One checks factual claims. One is the contrarian, looking for holes in the argument. Another considers a different perspective and questions assumptions the others might have missed.

I want the argument challenged before I put it in front of a reader.

There’s a catch, of course. Three AI systems can agree and still be wrong. Giving one the job of fact-checker doesn’t magically make it reliable. And asking for another perspective doesn’t give a machine someone else’s lived experience.

Their reviews help identify things to investigate. The source still has to support the claim. Important facts still need checking.

That’s where my judgment comes in, and where my responsibility stays.

Why This Matters to Me

I remember what research used to involve. Going to a library, sometimes a university library. Requesting books from other libraries. Reading, taking notes, cross-checking, and following a lead that might turn out to be a dead end.

Days could become weeks.

There was satisfaction in that process. I also had questions I couldn’t pursue because I didn’t have unlimited time.

What excites me now is being able to explore more of those questions. I can get an initial view of a subject, find possible sources, and have an argument picked apart while I’m still developing it.

The checking takes work. So does deciding what matters. But I can get further into an idea before running out of hours.

For someone with more ideas than time, that’s a pretty big deal.

Getting feedback on my writing isn’t new, either. When I was younger and had an important paper to turn in, my AI engine was called Mom or Dad. As I got older, it was called Editor. And for others, I was the AI engine, under the title Ghost Writer.

This essay is mine. I asked AI to review the organization and the tone, the same way I once asked them. Love you, Mom.

So, Is It Slop?

Some of it absolutely is.

I don’t enjoy an article that wastes my time, repeats itself, or tells me something that falls apart the moment I check it. Producing a thousand more of those isn’t an accomplishment.

But I’d like to leave room for AI-made work that someone has thought about, questioned, checked, and shaped into something useful.

That’s the work I’m trying to do.

I’m enthusiastic because I keep finding uses for these tools in my own life. I’m still learning, and I still have to be willing to question what they give me.

You don’t have to share my enthusiasm. But I hope I can talk about what’s working for me without the conversation ending at “AI slop.” Maybe then I can be a little less of a closet success story.

And I’d like to hear what you’ve tried, too. Including the part where it went completely wrong. I probably have a story to match.

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“Oh man, look at that guy,” I said to Pam. “Doesn’t look safe.”

As we got closer, I realized.

“Oh crap. That’s my dad.”

We pulled over, and I urged him to get in the car. He was pissed.

“Dad, what are you doing?”

“You left me alone and I wanted some candy, so I walked to the grocery store.”

The grocery store was across a divided highway where the speed limit was 55 miles an hour. We caught him on the way back.

He’d already crossed it twice.

As he shakily got into the car, I learned why he was so annoyed. He had lost his glasses, and people kept stopping to ask if he needed help.

“Why can’t people mind their own damn business,” he said.

There was no sense even beginning that conversation. He was hot, a little dehydrated, and in no mood after his long walk along the road.

He had wanted candy. He’d gone to get some. And a bunch of strangers had made a nuisance of themselves along the way.

Meanwhile, I was trying to keep my father alive.

My dad was the first person to graduate with a PhD in political science from Michigan State. He was brilliant, although some common sense might occasionally have come in handy. People loved him. They respected him. When they saw him, they smiled.

When I was a kid and didn’t feel well, he would sit on my bed and read me stories. He made me feel cared for and loved.

That was my dad.

After my mom died of ovarian cancer, the responsibility for making sure he was safe and cared for fell to me. My first reaction was to bring him into our house. He needed care. We would care for him.

But eventually, he couldn’t be left alone. The trip for candy made painfully clear what that could mean.

Somewhere along the way, I felt as though I had lost my dad and become his father. I was responsible for his safety, his healthcare, and needs he could no longer manage himself. The man who had raised me was changing into someone I sometimes didn’t recognize.

I can’t give you a date for that first loss. There wasn’t a single goodbye. He was still there, and I was already missing him.

I didn’t know how to do this. I learned things along the way, sometimes after getting them wrong.

“Don’t you remember?” came out of my mouth more easily than I wish it had.

Of course he didn’t remember. That was why he was asking.

I eventually retired that question from my vocabulary. There was nothing useful waiting on the other end of it for either of us.

There was one strange advantage to the repeated questions. Dementia made me look like the smartest person in the room. By the next time he asked, I already knew the answer.

You take your little victories where you can find them.

Caring for someone with dementia is a tough, emotionally draining job that fucks with your own mental health.

It was just about all I could do to manage his care, and I wasn’t doing it alone. My wife, Pam, played a giant role. Without her, I’m fairly certain there would have been days when you could have found me curled up in a corner.

“I’m just going to skip today. Thanks.”

Except his needs would still have been there that day.

If you’ve lived through this, you probably don’t need me to explain the exhaustion. You may have your own version of the candy trip. Your own phrase you wish you hadn’t said. Your own person who helped you get through the day.

I wish I had a neat answer for what caregivers need. I know they need more support than we give them. I don’t know how a support group alone is supposed to make the rest of the week manageable.

Eventually, my dad moved into assisted living.

One night, sometime after one in the morning, the facility called. He was agitated, and they couldn’t settle him. They were going to call an ambulance and send him to the hospital.

“Don’t do that,” I said. “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

I had no idea what I was going to do when I got there. I just couldn’t see how sending this frightened, confused man to an emergency room was going to make that night better for him.

“What are you going to do?” the night staff asked.

Then I walked into his room and saw him scared and alone.

I knew.

I told my dad to move over in his single bed. I took off my shoes, climbed in behind him, and wrapped my arms around him.

I told him I would tell him a story.

Eventually, dementia would take him all the way to his grave. That was the second time I lost him.

But that night, we fell asleep together in his single bed.

He was safe. He was loved. And so was I.

For one moment, everything was right in the world.

—Steve

P.S. If you’ve lived some version of this, you’re welcome to tell me about your person in the comments.

I know how hard that can be, and I want you to know you’re not alone in this.

There was a time when I felt completely alone, even though I had people around me who cared about me. I still felt like I was on an island, cut off from the world. I’d lay awake at night staring at the ceiling, wondering what the hell was wrong with me. During the day I put on a good face, maybe cracked a joke here or there, but inside I felt hollow. Like I was in a room full of people and no one could really see me.

Those days were long and heavy. I won’t lie to you and say there was some big dramatic turning point where everything magically got better. But one day I woke up, the sun was shining, I felt the warmth of the day, and something inside me shifted just a little. It wasn’t that everything changed all at once. It reminded me that things can change even when you don’t expect them to. And little by little, the weight started to lift.

I don’t have magic words that will fix this for you. There’s no string of perfect phrases that makes everything better overnight. But here’s what I do know. You matter exactly as you are. You don’t need to perform or pretend.

And be kind to yourself. On our darkest days we’re our own toughest critics. Loneliness isn’t a failure. It’s part of being human. Treat yourself with the same patience and care you’d offer someone else.

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The advice that doesn’t help

Here’s something I’ve learned. Most of the advice about loneliness is crap. It’s nonsense.

When people say put yourself out there, or go make new friends, or make lemonade out of lemons, it sounds easy. When you’re in a tough place it feels damn impossible. And depending on other people to validate your efforts can set you up for disappointment. Connection is messy. It’s not always neat and it’s not always instant.

One of the most common questions I hear, especially from people who feel lonely, is “Steve, how do you even make friends as an adult?” It’s not always easy. But here are some things that worked for me. Maybe they’ll work for you too.

What worked for me

It starts with showing up. A local coffee shop, the gym, a class, or just walking the same trail regularly. Putting yourself out there in a consistent way is the first step. When people start recognizing your face, it creates familiarity, and that’s the foundation of connection.

Be approachable. A friendly smile, eye contact and a little small talk go a long way. I’ve met some of my best friends just by being the kind of person who says “Hey, how’s your day going?” and actually listens to the answer.

But here’s something I learned the hard way. Most people aren’t really listening. When I was in college we did a little class experiment. For an entire day, whenever someone said “How you doing?”, we answered “Dying. And you?” Most people didn’t even register it. They kept walking, or nodded like we’d said “Good.” People are so wrapped up in their own world that they don’t really hear what’s being said. You have to knock on the door, gently and consistently, to get them to wake up to you.

Be curious about other people. Genuine, interested questions open the door. You’d be amazed how much people appreciate being truly listened to. Start simple: “What brought you here?” or “What’s something you’re excited about right now?”

Don’t rush it. Not every interaction will lead to a friendship, and that’s okay. Trust takes time. Focus on small, consistent interactions and let the relationship grow naturally.

Making and keeping friends isn’t free or easy. It takes work and commitment. True friendships mean showing up for each other. Not everyone will become a true friend, and that’s okay too. Many will still become caring acquaintances who bring something good into your life.

Friendships come from unexpected places. I met one of my really good friends years ago because we rode the same kind of motorcycle. That small connection turned into something big, and nearly 20 years later we’re still great friends. Sometimes it’s the person who helps carry your groceries, or the one who strikes up a conversation while you’re both waiting in line.

Making friends as an adult isn’t about waiting for the perfect person to come along. It’s putting yourself out there with a little courage, a lot of kindness, and no expectations.

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The little things

What I’ve found really helps is the little things. Doing good for others without expecting anything back. Hold the door. Take the grocery cart back for someone. Smile, make eye contact, say hello.

I remember holding the door for an older man once. He stopped, looked me right in the eye and said, “You have no idea how much I needed that today.” I don’t know his story. But I knew I’d made a difference, and that small moment made a difference in me too.

Don’t expect people to see you for who you are the first time you meet them, or even the tenth. Not everyone is ready for a new friend or able to accept kindness, and that’s okay. It isn’t about you being broken. A lot of people are suffering in silence and sometimes they don’t have the capacity to let someone in. But you never know about tomorrow, so don’t give up.

There are three people in my life who are great friends, the kind who would come in an instant if I needed them. One I met when he came to do a job as a handyman. One was a random phone call about business. One was a local police officer I just kept running into. You never know where your friends are hiding. You have to mine for them, with effort and kindness.

When I go places over and over, I hear something a lot: “Oh, Steve, we love when you visit because you’re always so kind and friendly.” I think that’s a great compliment. It means I’m making the day better for the people I meet.

Open the door a little

Don’t underestimate vulnerability. Being vulnerable is scary and nerve-racking, but it’s also the key to meaningful connection. When you share even a small piece of yourself, it makes room for the other person to do the same. Sometimes it just takes a little courage to open the door.

Gratitude has helped me a lot too. Not the fake kind where you force yourself to be happy. The kind where you notice the small stuff. The warmth of the sun. The sound of the wind. The way a good laugh feels. And while we’re at it, let’s be grateful no one has invented telepathic texting yet. Can you imagine everyone accidentally sending their unfiltered thoughts?

Brains are like toddlers most of the time. They do amazing things, solve problems and make sense of the world. And sometimes they throw all your serotonin on the floor and leave you to clean up the mess. That’s okay. We all need a little help to get back on track sometimes, whether that’s talking to a therapist, checking in with a doctor, or taking tiny steps to care for yourself. It doesn’t make you weak. It makes you human.

Take a moment and think of one small thing you can do today. It doesn’t have to cost money. It can be something that feels like kindness toward yourself. Noticing something beautiful. A deep breath. Sitting still for a moment. Small steps can lead to big shifts.

The fact that you’re still trying, still open to connection, shows how much strength you have. You’re already taking steps toward something better, even if you don’t see it yet. This won’t last forever. Things can and will shift, even if it’s little by little.

Loneliness isn’t the end of your story. It’s one chapter, and the next page is yours to write. It can be filled with connection, kindness and hope. You’re not invisible. You matter.

— Steve

I had a comfortable belief: financial literacy classes for the masses don’t really work. I didn’t pull that out of the air. A big 2014 review of 201 studies found the classes barely changed what people actually did. Then I ran into a 2020 paper that pooled 76 experiments and more than 160,000 people and said they do. I promised I’d go read it and not just get pissed off.

So I read it. All of it. I even paid $37 for the journal copy, which tells you how my week went.

You don’t need to reach for your shocked face when I tell you the facts paint a different story when you dive deeper. The results don’t show what the headlines and people are saying they do.

But hold on. Before anybody gets comfortable, including me, it’s not what I said either.

Here’s the short version. The study people point to as support for financial literacy says the classes helped, on average. If you line up 100 people by how well they handle money, the class moved the person in the middle from number 50 to about number 54. That’s real. It isn’t nothing. What’s less clear is how long the benefit lasts. And that matters if we’re counting on a class at 16 to help someone make money decisions at 36.

Half of the effectiveness measurements were taken within about six months of the class. On whether it lasts, the authors called it “inconclusive.” Their word, not mine.

That 2014 review is worth a closer look. It came from a different team, six years earlier, and it found the classes explained only 0.1% of the difference in how people handle money. In their words, even big programs with many hours of teaching had “negligible effects on behavior 20 months or more” later. That’s the study I leaned on in March.

But most of those 201 studies weren’t true experiments, and the 2020 team says it found coding errors in the older numbers. So the older study isn’t the last word either.

And me? Back in March, I wrote that the benefits fade away in under two years, as if that were settled. The 2020 authors say nobody has shown the fade either. One study in Brazil followed 16,000 students for nine years and still found a small effect, about one percentage point.

Okay, a small benefit nine years later deserves a seat at this conversation. Especially after I said the benefits disappear. I still want to know how much the classes cost, and whether that was a good use of the money.

So the people quoting this study as proof were a little wrong. And I was a little wrong. That’s the least satisfying ending there is, and I called it last week. I put all the numbers and links here and fixed my March piece with a note at the top.

Those are the facts. Now here’s what I’ve actually been chewing on.

How do you tell someone that something they believe in might help, but might not do nearly as much as they hope?

Because nobody believes in these classes out of stupidity. It’s a lovely idea. Teach kids about money while they’re young, and they’ll be set. I think a lot of people support it because they hope it will inoculate kids against money trouble for life. I understand the hope. I’d like it to be true.

But hoping a financial literacy class will inoculate our kids against money trouble is like assuming every kid who takes high school English will be a literary whiz. We all took English. Look around. Read some emails.

I still find the promises hyped around that study to be dubious. Dubious is a nicer word than bullshit. And when I say bullshit, I get crazy looks.

Here’s a question I’d ask gently. If someone you know struggles with hoarding or gambling, what high school class would have prevented that?

So if someone struggles with overspending due to self-esteem, stress reduction, or financial codependency, what financial literacy class is going to change that?

Knowing how interest works doesn’t necessarily stop someone from spending money to feel better, keep a relationship together, or keep up with the damn Joneses.

After more than 30 years of talking with people about money, I find it hard to treat this mainly as a knowledge problem. The 2014 study pointed the same way. It said the effects of financial literacy “diminish dramatically when one controls for psychological traits.” People bring different habits, worries, memories, and amounts of give-a-damn to it. You’ve met your family. Want to know what your money personality is? Take this free test.

Now, the authors say these programs are cost-effective. I’m still not persuaded, but I need to be fair: a small benefit might be worth paying for if the cost is low enough.

I think we could teach most of what we call financial literacy better by teaching critical thinking, decision-making, how to use Claude, a calculator, and how to verify facts. Because the AI can be wrong too. That’s my opinion. I don’t have a study for it.

If you loved your kid’s personal finance class, or you teach one, I’m not coming for you. A class can teach useful things. If it helped you, good. And if you took one and still ended up in a mess, you didn’t fail it. It was never going to carry that much weight.

So how do you break it to someone? Here’s the best I’ve got after this week.

You go first. You say the part where you were wrong before you get to the part where they were. You say what’s true about their side out loud. You leave them a door to walk through that doesn’t have a sign over it reading “idiot.” And then you stop talking, which I’m still working on.

And here’s the uncomfortable question: if current financial literacy classes are ineffective, what will work? Maybe something else, but maybe nothing will fundamentally change the unconscious things that drive us. Worth pondering.

Getting it a little wrong and saying so didn’t kill me. It mostly cost me a journal article.

You’re welcome to check my work. That’s sort of the point.

— Steve

There are two ways to react when a fact shows up that doesn't fit what you believe. One is "Huh. I should learn more." The other is to get inflamed and pissed off.

I try to be a good observer. I try to talk less than I listen. Who knows how good I am at that. The people who know me are welcome to stay quiet.

You've seen the inflamed version. Bring up politics at a family dinner and count the seconds. Religion works too. Nobody at that table says "Interesting, what are you reading?" They say your name, slowly, the way you'd talk to a dog holding a shoe.

Here's what I think is going on. People latch onto a belief that feels like it defines them. It lines up with the group they feel they belong in. So when a fact doesn't line up with the belief, it doesn't land as information. It lands as an insult. A lie. To them, and to everybody on their team. This is bullshit.

And somebody is making a living off that reaction.

I can't see inside anybody's head at a news outlet, so I won't tell you what they intend. But researchers can count clicks. One team looked at more than 22,000 headline tests on a news site and found that each extra negative word in a headline raised the click rate by 2.3%. Another found that posts about the other political side get shared a lot more than posts about your own, and said this may be creating "perverse incentives for divisive content."

Attention is what gets sold to advertisers. So nobody has to be a villain for this to work. If inflamed pays and informed doesn't, you get more inflamed. It's the same reason the candy is at the checkout and not back by the vegetables.

And it isn't only politics and religion. It's money. It's investing. It's debt. Those are the ones where getting inflamed costs you real quality of life, because the bill shows up whether you won the argument or not.

Let me give you my favorite example. I like it because I get to be the one who starts the fire.

If I tell someone the evidence shows financial literacy classes for the masses don't really work, I get inflamed retorts. Fast. You'd think I had suggested cancelling recess.

I'm not making it up. In 2014 three researchers pulled together 168 papers covering 201 studies and found that programs meant to improve financial literacy explained 0.1% of the variation in what people actually did with their money. A tenth of one percent. They also found the lessons fade, and that even big programs with many hours of teaching had next to no effect on behavior 20 months or more later.

That fit what I saw. When I ran a debt counseling organization, I watched tens of thousands of clients who knew exactly what they were supposed to do financially and still couldn't do it. They didn't need a pamphlet. For most people, financial problems are not a knowledge problem. They are a psychology problem wearing a knowledge problem's clothing. Debt is just math wrapped in emotion. I wrote up the whole case here.

So that's my belief. I like it. It's comfortable. It has a nice study attached.

Now here's the part I'd rather skip.

In 2020 a different group of researchers looked at 76 randomized experiments with more than 160,000 people and concluded that financial education does work, on average. They called the effects meaningful, and at least three times as large as the earlier work found.

Well, damn it.

There it is. A fact that doesn't line up with my belief. It showed up like a parking ticket.

The inflamed move is easy. Go hunting for what's wrong with their study. Decide those researchers play for the other team. Type something in capital letters. Just be pissed off.

The informed move is slower and a hell of a lot less fun. Read it. Figure out what they measured that the first group didn't. Maybe a class right before a real decision works and a class in tenth grade doesn't. Maybe we're both a little right, which is the least satisfying ending there is.

I don't know yet. That's a sentence I'm trying to get more comfortable saying. It doesn't come naturally to a guy with a website.

Here's the difference as best I can tell. Inflamed feels great for about a minute. You get to be right. You get to be powerful. You get to be loud. You get to be with your people. Informed feels like homework. But winning an argument has never paid anybody's bills.

The person who won't look at an option because of how it would feel. The investor who won't sell because selling means admitting it. The guy who knows what he believes about debt and doesn't want it ruined by details. Same thing every time. The belief is doing the deciding, and the facts are waiting in the lobby.

Look, I'm not telling you what to believe. You do you. I'm telling you what I'm going to try, which is to notice the heat. When I feel it come up, that's my cue. Keep my mouth shut. Don't talk. Go read. Get informed.

I'll let you know how that second study turns out. If I come back and tell you I was wrong, be gentle. If I come back inflamed, you have my permission to say my name slowly.

— Steve

We were visiting an unfamiliar city while we explored Europe: Cambridge, England.

We walked out of a very local and very tasty restaurant, just gushing about the staff, the food, and how wonderful the experience was. Our 14 year old daughter had stayed behind at the bed and breakfast, and my wife decided we should take a walk before heading back for the night.

As we walked towards the market area of that quaint little historic English town two very nice police officers were walking towards us. We all stopped and chatted for a moment, and they left us with, “It’s getting dark, be careful, we’ve had some very unfriendly people in the area.”

Waves and thank yous were exchanged.

A couple of minutes later I looked up from our stroll and noticed a couple inside the edge of an alley with their backs to the wall. Odd. Less than 10 steps later I could see why. Some guy was gesturing angrily at them. By the time it all registered with me what was happening, that they were getting shaken down for money, it was too late.

The angry man turned out of the alley towards us and the couple made a hasty retreat headed the other way. This was not going to end well, I thought, and he was closing on my wife and me fast. Street lights were starting to pop on and this guy was about to pop off at us.

He was now about four steps from us and I did the only thing I could at that moment. I stepped in front of my wife, stuck out my hand, made direct eye contact, and with a big smile said, “Hi, my name is Steve.”

The potential mugger stopped, stared at my outstretched hand, paused, blinked, and slowly stuck out his hand. We shook. He said, “My name is Simon.”

I told Simon we were out for a walk, enjoying Cambridge, and asked him where we should go. He pointed towards the market square. After some more conversation his hard edge was gone, and as we parted company and he went on to find his next target, we both looked back and waved.

Afterwards my wife said, “Boy, that was close.”

Over the next week we would see Simon in the park with more people cornered and I’d give him a big wave and a loud “Hi Simon.” He would not stop what he was doing but he would turn and smile and give me a wave and a “Hi Steve” back.

As we’d continue through the park I would warn people headed his way to think about an alternate route because Simon the mugger was that way.

At the first possible opportunity I did let police know a mugger was roaming about but they said, “He’s one of many.” And I suppose that’s exactly why the two officers warned us that night.

One of the Simon spottings that week was near the drug clinic for addicted people. I strongly suspect that’s what was driving Simon.

Over the rest of the week Simon and I exchanged warm hellos and waves a few more times.

Simon was a criminal and I’m not making any excuses for him. He might have had trauma in life, or been just an opportunist trying to feed a drug habit. I don’t know and it doesn’t matter. I wasn’t trying to fix Simon, I was trying to save us.

I can’t save everyone. I would not be able to save Simon, future potential victims, or anyone else that would fall into the gravitational well surrounding Simon. But there was something I could do in that unfortunate situation and I did it. One of my life mottos is Don’t be a Dick. I know when it comes to someone bent on aggression headed my way my personal course of action is to not be afraid, but put on a smile and be willing to talk and listen.

Along the way I’ve learned there is no sense dying all tensed up. If you find yourself in a bad situation, take a breath and think it through. And let me tell you that has saved my life too many times as a search and rescue pilot.

All these years later I still wonder whatever happened to Simon. Did he change, die, or lie addicted someplace?

Is there someone you still wonder about? Share it in the comments so we can all learn from it. I read every comment.

— Steve

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