About the Author

I guess you could say my money journey started at the ripe age of five when I unexpectedly found 100 dollars lying on the ground. I can still vividly remember that day; this was the most money I had ever seen at that point in my life. I imagine that if I ever won the lottery, I would experience the same feeling that five-year-old me felt when finding that money. The adrenaline and excitement running through my body took over, and I remember smiling uncontrollably and running as fast as I could to show my mom, who was picking me up from daycare at the time.

Obviously, like any five-year-old would think, I instantly started planning how much candy and ice cream I was going to buy that night or weekend. The possibilities were endless, and I felt like the richest kid alive. However, to my initial dismay, my parents had other ideas. They immediately took me to a bank, and we deposited that money into a savings account (in my name) without letting me spend a dime.

While I imagine the five-year-old me probably had some initial disappointment in my parents’ actions with this money, it ended up being the best thing for me. This action laid the foundation and set me on a clear and simplified personal financial path—one I probably wouldn’t have been on had they not done this.

What was really crazy about this experience and opening that savings account was that (for lack of a better term) it created a monster in me. The reason I say that is because this was 1996, and there was no such thing as online banking at the time. So with my savings account, I was given a little book that tracked the amount of money I had in the account. I would read that book daily, looking at my current balance and the progress I had made since the inception of the account. Every time I opened that book, it fueled me to save and deposit all the money I could into the account. And every time I was at the bank depositing cash, I would get this huge rush seeing the teller open my savings account book, flip the pages to the next open line, and write what my current balance was. While I have never done drugs, I would imagine the dopamine hit I was getting from this process would be similar to someone taking drugs.

And I have maintained this financial fire within me ever since. However, my financial goals have evolved and matured with me as I aged. Once I hit the age of 11 or 12, I saw my older brother buy a car and have the associated freedom that came with it. This sparked me to shift my financial focus from just saving as much money as possible to saving for my own first car.

While setting this goal definitely kept me motivated and gave me a singular financial focus (which I profoundly lacked prior to this), I think it was my first true bad deviation that took me severely off course on my personal finance journey. Without getting into all the details, I had saved 16,000 dollars by the time I was 16 and bought my first car for 15,000 (when converting that figure into today’s dollars, that car would cost about 23,000).

This was obviously a huge accomplishment for me and gave me a ton of satisfaction that I had set a goal and actually achieved it in the timeframe I had set. However, 33-year-old me is shouting and kicking myself because I lost out on huge financial gains by not investing that money (I should have bought a junker car like most 16-year-olds drive).

But not to worry after buying my car, I hopped back on the savings wagon and began my journey to make back that money. I worked very hard performing chores around the house and picking up summer jobs when I was in college to build a savings account back up to 10,000 by the time I graduated from undergrad.

Sadly, upon graduating from college, I gained my first true experience with debt I had exactly 10,000 dollars in student loans. In other words, my net worth was officially zero dollars, and I was devastated by that. The pain and misery I felt every time I saw my hard-earned money go toward paying someone else back with interest drove me nuts. So, I made it a financial priority to get out of debt as quickly as possible (I paid it off in a year) and began to study various methods to win at personal finance.

Through studying various personal finance strategies and methods, I learned a ton about different ways to make, save, and invest money. Unfortunately, throughout my 20s, I was very naive about these differing strategies and fell victim to various influencers, books, blogs, and methods that made it seem as if their methods were very simple and would generate immense wealth in a short amount of time. Some of those strategies I attempted were day trading, cryptocurrencies, and more. In attempting those strategies, I lost thousands of dollars. That is still a hard pill for me to swallow knowing I lost all that money. I will say I am very lucky in that I only invested “play money” (money I could afford to lose) into these strategies, so I still have a very solid financial base. But I could be doing so much better financially right now.

After losing those thousands of dollars, I decided to look back at my financial strategy and analyze what worked and what didn’t. The only conclusion I can draw from this analysis is that I needed to implement a strategy utilizing financial products that I know and fully understand. This meant getting rid of complex day trading, cryptocurrencies, and the thought that I could be the next brilliant real estate investor. News flash, Sean: you’re too stupid to make any money doing these.

From that point on, my personal finance strategy has eliminated all complex investment products and strategies anything I don’t fully understand. Instead, I’ve gone back to my childhood approach: watching my money like a hawk and investing or saving only in things I am comfortable with and know well. While this method may not get me rich overnight, I am confident that I will eventually achieve financial freedom through this approach.