Here's what I'd do, if I were a twenty-something, working toward her first $1,000,000; luckily for us, I was that twenty-something *hair-flip*

[DISCLAIMER] i was born into, essentially, some type of poverty and thusly, was converted into a product called "international adoptee," which sent me to be raised as a Citizen of Empire. my adopted parents were financially stable, by all accounts, but we were not wealthy, by any means. both of my parents worked during my entire childhood: my father, full-time sales, my mother, child-related educational care and retail. i have not relied on any financial assistance from my parents since i graduated from college in 2010. yes, they enabled me to take on debt in order to attend college, and they do have the means to help me out if i were to come upon hard times, for the love of Ladybug! my parents bought me my first car, when i was seventeen, outright (nothing new or fancy), and they covered all of the expenses of that car until i sold it, when i was twenty-two, to buy the first and only car i'd ever buy (nothing new but a bad choice). nevertheless, they have not contributed to my current, personal financial state, one bit. they didn't even support our first business endeavor, financially. so why would i ask for their help ever again? also, their money comes with strings. my point with this disclaimer is that i do consider myself a self-made woman (and when i attain my B$, i will identify, fully, as a self-made billionaire), but this is only partially true, as with anyone who is a success. nobody gets anywhere alone. nobody. and even though i started from the literal bottom, my adopted parents certainly gave me an incredible chance to find success. nevertheless, i am doing it, have been doing it and won't quit til i make it. i am able-bodied, able-minded and have the privilege of taking risks simply due to the financial status of the people who adopted me to raise as their own. thus, i fully understand how the information i present here might not be useful to the "every woman," because every woman has lived a life wholly unique to her, and so, i suggest that you take what you find useful and leave whatever is not going to serve you, and ask questions. i also have no children, by choice.

₹20 INR = $0.21 USD [08aug26 0650]

$1 USD = ₹95.21 INR [same timestamp]

about ₹250 INR will buy you the US equivalent of a Big Mac in India [today]

Late Teens/Early Twenties

First things first, for women like us, GET A JOB.

You gotta make money, and you gotta make as much as you can.

So start early. 

If you're a teenager, hustle your ass off. If there's an opportunity to make money (say, someone's offering a hundred bucks to anyone willing to help them move, and they'll split it between everyone who shows up; you'll quickly learn that you're splitting that hundred with yourself) seize it. Seize every opportunity to make money that comes your way. Save every penny. You're a teenager living under your parents' roof. What expenses do you have? If you are a teenager with expenses due to circumstances beyond your control, get a job. 

When you're twenty, you have seemingly endless energy (trust me, i am forty), so use it. Burn out. Do the thing. Take the risk. Leap before looking. Go, Go, Go! Seriously, gurl, get off your ass and GO! Your twenties are not the time to "reap the rewards;" you haven't sown any seeds; you don't even have any money with which to buy seeds.  

If you're not in school, job as many jobs as you can physically accomplish. If you're in school and can manage your class load, get a part-time job. Students are extended a lot of flexibility in the jobforce. If you need to focus only on school to get through school, then do so. Everything you decide to do in this life comes at a price, and you are the only person who can know which price(s) you want to pay and why. 

My early twenties were spent in college: three years in Waco, Texas, USA, a one-year break in Syracuse, NY, USA, followed by two years to graduate in Boulder, Colorado, USA. 

Thus, my tuition and rent was financed by my scholarships, financial aid and student loans while I was in school, and I jobbed a job in Syracuse.

If you are not attending college, no problem.

If you're living at home, then your parents are subsidizing your rent and food, so the texture of your financial life isn't actually all that different from someone attending school. 

I worked my ass off while living at home all summer, and then, I lived off that money during the school year. 

I had to take out a lot of student loans after my freshman year, cause scholarships don't inflate with tuition, lol. By the time my junior year rolled around, I got a piss-poor part-time job so that I could have some extra cash. The money I made over the summers was no longer enough to cover tuition plus daily/social expenses. I had to come up with my own money for anything beyond rent and school. I didn't have to make much money, but I had to make some money. I think I worked three, four-hour shifts in the middle of the day between my MWF classes. I think I got paid about $7.10/hr (adjusted for inflation, about $11.50/hr today), plus maybe about ten or fifteen bucks a week in tips, a far cry from my one-to-three-hundred dollar days waiting tables *weeps*

My parents were paying for my cell phone and car expenses (except fuel).

I did not have a credit card. 

I had my debit card (along with its checkbook), and that was it.

I cleared $10K over three-months of waiting tables during the summers, and all of that money got thrown into my checking account (the money in this account is the money I accessed with my debit card).

My account simply got smaller and smaller as the school year went on. 

Not a great strategy for building wealth, but whatever, I was twenty and was not financially educated by my parents, so simply getting by was the goal, and I got by just fine. 

The paychecks I received from the job I jobbed my junior year were simply cashed, cause it was all disposable money with which I could eat and socialize.

I was in college, goddammit!, without a financial education!

If I could do this portion of my life over again, everything would've been different, and so, it's tough to give advice here, cause for most of us, we're simply trying to figure shit out. Everything seems expensive. $1,000 sounds like so much money. I remember writing my first $1,000 check, and I was like, "Oh my god, so many zeroes!" *weeps* Working with payments that are a mere few-hundred dollars is overwhelming when you're twenty. 

The important part, at this stage of your life is simply finding a way to support your life. 

There's no need, at this point, to strive for the life you want.

YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT YOU WANT; I PROMISE.

You don't even really know what money is!

Nevertheless, what you need is money, so, get out there and make some money.

Make enough money to live a life.

Save all of the rest.

You don't have to make enough money to live your whole life, and you especially do not need to make enough money to live a luxurious life. 

You can get a roommate.

I had a roommate for all of my first three years of college, and then I rented a room in a woman's house when I lived in Syracuse while dancing. 

Once you've found your footing juggling a job and some responsibilities, maybe school, then you can start to really look at your money. 

For normal, regular people, we don't simply have money flowing to us. This is why you're "poor" or "working class." You must trade your time for money. But the whole point of this writing, the whole reason why you're reading this thing is cause you've realized that you don't want to keep trading your time for money, like an economic slave on Empire. 

Thus, you need a job.

You don't need a great job.

You don't need a job that you "like."

You don't even need a good job.

All you need is a job that you're willing to do and that pays you to do your job.

The job needs to cover your expenses.

Your expenses need to fit inside the amount of money you bring home. 

This is when everyone bails, cause they think they "deserve" whatever they want, NOW.

If this is you, fuck off. Good luck!

If this is not-you, congratulations. We're gonna be rich!

A job is cash flow.

Cash is flowing to you in the increments of hours that you toil away for someone else.

Look at your paychecks.

Look at where your money goes.

Look at how your hard-earned hours are divided up by The State.

LOOK AT YOUR MONEY.

In your early twenties, the most-important habit you can develop is simply: LOOK AT YOUR MONEY.

No judgement.

You're twenty.

You don't know anything.

You haven't been alive long enough to understand much.

You've been alive long enough to "know" a lot.

But you haven't learned the lessons, cause you're about to, lol. 

Late-Teens/Early-Twenties Cash Check:

• Does cash flow toward you through a job?
• How much money does The State take of your paycheck?
• Do you have enough money to cover the expenses that are your responsibility to cover?

*deep breath in*

there was a time when women had no rights to a job or money of their own

*deep breath out*

*deep breath in*

i am so grateful to be a woman,

today,

able to make as much money as i please, 

all by myself,

that is all mine

*deep breath out*

this is all the money that i've found
on the ground
since moving here
in 2023
[not including the $20 in the below photo]
$44
&it's being saved for our future kitten

Early Twenties/Mid-Twenties

Now we're talking expenses. 

Unfortunately, this is the time in your life when you really need to start understanding what your life costs. If you were in school, you're probably out of school by now, and so, the full force of the cost of your life is going to hit you like a ton of bricks. Life is fucking expensive. Life is even more expensive if you're trying to pay for all of it yourself. 

Remember, you're building your life, one paycheck at a time ... for now.

Your largest expenses will be rent and a car.  
I am of the no-car camp. 

Nevertheless, I have had two cars, which is why I know there's no point in owning one.

Nevertheless, I know that not-having a car is not-possible, cause like, well, I mean, it is possible, it simply requires a level of effort that creates too much inconvenience in the lives of people who have lives.

I don't really have "a life." 

I don't socialize often, and I've never been susceptible to social pressure to socialize.

I, personally, do think that life is doable without a car, and I fully acknowledge your opinion if you think that life is not-doable without a car.

Depending on where you live, it is true, a car might not be optional, which sort of suggests that you should really pay attention to where you decide to live, right? 

If you must have a car, then what you're looking for is something that will last a minimum of 100,000 miles. So you're shopping "reliability." You also want to keep the repairs cheap. Every car will break down. Every car needs constant upkeep. Choose a car that you can buy in cash, save up that cash, and then choose something that's boring, run of the mill, a dime a dozen. The thing about dime-a-dozen cars is that their replacement parts are easy to come by, which is what makes the parts cheap. If you're driving an ultra-rare luxury vehicle, the parts are not expensive because they're "better." The parts are expensive because there's only ONE place where you can buy this ONE part, and guess what, there's only ONE of them. When you buy a regular old car, there are literally millions of parts that are made to replace parts that will inevitably break. Also, befriend a mechanic ;)

Some food for further convincing: personal vehicles spend ~95-99% of their useful lives unused.

There's nothing wrong with renting. 

Rent is not money being flushed down the toilet [i've already explained this here].

Rent is paying to live somewhere.

You gotta live somewhere.

And that somewhere costs money.

If you think that you're somehow investing in a house by paying a mortgage, you're not.

If we need to do a further discussion on buying a home to live in versus paying rent, that's a whole thing all its own.

If you don't want to believe me, that's fine. 

Before you buy that "dream house," however, at least do the math on all of the expenses that come along with home "ownership."

If you do this math, you will quickly learn that home "ownership" is not ownership at all.

It's a racket.

There will come a time for property ownership, but now is not the time.

You have to have decent credit to rent a decent place. 

The better the credit the better the place.

Credit is money that is being extended to you through Trust.

The credit card company is giving you money AND trusting you to pay them back.

Your credit score is essentially your ability to pay back the money that is loaned to you.

If you have a low credit score, a landlord KNOWS that you are bad at paying your bills.

If you always pay your bills, you never need to check your credit score.

If you're living at home, now is a good time to start using a credit card.

If you went to school, you probably needed a parent to co-sign on a lease.

If you don't know someone with good enough credit to help you get a lease, then you're gonna have to live at home while you build credit before you can rent a place all your own.

If you need to ask someone about the specifics about how to build credit, ask.

Creditors don't give one flying fuck about your good grades, beautiful hair and extra community service; they ONLY measure monetary events, of which you must create an official history.

For me, I rented a room out of a woman's house while I started building my credit.

I did not need a credit score to live in her home.

She did not require one, although she could have.

I was part of a teensy-tiny ballet company that arranged all of my housing through various members of the church with which the company was associated. 

Andrea was the name of the lady who owned the home.

She had inherited it from a grandmother.

While I was living there, I was not in school, and so, I was jobbing during all of the hours I was not dancing. 

I was a Starbucks barista. 

I was paid the state's minimum wage of $7.15/hr plus tips, and I received $0.10 (ten cent) pay raises every few months.

My paychecks were about $300/week plus about $50 in tips. 

I sold the car my parents gave me (a 1995 mazda 626) for $3,000, and bought a 2004 volkswagon new beetle (in light blue) for $5,000. I put down the $3,000, and I used my mother's credit score as a co-signer on a $2,000 loan.

My expenses at this time:

• rent $300/mo (flat)
• car $125/mo
• car insurance $0 (parents, will explain below)
• cellphone $0 (still on the family plan)
• food unknown
• savings unknown

As you can see, I had very little knowledge of my spending habits and expenses. My parents were still floating my car insurance, because as a veteran, my father gets really good insurance rates through USAA, and I was grandfathered into his low rates even after I opened my own account with all of my own information so that I could pay all of my own bills (but this doesn't happen for another two years or so). 

I used to spend a few hours every payday looking at my paychecks, divvying up all the money.

I took 20% right off the top, and that would remain in my checking account.

I used my checkbook proficiently, so I knew how much money I had. 

My mom and I went to the bank when I was maybe thirteen and opened my first checking account with $20, and she taught me how to balance my checkbook. I bounced a check maybe six months later.

I added everything up.

I made a chart of the percentage of each paycheck that I needed to stash away so that I had enough money for rent, my car payment, gas, and then whatever was leftover went toward food.  

Then I'd write down how much cash I needed and in which denominations so that I could put the exact percentage (rounded up to the nearest dollar) amount into the various envelopes of my expenses.

I had an envelope labeled "RENT," and every paycheck, the amount of money that needed to be taken out of that paycheck for RENT would go into that envelope.

I typically received four paychecks a month.

I made about $300/week.

I had to put away about $100 of each paycheck into the RENT envelope.

I had to put away about $32 into the CAR envelope.

I had to put away about $20 into the GAS envelope.

(This is where you could create a Transportation Budget in lieu of a car)

Bank of America was the closest bank to the house I was living in, so I walked in and opened savings and checking accounts, and the bank offered, and I accepted, a $1,000 line of credit with my very first credit card.

I only used my credit card for gas, to build credit.

I'd run my card to fill my tank, and then, I'd pay it off every month. 

One time, however, I was being a stupid ho, and I let a friend run a tab on my card at a bar. I woke up the next morning to a $300+ receipt. I was livid and terrified. An entire paycheck! Needless to say, I paid that thing off with the next payment, and I cut the card up.

I had envelopes for food and frivolous spending.

I would go to the bank with every paycheck, and I would deposit the check and withdraw the exact amount of cash I needed, in the denominations of bills that I needed to fill my envelopes. When my bills were due, I'd pay them, and at the end of the month, I deposited any leftover cash that I had back into my checking account.

I lived this way for exactly eight months before I moved back to Colorado to finish school at twenty-three.

When I left Syracuse, there was no Bank of America in Boulder, so I had to find a new bank.

The 20% that I scraped off every paycheck totaled nearly $2,000 by the time I left.

I wasn't much of a spender, cause I didn't have much of a social life.

I spent 90% of my free time in the local library just down the street, lol.

By the time I moved to Boulder, I had about $4,000 to deposit between my new savings and checking accounts.

I opened a new savings account and a new checking account in 2008.

I deposited $500 into a "No Touch" savings account, and the rest into the checking account.

To this day, I have the $500 "No Touch" savings account, and I have not *knock on wood* touched it.

Every banker comments on it.

The bodybuddy/lifemate wishes I would invest it.

The account is worth a whopping $503, today. 

By all accounts it should be invested, but it is not, and it is because it is a remnant of a life long past. 

$500 is enough to save most people from a financial emergency, or at the very least, it's enough to get through one day in the face of an emergency.

Saving actually destroys wealth; when money isn't multiplying, its spending power slowly erodes. Today, in 2026, that $500 only has about $325 of 2008 spending power; or, put another way, I need $775 today to buy what $500 bought me in 2008. By saving it, I now have less to spend. 

I did not come from money.

The security of these five-hundred dollars gives me peace. 

$500 is nearly nothing in our portfolio, a drop, but I never, never ever, want to embody a mindset wherein I would take $500 for granted!

I traded my time, a hundred years ago, for that money.

And yea, it would've grown to be more than $503 if I had invested it, and even if I invested it, today, I could still earn on it at a rate greater than it has grown in the past nearly twenty years, but nobody can tell you what to do with your money.

Yea, a lot of ifs and woulda-couldas have come and gone, and I have more money today than I would've ever let myself dream of back then, AND I still have that $500.

By the time I had settled back into college, I was feeling really confident about my money. I had enough to cover my life. I was confident in my ability to show up to some job and get paid. I transferred to a Starbucks in Boulder so I did not lose my seniority or my pay rate. I jumped right in where I had left off in Syracuse, but now I had a little confidence knowing I had enough money to cover my life sitting in the bank. Of course, I still had to show up to my job to continue to collect paychecks to afford my life from here on, but I had a little stash of cash to cover my life for a few months without a job. My scholarships and student loans continued to cover my tuition and rent ($800/month at its height, not including utilities, a lease co-signed by my parents), but that was it by this point in my schooling. My job really was supporting me, although, my rent was still being financed, and so, I had a really great opportunity to save even more money, but of course, I squandered it, cause I was a young ho who was never taught about money, what it is or how to use it to work for me.

I also opened my second-ever credit card, a Target card, in 2008.

I furnished my apartment through Craigslist and at Target.

Target lures you in with percentage discounts off entire purchases if paid on Target Credit.

So, I got the card to save 30% off about $200 (~$60) of furniture and used it exclusively at Target from then on, and I paid it off every month.

When we moved to Seoul in 2013, I canceled that credit card and closed its account.

In 2012, I opened the credit line, through my bank, that we use to this day.

It is our only personal line of credit.

We used to pay off the balance every month.

Since our thirties, we've kept a small balance on it, cause now we know what money is and how it works. 

Every once in a while, we will pay it way down, and every time, our credit gets extended. 

If I could go back, this is the point in time I would return to. 

I would tell myself to invest all of that extra money I did not have to spend on rent.

I'd pat myself on the back for saving any of it at all, but then I'd tell myself that saving it is not enough.

Saving feels secure, but saving does not create wealth. 

I would, obviously, need to explain a lot of things to myself, but this is the time in my life I would return to myself.

This is a point in time when:

I have consistent cash flowing to me through my job.

I like my job.

I have reasonable expenses, because school is subsidizing my early adulthood.

I'm comfortable with the whole act of paying bills.

I'm not bouncing on zero between paychecks.

I've graduated from college.

I'm twenty-four years old.

I'm about to move in with the bodybuddy/lifemate.

Our first apartment is $1,000/month, not including utilities.

I have a car and car payments (until 2012).

I paid off my car at twenty-seven.

I pay my own car insurance.

We move off our family's family plans.

He does not have a car. 

We split everything else down the middle.

After about a year of living together, we start thinking of our money as "our money"

We pay all of our life's expenses.

We have really great credit. (Never. Miss. Payments.)

We're logging our every expense.

Now is when everything begins to get complicated, cause this is when we started our first business, and so, this is when everything that we thought we knew about money became, "We don't know anything about money." We were affording our life, just fine, but we were going nowhere, fast. We'd been "scammed" out of $1,000 when we were too stupid to know that we could file our own business registration paperwork. We started searching for answers to our money questions. 

Early-Twenties/Mid-Twenties Cash Check:

• Do you have money in your accounts between pay checks?
• Have you built some consumer credit?
• Do you understand what money is? What a credit is? What a debit is?
• Do you know what Debt is?
• Do you track every penny flowing in and every penny flowing out?

The reason why this is the point in my life I wish I could return to (only for a day to talk to myself, not live, ugh *boo*) is because this is the point in my life when I wish I had started to invest my "extra" money. But investing your money feels no different than letting it go. It's not in an accessible bank account (it's in a brokerage account), so it's a terrifying feeling to let that money go be somewhere where you cannot access it or spend it.

It's a truly terrifying feeling. I know. I've lived it. But you get used to it, and then you get used to having money, and then your life changes.

This point in time, nevertheless, is the exact point in time to utilize a thing we call "compound interest."

When you save money, you're doing basic addition. You have $500 today, you add $100 tomorrow, now you have $600. Linear math. Linear growth. Add one, now you've added one. Not only that, you have to trade your time for all of those additional deposits.

When you invest money, you're MULTIPLYING your money. Your money grows by a percentage ... it multiplies. If you have $500 and it's going to grow at 5%, that's 500x0.05, which is $25, that $25 is what you've "earned" on the $500, and it's "returned" to you, so now you have $525. 

Now, your money is going to multiply 525x0.05, which is $26.25, so now you have $551.25.

Now, your money is going to multiply 551.25x0.05, which is $27.56, so now you have $578.81

Now, your money is going to multiply 578.81x0.05, which is $28.94, so now you have $607.75

If you keep going ...

you're creating exponential growth, at which point, your money begins to double, infinitely ... in theory.

This is compound interest. This is wealth.

When you reach this point where your money is doubling, you are wealthy beyond measure.

The only way to get here is through ZEROES. 

You must collect ZEROES. 

Zeroes are how multiplication works fastest.

Add a zero, you're multiplying your multiplication.

Look at 10x1 ... it equals 10

Look at 10x10 ... it equals 100

That zero that makes the difference between one and ten is the difference between being rich and poor, today, on Empire.

Here are some examples of a $100 stock that grows by $5 or 5% of 100 or 100x0.05 for the sake of math:

Pretend that you buy 1 share of a stock that's worth $100. 

This is called investing in a public company; 

the company is collectively owned by the public: people like you.

You own the right to 1 share of the earnings of that public company

And the day you bought it 1 share = $100.  

If the share price goes up by $5 in a day, you own 105x1, which equals $105.

Now you own 1 share that equals $105, the share price for one stock. 

 

Pretend now that you buy 2 shares of a stock that's worth $100.

You have 200 dollars in stock.

The stock goes up by $5 in a day.

You own 105x2, which equals $210.

What was $200 is now $210 in stock.

Pretend now that you buy 10 shares of a stock that's worth $100.

You have 1,000 dollars in stock.

The stock goes up by $5 in a day.

You own 105x10, which equals $1,050.

What was $1,000 is now $1,050 in stock.

Example One made $5, while Two made $10, and Three made $50 all in the exact same time frame.

This is capitalism-as-usual with public companies: THE MONEY MUST GROW. 

You can make your money grow by buying stocks and simply watching the market grow, &or you can buy more stocks whenever you have some extra cash. 

What I would've told myself at this point in time to which I would (if I could) return is that I MUST LEARN HOW TO INVEST MY MONEY, AND I MUST LEARN IT NOW, AND I MUST SHOVEL AT LEAST $1,000 INTO THE MARKETS, NOW.

We went down the road of investing, but the road that the mainstream "financial educational" seminars and meetups focus on is real estate investing and entrepreneurship.

The reason why there are so few mainstream avenues for stocks &bonds securities investing is because securities are governed, literally, by the law. 

these are the two laws that govern investing in these united states

These fucktards on socials think that they can tell you how to invest, but if you were to ask them what the rules are for investing, I'd bet big money that 0/100 of these fucktards would cite these laws.

If they're not quoting the law, they can't help you, lol.

In 2013, we learned that we were not going to be able to reach our financial goals without some major lifestyle changes. I had injured my neck and was unable to hold down full-time or even consistent employment. The bodybuddy/lifemate worked his little butt off supporting us and taking care of me. At some point in late 2012, we looked at each other, and we knew we couldn't go on like this and reach our goals. So, we decided to move to Seoul, South Korea. We made it to Daegu, South Korea in 2013, and then we finally moved to Seoul in 2014. I sold my car to cover all of our consumer debts, and the bodybuddy/lifemate sold his very expensive trumpet to buy my plane ticket. 

We spent our first years in South Korea learning and honing our money skills. We saved up a ton of money. The bodybuddy/lifemate was making good money. We basically had zero expenses, cause housing was covered. I made a little money here and there, and it was enough to create a little luxury in our life, because it was 100% disposable. 

By 2016, we had filled our coffers and saved enough to finally invest. I highly recommend not-investing money that might be needed at a moment's notice. This is why, while investing is key to generating wealth, it cannot be done too soon, because you have ongoing expenses to pay, forever, and so, if you might miss your bill payment, cause you're short $20, you should not be investing any money at all. There can be delays, penalties and fees for removing your money from stock market investments, and so, it is important that you've first saved enough to cover your daily life before you begin shoveling extra money into the markets. 

If you are drowning, you cannot help someone who is drowning. It is very important, especially for us women, to be extremely selfish during this time of financial foundation building. I know how challenging it can be, as a woman, to not help out, to not lend a helping hand. The time for this WILL COME, but for now, you gotta be selfish.

When I was thirty years old, we purchased our very first stocks. Ten shares of Tesla for $2,294.99. 

Our strategy has always been to live at the lowest possible level we can reasonably tolerate. In short, we have, for the past decade, on paper, lived "in poverty." We have a plan for every cent that enters our life, and every cent follows its plan. 

You do not need to be this "invested" in investing, lol. There are easy methods for stashing your cash in stocks &or bonds. The point is for YOU to learn what sort of capital outlays work for YOU. You do not have the same goals that I have. You do not know the things I know. I do not know the things you know. All we can know is what we learn, and so, if you want to invest your money so that it can grow, learn how money grows, and then learn how and where to put your money so that it can grow. 

Today, our financial portfolio and our capital strategy is far too complicated to outline here on this blog.

I will say this, however, we track every penny, incoming and outgoing.
We have many checking, savings, credit, and brokerage accounts at many different financial institutions, all carefully tracked.

We set a budget.

It doesn't matter how much money we make, we have a budget much lower than any amount we would ever reasonably make, and coming under budget is so satisfying.

The budget is reassessed with every new fluctuation in cash flows, which is about every quarter.

The budget is set based on current and future, upcoming expenses.

Once the month has begun, the budget cannot be reexamined, except in the case of emergencies, duh.

We still rent our living space, and we will continue to do so until we have so much money that we literally need to stash it in property.

Property ownership, here on Empire, is only for the truly wealthy. Don't get it twisted. It's called a housing market, and until you have the cash flow to throw down cash on that property, you're too poor to shop in the housing market. Treat the housing market like any market. Some of us can't afford organic. 

But the most important piece to all of this is actually not about investing. Investing will come naturally once you have a stash of cash. It just will. When you get to that point, it is imperative that you seek the Truth about how money works, about what investing is, what your options are when it comes to securities. Securities are a big deal. People go to jail. You cannot simply start a business and monetize your investing advice. You cannot. By law. This is why it's so difficult to find good advice. 

If you take advice from social media, you deserve to lose all of your money and be poor for the rest of your life. Would you really give away your money based on something you saw on a highway billboard?

So you either need to learn it yourself, or you need to find someone you trust who can teach it to you for free. Or you can get a job in the industry, lol, but that way lies lies, corruption and madness.

What you really need to know is how to stay out of debt.

The only way to do this is by living within your means.

If you want more means, job more.

If you don't want to job more for more means, fuck off.

Once you have your expenses under your control, you log every penny exiting your control and every penny entering your control, you will know exactly, to the penny, how much money you need to get through one day, one week, one month, one year, one decade.

If you do not know how much money you need, 

how can you ever hope to know how much money you want? 

We currently use Charles Schwab for all of our brokerage services:

• We have a schedule and a plan for every penny that comes in and goes out
• We make plays and take positions in the stock market every week
• We have different interests when it comes to companies in which to invest
• We have different approaches to investing
• We have the same philosophy about what types of companies interest us
• We're playing the long-game, always
• I prefer to stay away from big tech sector, infotech-type companies and lean more naturally to all-american, big brands, everyday consumer goods, the sorts of products that prop up everyday living
• I also like services that are non-negotiable, like, say, trash collection
• He pays attention to companies that are going to be affected by geopolitics and the law
• He also likes to throw his hat into rings that are untested, and so far, all of these picks of his have been gobbled up by larger companies, and we've been paid out our shares. He knows what he is doing; he is NOT a beginner.
• We're mostly in it for this next wave of trillion-dollar corporations, because this next wave of trillion-dollar corporations is going to be heavily reliant on a few, very specific materials, and if you understand what these materials are and the companies producing them, these companies are trading at next-to-nothing, because they're essential for building the future, but the building of the future has only just begun

kinda chic to use money found on the ground as decor for more

₩500 KRW = $0.36 USD [08aug2026 0653]

$1 USD = ₩1,408 KRW [same timestamp]

about ₩5,700 KRW will buy you a Big Mac in South Korea [today]

An Intermediate working toward Advanced (&beyond) Financial Literacy Comprehension Check:

• What is the Federal Reserve's dual mandate?
• How much does it cost to buy/sell money?
• What does "ownership" mean?
• What does "privatization" mean?
• What does "securitization" mean?
• If you were to add up the total weight of your groceries every week (every product has the weight labeled on it, and every receipt has the weight of any fruits and veggies), what is the cost per pound of your weekly groceries? 
• What is the margin buffer on your weekly budget?
• What was your non-wage income last month?
• What is an accredited investor?
• What is your total net worth excluding the value of your primary residence?
• What happens when The State prints more money?
• What is capitalism?
• When you deposit $100 into a bank account, what does the bank do with it?
• What is the FDIC?
• Tell me about your money.

Once you feel confident in your ability to talk about all of the above talking points, you're probably ready to hop on over to tkscmlimiteddotcom and start reading TPDEARR articles (our more advanced financial literacy retail investment resources).

We wish you well on your Quest,

Sun &Ahd

[for the truly curious]

yes, you are 100% normal if you hate talking about money.

i wrote about 90% of this thing yesterday,

and then i quit.

i nearly deleted the whole thing, 

cause writing about one's own finances 

is terrifying.

and so yea

i woke up this morning

and had the physical reaction of throwing up

before we (the bodybuddy/lifemtea&i) sat down to finish this thing.

so if you're thinking that it's so easy for me to talk about money,

and so difficult for you;

don't get it twisted.

money is a tough thing to talk about.

i love talking about making money,

but i do not like to talk about my money.

so no worries if you hate it.

you're good.

and do it anyway.

back in 2019, i called a fellow millennial's mortgage, on an apartment complex that he'd recently bought, 'DEBT,' and he looked at me like i was the stupidest person in the whole world, and then one beat later, he looked at me as if he could punch me in my face, lol.

Free your mind of the idea of deserving,

of the idea of earning,

and you will begin to be able to think.

—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed [as quoted on page 361]

DEBT: THE FIRST 5,000 YEARS
by David Graeber
[332 Gr]

this book is a library loaner
so this is what i do [combined w/below pic] when i need to take a lot of notes
but the book is not mine to mark up
*yawn*

of all the things that i love about the bodybuddy/lifemate, the single, greatest one (the one that just gets me so hot) is his big brain, and his big brain loves to read; it reads a lot and fast. i would consider him to be a better reader than i, in both speed and comprehension, and so, when he picks out his books on our jaunts to the library, i oftentimes end up reading one of the books that he chooses, cause, as i'm explaining, rn, his big brain is so attractive.

anyway, this book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber, is a the bodybuddy/lifemate pick and a highly-recommended read, especially if you're a woman. 

i was also introduced to two words with which i was pastly unfamiliar: dragooning [p 314] and prestidigitation [p 343], and they'll be presented below with their respective usage.

also, this is a book about debt over the course of a somewhat knowable human history, and the book works chronologically from past to present, so read the page numbers to understand the lateness or newness of the actual timeline of human history from which the quote was pulled.

also, keep in mind that this is a book of history, which means that a lot of these quotes are from someone who has written something, but since i cannot transcribe the entire book, here (as much as i wish i could), the quotes are completely out of context, and the context is an anthropological study of human societies not an economics theory from economists who largely do not understand human history.  

[begin quotes]

The definitive anthropological work on barter,

by Caroline Humphrey, of Cambridge,

could not be more definitive in its conclusions:

"No example of a barter economy, pure and simple,

has ever been described,

let alone the emergence from it of money; 

all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing." 

p 29

L. Frank Baum's book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which appeared in 1900,

is often held to be a parable for the Populist campaign of William Jennings Bryan,

who twice ran for president on the Free Silver platform—

vowing to replace the gold standard

with a bimetallic system

that would allow the free creation of silver money alongside gold.

As with the Greenbackers,

one of the main constituencies for the movement was debtors:

particularly, Midwestern farm families such as Dorothy's,

who had been facing a massive wave of foreclosures during the severe recession of the 1890s.

According to the Populist reading,

the Wicked Witches of the East and West represent the East and West Coast bankers ...

the Scarecrow represented the farmers

(who didn't have the brains to avoid the debt trap),

the Tin Woodsman was the industrial proletariat

(who didn't have the heart to act in solidarity with the farmers),

the Cowardly Lion represented the political class

(who didn't' have the courage to intervene).

The yellow brick road, silver slippers, emerald city, and hapless Wizard

presumably speak for themselves.

"Oz" is of course the standard abbreviation for "ounce." 

pp 52-53

[in-book quote]

"Up in our country we are human!" said the hunter.

"And since we are human we help each other.

We don't like to hear anybody say thanks for that.

What I get today you may get tomorrow.

Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs."

[new para]

The last line is something of an anthropological classic,

and similar statements about the refusal to calculate credits and debits

can be found throughout the anthropological literature on egalitarian hunting societies.

p 79

[in-book quote]

Always owe somebody something,

then he will be forever praying God to grant you a good, long and blessed life.

Fearing to lose what you owe him,

he will always be saying good things about you in every sort of company;

he will be constantly acquiring new lenders for you,

so that you can borrow to pay him back,

filling his ditch with other men's spoil. 

p 125

The only appropriate payment for the gift of a woman is the gift of another woman;

in the meantime, all one can do is acknowledge the outstanding debt.

...

Only a human could ever be considered equivalent to another human.

All the more so since, in the case of marriage,

we are speaking of something even more valuable than one human life:

we are speaking of a human life that also has the capacity to generate new lives.

[emphasis mine]

...

Money, then, begins, as Rospabe ́ himself puts it, "as a substitute for life."

One might call it the recognition of a life-debt. 

p 132 & 133

This is the profound truth of the blood-feud.

No one can ever really forgive the man who killed his brother because every brother is unique.

Nothing could substitute—

not even some other man given the same name and status as your brother,

or a concubine who will bear a son who will be named after your brother,

or a ghost-wife who will bear a child pledged to some day avenge his death.

[new para]

In a human economy, each person is unique, and of incomparable value,

because each is a nexus [emphasis mine] of relations with others.

...

The Lele example gave us a hint:

to make a human being an object of exchange,

one woman equivalent for another, for example,

requires first of all ripping her from her context;

that is, tearing her away from that web of relations

that makes her the unique conflux of relations that she is,

and thus,

into a generic value capable of being added and subtracted and used as a means to measure debt.

This requires a certain violence.

p 158 & 159

First-year Roman law students, for instance,

were made to memorize the following definition:

slavery

is an institution according to the law of nations

whereby one person falls under the property rights of another,

contrary to nature.

p 167

We might say, then, that money introduced a democratization of desire.

Insofar as everyone wanted money, everyone, high and low, was pursuing the same promiscuous substance. 

But even more:

increasingly, they did not just want money.

They needed it.

This was a profound change.

In the Homeric world, as in most human economies,

we hear almost no discussion of those things considered necessary to human life

(food, shelter, clothing)

because it is simply assumed that everybody has them.

A man with no possessions could, at the very least, become a retainer in some rich man's household.

Even slaves had enough to eat. 

p 190

Rulers are like shepherds.

We like to think of them as benevolently tending their flocks,

but what do shepherds ultimately do with sheep?

They kill and eat them,

or sell the meat for money.

...

It's only the existence of money, Socrates suggests,

that allows us to imagine that words like "power" and "interest" refer to universal realities

that can be pursued in their own right,

let alone that all pursuits are really ultimately the pursuit of power, advantage, or self-interest.

The question, he said, is how to ensure that those who hold political office

will do so not for gain,

but rather for honor.

p 196

As for dominium, the word is derived from dominus, meaning "master" or "slave-owner,"

but ultimately from domus, meaning "house" or "household."

It's of course related to the English term "domestic,"

which even now can be used either to mean "pertaining to private life"

or to refer to a servant who cleans the house.

Domus overlaps somewhat in meaning with familia, "family"—

but, as proponents of "family values" might be interested to know,

familia itself ultimately derives from the word famulus, meaning "slave."

A family was originally all those people under the domestic authority of a paterfamilias,

and that authority was, in early Roman law at least,

conceived as absolute.

A man did not have total power over his wife,

since she was still to some degree under the protection of her own father,

but his children, slaves and other dependents were his to do with as he wanted—

at least in early Roman law, he was perfectly free to whip, torture, or sell them.

A father could even execute his children, provided he found them to have committed capital crimes.

With his slaves, he didn't even need that excuse.

pp 200-201

We are so used to the idea of "having" rights—

that rights are something one can possess—

that we rarely think about what this might actually mean.

In fact (as Medieval jurists were well aware), one man's right is simply another's obligation.

My right to free speech is others' obligation not to punish me for speaking;

my right to a trial by jury of my peers is the responsibility of others to maintain a system of jury duty.

p 205

This is why I developed the concept of human economies:

ones in which what is considered really important about human beings

is the fact that they are each a unique nexus of relations with others—

therefore, that no one could ever be considered an exact equivalent to anything or anyone else.

In a human economy,

money is not a way of buying or trading human beings,

but a way of expressing just how much one cannot do so. 

p 208

As many an African proverb emphasizes:

a proper king has no relatives either, or at least,

he acts as if he does not.

In other words,

king and slave are mirror images,

in that unlike normal human beings who are defined by their commitments to others,

they are defined only by relations of power.

They are as close to perfectly isolated, alienated beings as one can possibly become. 

p 209

 

Mo Di, the founder of Mohism, took that first approach.

He turned the concept of li, profit, into something more like "social utility,"

and then he attempted to demonstrate that war itself is, by definition, an unprofitable activity.

p 241

How do you compare two things with no common qualities? 

His [Ghazali's] conclusion: 

it can only be done by comparing both to a third thing with no qualities at all. 

...

From this it also follows that lending money at interest must be illegitimate,

since it means using money as an end in itself: 

"Money is not created to earn money." 

In fact, he says, 

"in relation to other goods, dirhams and dinars are like prepositions in a sentence," 

words that, as the grammarians inform us, are used to give meaning to other words, 

but can only do so because they have no meaning in themselves. 

Money is thus a unit of measure that provides a means of assessing the value of goods, 

but also one that operates as such only if it stays in constant motion. 

To enter into monetary transactions in order to obtain even more money, ... would be, 

according to Ghazali, 

the equivalent of kidnapping the postman. 

p 281

When Aristotle argued that coins are merely social conventions, 

the term he used was symbolon—

from which our own word "symbol" is derived. 

Symbolon was originally the Greek word for "tally"—

an object broken in half to mark a contract or agreement, or marked and broken to record a debt. 

So our word "symbol"

traces back originally to objects broken to record debt contracts of one sort or another. 

This is striking enough. 

What's really remarkable though, is that the contemporary Chinese word for "symbol," 

fu, or fu hao, 

has almost exactly the same origin. 

p 298

While we are used to assuming 

that the Mexican population was devastated simply as an effect of newly introduced European diseases, 

contemporary observers felt that the dragooning of the newly conquered natives 

to work in the mines was at least equally responsible. 

p 314

The story of the origins of capitalism, then, 

is not the story of the gradual destruction of traditional communities 

by the impersonal power of the market. 

It is, rather, 

the story of how an economy of credit was converted into an economy of interest; 

of the gradual transformation of moral networks by the intrusion of the impersonal—

and often vindictive—

power of the state. 

p 332

The criminalization of debt, then, was the criminalization of the very basis of human society. 

It cannot be overemphasized that in a small community, 

everyone normally was both lender and borrower. 

p 334

The reader will recall 

that the Bank of England was created 

when a consortium of forty London and Edinburgh merchants—

mostly already creditors to the crown—

offered King William III a £1.2 million loan to help finance his war against France. 

In doing so, 

they also convinced him to allow them to return to form a corporation 

with a monopoly on the issuance of banknotes—

which were, in effect, promissory notes for the money the kind now owed them. 

This was the first independent national central bank, 

and it became the clearinghouse for debts owed between smaller banks; 

the notes soon developed into the first European national paper currency. 

pp 339-340

In Goethe's Faust (1808), 

he actually has his hero ... pay a visit to the Holy Roman Emperor. 

The Emperor is sinking under the weight of endless debts 

that he has piled up paying for the extravagant pleasure of his court. 

Faust and his assistant, Mephistopheles, 

convince him that he can pay off his creditors by creating paper money. 

It's represented as an act of pure prestidigitation. 

p 343

[in-book quote] 

The root of the whole evil was the so called patron or "peonage" system ... 

by which the employee, forced to buy all his supplies at the employer's store, 

is kept hopelessly in debt, 

while by law he is unable to leave his employment until his debt is paid ... 

The peon is thus, as often as not, a de facto slave; 

and since in remoter regions of the vast continent there is no effective government, 

he is wholly at the mercy of his master.

p 349

It is the secret scandal of capitalism that at no point has it been organized primarily around free labor. 

The conquest of the Americas began with mass enslavement, 

then gradually settled into various forms of debt peonage, African slavery, and "indentured service"—

that is, the use of contract labor, workers who had received cash in advance 

and were thus bound for five-, seven-, or ten-year terms to pay it back.

p 350

Marxists have questioned whether wage labor is ultimately free in any sense 

(since someone with nothing to sell but his or her body 

cannot in any sense be considered a genuinely free agent), 

but they still tend to assume that free wage labor is the basis of capitalism. 

Our dominant image of the origins of capitalism 

continues to be the English workingman toiling in the factories of the industrial revolution, 

and it is assumed this image can be traced forward to Silicon Valley, 

with a straight line in between. 

All those millions of slaves and serfs and coolies and debt peons disappear, 

or if we must speak of them, we write them off as temporary bumps along the road. 

... 

In most of medieval northern Europe, 

wage labor had been mainly a lifestyle phenomenon.

p 351

Speaking as someone brought up in that sort of working-class family, ... 

I can attest to the degree that, 

for those who spend most of their waking hours working at someone else's orders, 

the ability to pull out a wallet full of banknotes 

that are unconditionally one's own 

can be a compelling form of freedom.

pp 354-355

On August 15, 1971, 

United States President Richard Nixon 

announced that foreign-held U.S. dollars 

would no longer be convertible into gold—

thus stripping away the last vestige of the international gold standard. 

p 361

For instance, while technically, 

the Fed cannot lend money directly to the government by buying Treasury Bonds, 

everyone knows that doing so indirectly is one of its primary reasons for being. 

And insofar as the government issues T-bonds, 

it actually is, in one sense, printing money; 

circulating debt tokens that—

as one apparently paradoxical effect of Nixon's floating the dollar—

have now themselves come to replace gold as the world's reserve currency; 

that is, as the ultimate store of value in the world, 

yielding the United States enormous economic advantages. 

[new para] 

Meanwhile, the U.S. debt remains, as it has been since 1790, a war debt: 

the United States continues to spend more on its military 

than do all other nations on earth put together ...

p 365

The U.S. military, unlike any other, 

maintains a doctrine of global power projection: 

that it should have the ability, 

through roughly 800 overseas military bases, 

to intervene with deadly force absolutely anywhere on the planet.

... 

Again, we are talking about symbolic power.

p 366

How much did Hussein's decision to buck the dollar 

really weigh into the U.S. decision to depose him?

p 368

If history holds true, 

an age of virtual money 

should mean a movement away from war, empire-building, slavery and debt peonage 

(waged or otherwise), 

and toward the creation of some sort of overarching institutions, 

global in scale, 

to protect debtors. 

What we have seen so far is the opposite.

p 368

"debt imperialism"

p 369

It is no coincidence that the new phase of American debt imperialism 

has also been accompanied by the rise of the evangelical right, who—

in defiance of almost all previously existing Christian theology—

have enthusiastically embraced the doctrine of "supply-side economics," 

that creating money and effectively giving it to the rich 

is the most Biblically appropriate way to bring about national prosperity. 

p 377

Even if we are at the beginning of the turn of a very long historical cycle, 

it's still largely up to us to determine how it's going to turn out.

p 383

As I pointed out in the very beginning: 

the difference between owing someone a favor and owing someone a debt 

is that the amount of a debt can be precisely calculated. 

Calculation demands equivalence. 

p 386

This in turn leads to that great embarrassing fact 

that haunts all attempts to represent the market as the highest form of human freedom: 

that historically, impersonal, commercial markets originate in theft.

p 386

What could possibly be more presumptuous, or more ridiculous, 

than to think it would be possible to negotiate with the grounds of one's existence?

p 387

For me, this is exactly what's so pernicious about the morality of debt: 

the way that financial imperatives constantly try to reduce us all, 

despite ourselves, 

to the equivalent of pillagers, 

eyeing the world simply for what can be turned into money—

and then tell us that it's only those who are willing to see the world as pillagers 

who deserve access to the resources required to pursue anything in life other than money. 

It introduces moral perversions on almost every level.

p 390

[end quotes]

선 &her Studio

we finally did the final rearrange
*weeps*
this Studio, my studio, has turned out even better than i'd imagined
&it is the greatest studio space i have ever had
so naturally
we had more hurdles to hurdle
emotionally speaking
*ugh*
it
literally
never ends
but then
i realized that
that's what we want
right?
for it
life
to not-end
&so
a little perspective shift goes a long way

this is exactly what this tabletop
&this studio in general
looks like
i have not cleaned up or made it "photo ready," etc.
*barf*
well
i guess i lied a little
cause i put a shirt on for those mirror selfies
lol
but the socks
i already had them on
^..^

i have not done a lick of sewing yet
in this space
&i'm just sitting in it
cause it's all a struggle
the bad
obviously
but also the good?
what the fuck.
on an unrelated note
the Time Tide is crawling i tell ya
painstakingly crawling
why?
it was flying by so fast
&now
it's not.
why, Ladybug, why?!?

[added 03aug26 0312]
ive gotta friend here waiting for her fourth grandbaby
so i thought that i'd christen my (the bodybuddy/lifemate&my, our) studio
by making the first few pieces of cloth for her grandbaby
*weeps*
i am making twenty pieces
(outlined above)
out of  4 yds x 2.5 yds of cotton muslin
cause in that book Debt by David Graeber
he writes about the way that various human cultures
partake in gift giving traditions
&one of the traditions that is mentioned
is the giving of twenty pieces of cloth when a baby is born
*heart-eyes*
the father must go out and collect twenty pieces of cloth
&present it to the woman who birthed his child
&the tradition hailed from a culture that made cloth
&exported its cloth
(this all might need to be in the present tense
cause imnota great reader)
&i thought that it's also a very fitting type of gift for me to give
as well
as a person who works with textiles

[05aug2026 updated my mirror w/this pic that i couldn't find]