My Experience With Money is MY Experience. Not Yours
I’ve been on social media for almost three years teaching people how to invest and trade stocks. I am entirely self taught. I never went to college. Prior to trading stocks, I worked the front desk at a gym making $8-9/hour. Before that, I was a line cook at a Tex-Mex restaurant making around $10/hour. And before that, I was a high school student with a dream: I wanted to be a professional wrestler.
But, on the first day of class, I was thrown over the top rope and landed on the cement, breaking my back. I came home and started working.
After the working at the gym, I decided I wanted to work for myself. I was interested in the stock market. After losing quite a bit of money gambling with penny stocks, I decided to teach myself everything I know about the trading and investing.
Cut to almost 19 years later. I’ve got 200,000 TikTok followers and almost 10,000 YouTube followers. My story is unique to me. There aren’t very many wanna be pro wrestlers who become line cooks, front desk associates at a gym, author of two books: a restaurant exposé and a horror/thriller novel and then go on to teach themselves how to trade. Successfully. For 13 years.
But here we are.
There’s a new trend on TiKTok where you share money mistakes you were younger. You can watch mine here.
The thing that kills me about social media is how personal experiences are always the focus of debate. Whenever I make a video talking about things I wish I had done (so others can learn from my mistakes), there’s inevitably someone in the comments who pops up to inform you that because they personally weren’t able to invest $300 a month when they were 18, that you must be lying.
These grandiose claims like, “Nobody can do that!” or “That never happens!” are exhausting.
When I was working as a line cook, making $10 an hour, I worked 40 hours a week. I lived at home. I didn’t have rent. I didn’t have student loans. My mom didn’t ask me to contribute to anything. Fortunate? Of course. Impossible? No. Because it happened to me. And this is my story, on my TikTok account, about my unique experience.
Not yours.
I always tell trolls that my videos aren’t about them. They’re about me. Because this is my channel. Where I … ::drumroll please:: talk about myself.
That’s why the title of the video is, “Money Mistakes I Made When I was Younger.” Not “Money Mistakes You Made when YOU were younger.”
Your money mistakes will be different, because they are unique to you. The point of these videos isn’t to say all of us are the same, with the same experiences and the same financial situations. And I love when people say, “Hindsight is 20/20!” Yes. That is sort of the point of these videos. I made mistakes. And hopefully you can learn from them. And hopefully I can learn from yours.
