My debt journey started very early in life. Growing up poor my mother didn’t know anything about finance. My sister got a job at a bank and helped me get my first bank account and she warned me about the pitfalls of credit card debt Told me to never to carry a balance. Which I still follow to this day.

So when it was time to go to college my mom encouraged me to take out loans to pay for school because “knowledge is something they can’t take away” she told me.

So I enrolled into a really expensive private school and after 4 years I racked up $50k in student loans. I went into a STEM field and I was confident I would earn enough to pay the loans off but hopefully I would be able to find a job to pay them off for me. Which I did by working for the government.

After college I got my first of 3 car loans. I always paid those off quickly as possible. But interest rate on those was always below 5%.

After 4 years of working with the government I paid off all of my student debt using their debt repayment program.

Then I just used credit cards to pay for everything and racked up hella reward points. Points I would use for travel gifts for money I was spending. Trying my best to achieve a perfect credit score. I credit card churned all in the chase if free money while never paying a single cent in interest.

I would often use the 0% APR offers because they were “free money”. For example when bitcoin crashed to $3k I bought BTC using a 0% Apr credit card then used the 0% term of 18 months to pay it off. But the nagging payment after the fact would always annoy me and I would end up paying it off way before the grace period.

Using the VA loan (which allows 0% down) to purchase a few homes at great interest rates.

For the homes I used loans to pay for solar systems.

The last major loan I took is the one I am struggling the most with. I took a business loan to buy some miners at the peak of the market. $75/TH was the price for miners. Now the BTC price has crash and I’m just barely getting by making loan payment and paying for power for the miners. I am crunching the numbers to see if I would have been better off just buying BTC instead of the miners but so far it’s too early to tell.

But the silver lining is the interest on the loan counts as a business expense! Because of that and how the business isn’t profitable my federal tax liability is very very small. Not saying I regret doing this deal yet but probably was not the smartest use of debt for me to date.

But I think that is my last hurrah with debt. Now I am trying to live more if a debt free/bank free life. I’m just so tired of this broken ass system. It blew my mind that interest loan payments can be a business expense and lower your tax burden.

I have always been responsible with debt and clearly it had a strong role of allowing me to move up the economic ladder but bitcoin has really showed me the evil rot this system brings and if I want to see change it starts with me.