Debt is a prison to keep you trapped in a world of no-hope and no-chance. It is a prison that the wolves use to keep you a sheep and therefore under control. If you want to be a wolf yourself and have freedom and success, you need to get rid of debt, get in the black and start making some money.
As Daygame is an offshoot of Direct Game, much of your success will come from turning yourself into a solid, self-confident guy rather than from techniques and pick-up lines. One thing that girls will almost psychically pick up on when talking to you is your sense of self-worth and level of happiness. You can make yourself feel happy when you’re sad but true happiness is radiant and will be noticed by anybody.
Self-worth comes from accomplishing notable things and overcoming hurdles in your life. Your life becomes lighter and more happy if you have no burden of debt. You no longer have to worry where money is coming from and it is like a weight is removed from your shoulders. Women will see this in your eyes and the way you walk and hold yourself.
This is a bit of a long story, but it’s my story and you can see how I went from being just another average sheep to where I am now and how I did it. If you’re somewhere along the same timeline and in similar circumstances it may give you a path to help get yourself out of it the pickle you’re in.
They Prey on the Young and Naive
When I was 18 years old and a fresh new student at University, I had to get myself a bank account to put the cash from my student grant (yes it was that long ago) into. I thought I was good at budgeting, like I thought I was good at everything, but although I was better than most of my peers, it proved to be almost impossible to live as a student and not get into debt.
After the three years, I had resisted getting a student loan (which turned out to be a good thing) but had managed to accumulate the burden of an overdraft. It was still under a thousand pounds, so the monthly interest payments were barely noticeable. But now I know why Lottery millionaires often lose their wealth within months of winning it. They get a large amount of money without having to earn it, so they do not value it. With my education, the money was given to me for free by the government, so it was easy for me to squander it and not care.
In the end, I failed to graduate because I chose a degree more on whim than anything else. It fitted the A-Levels I’d done. Many of my classmates were going into it. It would be a well-paid profession. My careers teacher told me that I should go to University and enjoy myself. I did a Mechanical Engineering degree.
After less than a year I knew that I never wanted to be an Engineer and spent most of my time playing on the then-fledgeling Internet, programming simple text-based games and chatting girls up over email. That should have been a pointer to me as to what I should have been doing with my time. But I felt pressure from my parents to study and graduate with a degree. In the end I flunked and wasted three years of my life.
Get Your Life in the Right Order
If I was the kind of guy then that I am now, before deciding to go to University, I’d have taken a year off, worked for six months and gone travelling. This would have given me time to work out what I wanted to do with my life. I don’t know if I’d be the person I am now though without having gone through everything that follows, so maybe it was for the best.
With a vague idea of travelling and somehow improving my lot, I went to Wisconsin in the US for the summer with the aim of paying my overdraft back by joining a scheme aimed at taking students over there as sales-reps. We had to pay for our own flights and living costs but they would provide us with products to sell. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it was just a company’s way of exploiting naive young graduates.
We were to sell aerial photographs of people’s houses and neighbourhoods to families by walking around knocking on their doors. I had a great time (youthful enthusiasm got me by) and as a bonus, had a couple of liaisons with the girls in my group during the four months out there.
However, I turned out to be an average salesman and ended up not even making enough money to pay for the bus back to New York, let alone enough to pay for the flights and make a profit. Luckily, it was my Dad that lent me the money in the first place and he wasn’t charging me interest, but I hated having to pay him the money back and it took long months to do it. I just wanted to go out, drink beer, watch live bands and meet girls.
I returned from the US and I had to get myself a job. As I had no experience at anything but sales, I went into that, selling electrical goods like TVs, washing machines, etc. I had a massive interest in music at the time. Music and women were all I could think of, so I thought why not combine the two? Everyone knows that musicians get women. So, with my rudimentary drumming skills, I joined a band with my school-friend who was a guitarist.
Have a Vision and Work Towards It
For more than ten years, I played drums in various bands and lived a stoner musician low-life existence. I didn’t make it in the music business nor did I get laid as a direct result of being a drummer. All I got was ten years of living on the bread-line.
When you have a shit job just to make ends meet, you live month-to-month and you can barely pay your bills and living costs. When you smoke and drink and go out all the time to bars to play or just socialise, all your money goes, plus more. I’d increase my overdraft by a little every month. I bought a computer on credit, to be paid over three years.
After two years my monitor blew, so I got a larger loan to pay off my original loan, plus pay for a new flatscreen monitor. A couple of years later, I got another loan to consolidate that one. I hoped to use the extra cash to buy a van to enable the band I was in at the time to go on tour. I thought that if we could go on tours, more people would be able to see us and we would have more chance of getting signed. What actually happened was that I spent most of the money on getting stoned and other trivial stuff.
During that whole hazy time, I did do one fairly clever thing and that was to get myself back to college and do an evening class on Computer-Aided Design. This got me a job in London which had a pretty good wage. Far more than I’d had in the past. I even started saving up some cash to pay off my loan.
I’d become interested in Game around this time and had started to go out to meet girls, without much success. So, I got myself my own flat which, with housing prices in London being ridiculous, was barely within my means, and I paid for a bootcamp with an eminent pick-up instructor in Croatia (on my overdraft of course). I came back from an amazing experience where I was talking to model-quality girls and going on dates, but I failed to replicate my success in Croatia upon returning to London.
Not long after, the recession hit, my job was made redundant and I found myself on the dole.
Turn Your Life Around One Good Decision at a Time
I had an expensive flat to pay for but I had to stay in London for a little while longer as previously in a moment of clarity, I had decided to do a pre-university course in to try and get myself out of the shit job market and into a good job market.
Being on the dole was good in that I had all day every day to knuckle down and concentrate on my course, but the money I had coming in from unemployment benefit didn’t pay for all of my living costs and it didn’t pay for loan payments and overdraft interest. Money was hemorrhaging from my account and it wouldn’t be long before the cash I’d saved to pay off my loan was gone.
I finished my course, managed to get out of London by breaking the contract on my flat and moved to Nottingham to do a degree in Computing. Once there, despite really strict budgeting for food and having no social life, money was slipping away. In the end, what saved me from the financial cliff-edge was two things:
- Selling all of my possessions (including my prized drum-kit) on eBay to pay for rent.
- The help of an awesome charity called Elizabeth Finn. They paid me a lump sum to keep me going and also gave me a small monthly payment to tide me over until I got my first student loan cheque. If it hadn’t been for them I’d probably be in prison or dead.
I knew that because I hadn’t used one when I went to university before, the government would give me a loan to pay for my course, but for one less year than I needed. My idea was to get a part-time job whilst studying and save up enough cash to pay for the missing year by the time I came to it. However after a few days on the course, it turned out that the government was going to make me pay for my first year, not my last year. But I’d already started the course, so I would have to pay for the first year whatever happened. I was stuck like a rat in a trap. I had no money, a large loan and overdraft and a degree course to pay for. This was one of the most stressful periods of my life.
Luckily I have awesome parents and they gave me the entirety of their life savings to pay for this course. Also, now that I was officially student, I managed to get a second overdraft with a different bank by lying to them, but that barely kept me going.
Cut the Crap – Get Rid of Your Baggage
I was living with a girl at the time and we were really unmatched to each other, which made daily life really difficult. We were both stressed out at being jobless and poor, we weren’t fucking and she was a massive spendthrift, so combined with the shitty life I was already living, I withdrew into a little shell and spent most of my time playing online games. I got along, barely passing the modules of my course, onward to my oblivion.
And then came the crucial moment where I woke up from my haze and saw what had become of me.
My entire life was a mass of debt and I was constantly failing to stand up to responsibility for my own lack of success. I didn’t realise it at the time, but the scales of my life flipped at that moment. I had been slowly building up a positive momentum for a few years and this one point of my life was when my life switched over from a negative to a positive trend.
I dumped my girlfriend, moved to a cheaper flat, told the loan company that I couldn’t pay them for the foreseeable future and cancelled the direct debit. I stopped playing games, started to wake up early and exercise and worked hard all day, every day on my course work. I had the hassle of the loan company turning my loan over to debt collectors, but they had nothing on me as I had no assets and I was a student. They would call me every week asking for the money, so I told them that I was a student and would pay them off when I graduated and got myself a job.
During the winter I had no heating, so I worked dressed in a sleeping bag and bedsheets. Because I lived in a shitty area, hoodlums vandalised my only mode of transport; my bicycle and they also superglued the lock on the door to my flat, but I worked through it and eventually I graduated.
With distinction.
Turn Negative Experiences into Positive Experiences
I think when you experience a massive amount of hardship and difficulty, it hardens you as a person and makes you more resilient. Looking back, if I had chosen the right path before going to University the first time, I may still be a sheep, tied to a marriage / children / mortgage burden like everybody else. Or I may have gotten to where I am now, but fifteen years earlier. Who knows? You have to start from where you are in life and make good decisions. That’s what I’m doing now.
Anyway, after graduation, I wasn’t expecting much as my previous experience of the job market wasn’t very good. I was expecting nothing when I put my CV on a job site, but after a couple of days I had agencies calling me and I had an interview. That interview lead to a job.
I accepted. There were problems. It was a four hour daily commute, but it paid well enough. I did that for three months. During that time I just worked, commuted, ate and slept. I didn’t have any spare time. Eventually I managed to work up enough cash to pay for a house near my employers and that’s where I came over the plateau and started my rise.
During the next two years I used my experience of living a frugal life and became determined to get rid of this Sword of Damocles that had been hanging over my head for fifteen years. This awful, debilitating debt.
How to Get Rid of Debt
I started saving as much spare cash as I could every month. I read that you could make an offer to debt collection agencies, so once I’d saved up 75% of the amount that I owed to them, I called and offered it to them as a lump sum. They took it. I was delighted. I could feel my burden being lightened, brick by brick, pound by pound.
I’d also read about zero percent interest credit cards. You can buy whatever you want and not have to pay interest on the money until 18 months later. There was even one where you could transfer a lump sum into your bank account. I applied for this and managed to get it. The credit card companies expect you to buy lots of useless rubbish and forget to pay the money off. Then they hit you for crippling interest payments.
Not me though. I’d learned my lesson. I used the lump sum they transferred to my account to pay off my biggest overdraft and closed that bank account. Then I worked out how much I’d have to pay off every month to clear the credit card debt before I had to start paying interest and paid it every single month. Coincidentally, this also allowed me to pay my parents back within the same time-frame, so I remained disciplined for 18 months and just got on with it.
I was almost out of debt, all I had left was the overdraft on my student account. I reckoned it would take me another six months to get rid of and I would be debt free! During this whole period I’d been learning Daygame and I’d started to get good at it, but I wanted higher quality women and I wanted to earn more money and have greater opportunities in life, so after the six months was over, I planned to move to London.
Then something happened. The company I was working for lost a major client and I lost my job (again).
But it was different this time. I didn’t have a massive debt load. I could think clearly and look upon the event positively. I had been at the job exactly two years, so they gave me a large redundancy payment. I saw my chance, so I paid off my last overdraft debt and used the remaining cash to move to London, earlier than expected.
Exponential Upward Spiral
You cannot believe the amount of joy I felt at getting rid of this debt and finally being in the black. After fifteen years swimming in murky water, I finally emerged into the light. A great feeling of opportunity and enthusiasm washed over me.
I got a job fairly easily and despite the steep hike in living costs in London, the amount of spare cash I had after expenses was comparable to living in the Midlands. So, I began to invest money in the stock market and looked for business opportunities to enable me to start making a secondary income. Once you have cash to invest, there are ways to increase your wealth quickly. Check out the following books for ideas:
- The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime by MJ DeMarco.
- The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Tim Ferriss.
- Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill.
- Rich Dad Poor Dad: What The Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not by Robert Kiyosaki.
DeMarco’s book is the one that resonates with me the most and is the model that I am trying to implement at the moment. He does mock the 4-Hour Work Week (4HWW) and Rich Dad Poor Dad (RDPD) because their philosophies differ from his, but there are still important lessons to be learned from both books. For example, 4HWW teaches you the benefits of business automation and remote working and RDPD teaches you the difference between assets and liabilities and the value of hard work. Think and Grow Rich is essential reading to get you in the right mindset for success and is still selling massive numbers of copies despite being more than eighties years old.
Eventually I’ll be making enough from my secondary business income that it will turn into my primary income and I can quit working for someone else and work for myself instead. This will free up a lot of cash by enabling me to pay myself before the tax man, allowing me to have extra cash to invest. Then, eventually I will automate the business as much as possible and spend the rest of my days free to meet and fuck girls and travel the world.
Get rid of your debt, stop being a sheep and become a wolf. Do it while you’re young and can enjoy it.