After racking up $30,000 in debt, Brooklyn software engineer Devonte Duncan took out a consolidation loan and began rethinking how he spends. His biggest lesson: Earning more doesn’t mean you should spend more.

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Transcript

Transcript

Transcript
So every month I tried to save about 10% of my salary. So that comes out to about 700 plus dollars. I also have a 401K with my company annually I’m saving about $15,900. It’s a 4% employer match and I I Max it out at also 10% contribution. For the credit cards that I do have I only have one that has an annual fee and it’s my Amex Platinum and that’s about 695. Was a year. Back when I was at my peak spending, I realized that I had racked up a lot of debt because I was spending more money than I had. I decided to basically take out a debt consolidation consolidation loan for about $30,000, and every month that runs me about $947. On that loan. I believe I have about two years left until it’s completely paid off. I think the lessons I took away from racking up that debt was realizing that just because you make more money. Doesn’t mean you have to spend more money. And so I, I kept fighting with this thing called lifestyle creep. So as I would make more money, I would incur more expenses. And so I had to realize that I have to strike a balance between what’s necessary and what I want and keep it within what’s feasible for the actual money that I have in my pocket. I will say because of the way that I was brought up, I don’t my relationship with money is a bit strained. I’ve never really been good at it because I’ve had to learn a lot of the skills for dealing with it on my own. So like, I didn’t understand how things like credit score worked or how loans worked or what it would even look like to buy a home because nobody in my family that I know of actually owns a home like. I, I don’t even think I know a home, a homeowner directly other than my landlord and he owns this whole building. So I currently don’t have any savings goals outside of saving 10% of my salary, mostly because I realized that you can’t save your way out of poverty and you definitely can’t save your way into a house because the price of things is going up way, way faster than my wages are going up and everyone else’s wages. And so for me, one time debt free, I’m going to continue to save, but. A lot of the money I have, I’m going to continue investing in myself and the ideas that I have in the hopes that someday turns into something that can help me live my dreams.