Flippant Financial Statements
By no means am I a financial expert. Just to prove this to you, I warn you that profanity will be used in this Blog post. My greatest financial skill is honesty—and the ability to respond systematically to an honest assessment over a large time of long suffering. My person can suffer for such a large time (by childlike, North American standards) that people not watching me closely actually accuse me of enjoying my humiliation in some sort of rube ignorance. So very insulting… Another important skill is valuing the “here a little, there a little” principle—which loosely translates into having a “long-term investment strategy.”
But before my thoughts could even begin to measure around far-flung ‘ investment strategy,’ an honest assessment of my captivity has to be embraced like a brother and a friend. For me this ‘friend’ shows itself in this simple line:
You can’t really talk shit about an “evil” corporation when you know you owe them money.
Of course, the corporation can lie about you owing them money but, for most of us captives of first-world countries, we are the ones who are lying about our debts. My journey out of massive consumer credit card debt—the lowliest of debts to have—was an incredible experience. My debt was crippling. ‘Crippling’ means that every time you get paid almost all of the money left over from basic necessities has to go paying debts. These were reasons why crippling consumer credit card debt was with me for over a decade:
- I was not born into a family with magic resources that could swoop down and save me from my debt problems—my father was simply not having it and my mother did not think that males are so incompetent that we actually need this kind of help forever. I feel sorry for other momma’s boys who are systematically and deliberately weakened over their lifetime because their mother is “helping” them so much. It makes me so angry that I’m going to pretend that you are one of those spoiled sons: You punk bitch—now you have to overcompensate for a fictional standard of masculinity by being hyper-violent and pornographic. It’s strange how old girls that play with living Ken dolls are so hypnotically attracted to you. Okay. My pretending is over… Actually it’s not strange: imperial chicks have the “woman’s right” to be a sugarmomma too. Hear her roar.
- I married poor before I left college at the age of 21 to a girl who was poorer than me. We made no registry (like it would matter) and spent years buying basic infrastructure items like an iron or a microwave oven—and then, according to modern North American customs, we divorced—leaving me to buy all of these infrastructure items all over again. I encouraged my ex-wife to take everything we bought because I am not a punk bitch Ken doll. Like I had to explain sarcastically and seriously to one college-educated woman about a decade ago, I am a man. This ain’t “the friendly ghost”—this, the Holy Ghost. It may seem silly to explain these things to those who are not familiar with this American life.
- I started paying for items like food with a consumer credit card. I’m glad for those of you who find this purchasing decision strange. More power to you.
- While I was in W2 labor, I started a “business” at “home” and bought a whole bunch of electronic equipment with a consumer credit card. Again, I’m glad for those of you who find this purchasing decision strange. I must have missed that loan officer from my local bullet-proof bank knocking on my door.
It is the last item on my list that cost me the most. Rumors told me that Robert Townsend did the same thing in order finish Hollywood Shuffle. But me, I was not making a film to be released in a relatively small time. I was buying computer parts and building computers. I was buying overpriced audio equipment. I was showing up half-crazed at Radio Shack in the morning without bathing to buy yet another goddamned cable because of a dream that woke me up and told me to go. Now you can buy these strange cables on the Internet—back then, you couldn’t.
So, anyway, we’ll see what comes from such crazy, funky, stanky dreams. Eventually this stankiness gets washed off and over time bathing kicks in regularly—here a little, there a little—line upon line precept upon precept. And now here comes my next flippant financial statement:
Don’t buy certain things that you do not know how sell.
No, I’m not talking about audio cables. Let’s talk real estate. These were my reasons for buying a house in freaking California, one of the most expensive real estate markets on Earth:
- To provide a central family compound for my three children and, at least, one of their mothers.
- To improve my credit rating and my ability to get loans outside of the bullshit of consumer credit cards.
- To serve some unclearly-defined notion of investing.
- To remove myself from the stench of depraved landlords, their evil property management companies (like Compass Property Management), their asbestos and their equally depraved tenants.
The first item is a joke (on me) and an ongoing tragedy for two out of three of my children. For those of you who follow this Blog—ah, just read an earlier post. The second item was based on a little bit of ignorance—just a little bit. Primarily, my credit rating is nowhere near as “bad” as I was easily led to conclude (ghetto thinking fails to compare with the nation as a whole). Importantly, my rediscovery of the 1980s-style Credit Union appears to me as a significant interim step and is a full replacement for bullshit consumer debt.
My apologies to those of you who command six-figure credit lines but the simple Credit Union arithmetic still amuses me. Compare some 18-percent, squid-Billy, trailer-park, credit-card garbage to, say, depositing a few thousand in a Credit Union account at, say, 5% and then turning around and taking out loan at, say, 9%. When your Credit Union loan is less than or equal to the amount on deposit you are effectively paying 4% for ‘lowly’ consumer debt. This is my new version of a “secured credit card.” My first, tricycle, broke-ass, ghetto credit card was a $500 secured credit card. Damn near a decade later I still have secured card—but this time it’s on my terms and under my motherfucking control. You won’t get ghetto financial advice like this on Oprah*,* baby!
This financing is similar (to me) to the kind of credit farmers got in the old days before evil corporations drove them out of business (with the help of the government). You get one lump sum of cash for 6 to 12 months—and it’s for you to not forget that this cash is really credit. It takes a very special kind of anti-bling-bling American to think in this old fashioned way. My deep and sincere respect goes out to you—and you being a female in your thirties fits in your description just send me something to know about you… And, by the way, for more information about the death of real American farming, listen to “Mike Thornton: Black Farmers vs. USDA” here in the kinté space.
The third reason I had for buying a house gets back to knowing how to sell a house—or even being interested in knowing how to sell a house. The fact that your house is an “investment” implies that you are going to eventually sell it. So, now, let’s back to honesty: honestly Bryan, do you care about selling property? Bryan, you have trouble with the very concept of property. Bryan, do you care about managing property? Hey, Bryan did you see what happened to that fronting poser with that exotic mortgage? Today, my answers are No—and my new ‘ghetto’ tricycle is this thing called REIT.
The strongest understanding holding me in the form with you now is this respect for starting small. The greatest weakness of an otherwise healthy young person is making the effort to be big when they really need to face facts and be small. One of my foundational decisions as a younger man was to decide what size and scale my life would be. We who come out of Hollywood-land with our doting mothers and silenced fathers have serious, serious motherfucking issues with this. —And this leads to my last flippant financial statement of the day:
People with no debt and no money are financially superior to people in crippling debt with “high” income.
Again, the only reason why people with no debt and no money are made to feel “bad” in the face of a high-income, negative-net-worth individual is because such an individual is a cancerous liar—or, in the very least, hiding behind the façade of financial status and the threat that the next act of aggression will make them “rich” according to the laws of some jungle synthesized out of Euro-imperial fiction.
The United Motherfucking States of America is the world super-power of crippling debt and “high” income.
Bryan Wilhite, here in the rasx() context, now feels free to make such “profane” statements—he’s not totally free but the holistic authenticity is firmly established… For more financial talk here in the kinté space, check out “Jeannette Fisher-Kouadio: Generational Wealth-Building.”