What's up fam, it's me you and your boy, subway cup, coming back again for another youtube video. This is going to be a different one. I kind of want to walk you guys through my my personal story and you know. Amc has brought together a freaking, really incredible community of people who who are all in this, for you know for differing reasons, but i think a lot of people maybe don't know my personal story coming into finance, why i'm holding emc and why this means so much To me personally, so i kind of just wanted to take this time right now to to walk you guys through you know my story and how i came into amc.

What made me decide to move from a swing trade to holding this position with the freaking apes out there and waiting for our attendees to start printing, while we freaking milk out these hedgies but uh? Let's just get right into the video, so i'm not gon na. Not gon na hold you here for as long as i i know i humanly have to so my personal finance story right financial story. I ran into a lot of hardships. You know growing up as a kid uh i i grew up in a family, my mom and dad were divorced.

I lived in my stepdad and my mother. My stepdad raised me great guy, passed away about five years ago. My father hadn't meet until i was about 13 years old right uh. We didn't have a lot of money, i'm going to be honest with you.

We we grew up with enough to get by right. We put food on the table. We had a lot of different. You know things that that kind of uh played into our financial equation, that you know we had enough of what we needed, but not enough to thrive per se.

You know, and when i graduated from high school, i went into college a lot of really crazy. Stuff happened so there was. There was two main factors that put me into a really deep hole. There was actually about a six-month period of time that you know this hole that i dug myself.

I ended up living out of my car. I was homeless. You know i i would eat bananas and ramen noodles for meals and literally sleep in the back seat of my my 2006 ford taurus, that good old clunker i'll, never forget that beast of a wagon but um. I i had two issues that i dealt with.

You know for a long period of my life, one of them was medical issues right uncontrollable thing. I had this eye condition in which i dropped. You know hundreds of thousands of dollars every single month on on these eye, drops steroid drops of dilation eye drops and at the time i could not afford them. You know so what i was doing was just paying them with my credit card right, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, and eventually i read to this this, this crossing point where i could no longer afford the minimums, with the amount of money that i was making every Single month, so i was in a freaking hole and then the second piece of the equation that played into this and i've never told this to anybody.

But this is maybe you know something something good to talk about. Is i had a raging gambling addiction, bad bad, bad bad? So when my pops passed away right, that was back when i was about 18 years old and the way that i coped with that obviously unhealthy was was gambling and it was bad. What what my thought process was is you know what i just don't care anymore? I don't even care if i'm freaking alive, like like everything about the way i thought about the world when my pops passed away it just flipped on its head. You know i had a lot of ambitions.

I had a lot of dreams had a lot of goals if there was a long like about your period of time, where i never dug myself. Out of that, i just kept pissing away money over and over and over and over and over and over and over i'll. Never forget this one time that i went to the casino and my bank account when i walked in there. You know both my checking and my savings had about three thousand dollars and i walked out of my bank account had maybe 10 or 20 bucks and that's what i had to live off of for a couple of months.

Now you throw into the equation of. I couldn't afford to pay my my medical bills because of my eye issues. It was this constant battle of me trying to fight for uh making money at the casino so that i could go and pay off my medical bills. Now don't get me wrong.

There were times when i went where i got lucky i played poker. I played blackjack, i made money, but more often than not. I lost money, and this put me into a really really bad endless feedback loop cycle, where all that i could do was dig myself deeper and deeper and deeper into this hole. Right.

So, to put you know, to put the the pin on the needle right here at the lowest point in my life i was 30 000 deep in medical debt. I had uh, you know a couple, tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt. I had car payments that i was making right. I had to pay all my bills, all all said and done.

I was probably about you, know 55 to 60 thousand dollars in the hole with no means to pay that off right. Absolutely struggling - and this was you know, the way that i was paying for anything at the time was just bartending at buffalo wild wings, and i i can't complain. I did okay at the time and definitely enough to survive off of, but not enough to thrive. You know and definitely not enough to pay off all the medical bills that i was having at the time.

So what ended up happening is i've got a brother-in-law. His name is patrick williamson. He married my sister, absolutely freaking, awesome dude and we would just have these talks. He was actually my optometrist back when i lived in minnesota uh.

I would. I would drive out three hours from where i lived central minnesota out to fargo and that's where he lived and we'd just do these eye appointments. You know he he'd uh, give me the update on how my anterior uveitis is going. He would tell me how speaking of which i should put my glasses on.

I know: there's gon na be people in the comment section that are saying stuff but we'd give our updates he'd. Give me my new prescriptions and then he'd. Take me out to lunch. He'd.

Take me out to lunch and we get these burgers and we get beer and he'd pay for the tab and for an hour all that he would talk about, is finance money and investing, and he put me on a couple different podcasts. I listened to bigger money. Uh podcasts uh, bigger, bigger pockets, i think, is what it is, but it's it's investing in real estate sort of podcast and i never really clicked with me a huge amount um not to say that i'm not going to invest in real estate. I own my own property, obviously, but it was the beginning right that was kind of the spark that got me thinking a little bit about what i need to do with my life and i'm not going to sit here and pretend there was some aha light bulb Moment where all of a sudden, i started making a ton of cash, but what it was is it planted the seed in my brain you know, so i started thinking about things a little bit differently.

I stopped going to the casino as much i stopped gambling. I was definitely more fruitful with the way that i spent money, and i took a step back and thought to myself about what i need to do to dig myself out of this hole. So it was. It was winter break uh, the senior year of of college.

For me right, my last year of college, i ended up uh just cranking hard. I worked two two jobs, two part-time jobs. At the time i was a bartender buffalo wild wings and i was an intern. The nutrition intern, a nutrition dietetics intern at the dining service facility, on campus and in between those two jobs during that one month period of time.

I worked 70 hours a week for that entire one month, winter break and i raised up enough money to be able to put a pretty good dent in my in my my debts, and that was the beginning. That was just enough confidence for me to start really taking seriously taking my financial situation into control right. So with that being said, you know this would have been. You know, december of probably 2019 coming into january of 2020.

This is when i really started to take control of my financial situation and do some research and kind of surround myself with different people. Now i didn't really get into the market per se. Investing i didn't take a stab at until july of 2020, in which i i actually lost money. I'll, never forget that.

I remember i bought into wells fargo with a pretty decent. You know chunk of chunk of cash and uh lost like five thousand or six thousand dollars or something i was like. This is freaking stupid. I don't know why i'm in the market right now, but i you know after that period of time i came back from july - took a little bit of a break came back again in october, and i said you know what screw it.

I'm gon na sit down and i'm gon na really take the time to learn the ins and the outs of what i think i'll be able to manage as as an investor right, because at the time i was, i was working full-time still, i'm still working full-time. Now and i came up my own sort of strategy based on different people on youtube, i watched this guy named rainer tail r-a-y-n-e-r-space t-e-o technical analysis, freakin god. The guy knows everything about anything that has to do with charts and i sat down for that month. Two hours a day plugged away made made made some uh some good learning points learned how to trade stocks.

You know technically and swing trades, because that's essentially what my strategy was before amc came into the equation and from there i turned you know eight thousand dollars when i started my channel - and you know december 16 2020 about four months ago into 45 000. At the end of january, when amc started doing its thing now, i'm not telling you all this guys to to to brag about how much money i make by any means, but it comes full circle to why i'm holding amc right. So, coming back to my my life story and what got me into the market, why i started investing? Is i wanted to change my life forever? You know because at the time dude there's there's i'm a really easygoing guy. I don't stress about a lot of stuff, but the one thing on this planet that does stress me out is freaking money.

People say that that money doesn't buy happiness, and i agree with that. But money does buy you, freedom, freedom from financial hardships, freedom to travel, freedom to be with your family and friends, freedom to do whatever the heck you want to do in your whole freaking life. You know - and that is that that was the entire moral of the story for me - is i want to get to the market so that i can take control of my own life and i can take care of my family so that none of them ever have To go through the stuff that i went through, i don't want my my mom to ever be in a situation where she can't feed herself can't take care of herself can't pay. Her house can't pay a car.

I don't want my uncle mike to ever be in a situation where he's struggling. I don't want. I don't want my brother, i mean he's doing absolutely fine, but we can go out on an endless endless endless list where you can pay it forward. You know.

So, if i can do something here with youtube and with amc to to change people's lives because i'll tell you what, when amc is printing those mad freak attendees, i'm going to be paying it forward, you know i'm going to go out of my way to make Sure that people are are never in that situation that i can control. If i ever see it, you know and that's why i take things seriously. I mean i, i think, there's probably people out there who take advantage of people with money, but that speaks more on their philosophy and character than it does mine. You know i'm an intelligent guy.

I can obviously sniff. You know the majority of when people are just trying to scam me, but you know sometimes sometimes people sneak through and that's that's, okay. You know, i'm not i'm not stressing over that sort of thing, so anyways coming full circle. Why am i holding amc? Why does this matter to me? Why have i not let this go, because this is a? This is what i think is a culmination of years and years and years of malpractice from the from the one percent, the rich, the hedge funds, to take advantage of the poor and that sort of malpractice and that sort of manipulation and naked short selling has transferred Billions, probably trillions of dollars of liquidity from poor people right, the retail investor, not all poor, but you know it definitely makes a difference to the rich right.

The rich get richer and richer and richer, and the poor continue to to build this large freaking wealth gap and it causes people like myself to be put in those different situations. Now, obviously, i never invested in the market and i never you know, went to the market and lost all my money because i was being you know, stolen from by hedge funds, but other people are, you know, other people are in situations and here's an example right. You remember when, when robin hood and fidelity and all these different uh, you know brokerage firms liquidated people's stocks and they lost probably millions and billions of dollars. That's an example right.

So, for me, this is the idea of we can make a difference in real people's lives, real people. You know i've run into a couple people now. You know where i'm working here and uh. You know for my job when i travel out to texas out to different places.

Let's say man like you, you have no idea how much this movement has helped me mentally. Like just get my together, you know, so that's why it matters so much to me. You know my personal story coming into finance. Turning myself around from being net negative net worth of you know, 55 to 60 thousand dollars to positive, i mean i know, i've got a six figure net worth, which is really cool, and i continue to add to my amc position as much as i can and Will continue to grow that wealth is an absolute game changer.

I want that same thing for everybody else, so i'll never be silenced, i'll, never be bought out. I'm never going to stop talking about this because it matters. You know it's real people's lives. Real people's lives are real people's money on the line.

Money can't buy you happiness, but it can buy you freedom and i want every single person on the planet who deserves freedom to have that freedom. That's why this matters so much to me. So that's kind of my background and story on how i got into stocks. How i got into investing? Why this? Why why i'm so passionate about investing in finance, because it can make a real difference? Man, i'm telling you you never know the impact you're having on somebody every single day.

You could be having an impact on somebody guys, so it you know what. Where does this come for you, if you're sitting in a situation right now, where you've got your last couple pennies? Your last couple dollars in the stock market, you're you're, living paycheck to paycheck, just trying to make ends meet right. The power of investing the power of the stock market amc. I know all these other securities out there is surreal.

You can really change your life in a split. Second, if you told me a year ago that i would go from being a negative net worth to in a position where i could help my family friends and you know, eat keep take care of themselves, lay off their bills. You know, i would have never believed you, you never know when things are going to change, and that is why i'm so passionate about emc. That's why i'm so passionate about investing and that's kind of my personal story of how i came into uh into finance and into youtube.

So you know, obviously this is kind of a you know, a whatever video, it's it's it's something that i just thought was an interesting topic. It's been asked about quite a few times uh, you know what was your story? How did you get here and that's kind of what it is, so that's what i've got for you guys today. If you enjoyed that uh, you know that that probably boring story, then let me know in the comment section down below share your story too. I kind of want to hear it.

You know, i think, there's there's something really really powerful about telling people your story, because everybody's got one, you know, uh everybody's got a story, we're all special and none of us are special. It's what i always say. You know, if you think your story doesn't matter, you probably just haven't, told it to the right people so um, that's what i've got for you guys today, mine drop a like on the video does help out the channel a lot consider subscribing. Let me see more stuff like this uh.

That's what i've got for you guys so peace out, my friends, family fellow gorilla, gang catch you on the next one, my fellow apes, much love peace.