Stop Performing Fabulous: David & John on Queer Money, Debt, and Real Financial Freedom
What if the thing keeping you from your dream life isn’t money itself—but the story you’ve attached to it?
In this episode of Pride Nomad Unleashed, Ken sits down with David and John, the Debt Free Guys and hosts of the Queer Money Podcast, for a brutally honest, funny, and deeply necessary conversation about money, shame, status, debt, and the very queer pressure to look fabulous even when your finances are falling apart.
David and John know this story personally. Before becoming financial educators, they were two financial professionals sitting in a gloomy basement apartment with $51,000 in credit card debt, dreaming about a vacation home they absolutely could not afford. That wake-up call became the beginning of their transformation—and eventually, the foundation for helping LGBTQ+ people build real financial freedom.
This conversation goes way beyond budgeting apps and boring spreadsheets.
We talk about why money is different for LGBTQ+ people, how self-worth gets tangled up in spending, why so many of us chase approval through clothes, trips, cocktails, bags, and “A-list gay” performance, and how to stop living like your Instagram feed is more important than your future.
You’ll also hear about their Debt Lasso Method, why it may beat the traditional snowball and avalanche debt payoff strategies, and how they paid off $51,000 in credit card debt in under three years by attacking interest, automating payments, and treating debt payoff like a real bill.
And because this is Pride Nomad Unleashed, we also get into the travel side: how living abroad or becoming location-independent can dramatically reduce your cost of living, why you don’t need a luxury hotel to have a rich life, and how to build a lifestyle that actually gives you freedom instead of just looking good from the outside.
This is one of those episodes every queer person should hear—especially if you’ve ever thought:
“I can’t afford that life.”
“Everyone else seems to be doing better than me.”
“I’m too old to fix my finances.”
“I want to travel, but I’m broke.”
Or…
“I know my BMI, but not my credit score.”
Honey, this one’s for you.
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Stop Performing Fabulous: David & John on Queer Money, Debt, and Real Financial Freedom
The Cost of Performing Fabulous
Let me introduce you to the dynamic duel that gives new meaning to the words of Financial Queen's, David and John AKA the debt free guys who once thought swiping plastic was a competitive sport. These two were the walking definition of champagne taste on a box wine budget, $51,000 in credit card debt while dreaming of a mountain vacation home. Talk about delusional financial foreplay. This is where it gets interesting. These boys hit rock bottom sitting on the floor of their gloomy basement apartment.
Two financial professionals who couldn't finance their way out of a paper bag. The irony is bigger than the foundation at a Drag Brunch. These guys were living the A-list gay fantasy with new phones, designer clothes, fabulous vacations, all other credit scores were in the closet afraid to come out, but one trying to keep going back to their toxic ex. David and John turn their lives around. They created something called the Debt Lawsuit Method, which sounds like a kinky financial move, but I promise it. We’ll learn about that in a minute. Now, they're hosting the Queer Money show, writing for Forbes as the first LGBTQ+ financial contributors.
They even have a show on Yahoo Finance called Living Not So Fabulously. If you feel pressured to keep up with those fabulous Instagram gays while your bank account is on life support or you use student loans to fund Madonna concerts in Vegas or put down car down payments on credit cards or you know your BMI but not your credit score, then you found your financial gay fairy godmothers.
These guys aren't here to shame you for Sunday funday splurges. They're here to help you live fabulously as a plane goes over me. Not just Instagram fabulous while your bank account cries in the corner. This is Pride Nomad Unleashed where financial guru or queer financial freedom meets fabulous living without having to eat Raymond while you're 80.
That is the most colorful introduction we've ever had. That is not the bio that I sent over to you.
Somebody works some queer magic on that.
I read that and I was like, “That will not do.” I had fun getting that created.
Apparently, you did your homework. Some of those stories I don't know where they're hidden.
I know exactly where they're hidden. They’re hidden on your website. I went to your About pages and I was like, “We have some stuff we can use here.” That leads me to asking you this basic question, which is you went from $51,000 in credit card debt. By the way, I've been there and done that. You went from there to financial experts. What was the most embarrassing purchase you made during the fabulously broke era that makes you cringe?
The Most Embarrassing Purchase
It's embarrassing when I tell the story because it gets to the core of why I got into so much credit card debt. John and I were heading to a going away party for someone who lived in Denver that we didn't know all that well but to a certain degree, was the leader of the pack in the gay lister group. We showed up quite late to the bar. It was like a quarter after 1:00 and everybody was winding down and done with their drinks.
They had a VIP table and they were winding it down. Everybody was looking around like we're done with drinking and I said, “We're not.” I went to the bar and I got a 750 ML bottle of Stoli. That was a bottle service and I spent over $150 on that all so I could impress this person who was moving away from Denver who I can't even remember what his name is now.
The embarrassing part of it was it just spoke to this; I was spending money to try to appease the crowd to make everybody else happy. I didn't have $150 to drop on a bottle of alcohol that at the local liquor store probably cost $19.99 or $23 or something like that and I'm spending $150 on it. That's why it's embarrassing because it shines the light on how shallow and self-unaware I was. I was seeking validation from everybody else rather than myself.
That's so unique. No one else feels that way. You're the only one in the world. You fucked up. I think we've all done worse in so many ways. That only comes down and begs the question of financial health, self-esteem and how it's like. I looked at my one identity as, “If I have money, I'm good. If I don't have money, I'm not.” That's a hard energetic place to live.
Why Money Matters Differently for the LGBTQ+ Community
People often ask us. They say, “Money isn't different for gay people or LGBT people. It's the same for everybody.” David and I disagree with that because 80% of money is the same. A dollar works the same for you, as a dollar works for me. We all swipe credit cards the same way. We're all trying to keep up with their bills and pay off our loans. That's all the same regardless of who you are and where you come from.
There's 20% that’s more behavioral finance or the personal side of personal finance. That's based on your background, your socioeconomic status, your history, your experience in life, your family, your religion, your sexual orientation, your gender identity. All that stuff informs how you use money. Similar to the Pareto Principle, if you're familiar with that. That 20% has an overshadowing effect on the entire 100%. This is why siblings can come from the same parents and everything on the outside looks exactly the same but their outcomes are completely different. Something different happened throughout their stories or the histories that make them respond differently to life in general, but money specifically.
I agree. Unfortunately, it stays with us for a very long time. I'm flashing back to Saturday night or Friday night or whatever, when I got here. I did something colossally stupid, and I'll share with you guys because we're on that subject. I wasn't going to go out yet. I was too humiliated because I was fucking stupid.
If I wasn't in approval mode and not wanting to rock the boat mode. I would never let it happen. It wasn't even money related. It was just, “This is just stupid.” It's a scam. I met this guy online who's cute. Young and cute. I went out to the bar to meet him. He was with two of his girlfriends. The kid is young. Anyways, I was like, “I'm going to go back to my room, if you want to come back, great. Come back later.” He said, “Buy me a drink.”
We are spending money we don't have to impress people we don't even like. It's time to stop performing fabulous and get real.
I'm in Columbia. It's cheap enough. I thought, I'll buy around for him and the girls because I was feeling like Big Daddy. When it came to pay the bill, they closed up the bill for everyone on the same bill. You know where that's going. In my back of my head, I was like, “I'm going to get fucked,” and not in a good way. They said, “We'll go to the ATM and get cash and get it to you.” That never happened at the end of the thing.
I knew at that point I should have said, “Stop. You get the money. I'm putting this much in because we couldn't spit it.” I didn't. It was a $100 lesson. The same thing, but it wasn't even about the money. I could afford it but it was like, “You're an idiot.” I didn't want to rock the boat. I didn't want to play the problem and I knew going in. Took over the energy of money and our gay story.
I want to applaud you for sharing that because the foundation of everything that David and I have done over the last decade has been to get the community to talk about our financial situation. Many of us aspire to be or think we are the gay lister with the washboard abs, into our 60s, with a six-figure job, traveling the world. If we're not that person, we have low self-esteem. We take it hard. Harder than the general population. Stories like that, it lets other people see themselves and say, “I did that, too. Clearly, I am not alone,” or on the other hand, “I know what to look out for when I'm traveling abroad.”
That’s why I was like, I'm going to let the humiliation go on the shelf for a second. Now, what we’re going to create is not the humiliation club but what scams you experienced so that we take away the shame and help people because there's other stuff out there. There's a so-called ghost. I forget what I call it.
We just put in the newsletter, but apparently there's people spiking drinks and there’s some drug that goes in there or that's used for nausea or something. It removes all of your inhibitions so that effectively you give that person your credit card information and all your money if that's bad shit. I learned about that from a friend of mine that used to live here in Columbia.
I don't really drink, but he said, “Don't ever let anybody give you an unopened bottle.” Coming back to you guys. You mentioned on your website that you sat on the floor of your bloomy basement apartment having that financial come to Jesus moment. Walk us through that conversation and what happened. Were you guys yelling, tears or whining? What was the experience?
The Basement Come-to-Jesus Moment
I'll start out with the impetus of the conversation. You mentioned this idea of a vacation home in the mountains. John and I are up in the mountains in Colorado. We lived in Denver and we went up to the mountains in Colorado to a small town called Winter Park. It's a ski resort. Although, we had been there before. For whatever reason, we were up there this time. We were like, “This is the perfect place.”
It's a great place. It's an hour and fifteen minutes away from Denver. We said, “This is the perfect place for us to have a vacation home.” We left town thinking that we were going to eventually someday have a vacation home here but we just decided to stop at a realtor’s office. We checked out land and the reason we checked out land is because I love modern architecture. We were having this whole fantasy conversation about buying land and building a modern vacation home.
For some reason, after we crossed over the top of the mountain, we were headed down towards Denver. One of us looked at the other and said, “What can we afford?” This was not a conversation that John and I were used to having. We have been together for a year and a half and we had never talked about our finances openly with each other about how much each of us made or how we were managing our own money.
Here we are in financial services, both of us, and we're not talking to each other about it. It was that conversation that as we went down the mountain, we went to, “We can afford to buy land and build a modern vacation home,” to, “We could afford to buy a condo that was already there on the ski slopes,” to, “We could rent long term during the ski season,” to, “We are financial messes. We can't afford shit.” It was that point where we got to Denver. We opened up the door to our home and we literally walked down a flight of stairs into a basement apartment.
Now, you think of basement apartments in New York or San Francisco and they can be pretty nice. This wasn't nice. This is Denver where most people don't live in basements. That was the point when we said to ourselves, “We are physically and financially living in a hole. Why is that?” That was when we confessed to each other that between the two of us, we had $51,000 in credit card debt.
The important thing was we went through a process and I say this sometimes to people, “Go and lock yourself in a car with your partner. Drive 65-75 miles an hour down the highway and ask them a serious question.” I'm not giving this advice to people, but it was the fact that John and I were in a situation where we were trapped in a car going 75 miles an hour down the highway that we couldn't disengage from the conversation.
Eighty percent of personal finance is the same for everyone, but the twenty percent that's behavioral determines your entire future.
It was the fact that we had the conversation that made us say to ourselves, “What the heck are we doing with our lives because we're not going to get to where we want to in life. We're not going to have the things or go to the places we want to or be able to retire the way we want to if we keep living this kind of lifestyle trying to keep up with these gay listers that we are not getting any love back from just trying to impress them.”
You’re 100% right, which leads me to another thought. I've been teaching entrepreneurs how to make money. I started doing real estate training. I used to buy a lot of real estate back in the day., In my classes, what I discovered was the number one reason for divorce or the number one cause a divorce is what? It was marriage, but behind that is money. Money is what fucks up all relationships, apparently.
We talked about that and my intention to change the world was in teaching you how to buy property and investing money so that way that solves the money problem. The question I have for you is, how did you guys keep it together with that challenge? Again, that breaks people up all the time. More so to turn this into the positive, which this is anyway. How do you advise people that are in relationships to manage that?
Tackling Debt as a Team
We were only a year and a half into our relationship, so it wasn't like we were married quite yet. We were on the cusp of saying, “This is going to be a long-term thing.” What benefited us mostly, though, was that we did have an open and honest conversation. We realized that we had a lot of overlap in the things we wanted to achieve and the goals we had. Not everything. It wasn't an exact match.
The fact that there were so many similarities. We could come together even on those that were different. That helped us out a lot. That’s probably the case for most people, but you have to be receptive to what the other person has to say. You have to be honest about how you feel about your situation and how you feel about the dynamic between the two of you.
Probably the most important thing is that John and I always looked at each other as a team. I think a lot of couples, especially in the world we live in where people want their independence. They want to be able to do their own thing. A lot of couples look at it as, “That's your debt and this is my debt.” John and I both said, “It doesn't matter who's debt. We just don't want it. Let's get rid of it. Let's figure out a way to get out of this.” John had twice as much debt as me. I had the round $17,000 and he had close to $34,000.
We also say I'm twice as much fun.
You're a high achiever.
We said, “Let's pay this off. Let's both figure out what we need to do to be in a situation where we can pay this off and get our lives to the things we want.” We knew living off of credit cards wasn't going to get us to the point where we could have a condo or an apartment of our own that we felt comfortable and loved. When we were on the path to paying off our debt, we were able to eventually do that because we got close to having all of our debt paid off.
We also then said we want to travel more. We love to travel but let's do it with cash instead of credit cards. It was the fact that we said, “We're a team. Let's do this as a team.” Not, “You need to sacrifice your life, but I'm going to do fine with my life so that you can pay your debt off. I'm going to go have fun while you're paying your debt off.”
A lot of couples, be it gay or straight, whatever you have, get into that dynamic of, “This isn't my problem. This isn't my fault.” You're married. You're together. Do it together. Even if you have to commit more money to paying it off than one of the others. Do it together in a way that allows you to work towards a similar goal together.
I'm glad we're having this part of the conversation because it's important that if you're going to be in a relationship, it's got to be we. You defeat that. I was lucky. When I got married, I was 23 years old and he was 26. I stayed married back in the day that didn't exist in a gay orientation, but we had joint bank accounts. We were in business together. We worked together and lived together. That was crazy.
We were together for fourteen years, so something worked. We were lucky because during the aid crisis, we were together. God bless them. It was because we were together. We shared the business, so everything was together. I went bankrupt at 23 years old. He moved down with me. He moved down from Connecticut to live with me. I lost everything with the business. I started my first business with a credit card. That was genius.
A conversation from another day but let's talk about Debt Lasso because that is where we need to get to know, to start solving some problems. It supposedly beat the snowball and avalanche methods, which I don't have any clue what the hell those are. Other than the fact that I want to be careful when I go skiing to not be in an avalanche. Would you explain that to all of us, all the financial dummies out there including me so that we're on the same page?
Demystifying the Debt Lasso Method
For sure. I'll start by explaining what the two primary methods that people use. Think of the Snowball Method of a snowball that you start out. You roll it and the more you roll it, the bigger it gets. That's the way basically it works for paying off that credit card debt. You start by paying off your lowest balance credit card first. Once you have that win, then you roll that payment into paying off the next credit card. You're paying your minimum payments on all your cards, but the idea is eventually, you’re paying all of your payment towards the largest credit card. You're still paying interest while you're doing that.
The second method is called the Avalanche Method. The Avalanche Method says, attack the credit card that has the highest interest rate first. The idea behind that is, the faster you pay down the highest interest rate, the more your money goes when you're making your payment. You're paying less and less to interest and more to the principal or the amount of money that you borrowed. You're still paying the interest. The nice thing about the Avalanche Method, you do pay your credit card debt off a little bit faster than you do with the Snowball Method.
We said to each other, “We've got $51,000 in credit card debt. We are paying off about $10,000 a year in interest just on those cards. How do we figure out how to get rid of the biggest hurdle that is paying off our credit cards?” We said, “Let's attack the interest first.” There's a five-step process to the Debt Lasso Method. It's not just which credit card you pay off first. This first step in the Debt Lasso Method is to commit. The commitment is broken down into two pieces. Commit to paying off your debt. That means not acquiring more debt.
The second is to commit to a specific amount every month. Turn it into a bill just like you pay your insurance, your car payment, or your mortgage. You are always going to pay a minimum amount towards all of your credit cards and not the minimum amount on each card, but just your minimum amount. It might be $500 or $200 or $1,000. You pick that amount and you send at least that amount every single month. The second step is to get a little bit of those quick wins like the Snowball Method. If you have a balance that you can pay off in one or two months, pay that balance off. Get that quick win, so you feel good about the fact you're making progress.
The third step is the Lasso step and this is what it's named for. That is, look at all your credit cards. If you can, try to gather them all into one place with the lowest interest rate. Back then, that meant for us, we were able to get zero balance transfer cards. We could transfer something we were paying 25% over to another card where we were paying 0% for an extended period of time like 12 months, 15 months, or 18 months. We paid that 3% or 4% balance transfer. Since we did that, we had this extended period of time where we weren’t paying any interest. That meant all of our money went to our principal.
That's smart.
After that, automate that process and monitor it. That's how we were able to pay off $51,000 in credit card debt in just under three years.
That's great. That makes all sorts of sense. I hadn't heard of the Snowball strategy in that term, but you'll find this interesting. Back in the day, I created a tool but it didn't work. The strategy worked, but the business didn't. That was the idea. It was called the loan free system. We were trying to automate that using the check free company that would do checks automatically and the same idea. It’s solid. It makes all sorts of sense. Again, that high interest stuff is still sitting out there. It makes all sorts of sense. What's the biggest money mistake you see specifically in the queer community that straight people don't make just as often?
I know we might get some pushback from this, but I’ll just say, Don Lemon said the same thing. Many of us, particularly the gay men, are buying Gucci, Versace, Louis Vuitton and Eragon. We are obsessed with this stuff that we've now all learned is like $20 or $30, but we're obsessed with paying thousands of dollars for it. That erodes our net worth and our long term financial security. We gave a talk in Maryland at an LGBTQ+ center several years ago. One of the attendees came up to David and they were drag queens. They’re performers.
They just bought a pair of Manolo Blahnik boots. Red bottom shoes and I think they were $600. They said they were struggling to pay their rent that month because they bought the red bottom shoes and what should they do? One, you shouldn't have gotten the red bottom shoes. The other option is to now return the red bottom shoes. The look on their face was like, “What? I can't return these.” Our value is not in the clothing we can buy. Our value is not in the stuff that we have.
If you can't afford the big things in life, enjoy the small things. If you enjoy the small things too much, you'll never get the big.
If that's where we're seeking validation, which is exactly what David and I were doing. We're going to be continually left empty. That's why you're on that hedonic treadmill where, “I got the bag. I'm bored of the bag. I need to get a purse or a wallet to go with a bag. I’m bored with that. I need to get a car.” You just can't get off that treadmill. I would say from the decade or so that we've been doing this and from all the people that we've interviewed, that seems to be one of the biggest hurdles in the community.
I agree with that. There's a large number of, especially younger queer people who feel the need to do that. That's the point in your life where the way you use your money can have the biggest impact on how your future ends up. When you're young, if you're able to put money into a retirement account, instead of spending a thousand dollars on that bag. You go buy a $200 bag and you put $800 dollars into a retirement account. Nobody's going to applaud you when you walk into the next party because you have that other bag.
That $800 can turn into tens of thousands of dollars in 20 years or 30 years or 40 years. I agree with that. To me, the other big mistake is that our community has gotten trapped into this idea that there are only a few locations in the world where we can live. We can only live in places like San Francisco, LA, Seattle, Chicago, or New York City. These expensive cities. Not all of us have these really well-paying jobs. Many of us are spending 40%, 50% or 60% of the money that we make on housing.
For that reason, most of us are never able to get to the point where we can buy a home. We live in these expensive cities. I get it. We want to be in a place where we're a little bit more accepted and we have a little bit more fun and there's a larger gay community. We end up putting ourselves into a financial struggle state and we get stuck in that financial struggle state. That affects our mentality and our self-worth when we're in that financial struggle state. We need to get a custom to this idea of, you don't need to live in the nicest city, in the nicest neighborhood and have the nicest things. Especially when you're young. It is okay to say, “I'm going to live within my means so that I can protect my mental health and protect my financial future.”
I agree. It's been frustrating for me because I was raised as an investor. I’ve had two bankruptcies, by the way. I'm a high achiever. Both were businesses. It wasn't because I was buying all the Gucci. I never was never into that. What was interesting was I started looking at every dollar that I was throwing away. I could have gone to buy another house or another toilet or fix the roof because that adds value. When I was a kid, I never thought about retirement. I thought, “I'll be a millionaire anyway. I don't need to worry about that.” Bullshit.
What I see with a lot of our subscribers, I'll get comments to our YouTube videos and so on, saying, “That's good for you, Ken, but I'm broke. I can't do this.” The fact of the matter is, you can and you should. I'm in Medellín, Colombia. The food and housing is cheap here. There's a lot homosexual here. You want to be careful about being ripped off because there's issues here with some of that. Medellín is safer than Houston.
Bogota is safer than Los Angeles. They've cleaned this act up. This is just Columbia with cheap flight from the United States. You want to do something more interesting? Go to Thailand. I lived there for ten years. It’s super cheap and the best food in the world. All the lies were telling ourselves about San Francisco and New York or wherever else. It's all bullshit.
There's a theological challenge of hyperbolic discounting. Where you're in your 20s and 40 even seems like millions of years away from you. Sixty is like, “I don’t know if I’ll ever make it.” I don't know how many gay men have reached out to us and said that they're retirement strategies that they're just going to die young. I hang over from the HIV aids crisis and they think that we're all destined to die young. We saw solved problems by and large. We need to start to think about that even though you're 20, you're going to be 40 or 60 quicker than you think.
It's shocking how it catches up on us. I can't believe I'm in my late 60s. It's ridiculous. How the hell did that happen? I was 35 the last few weeks.
What’s hard is everybody who reaches our age or your age, says that. It's so hard to accept that when you're in your 20s and 30s. It's like, “It’s never going to happen. Somehow, I'm different. It's not going to affect me.”
You’re wrong.
In our community, especially because many of us have been estranged from our families in some way or another. Especially if you're not a baby gay who is in your twenties now. Many of us have been a stranger for our families and then our community achoo anybody who's over 40. You trapped these 20 to 30 year olds in this environment where they don't have their parents or their family members to learn about retirement and investing from.
You don't need a luxury condo or a brand new car to live a rich life. Real freedom is having choices, not looking rich on Instagram.
They're trapping themselves away from the older gays who may have that insight. We trap ourselves when we're in our 20s and 30s and sometimes, even our early 40s away from this environment where we could be learning from people. We have all this fun. The biggest question that we get is the same thing that you mentioned. On a regular basis, we have gay men who email us and say, “I'm 55. I'm 60 years old. I’m 65 years old. I haven't saved anything from retirement. What can I do now?”
It's not impossible, but it's a lot harder. We just want people to wake up. I love that you said at the very beginning, we're not telling you that you can't have brunch. We're not telling you that you can't enjoy a trip of a lifetime. When you do it once a quarter and you go to brunch every Sunday, you don't have any money left over. I always like to say to people, if you can't afford the big things in life, enjoy the small things. The thing is like going to brunch, going to coffee or setting aside some money for a long weekend away. If you enjoy the small things too much, you'll never have the money for the big things in life.
I was never a drinker. I never smoked and I never did drugs. Nor do I ever want to. I don't have these expenses that so many of our brothers and sisters are going through without having to do Nancy Reagan. How much is your drug habit costing you? You don't need another, whatever it is that you do. Smoking, which is going to kill you anyway. Why don't we stop that? How much are you dropping on that?
If we look at ourselves as an investment, I'm trying to get people to think that way. I'm so thrilled that I’m having this conversation with you guys. Everything we spend, every bottle of beer you buy or cocktail that maybe $10 or $15 or whatever dollars. I look at that and go, “What's fucking wrong with you?” That's my mindset because I'm not a drinker. If you look at what your drink tab was. I’ve lived in Australia. I visited Australia for four years during COVID and their mentality is very alcoholic. Everyone drinks and I'm thinking, “How much money are you throwing away?” It's just crazy.
The question that we often ask ourselves, this is one of the tricks that we used to help pay off our debt, was, “Do we want to have the margarita around the corner on Colfax in Denver or do we want to have the margarita in Puerto Vallarta?” By and large, it’s always Puerto Vallarta. We're like, “We’ll forgo it now so that we can enjoy it then.”
To that same question. My thing is I love to eat. I also love to play with good food. Meanwhile, I still need to keep my girl figure. I'm still single. I'm interviewing. I have to be a good boy. The question now I ask is, is that brownie going to bring me closer? That's the same question. Only with the different things. We have to couch it that way. Is that going to get as close as going to Puerto Vallarta or not? We need to play that game. Do you guys have a coaching program or any training or things that you're putting together? We haven't had that conversation. I want to get an idea.
We don't actively have anything. We've had different programs throughout our career. We're pivoting a little bit our business. Something will be coming. I'm just not sure what. We have to have that conversation.
We do have a couple of things that we have as freebies. If you go to our DebtFreeGuys.com website, we have a tool that you can download that explains the basics of the Debt Lasso Method. There is a very low cost paid setup tool that we provide that helps you work on that altogether. On the Queer Money show side, you can go to QueerMoneyPodcast.com or you can go to any one of our social media accounts and get our Queer Money Kickstarter, which is the basics of what queer people need to be thinking about when it comes to getting their finances in order.
If you're on the path to retirement, we have a free happy gay retirement calculator that gets you thinking about what it takes to be able to retire and what money you will need to have or set aside or how much you're going to get from Social Security. All those kinds of things that are wrapped up in that calculator. With each of those, we follow up with some emails to help walk you through those processes. As John mentioned, we're working on another tool that is more specific towards that retirement side since that is a common question that we get.
On a personal note, if you guys want to brainstorm that, I'm happy to support that. The community needs it. Given what I'm doing with my new initiative with Alex Listens, my focus is on saving lives. Your focus is on saving financial lives. Any way I can help.
Thank you.
It's interesting. I appreciate you saying that, but there is a major connection in our community especially among gay men between our finances and our mental health. From time to time on Threads, I do these “Dear, Gay Boy” posts. I did one and it basically said, something to the effect of, “Dear, Gay Boy, it is not expensive to be gay. It is expensive to live up to the standards of the gay listers who think that the only way that they can repeat appeasement or find approval is by the things on the outside. It's what's on the inside.”
The problem is, especially as gay men, we trap ourselves in our childhood and in our teen years. Some of us are all the way into college and maybe older. We trap ourselves in a world where we're not giving ourselves what we need. We're not satisfying the need of, “You're okay as a queer person. You're okay to date somebody of the same sex.” We trap ourselves in that mentality and as soon as we come out of the closet, many of us burst out of the closet and want to capture everything that we missed.
For many of us, that means spending a lot of money to try to capture what we missed. The approval from people, the fun that we missed in high school and college by dating and going out to the bars and clubs. We bust out into this and then we get to a point in our 40s, 50s, and 60s, where all that is winding down. We're starting to feel insecure again about who we are because we don't have the 1,000 foot square condo in the Upper West Side in New York that cost $2 million.
We don't have the Range Rover that everybody in LA says you have to have to be a cool person. We no longer can afford that. All of a sudden, we're forced back into this feeling bad about ourselves and that's when all of that scarcity mindset and negativity creeps in. The first thing we start thinking about is, “My life is over. I might as well end it now.”
I want to say it's so stupid but I don't want to devalue people by saying that but it's so fucking stupid. It's funny. I have owned a car since 2011. I don't want a car because I'm a digital nomad. I'll be in my mom's in Florida, then I'll be in Costa Rica, Scotland, London, then I'll be back in Sydney. I don’t need a car. It's taking away so much expense. Some people look at me and go, “It's an amazing life.” Great. I can't do it. You can. To a large extent, you can save money by having this life particularly if you pick a low expense place such as Columbia or Uruguay.
We cover a lot of that in the Pride Nomad newsletter. You live an incredible life because there's a different standard. The American gay standard of having all that to me is just nuts. I look at this lifestyle and it is almost fascinating. You'll appreciate this. Public transportation is common in New York, in Chicago, and in San Francisco, the same thing and certainly in Australia. It's great. In Miami, Fort Lauderdale, not so much. To rent a car is $50 a day in Miami these days. I don't even bother renting a car when I see my mom because I don't go anywhere. I’m with her all day. A couple years ago, I took a bus from my mom's place to Fort Lauderdale. It cost a dollar.
That's super cheap.
I know. It's great. I worked on the bus. It was longer, of course, but I got to work and used the time. I got to this gay chamber of commerce meeting in Fort Lauderdale. I met this hot guy. We're going good and I casually mentioned something like coming up on the bus. That was it. We were done. It was like I had cooties. It was terrible. Our mindset needs to shift. I used to have a BMW and a Lexus. That's great, but no one cares.
People who matter don't care.
People who live here don't matter. There’s a great book for that. I used to teach people The Millionaire Next Door. It’s a great book. Mandatory reading for everybody. The number one vehicle the millionaires drive, do you know what it is?
Back then, wasn't it the Camry?
Ford F-150 pick truck. That shocked me. Most of them, if they buy a new car, they keep it forever.
Slashing Costs through Nomad Living
John and I are just getting ready to start unwinding our work-life and retire. We’re in our 50s. People are like, “How the hell did you do that?” We have a million and a half dollars in our retirement accounts and we're being forced into retirement because of the attacks on DEI and that disrupted our business. People ask, “How did you do that?” I say that one of the things is that we bought a car and we kept it for sixteen years.
We trap ourselves in a cycle of overspending because we are trying to buy back the validation we missed out on when we were younger.
It was a 2006 Mini Cooper. This little tiny car with just the two of us, we didn't need to have anything bigger than that. We had ten years where we didn't have car payments. That car payment was $500 a month. Ten years of car payments that were not making those car payments was over $60,000 that we put into our retirement accounts. That money grew into hundreds of thousands of dollars. One thing, just not having a car payment for ten years.
There's more. Since you kept the car, the insured value kept dropping so your insurance rates dropped as well, didn't it?
We did the digital nomad thing for a minute there. We went to Spain and we lived in Sitges, Spain for three months. The reason we were able to do that is we sold our condo and moved into an apartment. We got rid of all of our shit that we didn't need and put the rest of it in storage. We have that car that was already paid off. We were paying $86 a month in insurance.
We lowered that to the insurance for when your car is just parked and not being driven, which ended up being like $40 for three months. All of sudden, we didn't have a mortgage and a car payment. We barely had car insurance. When we saw a place for rent for $1,100 a month that was a two bedroom, three bathroom place in Sitges, we’re like, “That's cheaper than living in the United States.”
I got to get out of here, unfortunately. Can we do this again? Will you guys come back?
Definitely.
We've got our phone number. We got our emails. Absolutely.
Get in touch with them. Hopefully, they'll have a course together by then to keep you guys in solid shape because this is critically important. Of everything, the foundation to our travel, managing our health and the foundation to everything, aside from just self-esteem is money. It's got to pay for it. If you're screwing up the money thing, then everything compounds.
Let's get you on from the financial foundation lasso to it. If you want to call a financial dominatrix nest. That's fine. I like that idea. Anyway, to everybody out there, thanks for tuning in. I appreciate you guys. Get in touch with John and David. Take advantage of the stuff that they have available for you. It's critically important to your lifestyle and to our success as a community. Thanks, gentlemen. You're awesome.
Thanks for having us. We appreciate it.
Thank you.
Good luck with your travels.
Thank you.
