The Habit That Got Me Out of $80,000 in Debt

At 25 years old, I was $80,000 in debt.

It wasn’t because I didn’t make money, but because I had absolutely no idea where it went. Student loans, a car payment, nights out, random purchases I couldn’t even remember. I was a finance major, and if you had asked me where my paycheck disappeared to every month, I couldn’t have told you.

One habit changed everything, and I’ve done it every month for the last twelve years.

When I moved to Jacksonville in 2014, I sat down and did something I had never once done as a finance major. I wrote down every dollar I earned and every dollar I spent. Then I did it again the next month, and the next. Net worth statement, income statement, every dollar accounted for.

That habit is what got me out of debt and, a few years later, to my first million.

My first year in business for myself as a real estate agent, I had exactly one goal. Get out of the hole.

Suddenly every dollar had a job. I stopped buying things and nights out became nights in. Every commission check had one purpose, which was to destroy debt.

Twelve months later it was gone. For the first time in my adult life, my paycheck belonged to me instead of to my past decisions.

Once the debt was dead, the extra money changed jobs. Every dollar that used to pay interest started buying assets instead.

I bought another property and rented out the one I’d been living in. I wasn’t trying to hit home runs. I just wanted assets that would quietly become more valuable while someone else paid the mortgage.

In year three I roughly doubled my business again. Looking back, every major jump in my income followed a major investment in myself. Coaching, training, conferences, better mentors, better books, better people. Every dollar I spent becoming better came back many times over.

That’s the year my net worth crossed a million. I was 28.

Net Worth by Year
2014    -$80,000
2015         ~$0
2016     $250,000
2017     $650,000
2018   $1,050,000

Here’s the crazy part. Becoming a millionaire didn’t feel much different than becoming debt free. The freedom felt almost identical, and the only real difference was the size of the numbers.

The first million isn’t hard because of the math. It’s hard because you’re fighting gravity the whole way up. Every unexpected expense matters, every mistake hurts, and every dollar has to come from your own labor. Then eventually something changes, and your money starts working while you sleep. That’s when the game becomes a completely different one.

The problem is that new problems show up as you climb.

You have to evolve from being a business operator into being an investor. Both can make you wealthy, but they reward almost opposite instincts, and I had to become a completely different person to make the switch. You basically need a brain transplant, or you pay tuition to the market until you get one.

In business, speed creates opportunity. In investing, patience creates wealth.

The biggest investing losses of my life didn’t come from bad markets. They came from trusting the wrong people. There’s a built-in problem with handing your money to someone else to run, because you’re exposed to crooks, thieves, and misaligned incentives you can’t see. I’ve had powerhouse attorneys review the documents and still watched things go sideways with almost no way to fix it short of a long legal fight.

Eventually I figured out something about myself. I sleep better when I control my own investments, and that has quietly become one of my biggest advantages. Today most of my capital goes into businesses and real estate where I understand the risks and control the outcomes.

Tracking my money didn’t make me wealthy. It made me honest.

Once I could no longer lie to myself about where my money was going, better decisions became almost inevitable.

Because looking back, becoming wealthy was never one decision. It wasn’t one investment, one business, or one lucky break. It was thousands of tiny decisions that all started the day I stopped guessing where my money went.

Awareness came first, and wealth came later.

Jon Brooks Co-Founder, Momentum Realty 📧 jon@movewithmomentum.com