How you can lose a few years of your life when you're not exactly stupid, frugal even - you just never count your money.
Back in Kazakhstan I made $200 a month for a family of three. Naturally there was never enough, and "putting money aside" wasn't something I'd ever heard of - not that it was possible anyway.
Then I moved to the US and started earning minimum wage - $2,000 a month. It covered everything: $500 to my family in Kazakhstan, $500 for a hostel bunk, $500 to live on, and $500 toward the $5,000 I'd borrowed from two friends, for one year, to make the move.
To me that was the height of wealth. I picked up two side jobs on top, which let me pay my friends back early - plus $200 extra, $100 to each.
Debt paid off, I got a job as a driver and moved into the van. Sadly, life on the road didn't actually save me the $500 I'd been paying for the bunk: eating out costs more. The new budget looked like this: $750 for food, $750 for the family, $1,000 into savings.
Six months of that life and $6,000 saved later, I broke my arm. I flew to Kazakhstan and didn't work for half a year - I was rehabbing the arm. Thank God I had an American credit card with travel rewards; that's what bought the tickets both ways. When the money ran out completely, I started living on the card, and to avoid paying interest I flew back to work with the arm still not fully healed.
That card had bailed me out so well that I spent the whole next year playing the credit card game - churning sign-up bonuses and cashback, coming out way ahead. I built up my credit score and credit limit fast - around $20,000 by then. A year later, same rhythm - $750 for me, $750 for the family, $1,000 saved - I tore my meniscus. That's the cartilage in your knee. And tore it in some complicated way, too.
I flew to Kazakhstan in a wheelchair. After surgery I spent six months learning to walk again, the money ran out - and the pattern repeated: living on credit, tickets on points, back to the US still leaning on a cane.
After being rescued by plastic a second time, I grew my credit score and limits with even more enthusiasm.
I changed jobs, got my truck license, and started making $3,000 a week. My personal credit limit was around $50,000 by then, and it went to my head. Or rather: I simply stopped counting money. Why would I? There was roughly an infinite amount of it. Besides, I'm no spendthrift. I made $3,000 a week - that's $12,000 a month - and spent far less (only $3,000 a month).
I rented an apartment for $750 a month, financed a car at $750 a month, spent $750 on myself and sent $750 to Kazakhstan. At that pace - earning $3,000 a week, spending $3,000 a month - I worked another year. The work was heavy; some days I didn't get even six hours of sleep. No time to count.
I planned and paid for - on points again - another vacation in Kazakhstan. And there, once I'd calmed down, I tried to figure out why, making $3,000 a week and spending $3,000 a month, I was finding it harder and harder to pay off the card balances and dodge the interest.
First, it turned out the brain only remembers the very best weeks - the ones that hit $3,000. In reality there were weeks of $2,500, of $2,000, and less.
But the main thing I'd missed: even at the hardest pace I can physically sustain, I can only work 39 weeks out of 52. That's two months on the road, then one week off, plus one trip a year to see my family.
So the most I could sustain was a schedule where I work 75% of the time and rest 25%. The salary math I did in my head never included that.
With that in the picture, an average of $2,500 a week is no longer $10,000 a month - it's $7,500.
And the average didn't even reach $2,500. And that money was before business expenses. I knew profit is income minus expenses - but why count some $20-30 for parking or $80-90 for boots? Why count tens of dollars when you make $12,000 and spend $3,000?
Once I'd subtracted the rough expenses, I counted an average of $2,000+ profit per week. And since I work not 100% of the year's weeks but 75% - 39 of them - that $2,000+ income left me with about $1,500 of spendable money per week of the year, or about $6,000 a month.
Same story with the spending. Add insurance, maintenance, gas, and washes to the car payment, and it ran well past $1,000. The apartment, with utilities and a parking spot, was closing in on $1,500. Food was no longer $750 but $1,000, plus $500 for health insurance. And there turned out to be a few more installment plans back in Kazakhstan than I'd imagined.
By the time I realized paying the cards off on time was getting hard, I had about $100,000 in credit limits: $50,000 personal and $50,000 business. Plus $3,000-3,500+ coming in every week. It all kept up the illusion that my money was roughly infinite. Card balances of a few thousand dollars looked negligible next to limits in the tens of thousands.
On January 1, 2025, I faced the fact that I was spending about as much as I was earning - around $6,000 a month - and that the cards were stuffed with those same $6,000. It was chilling. Where was that money supposed to come from, if I spend exactly what I make?
I understood I could afford neither the apartment nor the car. The problem: the lease was already signed six months ahead, and the loan balance on the car was higher than the car was worth.
I started cutting back, and the first thing to go was subscriptions - to everything and anything. They had piled up to hundreds of dollars. Another medical leave, in April 2025, I paid for with card points again. Mercifully, I was only sick for a month.
In June the lease ran out, and I went back to being homeless in America - happily so this time. Thanks to that, by January 1, 2026, I counted myself back at zero: every card balance paid off and about $8,000 in a savings account. That money had to cover taxes and two weeks of rest, one in January and one in April.
And in April 2026 I sold the 2020 Toyota RAV4 for $18,000 - the one I'd bought a little over three years earlier for $36,000. The loan balance at the moment of sale was $20,400, so I paid $2,400 out of pocket just so they'd take it. On top of that, over 40 months I had paid the bank $28,200 in installments.
$30,000 in three-plus years. And that's the car alone.
$18,000 for a year and a half of renting an apartment I had no time to live in.
And none of this was crazy spending. I didn't gamble the money away. Didn't blow it on showing off. No Rolex, no business class. I just wasn't counting.
I didn't count the year - I counted the best weeks. I didn't count what the car cost - only the payment. I didn't count the apartment I barely lived in. I didn't count vacations, sickness, and downtime. I didn't count the small expenses, because next to the big weekly paychecks they looked like nothing.
And that's how you lose not one bad month but several years of your life.
Find the time to count what you actually earn and what you actually spend. Not in your best weeks. Not in your head. Not by feel. Not by your credit limit. By the actual transactions, over a full year. Because if you don't count, you can lose $50,000 by accident and never even see where.