Why I'm Grateful for 15 Years of Crushing Debt
How debt taught me more about living than any finance book ever could
I paid off my last debt. After 15 years. I've been holding my breath since I was 18 and I almost forgot that oxygen even exists. It feels so... weird.
Debt doesn't just take your money. It sits at your dinner table. It whispers in your ear, every time you're trying to make a decision. It is your personal monster in the closet. Every single decision I've made in the last fifteen years had debt's fingerprints on it.
Me: Let's work three full time jobs?
Debt: Why not! It will be fun!
Me: Skip your friends wedding?
Debt: RSVP'd no for you.
It's soul crushing, but I'm grateful for it. (Wait, what?) Yes, I'm grateful for it. Because this story isn't really about debt or success of fighting it. It's about what happens when a kid from post-Soviet Russia learns about money the hard way. And the lessons are not what you think.
Look, debt helped me achieve a lot of things. But it also forced me to make a lot of dumb decisions. No, I never got myself an expensive car, watches or houses - in my mind this is beyond dumb when you can't afford it, but I still feel that power of consumerism. Those money spending habits everyone gets with their first Amazon same-day delivery? So incredibly addictive that alcohol or smoking look like margin errors in comparison.
To understand how I got here, you need to know where I started. I grew up in a small city in Southern Russia in the 90s. Post-Soviet depression era. We had nothing.
Personal finance education? Also nothing. Why would you learn to manage money when you don't have any? No generational wealth. No connections. No advantages.
Loans didn't exist back then - unless you wanted to borrow from the local criminal gang. And that wasn't an option unless you were desperate. Picture this: six people (me, my mom, grandpa, grandma, uncle and his wife) in a two-bedroom, one-bath apartment.
Every morning my grandparents woke up at 4am to start their routine. Shower-line. Cooking breakfast. The apartment smelled like black tea and fried eggs before the sun came up.
God, I miss those good times.
Being a kid is always great when you have a family that loves you. The general notion of money was simple: spend wisely, and only when you have enough left to eat.
Then the new millennium arrived, and with it, a weird version of capitalism took Russia by storm.
Oligarchs got into power and successfully ran privatization. On paper? Great idea. In reality? A marvelous disaster that benefited only the new elites. Ask them, and they'll tell you they were saving Russian resources from failure. Taking tremendous risks. They became ultra-rich because only they were smart enough to make it work. (If you can find a better example of survivorship bias, I'll wait.) My family? We got extremely lucky.
Grandpa was working construction and landed a new job overseeing gas station build-outs for YUKOS. You know, that soon-to-fail empire that Putin would seize from Khodorkovsky. But for a brief sprint between my 7th and 12th birthday, we were doing better than most families in our city.
We bought cars, that was a huge wow factor...two brand new Toyota Corollas. Our big family could finally afford three different apartments.
And oh God - summer vacations on the Black Sea. Beautiful. Remember, we were small-city, way above-average household income in the area, but nobody was thinking about traveling outside the country or going to Saint Petersburg or Moscow. That was luxury we couldn't touch.
Then YUKOS failed. And I learned something about my family: nobody knew how to save or invest money. Grandpa worked 12 hours every day, sometimes without weekends. Even during our Black Sea vacations, he'd disappear for two-three days to oversee construction. His "two-week vacation" was really 5-6 days, if we were lucky.
But money? It left as fast as it came in. When grandpa died during his unsuccessful heart surgery, he left me nothing material.
But those vacation weeks? I remember them like yesterday. The smell of the sea. Chebureki with cheese as a breakfast routine. The way he'd sneak me extra ice cream when grandma wasn't looking.
He definitely skipped the financial planning step. But he taught me something else: spend on experiences and memories. That was the most valuable lesson to me.
On my 18th birthday, everything changed. I got a full-time job at a trade-in car ads newspaper with an idea to build automation for them. I needed something expensive to make money - a computer. So I got my first loan. Probably the best loan I ever took. That MacBook Pro generated way more money than it cost, even with the insane interest rates they charge 18-year-olds in Russia.
Then life hit hard.
I got unlucky a few times. Me and my mom, we weren't built to succeed in a corrupt country. Despite help from a lot of my friends, I ended up in crushing debt that I took for a chance to keep my mother alive. That bet didn't pan out.
My mom's brain died the next morning after her 12-hour surgery. June 15, 2014. My 22nd birthday was the worst birthday of my life. Another lesson: life is short and fragile. I didn't have time to sit and reflect. No time to treat the PTSD. I was running non-stop on the wheel, trying to escape that moment. While running, things happened:
The USA welcomed me as an immigrant.
I found great friends.
I helped build a business from the ground up.
I built a beautiful family.
...
But this is a story about finance, as you can notice my dear reader, I was always in debt since I was 18.
So what did it take to get out? Fifteen years of discipline and real teamwork between me and my wife. After all this time, I still run our family budget, still record every transaction, still analyze what was smart and what was dumb.
And now? 15 long years since my first loan payment to my last one, I'm here in NYC - one of the best cities on Earth, debt free. It's a wild feeling, that I no longer want to lose, but in the same time as any first generation new-money family we decided to play it smart - invest in long-term future & invest in memories.
Substack is full of great investment channels and I'm too much of a beginner in the topic yet to give any advice. Feel free to take a look at these newsletters (Financial Underdog, The Intellectual Edge) that I found extremely resonating with my style and take a look at what Berkshire like investment companies are doing, I went with Marshfield and they are awesome.
My understanding of investments so far is if you want to be better than average, you need to take time, read a lot about what happened before and what's happening now, then build strong convictions that will play out in a horizon of 5-25 years. Indeed as Einstein was saying: “Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it earns it … he who doesn't … pays it”.
What really matters in this story is what I've learned about living, not just surviving.
My general rule for memory generation: rent everything that's possible to rent instead of purchasing. Only purchase something that you wanted for more than a year and that will not lose more than 30% of its original cost.
Why spend on memories? First - they make your life feel longer, second - shrouds have no pockets. Two things that you want to give your kids - freedom of education and as a bonus some place to live. Things that should allow them to be smart enough and safe enough to pursue a happy life debt-free.