Note: I was technically supposed to post this earlier this week, but noticed that no one was signed up for today (plus I was super busy earlier), so I'm posting a bit late, under a throwaway account! Fair warning: I'm VERY verbose, so this will be long!
Section One: Assets and Debt
As I mentioned above, I make $56k per year as an administrator in higher education. My husband (K) just got a raise to making $155k per year. He works as a lawyer, has been in the workforce for about 12 years. I won't get into too many details but he works for a small boutique firm, not Biglaw. He also sometimes gets a yearly bonus of around $10k-20k but it's not guaranteed or anything like that. K and I have totally combined finances, so the below numbers are for both of us. I have a humanities PhD but I decided to leave academia and find an alt-ac job. My current position has good work-life balance (I never work past 5 pm), but pays terribly and my university is very badly run. I'm hoping to leave higher education all together in the future and am currently enrolled in a certificate program to try to make a career transition to instructional design.
The big elephant in the room is that my husband, K, makes a lot more money than me. When we first met, he was paying off massive amounts of student loans and making much less, and I was debt free with a lot of savings, so we both spent about the same amount. Now he makes 3x what I make and we are both debt-free, so the difference is much more noticeable. We do argue about money sometimes (more in the past), but the reality is that I have a humanities PhD and will likely never out earn him, and he knew that when I married him, lol. Because of all the labor I do around the house and in our lives to support him as he works a much more intense job, I was very clear that I believed we should split our finances equally as soon as we got married. We don't have separate accounts and we generally check in with one another whenever we are planning to spend more than $100. This system works for us for now.
I also want to address the question about parental or family support. Although I technically paid all of my own bills since I got my Bachelor's degree, my parents supported me a lot by paying for my flights home to visit at Christmas or in the summer as Xmas presents/birthday presents. My parents also paid for my undergraduate degree (and K's parents paid for his undergraduate degree as well). They also gave us about $15k to pay for our wedding.
Finally, my parents recently gave me $20k as an "early inheritance." They told me they plan to do this every year (depending on the stock market). We put this money into a brokerage. I don't consider my parents rich, as they both worked hourly jobs in health care my entire life (as a nurse and respiratory therapist - both with only associate's degrees). We never owned a new car, when we went on vacation we stayed in hostels , and shopped almost exclusively at Goodwill. But they scrimped and saved and now they have over $1 million in a retirement account. So I want to acknowledge my financial privilege in that I came from this kind of background. K's parents are similar.
Retirement Balance: $186k (combination of 401k, 403b, 457, 2 Roth IRAs, and taxable brokerage account).
Equity: None, we rent.
Savings account balance: Approximately $45k.
Checking account balance: Right now, around 8k.
Credit card debt: Right now, around $3k. But we pay it off each month with our checking account balance.
Student loan debt: $0. We finally paid off my husband’s law school loans (around $130k), last year. I didn’t have any student loans from undergrad (parents paid) and my MA & PhD were fully funded.
Section Two: Income
Income Progression: I’ve been working in my current field for 3 years. I started off making about $53k and got tiny 2% “merit increases” twice. Then in July my payroll title was changed, which triggered a required raise of about $2k. (I am dramatically underpaid).
Before my current position, I was in academia. I worked as a visiting assistant professor for one year at my alma mater (made $50k for 9 months of work) and before that I was a graduate student for 7 years. I was paid $18k-21k in stipends each year and my tuition & benefits were covered. Luckily, I lived in a very low cost of living area and this was enough for me to live on without going into debt. I got my PhD in 2017. Before I was a graduate student, I taught English in Japan for three years and made around $36k per year. In high school and college, I had random jobs that provided grocery/spending money, but I was lucky enough to have parents that paid my tuition and my rent in college.
I’m currently trying to make a career change (as you will see in my diary) and enrolled in a certificate program which runs from Autumn 2020 to Spring 2021 in order to help with that.
Main Job Monthly Take Home: $7,634. This probably seems low relative to our joint income, but we max out our 401k (K) and 403b (me). I work for the state government, which means I’m also eligible for something called a Deferred Compensation Plan (457b). This is basically the same as a 401k but you can withdraw contributions and gains from the account at any age without penalty (of course, you still have to pay taxes). I also max this out, and the limit is the same as a 401k/403b - $19.5k. Also this number is before K’s raise is accounted for. It won’t increase until his end of February paycheck.
Other deductions - I have health insurance taken out (about $80 a month for me, K’s firm covers his premiums) and taxes. WA has no state taxes, so it’s only federal taxes. I used to have to pay $50 / month for a bus pass (K's was free), but I don’t pay any longer because I’m working from home during COVID.
Final note - the sum I mentioned in the headline includes a variable bonus my husband gets. My base pay is $56k and his is $155k (as of February 1). This year he also got a bonus of $20k, which is set up a bit strangely. About $4k of this was structured as a 3% matching contribution to his 401k and the rest was taxable income. In small law firms, it’s unusual to get any 401k match so this was nice.
Side Gig Monthly Take Home: None.
Any Other Monthly Income Here: We get some interest from our savings account… like $25 a month.
Section Three: Expenses
Rent: Rent comes to approximately $2,050 total for a one-bedroom apartment. Rent itself is $1886, then we have pet rent ($25 per month), bicycle parking ($15 a month) and water / sewage / gas, which is usually $120-150 (variable cost).
Renters insurance: $157.76, paid annually. $13 a month.
Retirement contribution: In addition to the 401k, 403b, and 457, which all come out before taxes, we max out our Roth IRAs. That means $500 each per month per person (for a yearly total of $6k each). As I noted up top, we match out our 401k and 403b (19,500 each) and our 457. My employee also offers a 7.5% match. K's employee offers a 3% match but it is included in his yearly bonus so it's not guaranteed (confusing).
Savings contribution: We put $500 per month into our emergency fund. We also put about $860 a month into our “sinking fund,” which covers large and small annual or sporadic purchases such as vacations, gifts, Amazon Prime renewal, car insurance and renters insurance, etc.
Investment contribution: $875 per month into a taxable brokerage at Vanguard.
In total, we save about 47% of our gross income. We can do this because we keep our housing cost low relative to our high income, we don’t have any debt remaining, we don’t have any kids or parents who need financial support, and we’re very privileged in a lot of ways. We are hoping to FIRE within 10 years.
Debt payments: None.
Donations: We budget $100 per month for donations, which includes one-time donations as well as some reoccurring donations. My husband does pro bono work as well. I would like to increase this by quite a bit, but I still have a hard time budgeting for donations because I spent 7 years living on approximately $20k a year. To go from that to making more than 10x that amount within 3-4 years is obviously something that I am very privileged for, but it is still hard for me emotionally to comprehend at times.
Electric: ~$50-100 (billed every other month)
Wifi/Cable/Landline: An extortionate $87.12 for slow internet that only works for Zoom calls about half the time. Do I really live in one of the tech cities of the future?
Cellphone: $170 (This includes both service and paying off two new iPhones. We could have paid them off up front, but it was actually cheaper by like $50 to go on a payment plan.)
Subscriptions: BritBox ($7.70), Spotify ($16.50), HBOMax ($16.50), We Hate Movies Patreon (my favorite podcast - $8.81). My parents pay for Netflix and my sister pays for Hulu, and we all share.
Gym membership: None. K and I both run and do yoga with YouTube videos. Before the pandemic, we went to yoga classes pretty frequently in person. I’d like to do some online synchronous yoga classes but find it hard to make time.
Pet expenses: Varies, but I budget $50 per month and also include an emergency fund for my cat’s vet bills in our sinking fund. She’s 11 years old and probably asthmatic, so I know her vet bills are going to increase over time.
Car payment / insurance: We own our car outright. Insurance billed yearly is $2,097, about $174 per month.
Regular therapy: $0
Paid hobbies: Nothing regular, sporadic language classes and art supplies.
Other expenses: Right now I’m doing a certificate to hopefully help with a career change. The total cost for tuition is about $5k and we already saved it up (included in our 'sinking fund') basically through spending less during the pandemic. I’ve paid two quarters so far, and the last quarter (due in March) will be a bit more - about $2.3k.
__________
Day 1
Morning: I wake up at 5:30 am. Ever since the pandemic, my sleep schedule has been shot. At first, I was so happy not to have to leave the house at 7:15 for my 45 minute bus commute and I slept in a lot. But the stress (and maybe getting old?) has made me an early riser, no matter how much I try to sleep in. I do value my early mornings with just me, my cat, and my coffee, though.
I start work at 8 am and begin by triaging my emails. I have a bunch of deadlines this week, so it’s busier than usual. My job tends to be very seasonal, and sometimes I have a ton of work and sometimes I have none and can work on other longer-term projects. I have a piece of toast for breakfast and place a Whole Foods delivery order for the following day at 10:30 am. We made a meal plan and put everything in the cart the day before ($117.36, including tip).
Afternoon: I have my lunch break from noon to 1 pm. It doesn’t really matter when I take my lunch break, since I’m salaried, but the others in my office are hourly so in the before times we used to always close our office during the same time. I have a piece of leftover delivery pizza and some spinach risotto that I made a few days earlier. I also have half a brownie – the last one from a batch I made a few days ago (K gets the other half). He also has leftovers for lunch.
I should say at this point that both K and I are lucky enough to have been working almost entirely from home since early March. An area near Seattle was one of the first places to get hit by COVID-19, and my state and both of our employers have been taking it very seriously ever since. Working from home hasn’t always been easy since we live in a 600-square foot apartment. Also, there is a three-story townhouse being built directly next door to us and I can hear the pounding in my dreams at this point.
Around 2 pm, I go for a 2-mile run. I feel like some money diarists tend to toss off things like “oh, I went for an easy 7 mile run,” at the drop of a hat, so I want to be clear – running for 2 miles isn’t easy for me; it’s exhausting, annoying, sweaty, and generally gross. Also I am very slow. But it has kept me sane during quarantine.
Meanwhile, my husband goes to our local pet store to get an enzymatic cleaner (our cat peed in one of our suitcases… I think it’s probably a lost cause, but it was basically brand new, so worth a try) and special weight-loss cat food. Our cat is an 11-year-old rescue from the Humane Society and she is a chonky girl. We had to sign a waiver when we adopted her, saying that we understood that she was very overweight, lol. Our vet recommended a special diet food, rather than just restricting her intake as we have been doing, so we will give it a try ($78). My husband also stops buy our local wine store and picks up two bottles. We’ve been doing a dry January, so this will be our first drink for a while ($27.53).
I have a phone interview scheduled for 4 pm – just a preliminary interview with an internal recruiter. It’s the first ‘corporate’ job interview I’ve ever had, since I’ve been in academia my entire life. I’m trying to make a pivot into instructional design / training and development. I’m just excited to get an interview. It seems to go pretty well, but who knows. They tell me they will probably get back to me by the end of this week.
Evening: My husband whips up a random meal of fridge remnants – pesto pasta with sausage and a fridge salad with feta and bell peppers. It’s pretty tasty with a little Sauvignon Blanc. During dinner, we play a card game we call gin rummy, although it bears no resemblance to the actual game. After dinner, I make a chocolate cake with orange buttercream frosting and we watch Cobra Kai.
Daily total: $222.89
Day 2
Morning: Up early again, a piece of toast for breakfast (very exciting). We’re out of eggs until our Whole Foods order arrives. I’m working on creating some tedious but necessary spreadsheets this morning.
Noon: Our Whole Foods order arrives around noon. Excitement! They’ve given us a half-rotten bag of romaine lettuce and substituted pecans for hazelnuts. I should probably just double mask and go to Trader Joe’s myself (our regular spot, only a 5-minute walk from my apartment). I’m just getting anxious about these new variants.
I have leftover meatloaf and spinach risotto again for lunch. Lots of meetings and more organizing spreadsheets in the afternoon. Around 3 pm, I go for my daily ritual - a 20-minute walk around my neighborhood. It’s still raining slightly but I need to get out. Halfway through the walk, I get an email from my apartment manager telling me the apartment will no longer accept debit card payments, direct deposit, or credit card payments for paying rent. In other words, only checks or money orders (?!). Ugh. Our lease is up in 4 months and we will not be renewing our lease. Our last apartment manager was a gambling addict who may have been stealing people’s identities, but by God, he kept things working. Ever since they fired him, this place has been going downhill.
Evening: I check my bank statements to update my budget spreadsheet and realize that I have been billed the wrong amount of rent. They actually charged me less than they should have. I don’t trust my apartment manager not to start charging me a late fee or something for this, so I call them up. They are baffled by how to fix this, which you would think would be the one thing you would want to get right, if you’re renting out apartments.
K cooks dinner – steak with a Roquefort sauce and glazed brussels sprouts. It’s from a French cookbook we recently bought and it is delicious. I work on classwork for my certificate program while he cooks. After dinner, I do the dishes and buy the 13th season of RuPaul’s Drag Race. I watch the first episode – lots of shocking twists and turns! I’m planning to watch the rest of the episodes together with my younger sister, M ($22.01).
Daily total: $22.01
Day 3
Morning: K has an 8 am dentist appointment, so he takes off early. He already paid for the work last month, so there’s no charge. I have a piece of toast for breakfast and get to work checking my emails. It’s 8:20 am and the construction crew building a townhouse next door is blasting mariachi music. I’m glad someone is having fun. At least the sun is coming out.
Someone at work has made a critical error, but it wasn’t me, thank God. I was the one who found out about it, but it’s still going to cause a big old headache for me. I’m ready to be done with this job. K and I go for a run so that I can exhaust myself enough to no longer be furious about said careless error.
Noon: I have leftover spinach risotto and meatloaf again – exciting. I’m busy at work but frankly, not a lot going on other than that. Still no word about fixing my rent payments. I’m not really willing to pursue this any further at this point.
Evening: I start making chili (Turkey Chili from the NY Times) and cornbread (from my new cookbook, Jubilee). K is doing some work on our investments when he announces that, somehow, a transfer was scheduled from our checking account to our savings account of $55k (?!) We obviously don’t have $55k in our checking account, so we start frantically trying to figure out what’s going on. Numerous phone calls later, we still don’t know if that was a hack, if my husband somehow mistakenly scheduled the transfer himself, or if the bank messed it up. Either way, it doesn’t seem like any harm was done since the bank with our checking account just declined the transaction. But it seems really strange and worrisome. We get to work changing the passwords on all of our accounts, just in case it was some kind of hack.
After dinner (and chocolate cake), I have a Zoom happy hour with a local friend. We occasionally see each other outside but it’s nice to have a longer chat from the comfort of our living rooms. We both love murder mysteries, so we signed up for a service where a company sends us letters with clues and we try to solve the mystery together. It’s a fun way to stay connected and look forward to something during the pandemic. The service costs about $15 per month, but I paid for it in lump sum for 3 months, so it’s not included in my budget above. I drink some wine and we vent about work (we work at the same place) before getting started on the puzzle.
Daily total: $0
Day 4
Morning: I sleep in a bit, which is nice. Get up around 7 am. My parents are both getting their 2nd vaccine today – they’re both in their 70s and I am so relieved. I send my mom a “congratulations on being vaccinated!” text and we chat for a bit. I have leftover cornbread with honey and butter for breakfast – soooo good.
Work is not particularly exciting today, but someone sends me a last-minute request for something that does not need to be so urgent. I feel annoyed. Still no word from the interviewers on Monday, and I’m beginning to suspect I wasn’t selected to move forward. Too bad. K pays for a Wordpress website for the year (it’s a work-related website, but sadly his work doesn’t reimburse him). It costs $92.48.
Noon: The mariachi music is particularly loud today. I stand out on my balcony in the sun for a while and watch the workers. It’s been interesting seeing a house go up next door in real time, especially since I’m at home all the time. The workers are balancing on the top of the third story wall without, as far as I can see, anything like a safety line. It seems unsafe, but I presume they know what they’re doing.
We booked a cabin for the upcoming weekend in the Hood Canal region of Washington to do some hiking and birdwatching. I want to be as safe as possible and not go to any grocery stores or risk spreading COVID in any way while I’m there, so I place another grocery order with Whole Foods just for some special treats for the weekend. The cabin has a small kitchen and a grill, so we’re planning to make a fancy steak salad on Saturday. I order chips and hummus, some fancy cheese and meats, Tate’s cookies (I’ve heard a lot of good things about these), a baguette, and the ingredients for the steak salad. I also order a few staples I forgot in our last order, like sweet potatoes, more coffee, and half and half. It comes to $87.41, including tip, but that does include like $30 worth of steak. For some reason, I can’t order a small amount of steak online, so I’m planning to freeze half of it for later. (I include this purchase in our vacation fund budget, rather than under our regular grocery budget).
Around 2 pm, K makes a quick trip to our local wine store to buy an Oregon pinot noir and some port to enjoy at the cabin ($59.45). This store has an outdoor walk-up counter where you can tell the owner what you’re looking for, and he brings you some options (the store is way too small to allow customers to enter during Covid). It’s fun to chat with another human being, even briefly.
Evening: After work, we spend a little time rebalancing our investing and retirement accounts. We decide to put more money into bonds and a little bit into REIT’s as a hedge against a potential crash or recession in the future. Then I start making dinner – Broken Eggs (Huevas Rotas) from the NY Times cooking site. You basically cook the potatoes in a skillet in water, spices, and olive oil, and then sauté them to crisp them up once the water evaporates. Then you add onion, lots of garlic, and finally some eggs. It is delicious. I eat it with leftover cornbread while watching RuPaul’s Drag Race season 13 with my sister – we watch the first two episodes. It’s full of twists and turns. A note about this – we have an elaborate procedure for watching shows together developed during quarantine whereby we start the show at the same with an earbud in one ear, while FaceTiming. I also have chocolate cake, of course.
Later, I get an email that I’ve signed up for HBO on Amazon Prime. I definitely have not. I text my mom, who shares my account, and she tells me she signed up by mistake. I cancel right away and luckily they won’t charge us for it.
Meanwhile, K is doing an online Japanese language class over Zoom. He’s been interested in learning ever since we went to Japan last January. I lived in Japan for 3 years so I was able to take us around to a lot of more obscure places and he really enjoyed the trip – it was a blast.
K starts a YouTube yoga class (from Do Yoga With Me – my favorite channel) and I join him for part of it before bed around 10 pm.
Daily total: $239.34
Day 5
Morning: I get up around 7 am and we go for a run first thing. I prefer running early in the morning because there are fewer people to avoid during COVID. We do a different route today – it’s longer (3 miles) but has fewer hills. It’s a slog, as always, but I feel good when I get back right around 8 am. I jump straight onto my computer to start checking work emails and my husband makes us avocado and egg toast for breakfast - it is absolutely delicious.
We talk about how our bathroom smells distinctly mildewy (yay for being a grown-up because I guess this is what we talk about now) and we buy two big buckets of DampRid on Amazon ($26.60). I’ve found this to be a necessity in Seattle. Mid-morning, I take a break from work and start packing for our trip to the cabin.
Noon: I have leftover potatoes and cornbread for lunch, and my husband has the leftover chili. We finish getting ready to leave and head out right after lunch, taking a half day. The only problem is that I have attend a meeting at 3:30 pm, so we head out hoping to get there in time. Our cabin is near Quilcene in the Hood Canal region of Washington, about a 2 hour drive or a 2 hour ferry ride + drive. We are initially planning to take the ferry both ways, but realize that we mistimed the ferry departure, so we drive the whole way instead. Luckily, there’s little traffic mid-day, and we arrive at our Airbnb around 3:00 pm.
The Airbnb is beautiful! It’s a small cabin handmade by the owner, whose house is next door. It’s very rural, with a beautiful view. It’s tiny, but has a little kitchen and a waterfall-style shower with river rocks on the floor. It’s a great place to get away for a short time. Luckily, it also has good reception and I’m able to sit in on my meeting with no problems. My husband also does a little work, and then at 5 pm we’re free!
In our planning, we decided to get takeout on Friday night, since the little kitchen isn’t designed for any serious cooking. We call ahead to a local restaurant to order burgers (one of only 2 restaurants in the whole town). It’s around 5:30 pm and the place is deserted. It’s a microbrewery, but they tell us they haven’t been making beer since COVID-19 hit. None of the workers are wearing masks when I walk in, but they put them on when they see I’m wearing one. I pick up our order - a few bottled beers and burgers and fries ($49.52 including tip).
Back at our Airbnb, we watch Big Trouble in Little China and enjoy our very messy, but delicious, burgers (it costs $4.39 to rent). The movie is very campy but fun. I love silly action movies, as you will see with my other viewing choices. We wrap up the night in a very exciting fashion, eating chocolate cake and watching old episodes of the original Star Trek.
Daily total: $80.51
Day 6
Morning & noon: When we wake up around 8 am, the weather is looking thankfully clear and even sunny! We were expecting rain, so we’re really glad. We decide to go hiking today, and we head out before even having breakfast, with snacks and lunches packed. Our first destination is a hike called Mt. Zion, but unfortunately, we run into enough snow 2 miles before the trailhead that we decide to turn back. We don’t have any traction for our Subaru and don’t want to risk getting stuck on a very narrow mountain road. Instead, we drive another hour or so to the Lena Lake trailhead, a very popular and less strenuous trail. It’s about 7.5 miles roundtrip with 1200 feet of elevation gain.
By this time, it’s around 11:30, but luckily there is still parking. It’s a great hike up, and we run into relatively few people. We always mask up whenever we pass anyone, as does about 50% of the people we meet. The others… not so much. Around a mile from the lake, we start to run into snow. It’s turned into a beautiful sunny day, and I’m loving seeing all this snow! It’s a bit slippery, but not too bad. We make it to the lake mid-day, and it’s super jammed – there’s only a small viewpoint accessible, so everyone is crowded in there. I feel a bit uneasy with all the unmasked people, but we manage to find a spot away from the crowd and sit down to eat our lunch of apples, chips, and energy bars. There are a ton of robber jays there (Canada Jays) which try to eat our chips. It is fun watching them, but I’m annoyed to see some kids feeding them – it’ll just make them that much more aggressive. Bad trail manners.
On our way back down, we get stuck behind a group of 5 unmasked adults, who refuse to cede the narrow trail to faster hikers. I’m a slow hiker myself, so, to be clear, I’m not angry at slower walkers being on the trail but have some self-awareness and let people pass! especially if you’re going to go hiking in a big group during a pandemic! We finally get back down and head back to our Airbnb.
Evening: Back home, we explore some of the trails our Airbnb host has set up around his extensive property, and then relax on the deck. The sun is breaking through the clouds and it feels wonderful to sit out in nature and feel the sun on my back. We open up a bottle of wine and have a few pre-dinner snacks (more chips and hummus). For this night, we brought ingredients to make a steak salad. Our Airbnb host has kindly set up a charcoal grill for us, so we grilled the steak and toast some bread on the side.
We eat dinner while watching the truly terrible Jean Claude Van Damme movie Bloodsport and finish up the very last of my chocolate cake. It’s amazing that anyone ever let Van Damme act… or should I say ‘act.’ I also have a Tate’s chocolate chip cookie or two, accompanied by a little port. My husband and I are truly very old people at heart, so we finish up the night watching a few episodes of Columbo.
Daily total: $0
Day 7
Morning: Unfortunately, K had insomnia last night, so he sleeps in pretty late. I drink coffee in bed and enjoy looking at the view out our big windows. Once he’s up, we get packed up and write a thank you note for our host. It was a great stay.
One of my big hobbies is birding and K enjoys wildlife photography, so we go out to look for some lifers! (The first time you see a new species of bird). Did I mention we are very old people in (relatively) young bodies? We first go to Dosewallips State Park and see some bald eagles, great blue herons, lots of various ducks, and a flock of Canada Geese, which, strangely, includes a domesticated gray goose. He’s much larger than the Canada Geese and seems to be watching over them. It’s kind of cute. Unfortunately, a lot of the birds are too far from shore to be seen clearly.
Our next stop is Point No Point (I love all the sad & disappointed names that early Westerner explorers gave places in the Washington/Oregon coast), a popular birding spot. We see a ton of birds here, and I can understand why it’s so well-known - Red-Breasted Mergansers, Western Grebes, Common Goldeneyes, Pacific Loons, and a few others I can’t identify yet. Most excitingly though, we see a whole pile of otters! They’re lounging around together on a rock just offshore and a ton of people are watching. We watch as they all slip off the rock and go hunting in the shore. It’s my first otter sighting in the wild, and it’s so cool! We also see some seals and possibly a sea lion. It’s a great spot for wildlife. We eat some snacks (hummus, chips, some sliced meat & cheese) before we head out.
I really want to come back to this area another time and explore further, but K has decided that we need to get back home in time for the Big Game. We take the 3:00 pm ferry back to Seattle ($16.40) and get home around 3:45 pm. I veg out at home while my husband watches football. He’s a Patriots fan but he still loves Tom Brady (??) so he’s happy to see Florida win. I don’t understand sports team loyalties at all, but whatever, I’m glad he’s happy. We order from a new Indian place called Spice Box and get vindaloo, roganjosh, and vegetables pakora – so tasty ($53.96). Happily, there’s enough left over for lunch the next day, since I have no plans for what we will eat yet!
I’m really dreading work the next day, as I know that it will be obnoxious. I want to get out of my job so badly, but it doesn’t look like I’m going on to the next interview stage for the job I interviewed no back on Monday. I’m feeling kind of down about it. I try to stay positive and promise that I’ll apply for at least 2-3 new jobs next week. I bake up some frozen cookie dough I had in the freezer and feel sorry for myself. We end the night by watching another episode of Columbo.
Daily total: 70.36
Food + Drink: $395.23
Fun / Entertainment: $26.40
Home + Health: $26.60
Clothes + Beauty: $0
Transport: $16.40
Other: $170.48
Grand Total: $635.11
I think this week was pretty normal for us. Obviously we spent a bit more than usual due to the weekend cabin trip, but nothing outrageous. Our largest consumer spending category is definitely food and drink – we live in a very busy area of Seattle with tons of restaurants and bars so believe it or not, we actually used to spend even more on eating out. We still try to support our local places by getting takeout or delivery during the pandemic and even occasionally getting a few drinks outside. I spent more than usual on groceries due to stocking up for the weekend away.

Hi, I’m sharing data from my recent 30-day a20 heart kill challenge. I was able to kill 127 hearts in 212 runs, a substantial increase both in total hearts killed (previous best was 102) and winrate (don’t remember previous but it wasn’t very close to 60%).
This is my third time attempting the challenge. It’s mostly just a ton of fun. It isn’t intended to be a competitive category and I’m sure that it’s possible to go much higher still, especially with strategies that sacrifice winrate, for example forfeiting at the end of bad act ones.
Runs are played rotating through characters. I started on Ironclad and ended on Watcher.
These runs can mostly be interpreted as me trying to win as often as possible, with the obvious caveats that I’m also trying to complete runs in <1.5 hours and playing 8+ hours a day without a day off for 30 days. Quite a few runs in the dataset were lost to simple calculation errors because my brain was melting, or to not pursuing lines which would trade time for marginal advantages like a better number on Ink Bottle. On a more macro level I tended slightly toward taking high-risk/high-reward lines in runs which were falling behind in order to either get them over with or give myself a higher chance of winning if I continued - stuff like taking more Act 2 Elite fights, fighting Double Orb Walkers, etc. - I don’t think this had a large effect on my winrate (mostly I did this in spots where both options seemed very close in value anyway) but it’s worth noting because it is different from how I’d play when trying to purely maximize my chance to win.
You also may want to ignore the runs where I bought Prismatic Shard or took early Signature Move and tried to kill every enemy with it if you’re interested in analyzing “serious” play xD. But I think there are only three of those or something like that. I have been known to meme a little at times.
Link to Folder of Run Histories
Link to IMGUR album of in-game Run History screens
Overall thoughts on the attempt:
It took me a while to switch into 1.5-hour run mode. I’d been playing 2-3hr runs for the last 4 months, and the first few days involved a LOT of calculation errors and turns where I spent a long time looking for very specific lines, which works if I’m giving myself a comfortable amount of time to play but fails when I’m time-crunching myself. There were turns where - for example - I’d look for lethal for five minutes when it was immediately obvious that I could just full block and kill next turn, or spend five minutes trying to work out a good reshuffle that was only ~5% likely to be doable to begin with, and spending mental energy on these lines compounded into making mistakes when I didn’t make time to spend mental energy on the things which were more generally important in the run.
To give you a numerical idea, I started the challenge 39w-41l over the first 80 runs. Variance definitely exists in a dataset of that size, but that is a LOT worse than how well I was doing once I settled in.
Once I dialed in I started doing much better. Especially in the middle of the challenge, lines felt effortless to find and maximizing the minutiae of the game (Ink Bottle on right number types of things) was often automatic. I also started to vibe very well with the limits of each run - there were very few runs where I was dying to elites I could have avoided, or building decks which ultimately couldn’t handle the late-game boss gauntlet. Some of the wins in this period were VERY good wins which I’d be proud to have played even in a non-challenge settings.
I managed 52w-26l rotating during this period, including holding 75% winrate for 50+ runs, an 11-0 rotating winstreak (new world record at the time - congrats to Baalor and Terrence, who managed 11-0 and 13-0 respectively later in the same week! Completely insane!, and to CrimsonBlur who managed 10-0 last year on a much harder patch), a 12-0/18-1 Watcher streak (new personal best), and a 9-0 Defect streak (one run short of my previous best from late last year). My Silent and Ironclad did quite well here too. I’ve had moments when I’ve been sharper on calculations or more dialed in on specific characters, but in terms of overall rotating play this is the best period of play I’ve ever managed.
Then there was the decline. Turns out doing this involves some mental fatigue. I put a ton of my remaining mental energy into my 11-0 winstreak and never got back to full. I closed out the challenge with 23w-17l, including MANY losses to extremely simple mistakes. Things like not resting before an elite when it was very obvious I was taking 30+ against Gremlin Nob, or entering Wrath with no way to leave it on the turn before the Heart attacked me.
What was most interesting to me during this final “exhaustion” period was how many runs I lost on Defect and Watcher to misevaluating my deck’s ability to perform in important fights. I don’t usually have to think at all to be able to have a good idea of whether my deck can win a fight like Book of Stabbing or Time Eater, but at this point in the challenge I was often getting things like that completely wrong, or my brain just wasn’t even registering that it needed to consider them. These mistakes were accompanied by building some quite bad decks which leaned heavily into trying to do things that weren’t actually good enough to overcome the challenges they faced, and an uptick in calculation errors didn’t help at all.
I finished the challenge VERY tired but very glad to have committed to it. One of the most enjoyable months of my life, and there were times in there where Slaying the Spire felt like seeing the Matrix. I can’t wait to do it again.
Ironclad-specific thoughts (25w-28l):
I was 15-5 over my last 20 with Ironclad before the challenge and was expecting to win a lot with him, but I ran poorly and played poorly for a lot of the challenge. Probably the simplest way to describe it would be that I had a string of runs with poor Act 1’s, which led to me overcompensating and putting too much stuff into my deck for Act 1 and Act 2. Then I died a lot to Act 3 and 4, whoops. I adjusted properly for the middle of the challenge, then fell off a cliff when I started getting exhausted. I think the fact that he got played after Watcher runs, which are often calculation-heavy and also which often impose a sense of invincibility on the player, didn’t help much.
I relic-swapped the vast majority of these runs, which I found to be less good than it used to be with the buffs to self-damage synergies. Toward the end of the challenge I was only relic-swapping if there wasn’t a very good other option. I still find that Ironclad performs very well on 4 energy, but it’s rough that his character-specific relics aren’t great and that the sustain from his regular starter relic matters a bit more now that Rupture and Hemokinesis are so much better, since you're often taking extra damage in hallway fights in order to have extra power in boss fights.
Most of my Ironclad wins are built on strong Act 1 relics and boss relics. His synergies mostly don’t feel strong enough to win on their own, unless you assemble a Corruption or Barricade exodia and/or get multiple Offerings to get everything online. It’s hard to draw cards with him to accelerate your deck, and it’s hard to deal damage without taking damage and hard to block while achieving anything else.
It also lowkey tilts me that several of his best cards don’t get better in multiples. If Defect gets offered a second Echo Form it massively improves the deck, but if Ironclad gets offered a second Corruption or Barricade it’s like… maybe you take it to get it in play earlier, sure, but it definitely doesn’t let you play your first three cards twice every turn.
General advice: just get Snecko Eye and Corruption every run, ideally with Reaper and Feed alongside. Failing that, the best ways to combine damage and survivability are usually going to be Strength + Reaper with some passable Block cards and good Max HP or Block + Anything; Body Slam isn’t the be-all end-all here, if you have the ability to survive turns with copies of Shrug It Off+ and Exhaust + Feel No Pain you have enough time to kill enemies with a variety of things.
Silent-specific thoughts (34w-19l):
Not a fan of the Blade Dance buff. Prior to it Silent was possibly my favorite character. The tension between generally needing attack-based damage to survive Act 2 but having difficulty scaling it enough to defeat the endgame gauntlet often led to runs where every floor felt challenging (with the exception of Wraith Form runs. Imagine having a card just make the player invincible for >50% of the game).
Now it feels generally easy to not only demolish Act 1 and 2 with attacks, but also scale them into a lategame deck. By the end of the challenge I was building a deck around an attack-generating common that I sometimes hadn’t even gotten one of yet instead of picking Crippling Cloud+’s I was offered, which was not a good feeling at all. I don’t think there’s ever been a common that dominated a character’s strategic space this heavily before.
Keep in mind that this is alongside other buffs as well. It used to be that a deck that dealt damage with a lot of attacks needed creative solutions to Time Eater and the Heart and stomped everything else, but now it’s often the case that it just stomps everything full-stop.
It doesn’t help that Silent’s starter relic plus Acrobatics and Calculated Gamble were already so strong at accelerating. Now you can play your attack common on turn 1 and discard four Shivs to draw four more cards toward your copies of Adrenaline and Footwork etc., so not only does it deal 16 for 1, count as five cards for Ink Bottle, play four attacks for Shuriken, and have the ability to be targeted at separate enemies, but it can also combine with a strong Uncommon to be Skim+. This is too strong :/.
General advice:
Take enough damage cards/relics to kill things and then make sure you can survive 40 incoming damage on the turns you need to - relics and potions are sometimes all you need, but damage options are also so strong that you can get away with dedicating a significant portion of your deck to mitigation.
Also: don’t Relic swap unless the other options are incredibly bad. Bag of Preparation is insanely good and with this character you can get two.
Defect-specific thoughts (29w-24l):
Defect is a beautiful character right now and often provided the most entertaining run of the day. The general yin-yang pull of needing to be able to survive vicious fights in Act 2 and 3 but also needing to be able to scale into a deck that beats the lategame gauntlet compartmentalizes into lots of interesting decisions about when it’s okay to add so-so orb-scaling cards to your deck, and how exactly you’re going to throw together a combination of 25 atrocious attack cards, Ball Lightning, Doom and Gloom, and Electrodynamics to deal damage to things. (My advice is to just get offered Ball Lightning, Doom and Gloom, and Electrodynamics so you don’t have to think too hard. Static Discharge does okay sometimes too).
I love the way runs “typically” revolve around fairly normal attack-based clears of low-hp enemies into fairly normal block-scaling to survive lategame fights long enough to kill them however you’d like, but sometimes completely go off the rails. I got to play a ridiculous 3x Hyperbeam/3x Meteor Strike run (without Snecko Eye), for example.
I also love being offered Stack. Hello World + Stack scaling led to a couple of other immensely enjoyable wins. It’s very funny to me to have a Defragment+ and Glacier in my deck, be thinking “oh yeah, I have premium uncommons that block super well!”, and then be offered Stack and be forced to admit that an unupgraded common usually blocks better than they do.
I think Defect is the best-positioned character in terms of Whale Bonus balance right now. I’ve found it to generally be correct to relic swap unless there is a very strong alternative or a path which allows me to get a lot of value out of my Lightning Orb.
General advice:
Kill early and midgame stuff with whatever option gets in the way of your lategame scaling least. Compile Driver and Sweeping Beam draw cards, Electrodynamics and Static Discharge remove themselves from your deck (also Static is OP with Frost Orbs against multiattacks), Ball Lightning and Doom and Gloom are 2+ attacks worth of damage in one card, etc.
Then make sure you scale and can accelerate into that scaling. Fission, Seek, Skim+, Turbo+, Bag of Preparation, Bottles, etc. to get your deck to a point where it’s outputting 40+ block per turn and the run is over.
Watcher-specific thoughts (39w-14l):
The great thing about Watcher is that almost every run you lose is entirely your fault. Probably somewhere between one and three of these runs were lost to an unlucky result of close-to-correct play, and every other one was me building my deck wrong for a fight, piloting it wrong, picking the wrong potion or relic, etc.
I haven’t generally enjoyed Watcher in the past, and have mostly not been playing her for the last year (or when I have I’ve been occasionally forfeiting Act 3 because I’m bored of clicking on Cut Through Fate and Tantrum over and over again), so I felt like I actually learned a significant amount about the character in this challenge.
My general Watcher-heuristics right now are:
Pretty much every type of synergy draws cards, makes block, and some of them even make energy, so it’s fine to have lots of different synergies in the same deck as long as they aren’t too awkward to get rolling. If you just take the best card offered to you every time you should still easily be winning 70+% of your runs. Getting better at Watcher seems to largely be about first realizing that Talk to the Hand, Mental Fortress, Tantrum, and Rushdown are obscenely overpowered, and then realizing the ways in which every single other card is obscenely overpowered as well. (Except Pressure Points, lol).
Hexaghost can kill you if you don’t take enough damage cards, Act 2 Elites can kill you if you don’t have enough health banked for them or didn't take attacks properly, Time Eater can kill you if your deck is very bad at dealing damage or very bad at blocking, and the Heart can kill you on turn 2 or 3 if you are bad at accelerating your synergies. Other than that it’s unclear that Watcher can ever die unless you click the cards wrong or get incredibly incredibly incredibly unlucky AND don't have potions available to compensate for it.
I actually quite enjoyed Watcher this challenge and look forward to playing her more. The lategame gauntlets were sometimes a lot more interesting than I thought they would be, with my win to go 10-0 in my 11-0 streak being one of the coolest Heart fights I’ve ever played.
It’s just a bit unfortunate that like, her cards are so strong that I take Pandora’s Box over anything, the most interesting thing about most fights she plays is working out how to Lesson Learned with Ink Bottle on the right number, and the times that you do legitimately lose are to ridiculous things like drawing three copies of Omniscience in your opening hand. (And that she’s so strong that you find yourself questioning if that was your fault and you should’ve not taken the third Omniscience so that this couldn’t happen when that happens to you).
I personally tended to avoid Boss Relic swap on her because it didn't seem like I needed four energy to win anyway, and the upsides that the Boss Relics turn off often seemed more impactful than the bonuses they were providing, but you can certainly win almost every run with her by Relic swapping too.
Overall Takeaways:
The game is a bit easier than I’d like right now. It seems hard for the devs to add more ascensions, but balance is starting to break a bit at a20 and I hope they go very easy on the buffs in the future. The Blade Dance buff was a massive correction to a problem that I don’t think was actually a problem.
I don’t like that Boss Relics are so strong that trading Boss Relic is a common start, and don’t like that the cardpools have gotten so strong that Transforming cards is generally correct. Balancing such that high-variance options are correct leads to an increase in the frequency of runs where the balance breaks very quickly. I'd personally prefer if these options were usually slightly -ev, so that they were available for runs where you needed a chance to highroll but incorrect the rest of the time.
Last challenge I felt like I was engaged ~80% of the time, with ~10% of the time I was unengaged being because the run was completely won already and ~10% of the time I was unengaged being because the run was almost certainly lost and I was treading water until something killed me. This time those numbers were more like 75/20/5.
Game is very very good though, and I hope you enjoy this set of runs if you decide to check them out!
<3, jorbs

NEW INFO 5 Results from share redemption are posted. Less than .2% redeemed. Very bullish as investors are showing extreme confidence in the future of PLBY.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/playboy-mountain-crest-acquisition-corp-120000721.html
NEW INFO 4 Definitive Agreement to purchase 100% of Lovers brand stores announced 2/1.
https://www.streetinsider.com/Corporate+News/Playboy+%28MCAC%29+Confirms+Deal+to+Acquire+Lovers/17892359.html
NEW INFO 3 I bought more on the dip today. 5081 total. Price rose AH to $12.38 (2.15%)
NEW INFO 2 Here is the full webinar.
https://icrinc.zoom.us/rec/play/9GWKdmOYumjWfZuufW3QXpe_FW_g--qeNbg6PnTjTMbnNTgLmCbWjeRFpQga1iPc-elpGap8dnDv8Zww.yD7DjUwuPmapeEdP?continueMode=true&tk=lEYc4F_FkKlgsmCIs6w0gtGHT2kbgVGbUju3cIRBSjk.DQIAAAAV8NK49xZWdldRM2xNSFNQcTBmcE00UzM3bXh3AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA&uuid=WN_GKWqbHkeSyuWetJmLFkj4g&_x_zm_rtaid=kR45-uuqRE-L65AxLjpbQw.1611967079119.2c054e3d3f8d8e63339273d9175939ed&_x_zm_rhtaid=866
NEW INFO 1 Live merger webinar with PLBY and MCAC on Friday January 29, 2021 at 12:00 NOON EST link below
https://mcacquisition.com/investor-relations/press-release-details/2021/Playboy-Enterprises-Inc.-and-Mountain-Crest-Acquisition-Corp-Participate-in-SPACInsider-ICR-Webinar-on-January-29th-at-12pm-ET/default.aspx
Playboy going public: Porn, Gambling, and Cannabis
!!!WARNING READING AHEAD!!! TL;DR at the end. It will take some time to sort through all the links and read/watch everything, but you should.
In the next couple weeks, Mountain Crest Acquisition Corp is taking Playboy public. The existing ticker MCAC will become PLBY. Special purpose acquisition companies have taken private companies public in recent months with great success. I believe this will be no exception. Notably, Playboy is profitable and has skyrocketing revenue going into a transformational growth phase.
Porn - First and foremost, let's talk about porn. I know what you guys are thinking. “Porno mags are dead. Why would I want to invest in something like that? I can get porn for free online.” Guess what? You are absolutely right. And that’s exactly why Playboy doesn’t do that anymore. That’s right, they eliminated their print division. And yet they somehow STILL make money from porn that people (see: boomers) pay for on their website through PlayboyTV, Playboy Plus, and iPlayboy. Here’s the thing: Playboy has international, multi-generational name recognition from porn. They have content available in 180 countries. It will be the only publicly traded adult entertainment (porn) company. But that is not where this company is going. It will help support them along the way. You can see every Playboy magazine through iPlayboy if you’re interested. NSFW links below:
https://www.playboy.com/
https://www.playboytv.com/
https://www.playboyplus.com/
https://www.iplayboy.com/
Gambling - Some of you might recognize the Playboy brand from gambling trips to places like Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Cancun, London or Macau. They’ve been in the gambling biz for decades through their casinos, clubs, and licensed gaming products. They see the writing on the wall. COVID is accelerating the transition to digital, application based GAMBLING. That’s right. What we are doing on Robinhood with risky options is gambling, and the only reason regulators might give a shit anymore is because we are making too much money. There may be some restrictions put in place, but gambling from your phone on your couch is not going anywhere. More and more states are allowing things like Draftkings, poker, state ‘lottery” apps, hell - even political betting. Michigan and Virginia just ok’d gambling apps. They won’t be the last. This is all from your couch and any 18 year old with a cracked iphone can access it. Wouldn’t it be cool if Playboy was going to do something like that? They’re already working on it. As per CEO Ben Kohn who we will get to later, “...the company’s casino-style digital gaming products with Scientific Games and Microgaming continue to see significant global growth.” Honestly, I stopped researching Scientific Games' sports betting segment when I saw the word ‘omni-channel’. That told me all I needed to know about it’s success.
“Our SG Sports™ platform is an enhanced, omni-channel solution for online, self-service and retail fixed odds sports betting – from soccer to tennis, basketball, football, baseball, hockey, motor sports, racing and more.”
https://www.scientificgames.com/
https://www.microgaming.co.uk/
“This latter segment has become increasingly enticing for Playboy, and it said last week that it is considering new tie-ups that could include gaming operators like PointsBet and 888Holdings.”
https://calvinayre.com/2020/10/05/business/playboys-gaming-ops-could-get-a-boost-from-spac-purchase/
As per their SEC filing:
“Significant consumer engagement and spend with Playboy-branded gaming properties around the world, including with leading partners such as Microgaming, Scientific Games, and Caesar’s Entertainment, steers our investment in digital gaming, sports betting and other digital offerings to further support our commercial strategy to expand consumer spend with minimal marginal cost, and gain consumer data to inform go-to-market plans across categories.”
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgadata/1803914/000110465921005986/tm2034213-12_defm14a.htm#tMDAA1
They are expanding into more areas of gaming/gambling, working with international players in the digital gaming/gambling arena, and a Playboy sportsbook is on the horizon.
https://www.playboy.com/read/the-pleasure-of-playing-with-yourself-mobile-gaming-in-the-covid-era
Cannabis - If you’ve ever read through a Playboy magazine, you know they’ve had a positive relationship with cannabis for many years. As of September 2020, Playboy has made a major shift into the cannabis space. Too good to be true you say? Check their website. Playboy currently sells a range of CBD products. This is a good sign. Federal hemp products, which these most likely are, can be mailed across state lines and most importantly for a company like Playboy, can operate through a traditional banking institution. CBD products are usually the first step towards the cannabis space for large companies. Playboy didn’t make these products themselves meaning they are working with a processor in the cannabis industry. Another good sign for future expansion. What else do they have for sale? Pipes, grinders, ashtrays, rolling trays, joint holders. Hmm. Ok. So it looks like they want to sell some shit. They probably don’t have an active interest in cannabis right? Think again:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/javierhasse/2020/09/24/playboy-gets-serious-about-cannabis-law-reform-advocacy-with-new-partnership-grants/?sh=62f044a65cea
“Taking yet another step into the cannabis space, Playboy will be announcing later on Thursday (September, 2020) that it is launching a cannabis law reform and advocacy campaign in partnership with National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), Last Prisoner Project, Marijuana Policy Project, the Veterans Cannabis Project, and the Eaze Momentum Program.”
“According to information procured exclusively, the three-pronged campaign will focus on calling for federal legalization. The program also includes the creation of a mentorship plan, through which the Playboy Foundation will support entrepreneurs from groups that are underrepresented in the industry.” Remember that CEO Kohn from earlier? He wrote this recently:
https://medium.com/naked-open-letters-from-playboy/congress-must-pass-the-more-act-c867c35239ae
Seems like he really wants weed to be legal? Hmm wonder why? The writing's on the wall my friends. Playboy wants into the cannabis industry, they are making steps towards this end, and we have favorable conditions for legislative progress.
Don’t think branding your own cannabis line is profitable or worthwhile? Tell me why these 41 celebrity millionaires and billionaires are dummies. I’ll wait.
https://www.celebstoner.com/news/celebstoner-news/2019/07/12/top-celebrity-cannabis-brands/
Confirmation: I hear you. “This all seems pretty speculative. It would be wildly profitable if they pull this shift off. But how do we really know?” Watch this whole video:
https://finance.yahoo.com/video/playboy-ceo-telling-story-female-154907068.html
Man - this interview just gets my juices flowing. And highlights one of my favorite reasons for this play. They have so many different business avenues from which a catalyst could appear. I think paying attention, holding shares, and options on these staggered announcements over the next year is the way I am going to go about it. "There's definitely been a shift to direct-to-consumer," he (Kohn) said. "About 50 percent of our revenue today is direct-to-consumer, and that will continue to grow going forward.” “Kohn touted Playboy's portfolio of both digital and consumer products, with casino-style gaming, in particular, serving a crucial role under the company's new business model. Playboy also has its sights on the emerging cannabis market, from CBD products to marijuana products geared toward sexual health and pleasure.” "If THC does become legal in the United States, we have developed certain strains to enhance your sex life that we will launch," Kohn said. https://cheddar.com/media/playboy-goes-public-health-gaming-lifestyle-focus Oh? The CEO actually said it? Ok then. “We have developed certain strains…” They’re already working with growers on strains and genetics? Ok. There are several legal cannabis markets for those products right now, international and stateside. I expect Playboy licensed hemp and THC pre-rolls by EOY. Something like this: https://www.etsy.com/listing/842996758/10-playboy-pre-roll-tubes-limited?ga_order=most_relevant&ga_search_type=all&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_search_query=pre+roll+playboy&ref=sr_gallery-1-2&organic_search_click=1 Maintaining cannabis operations can be costly and a regulatory headache. Playboy’s licensing strategy allows them to pick successful, established partners and sidestep traditional barriers to entry. You know what I like about these new markets? They’re expanding. Worldwide. And they are going to be a bigger deal than they already are with or without Playboy. Who thinks weed and gambling are going away? Too many people like that stuff. These are easy markets. And Playboy is early enough to carve out their spot in each. Fuck it, read this too: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimosman/2020/10/20/playboy-could-be-the-king-of-spacs-here-are-three-picks/?sh=2e13dcaa3e05
Numbers: You want numbers? I got numbers. As per the company’s most recent SEC filing:
“For the year ended December 31, 2019, and the nine months ended September 30, 2020, Playboy’s historical consolidated revenue was $78.1 million and $101.3 million, respectively, historical consolidated net income (loss) was $(23.6) million and $(4.8) million, respectively, and Adjusted EBITDA was $13.1 million and $21.8 million, respectively.”
“In the nine months ended September 30, 2020, Playboy’s Licensing segment contributed $44.2 million in revenue and $31.1 million in net income.”
“In the ninth months ended September 30, 2020, Playboy’s Direct-to-Consumer segment contributed $40.2 million in revenue and net income of $0.1 million.”
“In the nine months ended September 30, 2020, Playboy’s Digital Subscriptions and Content segment contributed $15.4 million in revenue and net income of $7.4 million.”
They are profitable across all three of their current business segments.
“Playboy’s return to the public markets presents a transformed, streamlined and high-growth business. The Company has over $400 million in cash flows contracted through 2029, sexual wellness products available for sale online and in over 10,000 major retail stores in the US, and a growing variety of clothing and branded lifestyle and digital gaming products.”
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgadata/1803914/000110465921005986/tm2034213-12_defm14a.htm#tSHCF
Growth: Playboy has massive growth in China and massive growth potential in India. “In China, where Playboy has spent more than 25 years building its business, our licensees have an enormous footprint of nearly 2,500 brick and mortar stores and 1,000 ecommerce stores selling high quality, Playboy-branded men’s casual wear, shoes/footwear, sleepwear, swimwear, formal suits, leather & non-leather goods, sweaters, active wear, and accessories. We have achieved significant growth in China licensing revenues over the past several years in partnership with strong licensees and high-quality manufacturers, and we are planning for increased growth through updates to our men’s fashion lines and expansion into adjacent categories in men’s skincare and grooming, sexual wellness, and women’s fashion, a category where recent launches have been well received.” The men’s market in China is about the same size as the entire population of the United States and European Union combined. Playboy is a leading brand in this market. They are expanding into the women’s market too. Did you know CBD toothpaste is huge in China? China loves CBD products and has hemp fields that dwarf those in the US. If Playboy expands their CBD line China it will be huge. Did you know the gambling money in Macau absolutely puts Las Vegas to shame? Technically, it's illegal on the mainland, but in reality, there is a lot of gambling going on in China. https://www.forbes.com/sites/javierhasse/2020/10/19/magic-johnson-and-uncle-buds-cbd-brand-enter-china-via-tmall-partnership/?sh=271776ca411e “In India, Playboy today has a presence through select apparel licensees and hospitality establishments. Consumer research suggests significant growth opportunities in the territory with Playboy’s brand and categories of focus.” “Playboy Enterprises has announced the expansion of its global consumer products business into India as part of a partnership with Jay Jay Iconic Brands, a leading fashion and lifestyle Company in India.” “The Indian market today is dominated by consumers under the age of 35, who represent more than 65 percent of the country’s total population and are driving India’s significant online shopping growth. The Playboy brand’s core values of playfulness and exploration resonate strongly with the expressed desires of today’s younger millennial consumers. For us, Playboy was the perfect fit.” “The Playboy international portfolio has been flourishing for more than 25 years in several South Asian markets such as China and Japan. In particular, it has strategically targeted the millennial and gen-Z audiences across categories such as apparel, footwear, home textiles, eyewear and watches.” https://www.licenseglobal.com/industry-news/playboy-expands-global-footprint-india It looks like they gave COVID the heisman in terms of net damage sustained: “Although Playboy has not suffered any material adverse consequences to date from the COVID-19 pandemic, the business has been impacted both negatively and positively. The remote working and stay-at-home orders resulted in the closure of the London Playboy Club and retail stores of Playboy’s licensees, decreasing licensing revenues in the second quarter, as well as causing supply chain disruption and less efficient product development thereby slowing the launch of new products. However, these negative impacts were offset by an increase in Yandy’s direct-to-consumer sales, which have benefited in part from overall increases in online retail sales so far during the pandemic.” Looks like the positives are long term (Yandy acquisition) and the negatives are temporary (stay-at-home orders).
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgadata/1803914/000110465921006093/tm213766-1_defa14a.htm
This speaks to their ability to maintain a financially solvent company throughout the transition phase to the aforementioned areas. They’d say some fancy shit like “expanded business model to encompass four key revenue streams: Sexual Wellness, Style & Apparel, Gaming & Lifestyle, and Beauty & Grooming.” I hear “we’re just biding our time with these trinkets until those dollar dollar bill y’all markets are fully up and running.” But the truth is these existing revenue streams are profitable, scalable, and rapidly expanding Playboy’s e-commerce segment around the world.
"Even in the face of COVID this year, we've been able to grow EBITDA over 100 percent and revenue over 68 percent, and I expect that to accelerate going into 2021," he said. “Playboy is accelerating its growth in company-owned and branded consumer products in attractive and expanding markets in which it has a proven history of brand affinity and consumer spend.”
Also in the SEC filing, the Time Frame:
“As we detailed in the definitive proxy statement, the SPAC stockholder meeting to vote on the transaction has been set for February 9th, and, subject to stockholder approval and satisfaction of the other closing conditions, we expect to complete the merger and begin trading on NASDAQ under ticker PLBY shortly thereafter,” concluded Kohn.
The Players: Suhail “The Whale” Rizvi (HMFIC), Ben “The Bridge” Kohn (CEO), “lil” Suying Liu & “Big” Dong Liu (Young-gun China gang). I encourage you to look these folks up. The real OG here is Suhail Rizvi. He’s from India originally and Chairman of the Board for the new PLBY company. He was an early investor in Twitter, Square, Facebook and others. His firm, Rizvi Traverse, currently invests in Instacart, Pinterest, Snapchat, Playboy, and SpaceX. Maybe you’ve heard of them. “Rizvi, who owns a sprawling three-home compound in Greenwich, Connecticut, and a 1.65-acre estate in Palm Beach, Florida, near Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg, moved to Iowa Falls when he was five. His father was a professor of psychology at Iowa. Along with his older brother Ashraf, a hedge fund manager, Rizvi graduated from Wharton business school.” “Suhail Rizvi: the 47-year-old 'unsocial' social media baron: When Twitter goes public in the coming weeks (2013), one of the biggest winners will be a 47-year-old financier who guards his secrecy so zealously that he employs a person to take down his Wikipedia entry and scrub his photos from the internet. In IPO, Twitter seeks to be 'anti-FB'” “Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia looks like a big Twitter winner. So do the moneyed clients of Jamie Dimon. But as you’ve-got-to-be-joking wealth washed over Twitter on Thursday — a company that didn’t exist eight years ago was worth $31.7 billion after its first day on the stock market — the non-boldface name of the moment is Suhail R. Rizvi. Mr. Rizvi, 47, runs a private investment company that is the largest outside investor in Twitter with a 15.6 percent stake worth $3.8 billion at the end of trading on Thursday (November, 2013). Using a web of connections in the tech industry and in finance, as well as a hearty dose of good timing, he brought many prominent names in at the ground floor, including the Saudi prince and some of JPMorgan’s wealthiest clients.” https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/08/technology/at-twitter-working-behind-the-scenes-toward-a-billion-dollar-payday.html Y’all like that Arab money? How about a dude that can call up Saudi Princes and convince them to spend? Funniest shit about I read about him: “Rizvi was able to buy only $100 million in Facebook shortly before its IPO, thus limiting his returns, according to people with knowledge of the matter.” Poor guy :(
He should be fine with the 16 million PLBY shares he's going to have though :)
Shuhail also has experience in the entertainment industry. He’s invested in companies like SESAC, ICM, and Summit Entertainment. He’s got Hollywood connections to blast this stuff post-merger. And he’s at least partially responsible for that whole Twilight thing. I’m team Edward btw.
I really like what Suhail has done so far. He’s lurked in the shadows while Kohn is consolidating the company, trimming the fat, making Playboy profitable, and aiming the ship at modern growing markets.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-twitter-ipo-rizvi-insight/insight-little-known-hollywood-investor-poised-to-score-with-twitter-ipo-idUSBRE9920VW20131003
Ben “The Bridge” Kohn is an interesting guy. He’s the connection between Rizvi Traverse and Playboy. He’s both CEO of Playboy and was previously Managing Partner at Rizvi Traverse. Ben seems to be the voice of the Playboy-Rizvi partnership, which makes sense with Suhail’s privacy concerns. Kohn said this:
“Today is a very big day for all of us at Playboy and for all our partners globally. I stepped into the CEO role at Playboy in 2017 because I saw the biggest opportunity of my career. Playboy is a brand and platform that could not be replicated today. It has massive global reach, with more than $3B of global consumer spend and products sold in over 180 countries. Our mission – to create a culture where all people can pursue pleasure – is rooted in our 67-year history and creates a clear focus for our business and role we play in people’s lives, providing them with the products, services and experiences that create a lifestyle of pleasure. We are taking this step into the public markets because the committed capital will enable us to accelerate our product development and go-to-market strategies and to more rapidly build our direct to consumer capabilities,” said Ben Kohn, CEO of Playboy.
“Playboy today is a highly profitable commerce business with a total addressable market projected in the trillions of dollars,” Mr. Kohn continued, “We are actively selling into the Sexual Wellness consumer category, projected to be approximately $400 billion in size by 2024, where our recently launched intimacy products have rolled out to more than 10,000 stores at major US retailers in the United States. Combined with our owned & operated ecommerce Sexual Wellness initiatives, the category will contribute more than 40% of our revenue this year. In our Apparel and Beauty categories, our collaborations with high-end fashion brands including Missguided and PacSun are projected to achieve over $50M in retail sales across the US and UK this year, our leading men’s apparel lines in China expanded to nearly 2500 brick and mortar stores and almost 1000 digital stores, and our new men’s and women’s fragrance line recently launched in Europe. In Gaming, our casino-style digital gaming products with Scientific Games and Microgaming continue to see significant global growth. Our product strategy is informed by years of consumer data as we actively expand from a purely licensing model into owning and operating key high-growth product lines focused on driving profitability and consumer lifetime value. We are thrilled about the future of Playboy. Our foundation has been set to drive further growth and margin, and with the committed capital from this transaction and our more than $180M in NOLs, we will take advantage of the opportunity in front of us, building to our goal of $100M of adjusted EBITDA in 2025.”
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201001005404/en/Playboy-to-Become-a-Public-Company
Also, according to their Form 4s, “Big” Dong Liu and “lil” Suying Liu just loaded up with shares last week. These guys are brothers and seem like the Chinese market connection. They are only 32 & 35 years old. I don’t even know what that means, but it's provocative.
https://www.secform4.com/insider-trading/1832415.htm
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mountain-crest-acquisition-corp-ii-002600994.html
Y’all like that China money?
“Mr. Liu has been the Chief Financial Officer of Dongguan Zhishang Photoelectric Technology Co., Ltd., a regional designer, manufacturer and distributor of LED lights serving commercial customers throughout Southern China since November 2016, at which time he led a syndicate of investments into the firm. Mr. Liu has since overseen the financials of Dongguan Zhishang as well as provided strategic guidance to its board of directors, advising on operational efficiency and cash flow performance. From March 2010 to October 2016, Mr. Liu was the Head of Finance at Feidiao Electrical Group Co., Ltd., a leading Chinese manufacturer of electrical outlets headquartered in Shanghai and with businesses in the greater China region as well as Europe.”
Dr. Suying Liu, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Mountain Crest Acquisition Corp., commented, “Playboy is a unique and compelling investment opportunity, with one of the world’s largest and most recognized brands, its proven consumer affinity and spend, and its enormous future growth potential in its four product segments and new and existing geographic regions. I am thrilled to be partnering with Ben and his exceptional team to bring his vision to fruition.”
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201001005404/en/Playboy-to-Become-a-Public-Company
These guys are good. They have a proven track record of success across multiple industries. Connections and money run deep with all of these guys. I don’t think they’re in the game to lose.
I was going to write a couple more paragraphs about why you should have a look at this but really the best thing you can do is read this SEC filing from a couple days ago. It explains the situation in far better detail. Specifically, look to page 137 and read through their strategy. Also, look at their ownership percentages and compensation plans including the stock options and their prices. The financials look great, revenue is up 90% Q3, and it looks like a bright future.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgadata/1803914/000110465921005986/tm2034213-12_defm14a.htm#tSHCF
I’m hesitant to attach this because his position seems short term, but I’m going to with a warning because he does hit on some good points (two are below his link) and he’s got a sizable position in this thing (500k+ on margin, I think). I don’t know this guy but he did look at the same publicly available info and make roughly the same prediction, albeit without the in depth gambling or cannabis mention. You can also search reddit for ‘MCAC’ and very few relevant results come up and none of them even come close to really looking at this thing.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gOvAd6lebs452hFlWWbxVjQ3VMsjGBkbJeXRwDwIJfM/edit?usp=sharing
“Also, before you people start making claims that Playboy is a “boomer” company, STOP RIGHT THERE. This is not a good argument. Simply put. The only thing that matters is Playboy’s name recognition, not their archaic business model which doesn’t even exist anymore as they have completely repurposed their business.”
“Imagine not buying $MCAC at a 400M valuation lol. Streetwear department is worth 1B alone imo.”
Considering the ridiculous Chinese growth as a lifestyle brand, he’s not wrong.
Current Cultural Significance and Meme Value: A year ago I wouldn’t have included this section but the events from the last several weeks (even going back to tsla) have proven that a company’s ability to meme and/or gain social network popularity can have an effect. Tik-tok, Snapchat, Twitch, Reddit, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter. They all have Playboy stuff on them. Kids in middle and highschool know what Playboy is but will likely never see or touch one of the magazines in person. They’ll have a Playboy hoodie though. Crazy huh? A lot like GME, PLBY would hugely benefit from meme-value stock interest to drive engagement towards their new business model while also building strategic coffers. This interest may not directly and/or significantly move the stock price but can generate significant interest from larger players who will.
Bull Case: The year is 2025. Playboy is now the world leader pleasure brand. They began by offering Playboy licensed gaming products, including gambling products, direct to consumers through existing names. By 2022, demand has skyrocketed and Playboy has designed and released their own gambling platforms. In 2025, they are also a leading cannabis brand in the United States and Canada with proprietary strains and products geared towards sexual wellness. Cannabis was legalized in the US in 2023 when President Biden got glaucoma but had success with cannabis treatment. He personally pushes for cannabis legalization as he steps out of office after his first term. Playboy has also grown their brand in China and India to multi-billion per year markets. The stock goes up from 11ish to 100ish and everyone makes big gains buying somewhere along the way.
Bear Case: The United States does a complete 180 on marijuana and gambling. President Biden overdoses on marijuana in the Lincoln bedroom when his FDs go tits up and he loses a ton of money in his sports book app after the Fighting Blue Hens narrowly lose the National Championship to Bama. Playboy is unable to expand their cannabis and gambling brands but still does well with their worldwide lifestyle brand. They gain and lose some interest in China and India but the markets are too large to ignore them completely. The stock goes up from 11ish to 13ish and everyone makes 15-20% gains.
TL;DR: Successful technology/e-commerce investment firm took over Playboy to turn it into a porn, online gambling/gaming, sports book, cannabis company, worldwide lifestyle brand that promotes sexual wellness, vetern access, women-ownership, minority-ownership, and “pleasure for all”. Does a successful online team reinventing an antiquated physical copy giant sound familiar? No options yet, shares only for now. $11.38 per share at time of writing. My guess? $20 by the end of February. $50 by EOY. This is not financial advice. I am not qualified to give financial advice. I’m just sayin’ I would personally use a Playboy sports book app while smoking a Playboy strain specific joint and it would be cool if they did that. Do your own research. You’d probably want to start here:
WARNING - POTENTIALLY NSFW - SEXY MODELS AHEAD - no actual nudity though
https://s26.q4cdn.com/895475556/files/doc_presentations/Playboy-Craig-Hallum-Conference-Investor-Presentation-11_17_20-compressed.pdf
Or here:
https://www.mcacquisition.com/investor-relations/default.aspx
Jimmy Chill: “Get into any SPAC at $10 or $11 and you are going to make money.”
STL;DR: Buy MCAC. MCAC > PLBY couple weeks. Rocketship. Moon.
Position: 5000 shares. I will buy short, medium, and long-dated calls once available.

/gamblingstocks has just turned 3 days old. Congratulations and thank you all for joining our fledging community. In recognition of this milestone, I want to lay out how we got here, what my intentions are, and discuss what you would like to see from this subreddit moving forward.
skip this part if you only care about gamblingstocks: It starts with a brief background on me . I got inspired by the idea to invest in weedstocks when I was younger because I thought Trudeau would legalize it when he ran for Prime Minister. I knew nothing about stocks or the market or $ for that matter but I did and still have a big nerd interest in politics. I knew that the BC Young Liberals had already put forward in their platform the idea to legalize weed. I also knew that for the first time ever Liberals went from being 1 or 2 party in power to being relegated to the 3rd Party Position behind Michael Ignatieff. (Hard for ppl without reference, this was the most embarassing thing to happen to the Liberal's in Canada's history. Furthermore, the perfect storm was created because the Conservatives had already been in power for 10 years under Stephen Harper and no one has ever won more than 3 elections in a row) Even better, a smokeshow young Justin Trudeau was the new leader of the Liberals and rode the last name of the most famous Prime Minister in history before him (his father Pierre Trudeau). The final thing that made me sure, the obvious fact that Colorado legalized and the US Federal government didn't shut that shit down immediately - that was the writing on the wall. So anyways, I somehow googled and found some random medical marijuana stocks online that had just started trading. With no experience, I walked into a bank with 3k cash and asked to buy Tweed (what CGC was first) they told me that it wasn't a safe investment and I was young. I left and opened up an online account that week. My second investment in Aurora dropped 50% in 1 week and stayed that way for 5 months. I thought I was the biggest moron in the world. 2 Years later, and I was sitting on an insane growth. I remember joining the fucking tweed subreddit and the CGC sub. I remember lurking /weedstocks when it was less than 500 subscribers... I remember thinking that was a fucking genius idea. That sub has close to 200,000 subscribers at present point in time and I bought CGC when its market cap was 200 million Canadian. Now, this is hard for me to admit, but I was young, had no exit plan, got greedy, had no idea what I was trying to do and thought I was a trader savant, God's gift to the world, and I ultimately lost a substantial amount of my money. Mind you, it was all profit to begin with but that didn't make it hurt less and it would have significantly changed my life but its important to learn from our past successes and our past mistakes. It honestly was a hard thing to move on from specifically because I believe it was such a unique phenomenon.
Anyways I have continued to watch ppl try to replicate something close to what we saw with the "weedstocks" phenomenon (which is still happening mind you years later) and I had truly thought that it was a once in a lifetime play. It is of course a separate play but the similarities between weedstocks and gamblingstocks is obvious. In fact, it is my opinion that ppl are so hungry for another weedstocks play that they are turning to things like GME and DOGE coin (something completely unrelated) and /shroomstocks (very much so related). Shroomstocks is fast approaching 30,000 subscribers for investors of magic mushrooms stocks in the hopes that drug policy/laws will change to their benefit. With all do respect, as I hope the best for those investors, is this not the clearly better play? we have an 1) actual clear path to legalization 2) support across political parties 3) Real, established companies with actual business people 4) A pandemic which creates the perfect pressure for change! The gambling companies don't have to build warehouses to grow the product, spend money on heating and electricity, pesticides, storage, shipping and receiving? What about the 'product' in this industry? What is the comparative upkeep in that? So you can imagine how I felt when I stumbled across $SCR and Bill C-13 earlier this week. I have had this feeling exactly twice in my life before, with weedstocks and with crypto in 2017. I might be going crazy but I am seeing the exact same comments as plays as early weed. Ppl questioning if it will continue to go up after such a large run are missing the point. The Score was one of the most active traded stocks on the entire TSE yesterday. It was the same for weedstocks back in the day, it is not in the Canada's best interest to stop a homegrown company from doing well and becoming an international player. Trudeau and Company have all the reasons in the world for wanting to see this through. Why the fuck would you smack down a domestic company during a pandemic? Ultimately it is a gamble which is why there is such huge potential for us, but I would trust literally the same man who has already proven he can do something so different like legalize weed (because it may seem like long ago but it really was a debate in the recent past). And it really is his show at this point, because unless he does something really bad the other 2 have no chance in hell of beating him in an election any time soon. So with all that said, and with my previous history, I immediately checked reddit to see if I could find a community of likeminded ppl who were early on in this area. I have never done it but I thought there was a need to create a group and coalesce around a catchy name, so i decided on /gamblingstocks.
the same day that I started to begin to create and edit the subreddit, I noticed something strange. Ppl were immediately beginning to join and subscribe to the sub and we hadn't even started. Ppl of course already had the same idea I had, some turned out had it months ago! That motivated me to put just a bit of effort into the layout, and I tried to promote the sub to other areas of reddit with varying success. I continued to try and promote/shill this sub instead of allow for growth organically because of 2 ideas: 1)how would anyone even know we exist and find this place to start and 2)While it will happen regardless, the premise is that this subreddit could serve as a catalyst point for the upcoming gamblingstock wave in the current market we now find ourselves.
In other words, this ain't your daddy's stockmarket no more. Social media infects everything, and I believe that the pace will only continue to increase in the immediate future. Whether its picking US Presidents and World Leaders or manipulating the stock market (See GME) the era of social media investing has arrived. Our new gamblingstocks industry coupled with the new realities of social media are why I made this group. Fundamentals don't matter any more, nothing matters anymore. Values are detached from reality, look at housing prices in certain spots around the world. I was told Tesla is a joke and would never amount to anything because of something called finding value with P/E ratio? /s what a joke. Shouldn't have listened to that age old wisdom, if you have been living under a rock Tesla is now the most valuable car company in the world. Elon added Billions of Dollars in value to an internet coin named after a dog just by sending a joke tweet. (doge coin) We live in a world where if Elon Musk tweets $SCR the price will go to $50 in 1 hour. Heck it doesn't even have to be Elon at this point. That is the reality that we face today. And with that new reality, comes new problems and opportunities. I hope to ride those opportunities with every one of you in the coming year. I fully expect to see stock market only social media stars and celebrities. The lines are quickly becoming blurred. Its not Warren Buffet anymore, its kids dancing stock tips to their follower on Tik Tok videos.
And the best part. We are not shilling something fake or bullshit! We have a PROVEN product as old as time itself with a tested, real market. We have actual legalization change and public opinion change and the conversations on the matter are frankly already over in the public discourse. So with all of that together I truly believe that at some point what we have already found out will hit "the singularity" and then it will go viral. I don't know when that will happen. We don't even need it to happen. But I believe it will. So I will use the power of the internet to see if I can make this come to fruition faster, to see if I am completely full of shit, and to bring regular ppl together to see if we can make some $$$ in the interim. Because after all, that is the power (good or bad) of social media!
Now, I am just one simple person, and I literally have learned about the stocks and done all of this since Friday. So far, I have tried throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall, and see what sticks. However, as time goes on I want to make sure that I conduct myself in a manner that is open, transparent, and is a good reflection of this subreddit. So I finish by asking you for your help, advice, criticisms, and suggestions. Anything and everything is on the table. If you have seen me spreading the word about this subreddit in other subs, should I stop or keep going? Should I put any focus on promoting/marketing the sub, or just leave it alone? What do you think about the amount of posts that I am making, both personal and news articles? Would you like to see a daily discussion thread? Am I completely off my rocker and should I STFU? What's next for the sub?
Thank you and goodnight, I look forward to the shit show tomorrow.

I was going to just let my Simple account roll over to the new bank to see how they handled it but since my card started getting declined all over the place for no reason and support was no help, I decided to jump ship. After Envel breaking and lot letting me sign up, and Schwab turning me down for lack of credit history (I've basically lived off-grid in terms of debt all my life), I settled on SoFi as my first trial for a new primary bank. Since I really wish there'd been more posts like this to help me compare options, I'm making one for SoFi. I'll go through the big Simple features one by one and make a comparison.

Goals (Vaults):

Vaults are, for all intents and purposes, identical to Simple Goals. You can create an arbitrary numbers of them. You can set a goal amount. You can schedule monthly contributions to a Vault. You can turn on AutoSave for a Vault which will allow you to automatically funnel a dollar amount or percentage of your direct deposits into a Vault. You can also turn on Roudup Transfer to select a vault to grow with your round ups. You can decide to automatically draw from Vaults when your spending balance runs out, or you can disable this and your card will be declined if all of your money is tied up in Vaults. You cannot have protected and unprotected vaults like you could in Simple. It is all or nothing.
The feature I liked from Simple that it's missing is the ability to only contribute X amount each day if you have disposable income, or money in Safe to Spend. Since there's no direct 1:1 comparison to Safe to Spend in SoFi, this is not possible. I liked the idea with Simple that when I have extra spending money, I'm also saving extra.

Expenses

There's no analogous functionality to this in SoFi though you can schedule regular bill pay.

Spending Categories

You can categorize your spending and review it at a glance in SoFi much like you can in Simple. There aren't as many fine-grained categories, but you can also create arbitrary custom tags to drill down with as much detail as you want. The part where SoFi really shines is you can track spending in more than one account, similar to Mint or YNAB. More on that later.

Joint Accounts

You can set up a joint account simply by inviting someone. It's as easy and powerful as Simple. SoFi does not currently support owning a joint and individual account, but the FAQ says it's on their roadmap as a feature.

Sharing

Just like Simple, SoFi supports instant transfers between members. It also supports sending money to anyone via their email address or SMS. No idea how this actually works or looks on the receiving end. It's poorly documented.

Checks

You can order paper checks, or, like Simple used to support, send a check from the app by using the Bill Pay interface. You can deposit checks through the mobile app at $25,000/day.

Cards

Just like Simple, you can lock your card or change your pin instantly through the app or website.
That's it for Simple features. The only big thing missing is the concept of Safe to Spend and expense automation.

Things Simple didn't do

The big one for me is the Relay feature. This is an all-in-one dashboard for your net worth. You can add any account or asset to your SoFi account to track its worth. If the account supports Plaid, you can also see transaction history. This lets you see and categorize your spending on just from your SoFi Money account, but any account you have connected. This lets you track or spending similar to Mint. You can add bank accounts, credit, investment accounts, loans, cars, real estate, or arbitrary assets and liabilities. Seen this all in one place and automated is very satisfying.
Investment accounts. This is what made me try SoFi in the first place. I just recently started taking investing seriously and actually paying attention to my 401k. In SoFi you can open an Active Investing account similar to Robinhood where you can buy whole or fractional shares in stocks and ETFs. You can open IRAs (including SEP for self-employed people or anyone with side-gig money). You can open joint investing accounts. You can open "Auto Investing" accounts that operate similar to ETFs where you set an aggressiveness goal and they manage your investing for you. This is a good replacement for a savings goal. Just create a conservative automated investing account and you can earn much better interest on your money while you save it up. You can also buy a handfull of common cryptocurrencies. This is all wrapped up in an attractive UI with guided wizards to help you choose the best options for your investment accounts based on your goals. They will also cover up to $75 in transfer fees to transfer investment accounts to SoFi.
They support personal loans, home loans, and student loans. There appear to be interest perks for members who set up autopay from their SoFi checking accounts.
They have an invite-only credit card program with various rewards that are tied into other features in SoFi.
Free access to financial and career advisors online along with a whole slew of other financial, life, and career resources. Their GetThatRaise tool will ask you about your salary, your seniority, your job title, what kind of success you've had, and will help you put together a proposal for a raise based on average salaries in your area for your position.
Local offers lets you browse businesses with promotional SoFi deals. If I go to Quiznos right now I get 10% cash back if I run my SoFi card as credit.
Your Vantage score is always available for free and tracked.
Referal bonuses can be had for getting people to open investment accounts or get loans.
There are a bunch of partner offers similar to being a AAA or Costco member.
They have a bunch of articles to help you learn as you go.

Things I dislike

A lot of features like the GetThatRaise tool are not really obviously exposed anywhere. I've found things by digging around FAQs and documentation where are not linked anywhere else on the site that I can find. They're not really doing a great job of pushing their features in front of the user.
No opening links in new tabs. This is a big quality of life annoyance. I can't click a stock and open it in a new page. If you get a few links deep looking at stocks you can't just go back to where you were. You have to start over and search again instead of going back to your previous results. This is incredibly annoying.
Feedback isn't always great. For example if you open an investment account, there's a pending approval period. This is not listed anywhere on the web site. The mobile app indicates a pending approval. But on the website the only way to know it's not approved is your initial deposit hasn't gone through yet. There are a lot of other little things that could be better documented or better communicated to the user.
Screenshots:
Dashboard
Vaults
Investment Dashboard
Relay Dashboard
Relay Account Listing
...continued
I'm very happy with SoFi so far. I'm still digging up features. Being able to invest through my bank app is awesome. I'm going to screw around with some fun WSB-style gambling with disposable income in active investing, and set up longer term and lower risk accounts for savings. The APY on the Money (checking) account is 0.25% but I don't really care as all I'm going to keep there is my spending money and my emergency fund in a vault. I plan to keep as much of my money as possible in some level of investment account and "high yield" checking/savings accounts have been a complete joke for some time.
If you're using one of the other common banks people are jumping to, feel free to post a breakdown like this to help others decide.

When I was researching online about how my driving journey for class 3 license as a school student would be, I discovered that while there were a lot of tips scattered here and there, cohesive guides were rare and outdated with varying degrees. There were even fewer regarding SSDC, which is more ulu than the 2 other driving centers. Thus, I promised myself to the higher powers in the world that when I pass the test, I will give back to society and write an updated guide as of December 2020 about what is the current situation like. Three things to note: First, there were still many changes and updates even during my 3.5 months journey the driving school, and you should expect many more to come. Secondly, this is after COVID circuit breaker era, so to the future you who are reading this, hopefully, the pandemic is over and there may be changes, but changes in this aspect should be unimportant. The third thing, I have coordination issues, which made my driving journey a lot more difficult, just a little something to take into consideration when listening to my story. Heads up, getting a license in Singapore is filled with LOTS OF hassle, so be prepared. Without further ado, let’s start!
The first hurdle you need to clear is to register an account and pass your BTT. Their steps overlap so I will explain them together. What do you need to start an account? Paylah and at least $2K (Ok, you don’t technically need so much cash to start the account, but it’s important to have, explain later). Go to the SSDC website, register an account online. You will pay a lump sum for all the miscellaneous things, which includes the eye test and the BTT & FTT theory book (so don’t buy!). I always paid using Paylah. You have an account now, good. It’s a bit confusing hereon. I will list the steps before I explain why.
​

• Register and pay for the account
• Watch all the BTT theory videos online.
• Go to SSDC for the eye test, photo-taking, take the BTT&FTT theory books, and get an important small record booklet.
• Book (optional: BTT practice test) and compulsory BTT mock test.
• Pass BTT mock test.
• Book real BTT test.
• Pass BTT test.

One question that has no answers elsewhere is: If you watch the videos online, do you still need to go for the physical theory classes? Answer is: No. You either watch the videos online OR go and attend physical classes, and you only need to do one of them. Obviously, I chose the videos, and I watched them right away I registered my account. You have to watch for at least a few seconds before you can proceed, and there is a mini quiz after each section which you have to get all correct for. In my opinion, BTT is not difficult, but those people who think they can pass with sheer common sense are very mistaken. You need to study for it.
After you watched the videos, you think you can book the theory mock test, right? No, you need to pass your eye test before they allow you to book the mock test. For me, I registered my account on a Saturday. I studied the BTT with the e-PDF BTT theory book over the weekend. Then, hopefully, when I go to SSDC to do the eye test on Monday, I can try to see if I can book a mock test right afterward and pass it on the same day.
On Monday, I went to SSDC. A simple layout of SSDC. Level 1 is the lobby and the traffic police department. All your real-deal tests like BTT, FTT, and the eventual PT, as well as the actual test circuit, are all on level 1. Don’t go to the wrong level. Level 2 is parking I think, but I never went there as there is an escalator that takes you straight from level 1 to level 3, which is where you will spend the majority of your time. Level 3 is the reception for SSDC, as well as the place to report for your driving lessons. Level 4 is classrooms for theory lessons, BTT & FTT trial practices, and mock tests (TTT), as well as the simulator lessons. Level 5 is the roof, mostly for motorcycles and sometimes driving lessons for cars.
Due to COVID, they will usually ask everyone about their intentions before letting you into the lobby. When I went, I was stopped right there. Apparently, they strongly encourage you to book an appt before coming, and they don’t really allow walk-in. However, since I was there already and have nothing on for the rest of the day, I asked if I can just wait. They said okay. So, I took a queue number joined a group a people waiting in the lobby… for the chance to proceed to the third floor! Yes, you are not even at the reception yet, you’re just queueing for the chance to go to the third floor. Why didn’t I choose an appt? The next appt date is a whole week later! I decided to just sit there and study for my BTT. Do note if the lobby is filled up, they won’t even let you enter to wait. My visit from the start till the end took 3 hours. Damn tired. However, if you come at a quieter time (like early morning once they open, after 3:30 on Tuesday- Thursdays), your waiting time can be shortened to about an hour. If you want anything shorter than this, book an appointment. Do not come at 2:30 pm, cause 2:30 - 3:30 is their break time. So I waited in the lobby, wait wait wait, got to go to level 3 to queue to get ANOTHER queue number, wait wait wait, then I finally get to a counter. They did my eye test and later take a photo. NOTE! This photo they are taking right here and now is the photo that will eventually be on your license! I read online from old guides that they always take the photo after their PT, so I thought this photo would just for the school’s internal record booklet, so I just anyhow take. The photo was a nightmare. I was so horrified when I realised this fact that I ran down to SSDC right away to retake a photo that shows me as a human. The one important question they will ask you throughout the registration is if you will take manual or auto, so make yourself clear. Can you change it later? Yes, for a fee. Should you take manual or auto? Well, well, well, no offence to newbies but I am so sick of this question and the whole argument around this. I will explain this at the end if I still remember. Anyway, I chose manual. If you choose manual (class 3), you will get a blue booklet. If you choose auto (Class 3A), you will get a pink booklet. Talk about stereotypes. This is just the beginning. In my opinion, there are a lot of implicit and underlying gender stereotypes in the whole SSDC for both females and males. It’s not outright rude or unacceptable, but I just haven’t been anywhere where I have to face gender stereotypes in such a way for a long while. Anyways, don’t lose that booklet. It’s a booklet to record your progress, and in my opinion, for you to keep a record of who are the good and bad instructors.
Finally, you’re done… with registering your account. Phew. I didn’t get to book a TTT session (theory trial test-> the schools' internal practice or mock test sessions) that day, but I got one the next day. I do stand by the advice that it’s best if you book 2 TTT sessions back-to-back. For each session, when you sit in front of the computer, then you need to decide whether you want to do a practice or a mock test. If you have 2 sessions as advised, do a practice for the first one before doing the mock test for the second session. I thought I was well-prepared, so I just did the mock test straightaway. Passing mark for mock test is 46 marks, and I scrapped past with 46 marks, and this was even after I’ve done a lot of mock tests online. I was surprised! I thought I was well-prepared until I started the test. I was shocked to found out that the questions don’t ask you directly things from the book! Sometimes, they even test you things that are not stated clearly in the book, but things you will infer from the book. If you think you just memorise the book can already, no. You have to get used to THE WAY the questions were asked. Learning the book is basic knowledge, but to pass the test, you have to do a lot of questions. After this, I went to popular and bought the printed question bank, and did all the questions. When you have passed the mock test, you can finally book the real BTT test. The waiting time depends on the availability of slots. I registered on 23/08/2020, pass my BTT mock test on 25/08/2020, and passed my BTT real test on 03/09/2020. It took a little more than a week, and I’ll say I’m lucky. Expect more waiting time. This journey will train your patience more than your driving skills.
For the BTT real test, go to level 1! Wait at the area in front of the counter for the TRAFFIC POLICE department. There are some signs on the chair asking BTT/FTT students to wait there. Just wait. Close to the test time, some people will come out with a list and call your name. Show them your IC, squeeze some sanitiser onto your hand, go in, and pass the test. Then, if you have Singpass, register your PDL online. They will say wait until the next day, but impatient me found out that you just need to wait a few hours to register for the PDL.
When I got home, my mother asked if I have passed my PT. I told her, after all I’ve been through, I haven’t even touched a car yet. But that’s coming up next.
After you get your PDL, you can take driving lessons and prepare for FTT at the same time, which was what I did. Since FTT is largely similar to BTT, I will explain FTT first. So, you need to study for your FTT, pass mock test, pass real FTT test. FTT is more difficult than BTT, so be prepared. I studied the book, bought the question bank from popular, did 1 practice session, passed my mock test, and finally cleared my real FTT test will full marks. It’s not super hard, but please don’t underestimate these tests. That’s the failures’ undoing. More importantly, it takes such a long time for retests, so why would you want to waste your time? I was just super eager to get these miscellaneous things over and done with asap.
Finally, let’s move on to the real thing, the driving lessons.

Now, remember what I said about having $2K aside when you start this whole thing? Yes, that’s coming. When the system update my PDL and it finally lets me try to book a driving lesson, I was horrified to find out that the next available slot is *drumroll* 1 month later. Yes, 1 month later! What?? Right there and then, I was ready to cancel my account and go private. However, I remember a previous guide saying that some people will cancel their slot at the last moment. So now, I’m going to impart the ultimate skills to combat this system. Come, my disciples.
You want a slot and it’s available, you book it. You don’t want a slot? Cancel it. However, you can only cancel slots 3 days in advance. If you find out you can’t make it for a timing less than 3 days in advance, you enter the try sell period. This means that you put your slot back up on the market for sale. If someone buys it, good for you and the money is refunded back to you. If no one buys it, you have to attend the slot or waste the money. Now, almost every night, there is going to be someone who can’t make it for tomorrow’s slot, and that’s where you come in to snap that up. That’s also how I booked my first slot just a day later at 05/09/2020, and also how I booked the majority of my slots thereafter. However, if you have a relatively stable schedule, those lessons which are available 1 month later are still very important to you. Thus, you can just dump $2k into your account, and book all the slots 1 month later. Advisable to book about 20-25 slots from the onset, yes from the very first lesson. Don’t wait until later to book. You will prob need at least 20 lessons on average to clear. Then, when you find a try sell lot closer to you, you cancel the slot which is furthest away (no need for try sell if its more than 3 days away, you will be refunded immediately in this case). Your schedule is NOT fixed, in fact, it’s always changing. You found a better slot timing? Cancel this slot and change for that slot. Slot can appear at any time for any day, and it’s an always-changing market, so keep a lookout for it. If you are like a post-a level kid who have too much time on your hand, just camp there, and you will get all the slots you need. Just a thing to take note, if you can try selling your current slot for another try sell slot, you’re gambling. If you cannot sell the slot you don’t want, you will waste money, so take the stakes into the consideration and choose for yourself. Prices are different for peak and non-peak periods. To book all these slots, you will need at least about $2k. Don’t worry, you will get the unused balance back as cash after you pass your PT. If you top-up online, there is an additional $1.07 per top-up, and max top-up $500 each time. Might be nice to top-up at the counter when you get your booklet right at the start.

Now, about driving lessons and driving instructors. In my experience, there are 3 groups of instructors spread across the spectrum of good to bad. On the good side, there are really earnest, nice and patient instructors that will make learning driving fun even if you really suck at driving (like me). There are those which are neutral, they do their job, but nothing outstanding about them. Then, there are those really bad ones. Impatient. Bored. Distracted. Take long breaks. One even left for a toilet break for like 15 minutes. Hey, I didn’t pay for those 15 minutes for you to go to the toilet. But if I have to choose, the most horrible are the ones that are impatient and scold you for making mistakes. And that, my friends, was how my first lesson started. Yes, with the most horrible instructor.
So, I was excited to touch the car for the first time. To be fair, he is not intentionally nasty, but in my opinion, it doesn’t negate the fact that he made my experience horrible. He drove me around the 3rd and 5th floor circuit just to show me around, all the while asking me questions about myself. That was find, but I had a strong feeling he was asking those very stereotypical questions (where school you graduate from? What is job? What car does your father drive?) Pfft. How come you assume only my father drives? Then, instead of introducing to the manual car, he started on a 2 hour persuasion talk on how I should convert to auto. Even in my eagerness/good mood for the first lesson, I was very annoyed by him towards the end. To top it off, he said that since I’m a girl, there’s no need for me to learn manual, and auto will be enough. Like *bleep* you, who the *bleep* are you to determine what’s enough for me? If you tell your daughters to learn auto, that’s your problem, but my parents brought me up to choose the option with more potential, even if that’s the more difficult one. (To be clear, I’m NOT against learning auto. I’ve considered that too. I’m just pissed off by him). Besides, don’t you think a 24-year-old woman is a bit too old to be called a girl? Girl?? I know I look baby-face la, thank you, but please address me appropriately. I didn’t call you an uncle just because you look like one, right? Yes, by the end of the lesson, I didn’t have the excitement or exhilaration mentioned by other learners, I just want to get this over and done with and get out of the car. When I was stopping the car, I released my clutch too quickly again and the car stalled. In that exact moment, I knew he was going to go on and on and on about the manual/auto thing, and sure enough, the next moment he started saying that if I should learn auto since I don’t have to worry about the clutch. Do you know he even went so far as to tell me the fee for switching to auto and told me I just had to counter to ask them that I want to switch to auto? I was thinking *bleep* you! Did I say I want to convert??? *bleep* you! You like auto so much you go and teach auto la! Why come to manual and waste MY time and money. I was displeased.
With the try sell slot, I got another slot the next day, and I was so relieved that there was another instructor. This instructor was TOTALLY different from the auto promoter. The only question he asked me was “where did you stop the last lesson?”, and the lesson starts straightaway. I learned a lot from him, and the lesson was much better.
My third slot was on the third day. This was downright the most horrible lesson I’ve had throughout my journey. This was my first night time lesson, and I wanted to try if I am able to take lessons after work, and also learn at night. My slot was from 6:20- 8:20 p.m.. When I saw my name next to the car number I had for my first lesson, my heart sank and I texted a string of vulgarities to my friend as I head to my car. Yes, it was horrible. It was hot and stuffy in the evening with the masks on, no air-con as the windows had to be rolled down for COVID. That instructor had even less patience than before, though he didn’t mention auto as frequently as before. He didn’t “scold”, but his impatience was so obvious. I was tired from work, and I couldn’t focus as well-> more mistakes, more impatient comments. I was uneasy from driving at night at that dreary industrial building as I was worried about. All these piled together and I felt absolutely horrible when the lesson ended. It was till the point that I even thought about giving up, though I know I will get over it after a good night’s sleep, which I did.
The next morning, the first thing I did was to cancel all the nighttime slots I’ve prebooked. The only right thing auto promoter said was it’s harder to see in the circuit at night, and since none of the PT takes place at night, it will be better to take my lessons during the day. The next thing I did was to research how to block auto promoter. Though my own fatigue and uneasiness contributed to the previous night’s terrible experience, he was a big factor too. I know he doesn’t mean to be mean, but that’s not my problem. I don’t want to see him again. However, it would involve going to the head instructor’s office and telling him and I want to block this instructor, and that’s kind of bad too. doesn’t help that the office is in plain view of all the cars, so argh, I didn’t block him in the end, but I tried to book all my instructors for each lesson thereafter. In any case, I didn’t see him again. Booking your instructors cost an additional $8+, which may seem a lot. However, in my opinion, getting a not-so-good instructor can waste your whole 2 hours’ time and money. Might be better to just pay $8 for a good instructor.
I just want to be clear that not all the instructors are bad. There are some angel instructors, who never ever said a bad thing even when I made horrible mistakes repeatedly. They patiently guided me to do it again and again until I get it right, and we cheer together. There are also instructors that are a mix, they teach very well, but they will also disappear for toilet breaks or end lessons a bit earlier. That’s your choice. It’s a pro and con of learning at school, where you can try various instructors. This means bad instructors at some times, but it also means you can learn different skills from different really good instructors. It’s important because I found that another instructor can find out and pinpoint what the previous instructor didn’t notice, and if you gather all their opinions together, it will really help you to prepare well. I will go more into auto/school later if I feel like it.

In school learning, there are 33 parts categorised into 4 sections. You can clear multiple parts in 1 lesson, but there are also some parts which is compulsory minimum 1 lesson per part. Once you clear part 2, you can go for simulator lesson. Once you clear part 3 (which involves a mock PT test), you can go to the counter to pre-book your PT. Once you clear part 4 (more mock PT tests), you can book PT by yourself online. Given the long queue at the counter, you might as well just try to clear part 4 asap and book the PT on your own online. Advisable to have about 4 revision lessons before your PT. If you pass on the first try, it will like cost you about $2K-3K depending on the number of lessons you take. Now, it sounds like taking school doesn’t sound very nice, but there is a reason why I chose school after all. Let me talk about the simulator lesson first. I a bit tired of typing already, *yawn*
Simulator lesson is a new thing required by LTA for all, whether you are school or private. You have to take 3 simulator lesson in auto or manual version. Basically, you drive an arcade car that vibrates in a way that makes you want to puke through common accident scenarios in Singapore. Seriously, that vibration made me felt so dizzy and sick, and I’m not the only one. Prepare some sour plums before you go. It felt better on the second and third try, when I’m more prepared, but the first try was really horrible. I was wondering why they didn’t allow us to book a 1-hour slot, and instead required three 20minutes slots on different days. I bet car sickness is the main factor. I’d rather drive a real car for 2 hours instead. You have to clear all 3 sessions before you can book your PT. Even though I said this is like an arcade car, you should know that the traffic police department will screen your sessions before they certify you. Yes, that's right, so don't think you can go Fast and Furious on this simulator. Now, the simulator is a pain in the *bleep* too. If you want to clear this extra fast, you have to play with the system quite a bit too. Now, sessions are usually available 1 week later, and most importantly, once you booked a slot, you’re locked out from viewing the available slots again. The tricky thing is, sometimes they will release slots much closer at unpredictable and irregular hours. So what did I do? I book the latest available slot, usually about a week later. Then, late at night when hopefully no one else is online, I cancel my slot and enter the system again. If my slot is still the latest available slot, I booked it back. If a new slot (hooray!), I book a slot. They can be as close as 2 days later. IMPORTANT: you have to be SUPER fast when you do this. why? When you cancel your slot, if someone else happens to be online too, they can take your slot, and you’ll be left with nothing. So be fast! A bit ridiculous, right? All I want to do is just to get a driving license quickly ORZ.

Despite my lack of talent driving, I cleared all the lessons (I took 30) and booked my driving test in just 1.5 months after I registered my account. That involves up to 10 lessons per week at times. So, why did I still took 3.5 months to get my license? Haha, yes, I failed, thrice actually. I made different mistakes each time, but the fatal flaw for all of them was that I was too nervous. Don’t ask me about my total cost, I stopped keeping track after I failed for the first time. The good things about driving a manual car in school is that retest date is the fastest. It’s about a 2-weeks wait on average. 3-week for school-auto learner, and 1 month for all private students. Yup, it’s damn biased. The whole building is run by the school after all. Oh, I think the PT is cheaper for school students too, cause the insurance already covered. I was extremely upset and nervous after each failure, and I thought I would never pass, but I finally, finally managed to do so a few days ago! I kept asking the examiner (who is a very chill and funny person!) if I really passed, and he jokingly said if I ask him one more time, he is going to change to fail. HAHA! Anyway, I’m finally done with this! no more endless worries about the PT! No more days of anxiety! I can finally have my weekends back!
Lastly, if you want to ask me if I get to choose all over again, will I still choose to take a manual car in a school despite everything involved. I will say yes. I feel that the post I’ve written till now doesn’t really elaborate on the pros of learning a manual car, and in a school, but I’m honestly tired now. Maybe I’ll reply in the comments if anyone is even interested to hear about it.
Good luck to you! You can do this!
Edits for clarification, and little bits here and there which I forgot when I wrote it the first time. Thanks for the comments and reward!

Additional Edits: The instructors' system
You will be assigned to a group of instructors, and you will likely get the instructors within this grouping. They will try to assign the instructor you've met most often to you. Instructors are split into 2 shifts, and they alternate each week. Shift 1: 8:15a.m., 10:20a.m., 12:30pm. Shift 2: 3:20pm, 6pm, 8:20 p.m.. One group will take the whole of Saturday, and one group will take the whole of Sunday. So, if one instructor works the morning slot this week and Saturday, it's likely that he will work the afternoon shift and the sunday slot next week. However, this is not for certain, and just a general guide. If you dislike an instructor and you've seen him several times, good luck, it's likely you will keep seeing him in his shift. How to avoid an instructor without going through the hassle of blocking him? Click on the "book an instructor" for that session and see if he is available. If the name is there, it means he will be working, and I suggest you just book another instructor to avoid him. If his name is not there, he's not working and good for you.

Hi everyone, new here. Briefly read through some of the recent posts many of which sound a lot like my own struggle/story.
I'm in my mid 30s and have been losing every dime of my paychecks weekly since I was about 17. It all started with online poker - around the late 90s when sites like PokerStars and PartyPoker started popping up (and not checking I.D. as KYC laws and online gaming regulation wasn't really formed, with poker being a grey area in terms of it's "game of skill" status). Basically back then if you were underage you could just go buy a prepaid visa card from the local store and use that to deposit.
Without realizing consciously that I was starting to develop a pretty expensive habit. I spent most of my late teens and early 20s selling weed and working shitty jobs. The urge to gamble grew and my situation got really dark as I began stealing. First it was stuff like borrowing money from friends and girlfriends without thinking or caring about how I would pay them back. Then I began finding stuff around the house I figured I could sell without my parents knowing. Making e-check deposits on gambling sites with an empty bank account.
​
Once e-check deposits became a thing I basically just ran around opening new bank accounts once one was deep in the red and just ignoring the calls/collection mail. Eventually there were no more banks that I could open an account with. Then one day I found my parents checkbook sitting on the living room table.
​
In my mind, I could just do a quick $100 deposit, win at least $100 and get it back in-hand before their bank statement came in the mail. Or at worse just act like I didn't know anything about it when I would inevitably be asked about the strange charge. So I play with the $100, end up losing it before I saw any profits and decided, well, we're already in deep shit when they call the transaction company associated with the charge and get the full story.
​
So I deposit another $200 to remedy the situation...
and then $300... $500... and within 3 days I had made $4700 in charges on their account. A day or two after the deposits kept getting declined I came downstairs with my parents sitting on the sofa, bank statements in hand and said "Son have a seat we need to talk about something". Before I could make it to my seat I was already balling my eyes out. I explained that every deposit was an attempt to fix the previous mistake ect ect and it was really the only time where what I had done and how I was living finally hit as reality.
​
So fast forward 15 years later and here I am, still living with my parents. I have no real possessions or hobbies because i've sold everything of value to gamble along the years. Doing food delivery in a car that has 430,000 miles on it, working for companies that allow me to cash out my earnings on a daily basis. Unable to save a simple $2000 for an old beater replacement car before the one I have takes a dump on me. I literally have less than $500 to my name and I just got my stimulus money 4 days ago. I don't know what the hell i'm supposed to do to get on the right track and start making some progress in life. My friends and family have the patience of saints - that and I suppose they just feel bad or basically look down on me. Just last night I deposited $100 for slots and hit a $900 spin... but what do I do? Crank up my bet and watch it all wither away within a couple hours.
​
As I finish this wall of text I just shrug and tell myself "All I can do is just avoid gambling, avoid the triggers" but i've been here more times than I can even remember. This is painful. I hate it. I feel like a selfish, bored, simple, and unhappy person.

There are very few opportunities like investing in Bitcoin in its early days, probably unique in human history. A simple plan to create a decentralized peer to peer currency that will allow anyone in the world to transact without intermediaries or borders. A small-time investment learning how it works would have turned into millions or billions of dollars, many of us did not learn things early enough.
A few years ago Bitcoin started to grow rapidly, people found they could send money anywhere in the world just like an email. Uncensorable, fast and cheap. Big companies like Microsoft and Steam accepted Bitcoin as payment for their services. The list of merchants started to grow. More users, and merchants, and a growing network effect resulted in an increase of the Bitcoin price. It was fast, cheap, frictionless. Then the blocks became full. Many including the initial Bitcoin developers proposed to remove what was a temporary cap in the block-size, only to be blocked out. Things started to change.
"Gavin is right. The time to increase the block size limit is before transaction processing shows congestion problems. Discuss now, do soon". Andreas Antonopolous. Bitcoin advocate.https://twitter.com/aantonop/status/595601619581964289 .
"WikiLeaks has kicked the hornet's nest, and the swarm is headed towards us."Satoshi Nakamoto writer of Bitcoin white paper titled "Bitcoin, peer to peer electronic Cash".
DEC 2013:
"Bitcoin days are numbered. It seems like just a matter of time before it suffers the same fate as online gambling" Michael Saylor. "Rocket scientist".https://twitter.com/michael_saylostatus/413478389329428480?lang=en"
DEC 2020:
"Bitcoin is a swarm of cyber hornets serving the goddess of wisdom, feeding on the fire of truth, exponentially growing ever smarter, faster, and stronger behind a wall of encrypted energy." Michael Saylor. "Rocket scientist".https://twitter.com/michael_saylostatus/1307029562321231873
The hornets understand politics, power, and persuasion. And so the Bitcoin Core value proposition was changed from Peer to Peer electronic cash for the world to "hodl, numbers go up". But do these "rocket scientists" understand basic Math? You see, Bitcoin Core's new model changed the basics of Bitcoin's value proposition. As the price goes up it requires more money to have a price increase. Further, the increase of friction and fees make it more difficult for people to join THEIR network, thus destroying its own network effect. Small blocks imposed by the hornets, turned into high transaction fees, resulting in fewer people joining and no businesses accepting it as payment.
Why would anyone invest in Bitcoin Core if they will have to pay hundreds if not thousands of dollars to get control of their private keys while its network effect diminishes? Hornets solution are custodial wallets also known as Paypal that do not let users have control of their private keys:
https://twitter.com/rogerkvestatus/1340799990013300736
​
We must remember why did Bitcoin have value in the first place. Why didn't Satoshi just sell all the Bitcoin instead of giving them away? NETWORK EFFECT. As the number of participants increases on the Network so does its usefulness, its value. More people own it, more businesses accept it. Is more useful, it is more valuable. But now with the new Bitcoin Core narrative of Bitcoin as digital gold instead of the original Peer to Peer electronic cash, As price increases for Bitcoin Core, so does its risk. A higher price turns into a diminishing Network Effect. Fewer people can be part of the network. And so the Network effect moves somewhere else. Creating an incentive for Bitcoin Core investors to also move their funds early for high returns at a lower risk. In other words, for Bitcoin Core higher price results in lower possible gains and higher risk.
Imagine a rocket to the moon, with a lot of weight (banks and corporations) and tiny block engines. The more corporations buy-in pricing out small buyers, the heavier the rocket gets. COMMON PEOPLE LIKE YOU AND ME ARE THE ENGINES OF A CRYPTOCURRENCY. Banks and corporations are worth nothing without us.
As an early Bitcoiner writes it: https://twitter.com/CobraBitcoin/status/1340688841909432325
For Bitcoin Core, there is always a risk of a run towards a more useful decentralized platform. The trigger will be people understanding how it works once the Bitcoin Core blocks are constantly full. A bull run as we have never seen before in history will happen, first slow then all sudden.
Even if is not Bitcoin Cash (I do believe it will be Bitcoin Cash), there is no stopping CryptoCurrencies from changing this world. Lightning Network Math is broken, and you can't "fix Math" with politics. The hornets kicked the can down the road a few years, and just like 10 years ago an even Bigger less risky investment is waiting for you to do the reading and collect your fortune.
"But the lightning network will solve everything in 18 months".- It does not, it was never about LN, if you still believe it you were bamboozled. You can hear it directly from its inventor: https://www.reddit.com/btc/comments/khkedq/creator_of_lightning_network_that_type_of/
The hornets are deceiving you, and play it nice with you because without you they can't win. They need you to obey and "hodl".
This is not investment advice, PLEASE read and understand the basic ideas behind Bitcoin. The best place to start is the original Bitcoin White paper by Satoshi Nakamoto.
AND ALWAYS REMEMBER, NOT YOUR KEYS, NOT YOUR COINS.
Would anyone care to draw a Red Fat rocket vs a Green SpaceX spaceship? Thank you.

I think that this one has been under-reported somewhat but since I work in the online gaming industry, it showed up on my radar.
This SPAC has reached a deal to bring back Paysafe to the market, at a valuation of 9 billions.
What is Paysafe?
Paysafe Group has been consolidating the market for e-wallets and alternative payment methods for years and went back into private hands 3 years ago.
They regroup all the main e-wallets used for online gambling and Forex: Skrill and Neteller and also prepaid cards (to be bought in 7/11 and the like) under the Paysafe brand.
Why e-wallets matter in the online gambling market?
E-wallets and prepaid cards represent about 25% of the volume of payments in online gambling in UK, Europe, Canada and Skrill/NetellePaysafe are by far the biggest names in this field.
https://www.fisglobal.com/-/media/fisglobal/WorldPay/Docs/Miscellaneous/Gaming%20Payments%20Report%202019
Neteller and Moneybookers (as Skrill was known then) were dominating the US alternative payment methods gambling market in the US before they got pushed out in 2007. They still have high name recognition amongst the gambling crowd and web searches in the US for these brands remain high, even if they can’t process much transactions there for gambling since many states don’t have online gambling legislations yet, or very limiting ones.
E-Wallets are often the preferred payment method for gamblers since it allows to move money from one operator site to the other quickly and cheaply. They can also use it as a bankroll segregated from their main bank account/CC and on top of that, Paysafe offers loyalty benefits to users based on their transaction volumes. As such, their user retention is very good.
The prepaid card business is also a major factor for this stock attractiveness. Prepaid cards to be bought in gas stations or the like are often preferred by gamblers who want to strictly control their gambling or those who don’t have access to a CC (maybe because they gambled too much) or those that prefer cash transactions out of privacy concerns…
Why not invest in the gambling operators instead?
Operators such as Draftkings or legacy casino groups are going to make money but the regulatory environment is harsh and gambling taxes are crazy in some states and might keep going higher.
Moreover, the regulations being so fragmented, many smaller operators push in certain states and not others and the competitive environment is broad. Remember that gambling is a fungible good. There is no difference in the casino games that the operators can offer (same game studios, same rules) and aside from bonuses and the margins on sports bets, the only differentiation is in branding, which is a thin moat on a product that often leaves the users disgruntled (losers).
Payments on the other hand are not taxed for their relationship to gambling and there are far fewer players.
How does Paysafe make money?
The margins on their products are pretty high and Paysafe charges both sides of the transaction in the case of the e-wallets and the merchant side in the case of the prepaid cards.
For the use of Skrill and Neteller wallets, Paysafe charges on average 4.5% on the merchant side for deposits and a whooping 9.9% on deposits with prepaid cards… Larger merchants certainly can negotiate these rates down but this is still a healthy fee, much higher than credit card processors.
In markets where Paysafe has established domination they charge a small deposit fee to the user and a withdrawal fee.
For now, they charge no fees to the US users in a bid to grow market share surely but that will probably end some day.
Growth opportunity:
For now, the US online gambling market is still very limited. Most states have not legalized, the majority of those who have legalized only did so for sports betting and then a handful have legalized online casino gaming (where the real money is made). The opening up of the market is bound to grow as states need money and more of the world moves online.
https://www.playusa.com/us/
It is estimated that the online gaming market could reach 25 billions a year in the US in a few years time and 150 billions worldwide.
https://www.gminsights.com/industry-analysis/online-gambling-market#:~:text=The%20North%20America%20online%20gambling,CAGR%20during%20the%20forecast%20period.
https://www.grandviewresearch.com/press-release/global-online-gambling-market
These revenues do not equal to deposited amounts, they equal net deposits (deposits minus withdrawals). The hold % of online casinos can be anywhere between 50% and 80% depending on how degenerate the market is in a given country but we can conservatively assume 60%.
This means that deposits volume in the US alone would reach about 40 billions, Europe about 50 Billions and worldwide 250 billions.
That should give Paysafe around 8-10 billions in transaction volume per year in the US alone , another 10-12 billions in Europe and conservatively, another 20 billions worldwide.
Valuation estimates:
Rough estimates are therefore revenues of about 1.5 billions per year for Paysafe group in a few years for gambling alone.
Paysafe claims 1.5 billions in revenues total projected for 2021, with only a third from gambling.
Even assuming no growth from the other verticals, this means that the total revenues of Paysafe should grow by 66% with gambling alone in the next 5 years or so.
Pysafe is investing a lot into expansion in other areas than gambling, notably video-gaming and remittance so assuming they don’t fuck it up completely, we are likely to see a 3 billions dollar in revenues in the next 5 years.
Using Paypal’s marketcap vs revenues, that would mean 50 billions in marketcap for Paysafe… Of course, Paypal is ingrained deeply in the whole of ecommerce and Paysafe is more specialized in gambling which might be shakier and herefore command a lower valuation.
The deal details are not fully known but it looks like a current valuation of 9 billions for Paysafe Group upon listing.
Based on my estimates, the marketcap could reach 50 billions in a few years time, one US market for gambling fully opens.
$BFT is trading at a 25% premium right now, therefore the estimate is 4x on investment over a few years.
Obviously you retards are not the most patient bunch but I believe the stock will jump when it morphs and so keep an eye out for the options.

I'm going to deposit onto bodog soon and just wanted to get some second opinions. They have interac e-transfer for deposit which has worked before with my TD account on other sites, so that's not a problem. I've seen quite a few people on here say that 'TD doesn't allow online gambling' but I've never once had a problem.
Bodog also has direct bank transfer for withdrawals which once again I've done numerous times on other sites without an issue.
But then again it's bodog so I'm not convinced lol. They seem like one of the shittier sites when it comes to support communication and random bans, but their sng lobby looks so juicy so I can't resist.
I'm hoping I'll be able to depo/withdrawal hundreds (and hopefully withdrawing thousands) at once without an issue but I'd love to hear from other Canadians if you've been able to do so using non-crypto options.
Thanks.

My situation:
• Started my own business in 2019. (It's still going! Woo hoo!)
• Formed a single member LLC (SMLLC) for the liability protection.
• Business coach told me to get an EIN in my LLC's name to open a business bank account and also read that it was a good idea to get an EIN for your LLC, so that when vendors request a W-9 you don't have to provide your SSN. Yes, please.
• Following advice above, I got an EIN in my LLC's name and used it to open a business bank account.
• Didn't have income in 2019 that reached the threshold to generate tax forms to me (1099s), but filed 2019 taxes with what I'd made (lost), putting my LLC's EIN on line D of Schedule C per the IRS instructions that "if you are the sole owner of an LLC that is not treated as a separate entity for federal income tax purposes, enter on line D the EIN that was issued to the LLC (in the LLC's legal name) for a qualified retirement plan, to file employment, excise, alcohol, tobacco, or firearms returns, or as a payer of gambling winnings. If you do not have such an EIN, leave line D blank."
• Got my first W-9 and saw that it (see page 4) actually says (!!!) that "If you are a single-member LLC that is disregarded as an entity separate from its owner, enter the owner’s SSN (or EIN\, if the owner has one).* Do not enter the disregarded entity’s EIN."*
• Was surprised by this and wasn't comfortable giving out my SSN to this vendor, so I looked online for how other folks had handled this, and found that people often used their SMLLC's EIN despite the clear instructions not to (which seemed like a bad idea) or would request an EIN in their own name (an "owner's EIN") and then provide that EIN, since the W-9 instructions say an owner's EIN can be used.
• So, I subsequently requested an EIN in my own name (just as a sole proprietor) and have used that on W-9s and for PayPal and Stripe 1099-Ks.
• Now, I just got a 1099-INT from my bank for the business bank account that I opened in my LLC's name with its EIN, and so of course the 1099-INT has the LLC's name (just its name, in fact) on it and its EIN.
My main questions:
Is any of this a problem? If it is, what should I do to fix it?
My secondary / specific questions:
1 - Does my bank need to re-issue the 1099-INT in my name and SSN or EIN (or at least with my SSN or EIN?), per the IRS that "for federal income tax purposes, a single-member LLC classified as a disregarded entity generally must use the owner's social security number (SSN) or employer identification number (EIN) for all information returns and reporting related to income tax"?
2 - Schedule C instructions say that "if you are the sole owner of an LLC that is not treated as a separate entity for federal income tax purposes, enter on line D the EIN that was issued to the LLC (in the LLC's legal name) for a qualified retirement plan, to file employment, excise, alcohol, tobacco, or firearms returns, or as a payer of gambling winnings. If you do not have such an EIN, leave line D blank." I got the LLC's EIN to open a bank account (which is specifically allowed by the IRS), but does that mean that I should keep putting my LLC's EIN on line D of Schedule C or leave line D blank when I file for 2020 and in the future?
3 - Is the IRS going to have a problem that I'm using the EIN in my name ("owner's EIN") for tax purposes (W-9s, 1099-Ks) for my LLC, since the IRS doesn't allow me to use the LLC's EIN? Will they have issues connecting that the 1099s they receive with my EIN number are being reported on my Schedule C with my LLC's EIN number and instead be looking for a separate Schedule C with the EIN number in my name / "owner's EIN" on it?