the accident

is it time for me to tell my own QC story? might be a bad idea lol but i think it is.

so the thing is i was in a pretty fucking bad car accident when i was 2 years old...

the thing about easy money is it will always make u think ur smarter than u actually are

i don't remember any of it (thank god lol), but my dad was in a coma for 2 weeks and i have hundreds of stitches and scarring from it. some serious goddamn shit.

there was an insurance settlement for me and my dad. he used his to buy a small farm. mine was put in a locked account.

so i grew up knowing there was ~$100k sitting in an account for me that i couldn't access until i turned 18.

i don't think i really had a good concept of what that meant or that it was all that unusual for most of my life. we grew up pretty poor and highly rural overall. whenever it was mentioned, there was always a followup of "and you'll use it to pay for college"

when i was very young i thought of it as my "harry potter money". yknow, forehead scar, car accident while young, gringotts vault waiting, it fit pretty well lol

but mostly i didn't think about it. i went off to college and the student loans started mounting up. i hit 18 and my parents suggested i wait til my last year to actually withdraw anything, and i listened to them. just continued living my life, making $9/hr as a grader and TA

it would basically all eventually go towards my student loans, but it changed my relationship with money very quickly. being the kinda person i am, i didn't go out and buy anything crazy. i think i got myself a switch and bought my mom an iphone for christmas.

i did start ordering a fuckload more doordash though lol

but mostly i immediately started to get a handle on investing, IRAs and index funds, safe withdrawal rates, and generally dove deep into personal finance concepts, further than either of my parents had ever bothered with. suddenly it mattered

of course with that research, plus the confidence of youth, came risk seeking. i started out scared of equities, but within a month i was 2x levered on $50k of AMZN going into earnings. late nights making stupid micro momentum trades on the BTC chart came next.

before long i learned what options were, and managed not to lose too much before backing right the fuck off.

one of the interesting things is how these these subjects connected me in a different way to some of my friends. one was born relatively wealthy, one had a recent life insurance settlement, etc, but we were all navigating how the fuck to handle this shit well before our peers.

slowly i settled back into a pretty well defined safe and steady FIRE/boglehead style investment plan, and the madness stopped. but what could never change is how i viewed those numbers on the screen as virtually meaningless, now totally disconnected from reality.

i'd had the experience of really worrying about money as a kid, teen, and broke college student, but past that point it felt more like a game than anything else. tech jobs right out of college, gamestop, and further crypto cycles didn't help.

i ended up paying off my student loans under a year after graduating, and keeping the small amount of trading/crypto earnings as a seed.

these days i've pretty much broken my addiction to chart-checking and line go upping, and i think i'm happier for it.

anyway idk that there's much of a point here, just a bit of an unusual personal story. my mom always said the car accident was the worst event of her life, and i sympathize with her, but it worked out pretty sick for me.

it was surreal as hell. id never been near that anywhere near that much money. that morning we went to breakfast at a nearby diner and i tipped $100. it felt like a dream.

then a few weeks into my last year, i sent off some notarized letters, and basically by complete coincidence on the morning of my 20th birthday I woke up with $109,000 sitting in my students checking account