Words can't really explain how free I feel now that I don't have any debt. I feel like a new person. I feel as if I could do anything. My name is Roy Patterson. I'm 31 years old. I make $118,000 a year, and I live in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I think about money and finances about 90% of the time. Mainly, "How can I make more money? How can I save more money? And what can I do with the money?" Self-care is very, very important. And because of that, I spend a lot of money on skincare. As you can see, it looks good. Money plays a big part in my relationship with my girlfriend. I would say that she is more frugal than I am. So there will be times where we want to do things, but she doesn't want to spend the money on it. I'm very cognizant of the things that we talk about and how we budget our money. I try to help out as much as I can, but I also know that she has to go through her own journey as well. I tend to take on more of the 60% to 40% tactic, where I'll pay 60% of the bills and she'll take out 40% depending on what it is. I decided to get serious about paying off my debt I would say my senior year in college. I felt that my parents did the ultimate sacrifice by putting their names on the student loans. And so if I didn't pay that off, that's something that they would be straddled with. I used to watch The Suze Orman Show every Saturday at 9:00pm. I really took that to heart and kind of used her as my unofficial mentor to really stay focused and stay motivated to really start my debt repayment. One person who was by my side the entire time was my mom. We started watching Suze Orman together. She was looking to pay off her credit card debt, mortgage, car bills, and just miscellaneous items. We really held each other accountable in order to make sure that we accomplished getting rid of all this debt together. So growing up, I played a lot of The Sims on my laptop, and one day I found out that it came out for my X-Box One. So I ended up buying it and falling in love with that game all over again. So that's my little girl. They have money trees. Once they sell the fruit, they get about $8,000 per fruit. I actually spend a lot of money buying the expansion packs for the game. My girlfriend loves The Sims more than I do. She will play in 8-hour sprints. During the week, obviously, we have work and we try to be as productive as possible, but if it's a long weekend and we don't have anything to do, The Sims is on and we're going to play it. So being a child of immigrant parents definitely affected the way that I saw money, because I know how hard my parents had to work to make the money that they did have. Every need that we had was met. Every want, we had a discussion about it: Why did you really want it? How valuable is this? That really shaped my relationship with money. One of the things I really got into recently was cooking a lot of Jamaican dishes. Being from a Jamaican background, my dad did a lot of cooking for us and we didn't really go out as a kid, and that's one of the things that I hold near and dear to my heart. So I started this career actually by accident. I went to school for business management, and I had a friend who started an internship at Cigna, and she told me about this program called the Technology Early Career Development Program. I grew up in Connecticut, and I actually started working at Cigna in Connecticut. And then around 2015 I felt the need to kind of expand my wings and try something new. And I knew that Cigna had a big presence in Philadelphia, and so it seemed like a good fit. My salary has gone up about, I'd say almost 80% since I've started about seven years ago. In order to help with the move to New York, I put in a budget of about $10,000 to help with that. Work is also going to provide a relocation package as well. With a relocation package, I will also have my savings to pad the move to New York. Now that I'm debt free, some of the goals that I have is to start really diversifying my portfolio. One of the things that I'm working on right now is saving up enough money to buy my first rental property. One of them is Personal Capital. It's an app that I subscribe to, where it allows me to track all my investment accounts and all my bank accounts. And then I also use Mint to track my day-to-day expenses. I think that I'm good with money. I... I believe I'm good with money. You know what, I know that I'm good with money. My friends look at me as their financial guru, where they come to me with their specific problems, and I help them break it down into a manageable portion. The most important thing I learned about money is that money doesn't make who you are. Money brings out either the best or worst in what's already in you.
