The blue light of the monitor is a physical weight against my eyelids, a searing, rectangular pressure that feels like it’s trying to rewrite my DNA. It is 3:03 AM. I started this ridiculous juice cleanse at exactly 4:03 PM yesterday, and my stomach is currently staging a violent protest that sounds suspiciously like a dying radiator in an abandoned building. They tell you that hunger brings clarity, but all it’s bringing me right now is a heightened awareness of the $403 discrepancy in my client’s ledger and the way my 3-legged desk chair groans every time I shift my weight. Most people think financial literacy is about spreadsheets and compound interest, but in the trenches, it’s actually about the psychology of the void-the space between what you have and what you’ve been promised.
I’ve spent 13 years as a financial literacy educator, a title that sounds much more dignified than ‘the guy who explains why you’re broke at 23.’ My name is Mason D., and I’ve made more mistakes than I’ve had hot meals this week. My first major failure happened back in 2003, when I thought I was a genius for putting $1003 into a tech startup that didn’t actually have a product. It had a logo, a very shiny logo, but no product. I learned then that money doesn’t just disappear; it migrates



















