He’s Choosing Eating Out Over A Place To Live

0:00Hi, I'm Chris Seussis. I'm 39 years old and I'm based in Austin, Texas. This is Financial a lot. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on. So what do you do for a living right now? Nothing. Wait. Yeah, I am currently unemployed. I used to work for Facebook. They let me go with the first round of layoffs. Oh, dude, I'm sorry. Yeah, it was a it was a bummer. That was back in November of last year and I haven't worked since. What was your position? I program manager, but I I focused on managing relationships for the payments team. Come on, Zuck. Yeah, yeah. Well, that sucks. I'm sorry. I know the tech market got hammered with some layoffs.

0:44And I'm very curious what that market's going to do because tech stocks have done very well this year so far. I'm curious if they're going to start making up some of those positions again. But a lot of them said they overhired, but whatever, whatever. You've been applying to a bunch of program manager jobs? I, not specifically. So I took some time. I struggle with mental health too. So, um, when I was like, I was actually on a medical leave. Um, so I took some time to kind of try and get back on top of my, my mental health. And then when I started applying for jobs, I've just had, I mean, it's been probably three or four months of regular applying and I've had zero luck.

1:24You know, you don't have to tell us by any means, but if you want to, do you want to go into your mental health and what that might be? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's, I've struggled with depression and anxiety my entire life since literally single digits. I had an attempt in high school and then just kind of dealt with it for a long time. In 2016, it was getting bad again, and I went to see a therapist who told me in order to continue seeing her, I'd need to be dairy-free, gluten-free, sugar-free. What the? Drink half my weight in ounces of water every day. Walk a mile or two every day. It was preposterous, but it made me feel like I wasn't even good enough for therapy.

2:10Like I had to do all this to get there. Did you sign up the therapist? I didn't. I was really crushed by that. Yeah, she sounds like a, or they sound like a, interesting. Yeah, for sure. I've been to quite a few therapists. I've never experienced that. This was by far the worst I've encountered. And so I spent in the next couple of months just kind of like tolerating it. And then in September of 2016, the confluence of events, just advice from friends and being tipped off about the Whole30 workout and a bunch of other stuff. I started working out and I lost 100 pounds in the course of like 10 months and found a new you know got promoted and things were going great.

2:52Ended up dating a girl that I'd been in love with for years and we were together for maybe a year and a half and then she broke up with me and that kind of started another spiral. I had already encountering what I call occupational anxiety. I get really anxious when I worry that I'm not going to meet somebody's expectations, whether I'm close to meeting them or not. And one day I was on my way to work and just had a breakdown. Crying, punching the steering wheel because I was happy. I had everything I thought I wanted to be happy, but I didn't feel it. And so I really had a breakdown that day and couldn't go back to work after that and was trying to get a YouTube channel going, trying to find whatever was next.

3:37And eventually I think she got tired of that. Um, and we separated. And after that, I took all of my, um, savings, my, um, stock money, my retirement money. And I, because my mental mental health was in the dumper said, I'm going to live my next six months. Like they're the last six months of my life. And then I'm going to end it. Oh no. Yeah. Yeah. And so I, I had a blast. I don't want anybody to feel sorry for me. I went on a couple of cruises. I went to Hawaii. I went to pro wrestling school. All right. I did a bunch of fun stuff, a bunch of things that I thought I would never be able to do.

4:13I grew up in the projects in upstate New York. I never thought I would leave the city, let alone be able to travel the country or the world. So it was very cool to be able to do those things. Six months came up. I no longer wanted to not be here and had to figure out a way to survive. I didn't have any money left. I didn't have a job. I didn't really know what I wanted to do. So I started doing Uber Eats and living in my car. I would park my car at night. How long ago was this? This was 2019. Okay. I would park my car at night at truck stops, Loves or Pilot or Flying J, because you're not going to draw as much attention there.

4:51Lots of vehicles park there overnight. They have showers, food, bathrooms, always clean. So it was like I made the best of it that I could. Except for the lizards. There's that. They never bothered me because I was in the car. I think they were sticking to the trucks where people had money. But honestly, I had two neighbors, two other people living in their cars in the same parking lot that I would see regularly. And so, yeah, I'd wake up in the morning. I'd take my shower at the truck stop and go do Uber Eats for 12 hours and then come back to the truck stop. What were you doing with the money?

5:23Putting gas in the car, food. Wasn't really making much. And then there's the maintenance. I blew a tire. For a while, I'm a big wrestling fan. So for a while, the only thing I was doing aside from Uber Eats is I would kind of pull my money for the week and then go see a wrestling show. Interesting. That week, just because it was like I need something to keep me kind of going. And then one morning I woke up at the truck stop to an email from Facebook saying, hey, would you like to talk about this opening we have? I was like, of course, you know, I thought it was a scam. I reached out to a couple of friends and was like, BJ's Wholesale Club makes holiday hosting so easy.

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6:35And I was able to secure that job. I went from being homeless to making$108 ,000 almost overnight. Yeah. Yeah. It was a blessing. It was amazing. I mean, they flew me down here to Austin for my interview on Halloween 2019. Oh, so at that point you were in New York. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That was the first time I had spent, you know, the first night I had spent in a bed in probably two months at that point. And, you know, I didn't tell them that. Who's going to hire a guy who's living in his car? But somehow, you know, I took video interviews from my car, and they flew me down. I got the job. They put me up for a month.

7:09Things were going well. Found an apartment downtown. Pandemic hits. Everything shuts down. I've got no friends established. I just moved here. Adult friends are always hard in new locations, too. Yeah, and I'm not a big drinker. And, like, that's what people do to meet people. So I became very isolated. And that's where my mental health struggles kind of led me to over the last couple of years where I don't know anybody here. So I don't leave home. You know, it's and then I put all the weight back on. And so now I feel, you know, gross and don't want to be seen in public unless I'm with people.

7:46So to be clear, you are not gross. Thank you. I appreciate that. Objectively. Well, and that's the thing with mental health, right, is nobody's telling me these things. It's me telling me these things. You know, I've always felt like, oh, people think I'm a piece of. nobody's ever said, Hey, Chris, you're a piece of shit. That's always me saying, Chris, you're a piece of shit. You know? So I appreciate that. I'm still working on getting it through to my, to myself. I mean, there's always a conversation to be had about, okay, yes, there is like unhealthy, healthy. We want you to get to a place where you're healthy.

8:18I want to get to a place where I am healthy. But I mean, dude, you got that beard rocking. You're a handsome dude. Come on. I appreciate you. But of course there is the conversation of health and we do, we do want to get health and that is not, a part of the conversation even shameful to acknowledge to say we want to get to a place where we're healthy and we live a longer life and that includes for both of us you know eating better and probably being more active and losing some weight totally and well that's the thing right is it's if i don't want to be here now why do i want to get healthy to be here then well you know and also to say you know based what happened in 2019 based what's happened recently and based what happened in high school, I am very happy that you're here with all of us right now.

9:00Thank you. Normally, this is where I'd plug subscribing, but if you are dealing with anything mental health at all, and I have a panic disorder, everyone has their different things, 988 is the emergency hotline for anyone dealing with anything. So definitely reach out to 988 if you are - Just 988? 988. I didn't know that. Yeah, I think it's about a year old almost. That's awesome. Yeah, so that's the emergency mental health hotline. That's good to know. Yeah. And it actually connects you with like a regional place based on your own thing too. Wow. So it's not just some person thousands of miles away.

9:34Right. Yeah. Helps. But I am very glad that you're here with all of us today. And I'm very glad that, you know, you never went through with anything. That's, you know, very just, yeah, no, I'm happy for that. Appreciate that. How has life been here in Austin, you know, recently? You said you moved here, had a hard time meeting people. Have you had a chance over the past few years? No, just because I had gotten to that point where I wasn't comfortable going out. Now the only time I really see people is if I bring friends or family into town. Sure. Where are your friends? New York. Have you considered going back to New York?

10:09I have, especially now. So my lease is up at the end of August. That's quick. Yeah, yeah. So I've got to figure something out. I have talked about going back even just briefly to try and get back on my feet and maybe refresh myself in terms of having that social interaction and maybe get a little bit of happiness back before coming back and trying to. Do you have a connection, Austin? Do you feel anything about this place? Is there any reason for you to stay? I think it feels pretty clear to me, like go back, but just to play devil's advocate, Is there anything here? I genuinely love it here. Not even really knowing the city.

10:55New York sucks. You're from Michigan, I believe I read. Six, seven months of gray. Not for me. That was one of the issues, I think, with the ex and I, is I always wanted to move south, and she was never going to want to. Everyone always asks me what checking account I use and what high-yield savings account I use. Recently, I switched over to SoFi. The reason I did it is because their app is very intuitive, and it's super easy to use on your computer as well. But even better than that, their high yield savings account is all the way up to 4.4 % at the time of recording this clip. That is so hard to beat and I am taking advantage of that all day.

11:31And not only that, but there's additional bonuses that I took advantage of that you can as well. Set up direct deposit, get a$50 bonus or all the way up to$250. That's free money. That's free money. I took it. You can take it too. So check out my affiliate link in the description below. It's seriously awesome. I use it each and every day for my banking needs. I think looking out that window is the first time I've seen a cloud in like three months. It's wild. I mean, I send my family, you know, the 100 degree days for 10 in a row. Yeah, that's a bit much, but yeah. But I'll take that over dark, dirty snow that's been there since October.

12:07But your friends are there. Your friends are there. Support systems. I'm a big country music fan, so I like that about Texas. Big sports fan. And NASCAR is 15 minutes away once a year, which is nice. So there's a lot of reasons I'd like to stay here. Plus, I have this nagging feeling of I haven't made a mark here. Okay. And I kind of want to make a mark. What's this YouTube thing you're doing? It's in the description. It's the Troyalty Pod. It's Troyalty Podcast. I started it just over a year ago with my friend Matt from high school. I went to college for radio. I wanted to be in radio. I wanted to just have people talk about me and enjoy what I'm doing and help people along the way.

12:47And so we've tried to do that with the podcast. We just goof around a lot. We're friends from high school. He's in New Jersey now. I'm here in Austin, but we're from Troy, New York. So that's why we call it Troyalty. And we just have a blast. We've really, the show has evolved a lot from when it first started. When I first started, I wanted to just be this raw thing. And then I realized, oh, people do want a little production value. They want it to be a little prettier. And so we've tried to tweak on those things and really develop it over time. He's based out of New York? He's New York, New Jersey.

13:18Okay, so it's virtual. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We connect once or twice, once a week, either Tuesday or Wednesday. We do the Trial Through Podcast. We also do the Academia Awards, which is a movie review show. All on one channel? All on one channel. Well, how many subscribers do you have? Just hit 300. Oh, nice. Well, dude, those milestones are the hardest ones to hit. So that's worth celebrating. It's very exciting. I mean, we were very stagnant for a while. We were stuck at, you know,$150 to$200. Shopping is hard, right? But I found a better way. Stitch Fix online personal styling makes it easy. I just give my stylist my size, style, and budget preferences.

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14:41Bye. He's a gay man. I'm a straight man. And so there's a lot to play off of there, putting each other in each other's shoes or the fact that I go over the top for pride and he doesn't. So just trying to find little opportunities to kind of, I guess, stand out and be ourselves. So what have you been doing for getting back to the finance part of things? First of all, I want to give you – this is a great back story. This sets up a lot of context for things to come. What would you give yourself, zero to ten? What's your score right now, financially speaking, for where you are? In terms of? Your overall finances.

15:23Two. Maybe. Okay. And then I'll give you a rating at the end, as I always do. How November to now is quite a while ago. What is that, nine months? Ten months almost? At least. How have you been surviving and paying for things? How have you been spending$2 ,302 in the past month on fast food? I spent that much? Because the delivery part can add a lot to money. So Facebook was very generous when they let us go. And they kept paying us through mid-January. And then we also got a severance package, which I think was around$20 ,000 for myself. and then I had retirement funds and I took those out. No.

16:15Again? So this is the second time you've drawn retirement. Okay. Sorry, I was wrong. It was over $1 ,000 I needed out. Then combining with going grocery store shopping, that was$2 ,000 grocery shopping. That's a lot to grocery shop. I tend to throw a lot of groceries away because I do so much takeout. So you do$1 ,000 in groceries. You throw it all out. Yeah. Okay. The first time you took out of your retirement account, how much was in there? In 2019? Best guess. It doesn't have to be 100%. Okie dokie. $30 ,000. And let's see, that was 2019? So that would have been, just following the general stock market, like$35 ,000.

17:01How much did you just take out recently? That was, I think,$30 ,000 as well. Okay, so of that, you're almost 40. If you retire at 65, 26 years, average stock market, no extra additions. That would have been worth$516 ,000. You lost$516 ,000. That's what you just lost was$516 ,000 by pulling that out. When would that have been$516 ,000? 65. Counterpoint. I retired twice already. You have, but you need to go make money now, right? Yeah. What's in savings? I think it was, what,$200 or$300 at this point. How are you paying for this month? So I paid my rent ahead. Yeah, okay. I've got a few hundred bucks cash, and I've got some credit, and so hopefully a job soon.

18:06what what have you only applied for the jobs that were like your previous position or have you just been applying to anything and everything i've been applying so i started out just applying to tech jobs things similar to what i've been doing things that could uh come close to what i was making yeah um i've since opened that window quite a bit um i've recently applied to bucky's and Enterprise Rent-A-Car scheduled a phone interview with me on Thursday. Oh, good luck. There's some very entry-level jobs out there that I could probably get and I'm hoping to get if nothing else comes through. I did have an interview at McDonald's that I decided to skip out on just because I've got six years' experience, so I think I could probably get a McDonald's job pretty easily, and they were scheduling interviews in real time.

18:55I know, but you have like a couple hundred dollars to your name. Yeah, yeah. You're going to need to buy food soon. You're going to need to have a place to live soon. You probably have other bills. Well, you definitely have debts. Yeah, yeah. We haven't even gotten into that. You'll have to pay or else they'll go into collections. So, like, we accept we get a McDonald's job right now. And then while we have that, we apply to better jobs. I guess my concern is I don't want to start and stop and then leave them short. But I guess I really don't owe them anything. They are used to it. They are used to it.

19:23You guys, the employment contract between you and them is to say, first of all, they can fire you at will. So you giving them a two-week notice is just being nice anyway. And really, you guys are just agreeing, okay, you work these hours, they pay you this. There is no indefinite servitude involved in that. Plus, it's a very high turnover thing, so they're not going to be offended. They're used to it. Okay. Okay. So now we'll talk about the income situation. $1 ,541 is on a credit one. is this one that I have another statement for? Because I can't really... I've got two credit ones. That's the second one, I think.

20:03Yeah, those are two separate cards for credit one. Is it one of these? This is a credit one. Because I can't see what was like spent or anything. So that's one of the credit ones? This is this one. Bleep the last four digits. Okay, so on this one we have a balance of... Oh, dude. Yeah, this is why we need to start making money now. Credit one. This is$1 ,541.16. I think that was paid off last month, too. So you just rack that up every month? I thought it was good for my credit. Well, how are you going to pay it off now this time? Because it's some Google YouTube videos for like a rental. and Uber Eats, Uber Eats, Lotto, Uber Eats, Uber Eats, Uber Eats, Amazon Music.

21:00I don't even know what that is. I need to cancel that. First of all, we're not going to say where you live. I know where you live. You're surrounded by incredible restaurants that you can walk two seconds to. Yeah. Why are you Uber Eats? That whole not feeling comfortable being seen outside. I get it. Very fair. I get it. Okay, are you currently in therapy? A lot of this is going to come down to this. Okay, how often are you seeing your therapist? I was seeing her weekly. She's agreed to continue seeing me without insurance, but I don't feel comfortable seeing her weekly that way, so we're going to move to biweekly.

21:31Costs the expense? How much is it going to cost biweekly? I think she's going to see me for free until I find something. She's incredible. Okay. Have you, has it helped? Therapy? Uh-huh. Yeah. With her and everything? Yeah. She's great. Have you worked on you not being able to leave your place? Like you're here on camera in front of like 200 ,000 people. This I can do. I can be on camera. I can do my show every week. This is not an issue because this is I'm performing in a way. You know, I'm in front of the lights. I'm in front of the camera. There's something about like I could go on stage. I've been on stage in front of 30 ,000 people before introducing Taylor Swift.

22:15Not a problem. You introduced Taylor Swift? Interesting. She opened for Rascal Flatts back in the day. Did you meet the Swift? I did. This is back before she was anything popular. One of my employees is very jealous right now. This is teardrops on my guitar, Taylor Swift. Yeah, when it was just her and her mom visiting radio stations in their car. It was very cool. But, yeah, I can do this. So this is going out your place and then among the general population? Just because the voices. Why did you move on to, like, the busiest street in the world? Because I thought that would be the catalyst for me to get out.

22:52I'd be right there in the heart of it. And I love the street. I'd love to go out and experience it. I just don't have anybody to experience it with. Yeah. Have you tried, I don't even know if this works, but the Bumble BFF? No, I didn't know that was a thing. Yeah, you could do like a friend searching thing on there. One of my friends made a friend for a second on there. But it might be something worth considering. Have you? Again, this might deal with the anxiety and stuff like that. but there's also like different groups and stuff. Have you tried any of those hobbies? I've meant to. I meant to like look into overeaters anonymous or whatever, but I haven't have no excuse for why I haven't.

23:31My therapist is very much encouraging me to get out of the house. And when I'm having the conversation with her, I feel like, yeah, I can do this. There's nothing stopping me. I can go walk outside right now, but then we hang up and I'm crippled again. Maybe you need to walk outside while on the phone with her. That's a good idea. Yeah. Yeah. That might be something worth considering. Either way, the Uber Eats, it's not like I want you going down to the restaurant anyway. You're getting$1 ,000 of groceries. I put people on a$300 budget for themselves for groceries. Why are you Uber Eats instead of making the food?

24:06Too depressed to cook or clean up the dishes from the last time I cooked? I can't combat that or do anything with it because it's just, I'm not a mental health expert by any means. I think your situation is already going to start coming down to just working with different mental health experts to address the overall situation. Then you can address the finances, but it's hard for you to do that in reverse. Because if mental health is the barrier, then it's... in an odd twisted way, part of me is okay with this because I'm so used to living in chaos and in survival mode. This is like extra though.

24:49I know. Oh, I agree. What happens on, what happens on September 1st? That's a great question. I don't know. Um, the plan right now is to, I guess the worst case scenario plan is everything goes into storage and I drive back to New York and try to find something while they're staying at a friend's house or whatever. I got a little mixed up here. We have another credit one. So this is a separate credit one, right? Yep, I got two credit ones. This one's not paid off, or is it? At the time of the statement, it wasn't$300. By the way, you're dealing with so many fees on these. Credit one's terrible.

25:27Credit one's evil. It's just these monthly fees that's killing you. I mean, you paid$72 in interest this year so far on this card, probably similar on the other card, if not more, actually probably more. and then you paid$73 of fees on this card and you probably paid more on that other card as well. This card at one is death and it's buying weed. Yeah. Is that good for your mental health? That's a good question. It's one I've had several times from and to mental health experts. I've had recently mental health experts tell me don't rock the boat. Are you on any medication? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I'm on what is it Zoloft I'm on lithium I previously was doing ketamine treatments which that's pretty popular recently yeah check out our channel if you want to see me freak out during a ketamine session and throw myself to the floor that's why I have not tried it was a lot of fun at times and it did help initially but over the long run I just was not agreeing with it and I would have these moments where I would flop out of the chair and do kind of like the curly three stooges walk in a circle.

26:38Yeah. I'm on Celexa. That's fine. Nice. Can't be a millennial if you don't have an antidepressant. Yeah. Okay. And then we have a Capital One. You did pay it off, but now the balance is all the way up again. Yep. But you don't have the money to pay this off anymore. Correct. Uber. Uber. Mm-hmm. Eats. Eats. Papa John's. Uber Eats. Papa John's Weed Amazon Uber Eats Uber Eats Uber Eats Uber Eats Oh jeez Your T-Mobile bill is expensive by the way Yeah Financing a phone I am Uber Eats Uber Eats Regal Cinemas You went out Once yeah That was for my show How was that? It was fine What did I do? That was to go see the new Indiana Jones movie So I could review it How did you feel?