Name: How Caleb Hammer Overcame His Own Financial Problems
Uploaded: 2025-02-28T14:30:09.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'How Caleb Hammer Overcame His Own Financial Problems' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-02-28. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'How Caleb Hammer Overcame His Own Financial Problems' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-02-28. Transcript available.

i i noticed that so you're kind of this financial guy um or financial liaison
even uh to like gen z
or millennials i mean it could be anyone but i feel like that's kind of like um
it seems to me
like that's kind of like the world that you work with yeah that's who got
attached to it we age
range in that like 18 to 35 that's our big group that's where our metrics are
right now and you're
helping people with their finances like what kind of qualified you to become
sort of this um
this uh this like uh person who's offering suggestions to to uh others yeah i
mean since
the stuff i talk about is so basic i was a dumbass enough like back in the day
to overcome all that
debt uh get control of my spending learning how to budget get kind of obsessed
with the personal
finance space uh build a pretty successful net worth before i started youtube
and just sitting
down and talking to the people in the worst of the worst since i was there felt
like those are the
people i could talk to not talking to the to the theo vons not helping you with
your investments but
you know we're talking about the lady who has tens of thousands of dollars of
credit card debt some car
she can't afford and getting repoed left and right right yeah i mean i feel
like you kind of have this
like jerry springer meets finances kind of energy you know which is yeah it's
awesome we call it caleb
springer that's our really yeah oh i don't even know that yeah oh that's great
man yeah it's it's uh
it's super fascinating but like so what was your financial problem just so i
know like where did you
start where you're like oh okay i'm in a bad spot college was i was so dumb in
college man just
starting to go into it i was going into a major that wasn't gonna make any
money i wanted to go into music
and of course if you're gonna go into music you have to have like a fifty
thousand dollar computer
or whatever it's some nice beautiful imac so max out a credit card with that
gotta have an electric
piano like you gotta be cool you know you gotta be like the other music majors
max out a credit card
with that uh why cook when you're tired from school go to mcdonald's every day
and that's before i was
even a fat like you know the house was able to consume those and still be
skinny but max out a
credit card with that gotta get around so i maxed out i got like a 10 11 000
car loan but i couldn't
afford the down payment of course i didn't know anything about money so i
borrowed like five thousand
dollars from the grandparents just to get a down payment on a car it's the same
stuff we're seeing
on the show so you're just in a bad spot bad spot private student loans too man
it was rough and
did we had you been getting advice from anybody or do or you were just no this
was generational my
parents even though they are better now i'll give them credit there uh you know
we grew up definitely
lower middle class foreclosure notices that kind of stuff and at that point
when the people who would
teach you about that kind of stuff because our school system really doesn't at
least in michigan
and i don't think texas either uh at that point you rely on them to teach you
but they didn't know
anything so i was just continuing that cycle so every time you see people
coming from a lower middle
class background or poverty background it's just that endless cycle because you
can't learn from
anywhere and you have to get that drive somehow right that's a great point yeah
i was always kind
of amazed that they didn't teach us in school like if you didn't have a
strategy like they would have
people come for um like parents would come or people with like people in our
community that had jobs
would come and talk to us but they never had like people that had really up you
know they never had
like a crack at it come yeah and talk to the class for 20 minutes and be like
this is how this happened
right or they never had anybody that was selling leg or selling cooter or
whatever on the street tell you
know like hey this is how things fell apart like they never had that other side
of somebody who was
like in a second bankruptcy or somebody who'd been abused in a marriage you
know it's like you never
really got you always just got the like i'm a fireman you know and the kids
would be like awesome you
know and the guy would let you play with his axe or whatever it was like but
you never got like the
other side of it it's kind of crazy that they don't have that um just in like
kind of elementary
education you know dude it's crazy i think it's like a one-week subject in the
class where they also
spend like two weeks showing you birthing videos yeah you know this is
something that passes over
real quick okay so you were bad off real bad and how did you get on bad off i
just started becoming
obsessed with well i was always interested in the world of real estate so like
hgtv i ate that up i
don't know why this is that weird kid who loved hgtv so you know the all the
different home shows i was
interested in real estate and that's kind of just a decent connection and segue
over to personal
finances so eventually once i started realizing yo can't afford rent i started
just googling some
things and i found some other creators some other podcasts like bigger pockets
podcast is really
good um i think i started bigger pockets it's called yeah it's really good
those in real estate
now do you know graham stefan finance youtuber uh let's see a picture of him
yeah a little little
short dude graham stefan nope i don't know him he's one of the og finance
youtubers and i think i started
watching him when he was up and coming i was like wow i can't believe how
absolutely stupid i am with
finances i didn't even know there was this other world and then to accomplish
the things i dream
of accomplishing it's gonna take actually marking the goals i want to get to in
the different steps
that are required to get there and that's where i started to actually focus on
building the income
not just the hobby stuff you know i was doing music composition and you know i
was making like 30 000
hours a year off of that in college and dropped out of college but um from
there i just knew i had to go
get stronger income actually build myself a budget and that's when i started
you know looking to move
in different areas and i got a connection down in austin and that's when like i
actually started putting
the focus and pointing my money in the right direction building a budget for
the first time and it's
been it's been good since then yeah okay so you started to put your money back
together like you
started i mean did you pay off some of those things did you get rid of the car
you said you dropped out
of school so yeah i'm assuming that you just realized it wasn't for you or okay
it's gonna sound
like the most arrogant cunty thing ever and but like i was actually making more
on my music compositions
than my own professors did on their own compositions so i was like why am i
spending more money to go in
school okay so that's when i dropped out okay you already felt like you'd kind
of been able to learn
what they were going to teach you over a course of a long time kind of i mean i
i like the lessons
and stuff but then i still had to go to all these other classes that don't
matter and i had to spend
money on that right or at least things that were going for the degree but at
that point i still knew
nothing about personal finances once i moved to austin i wanted to get a job
that focused on me being my
own business essentially that's what i was doing with music composition and one
of the best jobs that
just like you and i could go get today if we wanted to where your own business
is sales okay you know
you are your business you're out there building the client base and that's what
i ended up doing and
with that i reached the top of the sales team immediately selling yeah uh
selling it was trading
education you know like stock trading and some memberships and stuff like that
okay so no i'm not
i'm not familiar with what you're talking about like stock market okay do it so
you became an investor
no i was selling classes that taught people how to become day traders and stuff
okay so day trading
courses really bad products i'll be honest but really you know i just had to
you know i was taking
the job that would hire okay so the but the actual product wasn't a good
product or just you thought it
was it was fine just people shouldn't be day traders that's the thing oh i see
it's like 90 lose money
it's not that the people that were teaching it were bad or the education itself
was bad it's just like
that's probably too risky for your average person to get into so it's just a
risky thing to get into
risky to get into but luckily the people i was selling to they were with people
with too much
money too much time so yeah it wasn't like you were selling it to children or
whatever no okay no
uh especially since i mean i think you have to be 18 to open a brokerage if i'm
or at least to open
those kind of accounts if i'm not mistaken but actually being able to build
that like personal
business personal brands and getting to the top of the sales team eventually
getting the place you
know bringing in six figures wow uh grinding for a couple years i focused on
paying off the uh my
grandparents first because it's family debt it's a little emotional that's
probably not what i would
necessarily suggest today uh to people that i'm talking to but that's what felt
right in that moment
and then the credit cards is what paying off your grandparents absolutely well
yeah because you have
to see them you still have to answer their calls and you have to hear the the
timbre in your
grandmother's voice you know knowing that they're concerned about their future
because they're
missing a little bit of their nest egg exactly exactly and they were nice
enough to give me that
money in a hard time i got to be nice enough to prioritize paying it back right
and then the 30
couple 30 credit cards i had from there about 10 000 hours total in credit card
debt and then sally
may you know that oh yeah the loan specialist yeah no she's not she's not great
so i had some like
12 percent interest private student loan debt maybe 15 it just kept ballooning
so i focused on paying
that off after that but those are private ones right so there's there's ones
you get from the
state that are lower percentage okay yep i had federal back student loans i
still do because i'm not
going to pay them off because they're only four percent and actually mine are
like three percent so
i'd rather invest instead right so i'm just doing my minimum monthlies there
but uh yeah so because
sally and her 15 were just so crappy i focused on paying those off next and and
then eventually
my car dead as well because that was also like 11 for a nissan ultima 2013 i
don't know if you're a
nissan ultima girly but their transmissions they all die immediately yeah it
was like 60 000 miles and
the transmission was dying so and i already owed debt on it oh yeah ultima
definitely um a lot of latinos
would drive them i know and then my ex-girlfriend drove one oh um okay so so
you started to get out
of debt you got some you got some money going you found out that okay you
realized maybe this could
the direction you were going in in school wasn't for you it sounded like you
started to make some kind
of like severe choices right yeah big life choices moving across the country
packing up the sedan you
know going from michigan to texas i guess it's not across the country but it
was a big move for me
and uh focus on paying off that debt and that's once i got my emergency fund
which is what we
prioritize after paying off high interest debt that's where i was like i can
finally start accomplishing
the dreams i wanted to and i was putting 10 down on a house here in austin oh
wow and that was my big goal