It's something I think he's been doing since he first started making money as an independent adult, which is fucking bizarre considering he lived with his parents well into his twenties and had little in the form for expenses outside of gas, maybe rent, and buying his own food.
There are two things which probably explain it.
First, his white collar income was probably never that high: Even if you believe his claims to have worked at Wells-Fargo he must have resigned at some point to take a sales job with Best Buy because he was fired from there for cause and appealed it to the state Labor Department (ruling is
here). Then he took a job working the phones at Helicopter Support before getting transferred multiple times for reasons he has never explained. As a layperson I suspect these jobs paid fairly little because they all sound like something a high school graduate could do with fairly little on the job training. Maybe he really did work at Wells-Fargo, maybe he eventually got transferred to a job that needed more education, but there was probably a time in the ~5 years between graduation and buying the Connectikhando when he was making very low wages.
Second, he was still spending a large amount on FGC stuff. He was able to attend so many FGC tourneys because he put them all on credit cards and we all know how poorly he understands compound interest or self restraint. He was probably paying a few hundred, maybe a thousand, every month without really reducing the principal. Then at the same time, he was buying up FGC action figures as well as other vidya collectibles like the Portal gun. Those aren't cheap.
It really shouldn't be surprising though, if that statistic about more than half Americans not having more than a few hundred in savings is anything to go by though. Obviously no one normal is totally financially stable on average but you should always have at least a few thousand spread across savings and emergency funds.
Yeah but Phil was in a position to NOT wind up in that 50 percent and squandered it: He blew any chance at a decent-paying job thanks to his attitude and the spending on FGC stuff is 100% him. Living paycheck to paycheck isn't that weird but that's normally because of life circumstances that did not apply to Phil or did not need to apply to him. When I think of people in that category I think of working parents, people in low-skilled jobs, and people still in university not bankers with near zero debt.
The last time Phil ever brought up having a savings account that I could find was when he was making the big youtube bucks back in Connecticut and he used that money in his saving account (presumably all of it, because I'll say why later) to help him move all his shit across, from memory he didn't do the cheaper alternative by selling most of his shit in his condominium and buying new stuff in Washington.
He also did have to take out a line of credit any way after this, as that move back then was too expensive for him apparently, and he had virtually no savings. It seems to me he thought that he would be fine coasting through life if he was making the same kind of money he always was so he could eventually start a savings account again, but his line of thinking never changed about how much he should spend in order to satrisfy his desires, his income started to dip or fluctuate over the years, so he used credit cards, loans and aggressively begging tactics on order to get himself over the debt line, but obviously the bankruptcy happened so we know that didn't last.
He then said after he got kicked out of the twitch partner program that he was hoping to start a savings account, so he could eventually save up and use it for things like going on that eventual honeymoon with his soul mate, the thing is for a time he was pretty much making a little more on YouTube compared to Twitch when he decided to dip for maybe two months I think? I'm not sure if he still is now as I haven't been keeping track of the income thread, but it's not unlike he isn't capable of starting to set aside income in order to use it for emergencies, like a rainy day find.
He liquidated everything for the move including his 401-k (retirement account). His down payment on the condo was only $13,250 and I believe he mentions putting some of the moving/furnishing expenses on credit cards which..... yikes. I have no idea how he could have been making as much as he was and have so little to show for it.
As for why the savings accounts never happened, it's because Phil is Mr. Instant Gratification. I can't prove it but I suspect the reason he had money lying around in the early 2010s was because he'd run out of other ways to spend it. Even buying the Wakhando might have been that compulsion to spend combined with an inability to think of other outlets. When his income started to dip, he couldn't bear to part with his creature comforts, so savings were the first thing to be cut. Living with Leanna could not have helped, she was high maintenance and likely insisted on going into Seattle much more than he wanted.
