67 · Six Hundred Dollars and Subscriptions

I'm barely breaking even at this point. I make about six hundred dollars a month, and all of it goes into e-book subscriptions and SaaS subscriptions — Claude, ChatGPT, TradingView, Everand, Scribd, Coursera, LinkedIn, Meta, Apple iCloud — all of which I use daily. You already have £200 a month burning in SaaS subscriptions: use all of them. You have Gemini, ChatGPT, the full Claude stack — push it to the extreme.

Set your monthly budget at £250 and never spend beyond it. The test for every purchase, first and foremost: will the business die without it? If the answer is yes, spend thirty or forty thousand if necessary. If not, don't spend an ounce.

Don't be afraid to use the capital your dad gave you. That's raw material. When the right time presents itself, reinvest all of it into yourself — into building the personal brand, seminars, in-person projects, paid mentorship, anything that moves your position to the next scale. The fact that business has almost no correlation with intelligence should not be a reason to avoid it, but to fully monetise it. You study pure maths and theoretical physics — this is conceptually easy by comparison.

I'm going to burn through the £25k reinvesting it into myself: courses — the Dale Carnegie course, the 4-Day MBA, sales training — AI and LLM subscriptions, alpha-generating news services, paid tutoring, paid mentoring, scaling agencies, online courses, digital products, live webinars. There is value behind paywalls, and when you pay, you pay attention.

Use your dad's £25k — this is exactly what that capital is for. Not for subscriptions alone. For transformation. And if the fear is spending it, then earn the course fees directly: one, pre-sell tutoring — find five TMUA students today, charge £200 an hour on the strength of a 9.0 and a Cambridge campaign; that's £1,000 for five hours, course paid. Two, cold call a hundred businesses offering websites — free, for testimonials — then convert two or three paying clients at £2k each; course paid. Three, the Putnam pitch: "I am preparing to score 120/120 on the Putnam; I need sales training to fund my preparation; invest in me now and I will pay it forward" — find ten people to give £250 each; course paid. Four, second-hand sales of everything you no longer use — good practice for photo editing too.

At the complete extreme you can create your own runway: if the subscriptions are leaking £5k a month, you have less than a quarter to save your ass. Now that is a sense of urgency.

The first money I make online — almost all of it is going back into me. Courses, business training, sales training. Being an entrepreneur and a scientist, running both tracks, can be done.

I can survive off three hundred dollars a month in Winnipeg. There is nothing to buy when you wake up, work sixteen hours, and go to bed — for two years straight. Groceries in Winnipeg are among the cheapest of any major Canadian city; realistically $250–300 a month cooking simply, less at No Frills or Superstore in bulk. University College double room, roughly $8,500–9,500 a year with the meal plan bundled in. Working 24 hours a week at Starbucks plus high-ticket online tutoring for TMUA and A-levels — that's already good money for a student, with the extra cash as experimental capital to reinvest.

Your flesh eats last. Your system, your spirit, your personal brand eat first.