Level 0 - Character Creation (My Origins)

This series tells my financial story, one level at a time, from childhood to today. How many levels will it take? Even I don’t know. It’ll keep going until I reach this blog’s goals, full or (more likely) partial financial independence.
Level 0 covers childhood, the first money I ever earned, and the first online projects that started out as a game.

Every video game starts with the same screen. You create your character, pick two or three traits, and you’re off. In real life, you don’t get that luxury. Your character comes pre-made, complete with a family, a neighborhood, and a set of rules you never chose.

My own “character creation” happened in a neighborhood in Bari, Italy, in a middle-class family that, without realizing it, was already teaching me the rules of the money game.

The First Rules of the Game

We weren’t rich, but my parents always tried to give my brother and me the best they could. Music lessons, summer sports, anything they could afford.

The problem is that “anything they could afford” had a very precise ceiling. Every so often it came down to a straight choice between the latest pair of Nikes and the instruments or rackets needed to keep up with an activity. Rarely both.

I definitely wasn’t aware I was learning anything about money. I’d simply started to understand that every euro spent on one thing was a euro less for something else.

My parents chose the activities over the shoes. And strangely, I never experienced it as a sacrifice. When they asked me at the supermarket if I wanted something, saying no made me feel proud, like I’d done my part for the team.

There was one big exception to this early thriftiness. Technology.

Clothes, backpacks, toys. The “GOM baby” of those days could give up all of it without blinking. But put a PC or a console in front of him, and he was just like every other kid. And boy, did he ask for one.

First Money? A Walk in the Park. Sort Of.

Up through high school, getting a weekly allowance is pretty standard in Italy. Mine was 5 euros a week. Luckily, though, I had another source of income, a much more unusual one. I played music in religious processions.

If you’ve never lived in southern Italy, let me explain. During local patron saint festivals, a marching band accompanies a statue of the saint through the streets, along with the priest and the faithful. Kids can play too, and they get paid for it.

I was just past 12, and I earned between 5 and 10 euros per outing. In summer there were anywhere from 10 to 15 of them, so a seasonal extra of 50 to 150 euros. Not bad for a twelve-year-old :).

I’d entered the working world without even realizing it.

Honestly, the P&L never actually balanced. Between music lessons and instruments, the expenses far outweighed what I earned playing. But my parents let me keep that money, and I spent it on little treats I can’t remember a single one of today.

What I do remember clearly is the effort behind that money. Hours standing under the sun, few breaks, the band running through the same tune for the hundredth time.

Those 5 to 10 euros carried a different weight than my allowance. And maybe that’s part of why I was noticeably more careful with money than my peers, who spent allowances bigger than mine without a second thought.

The Gift That Decided (Almost) Everything

Christmas was when the request season officially opened. And like good savers of wishes, we stockpiled them all for that one moment. On a couple of occasions, two gifts arrived that would end up changing a lot more than that year’s wish list. A PC and a Nintendo DS.

Credit for what came next, though, goes mostly to my older brother. He had an almost obsessive curiosity for exploring every corner of the internet, and that curiosity rubbed off on me.

Together we started downloading Nintendo DS games straight from Japan months before they came out in Italy. At one point we even started selling modded R4 cards loaded with early Pokémon games to classmates, who were green with envy.

From there, our projects kept getting more ambitious.

A private server for the game Metin. All-time record: three people online at once, running on an old PC that heated up like a mini data center and roared louder than a drone in flight.

And finally, the biggest project of them all. A Pokémon website.

We started out on one of those platforms with ready-made templates. It wasn’t enough. We wanted to compete with the biggest Pokémon fan sites of the moment, the ones that felt completely out of our league.

To pull that off, we had to go further. We tore the template apart and taught ourselves HTML, CSS, and JavaScript from scratch, one mistake at a time.

The site grew to hundreds of unique visitors, got reviewed by a magazine, and one day we even got a merger offer from one of the most popular Pokémon sites of the time. There was nothing financial on the table. The deal was that we’d hand over our most innovative sections, an interactive map of the Pokémon games and fake interviews with characters from the anime, and then shut our site down for good, folding into theirs. In exchange, we’d gain something we could never have bought on our own, an audience far bigger than ours.

My brother and I mulled it over for days, weighing every pro and con like we were actually negotiating a company acquisition. In the end, we said no. We’d rather be kings of a small kingdom than nobodies in a big empire.

Looking back, I regret it a little. Over time our interests shifted, the site fell into disuse, and it was shut down for good.

But that choice, right or wrong, was still ours to make.

Checkpoint

What I carried in my inventory, leaving this level, wasn’t money. It was habits.

I knew what it meant to work for something. I knew how to say no when it mattered. And thanks to an amateur Pokémon website, I’d just discovered how much I loved building something from scratch and seeing how far it could go.

Maybe that’s the real checkpoint of those years. I hadn’t yet learned how to manage wealth, but I’d already started to understand that money is just one of the resources you can build up. The others, like skills, curiosity, and the ability to build something, can be worth a lot more in the long run.

P.S. If this structure rings a bell, it’s probably because of Mr RIP’s Financial Story. That’s where I got the inspiration to tell my financial journey starting from childhood. The levels, checkpoints, side quests, and of course the story itself, are all my own.

Next level, things get real: high school. See you there.