Like so many of us, I didn’t have a real financial education growing up, even though I became an entrepreneur at the age of 11 (I sold boards with nails in them, it’s a whole thing). I earned money all my life—selling homemade toys led to selling newspapers led to an hourly job at 15—and still looked up after college to see I had a pile of car loans, credit cards, and school debt, with no money saved for a house.

As I entered my first year holding a freshly minted finance degree with a minor in economics, I took a hard look at my own situation and had a eureka moment: finance is much more than math. It’s a mindset about money. With that new thinking, I took advantage of my employer’s benefits, dropped my horrible decision to lease a vehicle, and paid off all my student loan and card debt.

I started SmartMov to help educate other people drowning in a series of poor financial choices. Gamifying the experience, like I did in the early days of tackling my own mess, helps us learn that we must make the choice every day to invest in ourselves. Otherwise, all our hard-earned money disappears toward slapdash spending choices like yet another subscription we’ll forget about. We don’t have to cut out all the joy to make smart choices, but we do need to make those choices conscious and thoughtful. We think a cow bank is much smarter than a piggy bank: you can keep milking a cow, but you have to smash the piggy to eat once.