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Going Broke On Purpose
Justin Hunte gave himself five years to get paid for writing about rap and ran out of money at year three. What got him through was not a hustle, it was sitting down and working out exactly what broke would look like.
By ElleJanelle|August 12, 2026|5 min read
The phone call happened in the middle of a Wednesday stream that had already run three hours and had no particular plan in it. Justin Hunte had ten minutes. He gave most of them to one question, and the answer turned out to be the most concrete thing anybody said on the show that morning.
The question was about the transition from corporate America to independent journalism, and Justin does not answer it the way that question usually gets answered. He does not talk about passion. He talks about a budget.
Five years, and what happens at year three
He left a job at Bank of America Merrill Lynch and gave himself five years to be getting paid to write about rap music. If he was not there by then, he would reassess: if he was still enjoying it and still not getting hired, he would go to journalism school, on the theory that the paper proves you can finish something.
He made it to three.
I'm like, oh shit, I am almost out of money. It's going to be a problem, because I was having the time of my life. I felt like I was doing great work. I felt like I was closer to the sun than ever. But you know, my budget.
The obvious move was to go back to finance for something low impact that would keep the lights on. He talked himself out of it inside a sentence, and the reason is worth sitting with, because it is a claim about how the industry is arranged rather than about how hard he was willing to work. The thing generating his progress was availability. If he was at a desk eight hours a day, he could not be at Fat Beats until four in the morning waiting to ask Raekwon about the purple tape. Presence was the asset. A job would have spent it.
The exercise
So instead of solving for money, he solved for the worst case. He asked what his life would actually look like if he simply went broke.
He was living in Brooklyn. There was a grandmother who would take him in. Failing that, South Carolina, where two fraternity brothers each owned a nightclub. That is two venues. He knew rappers by then, so he could book people into those venues, and when they came through he could get an interview. Phone interviews and Skype interviews still worked from anywhere.
Which meant the worst case was not a cliff. It was a slightly slower version of the same plan.
Once the worst case had an address, it stopped being frightening. Justin's phrasing for what happened next: the exercise separated him from the fear, the stress and the pressure, and he became resolute that it was going to work out either way.
What happened after that reads like a run of luck and is probably better understood as what stops being invisible when you are no longer bracing. Inside a few weeks: the Homeboy Sandman review, then the Lupe Fiasco Food and Liquor II review he had wanted on a major publication, then an invitation to Atlanta to shoot on camera interviews at A3C, where he met the people who ran the company. Two weeks after that, the good kid m.A.A.d city review, which became the most read review in the site's history. A week later he was at their New York retreat, and at dinner that night they offered him the editor in chief job.
He was about three months from quitting. His own image for it is the cartoon of the man digging for diamonds who turns around one swing short.
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Asked what corporate America was actually worth to him, Justin does not say discipline or professionalism. He says scale.
Working inside a large company shows you how many separate functions it takes to sell one thing. You can be selling tires, and there is a whole department that exists only to make sure people pay you, and another that exists only to handle the people who work there. Seeing that map changes what you do with a small operation, because you start asking which piece is missing rather than working harder at the piece you already have.
He applies it directly to video. The difference between the work he did at a large news site and the work he does now, in his own account, is that they got efficient: not better ideas, faster turnaround at the same quality. He also notes that in his whole corporate career he never once saw a group build a budget they actually believed they would hit. A budget was a starting point. Anything could happen from there. That is the lens he brought to his own five years.
Where ElleJanelle comes in
She takes the same question from the other side, and the shape matches. She never went corporate, but she was pointedly anti-job for the same reason: a job would have taken the hours, and she is a systems thinker who needed the hours to learn how the systems went together. She is blunt that this included accepting being broke, and blunter still that it was one of the best decisions she made, because what it bought was range. Time to learn the tech, work in a lot of roles, and work with a lot of people.
The two accounts land in the same place from different directions. Neither of them describes the choice as brave. Both describe it as arithmetic they were willing to do.
The figures, dates and career timeline in this piece are Justin Hunte's own account, given live on a phone call and not independently verified. Read them as his account of his own life, which is what they are.