I used to think being good with numbers meant I was good with money. Turns out, not even close.
Fresh out of college, I was living paycheck to paycheck like most people. I’d get paid, pay the minimum on my credit card, and just… keep going. I didn’t really look at my finances because honestly? I didn’t want to see them.
Then one day I actually sat down and faced the numbers. Student loans. Credit card debt. Negative net worth. The whole picture.
That was my wake-up call.
I went down a rabbit hole—read every personal finance book I could find, watched countless videos, tried to understand this investing thing everyone talked about. I even tried meeting with certified financial planners, but here’s the thing: most of them didn’t want to meet with me. I had nothing. Negative net worth isn’t exactly an attractive client.
But one financial planner did take the meeting. She didn’t try to sell me anything. She just recommended a book and pointed me in the right direction. That conversation changed everything.
I started small. Like, really small. $50 a month into stocks I believed in—Cisco, Nike, companies I actually knew. I didn’t fully understand what I was doing, but I wanted to get comfortable with the feeling of investing.
From there, it snowballed:
- Robo-advisors like Wealthfront and Betterment
- Maxing out my 401k
- Opening a Vanguard IRA
- Eventually getting into Bitcoin
Every small win built momentum. Paid off the credit card. Started seeing my net worth go positive. Then kept going.
The funny thing? Some of what I learned early on, I don’t even think is the best path anymore. That’s the thing about personal finance—you keep learning, you keep adjusting. There’s no “figure it out once and you’re done.”
I started this blog because I remember how overwhelming it felt at the beginning. How most advice assumed you already had money to spare. How nobody talked to you like a normal person.
So that’s what I’m trying to do here. Share what I’ve learned, what’s working, what’s not—without the gatekeeping or the guilt trips.
You don’t need to have it all figured out to start. You just need to start.