I once wrote a letter to Santa that said, “All I want is a box of eggnog and a million dollars.” I spelled my name backwards in the signature because I was that young and dyslexic. My mom saved it. I threw it away later in a PTSD-driven moment trying to forget my childhood. But I wish I’d kept it. Because even back then, I knew I wanted something more.
There’s an old saying that the first step toward building wealth is knowing what you’re building it for. In my case, the answer was always clear: safety. Not the kind of safety that comes from seatbelts or alarms, but the kind that lets you say “we’ll be okay,” and mean it, even when the rent is due, the market’s bleeding, or the world feels like it’s unraveling.
This is the first in what I hope will become a long-running series: a transparent, emotionally honest record of how I built my investment portfolios from scratch, not for performance bragging, but to create a safe, stable life for me, my son, and the person I one day hope to share it all with.
Where It Started
Before I ever bought my first stock, I bought an idea.
I was probably under ten when I first noticed it: in movies like The Santa Clause, Jingle All the Way, and Home Alone, the parents, especially the dads, never worried about money. Scott Calvin could provide for his son. Howard could run around chasing Turbo Man. Kevin’s dad, Peter McCallister? For years people wondered how he could afford a big house and a big family (Although; we have to ask was it the mom who was bringing in the bank) . What struck me wasn’t just their income. It was that money gave them freedom, time, choice, and options. It designed their life, not to say there weren’t problematic things outside of their financial success.
But it was the financial success I wanted.
Because for me, life didn’t stay stable. At some point, my dad got sick. I don’t remember exactly when the shift happened, only that it did. Things got harder. And I could also relate to Kevin when it came to the dysfunction in the home, the bullying, the feeling of being dismissed. Of acting out not because you’re bad, but because your environment is loud and heavy, and you don’t know how else to be heard.
Still, the seed was planted. Wealth wasn’t about status. It was about protection. About having something no one could take from you.
The First Moves: Acorns, Robinhood, and $8 to My Name
I moved into my first apartment in 2011, rent was $550, income was around $650. At the end of some months, I had maybe $8 to my name after buying pull-ups for the kid and hoping I wouldn’t need something else for him during the month that food stamps couldn’t cover.
Even though things got a bit better, I still had to count my change, so even in 2014, when I downloaded Acorns, I found the roundup model made sense in theory, but in practice, I was so broke I couldn’t afford to round up. Plus, I didn’t know what I was doing. I would change the settings every other day from low risk to aggressive. ( I find apps like that problematic for those wanting to learn how to invest, or at least understand the mechanics of investing.)
With that said, I wasn’t just poor, I was scared. But I kept learning.
Eventually, I opened Robinhood. I thought the app was the stock market. That’s how abstract it felt. Still, I bought a few tiny positions:
- $10 of Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals
- $6 of Barnes & Noble
- A few dollars in a Black-owned bank in California
When I sold them later, I made a $20 profit. Not much, but it was everything. For the first time, I saw how this worked. Stocks weren’t just headlines or hype, they were ownership. It wasn’t gambling. It was learning.
I told myself then: don’t just do this to get rich. Build something that lasts. Build something real.
The Pivot: 2018 Broke Me Open
By 2018, I hit one of the scariest points in my financial life. My income was uncertain. Rent was due each month, and I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to pay it. I was splitting my phone bill between checks just to buy time. One half this month, one half the next. I couldn’t afford to mess up.
But by 2019, things stabilized, my income became certain for the most part, my housing situation took a turn for the better, and I knew that I never wanted to feel that scared ever again. I put my household on a strict grocery budget: $200 a month. PB&Js were for lunch every week, chips and salsa for snacks, and leftovers from dinner turned into the next day’s dinner.
We bought Great Value sandwich cookies as our dessert, pancake mix was our backup for breakfast, and late-night meals (when we started to run low on other items), with some more PB and J, and Crystal Light was our drink, right besides water.
Two years prior, I had bought a Nintendo Wii at the pawn shop for $25. Not because it was cool, nobody was playing it anymore, but it was cheap entertainment, and we used it during that summer to stay indoors and not spend a dime. We played games like Bully and The Godfather.
Other times I would look out the window and stare at the brick wall that blocks our view reminding myself that we were doing this for a reason, after while, it felt pretty good as people around me kept spending at the resturants below our aprtment buildng while we kept saving, it felt like we were getting richer. I swear, sometimes frugality feels like freedom when you know what the alternative is.
For the first time, I remember the second month, I had $170 in my account at the end of the month. I took my son out for a donut to celebrate. That was our luxury. And it felt like winning, and it further grew my ambition to save more and cut back where we could.
The First Big Stock: Coca-Cola and the Pandemic Bleed
In February 2020, right before the pandemic bled the market, I bought two shares of Coca-Cola. $55 each. I was nervous, but I’d done the reading. I knew this company. I understood it. The shares dropped to the $30s soon after, but I didn’t panic. I bought more. That’s when I knew: I could do this.
The Influence: Joshua Kennon and the Old Guard
Before and around that time, I was reading everything I could from Joshua Kennon. His writing felt like finding a mentor through a keyhole. He wasn’t flashy, wasn’t selling anything. He just wrote like someone who built things. He had a husband, a portfolio, and a calm I wanted for myself. ( I finally found someone that was working through a blueprint that I had been working on myself, but only further along and with more knowlege.)
I also studied Buffett. I wanted quality businesses. I wanted to buy things I could hold. I wasn’t interested in fast money, I wanted wealth. Not as a flex, but as a tool. To fund ideas. To protect my son. To give myself options. To escape if I ever needed to.
The Strategy: Build, Then Build More
So I built portfolios:
- Charles Schwab (Blue Chip/Dividend): Started with Coca-Cola. Expanded into Starbucks, Shell just to name a few (which I bought around $25/share, regret not buying more), and Simon Property Group (also regret not buying more at $55/share during the pandemic). It’s my value play.
- Vanguard (Growth/ETF-heavy): VOO, QQQM. Let the market do the lifting. A little more aggressive.
- Fidelity (Private Fund): My mix. A blend of conviction and caution. Kenvue lives here.
- My Son’s Portfolio: Built for safety, for longevity, for options.
I moved from Robinhood to Schwab when my portfolio crossed $7,000. I was worried about Robinhood’s crypto direction. Schwab felt… adult. Like a bank vault instead of a trendy app. I still sometimes recommend Robinhood to beginners (if they don’t want a traditional brokerage firm, but if you ask me today, I would say Fidelity has all that you need), but it was time to level up.
The Philosophy: Long-Term Ownership
I believe in buying what you understand and what you’d want to own forever. I reinvest every dividend. I rarely check them. I don’t live off them, I plant them back in the soil. Only twice have I ever touched them because I wanted to see what it would be like to get paid from dividends as an investor and then use them to live off and it was a nice feeling, but I am long term stategist>
Last year, my Schwab dividends covered a whole new share of Coca-Cola without any new money from me. That was a moment. A signal that this works.
Regrets, Lessons, and Strategy
I have been asked before…
What’s your proudest investment moment so far? What about your biggest regret? I told them that my proudest moment so far is staying in and just trusting my gut, trusting what I learned, learning to trust myself, and not being scared to look foolish or not smart enough when everybody else was making money around me. I mean, it’s hard. I’ve made a few mistakes.
For example, my biggest regret is buying little ETFs that I thought might be worth it, like FINX, which I’m still down on. It was more of a moment of weakness of like, maybe I’m not doing this well enough. Maybe I’m not being aggressive enough. Maybe I’m not making enough returns on my portfolio.
However, one thing about investing is that you’re learning over the years; it’s not overnight. And so it took me a few years for me to realize that value investors often lag behind the market. They’re not always going to match the market. And I knew that this philosophy was never about beating the market either. Still, it was an eye opening but much needed realization that value investors might not garner the same market returns each year and for me to be okay with that.
Another regret is not buying more Simon Property Group during the pandemic, it dropped to $55 a share. I was nervous because I didn’t really know much about real estate companies. They say the mall was dying. That’s one of the biggest lessons I learned. Trust what I learned all those years studying under my mentors. When I say studying under, I mean just reading their articles over and over, back to front, over and over until I got it and understood even more of the meanings behind it.
Simon Property is now like $157 today at the time of this writing. I wish I had bought more. I think I bought like two or three shares, and that was it.
Understand Your Why, Your Ethics, and Reasons
People say the market is down. That life is hard. That investing is risky.
But so is waking up broke. So is watching your child sleep and wondering how you’ll keep a roof over his head. So is being one check away from collapse.
I’d rather ride the dips of a good company than the dips of despair.
And because I still believe in this market, even when it bleeds.
Don’t stay out of the market just because you’re afraid of what might happen. Pick your principles, learn the structure, and build. Even when the market’s down, I know that it’s temporary. I know the current administration is temporary. I know that some things will unfortunately have to take more than four years to recover, but if anything, as Warren Buffett says, don’t bet against America. Don’t bet against the largest American companies.
Understand that we, the people, have more power than we think we do. We’ve seen it with companies having to turn around and change their recipes, change what they do with their companies. Yes, you’re going to have those companies that try to bend the rules. Because at the end of the day, you got to keep in mind, companies are made up of what? People. Human beings. Some good, some bad, some smart, some dumb, some morally bankrupt, others that have morals, right?
But understand: the simplest example I give people is that Coca-Cola, for the longest time, didn’t have any Coca-Cola Zero products, right? Then they came out with the diet soda, and now they’re doing zero sugar. And now they’re doing other products that are healthier.
So understand that your ethics matter. But look deeper into the companies that matter to you. Don’t sit outside the market because you’re worried how it might look or how it might feel. That doesn’t mean that you invest in everything and just throw away your ethics. But understand, unfortunately, in this world, money does real things. Money does overtake or encompass a lot of things.
And for me, the reason I keep investing is because I know that I personally think the world we live in is making us sick, environmentally and chemically, and in so many other ways. And stress. And the way we focus on productive hustle as a measure of our worth. You’re only worthy if you are a productive member of society or if you’re constantly grinding. And that’s what I reject.
I think money should be a quiet presence, not a loud dictator. It should be the reason we get to say yes to peace, to health, to rest, not the reason we lose all of those things trying to chase it. That’s why I invest. Not to get rich quick. Not to prove anything. But to buy my time back. To protect the people I love. To one day sit at the table with someone I love, look them in the eye, and say, “We’re good. Let’s breathe.”
Futhermore…
I invest because I want to be okay. Because my son was sick as a child, he has some deficits that he’s had to overcome and still is working on them. I just want him to always be okay, regardless of what’s going on with him. He’s a smart child, and he’ll be able to do great things if that’s what he sets his mind to. I think just knowing that he’s going to be taken care of is why, but not just that, but I also imagine being that safe place for the person I love.
Because I imagine a love story where I get to hold the person I care about most and fund the ideas we dream up together. I can help make those happen. I can bring that peace of mind to not just my life, but their life as well.
When I think about that, I think about the home I want, the environment I want. It’s not just a structure. Yes, I would like to have my own house or the kind of home I would like in terms of a house, but it’s really just the home environment I want, where money is not the loudest. Money is not the issue. If anything, it’s where we own our time. Also, one day, if we look at each other and say, “Let’s get away,” we can book that trip to Italy/Rome without asking permission or checking a bank balance.
There’s also, again, being a parent of a sick child, wanting to be able to contribute to Mary Bridge at one point, going to the Christmas Tree Festival Gala and being able to put my name on a donation or create a foundation where we give scholarships to students like me who came from pretty much nothing in terms of the academic world and not having that support and that foundation and having to get that support as an adult rather than a child.
There are so many reasons why I keep going, so many reasons why to keep investing. If anything, I would tell people this. Think of the life that you truly, truly want, and then invest in that, not only in just stocks and bonds and savings, but within yourself.
Everything worth having is worth investing in, whether it’s your fitness, your health, your loved ones, or your financial projects. If you want to own your time so you can write books all the time, invest. If you want to create films and not worry about an income, invest. I think that is where I come into play with this, is that that’s what keeps me going
Even if it all started with a backwards letter to Santa and a box of eggnog.
P.S. I wrote this blog post from a personal Q&A. You can read the transcript here – some of my answers are either omitted or condensed since I wrote most of them into the blog post.
Portfolio Interview Transcript
Q: When did your curiosity about investing first begin?
A: Honestly, probably before the age of 10. Because I was always interested in those 1990‑1980 finance movies where, like, you had characters like Scott Calvin from The Santa Clause. You had Howard from Jingle All The Way. And I had Kevin’s dad, Peter McAllister. And I remember thinking, like, wow, not only do they not have to worry about money, but they’re able to design a life they want or create a certain life. And life wasn’t always hard financially, I think, growing up. It wasn’t until my dad got sick, and I can’t remember exactly when that was that foodbanks became the norm.
But financially, I remember most of us struggling. The home itself was a whole different story. I can relate to Kevin and how he was treated by his parents and everyone. Like, he was just a bad sheep, the bad child, even though what he did often manifested from what was going on. Like, his behavior was a manifestation of the things going on in the home. But I think my desire for investing definitely started early.
And then I think what made me really get into it when I first took interest in it and actually made it happen was, actually, wait, no. Back in 2014, I bought my first shares because I wanted to understand how it works. I downloaded Robinhood, and I remember no, wait. Scratch that. I’m trying to get to it. I downloaded Acorns, thinking, like, okay, this is how you do it. But it rounds up change. At this time, I didn’t have much money. I think my rent was, like, $550 plus electricity. My income was, like, $650‑something. If that, it wasn’t much.
On a good month, I had maybe, like, $8 left in my name. And then over time, I got maybe a little bit more money in my hands. So I would try to invest a little change here and there, but it wasn’t much. And then I chose the least aggressive, and I would change it to aggressive. I didn’t really know what I was doing, so I would change it every so often to a setting in Acorns. And then I got out of that because I didn’t really have the money to round up. I was that broke. I just couldn’t afford for it to round up because it might send me into the negative. Or I needed that extra $1.50 for groceries.
I think it was, like, 2014 or around that same time, or maybe a little bit later, I bought my first couple of shares of companies on Robinhood. I downloaded Robinhood because I wanted to understand how it looked. I thought the stock market was the app. You hear about the stock market. Like, what is that? It’s so abstract. You feel like there’s some puppet or somebody pulling the strings behind it, right? That’s how abstract it is.
But then I downloaded Robinhood because I was like, I want to see how this works. And I was like, okay. I remember buying shares of Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals. I bought Barnes & Noble. And I bought a Black‑owned bank in California. At the time, I was thinking in ‘stocks’, not ownership of businesses. And I made a profit. I sold each one of them because at that point, I remember telling myself, I really want to become wealthy from this.
I really want to build long‑term wealth from this. I don’t want this to just be a get‑rich‑quick scheme. So overall, I made, like, $20 in profit selling those shares. And they weren’t much. It was fractional. I bought, like, $10 of Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals, $6 of Barnes & Noble, and $5 of the bank. The Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals, I made more money from. And at that time, I can’t remember the price. It was, like, $20 a share or maybe more. I don’t remember. But that’s how I really got started, but it was right then and there I promised to not put another dime into the market until I learned how to actually build wealth through it.
Q: What happened next?
A: In 2018, I went through a really scary time with finances. I did not have a stable income at the time. So I was scared about a lot of things. I kind of wrote an article about that, of not being sure what was going to happen with my income, with rent. It was month-to-month at that point. And then I remember when things got okay and things settled down, and I knew that I was going to be okay. It was 2019. And I was, like, okay, don’t waste this chance to become financially stable, to have ownership of something, financial backup.
So I put us on a grocery budget of $200 a month. We ate a lot of PB&J sandwiches, a lot of salsa and chips for a snack. Dinner was sometimes the same thing the day after the next day. Like, we had leftovers. If we were lucky, we had pancakes for breakfast here and there. Dessert was those Walmart Great Value cookies that come with chocolate. Sandwich cookies, chocolate, and vanilla. It’s one big pack. And sometimes you’ll have the deluxe with one side being chocolate, the other side being vanilla. That was our dessert. And we did that for a great part of 2019, $200 a month.
I remember for the first time, I had, like $170 in my account after two months. And I was, like, whoa, I kept $170 in my savings. And I remember saying to my son, let’s go get a donut at the new donut shop. And it felt so nice for the first time to have money at the end of the month rather than have more month than money.
And that was because we spent that summer playing games so we could stay home for entertainment instead of spending money out there. It felt different, like this is what people do if they want to save money. Now frugality feels normal to me.
Q: February 2020, the first big purchase?
A: Right before the pandemic bled the market, I bought two shares of Coca‑Cola at $55 and change each. The market crashed, shares dropped into the $30s, and I kept buying. Preparation met opportunity.
Q: Do you follow a particular investing philosophy?
A: Yes, value, growth, and dividend income. My blue‑chip portfolio with Charles Schwab started with those Coca‑Cola shares. My Vanguard account is growth‑tilted, VOO, QQQM. Depending on the market, one portfolio goes up while another lags.
Q: What do you believe the average person gets wrong about investing?
A: That it’s an old white man’s game, or that you need a lot of money. You don’t. Start small. Meet yourself where you are.
Q: Has your strategy changed or stayed the same?
A: I’ve kept it since day one and doubled down.
Q: Do you reinvest dividends?
A: Yes, always. I don’t touch them. Last year, my dividends covered an entire new share of Coca‑Cola.
Q: How often do you review and rebalance?
A: Occasionally. I let time do its thing.
Q: Can you walk us through your original portfolio and its evolution?
A: It started with Coca‑Cola, then Starbucks, Shell (I bought at $25/share and wish I’d bought more), Simon Property Group (I regret not loading up at $55 during the pandemic, it’s around $150 now). Now I also own Nike, Kenvue, and more.
Q: Why move from Robinhood to Schwab?
A: My portfolio hit $7K. Robinhood leaned hard into crypto, and I wanted my money in a vault, not a trendy app.
Q: How many portfolios do you manage and what are their personalities?
A: Schwab (old‑guard blue chip value), Vanguard (growth ETF), Fidelity (private fund mix), and my son’s portfolio.
Q: Proudest moment and biggest regret?
A: Proudest, trusting my gut and staying in when others panicked. Biggest regret, buying little ETFs like FINX out of FOMO.
Q: Finally, why keep going now, when the market’s down, when life’s uncertain, when you miss the people you love?
A: Because you get one life in this body with with the people you love. I invest so my kid is safe, so I can fund ideas with a future partner, so money isn’t the loudest voice in the room. If life gets heavy, I want to own my time, fly to Italy for a month and come home to stability, invest for scholarships, for medical research, for the Mary Bridge Christmas Tree Festival.
Everything worth having is worth investing in. Even when the market’s down, it’s temporary. Don’t bet against America or against yourself. Ethics matter, Coca‑Cola now makes zero‑sugar products because people demanded better. Companies are people, some good, some bad, but we have power.
Money does real things. So I keep investing. Because I refuse to wake up broke, to watch the lights get cut, to bet my future on despair. I plant dividends back in the soil and grow options instead of fear.
The Broke College Student 
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