To the readers of this blog,
Each year, Warren Buffett begins his annual letter not with a market prediction, but with a story. I’ll do the same. Let me tell you about Maya.
Maya is fictional, but only technically. She exists in spirit all around us, in a sister, a coworker, a neighbor, or even the woman reading this right now. She is 55. She has no retirement account. She rents, not owns. Her savings are modest, and she still helps her grown children. For years, she put everyone else first.
This is not a story about guilt. It’s a story about beginning.
I. “I Don’t Have Much, But I Want to Do Something”
When Maya first started looking at her finances, she didn’t use words like “net worth” or “asset allocation.” She said things like: “I don’t have much, but I want to do something.” That phrase carried more wisdom than it seems. It means she knows time matters. It means she knows waiting longer won’t help. And most importantly, it means she wants ownership of her life.
Ownership, after all, is what investing really is.
She had around $2,000 in a brokerage account she started a few years ago but had forgotten about. It was invested in a handful of ETFs she didn’t remember choosing. A friend recommended one of them, a TikTok video suggested another. She had no idea why they were there.
The first step wasn’t to invest more. The first step was to understand what she already had.
II. Taking Inventory Like an Owner
Just as Buffett evaluates Berkshire’s dozens of companies, Maya needed to look at her financial life as a portfolio of businesses. Not just stocks, but:
- Her labor (part-time work at a local nonprofit)
- Her time (raising grandkids three days a week)
- Her money (the $2,000 in that forgotten brokerage account)
Each has value. Each can be optimized.
Her brokerage account held SPY (an S&P 500 ETF), ARKK (a speculative innovation fund), and QQQ (a Nasdaq ETF). She didn’t realize how overlapping these were. Together, they made her portfolio heavily tech-weighted and volatile.
We shifted her money slowly, no selling in a panic. One fund at a time, she began building a core: broad-market exposure, low fees, something she could trust.
SPY stayed. The rest, over time, rotated out.
She wasn’t chasing returns anymore. She was building a foundation.
III. The Power of Naming the Goal
Buffett’s letters are famous for being plainspoken, but they always name the goal. Maya had to do the same.
Her goal wasn’t “retire rich.” It was:
“I want to be okay if something happens. I don’t want to depend on anyone.”
That’s a goal you can work with. That’s a number you can reverse-engineer. We calculated what a bare-minimum retirement would look like, based on her lifestyle, her expenses, and her ability to still work part-time in her 60s.
She didn’t need millions. She needed consistency.
IV. From Fear to Framework
Like many late starters, Maya wrestled with regret. “If I had started earlier…” “I should’ve…” But as Buffett once said, “The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.” It’s easy to feel shame. But it’s more useful to build habits now.
So we created a framework:
- Auto-transfer: $75 every two weeks into her brokerage
- Visual tracker: A sheet on her fridge with savings milestones
- Reward system: Every $500 saved, a $10 treat
Behavioral finance matters more than beating the market.
V. What Maya Owns Now
She still rents. She still helps her kids. Her salary hasn’t changed. But Maya owns something she didn’t before:
A growing investment account.
A clear plan.
And a new story about herself.
She is not someone who missed the boat.
She is someone who got on board.
And that makes all the difference.
Final Word
We tell stories like Maya’s not because they’re rare, but because they’re common. And yet, they’re rarely told with care. Most financial media skips over people like her. But here, we don’t.
Because building late is still building. And ownership doesn’t expire at 55.
Neither does hope.
The Broke College Student 
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