I’ve been interested in personal finance for as long as I can remember. I got a job mowing grass in my neighborhood when I was in the 5th grade and began to faithfully sock away $20 bills into my bank account. It wasn’t until a few years later that I realized I could do something better than let my money earn 0.01% interest!

I’m not sure how or why, but in middle school I became fascinated with investing. I read as many books as I could find at the local library and would regularly watch Jim Cramer’s Mad Money stock show on CNBC at 6pm. With my eyes opened to this new world, I asked my dad to help me open a brokerage account one Christmas so I could start buying some stocks.

I still remember the first stock I bought in middle school, a solar company named Suntech Power. My rationale: solar is probably the future and will grow a lot (haha). I paid $6.86 per share and happily watched as it doubled in price within 6 months. Every morning I would sit in World History class “taking notes” during the lecture on my school-issued laptop, but in reality I was just checking Etrade and the daily performance of all my stocks! I was hooked. It wasn’t until later on that I realized I wasn’t actually an investing genius like I thought… I was just incredibly lucky to begin my investing career right after the market had completely crashed in 2008. Pretty much everything I could have bought would have gone up in 2009!

I went on to college to study finance and accounting (and even later to grad school to get an MBA), But it wasn’t my business classes that really taught me anything about personal finance. I quickly learned that managing your money doesn’t require knowing any fancy textbook theories, and you don’t need the intelligence of Einstein or the business savvy of Bill Gates. It’s actually pretty simple and boils down to a couple basic principles. Hopefully this site will help you realize just how easy it can be.