I grew up in a house where money was the most stressful thing in the room.

Texas, a loving family, and a constant low hum of money stress.

Then it all came apart.

I was fifteen when I decided what I was going to do with my life.

I went and learned it from the inside.

1. 2011 to 2016

   Discount Tire

   It was my first real job working as a customer service coordinator while I put myself through school, with long shifts, interacting with real people, and learning how to make a paycheck stretch.

   It taught me great work ethic and was a foundational step in building it. It taught me how to always keep 100% of your focus on the experience of the person you're serving, not on yourself. It kept me humble and I will forever be grateful for this experience.

2. 2013 to 2016

   Stephen F. Austin State University

   Bachelor of Business Administration in finance, with an emphasis in portfolio management. I graduated with a strong GPA and came out fired up, ready to help people with their money. I became treasurer and eventually president of my fraternity, learning to manage a chapter of over 40 college students with little to no alumni help and no adult supervision. What my fraternity taught me, along with my first career, is how to deal with people and build strong relationships. What my formal education taught me while I was there was how to learn the markets, mathematics, and analysis. 

   What none of it taught me was the physical experience of what to say when I was sitting across a kitchen table with a dear client.

3. 2016

   Northwestern Mutual

   My introduction to the industry, and to how it actually works. I learned how to sit with people, ask hard questions, and get people in front of me so I could actually help them. I learned grit. Working on 100% commission only and learning to call continued those lessons. One of the most fundamental lessons I have ever learned is that your network, the relationships you have, and the people around you are the most important things in your life.

   This is also where I began to understand the financial industry and the type of people you are incentivized and encouraged to go after. They did not look like the people I was trying to help, and mentors willing to help me take on that work were few and far between.

4. 2016 to 2022

   Edward Jones

   This is where I learned the bulk of my experience in the financial planning industry. I spent six months in training in an after-college program in St. Louis, immersing myself in the business every single day. My job was to find as many people as I could to help who fit the profile of what we were looking for. I spent my years knocking on thousands of doors in front of people who had far more money than the average person, large accounts, huge incomes coming in, and many people who had already won. I had the chance to study these people, their mindset, their habits, and how they managed their money without even realizing it. I was running a successful branch office in Columbus, Texas, and got to help hundreds of families.

   Despite the success in that position, something still felt missing. I was not building things the way I thought they should be done, and I was not following my own intuition for how to best give my gift to the world.

5. 2022 to present

   Money Holistics

   In 2022, after a long internal struggle, I followed my intuition to start my own company, even if it meant losing everything and starting from zero. I kept doing the one-on-one work with families and individuals, but on my own terms and in my own style. I built Money Holistics, from scratch, stitching together the best tools and the most cutting-edge technology I could find in the industry, all serving one purpose: helping the people I wanted to help, with no restriction on who that could be or how it was done.

   The leap of faith paid off. It became one of the best decisions I ever made, and it gave me more growth than anything I had endured in my life. Still to this day, I love this part of my job the most: working with people one-on-one and hearing the countless stories of where people come from and how they got there. 

6. 2024 to present

   MoneyYogi

   MoneyYogi was my attempt to embed the process of building awareness around money into technology. Most people lack awareness, so they don't understand where they are, how they got there, or what is actually happening with their money. MoneyYogi was the missing link.

   The way I was helping people seemed a bit different from what most were doing: I helped bridge the gap in the unknown about where they actually stood. I built the technology to build this awareness, so someone can understand how they're actually doing and get a launching point to manifest a better situation.

The difference was never intelligence. It was awareness, an open mind, and discipline.

Five things I am certain about.

Your financial life is like a tree.

Most people spend their whole lives pulling at the fruit. Different results come from somewhere much lower down.

1. Fruit

   Your results

   What is in your accounts, what you owe, what you own, how much room you have to breathe. This is what everyone tries to fix first, and it is the last thing that moves.

2. Trunk

   Your actions and behaviors

   How your beliefs show up in daily decisions. What you spend on, what you avoid, what you check, what you refuse to look at, your money strategies, and every action in between.

3. Roots

   Your beliefs and your foundation

   What you were taught about money, what you were told, what you absorbed from the house you grew up in, and why you operate the way you do. Change starts here or it does not last.

You cannot get an orange from an apple tree. If you want different fruit, you go to the roots.

The help my parents needed, built as a money platform.

Three ways in.