The Origin
I grew up navigating financial uncertainty in a household where money was always a conversation — and rarely a comfortable one. My mom was a mother of four with limited support, and college felt like an impossible mountain to climb. What got me there was a high school teacher named Mrs. Wolford, a class on college readiness, and a stubborn refusal to let circumstances write my story for me.
I became an engineer — not because it was my calling, but because it was stable and it paid. It took years of writing on the side, hiking mountains, moving cities, and sitting alone in Roman BnBs to understand what I actually wanted to do with my life.
Find the thing that draws you in for hours and hold on to it tightly.
For me, that thing has always been writing. Scholarships earned. Conference abstracts accepted. And now this — a place to think out loud and share what I find.
I spent a summer working at my dad's pizza shop in Virginia Beach the summer before my first year of high school. He passed away that January. I still think about the lesson he taught me cutting vegetables in his kitchen — always cut down and away from the body. In retrospect, it was about a lot more than knives.
The Work
By day, I've spent my career improving transportation systems as an engineer — work that, at its best, is deeply purposeful. By night (and in the margins of every commute), I write. Essays. Stories. Data reports designed to help people understand their own financial lives honestly.
The connective thread between all of it is clarity. I believe that most of the problems we face — personal, financial, societal — get harder when we avoid looking at them directly, and easier when we find the courage to examine them with honest eyes.
Data analysis and storytelling aren't opposites. They're two different ways of asking the same question: what's actually going on here?
I've lived in Maryland, Baltimore, and now Denver — a city that has given me mountains, house music, and a community of people who take their lives seriously without taking themselves too seriously. It suits me.
What I Believe
Over years of reading, writing, moving, working, and sitting with myself in uncomfortable places, I've distilled my operating principles into four freedoms — the ones I use to make decisions: