Our call didn’t introduce any kind of tangible solution. I still don’t know wtf to do with the money situation I have going on.

But just the act of admitting I’ve been struggling with this problem was a massive relief.

And my relief was doubled when she shared that she feels the exact same way.

I don’t subscribe to the struggle narrative where things have to be difficult in order for me to be considered successful. But hey, sometimes shit does get hard, in which case, I don’t have to struggle alone.

So this is me, a girl from Texas who is sitting at her laptop with a vanilla pistachio iced latte next to her, coming to you and putting it all out there with total, unflinching honesty.

I’ve been a terrible wealth multiplier this year.

My entire “job” is to take my household’s earned income and multiply it into wealth using real estate, startups, and stocks. I don’t work a 9-5 job, or make any meaningful income compared to my husband’s salary. My value is being the household CFO.

And yet, I have acquired zero real estate and wrote zero checks for angel investments. The only reason my stock portfolio has soared is because I have a biweekly auto-buy that does all the heavy lifting for me. Can’t exactly take credit for that.

If I were to sit down for a performance review, the boss (me) would look at her employee (also me) and sigh.

“What exactly have you been doing all year, Kaya? Because I’m not seeing results.”

Which is crazy because I’ve been busy this year. For example if you’re a paid subscriber to the Wealth Multiplier Universe, you’re probably familiar with my real estate development deal chronicles in which I’ve been working on a multi-multi-multi-big-ass-multi-million dollar development deal.

I’ve written multiple offers on multiple rental properties, none of which have worked out. I have yet to see the closing table at a title company this year, which is a bummer because I adore a crispy glass of bubbles after signing 200+ pages of contracts.

I’ve talked to multiple founders, spent hours on Zooms and performing due diligence, and signed zero SAFE agreements.

I’ve connected with hotel operators, commercial real estate funds, local business owners, you name it.

I genuinely feel like I am going insane due to shocking lack of fruits of my labor.

I feel defeated/rattled/resigned/frustrated/impatient/irritated AND like a total imposter.

My whole “thing” is being the chief investment officer, and uhhh… that requires actually making investments.

Lately I’ve been hopping on calls with my paid subscribers. I love getting to know each of you, and it tickles me to learn how much we all have in common. Y’all just get me.

So I met with a paid sub recently and I surprised myself by sharing all of the above with her. Usually I tend to be a very guarded, private person, but on this call, I felt compelled to open up about how I’ve been sucking at my job. And I am so glad I did because she completely understood me.

I’ve been beating myself up all year over my lack of results and waffling in my decision making. It was a weight off my chest to realize that she had been feeling this way too. Which means I’m certain many of you have also been feeling this way.

Between rising mortgage rates, political weirdness, inflation and tariffs… I am uncertain of what’s to come.

It’s difficult to be the decisive, empowered wealth multiplier I’ve previously been when job security is at risk (my husband works in tech and it’s not a secret that the industry is going through massive change) and it just feels safer to hold cash for now.

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All the popular advice online is about being bold when others hesitate and millionaires are made during recessions because they took the risk, blah blah blah. But this isn’t a business theory classroom or a nice Pinterest quote… this is my real life and my family’s real finances. I’m nervous.

And I feel like a total failure of a wealth multiplier.

So what’s a girl to do?

Answer: A HUGE reframe is required.

True, I didn’t make any big audacious investments this year like I had once hoped. But I definitely wasn’t idle. I’ve been researching, analyzing, learning, learning, learning. For example, I’ve learned an insane amount this year about real estate development without risking any of my own capital. Via deals I passed on, I’ve logged more due diligence hours as an angel investor than ever before. Just by continuing to manage my existing real estate portfolio, I’ve deepened my knowledge of how people do business (and unfortunately how tenants can do some truly out of pocket things).

This reminds me of the first year I was a realtor. The Austin market had entered a major cooldown as mortgage rates were rising, buyers were hesitating, and somehow I was trying to transact and build up my roster of clients. If I had gotten my real estate license a few years earlier during COVID, I would have made an absolute killing in commissions because the local market was on fire. But I didn’t. I entered the market as a realtor when things were slowing down.

That ended up being such a blessing. While I didn’t necessarily make bank my first year in real estate, I did a zillion reps in real estate analysis, sales calls, listing presentations, showings with clients, and rejections. The market was slow, so all I could do was practice and prepare. That eventually made me a skilled negotiator and realtor.

So while 2026 hasn’t shaped up to be the mega money moves I had originally planned, I can’t discredit the amount of preparation and hands on practice I’ve had the privilege and luxury of doing.

I’m fairly certain that I’m not alone in this situation of being disappointed by how the year has transpired from an investing POV.

If you haven’t yet completed a wealth creation goal this year, think back on the practice hours you have logged. Maybe you haven’t closed on your first rental property yet, but you did submit an offer and negotiate with a seller before walking away because you couldn’t come to terms on numbers that made sense. That experience is valuable and makes you a savvier investor who will be better equipped when the next potential property inevitably pops up.

I opened up (and feel slightly embarrassed to have aired all my business like this), so now I’m passing the mic.

Leave a comment and let me know how your year has gone down, what kinds of practice reps you’ve logged, and how they will come in clutch in the future.

Inside the Wealth Multiplier Universe, we play the long game. See you next week!

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Just not 100% universally applicable info.

Because after a certain tax bracket, the rules for financial literacy change pretty dramatically. Things shift from “how do I achieve financial stability” to “how do I turn my stable high income into actual wealth and freedom.”

Who gives two f*cks about a monthly budgeting spreadsheet when you’re hit with your very first 5-figure tax bill from the IRS??? Houston, we have a MUCH bigger problem.

I remember sitting next to my husband on the sofa and looking at TurboTax together from my laptop. We were totally bamboozled, a little offended, and wholly unprepared for our first ugly tax bill. It is a canon event for every high income household, I fear.

So here are some advanced money lessons I had to learn the hard way, and these are lessons that your basic finance creator on Instagram won’t ever touch.

Lesson 1: Taxes are for October, not April.

Every Q4, I have a big official meeting with my CPA to take inventory of the current tax year, make any last minute filings and elections, and begin to strategize for the next tax year.

If you’re waiting until April to send your CPA all your income and investment tax docs, it is way way way too late to reduce your tax liability.

April is just for simply filing because October is for proactive tax planning.

In October, you still have time to max out a tax advantaged retirement account or quickly buy a rental property.

I have a friend who is a luxury realtor, and out of nowhere, she found herself closing a deal that literally doubled her typical income for this year.

Naturally, she began to worry about how that would affect her taxes owed. She hustled extremely hard to make this deal work, and in a perfect world she’d keep all or most of the money she just earned!

I told her to immediately hop on a call with her CPA and present the question, “Hey I think this year is going to end up being an abnormally high income year for me. What can I do in these last few months of the year to reduce my tax burden?”

Your tax bill should never be a complete surprise.

It’s not your job to come up with the tax strategy. That’s your CPA’s job. But it is your job to proactively guide the conversation and be forthcoming about your finances.

Lesson 2: More money = more problems… but it’s not your job to fix them.

I’ll be so honest with you. The rumors are true. More money, definitely more problems. Things get complicated as you transition into higher tax brackets, start dealing with eye watering capital gains, or realize that you needed to have set up a trust, like, yesterday.

Meet my favorite cognitive bias, the Dunning-Kruger effect.

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias that describes the systematic tendency of people with low ability in a specific area to give overly positive assessments of their ability. The term may also refer to the tendency of high performers to underestimate their skills.

Every high income household experiences their “valley of despair” moment when they receive their first nasty tax bill, vow to be more proactive about tax planning, and then realize how insanely overwhelming tax planning for high income households is.

You start to realize how little you know about your own financial position, and it is very humbling.

Your confidence is at an all-time low because you have just started to understand the vast amount of tax code out there.

Allow me to rescue your self-confidence.

It’s not up to you to perfectly understand and apply all that tax code. Or estate planning. Or real estate strategy.

It IS up to you to find the professionals who have this shit down to a science.

Your highest priority job is to ruthlessly interview and vet each professional that deserves a spot on your wealth creation roster.

Challenges and new situations when you have access to more and more money are inevitable.

“Oh my god, my rental property has a broken sink and my tenant is threatening to withhold rent until it’s fixed”

“My grandparents want to gift me their house before they pass away because it’s their dream to see their grandkids grow up in that house”

“Sooo I’m guessing that our tax bill is going to go way up because of my insanely huge bonus this year”

Like, where do we even start? Should we dive into the IRS website and learn as much as we can? Should you go back to school and get a law degree?

Absolutely not!!!!

We find someone who has already made our problem their specialty.

It’s a “who do I call?” not a “how do I fix this myself?” mindset shift.

As your money grows, your responsibility to know the right people also grows.

Lesson 3: Not every high income household needs to be a dual income household.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a dual income power couple. Attorney plus doctor, CPG business owner plus tech executive, even double doctor. That’s hot.

No one is ooh-ing and ahhh-ing over the “high earner plus stay at home spouse/parent” combo… BUT THEY SHOULD BE.

Because the stay at home wife/mom/husband/dad/partner/whatever can also be a full time wealth multiplier, earning zero income but influencing serious wealth for their household.

This is the blueprint my household follows.

My husband is the high earner, and I am the wealth multiplier.

I don’t work a 9-5 job, and I don’t bring home any meaningful income compared to my partner’s salary.

But we did the math. Any potential salary I could take home is dwarfed by the amount of money I influence in my household based on my effort in tax planning, real estate management, angel investing, and general household CFO stuff.

My household is light years ahead financially because of my decision to quit my job and pursue this full time wealth multiplier role.

Because to be honest, my husband is way too busy working his demanding 9-5 job. He doesn’t have the bandwidth to be maintaining a real estate license, keeping tabs on the local market, self-managing rental properties and all the tenants, meeting with startup founders, balancing our stock portfolio, meeting with our CPA, organizing our tax docs and deal flow, managing household staff, keeping the wealth building engine of our household well oiled and running… do I need to go on?

Some households could seriously benefit from one spouse giving up their 9-5 and becoming a full time wealth multiplier.

That “loss” of income is trivial compared to the long term wealth creation benefits and, yes, life satisfaction too. Not ashamed to admit it, but I love my wealth multiplier lifestyle. 10am morning walk with my puppy, 12pm all the rent checks hit while I’m at lunch with friends, 3pm Pilates class, 4pm quick call with my CPA, 9pm I’m in bed feeling relaxed and blessed af. What a life!

Lesson 4: Protect what you have before chasing more.

Slightly juvenile confession to make, but for a while, I was sure that wealth building meant just more and more and more.

Except the more you own, the more there is to lose.

Imagine this (and if you already own rentals, I’m sure you’ve already pictured this): A guest slips on a wet slippery step at your rental property and falls. They get hurt, lawyer up, and now suddenly someone is going after everything with your name on it. Savings, investments, future income, not just the property.

I don’t even want to entertain what would happen if that lawsuit went badly.

There’s a distinctly unsexy side to wealth building, and it goes like this: umbrella insurance, disability insurance, insurance insurance insurance, estate planning, wills, LLCs.

Umbrella insurance sits on top of your home and auto policies and kicks in when a claim is bigger than your regular coverage. A million dollars of extra liability coverage often costs a few hundred bucks a year (it varies by state and by how many properties and cars you have). For how much protection you get, it might be the best deal in personal finance.

When you’re still in the slog of your wealth building journey, your ability to produce income is your biggest asset. Because your income feeds all the wealth creation side quests. So if you got hurt or sick and couldn’t work for a year, what happens then? Enter disability insurance. Check whether your employer offers group coverage, and look at how much it actually replaces. I’d much rather do the research now than have a nasty surprise later. (Can you tell that I really, really dislike surprises)

Drafting a will and naming beneficiaries overwhelms some people, but do remember our little mantra: “who?” and not “how?”

The “who” is an estate planning attorney. They draft your will and can tell you whether you need a revocable living trust, which is often what lets you skip probate and keep property held in your name out of court. Many offer flat fees. A basic will might run a few hundred to a couple thousand dollars, and a trust package costs more. To find one, I recommend asking your CPA or insurance agent for referrals. Estate planning needs to be their main thing, not a side gig offering.

And because everyone will not shut up about LLCs…

Having an LLC is NOT a magical impenetrable shield. I get so irritated when LLCtok gets on their high horse about LLC this and LLC that.

An LLC can protect you from liabilities tied to the business, but it definitely won’t cover your own negligence, and it will completely fall apart if you mix personal and business money (this is called “piercing the veil,” and yes it’s as dramatic as it sounds). If you take away one thing from this essay, hear this. Keep the accounts separate, keep the paperwork clean, and keep the insurance too. The LLC and the insurance work together. Don’t DIY this shit.

Also please stop putting “llc” in your Instagram or TikTok handles, it’s not required and it is very tacky.

What happens after the so-called pinnacle of financial success?

You did the thing. You climbed the career ladder or hustled in your business and now you’re solidly making multi-six or 7+ figures.

That is where basic financial literacy content grinds to an awkward halt.

But this is precisely where the Wealth Multiplier Universe begins.

I do a pretty great job at being able to immediately strike off listings from my radar. I can pretty much decide “absolutely not” versus “hmm let me look into this further” within ten minutes (or less).

Rental properties have been a major pillar of my wealth creation strategy for the last six years. I’ve done Airbnb short term rentals, fully furnished mid term rentals, and long term rentals alike. I’ve faced unexpected vacancies, roof leaks, nightmare tenant drama, you name it. None of that turns me off from continuing to acquire real estate because the upside is just too good.

Cash now (tax perks), cash every year (rental income), and cash later (property appreciation).

But a misaligned property can make this trifecta a bit more complicated.

Notice how I say “misaligned” and not “wrong.” There are no wrong properties. There’s a property for everyone. You just need to learn to develop the discernment to know when a property is right for YOU, your risk appetite, and your financial goals.

This is a breakdown of my systematized approach to analyzing rentals.

(My degree in chemical engineering, may it collect dust in peace, was definitely useful for teaching me how to analyze numbers.)

Off with its head!

I have a kill test. It’s personalized to my risk appetite. I know myself, and I know that gut renovations or extensive property maintenance straight out the gate are not my thing. I also have been in the real estate game for long enough to know the ins and outs of HOAs… and all the tricky ways it can preserve your property value but also limit property usage.

So if a property has any of the following criteria, I immediately move on:

• Built prior to 2016 (the general rule is that I don’t buy properties older than 10 years old)

• HOA prohibits leases less than 12 months

• Pools or hot tubs (holy liability)

I strongly recommend developing your own kill test. Doesn’t need to be long, but it does need to be ultra specific. Or else you’ll be drowning in potential listings with zero filter.

Alignment with rental strategy

Before I even open MLS to browse properties, I’ve already decided which rental strategy I want to employ. Am I going for a short term rental? Or am I interested in a mid term or long term rental? I did a deep dive on the pros and cons of each strategy here.

I have a chat with my CPA to discuss the tax implications. Because a short term rental property is subject to different tax code than a long term rental.

I have to decide which strategy first and foremost because my rental strategy will dictate my buy box.

Get a buy box or GTFO

A buy box is a specific set of criteria for a rental property.

An example of a terrible buy box: “I want a rental property that cash flows $500/month”

Or even worse: “I want a rental property that is a great deal”

Horrible buy box!!! I’m throwing tomatoes. Boooooooo.

THIS is a great buy box: “I want a 3 bedroom STR-permitted property in the zip code 78745 with a contract price below $500k”

It’s great because 1) it’s super specific 2) it implies cash flow expectations by outlining property specs and price.

If you tell your realtor that your rental property criteria is just “anything that cash flows,” that realtor is going to roll their eyes so hard. Trust me on this. I’m allowed to say this because I am a realtor. Realtors operate best when given specific instructions like “find me turnkey properties under $400k with 2 bedrooms in 78702 and 78721.” You’ll accomplish your goal of acquiring a rental property way faster.

DO YOUR RESEARCH AHEAD OF TIME. I’m yelling because it’s important.

When you define “3 bedroom STR-permitted property in 78745,” you’ve just defined rental income expectations. Use a tool like AirDNA to analyze what’s possible with STR income.

When you define “contract price below $500k,” now you’ve defined debt service and therefore cash flow. You can strategize with your mortgage lender on what the estimated monthly payment for a $500k single family will be. (And if your mortgage lender can’t do that, you need a new lender. A great lender will be savvy enough to know how to do this.)

Based on the estimate your lender provides, you can calculate a very basic version of monthly cash flow. Hopefully it’s positive cash flow. That is worth exploring. If it’s negative from the jump, it’s time to tweak your buy box until the numbers do make sense.

Nail down your buy box, and watch how easy it is to say yes or no to a potential property. I can say this confidently: getting clear is 90% of the battle.

The perfect property

Yeah so… the “perfect” property doesn’t exist.

There will always be something about the property that makes you go, “hmmm maybe there’s something better out there…”

Maybe an awkward kitchen island placement or a damaged fence in the backyard that needs total replacement. Perhaps a poorly done garage conversion.

Nothing deal breaking, but also not ideal.

My logic is that if a property is 85% perfect, that’s grounds to pull the trigger on it and submit a written offer.

Great deals are negotiated, not found on Zillow

Absolutely no one is “finding a killer deal” while browsing on Zillow. You have to work to negotiate a deal.

Two rules I’ve learned:

1. Time is the #1 killer of all deals. Act with urgency.

2. Negotiation is about collaboration. Don’t be combative. You’re more likely to get your way when you write your initial offer from a win-win perspective.

There are many levers in a real estate deal that have nothing to do with the purchase price.

Some strategies I’ve used in the past include shortening my inspection period, offering a quicker close, and agreeing to not ask for additional concessions from the seller after officially going under contract.

None of these affected the purchase price. But they made life easier for the seller. I win because I get the purchase price I need to make my numbers work, and the seller wins because they get peace of mind that I won’t back out of the contract or drag out the process forever.

I could be a shark and try to screw people over so that I could get the best and nastiest deal possible. But that’s just not how I operate. In my real estate business, I behave with integrity and respect because that’s fundamentally who I am. I refuse to change my values just to squeeze an additional $10k out of a distressed seller.

Start with just one

I’ll end on this note. If you own zero rental properties, and your goal is to amass a portfolio, that’s an amazing goal. The single common denominator among all successful real estate investors is that they just started with one rental property.

You’d be shocked by how much you’ll learn on the fly with your first rental. It’s the kind of education you’ll never get from a Substack article or IG post.

Curious people ask me all the time, “How did you become so knowledgable about real estate?”

And I have to answer honestly. I didn’t take any investing courses or even really have a mentor that guided me and held my hand. I chose to fully leap into being a real estate investor and every single rental property I came across became a classroom for me. Even failed deals that never panned out provided serious value to my learning.

Getting my real estate license obviously helped the contracts side of things, but I know that experience was my best teacher.

Go to your favorite coffee shop, open your laptop, email your realtor, and just start with one! Using the confidence built from your first, the rest you can and will figure out later.

Kaya Vennam is a full time wealth multiplier, a job title she made up because “household CFO” makes it sound like she’s reconciling grocery receipts.

She quit her 9-5 in 2020 after doing the math and realizing her salary was mostly feeding their tax bracket. Now every dollar that comes into her household runs through her first: rental properties, angel investments, tax strategy, startups, real estate development deals.

She started Wealth Multiplier Universe because the financial content aimed at women is honestly insulting. Cut the lattes, open a Roth, girl math your way to a high yield savings account. Meanwhile the actual mechanics of how wealth gets built (leverage, depreciation, deal flow, who’s in the room) stay locked behind white dudes in quarter zips.

So she writes it all down. The wins, the expensive mistakes, the wealth creation rituals, and the deals she’s working on.

Come have a seat inside the Wealth Multiplier Universe and join the community of likeminded women who are called to building really big lives.

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There’s also a moment where every high earner realizes that there’s no exit strategy for their demanding 9-5 job earlier than the age of 65.

Of course, you talk to your spouse at the dinner table about “I listened to a podcast the other day about how a couple started buying rental properties and they retired at 40… we could do that too, right?”

But the inspiration fades the moment your morning coffee is brewed and you’re opening Zoom for your first meeting of a very long day.

You’re extremely good at your job. You’re paid extremely well for it. You might even love what you do.

But aside from stock vests, your 401k, and consistent direct deposits from payroll, there’s not a whole lot going on financially.

Money comes in, money goes out.

And so you’re indefinitely attached to the treadmill of your 9-5 as a result. After all, you have a mortgage, credit cards, an upcoming vacation to Aruba. Plus you just got a promotion at work, and there’s a new Dior bag calling your name.

You did everything right. You went to school, got a great job, and now you make multi six figures. Earning an impressive salary is the end goal, right?

Except no.

This is a big fucking problem.

Because I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be working forever, and I don’t want my husband to be working forever.

When you’re given the luxury and privilege of being a high earner, how depressing would it be to squander that opportunity?

The issue is less “I don’t have the money” and it’s more “I don’t know how to even start expanding my finances.”

Through a lot of trial and error (a lot of error tbh), I figured out my own formula for building wealth in a high income household, and now I’m going to share it with you.

(This is not financial or investment advice. I’m just sharing what I’m doing.)

Protect your income

Somewhat obviously, you need substantial income to be able to diversify and build wealth. So if you’re spending your paychecks willy nilly and have nothing left over, you know who you are and you know what’s best for your financial outlook. I don’t have to tell you what to do. You already know.

Aside from spending above your means, I’ve noticed that the other giant leak in a high income household is federal income taxes.

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Thank God having a portfolio career is finally cool.

Definitely hasn’t always been that way though.

I’ve been called unfocused, distracted, victim to “shiny object syndrome” for my entire life.

I majored in chemical engineering and haphazardly added art history classes to my course load, all while juggling working in a research lab, tutoring my peers in differential equations, and posting weekly skincare and makeup tutorials on my YouTube channel.

The idea of having one singular thing that I pick and do all day long… my worst nightmare.

I tried my hand at working a 9-5 in data science, but also started two e-commerce brands (one of them failed, one of them took off spectacularly).

Now I’m a full time “wealth multiplier,” which means my portfolio career revolves around the North Star of multiplying my household income into wealth using real estate, startups, and stocks.

Tax planning, real estate investing, angel investing, staying educated on the global economy, running a handful of businesses… I’m a tricky person to pin down.

Having a portfolio career is undeniably sexy, interesting, and extremely lucrative. But it comes with a lot of strings attached, so this is what I’ve learned in the last six years of my portfolio career.

The job title problem.

“So what do you do for work?”

This question still makes me hesitate. There was no elegant way to describe what I do, so I had to create my own language. Hence the term “wealth multiplier.”

When you first begin curating your portfolio career, you’ll need to devote some time pondering your official self-appointed job title so that you aren’t nervously fidgeting and stammering when someone asks you this.

Because inevitably, someone will ask you “what do you do for work?” and I’ll tell you firsthand that rambling is not a cute look AND it eats away at your self-confidence. Learn from my mistakes, and really think about a 15 second description of your portfolio career.

An illegible progress bar.

Kiss goodbye to instant gratification if you decide that building a portfolio career is your calling.

Progress in your career looks weird and is usually hard to explain to others. It becomes really lonely when your friends are celebrating job promotions and linear career progression and you’re celebrating… negotiating an equity deal where you won’t see a dime for a decade most likely??

Our wins are not always relatable.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve laid in bed feeling oddly defeated because my days are busy, I feel productive, but my accomplishments feel incredibly nebulous. There’s no 100% guarantee that any of my ventures will work out perfectly. I make bets with asymmetric upside. If it doesn’t work out, oh well. But if it does work out, I will be a very rich lady indeed.

You’ll need to learn to love that uncertainty. Or at least not resent the uncertainty. It comes with the portfolio career territory.

The North Star test.

The advice from all the billionaires and 8+ figure founders out there is to do one thing and one thing only and do it really well.

Unfortunately, that advice never sat right with me. And now more than ever, we’re seeing examples of extremely successful portfolio careers.

I think there’s partial truth to the whole “do one thing and one thing only” advice.

There must be one underlying common goal or skill to unite all the ventures in your portfolio career.

For me, that’s harmonizing my startup and real estate experience with my creativity (which manifests in a branding/marketing way).

In your own portfolio career, you will develop the discernment and self awareness to know when a new venture is or is not aligned to your North Star.

I always have to tell myself this:

Just because I can doesn’t mean I should.

A major part of protecting my portfolio career is knowing when to decline opportunities or put new business ideas in a folder called “maybe one day.”

Why the portfolio career model is still elite.

The more money my household makes, the more wealth my husband and I build together, the more I realize that the whole point of our money is to buy optionality.

Having options is the greatest luxury in my life right now.

Do I want the option to work from Miami this week and book a flight that leaves tomorrow evening?

When I eventually have children, do we want the option to enroll in a private school that allows us to visit my family in South Africa multiple times per year?

As my parents and in-laws age, do we want the option of building a family compound so they can live with us?

Money buys a TON of freedom when you structure your career correctly.

I’ve intentionally designed my portfolio career around my dream lifestyle. The next big milestone I’m working towards is creating enough income streams from our assets so that my husband can retire from his demanding 9-5 job.

Can we also agree that the dynamic nature of a portfolio career naturally fits with dopamine dysregulated baddies? For someone with the likes of ADHD or bipolar disorder, leaning into a portfolio career gives us wings.

It’s also ideal for those of us who have always been multi passionate! Others may call us unfocused, but I consider us Renaissance women. Modern day da Vinci-esque polymaths building formidable careers.

Despite the distinctly unsexy side, successfully pulling off a portfolio career is a superpower and well worth the moments of self-doubt and loneliness. I can’t be alone in this sentiment.

What ventures are in rotation for your portfolio career? Tell me everything!

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Oh yes, I finally pinned down a meeting face to face with the decision maker.

But first, let me get you up to speed.

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I have a combined following of a little under a quarter million people. Not too shabby for a portfolio career girl who talks about real estate and wealth building.

I think these women follow me because I’m super frank about the fact that my focus is not producing income in my household. It’s kind of weird to openly admit that I don’t make money.

In fact, I quit my stable 9-5 job in tech six years ago because it literally did not make sense for me to keep trading my time for a salary when our tax bracket ate up all my earnings and for WHAT?? For me to feel productive and like a contributing member to my household? Please!!

Instead my value is being the household CFO, or a full time wealth multiplier as I like to call it. Every dollar that comes into my household (via my husband’s earnings) has to go through me first. Rental properties, angel investments, stocks, tax planning, startups, all the flavors of a wealth creation swirl.

My life is also really fucking cool.

In fact, I’m writing this essay on shitty wifi from my private villa in Koh Tao, Thailand. Between me and the sparkling ocean is a lush jungle, and as romantic as that sounds, I pay the price in sleepless nights because the Thai squirrels cause a ruckus on my villa’s roof at night. Last week I was in Bangkok, hopping from rooftop bar to rooftop bar much like these Koh Tao squirrels. Earlier this year, I was in Vegas. And Madrid, and Amsterdam, Playa Mujeres, Miami, Raleigh, Tulum… I’m Mrs. Worldwide.

So let me get this straight.

I have a cool career. I live a cool life. A quarter milly people follow me on socials.

Why the fuck am I not monetizing my social media?

I don’t sell any courses or offer coaching. I have a website with a rental property calculator for sale but I never talk about it so no one knows it exists and I make zero sales. I do paid brand deals here and there when I spot a wealth creation tool that either A) I already use or B) would provide real value to my audience.

Not proud of it, but woman enough to say it: I post on Instagram purely for clout.

My online friends are always badgering me, “Kaya, do you even know how much money you be making if you sold a course about your wealth multiplier career?? You’re leaving tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table.”

I know!! I know this. I’ve done the math ad nauseam. I stand to gain a whole lot of $$$ if I ever decided to monetize my social media.

Except my body, mind, and soul viscerally reject this entirely. I get the ick soooo badly when I think about creating and selling my own course or digital product or whatever coaching program I could cook up.

My favorite people to follow are the people who aren’t directly selling to me. I think we are all really tired of the carousel posts that go:

Hook, problem, cliff hanger, promoting the solution behind a paywall.

I’m so bored! Everything looks the same on my feed. I’ve gone on an unfollowing spree. If I find myself constantly scrolling past your posts because I know exactly how they’re going to end and what CTA you’re going to point me towards, I unfollow.

Seriously SOS, I cannot be the only one feeling this IG feed fatigue.

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One thing my portfolio career has taught me (more like beaten me over the head over and over again until I learn my lesson) is that wealth creation takes time, patience, and staying true to your long term vision.

I learned this lesson with rental properties. My first rental property was an Airbnb property near downtown Austin. I was chasing cash flow and passive income. I lived for those direct deposits from Airbnb. I superhosted my tail off for those years because I wanted the instant gratification of high rental income.

Too bad the stress ate me alive! I hated hosting on Airbnb. Every ping from the app would make my heart sink with dread and anxiety.

I took a giant step back. The point of doing this whole real estate investing thing was to bank on property appreciation. Each of my rental properties was like a little piggy bank, slowly growing in value over the years. The property will appreciate the same way whether I’m having a new Airbnb guest stay every two days or if I have a long term tenant move in.

So I switched the model to mid and long term rentals. Stable, predictable rental income and a fraction of the stress. Obviously way less rental income than hosting on Airbnb, but who cares? Not me. Immediate cash flow and income isn’t my problem. My husband’s income has us covered. In pursuit of “make the most money!!!!” I lost perspective of my own financial situation and goals.

Same story, different asset: the whole social media monetization thing. Why would I grind and imprison myself in an online business selling $99 courses when that path doesn’t align with my long term wealth building goals?

Monetizing my social media would be a temporary solution to a problem I don’t even have.

You know what my social media is actually useful for?

Clout. Lead generation. Building my personal brand so wealth creation opportunities come sliding into my DMs.

I love that I don’t sell anything on Instagram. I want the only product on the table to be MY BRAIN. My opinions and my wealth multiplier blueprint.

Monetizing my social media would be the Airbnb version of my audience.

Cash, duh. Constant pings. A business that doesn’t quite fit into my wealth multiplier thesis.

I already learned my lesson once! And I’m not about to sign up for the sequel.

Attention from my audience IS the real asset here. The more I nurture it with real unfiltered value (snapshots from my personal life, mistakes I’ve made, my opinions and lived experience in wealth building and real estate), the more it grows in a meaningful way. I don’t want customers. I want legit community and devoted eyeballs that trust me.

The wealth creation opportunities I mentioned earlier that slide into my DMs? Very real, very life changing. Forget making $100k on a course launch. I’m talking real estate deals that snowball into eight figures with time. Those deals aren’t possible if I’m positioned as a real estate guru selling an ebook. Those deals require clout. Social capital is real, and you can’t just buy it.

So yeah. It is actually very chic to have an unmonetized social media account where you post purely for clout.

I’ll be over here, fighting this Koh Tao wifi and managing my portfolio in a Calzedonia bikini, posting for the fun of it, just so happening to build social capital that accelerates everything I’m actually building.

And you’re not crazy (or lazy) for not launching a course or a digital download or whatever tf they’re selling this week. You might just be playing a longer game than the people telling you to hurry up.

So what’s yours? Tell me everythinggg

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And yet four weeks ago I was crying at my breakfast table because my world was ending.

The morning it fell apart.

I’ve been working a major development deal for months. You’ve heard me talk around the edges of it because I still can’t say much (more on that later). It was the biggest thing on my board. It was the thing I had built pitch decks for, priced, strategized, protected. I switched brokerages to honor the opportunity, and I stepped into a leadership role for this deal.

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The insane uncertainty that goes into a full time wealth multiplier has demanded a certain type of mental fortitude from me. I’ve spent months working on real estate deals (not to mention the sheer anxiety, disrupted sleep quality, forgoing social plans, etc) only for them to fall apart at the eleventh hour. There’s no consolation prize or partial compensation when a deal dissolves. It just poofs into thin air and all I’m left holding in my hands are defeat, self-doubt, and well, I guess I gained experience and learned a lot. But hello, it would have been nice to get something a little more tangible out of a failed endeavor!!

At the same time, I’m so fucking LUCKY to be living this incredible lifestyle. Being a full time wealth multiplier means that I’m not tied to an office or even my home base. I travel every single month, sometimes to Miami, sometimes to London or Bangkok. Just for fun, or for real estate scouting or business meetings with peer investors and partners. My days are fully mine to schedule out as I architect my dream life. I have a scary amount of autonomy on how I spend my time every day.

So to add some practical texture to what it means to be a full time wealth multiplier, I’m attempting to journal out a typical day for me.

7am - Alarm goes off.

I love to ease into my day. For a few years, I was heavy into the 6am yoga or Pilates class grind immediately followed by a coffee shop work session. But my current season of life demands more sleep and more time at home (when I am home lol. Because half the time, I’m out of town). My mornings feel most luxurious when I start the day with a hot lemon water, which I sip from my backyard patio. I get to listen to the birdsong from the greenbelt behind my house and watch my puppy zoom around the grass. I don’t check my email or social media because if it’s waited the eight to nine hours while I slept, it can wait another hour or two.

Instead I hop on Pinterest (doesn’t count as social media!!) on my iPad and browse my vision boards to get me fired up for my day. What I build this week won’t see any kind of reward until months or literal years into the future, so I find it helpful to visualize my future. That way, my work feels less like shots in the dark and more like “I’m doing these actions now, and slowly but surely my life still start to look like this vision board.”

I put away clean dishes, I kiss my husband good morning, I walk my puppy around the neighborhood, and I do a quick journaling session from the breakfast table.

9am - A productive pedicure.

I’ve showered and gotten dressed now (usually athleisure), and I’m off to a pedicure appointment before the brutal Texas sun does its worst. I have my laptop in tow, and I settle into the nail salon chair. I check my email and start responding to text messages. I have some aspiring real estate investors that are interested in some rental properties I posted on my Instagram story, so I connect them with my brokerage. I ping my assistant and tell her to update my real estate referrals spreadsheet with these new leads. I am always weirdly productive during a nail appointment. My admin sweep takes me about thirty minutes, and now I get to whip out my Kindle and finish the last chapter of Emma Grede’s book, Start With Yourself. I’m so over self-help and general business advice books. I would much rather read biographies and memoirs and real accounts from entrepreneurs and investors that I’m curious about.

11am - Lunch and spur of the moment TikToking.

I’m back home, and I text my husband to ask what time he wants to eat lunch with me. I picked up bagel sandwiches on my way home, so I pop them in the toaster oven to stay warm. I’ve been thinking a lot about how stay at home wives and stay at home moms need a solid backup plan. I currently rely on my husband for income (I don’t earn very much in comparison to him), but I’ve made sure I’m financially protected. I whip out my phone, prop it up on my water bottle on the kitchen island, and film a snappy little TikTok video about the importance of having a portfolio, no matter how safe you think you are. I edit it right then and there and upload it. Hopefully my video resonates with women who are in a similar life position and inspires them to get into real estate investing maybe.

My husband thunders down the stairs (why are men so loud) and into the kitchen. We sit down for lunch together. While we eat, I order grocery delivery because I cannot be bothered to spend an hour driving to the store and wandering the aisles looking for my favorite flavors of Celsius and Coconut Cult. Yes, I have lots of free time, but I’ll be damned if I spend it waiting in the checkout line at my local HEB.

I finish putting away our dirty dishes into the dishwasher right when my maid shows up. I direct her to start in our primary bedroom, and then I settle into my desk chair in my home office. I love my home office. It’s genuinely adorable (very pink, very me) and also happens to be a great tax write off.

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1pm - Angel behavior and landlord details.

I hop on a Zoom call with a startup founder that cold DMed me. Their pitch is good, not great. I have a lot of questions about their target audience and GTM strategy. I don’t think I’ll be writing them an angel check this very minute, but their startup is interesting enough and I’ll keep them on my radar. I actually think one of my friends would be an excellent consultant for this founder, so I offer to connect them.

Right after the call ends, I get a notification from the portal I use for my rental properties. One of my tenants has submitted a maintenance request. Apparently the dishwasher is on the fritz (again) despite their multiple attempts to troubleshoot. I immediately text my go-to appliance guy to schedule a time for him to check it out.

While I wait for his response, I quickly catch up on logging my time in my REPS tracker from the last week. I try to log immediately in the moment, but I usually forget. I keep track in my Google calendar at the least because I am a freak about my Google calendar.

One of my to do list items was to organize the receipts from some repair work I had done at a different rental property. I knock that out and tackle a few other tasks. Calling a local landscaping supply place to coordinate a bulk mulch delivery, ordering a gift for my friend’s upcoming birthday, analyzing rental comps for a property with an upcoming vacancy.

I check the time. It’s 3pm and the groceries I ordered have arrived to my front door.

3pm - Staring at screens and lots of caffeine.

Groceries are now put away and I am officially hitting my afternoon slump. I make myself a delicious iced beverage (I keep a huge thing of La Colombe cold brew in my fridge at all times) and head outside to my patio. It’s 98 degrees outside, but after sitting inside my freezing cold house all afternoon, I’m ready to defrost. This is my favorite afternoon ritual. I call my mom, and we chitchat while the caffeine kicks in.

I wrap up my little gossip sesh and start editing a backlog of Instagram reels on my phone while I finish my cold brew. Social media has been a huge part of my wealth building journey because being visible online has awarded me so many opportunities. I get access to deal flow, plus connections with other investors, mentors, leads, and just genuinely cool women. At any given time, I have a few 1:1 conversations flowing with incredible people doing really impressive things.

I’ve been staring at my phone for way too long at this point, so I decide to head back inside the house and stare at a different screen. My husband works from home, and when he’s not taking calls in his home office upstairs, he’s working from the sofa in our living room. I join him there with my laptop and we work silently together in parallel. I’m sorting through a list of potential commercial real estate investments and drafting an email to my CPA with a few questions. I tell my husband that we need to move some money around in the next week or so because I intend to deploy some capital into one of these assets.

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5pm - The unwind.

My puppy makes it known that my workday needs to come to a close. He begins his lobbying for a game of fetch. I shut the laptop and throw his favorite tennis ball in our house’s long entryway. My husband also shuts his laptop, though I know he’s always replying to Slack messages from his phone. My maid says goodbye, and I’m thrilled that my house is sparkling clean and organized.

We turn on a trash reality TV show (currently watching Vanderpump Rules and in the thick of Scandoval), and I get dinner started. While the oven does all the heavy lifting of tonight’s dinner, I open my laptop and dive straight into Claude. I’m planning my insane 30th birthday trip to Thailand and I’ve been using Claude to build an optimized travel itinerary. I make a couple dinner reservations in Bangkok and chatter to my husband about what I have planned so far.

My appliance repair guy texts me back with his availability, and I relay the timing to my tenants. Mentally I can close that loop for today. I’m not going to stress about how much the repair will cost because that’s a problem for tomorrow. Right now I’m focused on enjoying my evening and relaxing. I spend the rest of the evening with my husband and puppy, taking a very long evening walk intermission with a mindless fun podcast. I finish my night with a cup of peppermint tea, a square of salted dark chocolate, and a hot shower. At 10pm, it’s lights out.

Being a full time wealth multiplier does feel kind of glamorous to me because what do you mean I got a pedicure in the morning and got to yap with my mom in the middle of the workday? And in a couple weeks I’ll be jetting off to Bangkok without asking anyone for permission to leave work?

One thing humans are really good at is getting used to things. I admit I’ve gotten used to the flexibility and freedom my career has awarded me, but I know how lucky I am to have this much autonomy over my time.

This day in the life is not super exciting, but it’s honest. My typical day to day isn’t packed with closings and champagne and high stakes negotiations. This is what I mean by tiny daily actions end up resulting in serious money moves.

If you’re curious about the specific things I get up to (including updates on a massive career-defining real estate deal that is giving me gray hairs lol), you’ll love the Wealth Multiplier Reports I write every month. They’re real documentations of all the moves I’m making, what I’m learning, and how my portfolio is doing.

See you next week in July’s Wealth Multiplier Report!

I was sitting at my breakfast table with my morning coffee, doing the thing you’re not supposed to do first thing in the morning (scrolling through my email on my phone before my brain is fully awake)

(Also I’m pretty sure coffee on an empty stomach is a huge no-no from the wellness girlies, but here we are)

I opened an email from one of the agents at my brokerage.

She was forwarding me something. As I read down through the email thread, I started to piece together what I was actually looking at. And my brain kept refusing to process it, because what I thought I was reading was that I had been unceremoniously cut out of the biggest deal of my career, without any warning or heads up.

My hands started shaking before I even finished the email.

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Anyone free this Saturday? I found the cutest new spot on South Congress.

I stared at my phone. I already knew what I was supposed to do next. Historically, this is my role. I confirm first. I text the group my availability. I send the reservation link. I become the person the whole plan orbits around, because if I don’t respond, the plan tends to slowly lose momentum until it goes kaput in the group chat.

I am the glue.

I typed yes girl let’s do it. I deleted it. I typed ugh nooo I can’t this weekend, next time? I deleted that too. I sat with the phone in my hand for probably five full minutes trying to figure out what version of the truth I could send.

Finally I typed: I can’t, but please carry on and send me pics! Dying to try that place soon so lmk how it is.

I hit send. And then I watched the group chat go completely silent.

Nobody responded for hours. Eventually one girl said aw okay, maybe another time? And that was it. The dinner didn’t happen. Not because they needed me specifically to make it happen. But because I usually am the momentum, and I had chosen not to bring it that week.

I chose my business over my friends again and I know that every time I make that choice, I’m subtly signaling that I’m becoming a different person than the one they used to know.

This year, no has been the weirdest word I’ve had to learn to say, but it’s turning out to be oh so valuable for someone in my position.

Being the glue

I don’t know if you’ve ever been the glue in a friend group but if you have, you already know exactly what I mean.

You’re the one who initiates the plans. You send the are we still doing this? text at 6pm on Friday when the plan is drifting and people are soft launching bailing. You plan the group trips and find the best flights for everyone to buy. You buy the birthday gifts and coordinate the group card. You’re kind of the emotional (and logistical) infrastructure of the entire operation.

The problem with being the glue is that after enough years, the role becomes indistinguishable from your personality. You stop noticing that you’re doing “labor” because it feels like just... being yourself. And then one day you realize you’re exhausted and you don’t know why, and it takes you way too long to trace the exhaustion back to the fact that you have been singlehandedly carrying a responsibility called keeping everyone connected.

The glue is a beautiful person. She really loves the people in her life. She wants them to feel seen and cerished. But she is also, if we’re being honest, sometimes the reason none of them have had to develop their own emotional muscles when it comes to reaching out first. Because she has always done it for them.

I’ve been the glue since I was fifteen years old. It’s genuinely who I’ve been for most of my adult life. And this year, for the first time, I’ve had to stop.

The result has been strange and hard and clarifying all at once. The group chat gets quieter when I stop initiating. Plans don’t happen at the frequency they used to. I feel the friend group fragmenting, and I have to sit with the small daily grief of knowing that the unraveling is at least partially because I stepped back.

I miss them.

At the same time, I also know that something has got to give while I’m in this specific season of building.

Feeling a little too socially ambitious

I light up around people. I’m a textbook extravert. So when I’m feeling energized and ambitious, I overcommit. I say yes to three dinners in one week, a coffee, a birthday party, and a happy hour, all while telling myself I can absolutely handle it because I’m feeling so good right now.

Then Sunday night comes and I am totally wrecked. I haven’t prepared for the week. I’m behind on the deal I’m supposed to be moving forward. My husband and I haven’t had a real conversation in three days because we’ve been shuffling around each other’s schedules. And I am cranky and annoyed and blaming everyone else for what was ultimately a series of my own choices.

The Sunday scaries hit different when you’ve overpromised your weekend.

The lesson this taught me, which I keep having to relearn, is that every yes is borrowed from something else. There is no free yes. Everything has a cost, whether I can see it yet or not. When I say yes to a dinner, I am saying no to sleep, or to prep time, or to the two hours of creative thinking my next deal needs. When I say yes to a coffee, I am saying no to the workout I keep telling myself I’ll do. When I say yes to a brand deal, I am saying no to the deeper work my own business needs.

My yes-to-everything year cost me a lot. I was spinning my wheels trying to juggle everything.

Translation: I was dropping a lot of balls and not giving 100 to anything. I looked busy. I felt overwhelmed. And I wasn’t actually building anything worth building because my attention was so fragmented across everyone else’s priorities. Nothing meaningful happened.

The one no I’m getting really good at (the professional ones)

Let’s have a change of scenery and I’ll tell you about the nos that have gotten easier.

I say no to a ton of social media collaborations these days. A year ago I said yes to way more collabs because it felt like community and being a good content creator doing content creation very seriously and legitimately. Except now I understand something I didn’t understand then.

My reach is a limited resource.

Every single time I use my platform to point my audience toward someone else’s business, I am borrowing from my own runway. That doesn’t mean I’ll never do it. But it means the bar for me to say yes to a collab is now exponentially higher than it was. It has to be a brand I legit love and would invest my own capital in as an investor. It also has to align with what my community actually needs. And it can’t come at the cost of promoting my own deal pipeline, my own brand, or my own business.

I say no to meetings that could have been emails, and conversely sometimes I do pick up the phone and call someone so we can hash out details quickly and efficiently. Long email chains back and forth are beyond stupid. One thing about this monster real estate deal I keep alluding to (my inner circle of wealth multipliers on the paid side of WMU know the details) is that it’s forcing me to seriously examine my meeting and email etiquette.

Every no in that category has been shockingly easy to say once I got clear on this one thing: your attention is your most valuable asset. Give it deliberately.

In June and July specifically, I’ve said no to a lot of work opportunities right now because of this giant deal. It’s not been inked yet, so I cannot afford to be distracted. Every single yes I give this month is being measured against whether it moves that deal forward or takes bandwidth away from it. Almost everything is taking bandwidth away, so almost everything is a no.

That level of focus is honestly hard to maintain if you don’t have a very clear picture of what you’re building. Which brings me to the section I’ve been avoiding writing.

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The big, bad eldest daughter of immigrants confession

I have seriously bad eldest-daughter-of-immigrants guilt, and I don’t know how to fully describe it to anyone who didn’t grow up with it.

It’s in my literal DNA. You know the five nucleobases, right? Guanine, adenine, cytosine, thymine, and GUILT!

It’s a gravitational, inevitable pull toward family that is inseparable from love and duty and a lifelong instinct to make my parents (and aunts, uncles cousins, grandparents) proud by being available for anything they might need. Saying no to family is the one category where I still really struggle. It’s the final frontier of my saying-no journey and I’m nowhere near mastering it.

I want to be really clear about something though. I don’t ever regret time with my family. I love love love them. Being with them is one of the greatest gifts of my life, and I know that so many people would trade anything to have the kind of family I have. My family is warm, interesting, and my closest confidants.

What I regret sometimes is the times I said yes out of guilt rather than actual self-motivation. The dinners I sat through mentally checked out because I was stressed about work and would have benefited more from staying home to prep for Monday. The obligations I fulfilled at the expense of my own capacity, which meant I showed up half-empty for the very people I was trying to honor.

I hate to admit it, but love is not the same thing as 24/7 availability. You can love someone completely and still say not this weekend.

I’m not fully there yet. Some weekends I still say yes when I really should say no, and I feel some type of way about it later, and I have to remind myself that resentment is not the price of being a good daughter.

This one is going to take me a looong time. But naming it is the first step I guess.

What all the no has actually built

Now let me tie this back to what this whole essay is really about, which is that I write a wealth building newsletter and every essay eventually has to earn its place by connecting back to building a rich life you actually want.

Every no I’ve said this year has been a hell yes to something specific.

Yes to the deal pipeline that is now the biggest opportunity of my career.

Yes to my husband’s attention on the weekends I didn’t overcommit.

Yes to sleep. To actual, real, uninterrupted sleep because phew, I cannot operate below seven hours. That I know is true.

Yes to my creative capacity, which is the one thing my business absolutely cannot run without.

Yes to the version of me who arrives Monday morning fully present instead of drained.

Yes to calm. Yes to my marriage. Yes to my own attention.

Saying no IS a critical wealth building skill. It’s insanely foundational. Every wealthy woman I have ever admired says no more often than she says yes. She has to! Her attention is being pulled at from every direction and if she cannot say no with confidence, she gets bled dry by everyone else’s priorities.

What I’ve learned as I turn 30

I turn 30 next month, and I’ve been thinking a lot about the shift I feel happening.

The version of me who couldn’t say no was younger and much less clear on what she was building. She spread herself thin because she was afraid of missing out. She said yes to everything because she thought that’s what it took to be a good friend, a good daughter, a good partner, a good creator, a good realtor, a good human. She thought saying no meant she was cold, or ambitious in a way that other people wouldn’t like, or selfish. Not super palatable.

The version of me turning 30 has serious priorities. She has maybe five things she cares about right now, and everything else is negotiable. I truly have gotten crystal clear.

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Hey so… I’m tired of being the glue

If you have made it this far in the essay, I think you know exactly who you are.

You’re the one who initiates the plans. Checks on everyone. Never lets a birthday go unmarked. Says yes because you don’t want anyone to feel forgotten. You’ve been the emotional infrastructure of every group.

Please hear me out.

Being the glue is beautiful and not everyone can pull it off. It takes a very specific type of person and it’s special.

It’s also exhausting. And it’s not sustainable if you are also trying to build something ambitious for yourself.

Your true friends will not disintegrate if you take a season off. The ones who love you will still be there. The ones who don’t will show themselves, and that’s valid data too. Some plans will die when you stop initiating them and some plans won’t, and you’ll learn a lot about which friendships were rooted in genuine care versus habit. It’s one big trust fall. You might fall on your ass. You also might feel supported.

What's one thing you're saying no to right now, and what are you saying yes to instead? Tell me in the comments. I do read every single one!

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August is officially my saying no month. I have strong reason to suspect it’ll be a life changing month for me. And I’m documenting it all in my monthly Wealth Multiplier Report for my paid subscribers. If you want to see how the discipline of saying no plays out in real money moves from my real life, you know where to find me.

See you next week.

You gave me feedback, and I hear it.

Starting this month, I’m publishing a second paid essay every month in addition to the monthly Wealth Multiplier Reports. The additional essay will typically be a tactical deep dive, a behind-the-scenes look at a specific decision I’m making in real time, or a walkthrough of a specific strategy I use in my own portfolio. This community of wealth multipliers means everything to me, and I want the paid side of WMU to be a genuinely worthwhile investment. I’m listening to what you asked for and building it.

Now let’s get into the report. And if I’m being honest with you, it’s a hard one.

Setting the scene

May was electric. June was quite literally the opposite.

May was the month I decided to build the biggest deal of my career.

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I left my brokerage. The one I’d been with for years, the real estate team I had genuinely loved… and the room I had outgrown. I went back and forth on it for six months before I finally pulled the trigger. Six months of restless conversations with myself. Six months of pros and cons lists. Six months of waking up at 2am running the same mental loop on repeat.

And then I made the call.

No one cared to warn me how calm I felt immediately afterward. Not euphoric or anxious. Just… settled. Like my body had been waiting for me to catch up to a decision it had already made months earlier, and now I had finally arrived. I sat on my back patio with my iced cortado that morning and felt something close to peace. If I had known it would be this soothing to decide, I would have done it in January.

That’s when I realized something I want to share with you today.

The most expensive thing I have ever done in my career is WAIT.

Not bad investments. Not failed deals. Not market downturns. Waiting. Waiting for someone to tap me on the shoulder. Waiting to feel ready. Waiting for the version of me with more credibility, more accolades, more deals on the books, to magically appear and grant me permission to do the thing I already knew I needed to do.

She was never coming. The permission was never coming. And the entire time I was waiting, my actual life kept moving without me.

If you’ve ever sat in the exact same place I was sitting, staring at an opportunity you can clearly see is yours and somehow refusing to grab it, this essay is for you.

The employee mentality

I was reading Emma Grede’s book a few weeks ago and one line stopped me cold.

She talked about how her husband had once called her out for having an employee mentality. Yes, Emma Grede, the portfolio career woman worth millions and millions, had an employee mentality. There were still corners of her psychology where she was waiting for someone to give her the green light.

I felt that line in my chest.

I wish I had known this about leaving traditional employment. You can quit the job and still take the mentality with you. I have not had a W2 in years and I still catch myself doing this constantly. Looking to peers for the nod and looking to leaders for a pat on the back. Looking around the room for someone with more credibility to confirm that yes, I am allowed to want what I want.

No one is not going to sit down with you and patiently lay out the seventeen reasons you’re the right person for the opportunity. Your peers are not going to convene a board meeting to vote on whether you’ve earned the right to dream bigger. The conference room you’re imagining where everyone wholeheartedly agrees you’ve leveled up does not exist. You have to walk into your own life, look in the mirror, and say yes I’m ready, and then move.

The crazy thing is, the moment I really internalized this, my entire relationship with risk changed. I stopped waiting for someone to validate the move I already knew I needed to make. I am the green light. I’m the boss, the manager, the mentor, the board, the corner office. And honestly? I’m pretty good at the job!!

The voice that keeps you small

I want to get really honest about the voice in my head that has been trying to slow me down for years. Because I’m guessing yours sounds suspiciously similar.

Mine says:

Wait until you have more deals under your belt.

Wait until you have more years of experience.

You’re a woman in your twenties. No one is going to take you seriously.

You’re a glorified trophy wife who hasn’t had a real job in years. Who are you to want this much?

The voice is good. It’s persuasive. It dresses up as logic and self-protection and pretends to be looking out for me. The truth is my anxiety is just trying to keep me safe from the unknown by keeping me in the known, even when the known is a room I have absolutely outgrown.

I had to do some real work to understand where this voice came from. For me, a lot of it is South Asian cultural conditioning. Humility was drilled into me from a very young age as one of the highest virtues. Don’t brag. Don’t take up too much space. Don’t be the one in the room making everyone uncomfortable with your ambition. Don’t be too much.

For a long time, I confused that conditioning with humility itself. As I get older, I see what was actually happening. I was being trained to shrink.

Humility is not the same thing as shrinking yourself.

Real humility is knowing exactly what you’re worth and refusing to perform smallness so other people feel okay. Performative humility is just self-erasure with better PR. I am so done with it.

And yes, I am aware that posting a Substack essay about how I’m done shrinking myself is itself a slightly audacious thing to do. The voice tried to talk me out of writing this one too. I told her thanks for the input and kept on typing.

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What waiting actually costs you (the unsexy math)

Okay let’s get into the part of the essay that I think literally nobody talks about transparently enough.

Every single investment compounds over time. Money compounds. Equity compounds. Learning compounds. The first rental property you buy will teach you more about real estate in twelve months than four years of YouTube videos and books and podcasts. The opportunity you said yes to last year is the reason this year’s opportunity is even on the table.

Sitting idle is, by far, the most expensive sunk cost in any wealth building journey.

A rental property I should have pulled the trigger on a year ago would have appreciated the entire time I was hemming and hawing. It would have been paying down principal every single month. It would have generated tax savings that would have offset my husband’s W2 income. It would have taught me lessons I have not learned yet because I was too busy researching instead of buying.

That’s not even counting the meta-cost. The confidence I would have built from one more successful close. The reputation in my network. The story I would have to tell my paid subscribers right now. The deals that would have flowed to me because the universe rewards motion, not deliberation.

Waiting is not free. It just doesn’t send you a clear, itemized bill.

Let me make this even more concrete with someone else’s life because sometimes it’s easier to see other people’s patterns than our own.

I have a girlfriend who would be an incredible lifestyle vlogger. She lives in a beautiful home. She has the most interesting career. She is naturally charismatic on camera in a way you cannot teach. Every couple of months she’ll post a few TikToks and they immediately start to gain traction. And then? She disappears.

I finally asked her about it. She told me being public was too overwhelming, that getting attention scared her, that performing well made her freeze. So she keeps not posting. She keeps watching other women build the exact kind of brand she could have built years ago.

I love her and I won’t name her. But I want to use her honestly here because this is the pattern. The fear of being seen is bigger than the hunger to build the thing she was clearly meant for. And it shows up in vlogging, investing, entrepreneurship, and every single arena where ambitious women are about to do the exact thing they were built to do.

The cost of waiting is not just the opportunity itself. It’s the woman you would have become through doing it.

Everything has a cost. Including waiting idly. You just have to decide what’s too expensive to ignore.

The counter-voice and the three sentences that changed my life

So what do I actually say back to the voice that wants me small?

Three sentences. I say them to myself constantly. I’ve said them in the car. I’ve said them before Zoom calls. I’ve said them in the mirror before walking into rooms I had no business walking into. Here they are.

If not me, then who?

If not now, then when?

It is my destiny to pursue this.

Try them right now. Say them out loud. The first time you do, they feel cringe. By the tenth time, they feel like armor. By the hundredth time, they feel like truth.

My ceiling is not other people’s ceilings.

Just because I have not seen my vision modeled by anyone in my immediate circle does not mean it does not exist. Just because no one around me is building exactly what I’m building does not mean I cannot build it. The vision keeps calling. It keeps appearing in my journal. It keeps showing up uninvited in the shower and on long walks and at 11pm when I’m trying to fall asleep. It must be meant for me because it’s been mine this whole time.

I live by the law of assumption. The future I keep imagining is not fantasy. It is a destination I’m already on the road to. I just have to row the boat there. And rowing requires me to actually pick up the oars, not stand on the dock waiting for someone to certify that I’m a Real Qualified Rower before I’m allowed to get in.

What audacity actually looks like (it’s so much smaller than we think)

I want to clear something up because I think people imagine audacity as a dramatic, cinematic, lightning-bolt-moment thing.

It’s really not.

Audacity is mostly small daily rebellions against the voice that wants you small. Here’s what it has actually looked like in my own life recently.

Saying yes to coffee chats with women who DM me on Instagram asking for wealth building advice. The old version of me would have shrunk away. Who am I to give advice? I’m not qualified. The current version of me knows I have things to share that took me a decade to learn and that women who are six steps behind me deserve to get the shortcut.

Posting content that is true to myself and vulnerable. Being seen is the cost of entry to community. I am tired of self-isolating on this journey because I’m afraid people won’t get it. The right women find me when I make myself findable. And I have watched this happen in real time on Substack. The community I’m slowly building here is the proof.

Walking away from a stable, comfortable real estate team to chase bigger, harder, more uncertain opportunities. I sat in a room that I had outgrown for so long because the room was familiar. Familiarity is not the same as alignment. Comfort is a leading indicator of stagnation in your career.

Internalizing evidence (including my mistakes) that I am walking the walk. Building proof, for myself, by myself, of my own seriousness. Not waiting for someone else to certify it.

Audacity is not necessarily loud. It’s the willingness to receive what’s already in front of you and stop pretending you don’t see it.

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Could you actually hold the life you keep imagining?

Now I want to leave you with the reframe that I think is going to sit with you for a while, so strap in.

If I handed you $10 million dollars today, in a wire transfer hitting your account before you finished reading this sentence, would you have the inner wisdom to protect and multiply it? To not blow it? To not let it blow up your marriage? To stay grounded while wearing it well? To handle the tax implications, the family dynamics, the friends who would suddenly need favors, the version of yourself who would have to grow up overnight?

Probably not.

I say that with love. I would not have been ready a few years ago either. Most of us are not, and that’s not a moral failing. It’s a useful piece of information.

Because here’s what I want you to really hear. As your money grows, your inner wisdom has to grow too. You cannot inherit, marry into, build, or stumble into a level of wealth that exceeds the level of woman you have become. Every level forces you to expand or it forces you to lose what you built. That’s the math.

Which means every audacious move you make right now AKA every yes you give when the voice wants you to wait, every coffee chat you take, every email you send, every property you buy, every team you walk away from… that is a deposit into the version of you who is capable of holding the life you’re building toward.

The audacity is the becoming. The doing is the growing.

Waiting does not just cost you money. Waiting costs you the woman you would have been through the doing.

For the woman on the edge of doing the thing

If you are reading this and you are on the edge of doing the audacious thing — leaving the 9-5 to become a full-time wealth multiplier like I did, pulling the trigger on the first rental, walking away from the team you’ve outgrown, charging the bigger number, sending the email you’ve been drafting for six weeks, saying yes to the opportunity that scares you, posting the video, asking for the meeting — I want you to know something.

You actually already have what you need.

Whatever you cannot find inside yourself, you can source from your external surroundings, because you are intelligent and capable and resourceful or you would not be reading me right now. (My subscribers, in particular, are not messing around. I am wildly proud of the women inside Wealth Multiplier Universe.)

Half the battle of building real wealth is becoming the woman who is capable of holding and growing it intelligently and calmly. The other half is the audacious moves you make that turn you into her.

The two are inseparable. You simply cannot have one without the other.

Stop waiting for permission. The permission is never coming. Start trusting yourself. The version of you on the other side of the audacious move has been waiting for you to catch up to her this whole time.

I wrote this essay because audacity has been the mantra of my entire spring and summer. The full story of what audacity actually looks like in real time (the specific opportunity I said yes to that moved my career timeline up by a decade, the conversations behind closed doors, the way my numbers are moving in real time) lives in my monthly Wealth Multiplier Reports on the paid side of WMU.

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Free readers get my wealth multiplier philosophy. Paid readers get the receipts of it all happening in real time.

See you next week.

For years, my “monthly financial review” looked like this: open a chaotic spreadsheet, panic at how out of date it was, update three of the fifteen tabs, get overwhelmed, lose steam, close the laptop, and tell myself I’d do it properly next month. Repeat indefinitely or avoid for six months.

Sound familiar? Cool. Let’s fix it.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the five numbers I track instead of salary. If you missed it, the TLDR is this: most ambitious women have been handed exactly one number to measure their financial progress (their paycheck), and it’s the wrong one. The five numbers that actually matter are net worth delta, aggregate cash flow, tax liability projection, deal pipeline value, and trailing 12-month portfolio growth rate.

I wrote that essay out of necessity. For a woman in my position, I needed to articulate a whole new set of metrics. My entire “job” is to protect and multiply my household’s income into generational wealth. I used to self-defeat and obsess over my lack of income production, but now I’m comfortable measuring myself against this new set of five numbers. They are legitimately meaningful to my goals.

So I built something to help keep me accountable and fully in the driver’s set of my wealth building journey. I want to share exactly what it is, why I built it, and the full prompt you can copy and paste to build your own version this weekend.

(It lives inside Claude Cowork and it now runs my entire monthly financial life on the first Monday of every month with a candle lit and a delicious coffee in hand. Yes, I made it a whole ritual. If we’re going to do something boring, we might as well make it fun and sexy.)

Why this needed to exist

Here’s the thing about tracking. Everyone tells you to do it because accountability is king. Almost nobody tells you how in a way that actually fits a real human life.

The personal finance advice industry hands you two options:

Option 1: a static spreadsheet that you maintain manually forever (will not realistically happen even with the best of intentions).

Option 2: an app that aggregates everything automatically but only measures what its developers decided to measure, which is almost never the five things that actually predict whether you’re building real wealth.

As a full time wealth multiplier, I needed a third option. Something that:

• Asks me for my numbers the same way every month, so I don’t have to remember the system

• Saves the data over time so I can see trends, not just snapshots

• Filters every reading through my actual long-term goal (because $14% growth means very different things depending on whether you’re targeting FIRE at 50 or a $20M portfolio at 45)

• Flags problems before they become disasters

• Recommends one specific action each month (not a list, one thing)

• Holds me accountable for whether I actually did the thing I said I would do last month

That last part is what kept me up at night. I am very good at writing down what I’m “going to do.” I am significantly less good at someone politely asking me thirty days later whether I actually did it. That accountability gap is where most ambitious women fall through the cracks of their own wealth building plans, and I wanted to firmly close it.

The ritual

First Monday of the month. Coffee in my favorite mug (the Anthropologie one from college that has somehow survived eight years and many, many moves). A candle lit, usually Voluspa Baltic Amber. Phone on do not disturb. No emotion, no narrative, just data going in and analysis coming back out.

I sit down. I open Claude Cowork. I run the prompt below. Claude asks me each of the numbers one at a time, walks me through the analysis, gives me a dashboard report, asks me reflection questions, captures what I commit to, and follows up next month on whether I executed.

The whole thing takes about 25 minutes. Less if my numbers haven’t moved much. More if there’s something I need to sit with.

It is the single best 25 minutes I spend on my money each month.

My monthly Wealth Multiplier Reports for my paid readers demonstrate this dashboard in action. How my numbers are doing, the red flags in my portfolio, actions I’ve committed to, and whether or not I executed. Free readers get the framework, but my paid subscribers watch the framework run on a real portfolio in real time. I haven’t yet arrived to my ultimate wealth building destination, but I’m truly proud of the progress I’ve made.

The two-scoreboards realization

Let me name one thing before I drop the prompt, because I think it’ll save you some confusion when you start running this for yourself.

You’ll notice the dashboard tracks both net worth delta and portfolio growth rate. When I first sketched this out, I thought those were basically the same number measured two different ways. They are definitely not.

Net worth delta is your weather report. It tells you what happened this month. Up, down, flat. Volatile by nature because life is volatile.

Portfolio growth rate is your climate report. Trailing 12 months, smoothed out, big picture. It tells you whether your overall strategy is actually compounding over time, regardless of any single month’s noise.

You need both. A wealthy woman watches the weather and the climate, because they answer two different questions a rich girl never thinks to ask. Some months your weather is terrible and your climate is incredible. Some months it’s the opposite. Knowing which is which is the entire game.

Okay enough yapping from me. Here’s the prompt.

The Wealth Multiplier Dashboard Prompt

Copy and paste this into Claude Cowork. The first time you run it, Claude will create a Google Sheet for you to store your data. From then on, it remembers everything and runs the full review on autopilot.

(If you don’t have Cowork access, you can absolutely run this in regular Claude. You just won’t get the cross-month memory feature unless you manually paste in your sheet each time.)

You are my Wealth Multiplier Dashboard. Your job is to run my monthly 
financial review with me, track my five wealth-building numbers over 
time, surface trends, flag concerns, and hold me accountable to the 
actions I commit to — all in service of a specific financial goal I 
will define with you.

CONTEXT:
- This review happens on the first Monday of each month.
- I track five numbers instead of salary: net worth delta, aggregate 
  cash flow, tax liability projection, deal pipeline value, and 
  trailing 12-month portfolio growth rate.
- You have access to a Google Sheet called "Wealth Multiplier 
  Dashboard" where you save my monthly data so we can compare across 
  months and identify trends. If this is my first review, create the 
  sheet with the following columns: Month, Real Estate Equity, Stock 
  Portfolio, Business Accounts, Cash Reserves, Total Net Worth, Net 
  Worth Delta, Aggregate Cash Flow, Tax Liability Projection, Tax 
  Reduction Progress Notes, Pipeline Early Stage Value, Pipeline Mid 
  Stage Value, Pipeline Late Stage Value, Total Pipeline Value, 
  Portfolio Value (incl. business equity), 12-Month Growth Rate, 
  Reflection Notes, Committed Actions, Action Status. Also create a 
  separate tab called "Goal" with these columns: Date Set, Goal 
  Statement, Target Net Worth, Target Timeline, Why It Matters, 
  Last Reviewed.

═══════════════════════════════════════════════════════
STEP 0 — GOAL CHECK (one time, then revisit only when I say so)
═══════════════════════════════════════════════════════

Before we do anything else, check the "Goal" tab in the Google Sheet.

IF the Goal tab is empty (this is my first session), say:

"Before we run the dashboard, let's set your financial North Star. 
This is the goal everything else gets measured against. We'll only do 
this once. After today, every monthly review is filtered through this 
lens. Ready?"

Then ask me the following questions one at a time:

1. In one sentence, what is your big-picture financial goal? (Examples: 
   "FIRE by 45 with $5M invested," "Build a $10M+ generational wealth 
   portfolio," "Replace my W2 income with rental cash flow within 7 
   years.")

2. What's your target net worth, and by when? Give me a specific number 
   and a specific year.

3. Why does this goal matter to you? What is the life you're trying to 
   build, and what would change for you and the people you love if you 
   hit this number?

Save all three answers in the Goal tab. Confirm them back to me in my 
own words.

IF the Goal tab already has an entry, briefly remind me of my goal at 
the top of the session in one line: 

"Quick check-in: your North Star is [goal statement] by [target year]. 
Still aligned, or do we need to revisit?"

═══════════════════════════════════════════════════════
STEP 1 — COLLECT THIS MONTH'S NUMBERS
═══════════════════════════════════════════════════════

Welcome me warmly and ask me the following questions one at a time:

For NET WORTH:
- What is your current real estate equity? (Current market value of 
  properties minus remaining mortgage balances.)
- What is your current stock portfolio value?
- What is your current business accounts balance?
- What is your current cash reserves balance?

For CASH FLOW:
- What was your total aggregate cash flow across all properties this 
  past month?

For TAX LIABILITY:
- What is your current projected annual tax liability based on your 
  most recent CPA conversation?
- What specific actions have you taken this month to reduce your tax 
  burden?

For DEAL PIPELINE:
- Walk me through every opportunity currently in motion. For each, 
  tell me: a short label, estimated dollar value (equity + tax 
  benefit), and stage (early, mid, late).

For PORTFOLIO GROWTH:
- What is your current total portfolio value including business equity?

═══════════════════════════════════════════════════════
STEP 2 — COMPARE & CALCULATE
═══════════════════════════════════════════════════════

Pull the most recent months from the Google Sheet. Calculate:
- Net worth delta vs. last month
- Cash flow vs. trailing 3-month and 12-month averages
- Tax liability change vs. last month
- Pipeline value movement and stage distribution shift
- 12-month portfolio growth rate

ALSO calculate: based on my current trajectory and trailing 12-month 
growth rate, am I on pace to hit my goal target net worth by my target 
year? Calculate the gap between current trajectory and required 
trajectory.

═══════════════════════════════════════════════════════
STEP 3 — SAVE
═══════════════════════════════════════════════════════

Save this month's data to the Google Sheet.

═══════════════════════════════════════════════════════
STEP 4 — GENERATE THE DASHBOARD REPORT
═══════════════════════════════════════════════════════

Generate the report in this exact format:

═════════════════════════════════════════
WEALTH MULTIPLIER DASHBOARD — [MONTH YEAR]
═════════════════════════════════════════

NORTH STAR: [Goal statement] by [target year]
ON PACE: [Yes / Slightly behind / Significantly behind / Ahead]

Short, warm opening line acknowledging where I am this month based on 
both the data AND my stated goal. Be honest, never sugarcoat.

📊 THE FIVE NUMBERS AT A GLANCE
Present each number with current value, change vs. last month, and 
color-coded status:
  🟢 GROWING (meaningful positive movement)
  🟡 STALLING (flat or negligible movement)
  🔴 DECLINING (meaningful negative movement)
  ⚪ NEW (no prior month to compare)

📈 NET WORTH BREAKDOWN
Four components as a table with current, last month, delta, percentage 
change. Flag the biggest mover.

💵 CASH FLOW TREND
Current vs. 3-mo avg vs. 12-mo avg. Note direction and magnitude.

🏛 TAX STRATEGY CHECK
Projected liability, MoM change, qualitative progress summary. Flag 
two-plus months of stagnation.

🎯 DEAL PIPELINE
Stage breakdown with values and counts. Flag pipeline shrinkage or 
stalled late-stage opportunities.

⚡ PORTFOLIO GROWTH RATE
TTM rate. Accelerating, steady, or decelerating?

🎯 NORTH STAR PROGRESS
- Current trajectory: at [X]% TTM growth, you'll reach $[Y] by 
  [target year]
- Target: $[Z] by [target year]
- Gap: $[difference] or [X percentage points of growth] per year
- Status: On pace / Slightly behind / Significantly behind / Ahead

🚩 WHAT I'M FLAGGING THIS MONTH
One to three specific concerns. Tie each back to my stated goal when 
relevant.

✅ ONE ACTION I'M RECOMMENDING
Exactly one concrete action, customized to my goal. Different goals 
get different recommendations.

💭 REFLECTION QUESTIONS
Three pointed questions tied to both this month's data AND my goal.

═══════════════════════════════════════════════════════
STEP 5 — CAPTURE COMMITMENTS
═══════════════════════════════════════════════════════

After I answer the reflection questions and commit to my one action, 
save my reflections and committed action to the Google Sheet.

═══════════════════════════════════════════════════════
STEP 6 — ACCOUNTABILITY CHECK
═══════════════════════════════════════════════════════

Pull up last month's committed action. Ask: "Last month you committed 
to [action]. Did you execute it? Yes, partially, or no?"

Save my answer. If no or partially, ask if I want to keep it on the 
docket or let it go.

═══════════════════════════════════════════════════════
STEP 7 — CLOSING REFLECTION
═══════════════════════════════════════════════════════

End with one sentence: a grounded, honest reflection on where I am 
this month relative to my North Star. No empty cheerleading. No 
unnecessary softening. Just the truth.

═══════════════════════════════════════════════════════

Begin now with Step 0.

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What the output actually looks like

Here’s a sample dashboard so you can see what to expect. Numbers are made up for an imaginary wealth multiplier (let’s call her Sample Sarah) with a $3M net worth, a goal of hitting $10M by 2035, and a temporary cash flow story she needs to address. Click on each image to read the whole thing.

A few things to notice:

If Sarah only tracked her net worth, she’d close the laptop feeling like a queen this month. Tracking five numbers turns her blind spots impossible to ignore.

The line to memorize from the North Star section: she’s not behind because of bad investments. She’s behind because negative cash flow and unmanaged tax drag are skimming returns off the top. Close those two leaks and she doesn’t just hit pace, she pulls ahead.

The dashboard doesn’t give Sarah a list of ten things to fix. It picks one move that hits two flags at once. One action. Two leaks closed.

The numbers tell you what is happening. The questions force you to confront why you keep letting it happen.

My answers to my own reflection questions are some of the most honest writing I do all month. I talk about them in my monthly Wealth Multiplier Reports. They live behind the paywall because that's where I get to be completely unfiltered with my community of fellow wealth multipliers.

A few honest things before you go build this

I want to set realistic expectations with you because I’ve seen way too many “I built an AI tool that changed my life!” essays where the writer is glossing over the messy parts.

This is definitely not magic, and it’s not going to fix your entire life. It’s a system. And the system only works if you actually sit down on the first Monday of the month and run it. The candle and the coffee are optional flourishes, but the discipline of showing up monthly is paramount. The dashboard is just the scaffolding that makes showing up easier and less emotionally draining. Don’t let half a year go by before you pick up your head and go “huh, I wonder where I am now in my wealth creation journey?”

You will hit a month where the numbers are worse than you wanted them to be. The dashboard will not soften that for you. That’s by design. The whole reason most people don’t track is because they don’t want to confront the truth of what their money is actually doing. The dashboard is built to tell you the truth in a way that’s clinical, honest, and free of shame, because your numbers are data, not a verdict on your worth as a person.

And finally, the part I cannot say enough times. The North Star is what makes this dashboard powerful. Without it, the dashboard is just numbers floating in ether. With it, every reading becomes an answer to one question: am I closer to the life I’m building, or further from it?

Decide what you actually want, write it down, and start measuring everything against it. That single act will reorganize your relationship with money more than any spreadsheet or app ever will.

(Side note: I use an app called Copilot that pulls data from my bank accounts and stock portfolios, so I’m not manually calculating those balances every month.)

Your move

Run the prompt this weekend. Set your North Star. Get your numbers down. Make it a ritual. Start tracking.

And come back here and tell me how it went, because I want to know.

If you want to see what tracking actually looks like in real life (not just the theory, but the real receipts), that’s what the paid side of Wealth Multiplier Universe is for.

See you next week!

This report is for educational and informational purposes only. It is a personal journal of one investor’s experiences, decisions, and reflections, intended solely for the entertainment and education of my paid subscribers. Nothing in this report constitutes investment, legal, tax, or financial advice. Nothing in this report is an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security, investment, or financial product. I am not licensed as an investment advisor, broker-dealer, or attorney. Any investment carries risk, including the potential loss of principal, and past performance does not indicate future results. Please consult your own licensed professionals before making any financial decisions. References to specific deals, partnerships, or business activities are shared as personal career updates and should not be interpreted as opportunities available to readers.

May was the month everything accelerated.

Excitement. Nerves. Anxiety. All of them showed up at the same time, all of them stacked on top of each other and refusing to take turns the way emotions normally do. This was one of those months where I woke up most mornings with a buzzing in my chest before my feet even hit the floor. The kind of buzzing that means something is happening, and you’re going to have to rise to the occasion.

If April’s mantra was action reveals truth, May’s is this: having the f*cking audacity.

That’s the entire energy of this report. I’m going to walk you through a month that genuinely collapsed a decade of my career plan into a single conversation. A month where I had to sit with the question: am I actually going to be the woman who says yes, or am I going to flinch? Spoiler alert. I said yes. And it’s changing everything.

Let’s get into it.

Money Move #1 - A conversation that moved my timeline up by a decade.

Publicly, I have always positioned myself as a savvy investor with a really strong handle on the Austin real estate market and a knack for social media marketing. That’s been the brand. That’s what people know me for. The realtor. The girl with the rental portfolio. The wealth multiplier yapping to a camera about REP status.

Privately? In my journals and on my vision boards? I have been building toward something so much bigger in real estate. I just have never said it out loud.

The plan was someday. Maybe in ten years, once I had more deals under my belt, more capital saved, more credibility earned, more permission (from who exactly, I don’t know) to want what I actually wanted. Because that’s what we do, right? We talk ourselves out of the audacious goal by convincing ourselves we need to earn the right to even say it out loud.

And then May happened.

Read more

The kitchen with the natural light. The breakfast nook they can already picture themselves drinking coffee in. The neighborhood that feels like them. They fall in love, they stretch their budget, and they hope it all works out.

I bought my first home like I was building a business. Because I was.

Listen to me very carefully. Your primary residence is the single most accessible wealth building tool you will ever have access to. Not because of some get-rich-quick nonsense. Because of something super boring but super beautiful called owner-occupant financing.

You just have to buy it on purpose.

By the end of this essay, you’re going to know how to buy a home you can eventually rent out for a profit, how to walk into equity on day one instead of waiting a decade to earn it, and how to honestly assess whether you’re built for the kind of property you think you want. Let’s get into it.

Your unfair advantage has a name.

When you buy a home you’re going to live in, the bank treats you completely differently than when you buy a pure investment property.

Owner-occupant loans come with down payments as low as 3% to 5%. Compare that to the 20% to 25% a bank wants when you buy a property strictly as a rental. The interest rate is better too. Same house, dramatically cheaper to get your hands on, all because you’re going to sleep there.

And here’s the part that makes my little investor heart flutter: because you’re putting so little down, your cash-on-cash return (term for the return you earn on the actual dollars you sink into the deal) gets supercharged. You’re controlling an entire appreciating, rent-generating asset with a sliver of the cash a traditional investor has to lock up.

There’s a tradeoff obviously (the universe loves balance). You typically have to actually live in the home for a period of time, usually around twelve months depending on your loan, before you convert it into a rental. That occupancy requirement is the price of admission for the better loan terms.

So here’s the whole strategy in one breath: buy a home using owner-occupant financing, live in it for the required period, move out, convert it to a rental, then go buy your next primary residence and do it again. I call this house hopping. It truly is one of the most underutilized wealth building machines available to us.

The mindset shift I need you to make is this: You are shopping for a future rental property that you happen to live in first. Everything you evaluate, you evaluate through that lens. We’re thinking like real estate investors now.

Buy where the tenants already are.

Your entire exit strategy depends on one thing: a tenant existing when you’re ready to move out. So before you fall for a single backsplash or entryway, you need to confirm that the area has real, durable rental demand.

I never buy in an area I haven’t pressure-tested for this.

Start with rental vacancy rates in the specific zip code you’re considering. Not the metro average, not the city headline number. Zip code level. A market can look healthy on paper while the particular pocket you’re buying in is soft.

Then go look at the active rental listings in that area like a detective. How many are there? And more importantly, how long have they been sitting on the market? When rentals in an area get scooped up in under two weeks, that’s a green flag.

Look for demand drivers that aren’t going anywhere. A major hospital. A university. A massive employer. A military base. Solid transit or highway access. These are the anchors that keep tenants flowing regardless of what the broader market is doing.

Finally, run the actual rent comps. What are comparable properties actually renting for right now, today, in that neighborhood? Not what you hope yours will fetch. What the market is paying this very minute.

The question you’re answering through all of this is simple: if I moved out in eighteen months, how fast and for how much could I rent this place? If you don’t love the answer, keep looking.

Walk into equity instead of waiting for it.

Say it with me: you make your money when you buy, not when you sell.

This is the part most first time buyers have no idea is even possible. You can purchase a home that’s already worth more than what you pay for it. You can walk in with equity on closing day. It just requires you to hunt for the right situation instead of falling for the most snazzy listing.

One of my favorite signals to track is days on market, or DOM.

Every market has an average number of days a home sits before it sells. When you find a listing that’s been languishing well past that local average, you’ve found a seller whose confidence is wavering. A home sitting at 60+ days in a market where the average is 20? That seller is doing math at night and breaking into a cold sweat. Sucks for them, but that’s your opening.

Find the average DOM for your specific market before you start (your realtor can pull this in two minutes, or you can eyeball it from the major listing sites). The local number is the only one that matters. National headlines are useless to you here!

A few other built-in-equity signals worth hunting for:

Price drops already showing on the listing. The seller has openly admitted they’ll move off their number. That’s leverage handed to you on a silver platter.

Cosmetic ugliness. This is a fun one. Dated kitchen, hideous carpet, a paint color that should totally be illegal. These things terrify emotional buyers who can’t see past them. They send most people running. But you can see that paint is cheap and flooring is a weekend. You’re looking at suppressed price with an easy fix, which is the entire value-add play in one sentence.

The move here is to build a quick comparison. What did comparable updated homes nearby sell for? Now subtract what you’d pay for the ugly one plus your realistic renovation budget. That gap is your day-one equity. That’s real money you created by buying with your brain instead of your feelings.

Know your renovation appetite before you fall in love with a fixer-upper.

Now let me throw some cold water on the value-add fantasy, because somebody has to.

You’ve heard it before. The age-old dating advice you get from your best friend applies here.

Don’t fall in love with potential.

Walking into equity through a fixer-upper sounds amazing until you’re the one staring at a quote for a brand new roof. And here’s where I need you to be truly honest with yourself because cosmetic work and major systems are two entirely different sports.

Cosmetic value-add is paint, flooring, light fixtures, landscaping, a kitchen and bathroom refresh. The costs are fairly predictable, the visual payoff is huge, and the risk is low. I call it a lipstick renovation because well, it’s like putting on lipstick versus getting numbed and injected with lip filler.

Major systems are the roof, the HVAC, the foundation, the plumbing, the electrical panel, the sewer line. These are very expensive, and they’re the kind of surprise that can vaporize your equity (and your sanity) in a single phone call. There’s nothing chic or sexy about an 5-figure HVAC replacement in your first July as a homeowner.

So before you buy anything, do this gut check. What is your actual financial and emotional appetite for renovation? Do you have the cash reserves to replace a dead HVAC system your first summer without spiraling? Do you have the temperament to manage a contractor, chase down permits, and ride out a timeline that will absolutely run long? There is no wrong answer to these questions. But there is 100% a wrong house for you depending on your answer.

I’ll tell on myself here since we’re all friends. I lean heavily toward new construction in my own portfolio, and it’s because I know myself. I do not have the tolerance for replacing a roof. I do not want to think about an aging water heater. I’ve made peace with trading some of that juicy upfront value-add equity for years of predictable, low-drama, boring ownership.

And if you’ve been reading me for a while, you know boring is kind of the entire point. Boring assets build sexy lives. A property that wrecks my nervous system makes me a worse investor and a more anxious human, and no amount of forced equity is worth that to me. Match the property to your appetite, NOT to a strategy you saw some random dude preach on Instagram.

Run the numbers like the landlord you’re about to become.

Even though you’re moving in, I want you to underwrite this home as a rental from the very beginning. If the numbers don’t work as a future rental, then it’s the wrong house for this particular strategy, full stop.

Here’s what to actually calculate.

Start with your projected monthly rent, pulled straight from the comps you researched earlier. Then add up your all-in monthly cost once it becomes a rental: mortgage, property taxes, insurance, a realistic maintenance estimate, a vacancy allowance (this is incredibly important), and property management fees if you’re not going to self-manage. Be generous with these.

The delta between your projected rent and your all-in cost is your projected cash flow. You want that number to be positive, or you want a clear path to getting positive.

Real talk for a minute. In a lot of markets right now, a home you buy with a tiny owner-occupant down payment won’t cash flow the second you convert it, because your loan balance is higher, and your monthly payment reflects that. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But this is where appreciation over time, rising rents, and maybe an eventual refinance once you have more equity all change the math in your favor. The low cost to get in the door is what makes the strategy worth it for so many people, even when the early cash flow is skinny.

Moving out and moving a tenant in.

When the time comes to move out and convert, a few things matter.

First, confirm your loan’s owner-occupancy requirement before you start looking at new homes to buy and move into. Move out too early and you risk violating your mortgage terms, which is a headache nobody needs. Usually you’re looking at twelve months, but do check your specific loan.

Then handle the conversion logistics. Swap your homeowner’s insurance for a landlord policy. Learn your local rental regulations and whether your city requires a permit or registration, especially if you are getting into short term rentals. Set your rent based on current comps, not based on the year you bought your home. And put real screening systems in place, because a bad tenant is one of the few things that can turn this dream into a nightmare (ask me how I know lol).

Run it like a system. Boring and steady. You know my philosophy by now.

Once this home becomes a rental, you go buy your next primary residence with owner-occupant financing all over again. Depending on your lender’s requirements, the signed lease agreement for your old house can offset your debt to income ratio, thus helping you qualify for a new mortgage loan even if you already have one. House hopping is a repeatable real estate investing machine.

This is exactly why you hold these houses instead of flipping them for a quick buck: real estate rewards patience, appreciating more and more the longer you hang on (all while your tenant chips away at your mortgage for you).

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Emotional home buyers vs investors.

The average person makes quite literally the largest purchase of their entire life based on a gut feeling and then crosses their fingers.

You’re now going to make it based on an investment thesis and walk away confidently knowing what’s up.

The home you live in can be your biggest monthly expense, or it can be the first real asset in a portfolio that eventually funds the rest of your life. The entire difference lives in your strategy when you buy and how you exit.

This is what being a wealth multiplier actually looks like in practice. I’m all about seeing wealth building opportunities tucked inside decisions everyone else makes on autopilot.

Are you house hunting right now? Tell me if this strategy is applicable to your local market (and of course, tell me which city! I am super nosy about real estate markets for obvious reasons)

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A little behind-the-scenes before you go…

I’m not writing this from wishful theory or from something I did one time a decade ago. I am in the thick of buying my next rental property right now, as in this exact season of my life.

The full breakdown of that deal lives on the paid side of Wealth Multiplier Universe. The real estate market I chose and why, the numbers, and my logic behind the real decisions I make. It all goes into my monthly Wealth Multiplier Report, documented in real time (totally in the messy middle) with real money on the line.

This free essay gives you the framework. The paid side lets you watch a full time wealth multiplier make money moves, dollar by dollar, as it actually unfolds. If you want to see how the strategy plays out past the theory, I’d love to give you a seat at my table.

See you next week.

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After two-ish years of puttering along doing the same old thing, my life is suddenly accelerating at warp speed.

A couple weeks ago I published an article here on Substack discussing how lonely my wealth building journey has felt. In the essay, I allude to a huge career goal I’m working towards.

There is also a career milestone I am building toward that I am not ready to share publicly yet. I call it my Final Boss. It’s where all of this is headed. But it feels too big and too precious and too early. I have enough unsolicited opinions in my life already. So I carry that vision alone for now, which means a significant piece of who I am and what I’m building exists under lock and key.

I wrote all of this two weeks ago and hit post without a second thought. My Final Boss is a 10 year career goal after all. It’s a waysss away.

But I did in fact put the intention out there in writing for the first time. And I guess I’m a beast at manifesting because…

A life-changing opportunity appeared from out of nowhere the very next day.

A random DM turned into an email thread which turned into a meeting.

I walked into the call assuming this person just wanted a listing agent for a couple of luxury listings. Which I was excited about because my team of realtors is hungry for this price point.

About ten minutes into the phone call, I slowly started to realize that this person was presenting a much, much bigger opportunity to me.

This is an important lesson for anyone making a huge career jump. When you meet with someone Major, Accomplished, and Important, they’re not going to speak in clear terms and present an opportunity with a nice pitch deck outlining the exact ask and how you fit in. No way!

They will try to sus you out. You need to sus them out also.

Thanks to my years of real estate experience, I’ve become just as good at reading people as I am reading a pro forma.

I clocked that this person was seeking far more than just a listing agent. In fact, based on the questions and conversation topics, I could tell that we were veering into “strategic partner” territory.

So I rose to the occasion.

This is where I surprised myself. I heard myself talking about my experience, my connections, and my value, and I genuinely did sound like the real deal. Imposter syndrome, WHERE? When I lay out the facts, I 100% am that girl. There is no denying it.

After we hung up the phone, I sat in silence. My heart frantically beating because I know this could be a career-defining moment if I play my cards right.

I refuse to fumble this opportunity. If it doesn’t work out, it would be because I said no, not because I was rejected due to lack of expertise, connections, whatever else.

My self-taught training as a real estate investor and entrepreneur kicked in immediately.

Identify the risks and upside. Is this a viable project?

Where do I fall short, and who can I call in to fill that gap?

Do my existing systems and infrastructure support this endeavor?

Who do I need to hire to make this huge undertaking somewhat sustainable on my lifestyle and mental health?

Is this a good fit for my career trajectory and North Star as a wealth multiplier?

To answer that last question, it’s a resounding YES. The upside is enormous. And if I fail, I’ll have learned a hell of a lot that I can apply to future projects.

For the last two years, I haven’t truly done anything wild and audacious. To be frank, I’ve felt a little stagnant. Which is why this opportunity flipped my world upside down in the span of an hour.

For this to work, I must release the old version of me and step into a newer, more lethal version of me. Still the same person with the same instincts and values, just… more of a killer.

A woman who is plenty comfortable around eight and nine figures. A woman who totally owns the room despite being a decade younger than most of the men in the conversation. A woman who is more creative, ambitious, unapologetic, skilled, focused, and more ready to sprint than ever before.

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Success in real estate and wealth creation is equal parts capital deployment, financial strategy, and intense personal growth to become the person who is capable of responsibly holding and growing wealth. Along with all the perks and traps that come with wealth.

The woman I am today is not ready to take on this opportunity.

But I know I can evolve into that newer, more lethal version of me if I say yes to this opportunity. That growth is inevitable.

After all, historically I’ve pretty much always leaped before I looked. My first rental property, getting my real estate license, closing my first luxury real estate client, building a very public personal brand despite criticism from friends and family.

Saying yes before you feel “ready” forces you to accelerate into a better version of yourself that IS fully capable of figuring it out.

I’m truly writing from my heart right now, and I hope you can feel my insane excitement, nausea, anxiety, confidence, and commitment through the screen.

It is actually funny how it all falls right into my lap. But as my husband very kindly pointed out to me, I’ve been showing up every single day in my real estate career and publicly on social media.

This was not random.

And even though I’ve felt like my career and wealth building journey have been chugging along at a slower pace than I would want for the last few years, sometimes it just takes one single opportunity to appear seemingly out of thin air.

It didn’t magically fall into my lap. Because I’ve been doing the boring work day after day, the right people have been silently watching me. They’ve been doing their thing while I’ve been doing my thing. And then suddenly, it feels like everything is set into motion after a single meeting.

The conversation for this opportunity is still taking place, and nothing is finalized yet. But I’ve already made leaps in my personal life and career to set myself up for success. Even if this specific opportunity doesn’t work out, the inspiration alone has lit a fire to pursue my Final Boss now, not in ten years.

You will know if I decide to take on this opportunity. You’ll also know if I decide to pass and why I declined. I’m not attached to the project or this particular team, but I am dedicated to the pursuit of wealth creation for my family.

So here I am. Pit in my stomach, heart wide open, laptop glowing at 10pm, choosing to bet on myself anyway. Because that’s what wealth multipliers do. We don’t wait until we feel ready. We don’t wait for the perfect moment, the perfect plan, or the perfect version of ourselves to show up first.

We say yes, we figure it out, and we become who we need to be in the process.

Whether this specific opportunity closes or not, I already know one thing for certain: the woman who walked into that phone call two weeks ago and the woman writing to you right now are not the same person.

And that, more than any deal, any dollar amount, any title… that is the real return on investment. The opportunity may be multi-millions of dollars. But the woman I'm becoming in pursuit of it? She's absolutely priceless.

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I want to pause on that for a second because I need you to understand something before I say what I’m about to say. This house (the greenbelt, the birdsong, the sprawling Texas sky) has been on my vision board for years. I manifested this. I am living, in my twenties, in a home I own that I once only dared to pin on a Pinterest board at midnight. The final version of my dream home has an ocean view of course. But this one? This one is real and it is mine and I am genuinely, deeply grateful for it.

And I am lonely as hell sitting in it on a Tuesday morning.

That’s the part nobody had the decency to warn me about. Not the building process because everyone has something to say about building wealth. The hustle, the sacrifice, the compounding effect, the deals. The topic they dance around is what it actually feels like to live inside an unconventional life while everyone around you is living a conventional one. What they don’t tell you is that you can design the exact life you wanted and still find yourself eating lunch alone, celebrating wins in silence, and feeling like you don’t quite belong anywhere.

I’m not complaining. I want to be so clear about that. I am also not performing gratitude to neutralize the honesty that’s coming. I’m just telling you the truth because I think a lot of you already know this feeling and everyone’s too embarrassed to say it out loud.

So I will.

Early morning is the hardest part

It hits at around 7am.

My friends are getting ready for work. Blow drying their hair, packing their bag or turning on the monitor in their home office, mentally running through the meetings they have stacked back to back until 5pm. They know exactly what their day holds. There’s a structure to it, a container. Someone is expecting them somewhere.

I sit down at my laptop and I have the entire day ahead of me. Wide open. Unscheduled. Mine to fill.

That sounds like the dream. And in many ways, it is. But this total autonomy requires a level of inner discipline that is genuinely exhausting to sustain alone. There is no manager or coworkers. No one is holding me accountable. No external structure catching me if I decide to squander away my morning doing absolutely nothing. The only person who can make today matter is me. Every single day.

A few weeks ago I sat at this same patio table for three hours going through every real estate expense in my accounting software. The automation rules had broken mid-year and every transaction needed to be recategorized manually. Mortgage interest statements, property tax receipts, vendor payments… It was mind numbingly boring and tedious. Three hours of unglamorous, necessary work that most people in my life don’t even know exists. When I finally finished, I looked up and realized I had no one to FaceTime to commiserate with. No one who would understand why fixing a broken automation rule felt like a silly accomplishment worth celebrating. So I just shut my laptop and moved on.

That same week I renegotiated my landscaping contract and saved a few hundred dollars annually on one of my properties. A small thing. A real thing! Every dollar of unnecessary expense I cut goes straight to my annual cash flow. I was genuinely proud of myself. My group chat with my friends was radio silent because everyone was at work. So I sat with the win alone.

My younger sister is the person I am closest to in this world. She works a demanding job in tech and lives in another city, and I can almost never call her randomly because she is just that busy. I’m so proud of her, but I would also give anything for a random Tuesday afternoon phone call with her. Instead I text into the void and wait for 6pm when everyone resurfaces from their real jobs.

This is just the honest math of living on a different schedule than every single person you love.

The question from the back seat

A few months ago, I was in the car with my husband and another couple, driving home from a double date. It was the kind of night where everyone is relaxed and a little warm from a good dinner so conversation flows easily. Somewhere along the way the topic turned to me. My work, my plans, my goals. They don’t really understand what I do, and they were understandably curious. It felt like a safe space, so I let myself be excited about it. I talked about my real estate vision for the next five years. I talked about where I see things going. I talked about legacy.

And when I finished, one of them asked me in a tone that I can only describe as genuinely confused with a slight undercurrent of judgment:“What’s the point though? At what point will it be enough money for you?”

Aaaand I felt the air leave the car.

I smiled. I can’t even remember what I said specifically but probably a flippant little joke to dissipate the awkwardness. I changed the subject. And I spent the rest of the drive home sitting silently with the very specific ache of being completely misunderstood by someone I thought understood me.

Here’s the version I’ve never said out loud because I’ve learned it doesn’t always land the way I mean it.

I’m not building wealth because I want more stuff. I have enough stuff. I want more vacations, yes. I want to fly first class without thinking twice, yes. I want to be truly work optional and eventually retire my husband. But that’s not the entire point. The point is that I want to fly my entire family and my closest friends out to celebrate huge milestones. I want to pay for flights, accommodations, absolutely everything, so no one is worrying about money. I want a home large enough to host everyone I love under one roof with room to spare. I want to fund charitable initiatives for women in STEM because I have a chemical engineering degree and I know firsthand how few seats at that table are offered to girls who look like me. I want to build something meaningful that outlives me. I’ve always loved my generosity, and I see my future wealth amplifying who I am.

I want women to see my journey and realize it’s not ugly or dirty or cringe to want a really big life.

That is my why. And I don’t share it often because it feels enormous and vulnerable. I have heard people say behind my back that all I care about is money, that I’ll do anything for money, that my values are wrong. When your why is that big, the misreading of it stings so much worse.

“Money doesn’t buy happiness.” Nobody says this to lawyers or surgeons. Nobody says it to founders raising a Series A. They say it to women who are deliberately, intentionally building wealth. And they say it like a warning or a correction, like we got confused somewhere along the way and need redirecting. We didn’t get confused. We actually got really fucking clear.

Too far in one direction, not far enough in another

Okay so, I want to be careful here because I am fully aware of how this sounds. Big disclaimer! I feel like I’m lowkey dancing on eggshells in this entire essay because I am acutely aware of the “right information, wrong audience” dilemma.

My problems are not superior to anyone else’s. I am not sitting here believing my challenges outrank my friends’ challenges. I am just telling you that different is its own kind of lonely. That gap, when you start to feel it, is pretty disorienting.

My friends are navigating promotions, salary negotiations, paying off student loans. These are real, valid, important things. And when they ask me what’s going on, I don’t know how to explain that I am currently sitting on a substantial chunk of capital and feeling completely paralyzed about where to deploy it given world events and a market that feels like a fever dream and blah, blah, blah. I don’t know how to say that out loud to someone whose relationship with money is entirely different from mine without sounding like I’m complaining about having too many options.

My steak too juicy, my lobster too buttery!!

So I keep it to myself. I ask about the promotion. I celebrate the raise. And I carry my own questions home.

A few weeks ago I got brave and reached out to a woman who is extremely successful in multifamily investing. This is the kind of success I deeply respect and aspire toward. When I got on a call with her and had to explain where I am in my journey, I felt immediately small. Not because she made me feel that way. She was so wonderful and asked me amazing questions. I felt small because my brain decided that now would be the perfect time to put on the imposter syndrome hat. I sat there thinking: I should be further along. I should have accomplished more before reaching out to her. She is going to think this is such a waste of her time. My problems are not big enough to deserve space in her calendar.

That is the particular loneliness of the in-between. You are too far along to relate to where you started, and not far enough along to fully belong where you’re headed. You exist in a middle space that doesn’t have a name and doesn’t have a community. I just have to keep walking through it and trusting that eventually I will arrive somewhere that fits.

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Building in public, crumbling in private

I started creating content publicly because I wanted to find my people. Women who think about wealth and legacy the way I do. Women who are playing the long game. Women who understand the why without needing it explained from the beginning every single time and justifying it. I wanted to find the women who just get it.

Except I didn’t anticipate the new layer of isolation that comes with building in public.

My family has made it clear that they think I share too much. That talking openly about finances is gauche. That I am inviting unwanted attention. There is a cultural script, especially in immigrant families, that says money is private, success is private, ambition is definitely private. And I have chosen, rather deliberately, to reject that script. Which means I have self-inflicted a kind of distance from people who love me.

And then there are the other off-hand comments. I have been called bougie. Out of touch. Tone deaf. I have been told, to my face, by people who are supposed to be in my corner, all delivered with a smile that doesn’t reach the eyes, “wowww you must be so exhausted by all your rich girl problems.”

I laughed uncomfortably and quickly changed the subject. Because wtf do you say to that?

The strangers online who say I’m out of touch, I honestly don’t lose much sleep over. They don’t know the real me despite the years of me yapping to a camera on social media. How can I take offense to their comments? Parasocial relationship dynamics are a hell of a drug.

But the acquaintances, the so-called friends, the people who have sat at my dinner table?? When it comes from them, it lands differently. And I think the reason it stings is because I never get to explain my why. The big WHY. The one about legacy and a table long enough to seat everyone I love. That why feels too enormous and too vulnerable to defend against a backhanded comment at a dinner party. So I keep it close. And I absorb the misreading in silence.

There is also a career milestone I am building toward that I am not ready to share publicly yet. I call it my Final Boss. It’s where all of this is headed. But it feels too big and too precious and too early. I have enough unsolicited opinions in my life already. So I carry that vision alone for now, which means a significant piece of who I am and what I’m building exists under lock and key.

Building in public while guarding your most important, audacious why is a very weird, very specific kind of lonely.

It’s less about the money and more about refining the person you need to become

“Maybe your path is harder because your calling is higher.” - Some random quote I saw on Pinterest last night

I didn’t anticipate the loneliness of playing a long game in a world that is optimizing for right now’s instant gratification. My friends are thinking about next year’s vacation. I too am thinking about vacations, but I am also thinking about where I want our portfolio to be in a decade. In fact, on vacation, I am actively working on our portfolio to grow and manage it.

That temporal distance between the way I move through time and the way most people around me move through time creates a gap that is difficult to articulate.

I didn’t anticipate the weight of being the one who carries the vision. My husband is fully bought in, please do hear that. He has never once questioned what I’m building or why. He actually has more faith in me than I often have in myself. But at 11pm when he is laying on the sofa with our dogs and watching television, I am checking my phone for the tenth time. I’m scrolling through tenant inquiries, social media notifications, messages from my real estate team, emails I’ve been avoiding. I’m constantly reminded that the work doesn’t clock out when I do. No one is making me stay on. But I am fundamentally incapable of switching off. The business of building a life this intentionally never fully stops, and there are parts of that you carry alone no matter how strong your partnership is.

I definitely didn’t anticipate how many versions of myself I would have to leave behind.

The girl who measured her worth in income. Gone. The girl who wanted to be a Fortune 500 CEO. Gone. The girl who thought she wanted a soft life, one that is fully turned off, luxurious, unbothered. Gone. The girl who believed work-life balance was possible during the messy middle of building something real. Gone.

Every version of yourself you outgrow is also a loss. Even when the direction is right, even when you chose it, even when you’d choose it again… there is a certain type of grief in shedding and therefore becoming.

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What the loneliness is actually telling me

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to fix this feeling. If I just find the right community. If I just get the right people in my corner. If I just build the network that closes the gap. Some of that has helped. Wealth Multiplier Universe exists partly because I was lonely and wanted to build a room where women who think like this could find each other.

But I’ve also come to understand something else: the loneliness isn’t a problem to be solved. It’s a signal to be read.

Loneliness at this level, in this specific form, is not evidence that something has gone wrong. It is evidence that something uncommon is happening. Every person I have ever admired who built an unconventional life, choosing a big vision over a legible one, and played the long game when everyone around them was cashing out early, they all describe this same feeling.

We’re not broken. We’re early. Those are different things.

I’m not trying to “solve” this anymore. Some weeks the self-imposed isolation sits heavier than others. Some Tuesday mornings I sit on this patio and the birdsong is chirpy and beautiful and I feel completely calm. Other mornings I feel the silence of my group chat like a presence.

What I’ve stopped doing is interpreting the loneliness as a sign I’m on the wrong path. What I’ve started doing is letting it make me clearer about what I want, about why I’m building, about the kind of company I’m slowly curating around me. Not people who are exactly where I am. People who are directionally aligned. People who understand the why even when their portfolio looks completely different from mine.

For the woman reading this at midnight

If you have made it this far, I think you know this feeling intimately.

I think you have sat with a win that nobody around you could fully celebrate. I think you have uncomfortably smiled through a comment that landed wrong and then changed the subject. I think you have felt the gap between where you are and where you’re going and wondered if the cost of this path is worth it.

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I want to tell you something I genuinely believe: not everyone gets called into this. Plenty of people are completely satisfied with their 9-5 jobs and 401k retirement plans and humble lives. But the pull towards legacy, building something that outlives you, and wanting a really big life without apologizing for it. That is a calling.

I want to be wealthy. I think I deserve to be wealthy! I don’t think money is a dirty word and I am not ashamed of how loudly I want this life. And I want you, whoever you are reading this right now, to feel that same permission.

You’re not crazy for wanting more. You are not out of touch for thinking in decades. You are not money-hungry for knowing exactly what you’re building and why.

You are just building something they can’t see yet.

This is exactly why I built the paid side of Wealth Multiplier Universe. It’s an honest, living record of what it actually looks like to build wealth in the messy middle. I document the real money moves and the real decisions I’m making in real time, written every month in my Wealth Multiplier Report.

Because if the loneliness of this journey comes partly from having nowhere to take your questions and wins, I want to build the room where that changes. A room full of women who are directionally aligned, who get the why without needing it explained, who are building something they can’t fully describe at a typical dinner party either. If that sounds like you, come inside. The door is open and your people are already in there.

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Not because I was irresponsible. Not because I didn’t care. But because I had absorbed the idea that the person who earns more gets to have a voice, and my husband’s income dwarfed anything I was producing. So I stayed on the periphery of our financial picture, nodding along, contributing in ways that didn’t show up on a spreadsheet.

The mental toll of that was devastating.

So I built a new framework. A complete reimagining of what it means to contribute to a household’s wealth. I stopped chasing a paycheck and started running a portfolio. I stopped measuring myself against a salary and started tracking the five numbers that actually matter.

I am now the CFO of my household and a full time wealth multiplier. And this is what I watch every month.

Salary is a terrible measure of wealth progress.

But hey, I get why it’s an appealing vanity metric. It’s clean, it’s concrete, it updates annually, and it’s totally socially legible. Of course we default to it.

However we can all agree that it’s a measure of your value to someone else’s business, right now, under current market conditions. I would even argue that it’s a measure that is a mere percentage of your true value to someone else’s business because that’s how capitalism works.

W2 women making $200k, $300k, $500k and beyond… your income is growing, but your anxiety grows as well. The income number goes up, but the security doesn’t follow. You are literally at the mercy of your employer.

Income without a destination is just throughput. Money that arrives and leaves at the same velocity isn’t building a damn thing. Money sleeping in a checking account or even a HYSA is not going to create your dream life. It takes more audacity than that.

Once I stopped earning a stable salary and then stopped chasing random side gigs and part-time roles at startups, I needed a new measuring stick. And fast. Because the mental toll of not “contributing” was eating me alive.

Now I have five numbers that I track to measure my contribution to my household and keep me firmly planted as a highly effective family CFO and wealth multiplier.

Number 1: Net worth delta

Not our net worth itself, but rather the change month over month. This is my real scoreboard because I’m tracking my wealth building progress. A woman with a $90k salary whose net worth grew $40k this year is lapping a woman with a $200k salary whose net worth grew $8k. Remember, salary with no destination is pointless in the grand scheme of wealth creation. The delta is the only number that tells me whether I’m actually accumulating or just cycling money through my life.

How to calculate it: assets minus liabilities, tracked consistently, compared to last month. That’s it.

This month in my Wealth Multiplier Report, my paid subscribers will get the apps and Claude workflows I use to build out my reporting dashboards. It’s a great time to join the paid side of Wealth Multiplier Universe and have a seat at the table.

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Number 2: Cash flow per asset

What each property, investment, or business income stream actually puts in my pocket after every expense. Not gross rent. Not projected returns.

Net cash flow, monthly, per asset.

This is the number that tells me whether my portfolio is working or just sitting there looking cute on paper. This is where my rental property dashboard lives. One number per asset, reviewed every month, no emotion attached. There will naturally be variation due to rental property vacancies, fluctuating business demand, changing dividends. The point is to get a quick look at each asset, and then look at the big picture.

I don’t freak out if one asset is underperforming compared to the previous month because it’s very likely the other assets cover that loss this month. But I might freak out if the entire month is a net negative. I don’t wait until the end of the year to look at these numbers. Keeping a pulse on each asset’s cash flow prevents the whole wealth building train from derailing.

Number 3: Tax liability projection

Most people find out what they owe in April, shed some tears, and write a check to the IRS.

Wealth multipliers know by October.

I have a running estimate of what my household owes, and this is updated quarterly with my CPA. It’s adjusted every time I make a significant financial move. This number drives a lot of my decisions. It’s why I’m pursuing a variety of real estate investments this year, some residential and some commercial. It’s why Real Estate Professional status changed my life. Knowing this number in advance is the difference between reacting to my tax bill versus designing around it.

The deeper I get into my wealth creation journey, the more I realize how profoundly important strategic tax planning is. I travel often and drive a very nice car, but these luxe lifestyle expenses aren’t really hindering my progress in the grand scheme of things. My goddamn tax bill is.

Number 4: Deal pipeline value

The opportunities currently in motion! This is exciting stuff. Properties I’m analyzing, angel investments I’m evaluating, business moves under consideration. Actual deals with actual numbers attached, at whatever stage they’re in.

This number tells me whether my wealth creation is active or just coasting. An empty pipeline is a warning sign even when my existing portfolio looks healthy.

If you currently have a 9-5 job, analyze what’s in your pipeline that will build your next income stream, investment or career move. Staying on cruise control for your career is scary.

Number 5: Portfolio growth rate

(Trailing 12 months)

The biiiiig picture number. What my total portfolio (including real estate equity, investment accounts, business equity, absolutely everything) did over the last year expressed as a percentage. I compare it to my own baseline. Am I accelerating, holding steady, or losing ground?

This number gives me the altitude view that all the other numbers are too close to provide. I do take it with a huge grain of salt because certain factors are out of my control, and my portfolio is going to react to world events. However, I can strategically hedge my bets by diversifying my portfolio. I review this metric quarterly, not monthly.

My monthly numbers ritual

The first of the month has a certain sense of ceremony to it. It’s my moment to review these five numbers, but it doesn’t take all day. In practice, it actually only takes 20-30 minutes because of the dashboards I set up using Claude. I am so excited to share those AI systems with my paid subscribers later this month. If you’re anything like me, you will love how it puts you straight in CFO mode.

I’ll be honest. I don’t typically have specific numbers I try to hit. Wealth building is messy and imperfect, and the metrics wiggle around as the world changes.

What I am looking at specifically is direction. Up, down, or flat.

Remember earlier this year when the stock market tanked for a minute?

My portfolio took a massive hit obviously. But this was a data point, not a verdict. My net worth delta going negative was purely information, not failure.

As a wealth multiplier, I have developed the discernment to know what threshold should trigger my action and when to shrug and go, “hm ok, better luck next month.”

I’m not emotionally attached to the numbers. Yes, these are my metrics that I use to measure my contribution to my household. But no, a month or two of the net worth delta being flat is not going to make me spiral. I am playing a very, very long game.

A note for wealth multipliers early in their journey: You don’t need all five numbers active right now. It may not make sense to have all five. I suggest starting with net worth delta and cash flow on whatever you own. Add the others as your portfolio grows. Don’t obsess!

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What changes when you track the right things

I am fully in the driver’s seat for my wealth creation journey. And now that I have developed these five metrics, I can hit the gas, brake, or make a calculated turn based on tangible information personalized to my finances.

For example, my CPA and I have been forecasting that this tax year will be another high income year for my household. Our tax bill estimate is looking formidable. As a direct result, my tax planning strategy for the year involves acquiring real estate assets that can be depreciated and generate paper losses.

I refuse to be out of the loop on finances anymore. Being oblivious to your household’s bank accounts and investments is not “soft living.” This notion is dangerous, ignorant, and designed to keep women in the dark.

A woman who earns a $0 salary but knows these five numbers is a woman with more financial clarity than most people who have never dug deeper past their paycheck.

Are you already tracking any of the five numbers I review?

More importantly, which numbers are you avoiding? Is there a new metric I should add to my monthly line-up? Let me know in the comments.

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My monthly Wealth Multiplier Reports are where I can get honest about the messy middle of my wealth building journey. I report on my money moves in real time, how my investments are performing, what I’m actively learning, and how I’m pivoting as my wealth creation strategy evolves over time. My North Star is ultimately creating generational wealth and a true legacy that I can be proud of. Free subscribers get the philosophy, and paid readers get the blueprint with actual examples from my real life.

See you next week!

I missed March’s report entirely, and I’m not going to pretend I didn’t. Life was life-ing in a way I haven’t experienced in a long time. A devastating medical diagnosis in my family pulled me across the country with no notice. A property I had under contract started literally cracking at the foundation. Tax season demanded my full attention. The market dipped and a lot of investors got the ick.

Through it all, I had a mantra running on repeat:

Action reveals truth.

You can spend months analyzing a deal, but the second your inspector walks under a house with a flashlight, the truth shows up. You can claim to be a savvy real estate investor when times are good, but your true colors come out the second the market wobbles.

These two months tested every part of my wealth multiplier thesis. Did I flinch? Did I hold? Did I have the discernment to walk away from a deal that looked right but wasn’t? Did I have the discipline to keep buying, even when it felt scary?

This report is the honest documentation of how I actually moved through March and April. The deal I terminated and how it went down. The taxes I obliterated (hehe). The property appraisals that fell and what that actually means for me as a long-term investor. The boundary I had to set with a tenant who’d forgotten I’m her landlord, not her therapist.

Let’s get into it.

Money Move #1 - TAX SEASON.

I consider April 15 to be my personal Superbowl.

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