OppenFolio Blog

Welcome to the OppenFolio blog. Here you’ll find insights, breakdowns, and personal experiments in wealth-building that most financial blogs won’t touch. Whether you’re optimizing an income machine or just trying not to get crushed by NAV decay, this is for you.

Who OppenFolio Is For (And Who It's Not)

Somewhere out there is a person who might benefit from something like OppenFolio, and doesn’t know it yet. And somewhere much closer is someone who shouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. This post is for both. What OppenFolio Actually Is It’s a self-managed portfolio that turns capital into monthly income using high-yield ETFs. It tracks NAV decay, volatility, dividend momentum, and yield-to-risk ratios. It buys with pressure, exits with logic, and earns real, after-tax income, sometimes exceeding 20% annually. ...

How These ETFs Actually Work

Most people don’t know what an ETF actually is. That’s not a criticism. It’s by design. Wall Street wants you to think it’s complicated. But once you strip away the financial jargon, most ETFs are simple machines. At their core, they’re just someone else’s portfolio, one you can buy a share of, for a small fee. The Basics If you buy one share of Apple, you own Apple. If you buy one share of an ETF like SPY, what you really own is a sliver of 500 companies, bundled together. That’s all an ETF is: a pre-packaged basket of stocks. ...

Scaling OppenFolio to $50K

As of now, OppenFolio is running just above $20,000 in deployed capital. The system is live, steady, and doing its job: generating monthly income with precision and control. It’s already exceeding most income strategies I’ve come across, and we’re only getting started. We’re on track to scale to $50K over the next few market dips. That number wasn’t picked at random. It answers the question that launched this whole experiment: ...

How Oppenfolio Can Beat Los Angeles Real Estate

(and why this isn’t as crazy as it sounds) Every time I tell someone about my Oppenfolio strategy, a dividend-focused ETF portfolio tuned for high after-tax yield, I eventually hear the same thing: “But isn’t real estate the best investment? Especially in LA? My accountant says I should buy more property.” It’s a reasonable question. For decades, Los Angeles real estate has been the default “smart move” for anyone who wants to build wealth. And to be clear: I do own LA real estate. In fact, my family recently completed construction of an ADU in mid-city, and we live on a property with a mortgage and a 100-year-old main house. ...

Time is the Only Real Currency

Everybody loves money. We’ll do just about anything to get it. We need it to live. But what is it, really? Some dirty paper you wouldn’t touch if it didn’t promise lunch? A number on a screen that jumps around while you sleep? Somewhere along the line, money took on a god-like quality. But beneath the myth, all it really represents is time. Your time. Someone else’s. All sliced into tokens and traded across systems until we forget what we were actually exchanging. ...

Loans for Life

Let’s say you have $300K sitting in a taxable brokerage account. You could try to squeeze income out of it. Or you could never sell a single share, and still spend money for the rest of your life. That second path is what this post is about. Welcome to the Borrower Class Wealthy people don’t sell assets. They borrow against them. They go to their broker, get a margin line or a securities-backed line of credit (SBLOC), and draw cash against their portfolio, usually 20–30% of its value. ...

NAV Decay Is Rust

Every time I see an Instagram post telling me to “buy five vending machines and you’ll be rich,” I feel two things: Admiration for the hustle. Relief that I don’t have to live that life. Yes, vending machines can generate income. So can rental properties. So can a dozen other low-effort, high-hassle income schemes that get packaged as passive for clicks. But if you peel back the stickers and look at the underlying mechanics, they’re all doing the same thing: ...

I Do Not Want to Own a Vending Machine

Every day, I see some version of this post: “I own five vending machines and pull in $10,000 a month in cash flow.” And that’s awesome. Sincerely. If you figured out a way to make snack logistics profitable in 2025, I hope your Skittles empire lasts forever. But I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to negotiate placement with gas stations, buy bulk inventory, or find out someone jammed peanut butter into the coin return. ...

Reactor Shell

Last time, “Picking Symbols”, we talked about the core of OppenFolio, its fuel rods, which are currently all YieldMax ETFs due to their extreme volatility and leveraged yields. We talked about how those symbols are designed to be burned inside a reactor. They’re too dangerous to hold blindly. Today we’re talking about the shell I built around that core. What the Shell Is (and Isn’t) “Protective” isn’t quite the right word. ...

Picking Symbols

OppenFolio is built like a nuclear reactor. That’s not just branding. There’s a reactive core, dangerous, high-yield instruments that are guaranteed to decay over time. And there’s a containment shell, stable, income-heavy ballast that keeps the system from melting down. Some call this a barbell strategy. I call it fuel management. Why I Built It This Way Before OppenFolio, I used to run what you’d call safe income portfolios. The kind of thing a conservative retiree might live off. They paid $200–300/month, just enough to fund whatever project I was obsessed with that year without bothering my wife or risking our capital. When we wanted the money back, it was still right there for us to use. ...