(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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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: ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

Welcome to OppenFolio, my personal attempt to build a fusion nuclear reactor using the stock market. Okay, maybe a better description is: a data-driven, semi-automated, high-dividend portfolio using a class barbell design to manage risk. Or maybe it’s just: Can we extract enough real cash from YieldMax ETFs before their NAV erosion catches up? Or, fine, Can we earn money from the market faster than we lose it? However you want to frame it, this is an experiment. And yeah, it’s my real money on the line. You can check oppenfolio.com right now to see exactly how much, the whole thing is fully public, from structure to a detailed trade audit log. But this still isn’t something you should blindly try at home. This post is my attempt to introduce the project and explain why I’m doing it. ...