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How a $25 experiment became a self-funding creative machine Three years ago, I wanted to fund a side project, something creative, experimental, and probably unprofitable at first. Maybe a YouTube channel. Maybe a self-published book. The kind of thing that needs a few hundred dollars a month to breathe but doesn’t justify touching family savings to do it. So I started smaller. Much smaller. The Seed Loop The seed money wasn’t a windfall. It wasn’t inheritance or savings. It was Apple Cash. Grocery cashback. Twenty or thirty dollars a month, the kind of digital lint everyone ignores. ...

Six months in, and the Oppenfolio chart tells a story most stock pickers can’t. Green everywhere. Even the one ugly red mark has paid back its losses in dividends. That’s the difference between buying a stock and building a machine. Stocks rely on luck. Oppenfolio relies on math. But running the machine taught us something new. The results showed us that raw yield isn’t enough. To make this durable, we needed new rules. That’s where the $30,000 Cap and the 2x Rule came from. They aren’t how we started. They’re what we learned. ...

When Oppenfolio launched, the buying plan was simple. A fixed mix of symbols, each with a set target weight. Every so often I would make a manual adjustment, but the structure was static. New contributions followed the plan without any memory of what had worked best or what had lagged behind. That approach was easy to manage but left efficiency on the table. So we’ve pivoted. Now every purchase shifts the mix slightly, based on how each symbol has contributed to new money over its lifetime. If a symbol has delivered more than expected, it earns a little more weight the next time. If it has underperformed, it gives some back. Over time the system adapts, growing leaner and more efficient without requiring constant manual intervention. ...

There’s a famous quote from Dwight D. Eisenhower: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed.” True. But here’s the part no one says out loud: Every meal given to a hungry child is a bullet that wasn’t manufactured. The two truths are bound together. Every act of care diverts resources away from harm. Every act of harm diverts resources away from care. There is no clean separation. ...

Six months ago I launched OppenFolio with a simple goal: Take $50K of capital, scale it up in $10K tranches, and build a machine that spits out $1K a month in after-tax income. Today? That’s exactly what it’s doing. Which feels… strange. The Numbers Portfolio scaled to $50,000, right on plan Current cash flow: ~$1,000/month after tax Paper NAV: –2% unrealized Dividends earned: +4% Net effect: +2% new money overall That’s the machine, working as designed. No drama. No fireworks. Just steady output. ...

Everyone says they’re waiting for a crash. Almost no one is actually prepared for one. But Oppenfolio is. And not just in a “we’ll survive it” sense. In a “this is when we make our next best moves” sense. This post models a hypothetical 10% drawdown in the broader market, say, a July panic triggered by earnings misses, tariff shocks, or political turmoil, and shows how the Oppenfolio framework holds, adapts, and even benefits. ...

Every time I run the numbers, I come back to the same conclusion: This works. A structured, logic-driven portfolio, heavy on ballast, rich in monthly yield, layered with optionality, is holding its ground while markets drop, and still throwing off real, usable income. And not in theory: in practice. On paper. In real brokerage accounts. So why isn’t everyone talking about this? The Structure in Question If you’re new here, Oppenfolio is a barbell-income portfolio built on three layers: ...

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. ...

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. ...

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: ...