I’ll be damned if you're not going to be way better with money than before I met you
Hi! I’m Ernesto. Nice to meet you. I’m glad you’re here.
Who am I?
I'm an engineer-turned-finance-nerd who lives by the principles I teach. I grew up poor in the Philippines. Not "we couldn't afford the latest iPhone" poor. The kind of poor where Jollibee was a luxury saved for birthdays, and you learn the value of every peso long before you're old enough to understand compound interest.
At seventeen, I won the lottery of life, but it came with a gut-wrenching price: my U.S. visa was approved the same week my grandmother, who petitioned me, died. I moved to the United States on Christmas Eve 2002, determined to make the most of the opportunity I'd been given.
I earned my bachelor's degrees in Electrical Engineering and Physics in 2008, right in the middle of the Great Recession, and spent the next seventeen years in the semiconductor industry making microchips.
Why money became personal
In my late twenties, something hit me like a freight train. My parents weren't getting any younger, and my younger brother and I would one day be responsible for taking care of our sister, who has special needs. I had to be good with money. Not decent. Not eventually. Relentlessly good.
So I turned my hour-long commute into a rolling university on personal finance, devouring the work of truth-tellers and wading through mountains of garbage advice. I paid off my student loans, built a positive net worth, and started investing in index funds in 2009, after more analysis paralysis than I care to admit and the persistent nagging of a bank teller who kept telling me my cash was doing nothing in a checking account. She was right.
No inheritance. No lucky crypto windfall. No tech startup. I spent less than I earned and invested the difference, consistently and relentlessly, for years. And it worked.
Why I'm qualified to teach
I passed the Series 65, the Uniform Investment Adviser Law Exam, which makes me eligible to become an Investment Adviser Representative. It tests whether you actually understand securities law, fiduciary duty, and investment principles, not whether you can sell someone a product they don't need.
I'm also an engineer. Math and numbers are second nature to me. I see patterns, I optimize systems, and I calculate probabilities for fun. More importantly, I live these principles. I don't just teach them.
Over the years, I've helped friends and family do the same. Fiery Personal Finance started as an audience of one: my girlfriend, who can bring an almost-dead patient back to life in an emergency room but had no idea how money works. I suspected she wasn't the only one. So I created Fiery Personal Finance.
Life beyond Fiery Personal Finance
My journey has been humbling in ways I never expected. I've had far more adventures, chance encounters, and good fortune than should be legally allowed in a single lifetime, along with setbacks and obstacles I somehow weathered.
I've summited Mount Kilimanjaro, reached Annapurna Base Camp in the Himalayas during an earthquake, trekked Italy's Dolomites, taken on Patagonia's Fitz Roy, and scaled Guatemala's Volcán Acatenango to watch Volcán Fuego erupt through the night. I've gone skydiving, bungee jumping, hang gliding, and white-water rafting, explored over thirty countries across six continents, and seen the Seven Wonders.
I'm an Eagle Scout, I speak three languages, and I document the outdoors through landscape photography. When I'm not helping people fast-track their financial independence, I'm mountain biking, snowboarding, or hiking around the Pacific Northwest.
Every one of those moments reminds me why financial freedom matters. See more of my adventures on my personal Instagram.
Love,
Ernesto
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