Photo by: Tyler Kpakpo

MEET ECOMMJESS

I’m pretty dang good with money now, but like any other skill, it’s one I had to learn. I grew up in a single parent household. When my dad passed away, I was young, and my mom was a stay-at-home parent. We lost our only source of income, so my mom had to find a job that paid the bills for her kids without having a college degree. And that’s when she became a realtor.

I joke that I became a realtor too. I would go with her to listing appointments, open houses, and watch her draft contracts. I learned a LOT about the housing market at a super young age. But I also learned what happens when it crashes. In 2008, once again, our income stream vanished. So I grew up with a mindset: at any given moment, I could be minutes away from having no way to pay the bills. My experience taught me that I could never rely on another person for income, and that one source of income is only one step away from no source of income.

And since neither of my parents went to college, naturally, I thought: go big or go home baby. I’m getting a doctorate.

So I went to pharmacy school. I did four years of undergrad, four years of grad school AND completed residency. I did make six figures when I finally started working, but I also accumulated nearly $200,000 in student debt.

I crash-landed into the pandemic and eventually began working in the Emergency Department. On a near-daily basis, I heard patients say: “If I manage to make it out of this hospital, I have no idea how I’ll afford the bill.” In the same shift, doctors and nurses would be chatting to decompress. I’d hear: “What even is a 401(k) anyway?”

I realized, in those moments, that no one is taught anything about money.

Meanwhile, I learned the hard way that making a great salary, an ENORMOUS privilege on its own, wasn’t enough to build real wealth. My loans were eating away at my paycheck, and what money I could put into savings wasn’t doing anything. I knew I needed to learn how to invest, but I had no one to teach me. So, I decided to teach myself. And boy, did that pay off.

So, it all began! In a very dark time, I created @ecommjess to shed light on everything I’d learned about money from the ground up — including all of my mistakes so that no one else would have to make them. My source? Life experience and published literature, NOT get-rich-quick schemes or sketchy guru garbage. Oh, and I didn’t quit my day job.

I got a teaching certificate. I made the news! And this year, I wrote a book all about investing for complete beginners.

No, I’m not a Wall Street banker or a billionaire CEO, but that’s exactly my point. You don’t need a trust fund or a formal education in finance to be great at money or to build real wealth. Neither did I.

Today, @ecommjess has grown into a community of more than 1 million AMAZING friends all over the world, and I’m SO happy you’re here. Together, we’ll make personal finance easy to understand and accessible to all. ♥