About

This is us! My beautiful wife, our two kids, and I having fun together in Delaware.

I was born in England in 1987, lived in the Philippines for a little while or until Mount Pinatubo decided it was interested in erupting in 1991, and then quickly landed in Delaware shortly after.  

It wasn’t much longer after we moved onto base housing at Dover Air Force Base that my parents split up. So with my dad leaving the Air Force and moving back to California, it was my mom, my sister and I that were left to figure out life in America for ourselves.

My mom was new to this country at the time, having lived her entire life in England, but she knew that this was going to be the best place for her kids to be raised, and she stuck it out. She went from not needing to work for several years and being a stay-at-home mom to needing to provide for two kids in a new country in a really short period of time.

We moved into a low-income apartment complex in the Caesar Rodney School District and our single-parent family life began. We moved around a few more times throughout my childhood, but my mom was firm that we weren’t going to move out of the district, and that’s one thing among many that I’ll always be thankful for.  Looking back on it, those times were tough, but it really shaped who I am today and is really what gave me the desire to crush life, the drive to work hard no matter the odds against me and most importantly, the passion for helping others.

With my mom working multiple jobs for pretty much my entire life and my sister needing to be out on her own, I grew up without the presence a traditional family at home but quickly made my friends my family.  Growing up I felt like I was handed two options when faced with not-so-ideal life situation; be bad and do nothing with your life or be good and make something of your life. Now life isn’t quite that black and white, but at an early age, that’s what I was able to conceptualize and thankfully I was wide-eyed enough to clearly see those were the options as a young kid and I surrounded myself with good people and families as much as I could.  I’m incredibly grateful for the families that took me under their wing and have so many memories of love. I grew up with a lot of friends that were in the same boat as me and we stuck together. Of course, we weren’t perfect but we knew what we needed to do in order to succeed in life.

Fast forward a bunch of years, I was having a blast playing multiple sports in high school and building so many solid relationships that I’m fortunate enough to still have today.

After high school graduation in 2005, I moved up to Chester, Pennsylvania to attend and play lacrosse at Widener University.  I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in accounting and finance in May of 2009. (holy crap, I’ve been out of college for 10 years!).  

I landed my first “real” job at a public accounting firm in northern Delaware where I learned from some of the brightest accountants in our area.  Really fortunate to have been able to work there for almost three years, a new opportunity opened up closer to home and I became the finance guy at an electronic security company in Dover, Delaware.  And then after 6 full years there, I found my most recent opportunity where I still work today.

Sprinkled in between there I went back to school to earn a master’s degree in business administration (MBA) and I’m a certified public accountant (CPA) in Delaware.

Oh yeah, and along the way I married my high school sweetheart (see now why I was grateful we stayed in the same district) and we have two wonderful kids and a cool dog together.  

There is a lot more stuff about me that I could write but I hope this little glimpse helps frame the context and perspective in which I will document my experiences as I thrive to FI.