A bit more about my story

“EVERYTHING I HAVE I OWE TO FEAR”

Hello! My name is Stephanie. I want to introduce myself and share how I got interested in money. 

Igrew up with a single mother for most of my childhood. I never knew my father. We were poor, but I wasn’t aware of that until much later. When I was 12, my mom met a man who she ended up marrying and we moved in with him. My mom was happy. She lived in a house they owned for the first time in her life. Also for the first time, we had money. 

I never liked my stepdad. After he moved in with us I started having insomnia and seeing therapists for anxiety. As soon as I was old enough, I started staying away from home as much as possible. By the time I was in high school, my stepdad had started drinking. Soon he became abusive toward us. Mostly my mom, but sometimes me too. When the abuse turned violent, my mom moved us out of the house into an apartment. But without my stepdad's income, we couldn’t afford to live on our own, and my mom eventually moved us back into his house, despite the danger. At the time, I couldn’t understand her decision. Now I know that she wanted to get me through high school and into college before she risked financial instability again by leaving my stepdad for good. This was entirely a financial decision. 

After we moved back into the house with my stepfather, I changed. I decided that from that point forward, I would never be dependent on anyone. I vowed not to marry. Not to have children. I told myself I would always choose the hardest path in order to prove myself. I would be superwoman. I would be rich. I would be smart. I would be perfect.

It has taken me a long time to speak openly about this experience. But I believe it’s an important story to share since my fear of financial dependence has informed every major decision that I’ve made throughout my life. Even before I was legally able to work, I started picking up eight-hour shifts at the local strawberry fields, earning six dollars an hour under the table every Saturday and Sunday. As a fourteen-year-old, that was more money than I knew what to do with - I began stockpiling cash around my room and continued working and saving throughout high school, eventually opening my Roth IRA at 18. At the same time, I was lucky that my mom supported my academic endeavors and encouraged me to go to college - she bought me a book listing all the colleges in America that I read cover to cover, and even signed me up for nerdy science camps during the summers, where I took classes in dissection, magic, mask making, and rocketry.

Throughout my jobs, extracurriculars, and studies during high school, I was always working toward success. I thought that if I could do something, I should, and I carried this mindset to college, where I took out (perhaps too many) student loans and cycled through jobs to support myself, saving obsessively and hustling to catch up on my physics major after switching from premed. During college, my drive to “shoot for the stars” became more literal than figurative after I secured an internship at CalTech studying asteroids. When I was offered a position at NASA before I graduated, I was thrilled and relieved; it was 2007, and everyone around me was either losing their jobs or struggling to find work after college. I held on to that job like a lifeline. 

From that point on, I worked in Aerospace. I started at NASA, studying radiation leftover from the Big Bang at a telescope in Chile, and eventually took a position at SpaceX, where I worked on rockets, spaceships, and satellites. After bouncing between financial advisors and brokers, I decided to take my finances into my own hands and began building my portfolio from scratch. All the while, I was racing toward retirement, reaffirming my goals every New Year that passed. When I was 30, I quit my job and sold everything in order to move to Greece and reconnect with my real father. But after nine months in Europe, my fear of financial instability won out and I returned to SpaceX until I was able to reach financial independence two years later. 

As a woman who knows what it's like to fear financial dependence, who faced discrimination in a field still dominated by men, and who has become a personal finance expert along the way, I want to use my experience to help other women achieve their financial goals. I believe that mastering personal finance can be a path toward equality. And while I owe so much of my success to fear, it’s important to acknowledge that I wasn’t alone in this journey, and I’m incredibly grateful, lucky, and privileged to be where I am today. My sincerest hope is to teach women how to manage their finances and grow their wealth from a place of empowerment, rather than fear. 

STEPHANIE XENOS, MONEY MUSE