About Me
Derrick Ollinger
I think it's interesting that some of the biggest names in finance were initially college-educated in the humanities. Peter Lynch, Jim Cramer, Carl Icahn, Tom Gardner, Morgan Housel, Ramit Sethi – the list goes on and on. It’s as if there just might be something about the human condition and human behavior that plays a crucial role in finance. While I do not put myself among these luminaries (of course), I too started off in the humanities and then later received my MBA, and ultimately became transfixed by the subject of finance, in particular investing.
While I excelled at finance during my MBA years, I was too intimidated by the subject (aren’t we all?) to pursue it at the time. It wasn’t until I was in my mid-thirties that my dad handed me a book called “The Successful Investor Today” by Larry Swedroe. To be honest, it was dry and probably not the first investing book anyone should read. However, there was something to it – the fusion of hard numbers, behavior, and psychology. The obsession had started.
Around that same time, I sold a business I founded, which resulted in a modest chunk of money. The timing seemed perfect, but I was still very tentative to simply dive into investing on my own. Sure, I had given the token amounts to my 401k before and given some cursory glances to the inscrutably-named funds within. But it wasn’t until I sat down with my dad to discuss the Swedroe book for a couple hours that I felt comfortable putting a decent amount of money into this mysterious thing called the market. Don’t we all need that? It’s one thing to read a book or two, but it’s another to talk it through with someone who knows the subject much better than you.
Over the next 17 years, I consumed dozens of finance books, hundreds of podcasts, and countless sources online. Due to this knowledge, and a few turns of luck, I was able to retire by 50. Now, I want to do for you what my dad did for me. I want you to be able to meet with someone face-to-face and truly understand what you are doing with your hard-earned money. As they say, nobody cares more about your money than you do.
This is part cause and part business for me. I am not looking to make a fortune off of this; I just want everyone to feel the freedom I do knowing that you have a plan in place and your money is working for you.
Derrick lives with his wife, Alyssa, daughter, Abbey, and two lovable mutts, Bruno and Phoebe, in Baltimore, MD. He stays sane with exercise, meditation, yoga, and, strangely but not surprisingly, finance books.