About

Hi Friends,

My name is Adam, welcome to my blog.  

This blog serves as a place for me to talk about my life in general, my work, my investments, my health and well being, and as a place for me to share reviews of books that I've read and other products that I like to use in order to try to chase the American dream. For me that dream is financial independence.

Let me begin by telling you a little bit about myself.

A picture of me hiking at the Hot Springs Trailhead in Santa Barbara, CA.

I'm not sure where the appropriate place to begin is, so I'll start with my geography.  I live and work in "The Region" an area in NW Indiana that is just outside of Chicago. As the Indiana welcome center likes to say we are Chicago's neighboring south shore. Our area is best known for the steel mills in Gary, the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, and for being economically and politically different from the rest of our state. In the region we vote blue in a predominately red state.

I've lived in the region for my entire life. I received my primary and secondary education in the local public school system and my post-secondary education from Purdue University Calumet, currently known as Purdue Northwest. PNW is a commuter college in Hammond that is a part of the greater Purdue University System and a great school. I graduated from PUC with a bachelor of science in computer information systems and information technology, with a primary focus in software development.

After college I had the privilege of working for my dad's medical billing company. It was amazing! I had no stress and a secure financial future essentially handed to me. There was only one problem, I didn't have a passion for it. In fact I didn't really have a passion for anything.  I ended up leaving my dad's company after a few years to go find what I truly wanted to do. Over the next 5 years I worked in the steel industry as a system administrator, I bartended weddings on weekends, and I eventually ended up working as a web/app developer for a startup called Snapdragon Studios.  

It was Matt and his small development shop that helped me find my passion.  Matt's drive and attention to detail pushed me to grow leaps and bounds as a developer in a short period of time and exposed me to working on major products for major clients. We worked crazy hours on high stress projects for clients like the National Review, The Grand Ole Opry, and even Donald Rumsfeld. A little two man shop in NW Indiana was pushing out web dev work to clients in NYC, DC, Tennessee, and Chicago. The work, the environment, and the people taught me that I loved building a business, strategizing, and learning. It was finding this passion that allowed me to say yes to my dad when a few years later he asked me to come back and take over his company as he was looking to move into retirement.

For the last 4 years I've been back at Custom Data working in my family business trying to navigate my way through a whole new set of challenges.  The work although different from my other careers is just as challenging and just and exciting now that I've found what drives me.  

This page is getting a little long, so I think I'll end it here, even though I've really only touched on my professional career. I hope you'll stick around and continue to read some of the other articles that I post, and I promise that if you do I'll eventually get into some of my personal details as well.