#109: MMV's 2025 Year-End Letter

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Hey all, it’s MMV.

I’m a little late on this but I wanted to share a year-end letter like Warren Buffett’s annual shareholder letters. Obviously, a lot has been going on this month (I gave my resignation notice last week that you can read about here) so this post was on the back burner for obvious reasons.

Coincidentally, today is my last day in my current role and on Monday, I start my new career!

The purpose of this post is to share my journey, reflect on successes and failures, and share lessons that I learned during the year that spans across multiple areas from personal to business.

Maybe this will be an annual thing moving forward.

🇪🇺 Trump says he reached Greenland deal ‘framework’ with NATO, backs off Europe tariffs
A lot of crazy foreign relations stuff going on the last two days.. it’s almost like Trump is doing Putin’s work by separating the U.S. with NATO.

🛰️ Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin launches satellite internet service to rival SpaceX
Who you got? Blue Origin or SpaceX?

🐂 Trump signs order to limit Wall Street investors in single-family housing
Institutional investors own 3% of single-family rentals. I think this is a win because institutions are heavily concentrated in cities in the South and along the Sun Belt. Think Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Charlotte, and Tampa.

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I’m going to break this up into major categories:

In case you missed the big news, I resigned from my job at the Department of Defense.

It’s a crazy leap of faith to leave my cushy desk job to go into law enforcement, but I just can’t do another year of the past year so I rather take a chance on something else, even if it doesn’t work out.

The best parts of the job disappeared in 2025 so the reasons why I took this job were gone.

There isn’t much to update on from my career (because my job was so mundane) and that I resigned, but here are some highlights:

I hope that in next year’s year-end letter, I’ll be able to say I love my job (or at least enjoy it way more than my last)

It’s been 7 years since I started this account and I’m starting to treat it more like a business.

My Instagram account is probably how 99% of you are reading this. My Instagram is my top of funnel and primary means of growing my social media brand.

In 2025, I tried a lot of different types of content, but nothing seemed to do exceptionally well.

Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of voiceovers and I’ve been getting more comfortable with it. It seems like you all are receiving it well so I’m going to continue doing that with more b-roll type videos in the background of my day to day.

I stepped away from posting memes when Instagram made it very clear that reels were the only thing they were promoting, but the algorithm seemed to change again so I might start posting memes again. Memes are a good way to reach new accounts because memes are shared frequently. Meanwhile, the purpose of my reels are to nurture relationships with people who’ve been following along in my journey.

The biggest news from 2025 is that I finally broke 10,000 followers!

I think I had this goal for like 5 years.. At least I never gave up?

My 2026 goal is to hit 25,000 followers!

I’m not setting these goals because I think follower count means everything. The only reason why I want to hit 25,000 followers is to know whether what I’m posting is working on attracting an audience for that top of funnel marketing.

I’ll talk about monetizing my account later.

I haven’t posted much about my own personal finances since I took my year-long mini-retirement in 2023.

I haven’t accurately tracked my net worth in awhile and I don’t keep a budget since I’m okay spending my paychecks monthly after my TSP/401(k) and HSA contributions. As long as I contribute 5% to my retirement account and max out my Roth IRA and HSA, I spend my money so my wife and I can live comfortably.

Even though I’m taking a temporary $40,000 pay cut for my new job, not much will change other than the amount I invest from my paychecks. I’m lucky to have built a foundation where a $40,000 pay cut won’t change my lifestyle.

My real estate portfolio has been steady. I’m currently upgrading my cabin in Tennessee and spending about $30,000 to do so as vacation rental demand has gone down over the last 2 years.

I purposely haven’t added to my real estate portfolio due to the market turbulence of real estate values and vacation rental demand. I also didn’t want to add more stress dealing with another property and more guests.

To be honest, I have thought about selling my rentals and just cashing out. Life would be much easier not having to deal with guests, cleaners, contractors, etc. but the only reason I haven’t is because my portfolio is actively making me money every month with little effort.

My real estate portfolio nets on average $5,000/month over a year (summer months are 💰💰). This doesn’t include mortgage pay down and tax deductions (thanks STR loophole) which makes a huge difference at tax time.

I’ll probably maintain my real estate portfolio and just continue to invest my income in the stock market. It’s just so much easier.

I’ve always had trouble monetizing serious money from my social media account.

I try to steer away from the basics of personal finance because I personally think it’s so simple that it almost feels wrong to make money off it, but it seems like that tends to do well 🤷🏻‍♂️ like do I really want to explain what a 401(k) is?

With AI, I feel like selling basic personal finance education is not a great business which is why I’m focusing on newsletters.

Newsletters allow me to express my thoughts in long format, which you can’t do on Instagram. Also, my reach is dictated by the algorithms so every creator should be finding a way to connect to their followers off the platform as well.

It would be hard to fit all this information in a 30-second reel.

I host my newsletter on beehiiv because I think it’s the best platform in the long-term and it has a native advertising program. It costs money to host and send out my newsletter so I use ads to help pay the bills. If you want to support me, you can click on the ad links and it would help me out tremendously.

I recently re-introduced the paid subscription option as a recurring revenue stream. These premium posts are meant to be more focused on sharing people’s financial successes and lessons, stories about building businesses, and additional community-focused content. Because it’s so new, I’m still figuring out the content generation piece.

If you have a business or side hustle that you want to share, reply to this email and we’ll chat!

In February, I’m planning to repackage the offer so more people will sign up for the paid subscription. Currently, I created a Personal Finance Dashboard that I share for free when people sign up. If you have any suggestions on what would be valuable to add, I’m all ears - you can reply to this email.

Also on my to-do list is to incorporate a community forum and add mini-courses to it for premium subscribers.

If you want to support me and my work, consider upgrading your subscription.

Another way I monetize my social media account is by sharing affiliate links. It doesn’t cost my audience anything and I don’t share affiliate links unless it’s actually useful.

Here are some affiliate links that I commonly share:

I’ll continue to only share affiliate links that are thoroughly vetted by me. While I might not have as many followers as other creators, I realized that I built a lot of trust because so many people message me about their personal situations and I’m just a guy on the internet who they never met so that speaks volumes to me and I would never betray that over money (because it’s not even a lot to begin with 🤣).

I stopped offering this due to time constraints, but I have to be honest - it was the best way to make money off my social media account.

While the call is one hour, I never show up unprepared. I send out a questionnaire to understand what the person wants to get out of the call and I prepare a few days before and send out an email for any follow up questions I have.

I respect everyone’s time and their willingness to pay for my consultation so I want to make sure they get something out of it.

If time permits, I may offer this again, but my number one priority is to nail the paid subscription offer to get 100 paid subscribers!

If you’re reading this, I appreciate you reading everything I had to write. It was quite a lot to go through.

I want to thank you for your support and following my journey. It amazes me how so many of you can relate to different parts of my life.

Cheers to another year 🥂 let’s do amazing things together.