HOW I MADE IT

Millennial couple’s 6 income streams bring in $420,000 a year: ‘You only get as far as your efforts’

MEGAN SAUER AND ZACHARY GREEN Fortune Staff

July 13, 2023

Dave Liniger is the co-founder and chairman of global real estate company Re/Max

Source: Re/Max

Eddie Nuñez emigrated from Peru to the U.S. at age 14 in 2002. Through his nearly 4,000-mile journey, he imagined starting a family and giving them the life he never had.

The trip was difficult — he was held up at gunpoint, strip-searched, and robbed along the way — but it didn’t get much easier living as an undocumented immigrant in the post-9/11 U.S., Nuñez says. Once he and his mother settled in Ashburn, Virginia, he had to push harder to gain what many of his peers were handed: a high school diploma, college education and U.S. citizenship.

His mission of starting and supporting his own family drove him to achieve his goals, and then some. Two decades later, Nuñez and his wife Stefani Nicole Penaranda now have two children and six streams of income in Lucketts, Virginia.

They own a snowplow business and seven real estate properties. Penaranda runs a day care and is a real estate agent, while Nuñez works in IT consulting and as a cybersecurity contractor.

Last year, their jobs and businesses brought in a total of $420,000, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.

Nuñez has so many streams of income in order to give his own kids more financial security than he had when he was young. “Coming from Peru, I always knew that money was important, and you only get as far as your efforts,” says Nuñez, now 34. “I wanted to provide [my family] with everything that I didn’t get to enjoy as a child.”

Running six jobs at once is, he admits, challenging. Still, he’s not done adding to the family’s portfolio. He and Penaranda are in the process of buying a nearby Peruvian coffee shop.

‘Working and working, because you want to achieve’

Before Nuñez was a successful business owner, he felt like he had to outwork everyone, he says. It was tough watching other kids at his school receive countless opportunities, while his mom held down three jobs.

“Living [in the U.S.] as an undocumented person just means working and working and working, because you want to achieve something,” Nuñez says.

After high school, Nuñez began taking nursing classes at Northern Virginia Community College. Classes cost up to $1,700, he estimates, so he could only afford to take one course at a time.

In school, he met Penaranda, whose father was then a Bolivian diplomat. The pair fell in love and eloped. Because they were from “two different social classes,” Nuñez says his in-laws disapproved of the pairing, and threatened to report him to U.S. Border Patrol.

While attempting to seek asylum in Canada in December 2010, Nuñez was caught at the border, deported back to the U.S. and arrested.

Nuñez, who says he didn’t have previous infractions with the law, couldn’t stand being behind bars. While detained in Tacoma, Washington, he went to the prison library and studied his case every day for two months to ensure he knew every detail.

When the time came to plead his case in court, he impressed the judge with his diligence and drive to build a successful life in the U.S., Nuñez says. In February 2011, he was granted asylum in the U.S. He returned to Virginia, reconnected with Penaranda and reconciled with his in-laws.

‘My idea to get to my goals faster was to have different streams of income’

Nuñez was more motivated than ever to achieve his goals. He went back to school but switched to studying cybersecurity, hoping to see a quicker return on his investment.

In the meantime, Nuñez tried everything he could to bring in additional income by attempting to launch a string of businesses. He and Penaranda tried to sell inflatable moon bounces, rent out giant hamster balls, flip cars, and even tried to develop and sell a game they called Torito. All of these endeavors flopped.

By the end of 2011, Nuñez and Penaranda hit their stride. The couple rented out their basement and guest room to buy a $17,000 snowplow truck. The business saw enough initial success to scale quickly, and the couple worked their way up to a fleet of 10 trucks.

Fickle weather can make their snowplow income unpredictable, which is why the additional five revenue streams come in handy, he says, especially since they’ve since downsized to two trucks.

Penaranda opened her own day care in 2017. She now oversees 12 children, and the company brought in $168,300 last year. As a real estate agent, she made $9,600 in 2022.

Nuñez graduated with his bachelor’s degree in cybersecurity from the University of Maryland in 2018, two years after he officially became a U.S. citizen. Now, he makes about $113,800 from his full-time job as a cybersecurity contractor and freelance consultant.

He and Penaranda recently began investing in real estate. Their seven properties collect about $10,800 per month in rent.

“My idea to get to my goals faster was to have different streams of income and revenue,” Nuñez says.

Sustaining the American Dream

Eventually Nuñez wants to buy at least two more businesses, as well as twenty more properties to rent out.

Real estate ownership provides mostly passive income, and he hopes that his growing business portfolio will eventually be lucrative enough to allow him to hire people to run those companies. That way, he can work less on the day-to-day operations and spend more time with his family, including his in-laws.

But just because he’s ambitious doesn’t mean he isn’t satisfied, Nuñez says. He knows he’s accomplished his biggest goal already — building a comfortable life for his family.

“I’m grateful for my mom and my wife,” he says. “Life’s not easy, but it’s definitely given me good opportunities to be present in my kids’ daily lives. … I’m super happy to be able to actually achieve that goal, to provide them with the lifestyle I didn’t have as a child.”