Amon, of the personal finance channel Our Rich Journey, opens with a memory that stopped him cold: looking back at the side hustle income he and his wife Christina once earned and realizing that not spending a single dollar of it was the decision that changed everything. That money, invested consistently into SEP IRA accounts at Vanguard, recently crossed $1 million combined. Then, on camera, he pulled up both accounts and showed exactly what was inside.
The accounts are not a abstraction. Amon’s SEP IRA sits at roughly $500,000, with one-year investment gains of over $176,000 — a return of more than 54%. Christina’s account is slightly larger, clearing $520,000, with one-year gains of over $184,000 and a return rate above 55%. Together, the two accounts have crossed the seven-figure mark.
What a SEP IRA Actually Is and Who Can Open One
A SEP IRA — Simplified Employee Pension Individual Retirement Account — was built specifically for self-employed people. Freelancers, photographers, Etsy sellers, Uber drivers, real estate agents, graphic designers, and YouTubers all qualify if they have any self-employment income at all. The threshold is not as high as most people assume. As Amon puts it, even $500 a month in side hustle income is enough to get started.
For 2026, SEP IRA contribution limits are set at the lesser of 25% of compensation or $70,000 annually. By comparison, traditional IRAs and Roth IRAs cap annual contributions at $7,000 to $8,000 depending on age. That gap is the core advantage Amon is pointing to: entrepreneurs and side hustlers can funnel dramatically more pre-tax money into a SEP IRA than into most other retirement vehicles.
He is also quick to note that opening a SEP IRA does not close off other accounts. Someone could simultaneously hold a SEP IRA, a Roth IRA, a traditional IRA, a health savings account, and a 401k. Amon and Christina do exactly that. The SEP IRA is one bucket in a larger system, not a replacement for everything else.
The Single ETF Sitting Inside Both Accounts
Both Amon’s and Christina’s SEP IRAs hold one ETF: VGT, the Vanguard Information Technology ETF. Its holdings include Microsoft, Nvidia, Apple, Broadcom, Oracle, and Cisco — companies Amon describes as the engine of the current stock market and the dominant force shaping the economy across the next several decades. He does not hedge that view. Technology, in his read, is where the compounding pressure is greatest.
The one-year returns above 54% reflect VGT’s recent performance, but Amon anchors his longer projections on VGT’s historical average annual return of 14%. Running that math forward: at 14% annual growth, $500,000 doubles to roughly $1 million in about five years without any additional contributions. Amon is 46. By his own projection, each SEP IRA account reaches close to $4 million by the time he and Christina hit retirement age — $8 million combined from those two accounts alone, assuming no further deposits are ever made.
He also highlights the unrealized gains visible in both accounts as a specific signal. His unrealized gains exceed $160,000. Christina’s exceed $180,000. That figure matters because it represents the moment investment returns begin outpacing the contributions themselves — the point where compounding stops being theoretical and starts doing the heavy lifting.
The Discipline That Makes the Math Work
None of the projections function if the money gets pulled out. Amon is direct about that. No panic selling. No treating the SEP IRA like a checking account. The compounding only continues if the money is left alone long enough to accelerate. He describes this as a mindset shift he and Christina struggled with early on before they internalized what future growth actually looked like in dollar terms.
The original side hustle income — money made outside their regular jobs, the kind people might dismiss with ‘how’s that little side hustle of yours going’ — was never spent on vacations or cars. It was invested. That discipline is what built the foundation. The accounts are the result of treating every self-employment dollar as investment capital rather than discretionary spending.
The Vanguard Balance Screen at 46 Years Old
What stays in the frame is Amon, sitting in front of a live Vanguard account screen, walking through Christina’s balance the way someone might show a friend a bank statement they can barely believe themselves. The $520,000 figure is not a projection or a hypothetical. It is a current account balance built from income that many people around them probably would have spent.
More information on how Amon and Christina structure their full investment portfolio across multiple account types is available at ourrichjourney.com.
This article was reported in June 2026.
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