I moved to D.C. at 23 with a dog, no debt, and a director title I hadn't fully grown into yet.
I'm Justo Oppus. At 24 I'm the Director of a university-affiliated organization that brings young adults to Washington, D.C. to work, learn, and build careers in one of the most consequential cities in the world. Before that I ran two businesses — a screen printing company and a boba shop — both intentional experiments that taught me more than any class did. I've lived abroad, navigated different systems and cultures, and spent most of my 20s figuring out how to build something real with limited resources and no roadmap.
I graduated debt-free. That wasn't luck — it was a set of decisions I made early that most people don't know are available to them. Right now I'm working toward $100,000 invested by the time I'm 26, and I'm doing it in public so you can watch every move.
Most financial and career advice online comes from people who figured it out 15 years ago. They've forgotten what it felt like to not know. I haven't.
I'm one chapter ahead of you — not a decade. The mistake I made with my first lease is already an article here. The negotiation I fumbled at work became a YouTube video. The things I wish someone had explained when I was 18, 20, 22 — that's what this is.
GrowWithJusto exists because the gap between 'school is over' and 'I know what I'm doing' is brutal, and most people cross it alone. You don't have to.
Personal finance. Career building. Moving to a new city. Starting a business. Understanding your benefits. Negotiating your salary. Knowing when to quit something and when to keep going. The perspective that comes from living internationally and seeing how different the world looks when you stop assuming one way is the only way. All of it, from someone living it right now.
I run the Franciscan University Homeland Mission — a semester-in-D.C. program where college students spend 15 weeks doing congressional visits, think tank work, and professional immersion experiences. It's genuinely one of the most interesting jobs in the city, and it's also what put me in D.C. at 23 with all these adulting problems to solve.
GrowWithJusto is run by Oppus Ventures LLC. One person, no investors, no team yet. Everything you see was built by me — the website, the tools, the newsletter, the products. I mention this not as a caveat but as a reason to trust the content: when I say something works, it's because I tried it, not because a brand partnership told me to.
The one number I track publicly: $100K invested by 26. I'll share updates every quarter. Follow along.