How Grady Wulff is building a $100,000 portfolio for her son

This interview was filmed Wednesday 24th June, 2026.

Great moments are often borne of extreme circumstances. Ask any new parent - life as you know it gets turned upside down the moment your child arrives.

Those late nights spent feeding, rocking a baby back to sleep, and running on fumes have a strange way of surfacing things - fears, anxieties, plans. Some of those ideas are wild, even absurd, and while they feel brilliant in the middle of the night, they don't always hold up once you've had a few hours of sleep. Some simply get lost in the fog of survival that follows. But every so often, something sticks....a genuine shift. 

When I started at Livewire, the first piece I wrote was called Duolingo, but make it finance, my observations after a week working in the finance industry. Before this I had spent what felt like most of my life feeling lost about money. That frustration once I had kids reached a tipping point and is what eventually pushed me into a (pretty drastic) career and life change.

Regular Livewire readers will already know Grady Wulff, senior market analyst at Bell Financial Group. Like a lot of new mums, she had her own lightbulb moment, born one morning sometime around 2am, in the haze between feeds.

Thinking about how to set her son up financially sent Wulff looking for a practical, no-jargon guide to the stock market for new parents - and when she couldn't find one, she decided to build it herself.

The result is her new series, Future Funded Bubs, aimed squarely at parents starting from zero - answering questions like "what are shares?" and "what is the stock market?" - and laying out the practical steps to get them started on their investing journey.

In this interview, she talks about aiming to demystify investing jargon for new parents, the steps she herself is taking to set her son up financially, the tax rules that apply to a child's investments, and how to make it all work on a tighter budget during parental leave.

Structure first, portfolio second

Before parents pick a single stock, Wulff says there's a step that gets overlooked: how the investment is actually held.

"Say I set up a cash account and it made over $416 in the first year - that's taxed at 66% for every dollar over that. And a lot of people don't know this," she says. 

Income earned by a minor outside of the standard tax-free thresholds can attract penalty tax rates designed to discourage income-splitting - a detail that catches many parents by surprise.

Her steps for parents starting from zero:

• Understand the structure – decide how the investment will be held (Wulff uses a bare trust for her son) before putting money in, since this determines how it's taxed down the track.
  

• Open an online trading account – set up an account specifically held in trust for the child.

• Open a cash account – a separate high-interest account to sit alongside the investment portfolio, used as a buffer for costs that come up along the way.

• Educate yourself – read company reports and listen to relevant podcasts; she also notes AI tools can help simplify dense financial documents if you're time-poor.

What compounding actually looks like

Wulff shared the numbers behind her own strategy, which she's structured in three phases. 

• From age zero to six, she invests $300 a quarter.
• From six to 12, that rises to $500 a quarter.
• From 12 to 18, it steps up again to $800 a quarter.
  
  

"I want to end up with $100,000 in his account by the age of 18," she says. 

"Overall, your contributions are around $41,000. So the compounding, the time in the market and your contributions are what drives the results."

The contrast she draws is the cost of delay. "If I waited, or don't add any money to the account for say, 10 years time, the portfolio would only be around 15 to $18,000." 

Same end goal, vastly different outcome, simply because of when the money went in.

The portfolio behind the plan

Wulff splits her son's portfolio into what she calls a "foundation" and "fun" approach - her version of the more familiar core and satellite structure. 

Seventy percent sits in three ETFs for broad market exposure; the remaining 30% is in individual shares, currently two healthcare names and a gold miner.

There's also a deliberate tilt toward low or non-dividend-paying companies. She explains:

"We don't want dividends in my strategy because again, it triggers a tax implication and I have to pay the tax before we get to Freddie's age where he takes over the portfolio."

Alongside the share portfolio sits a separate high-interest cash account, used as a buffer for costs that might come up along the way, like medical bills.

Funding during maternity leave

The numbers above assume money is going in consistently, which can be a lot harder during maternity leave when income drops and costs rise. Wulff's approach was to audit the family budget rather than find new income.

Examples she gives: changing private health insurance providers after shopping around, using a mortgage broker to check the home loan was still competitive, cutting discretionary spend, switching supermarkets for the weekly shop, and cancelling unused subscriptions. 

None of these are dramatic on their own but cumulatively make a huge difference when household budgets are tighter.

The psychological barrier

Wulff's view is that the obstacle to getting started usually isn't a lack of capital. 

"A lot of people think you need tens of thousands of dollars to invest. I'm starting with $2,600, and in the cash account, $1,000. You can start with $500. The key point here is just getting started."

She points to a reluctance to talk about money at all, including in her own household. "There's such a stigma around talking about money…but these conversations don't need to be hard."

For investors, new and old, weighing up whether to start a similar strategy for their own kids, the takeaway is: get the structure right before putting any money into the portfolio, understand the tax thresholds, treat the contribution schedule as the main driver of the outcome - and educate yourself, above all else. 

You can watch Future Funded Bubs on YouTube or Instagram.