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…
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