PUP Students Launch 'Project Income on Autopilot' to Empower Youth to Break the Cycle of Financial Struggle Through Passive Income
By Marian Alice E. Meñez
Photos By: IOA Team of PUP
March 28, 2025
The time spent in school is a significant period in a young person's life. It is where connections and certain perspectives begin to develop. While most consider their university life as an exciting and memorable time full of academic pursuits, parties, and romance, others would describe it as a time of worry.
For these students, university life was replaced with worries about their tuition, how to make their allowance last, their family’s financial situation, and their chance of having a better future.
The Philippines has continued to struggle with its economy which makes it quite common to hear about students who work part-time to support themselves or even their other siblings who study. In an ideal world, every young person should be free to focus on their studies and enjoy the student life—where their problems are simply just how to pass or ace an exam and have enough time and money to make fond memories with friends.
But this is not the reality for every young person in our country.
The Psychological Impact of Financial Scarcity
The psychological impact of financial scarcity goes beyond just worrying about the tuition fee or missing out on certain activities or experiences at school that the other more privileged peers have easy access to.
It can force a young person to enter survival mode just to get by. Survival mode where the person is hyper focused on just one thing: getting his basic needs met. For the ones who grew up with more advantage and do not need to worry about their family’s financial situation, it is far easier to go after goals and dream of a sparkly future.
But what about those who do not have the same advantage?
When these young students start to feel the psychological effects of financial scarcity and continue to be burdened by it, it is likely that they will get stuck in survival mode up until their adult life. It cannot be denied how the system sometimes fails the youth, but moping about it won’t do anything.
As unfair as it might feel that the system owes the youth more, taking an action and redefining one’s mindset is a good way to beat the system.
Building Passive Income To Game the Cycle
While change cannot be implemented instantly, there is something that can be done. For the ones who do not have the same advantage as their other peers, having a passive income is one way to work around the system. One advantage that the youth can utilize is their openness to learning. Plus, they have more bandwidth than the older people to learn and build a skill.
When it comes to financial education, we are more likely to hear about it from the lips of professionals and entrepreneurs, but slowly it’s becoming popular to the youth too. One school in particular, the Polytechnic University of the Philippines, spearheaded a student initiative called the Income on Autopilot made of students aiming to access young and dynamic entrepreneurs who can help the students look toward a better future.
The main goal of the Income on Autopilot project is to create talks and seminars with these entrepreneurs as speakers covering topics such as entrepreneurship, leadership, financial management, investments, and many more.
In this seminar, two young entrepreneurs decided to share with the youth their expertise. Mr. Job Zamora and Mr. Wee Gonzales attended Polytechnic University of the Philippines’ Project Income on Autopilot (IOA) as speakers for Income on Autopilot: Elevating your passive income game, with Mr. Job Zamora covering entrepreneurial ventures in 2025 and with Mr. Wee Gonzales covering investments for the youth.
The Advisor Behind the Initiative
The main advisor of the initiative Ms. Rizza Valdez–de Vera, one of the professors who pushed for the student project, led the opening remarks.
She opened the event with the discussion of the importance of starting early in building passive income, highlighting the benefits of doing so especially in making the youth not struggle to make money up until old age.
She also highlighted how she supports changing the students’ mindset about money given the environments that they are and will be exposed to.
Her bold stance on business and investments is what led the students to be more open to how they can change their lives not only for themselves, but also for their loved ones.
Digital Entrepreneurship Versus Traditional Entrepreneurship
The first speaker is Mr. Job Zamora, a serial entrepreneur who has had his hand in different types of industries. He is most well-known for being the founder of top Forex school in the Philippines, The 30-Minute Trader. He is also ranked the second most popular Trading influencer in the Philippines according to Feedspot.
For the first talk, Mr. Zamora discussed the importance of developing an entrepreneurial mindset at an early age. An entrepreneur by heart, Mr. Zamora has always been drawn to the allure of having a business that could give him more money than a regular salary.
Having built his own businesses from scratch, he knows how difficult it is to get capital to jumpstart a business, much more for students who don’t have access to a big capital. So he shared with the PUP students the different ways of earning passive income without having to put in too much money to start.
One of his favorite ventures is creating Youtube content. He mentioned that if they have a passion for sharing information online, then Youtube is a good place to reach out to many people and get paid for it. Youtube offers content creators a way to have passive income by having a big follower base.
Another option is through selling online courses. Mr. Zamora states that if they have a skill, they shouldn’t keep it to themselves and they should find a way to monetize it. There are people willing to pay for their expertise and their style of teaching as long as they see value in it. If a person is able to help educate a lot of people and change their lives, then there will always be clients and customers who are eager to engage.
Of course, there is Forex trading which is one of the main businesses of Mr. Zamora. He told the story of how all his businesses had to temporarily close when the pandemic hit. The only way he was able to make money was through Forex trading. Should another pandemic happen in the future, Mr. Zamora recommended to the students that Forex trading is one of the best ventures to enter into.
He then continued to share about his own personal experience when he went into various industries such as construction, food and beverage, and airbnb rental.
While he has ventured into many traditional business industries, he does mention that digital entrepreneurship is the more practical and more financially appealing type of venture, especially for the youth.
He left the students with advice on success–that they should not put their success in the hands of others—whether that’s their parents, the government, or any other person, because their success is solely their own.
The Art of Making Money Without Working For Money
The next speaker is Mr. Alexander Wee Gonzales who is one of the co-founder of The 30-Minute Trader along with Mr. Zamora. He is also the author of the best selling local Forex book The Art of Forex.
Being an advocate of financial literacy, Mr. Wee Gonzales focused on various types of investments that can provide passive income. He believes that the youth, even though young, should already start learning about investments.
During the first part of his talk, he mentioned the importance of investing so that people do not get stuck in the vicious cycle of working → saving → spending, then doing the same thing all over again until old age. This will result in repeating the same cycle without having much money to set aside even for emergencies or the future.
He highlighted the main disadvantage of not having investments–it will be difficult to sustain your chosen lifestyle in the future because of the lack of money. He emphasized that the way to achieve a sustainable lifestyle of your choosing in the future is not through saving or holding on to money but through investments because at the end of the day, the value of money will depreciate. But with investments, your money will grow by itself while you sleep.
Afterwards he shared to the students the different types of investments: bonds, stocks, forex, and crypto. He then mentioned how each type of investment has its own set of advantages and disadvantages and that the investment of your choice is a reflection of your own personality, schedule, and appetite to risk.
He also gave some examples about why most people who venture into investments fail. Mr. Wee Gonzales mentioned how most beginners enter the field only expecting to earn money but without putting in the work to actually learn. That’s why investment education is extremely important.
To end the discussion, Mr. Wee Gonzales gave a very quick and basic lesson on how to read a financial chart, one of the most basic tools in the art of investing. This became a vital lesson for those who wanted to start learning how to invest but didn’t know where to start.
Lastly, he left a remarkable lesson for the students to take home: Sleeping money will always find a way to get out. Save to invest so that money can grow with minimal effort.
The event ended with the students asking Mr. Wee Gonzales and Mr. Zamora questions and advice on finance and taking photos with the two speakers together with their peers.
The youth deserve a future that is beyond survival; they deserve to live a future that is for thriving. It’s an undeniable part of reality in the Philippines that financial scarcity is simply woven into the everyday life of many Filipinos and the younger ones are inevitably affected.
Some Filipino students whose families struggle financially have learned to make use of their time and brains to earn money. The students attending universities like Polytechnic University of the Philippines are learning to build their own small businesses and find other ways to earn passive income.
Their initiative Income on Autopilot is giving the students a chance to build a better financial future where they can lessen the possibility of being stuck in survival mode as an adult or even break free from it!
The youth have the power to seize their own version of financial freedom: refining their skills and knowledge about their chosen way of building passive income.
