Ramen Profitability: My Personal Journey
DISCLAIMER: I am not a certified financial planner, so take my advice with a grain of salt.
But I am someone who had to figure this out with zero safety net, with no prior knowledge.As they say, “Doing it yourself beats reading about it in a book 100% of the time.”
When I started at Google in 2021, I was $22,500 in debt. I was on a visa, meaning if I lost my job, I would lose my apartment and would be on the next flight home. I was sending (and continue to send) money back to my family. Between my job offer at Google and my first paycheck, I primarily subsisted on Ramen fried rice to make ends meet.
Fast forward three years:
* Paid off all student loans.
* Fully paid for my wedding.
* Paid for my immigration process.
* Built a mid-six-figure net worth.
* The Ultimate ROI: Saved enough “Runway Cash” to quit a $250k/year job to start Anthromind with $0 income.
The main takeaway is that I treated personal finance like an engineering problem. I debugged my spending, optimized my savings rate, and built a system that runs on autopilot.
The Engineering Approach to Finance: Building the System
Please don’t take this guide as a guide to getting rich quickly; it’s about building a reliable machine that turns income into freedom. I broke my financial life down into components, just like a software architecture.
* Component 1: The “Visa Tax” & Playing Defense Most financial advice assumes you start at zero. Immigrants often begin at a disadvantage. We don’t just have standard bills; we have a “Visa Tax.”
It means a lot of money in visa fees, inability to work side hustles, no social benefits, high remittance fees, etc.
Even getting a credit card was a pain in the ass. I remember the Discover student card was the only one I qualified for in my first semester of college. And that allowed me to build credit very quickly, thankfully.
I didn’t think about investing until I was a couple of years into college, when I was putting money into GameStop and Dogecoin, lol. But before that, I was patching the holes, using summer internships to pay down my credit card debt and cover my tuition the following semester.
* Component 2: The Automation Engine
There’s a good financial lesson: “Pay yourself first.” It might sound like it means give yourself money first, but it actually means put money into your retirement accounts before you see any of your paycheck. I usually set up automatic transfers on payday:
* 401k Match (free money and Google had a very generous match)
* HSA (triple tax advantage, don’t touch the principle)
* Roth IRA (tax-free growth)
* High-Yield Savings in a Brokerage
* Contribution to a 6-12 months “emergency savings” account
* Student loan debt, if you have any. I recommend using the snowball approach, which is to pay off the highest-interest debt first.
By automating this, I removed myself from the equation. The money was gone before I could spend it.
I also received a quarterly bonus, which I would aggressively put into a Roth IRA and 401(k) to save on taxes. I recommend people do the same for year-end bonuses.
* Component 3: Grow, grow, grow baby!
If you aren’t aware of the magic of compound growth, let this be your lesson. If you contribute to all of these funds and set aside a good portion of your paycheck, with compound growth and smart investing, you can achieve up to 20% year-over-year returns and double your money every 5 to 7 years.
That can afford you a lot of things by cutting back on your lifestyle. Especially if you’re in your 20s, you should be saving as aggressively as possible because you give your money the highest amount of time to compound.
I believe the general goal is to have:
- 1 year’s salary in your 401(k) by the time you’re 30
- 3-4 years’ salary by the time you’re 40By working those years in your twenties, playing defense, and compounding your money, you are in a solid position in your thirties to buy a house, travel more, have kids, and retire early, etc.
Friday Positivity: Looking On The Bright Side
Today’s positivity piece is brought to you by this perfect illustration of perspective.
I am what you call an “optimistic nihilist.” I believe it was the French philosopher Sartre who first spoke extensively about nihilism. Later on, a whole movement developed about being optimistic despite nihilism. I tend to be in that camp because if nothing really matters, then every single thing you do is valuable, right?
It might also be because I am playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, an existential masterpiece, that I am discussing this for this week’s topic.
It took me about a year to fully grasp the logic that I have one life, and if I do not take as many risks and leap as far as I can in this one life, what is the point? That’s why I’m very daring. I do not care about putting myself out publicly. I do not care about making ostentatious goals for myself.
Because if nothing really matters, then everything I do really matters. I recommend that everybody think through things this way.
Topic of the week: The Immigrant Financial Stack
In today’s podcast, I break down the exact “order of operations” I used to allocate every dollar I earned, expanding on the engineering approach above. I cover:
* Defense: Living like a student even when earning a tech salary (and how to deal with lifestyle creep).
* The “Visa Tax”: Specific financial hurdles for immigrants (credit building without history, sending remittances, legal fees).
* The Google Strategy: How I utilized 401k matching, HSAs, and the Mega Backdoor Roth (the most underrated tool in tech).
* Buying Freedom: Why I bought the “Anthromind Runway” to fuel the growth of the next stage of my career.
Resources: To help you build your own system, I’ve provided the spreadsheets I actually use:
* My Personal Budget Sheet: This is the actual template I used to track my income, expenses, and savings rate. It’s not fancy, but it forces you to see exactly where your money is going.
* The Office Benefits Guide: A compilation of the most common workplace benefits (HSA, Student Loan Matching, FSA) that people ignore. I’ve included common misconceptions and strategies for each.
* The “Pay Yourself First” Protocol: A simple checklist for your payday routine. It ensures your savings and investments are funded before you start spending.
* The “Leaky Bucket” Tracker: If you don’t know where your money is going, use this simple daily log for 30 days. It helps catch the small expenses that drain your wallet.
To access them all, go to this Google Drive link. [Link]
P.S. What have I been reading/watching/playing?
* [Paper] EchoLeak: The First Real-World Zero-Click Prompt Injection Exploit in a Production LLM System: I’ve been more and more fascinated with data and memory leakage using LLMs, and this is an excellent paper on this topic. The researchers conducted a white-hat vulnerability exploitation of Microsoft Copilot using techniques such as Markdown to retrieve assets, all without any user interaction. The lesson here is how to build stable co-pilots without these security vulnerabilities. Source
* [Movie] Fackham Hall: A hilarious comedy movie that’s also very satirical about downtown Abbey, hoodunit mysteries like Knives Out, and the style of comedy is very much like the Naked Gun series. It was a great time and just made me laugh.
* [Book] The Captain Class: I was gifted this book by a friend (thank you, Paras dai). It’s a compelling, data-driven case study of what an actual glue leader looks like. Primarily written about sports teams like the legendary teams of Ferens Puskas, Tim Duncan, Tom Brady, etc. I believe there are many good business use-case translations as well. What stood out is that it’s not the “superstars” that are the best captains. A lot of them are actually antisocial and hard to get along with. But their conviction and win-at-all-costs mentality are what make them outliers.
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