About Me — Alok Vaidya

Updated: Sep 12, 2022

Photo by Dulcey Lima on Unsplash

There is nothing special about me. I am an ordinary guy. I usually prefer to go with the flow. I always go where life is taking me. This is how my life has been from the beginning.

I graduated from college in 1999 and started my career as an IT Professional in 2001. I was going thru the ups and downs of life like everyone else.

Everything was fine until 2018.

I was 44 years old, married for 16 years, and had 14 years old son. I worked in a senior position in Information Technology with a decent income. My wife was also earning almost the same.

Life was all set, and everything was going fine.

But God had other plans.

I got on the bench.

A bench is a term used in Indian IT Services companies. When you are not working on any customer projects and not making any money for the company, the organization considers you on the bench.

Usually, people go on the bench when they are in-between projects. Your one project is over, and you are looking for your next assignment. The same thing happened to me.

If it is the wrong timing, it is too bad for you to be on the bench. You can lose your job if you are there for too long. This is a common practice in IT Industry, specifically in India.

While it was only a week on the bench, I got a call from HR. They informed me that I had only 60 days to find another project/assignment. If I could not, they would consider my profile redundant and have to let me go.

This was a wake-up call for me.

Why a wake-up call?

I had 60 days on my hand to find another project or another job, right?

Well, I was panicking because

• I was not prepared for this mentally.
• I still had around 15–20 years before I could retire.
• All my finances were out of control. There was no control at all.
• I had no savings or investments.
• I had no financial plans at all.
• I was living paycheck to paycheck like everybody else.
• It was a daunting feeling to find another job at the age of 44. That too at a senior managerial position in India.
• What if I do not find another job in time
• How does the family survive?
• How do we take care of our day-to-day expenses?
• How do we pay for the mortgage?
• How do we save for child education?

The list of endless. I was overthinking.

I was living paycheck to paycheck until now. After all the expenses and paying the mortgage, I was not left with anything to save. The only smart move was buying a house. We were earning enough, but the issue was the adopted lifestyle.

Lion, by nature, is the laziest animal. It only hunts its prey when it is hungry. Otherwise, it will sit idle and watch them passing by.

I am, kind of, a Lion. I will not act/react unless a sword is on my head. It was that time now when I had to do something to change my circumstances.

I got up on my feet and started weighing my options.

• First, I started looking for projects within the same organization.
• Second, I updated my resume, which I did not even look at for almost 10 years, and started looking for a job.
• I also connected with everyone I could who could help me find a job.
• I also realized that I should not be dependent on my day job. I have to have a different plan in place.

While the job hunt was going on, I also started googling how can I save myself and my family from this situation.

After a few days of research, I found out about the FIRE movement. It is Financial Independence, Retire Early. Another term was Financial Freedom.

In essence, it was all about having a financial plan for your life. Save and invest your money. Grow your money enough, so you can lead the worry-free life you desire when you are not making any money.

But there was a problem. A big problem.

Everyone was talking about starting as early as they could, in their 20s or 30s.

Well, I was 44. Was it too late for me to do something about it? At least, I thought so.

After reading too much online, it was an overwhelming experience. I felt that

• I do not have enough knowledge or expertise.
• I can not do it all by myself.
• Also, I have no time.

So, I started looking for professional services for financial planning and advisory. The issue was finding someone reliable & trustworthy.

Someone who could take MY interests seriously rather than theirs. Everyone has their agenda, right? Customer interest is always secondary. I can not trust anyone.

But I had to go with someone. I chose the best from the options I had. Even though I could not afford it, I paid a hefty amount for my financial planning.

I did my due diligence and went ahead with recommended investment advice.

The best part of financial planning was:

• We knew how much money we needed before we could retire.
• What our financial goals are, and how do we achieve them one by one?

One good thing happened.

While working on the financial planning, I found another project. It was within the same organization before getting laid off. I considered myself lucky.

I did not believe it, but for the first time in my life, I started thinking that everything happens for a reason. There was a blessing in disguise because I started with my financial planning.

I continued with my 9–5 job.

But, I wanted to speed up the process of saving as much as possible. I wanted to achieve financial freedom as soon as possible to live a financially-free life. Once we reach that point, it is our choice if we want to continue working or relax on a beach.

We, as a family, took a few more steps to speed up the process. This was beyond financial planning.

• We started living a frugal life.
• We tried cutting our discretionary expenses, like eating out or ordering food online.
• No vacation, no subscriptions like Netflix, Spotify, etc.
• We foreclosed all consumer loans and car loans.
• We paid all credit card dues and stopped using them.
• We made mortgage foreclosure our top priority before we could even build the emergency fund.

Was it easy? Not at all.

It requires motivation to change your habits. It was there, but that was not enough.

Motivation only lasts for a few days or weeks. Right?

We all have experienced this in our life many times. If it was not true, we would wake up every day at 5 am, walk, and exercise daily. Right?

It was not easy. It required something else. What was that?

It was discipline.

…and believe me, it is hard to have discipline in life, but it was not impossible.

We did something extraordinary that we would have never thought of doing.

• We, both my wife and I, negotiated our salaries in our companies. It took time, but it worked for both of us.
• We also kept on looking for better job opportunities with better pay. But, this did not work (you will shortly find out why.)
• I reached out to all my entrepreneur friends to look for consultancy or side gigs.
• I started working on building an affiliate marketing business.
• I started providing digital marketing services to a few of the clients to earn more on the side.
• I joined one of my friends as a part-time CTO.

I was working 24x7. Well, almost.

God still had other plans.

This time these other plans did not apply only to me but to everyone around the globe.

We entered the last week of March 2020, and we all know what happened. The Covid and lockdown started. My investments in the market went down significantly. The financial advisory did not work.

Again, the blessing in disguise for me. I learned something. It was the biggest lesson of my life.

When the market is going down, nobody can save your money. Not even the most reputed financial organizations. Not even Warren Buffet.

This was the turning point of my life. I decided to take charge of my finances. I started learning everything I did not know and needed to know to manage my finances.

Somehow, Covid worked in my favor.

• I had more time to spare.
• I was able to focus more on my side gigs.
• Our savings went up because all the discretionary expenses got cut automatically.
• We started saving big on car fuel/gas expenses.
• Travel/vacation costs went down to zero. There was no regret in not going on a vacation because nature forced us to stay home.

Two years down the line

Now, I have multiple sources of income. I am not at all dependent on my 9–5. We have already achieved something great called Financial Freedom. We were able to send our son abroad for the under-graduation program.

We can retire any time now. But we are still working to take our financially-free life to the next level. We want to take it from decent to luxury.

It took me almost 5 years of hardship to achieve my Financial Freedom. I learned so many things along the way.

What Is Next

While we were going through all this, every friend’s visit turned into a discussion about financial freedom.

I realized that people do not have any plans. No one has any idea how much money they need in retirement. They are working their day jobs and making money but not saving or investing for the future.

In some cases, they are saving and investing but without goals. They do not know whether their savings are enough or not.

They are buying big cars, but I am not. They ask me, why not? My simple answer is I do not need it. I do not want to buy a luxury car because everyone else around me is buying one.

Everyone is going through the same struggle but not realizing it. People do not know how important it is to have a plan. Sometimes they do not even realize the need for financial planning.

None of my friends, not even a single one, had any idea about financial freedom or financial planning. Sometimes, this discussion became a debate that turned into an argument.

When I talked about my financial planning, everyone wanted to listen. People wanted to know how I achieved it. But, when it came to their financial planning, they were not comfortable sharing their personal information with me.

So, I started helping everyone around me by educating them on how they can create their financial plans themselves.

One day, one of my friends said, why do I not do this online to take this one step further?

The plan sounded good to me.

I wanted to become a writer and share my experience with the world. This is how everything started.

Now, because I had a lot of free time, I thought let me get started with something like this and share my learnings and experiences with everyone.

I started exploring the internet on how to get started.

The Problem I found

Everyone talks about financial freedom, but no one talks about financial planning. For that purpose, we have certified financial planners/advisors. The knowledge is all scattered.

I also realized that everyone has a trust issue.

• How can you share your most personal information with a 3rd person?
• How can some outsiders make a plan for you because they are an expert?
• Financial advisors do not understand your situation. They would never be able to understand it the way you do.
• Even if an expert prepares the plan, people do not have enough confidence whether this plan will work for them as expected or not.

When I was looking for financial advisory services, I came across many fee-only financial advisors.

The term — fee-only — is very famous in this field. This term tells you that financial advisors do not have any personal interest when recommending investment products.

Even then, I could not trust an individual, even though they were certified but decided to go with a reputed financial institution.

Also, financial advisory services are too costly. A lot of people can not even afford it.

Sometimes, it also becomes a mindset issue. Unless you realize the importance, you do not want to spend the money.

You might buy a luxury car or an iPhone. But, if someone asks you to spend the money of 20,000 INR or 1000–3000 USD for only one-time planning, you tend to avoid it.

Another problem I found was that financial planning requires regular review. You do not want to pay the money for a review of the same plan, year after year, all your life.

So, there is always a need for you to be aware and savvy enough to take charge of it.

The solution

Now, I spend my time teaching people, online and offline (along with my day job), how to create:

• The Financial Plan,
• List your Financial Goals, e.g., child education, marriage, buying a luxury car, annual international vacation plans, etc.
• A yearly Cash Flow Statement for pre- and post-retirement years.

Once you have everything in place and documented, an excel-based template takes care of everything automatically, including what-if analysis, e.g.,

• What if I save and invest more? How soon I retire?
• Can I afford to pay for a luxury home theatre system, which costs me $4000+

I use this excel template now for even small discretionary purchases (our wants)

I am here to help and share my experience with everyone. If I can positively affect the lives of even 0.1%, I will feel, that I did my bit of giving back to society.

This is it for now.

I hope you found this article valuable and provides some inspiration and motivation to start with your financial planning. If you need any help (totally free of cost), you can connect with me on Twitter @IAmAlokVaidya