From India to America: a Chartered Accountant's wealth-building journey

In the early years, his friends and neighbors were good people from solid middle-class families, earning decent salaries at real companies. But the financial strategy Deepak saw around him was almost entirely subtraction: clip the coupon, find the secondhand furniture, buy the cheaper groceries, send a little home, repeat.

He has nothing against frugality. His broader point, framed as a general principle rather than advice for any one person: saving from a paycheck is the foundation, but over the long run wealth usually comes from moving some of those savings into productive assets — a diversified mix suited to your own goals and risk tolerance — rather than leaving most of it sitting in cash. For the basics of getting started, see our index funds for beginners guide.

This is the question he feels most strongly about — and where his personal conviction needs the most careful framing. In his book he argues that many immigrants put their entire financial life on hold waiting for a green card, sometimes for a decade, while cash sits idle.

The balanced principle: immigration uncertainty shouldn't automatically place all long-term planning on hold. Many immigrants can still build emergency savings, capture an employer retirement match, and use diversified investments appropriate to their immigration status, liquidity needs, time horizon, and risk tolerance. What's right varies by person — and some choices genuinely depend on your visa situation, so this is an area to evaluate individually and, where useful, with a professional. For the immigration side, our immigration hub is a starting point.

The hard way, and on very little sleep. As a Chartered Accountant, his instinct was to learn the markets directly. He bought a few stocks and taught himself how trading worked — first the Indian market at 9 p.m. Chicago time, later the German and French exchanges before dawn.

For roughly six years he traded until 2 a.m. after a full day at the office. He frames this as tuition, not glamour: “losing some and winning some, all of it tuition.” The transferable lesson isn't the late nights — it's that financial literacy is a habit you can build in the margins.

Because he'd just arrived and didn't yet hold a green card, his first real-estate moves were back in India in 2009–10, when a downturn had knocked prices down. He bought at low recession-era prices that later appreciated — his own experience, he's careful to note, not a template that will repeat for anyone else.

His first American property came in 2012: a foreclosure bought at a low price, lived in for a few years, then sold for a profit that seeded what followed. If you're weighing your own first purchase, our guide on buying a first home on a visa covers the practical questions.

He's clear that this is where enthusiasm needs guardrails. Borrowing used to acquire an income-producing asset remains a liability — but the acquired asset may produce income or appreciate. Whether that leverage is beneficial depends on cash flow, financing costs, liquidity, market conditions, and risk, and it increases both potential return and potential loss.

His own path — one property helping finance the next — is a personal example, not a promise. He's equally clear about the cautions: leverage requires a strong credit profile, stable income, and a clear-eyed read of the market before you use it. This is a decision to evaluate for your own situation.

Two decades of watching the pattern, he says, points to the same place: leaning heavily on savings accounts and CDs out of a craving for safety, and delaying investment and retirement accounts for the first several years in the country. He's clear it isn't about age or income — he's seen this across the board.

His read is that the root cause is usually mindset and inherited caution about the markets, not a lack of money. The constructive version of that observation: build the habit of learning, and revisit whether more of your long-term savings could be working in diversified investments suited to your situation.

The employer retirement match. Where a company matches contributions, that match can be meaningful — effectively adding to what you set aside — and the earlier it's invested, the more time it has to compound. He calls it one of the closest things to free money most employees have access to.

The important caveat, which he stresses: review both the matching formula and the vesting schedule, because some employer contributions may be forfeited if you leave before becoming fully vested. Our 401(k) match explained guide walks through how it works.

With eyes open to currency risk. He walks through an example in the book: a property in India that gains in rupee terms can deliver far less in dollar terms once the rupee weakens against the dollar. He doesn't tell people to avoid home-country investments — he tells them to weigh the exchange-rate drift, and the tax and reporting side, before committing.

For readers navigating exactly that, our long-term NRI wealth hub and India tax & compliance hub go deeper on cross-border money.

Because the information immigrants need is scattered across government websites, banks, tax rules, visa rules, and personal-finance platforms that were never written with a new immigrant in mind. He lived that confusion himself: taxes, banking, credit, visas, insurance, investing, retirement, and cross-border India compliance, all at once.

NRI to USA exists, in his words, so immigrants don't have to learn every U.S. money, tax, visa, and compliance rule the hard way — turning hard-to-find answers into guides, calculators, and checklists they can actually use.

That the same courage it took to move can go toward building a financial life — steadily, over time. He ends his book close to that note, and it's the closest thing he has to a personal creed.