Many years ago, I arrived in the United States with big dreams and almost no idea how the financial system worked.

In my country of birth, money worked differently. You saved cash. You trusted family. You stayed away from debt.  You save enough to be able to start building your house, and investing in any meaningful enterprise requires hard cash. The concepts of credit scores, 401(k)s, index funds, and tax filing felt like a foreign language on top of an already foreign country.

Nobody handed me a guide. Nobody sat me down and explained how it all worked. I had to figure it out the hard way, through mistakes, confusion, and years of slowly unlearning everything I thought I knew about money.

It took time. But eventually, things clicked.