Praise
“A wonderful blueprint for your financial life.”
“A thinking person's guide to personal finance, focused on building wealth to support the lifestyle you desire. As a fellow engineer, I admire and envy his analytic approach. Don't delay a second in reading it!”
William P. Bengen, author of A Richer Retirement: Supercharging the 4% Rule to Spend More & Enjoy More
“A smart place to begin.”
“Most beginner books tell you what to do. Debugging Your Personal Finance helps you understand why it works, which is what makes the lessons last. An evidence-based starting point for readers who think analytically.”
Larry Swedroe, author of eighteen books on investing, including The Incredible Shrinking Alpha
“A personal finance book for the numerati.”
“Personal finance explained in engineering terms, for anyone who trusts an equation over an anecdote. Rigorous and refreshing.”
Jacob Lund Fisker, author of Early Retirement Extreme
“A nerdy, data-driven deep dive into financial independence.”
“If you're an engineer who loves spreadsheets, numbers, and optimizing everything, this book is for you.”
Kristy Shen, co-author of Quit Like a Millionaire and Parent Like a Millionaire (Without Being One)
“A practical yet refreshing read.”
“Armin Norouzi takes the guesswork out of wealth-building by transforming personal finance into a clear, data-driven system you can actually optimize.”
Jessica Moorhouse, CFC™, QAFP®, author of Everything but Money
“A comprehensive guide to financial freedom.”
“Debugging Your Personal Finance is a numbers-driven book written by an engineer for engineers. Armin Norouzi helps readers to perform a 360-degree analysis on their personal finance and set up concrete plans to achieve financial independence.”
Bob Lai, creator of Tawcan.com and DIY Wealth Canada Podcast
Table of contents
- 01 Direction Over Destination
Borrowing aviation's 1-in-60 rule: a one-degree error in your savings heading is invisible at year one and a canyon by year thirty. Why direction beats your current balance.
- 02 The Root Constraint
Time, not money, is the scarce resource, and status spending quietly mortgages it. The real constraint every financial plan is optimizing against.
- 03 The Vanity Metric
Income is a vanity metric; wealth is what survives it. Why big earners stay broke, quiet earners get rich, and the one ratio that separates them.
- 04 Defining Enough
Puts a hard number on 'enough' by deriving the Rule of 25 and the 4% rule from first principles, then stress-testing them against sequence-of-returns risk.
- 05 The System Audit
You audit before you optimize. A conservative protocol for measuring your true net worth and sorting every asset by how liquid it really is.
- 06 Technical Debt
Consumer debt is technical debt accruing interest against your future self. How to price the fragility it adds and refactor it off your balance sheet.
- 07 The High Cost of Latency
Every year you wait to invest is priced in compounding you can never buy back. The exponential cost of latency, quantified and validated.
- 08 Your Job is the Seed Round
Your career is the seed capital that funds everything else. Treating human capital as a bond you deliberately convert into financial capital.
- 09 The Investment Pipeline
A mechanical allocation algorithm that takes emotion out of investing, why 'wait for a dip' and all-time-high fear both fail the math, and how to automate contributions like a CI/CD pipeline.
- 10 The Dashboard
What you measure improves. Building a personal dashboard that tracks liquid net worth honestly, on a rhythm you'll actually keep.
- 11 Stability Is a Feature
Chasing returns is a bug; predictability is a feature. How the behavior gap quietly erases real money from the average investor’s account.
- 12 Resource Allocation
Every dollar carries an opportunity cost. Allocating spending with the same rigor you'd give any constrained optimization problem.
- 13 Abundance Through Constraints
Constraints don't shrink your life, they focus it. Why a defined 'enough' produces more freedom than unbounded consumption.
- 14 Signal vs. Noise
The crowd is mostly noise. Why doing the opposite of the average consumer is often the signal, and the discipline of standing alone.
- 15 Ready for Deployment
Intelligence doesn't protect a portfolio; execution does. The critical path from reading this to deploying the whole system, starting today.