// Data-Driven Personal Finance
Cover of Debugging Your Personal Finance by Armin Norouzi

Debugging Your Personal Finance

An Engineer's Data-Driven Guide to Financial Freedom

Coming soon

Hope is not a valid variable. Most financial plans quietly run on it anyway. This book swaps it out for inputs you can actually measure. It applies the first principles of engineering and science to personal finance, treating your net worth as a target variable to optimize and your spending noise as a signal to filter. No get-rich-quick schemes, no lattes-are-why-you-are-poor lectures, just the math of compounding, the mechanics of markets, and the behavioral bugs that quietly drain your wealth, all backed by public data you can check yourself.

Written by an engineer, for engineers and analytically minded readers.

Praise

“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 The Incredible Shrinking Alpha

Table of contents

Part I · The System Architecture
  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

Part II · Debugging the Codebase
  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

Part III · The Wealth Algorithm
  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 10
    The Dashboard

    What you measure improves. Building a personal dashboard that tracks liquid net worth honestly, on a rhythm you'll actually keep.

  4. 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.

Part IV · Patching the User Psychology
  1. 12
    Resource Allocation

    Every dollar carries an opportunity cost. Allocating spending with the same rigor you'd give any constrained optimization problem.

  2. 13
    Abundance Through Constraints

    Constraints don't shrink your life, they focus it. Why a defined 'enough' produces more freedom than unbounded consumption.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

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