Personal finance, learned
the hard way first.

It started with a pizza place in Berkeley, CA.

Before I knew anything about savings rates, index funds, or withdrawal rules, I was running a pizza business as a 20-year-old part owner of a restaurant in Berkeley, California. That experience taught me more about money than any book ever could.

Payroll was a constant reality check. Rent, ingredients and supplies, staffing — the gap between revenue and actual profit was eye-opening. I learned quickly that revenue isn't profit, and profit isn't cash. During slow season, covering expenses felt like treading water. Making a real profit after paying taxes and expenses often felt impossible.

But the business also showed me how much the rules of the game impact you. Berkeley's zoning laws were strict — signage changes required extensive approvals, staying open past 10pm required a special exception that was never granted. As a small business owner, regulations that seemed minor on paper had real costs in time and money.

From pizza to planning — and a degree and career I never expected

That frustration with restricted zoning laws sent me in an unexpected direction. I wanted to understand them — and eventually change them. So I went back to school and earned a degree in City & Regional Planning.

The degree opened a door into local government, and I built a career as a City Planner and Budget Analyst. Suddenly I was on the other side of the table — working with public budgets, financial projections, and contracts. The analytical skills I'd been developing since the pizza days had found a professional home.

The lightbulb moment — Mr. Money Mustache and FIRE

Around the same time I was training as a budget analyst, I stumbled across Mr. Money Mustache. His post "The Shockingly Simple Math Behind Early Retirement" stopped me in my tracks.

Here I was, building financial models for work — and I had never applied that same thinking to my own life. The 4% rule. Savings rates. The relationship between your spending, how much you save to invest, and how many years you have to work. It all clicked.

Being exposed to and working through financial concepts professionally and personally at the same time accelerated everything. I wasn't just reading about compound interest; I was seeing how small decisions could compound into major outcomes. I wasn't just learning about expense ratios; I was thinking about value, efficiency, and treating my financial decisions the same way I did for the public agency budget. These concepts became practical, measurable, and personal.

Why I built BorrowingBetter

I've always learned best from blogs, YouTube channels, calculators, and concise explainers — not textbooks or sales pitches from financial advisors. But after a while, I started noticing a gap.

Whenever I wanted to quickly understand the math behind the 4% rule, look up what the Rule of 72 actually means, or run a simple calculation without creating an account, getting hit with ads, or digging through a 3,000-word article — it was surprisingly hard to find one clean resource that brought those tools together.

A lot of what I found fell into one of two categories. Some content was too shallow — social media quick-takes, oversimplified rules of thumb, or advice without the math behind it. Other resources were too technical — academic papers, dense financial planning tools, or paid platforms built for professionals.

I wanted something in between: a clear, practical reference where someone could understand a concept, run the numbers, and move on with a little more confidence. That's the gap BorrowingBetter is trying to fill.

I bought an old personal finance website and rebuilt it from scratch around that idea: clear explanations, useful calculators, and practical tools without clickbait, ads, or unnecessary complexity.

I'm not a financial advisor. I'm someone who learned about money the hard way, then spent years applying analytical thinking to financial decisions both professionally and personally. BorrowingBetter is the resource I wish had existed when I was trying to figure all of this out — simple enough to use quickly, but serious enough to actually be useful.