This is the White Code Investor Podcast, where we help those who wear the White Code get a fair shake on Wall Street.

We've been helping doctors and other high-income professionals stop doing dumb things with their money since 2011.

Here is your host, Dr. Jim Dolly.

This is White Code Investor Podcast number 254, afford anything with Paula Pant.

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All right, our quote of the day today, which we should do right here up front, since we're going to have a really great guest, comes from Henry David Thoreau. This is our life is frittered away by detail.

Simplify. Simplify. And boy, there's a lot of wisdom there.

All right, you're going to love our guest. Let's get her on the line.

A special guest today on the WhiteCodeinvestor podcast is Paula Pant, who you may know from her work in the fire community. She's a prominent personal finance blogger and podcaster, et cetera. In fact, she has been blogging longer than I have longer than Mr. Money mustache has.

Paula, welcome to the WhiteCodeinvestor podcast. Thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me on. I'm happy to be here.

I don't know how many how many people in our audience know about you and your work. So let's start at the beginning. Tell us about your upbringing and maybe what it taught you about money.

Absolutely. So in terms of my upbringing, I come from an immigrant family. I am technically a first generation immigrant. I was born in Catman, Dune Nepal, but I came to the United States as a baby.

And so growing up my family and I my parents and I were getting settled in the United States for the first time and going through my parents at a later age in life in their 40s and in their 50s were going through a lot of the experiences that people sometimes go through in their teens and 20s.

They were buying their very first car. They rented their very first apartment and they bought their very first starter home. They were hitting all of those milestones in their 40s and 50s. My dad, in fact, did not open our retirement account until he was 50 years old.

And so they were very frugal out of necessity and we lived actually a very comfortable life, but it was the reason that it was comfortable was because we were so frugal and so attentive to money.

And so I learned a lot of money scarcity. I learned, you know, even though we had a very good upbringing, I learned the lesson that money is something that needs to be very, very well managed. And it gave me this sense of wanting to sort of gave me a sense of anxiety.

I wanted to make sure that I always had enough. I always had a little bit of a, even though I was comfortable, I always had a fear of never having enough. And it was that sense of anxiety, frankly, that got me into this space because I, in my 20s, after I graduated from college, I got my first job out of school.

I found more joy or more satisfaction in saving and investing than I did in spending on discretionary items. And it was largely because if I knew that I was building up my investments, that reduced my anxiety a little bit.

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