I grew up in India wearing my father's hand-me-down clothes.
He was a civil engineer for the state government. My mother ran our home. One salary, three children. My sister earned a master's in accounting and runs her own business in India. My brother is a psychiatrist in the American midwest. I am the youngest of the three.
My parents gave us two things that never wore out. Frugality and education. In our house, money was something you respected. It took me years to understand what that respect was made of. My parents knew what they had, down to the rupee, and they never pretended to have more.
I studied computer science and graduated in 2000, straight into the dot-com bust. I applied to a few hundred jobs before one said yes, a software engineering role in New York City. From my first paychecks I sent money home to my parents and put some into my own retirement. That part was automatic. It was how I was raised.
The next part was not.
The BMW I could not justify
Everyone around me looked successful, and I wanted to look successful too. So I bought a BMW 528 xDrive. I could not justify it. I bought it anyway. I was eating out four or five nights a week. No occasion. That was the routine. If you had asked me how I was doing with money, I would have said fine. I had not checked.
Then came a $1,200 maintenance bill. One repair, on a car I did not need, and it sent me reeling. Twelve hundred dollars was serious money in the house I grew up in. It was also the first honest number I had looked at in years.
So I fixed it. I traded the BMW for a Honda Pilot. I cut restaurant meals to once or twice a week. No raise. No promotion. I saved $19,500 that year.
There is a saying I grew up with. Boond boond se ghada bharta hai. Drop by drop, the pot fills. Every drop counts. What I learned that year is that a pot also empties drop by drop, and those drops count the same. That $19,500 was the leak, measured.
The long boring middle
What followed was not exciting. I invested with discipline, month after month, for years. Compounding did the heavy lifting, and a long bull market helped more than my ego wants to admit. I will not sell you a genius story. I bought, I held, I kept adding, and I let time work. It carried me to my financial independence number.
Life kept moving. The pandemic years brought a demanding new job and a daughter getting ready for college, and my writing went quiet for a stretch. Somewhere in there I diversified my portfolio internationally.
Through all of it, one belief kept getting stronger. School never taught me any of this. I learned money from my own mistakes and from years of reading and doing. Making smart money decisions is not that hard. All you need is discipline and education. That gap sowed the seed of OneMoreMillion.com. I wrote about the BMW. I wrote about the $19,500. I was writing for the person I used to be, the one who would have said everything was fine without ever checking.
The numbers I could not get
A couple of years ago I started selling options. I wanted to generate income from the portfolio I already held, and I was still learning how options worked. The wheel was the answer, and I have run it ever since.
Selling options changed my bookkeeping problem. My income now came from two places, dividends on the shares I held and premium on the options I sold. No broker screen puts those side by side. Dividends sit in one report. Premium hides in trade history. And the headline number at the top of the app tells you what your account is worth today. It does not tell you what you earned, what it cost you to earn it, or what you kept.
I knew that kind of number. The BMW was that kind of number. It looked like success, and it said nothing about what was underneath.
So I tried to track it myself. First one spreadsheet, then a second. Then the tools everyone recommends. Every one of them eventually broke or fell short. A few told me I was doing better than I was, which is worse. And I did not want three apps to answer one question. What did my portfolio pay me, and what did I keep?
That is where OMM comes from. I wanted one screen with two honest numbers on it. My combined income, options premium and dividends together. And beside it, my total return after everything. Never blended, because premium is income and total return is total return, and mixing the two is how investors flatter themselves.
I could not find that screen anywhere. So I built it.
OMM does not place trades. It takes the portfolio you already have and tells you the truth about it. If you collect dividends, sell options, or do both, it shows your real combined income and your honest total return, side by side. It will not flatter you. That is the point.
I think about my parents when I look at that screen. One salary, three children, and they were never in the dark about their own money. It took a $1,200 repair bill to bring me back to what they knew. I built OMM so I would never need another one.
See what you kept.
