Tracking your spending is not a financial strategy. You're a global earner. Act like One.

I grew up in Kuwait — a tax-free country. My parents built their careers there. Nobody in my family had ever filed a tax return.

Then I moved to India to study, then work. A company accountant filed my taxes and pointed me toward “lower-tax” mutual funds. What he didn't account for: I was a dual resident. Those investments made no sense for someone who might leave. I didn't know that. He didn't ask.

Five years later, I moved back to Kuwait, then to the UK. I built a life, a career, a consulting gig. And one day, a surprise bill arrived from the Indian income tax department — a matured FD I'd forgotten, an investment my grandparents made in my name, quietly accumulating liability while I was busy settling into a new country.

I worked in banking. I still got caught out.

That's when I stopped outsourcing my understanding.

I had an accountant in India, one in the UK, and zero clarity about my actual financial position across both. I was paying people to manage pieces of a puzzle nobody was seeing whole.