The story
Why 37xBetter exists
The person behind the tools, and the bias they carry.
I didn't start out wise about money. I started out as a mindless spender.
Then I overcorrected. Hard.
For a few years I became the kind of frugal that counts every rupee out loud, the person who can turn a small, harmless expense into a debate, who mistakes a low spend for a life well lived. I told myself it was discipline. What it actually did was make me, and the people closest to me, smaller and more anxious. Frugality, pushed that far, doesn't make you rich. It makes you bitter.
What pulled me out wasn't a better budget. It was a realisation: I had been optimising the number and losing the life around it.
I learned that same lesson twice, in two different rooms.
The first was investing. For years I picked my own stocks, and I did fairly well at it. But one day I added up the hours, the tracking, the reading, the low-grade worrying, against the extra return over a plain index fund. The excess didn't justify the effort. So I moved to mutual funds, automated everything, and got back the thing stock-picking had been charging me: my time, my attention, my career. No investment return compounds like the life you free up to live.
The second was spending. I stopped being frugal and started being deliberate. Today I keep a high savings rate, and everything left over, I spend without guilt. I tip. I round the auto fare up to the next ten. I started pampering the people I'd once lectured. Minimalism, it turns out, doesn't deprive you. It makes you lighter.
That's the whole idea behind this site, in one line: money is only one kind of wealth, and it's the only one you can outsource. Your health, your relationships, your peace of mind, no fund manager builds those for you. Financial independence matters enormously, not so you can stop working, but so you can work because you choose to, and say no when you need to. Early retirement is optional. Independence is not.
So 37xBetter carries a simple bias. It won't help you chase the last basis point. It will show you the decisions that actually move your life: the policy nobody made you question, the SIP you set once and forgot, the loan you keep overpaying, and then get out of your way.
Over time this site has grown past money, because the problem is bigger than money. I think of wealth as five accounts: money, health, relationships, peace of mind, and your career. Money is the only one you can outsource. And nothing compounds like the career that funds the other four. Mid-career growth is rarely about one more certificate. It is about prudence: reading a room, working with a difficult boss, guarding your name, leaving at the right time. That is why The Art of Prudence lives here, next to the SIP calculator: Baltasar Gracián's 300 maxims from 1647, rebuilt in plain language for the working professional, free like everything else. The tools handle the one wealth you can outsource. The maxims train the ones you cannot.
The name is the promise. Improve 1% a day and a year compounds it to 37×. Not through heroics: through small, boring, correct decisions, repeated.
It's free. There's nothing to log into, and nothing here is for sale. I've spent close to two decades inside the banking system, and I've watched good, careful people get sold bad products by someone they trusted. This is my attempt to even the odds, a little.
I'm still walking my own road to financial independence. These are the tools I built for myself first.