Chief Change Officer
#185 Gagan Sandhu: From Mechanical Engineer to Money Engineer—Mastering Career Pivots & Financial Freedom — Part Two
18 Feb 2025
Who is Gagan Sandhu and what is his career journey?
Hi, everyone. Welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Our show is a modernist humility for change progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world. Today, I'm thrilled to be speaking with my Chicago MBA classmate, Gargan Sandhu.
Like many of my previous guests, Gargan is an immigrant who moved from India to the States about 20 years ago. With a mechanical engineering background, he began his journey as a grad student. About two years ago, he founded a FinTech company aimed at helping Gen Y and Z achieve financial independence.
Speaking of financial independence, I've always been skeptical of it, seeing it more as a myth or a marketing buzzword. In true Chicago Bulls style, Gargant and I will be exchanging viewpoints on this topic, agreeing to disagree while appreciating and understanding our different perspectives in a sensible manner. On top of that, Gargant will share invaluable insights on managing career paths,
I really appreciate that before our interview. Despite his busy schedule, Gargan made it a point to thoroughly understand the scope of my show. He asked for examples and even took the time to write down his career insights to share with me ahead of time.
Hey, thank you so much, Vince. Thank you so much for reaching out and rekindling old memories from business school. And I'm so happy to be doing this with you. And I'm a fan of you and what you're doing. So thank you so much.
You've become financially independent and then decided to start this company to help others achieve the same. This makes me wonder, what does financial independence mean to you? I'm very eager to hear about your personal wealth philosophy. The term financial independence is heavily used online. In fact, often misused or reduced to just a buzzword.
But I'm interested in your genuine perspective and practices. How do you interpret and apply this concept in your life?
Yeah, absolutely. And I agree with you that There is a lot of noise around this term. Financial freedom, financial independence, financially independent, retire early. There's a whole fire movement. And also, especially ever since social media became a dominant force in the society, there are just too many people out there trying to almost... Some of them sound like snake oil salesmen.
They're like, oh yeah, I'm financially independent. I just have this social media or I do X, Y, Z and I make enough money, blah, blah, blah. So I'll tell you what my criteria was. It was fairly straightforward. And I will actually contextualize, right? I'm careful to use the word financial independence and not retirement.
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