In this second half of his conversation, Gagan Sandhu pulls back the curtain on what it really means to design financial independence. It’s not about the FIRE movement or early retirement—it’s about knowing your trade-offs and making conscious, math-informed decisions that align with your values. From career reinvention every 10 years to balancing ambition with family time, Gagan offers Gen Xers a refreshingly grounded take on money, identity, and midlife work design.Financial Independence Is a Design Decision“I didn’t quit to escape. I quit because I could—on my own terms.”Gagan redefines financial independence not as a finish line, but a framework for how to live, work, and choose with freedom.It’s Not About the Number. It’s About the Math Behind Your Life“I built a five-year runway—not a fantasy.”He walks through how he calculated his freedom, X + Y + Z style: long-term retirement, short-term burn, and real-life expenses like college.FIRE vs Philosophy“Desires evolve. So does your definition of freedom.”In a head-to-head with Vince, Gagan goes deep on the psychology of wealth—and why independence without self-awareness is just another trap.Ageism or Skill Gap?“Don’t blame age. Upgrade your playbook.”Gagan reframes mid-career uncertainty not as an HR problem, but a personal pivot point—and makes a sharp case for reinvention every 10 years.Teaching the Tool, Not the Trick“You don’t need financial content. You need clarity.”He explains how Zillion helps busy families and immigrants manage wealth like pros—not through advice, but through intuitive, data-backed modeling._________________________Connect with us:Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Gagan Sandhu --Chief Change Officer--Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself.Open a World of Expansive Human Intelligencefor Transformation Gurus, Black Sheep,Unsung Visionaries & Bold Hearts.EdTech Leadership Awards 2025 Finalist.15 Million+ All-Time Downloads.80+ Countries Reached Daily.Global Top 3% Podcast.Top 10 US Business.Top 1 US Careers.>>>150,000+ are outgrowing. Act Today.<<<
Chapter 1: Who are the guests and what is their background?
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.
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Chapter 2: What does financial independence really mean to Gagan Sandhu?
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.
Because those two are different terms, very different context and very different overall outcomes. For me, financial independence meant I could leave my corporate job and go work on my own and build something from scratch. When I was able to do that, I said, I am financially independent because I can do what I want with my time.
So I earned that independence and I don't have to be beholden to a paycheck to do that or to something else, right? In this case, it was paycheck. And for me, it actually, I'm an engineer after all, and I actually did a very mathematical thing. I figured out how much money I would need to sustain for at least five years so that I can build something on the side while not starving my family.
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Chapter 3: How did Gagan calculate his financial independence number?
And I did some math, and not super rigorous. We are all pretty good at doing basic math. And I did that. I'm like, OK, five years, our yearly spend is about this much. My kids, one of my kids is going to go to college in this much amount of time, so here's that. And also, while I build, I will not have an income.
So my retirement account has to be in a certain shape or form so that I'm not insecure about that. So that's going to be another amount, let's say X. And Y is going to be the amount that is going to be needed for just maintaining and sustaining for five years while I build something. And Z is the amount that is needed to send, let's say, one or two kids to college during that time.
So X plus Y plus Z. I felt that once I reached that number, that would be my financial independence. And what I realized was that it was a number, right? I think the specifics are not super important. I think everybody's circumstances are different. And what I realized was that it was easy for me to do this almost like a mental math. But for a lot of people, it was a much hard calculation.
Not because the math is hard, but because I think the reason it's easy for me is because I'm able to keep track of things much, much better than an average person. For instance, I know pretty well what my monthly expenses are. I've known it since I was in college and I have always maintained spreadsheets. I can tell you what my monthly expenses were in 2005, for instance, right?
I'll maintain spreadsheets. So it's very easy for me to do that. It's just a habit. The second is I'm pretty decent at also managing cash flow and investing. So all of that combined, it became pretty, I would say, attainable and achievable goal for me personally and me and my wife as a family, as a unit. But what I realized is for a lot of people, it's much harder because
A, a lot of people don't know how much they actually spend in a month. B, a lot of people do not really start investing early enough to actually gain the compounding effect, the magical compounding effect to actually see their savings grow. And that actually also stops them. Or C, This is relevant very much to the question you specifically asked.
A lot of people actually go in directions that they are told that will lead them to financial independence, but it's not. For instance, a lot of people are like, hey, I only buy real estate because somebody told me that's what I should do. If you're going to own only real estate doesn't yield cash returns, which means you'll be cash poor, but asset rate. That's not financial independence.
So understanding those things helped me build my viewpoint. And now my goal is to help others see that viewpoint and build financial independence in a way that works for them. And actually in that respect,
Another thing that, you know, because you and I went to a really good school and some of the things were hammered into us completely while we were at Booth, which is the stock market returns, right? I think you can wake up any UChicago Booth alum in the middle of the night and say, hey, what are long-term S&P 500 returns?
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Chapter 4: What tools does Zillion provide to help visualize financial independence?
For some people, it might mean they go from full-time to part-time. Or it might mean they, rather than just working for money, they can now pursue a passion where they will have a lower income. Let's say some people want to, one of my coworkers at Square, he quit his corporate job and became a teacher. Now, following that passion, I'm sure he took a huge pay cut, maybe 60, 70, even 80% pay cut.
But my guess is that this person is really good at doing the math and they can say, yeah, I can do this. One of our customers, they both work and one of them decided after using Zillion, they're like, hey, listen, one of us is going to quit and focus on family and just take some time off because we know our financial independence is not at stake. Our tools help people do that.
Let me share my take on financial independence if you allow me. Interestingly, I don't actually believe in it. And my reasoning isn't about the math. It's about human nature and psychology. We humans have desires at every stage of our lives. Whether it's craving the latest iPhone when we are younger or simply needing a functional phone as we grow older, our desires shape our financial behavior.
I believe as long as we have desires, we can never be truly financially independent because our decisions are influenced by our pursuit of these desires and the financial means to fulfill them. Personally, I'm not just about numbers. I consider myself a philosopher at heart. despite studying finance and accounting and spending a decade in financial institutions helping people manage money.
I'm fundamentally a humanist. Life is not only short, it is unpredictable. We might plan to achieve certain things by a certain age, but there's no guarantee we'll have the time. So for me, it's about focusing on the present, like building a good show here. Yes, I need to make and spend money to sustain it.
But I do stress over really long-term financial plans because the future is, after all, uncertain. To me, managing personal wealth is less about math. and more about one's life philosophy, psychology, and the ability to tune out the noise and adapt to changes around us. That's my perspective on financial independence.
I think we are talking about the same thing. Maybe we are talking about the two different sides of the same coin. What you are saying is living in present. One fact I think we both have to agree on. In the modern world, the concept of money and wealth is enmeshed with our daily lives. We just can't separate, right?
How we live our lives is influenced by money, whether we like it or not, but that's how the world is structured today. To your point, living in the present, I agree with you 100%. Knowing about independence does is it helps you define that present and it helps you be very conscious about that.
So one example that I gave you was my coworker who left a very comfortable corporate job to become a teacher. Now that person, they actually walked away from a lot of future wealth, but they pursued passion. Now, The idea is that financial independence let them pursue a passion and shape their today and their tomorrow.
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Chapter 5: Why does Vince Chan express skepticism about financial independence?
Chapter 6: How do human desires impact the concept of financial independence?
I think being aware of the pitfalls and also the possible rewards of financial independence, I think knowing those two is of extreme utility, is of extreme usefulness. So let me finish your thought, what you started on the financial independence part. I would say, yes, we provide assurance, but more than that, We also actually infuse knowledge in the product that is otherwise not very well known.
For instance, a lot of people are like, hey, I have three or four properties, so that should do it. What we provide is, and people generally, it's not, as I said, like people... Most people don't know S&P 500 long-term returns, believe it or not. Even though to us, it's always at the tip of our tongue and it's always at our fingertips. We know it.
And people don't know what the returns are for real estate in the long term. I'm talking about American markets. Asian markets are different, but American markets. So we bake the data. We also bake hard data. If somebody has
XYZ amount of funds in their 401 , which is the retirement account in the US, and they have some stocks in their brokerage account, and they have some real estate, and they have some treasury bonds, and they have some cash. We are able to put all that together and say, We know real estate grows about 3% to 3.5% per year. Based on what you have, here's where you can expect this thing to grow.
You have some cash that's not going to grow. It's actually going to lose value. You have some bonds. You have some of this thing. So we are able to build that model. So there is the math there, even though I said it's easy for people like you and me. But for most people, it becomes very complicated very quickly. And that's where we come in and we help.
When it comes to the customers you've worked with, I'm curious about something specific. What's the persona of your ideal customer?
Who's our ideal customer? Our ideal customer is someone who is earning a decent amount of money. We say $100,000 or more per household. Typically a young family and also quite often an immigrant family. And they are so busy working full-time jobs, raising kids that they don't have time for pretty much anything else for that.
And when they see Zillion, they're like, okay, this helps me because now I don't have to do all the research all the time. You guys do all this for me. And I'm able to spend five to 10 minutes a week And Zillion will, A, tell me whether I'm on a sustainable path to financial independence or not. B, if I'm not, Zillion will tell me, hey, we have too much cash here. Invest that into stocks.
What kind of stocks? Here are the stocks you can invest in. also you have a 401k account that is actually you're paying too much fee there change that and optimize it in such a way we actually show step by step so a typical customer will get a lot of value because they're pressed for time This is the money thing is it's always like item number five or six or seven on their list.
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Chapter 7: How can financial independence allow pursuing passion and living in the present?
But if you are like, hey, listen, I also need to talk to someone because for money, I don't just trust some numbers blinking on the screen. I also need to talk to someone. We offer you that service as well. You can talk to a certified financial expert and you pay us $79 a month. And it's a straightforward, simple, we're not an education platform.
Everything happens through osmosis, but that's not our goal. That's not our desire. We believe that there is enough content available just on YouTube itself and overall on the internet that anybody who really wants to learn, there are plenty of avenues available, plenty of resources available for you to learn. We are not here to teach you. We are here to help you.
And that's how we position ourselves.
In your industry, there's a new type of stakeholder known as finfluencers, financial influencers. The younger generation often turns to them for money management advice via social media. It's easily accessible, and they seem to crave all kinds of information.
But there are growing concerns about potential conflicts of interest and the creditability of these influencers, especially since they may lack formal financial education. Given this backdrop and considering your goal to help people become more knowledgeable about managing their money, which also positively impacts their lives, What's your take on this trend?
How do you engage with these influencers, perhaps promoting a product? And how do you assist your clients in becoming better decision makers and effectively multiplying their money, as your tagline on LinkedIn suggests?
The term is new, but the concept is not. If you go back, There are a couple of people who come to mind. Dave Ramsey, I don't know, I think he's in the late 60s or maybe early 70s. He's been an influencer for finance since like the 80s. Suze Orman, and there are many others, right? So influencers have always been there. The memory keeps changing. Before that, they were newspaper columnists.
They were always there. People would write letters. Hey, what should I do this? How should I do that? So there have always been influencers. They started with newspapers and magazines, then to TV, then to cable, and then to internet and some user groups and discussion boards, and now to social media. hasn't changed so much, but it has fragmented.
There's one Bera Ramsey, one Suzan, and there were probably like a dozen of them, say, 30 years ago, and there is probably thousands of them, if not millions now. I think there is a place for them. They provide bite-sized wisdom. I am in my own very small right. I'm also a finfluencer. I post my videos on LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, everywhere.
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Chapter 8: What common misconceptions do people have about building wealth?
And it's less about ageism, it's about discovery. For instance, right now we are in this hype cycle, which is somewhat real, but definitely we are in the cycle, I shouldn't say hype cycle, We're in the cycle where some of the old guard technologies are getting replaced with new guard technologies like AI, for instance.
If you are, whether you're food or you're 20, if you are not exploring AI as a technology, as potentially an enabler of new opportunities for you, then you're falling behind. And what happens is I think the ageism is the name we give to the skill gap. Someone coming out of college is probably well equipped with the technologies that have come out in the last couple of years, AI being one of them.
Somebody who's been working in corporate and doing certain job is less likely to have used those tools because those tools are new and their job didn't require it. So I think as an individual, I think the onus is on me to discover those things and learn those things on my own so that ageism doesn't become a place for me to put the blame on. It should be skills.
And skills are something that we unfortunately or fortunately live in a time when skills have to be updated and upgraded constantly. That's one. Second thing is, I tell anybody who I've worked with, anybody who has been on my team, I ask them to work hard. Jeff Bezos famously has said, work hard, work smart, work long, and you can't choose between them.
When anybody joins at Amazon, they're told they have to do all three things. You have to work hard, you have to work smart, and you have to work long. I think what happens is once we start working, get married, we have kids, we have more social life, we have more obligations, I think the work-around part falls off.
which is natural, but I think we need to find those times in your career where, in our careers, where we can work long for periods of time to build more equity, so to speak, with our employer or to build more skills. So maybe we are not, the work long part is we are doing somewhat long at the work, but also we are putting extra time to learn more skills. And that way we can actually
I think we can mitigate the side effects of ageism a decent bit. Does that make sense?
Yes, it makes sense. But in recruitment, there's always a focus on cost. HR and CEOs might lean towards hiring younger individuals because they offer lower salaries, even though the older candidates might be more experienced and competent. Sometimes they come up with their own justification that younger people are simply more creative or tech-savvy. This happens quite often in tech ventures.
Given that you run a tech venture as the CEO, would you consider hiring someone in their 40s? who's been pushed out of corporate life and is looking to start a new chapter by building a tech venture with you?
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