From Paycheck to Portfolio — United States
Most personal finance writing has the same problem: it tells you what to do without ever showing the arithmetic. You're told to build an emergency fund, avoid bad debt, start investing early — and left to work out what any of that means for your actual salary.
This takes the opposite approach. Every concept arrives attached to a calculation you can reproduce, and every calculation has a free tool on this site that runs it for your own numbers.
It also follows three people all the way through. Raj, Maya and Priya appear in Part 1 with a payslip and a bank balance, and are still there in Part 5 with a retirement target — the continuity a single calculator genuinely cannot give you.
| Part | Covers | Run it yourself |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Money Foundations | Cash flow vs. income, gross-to-net, 50/30/20 and zero-based budgeting, emergency funds, lifestyle inflation | Budget, Paycheck, Net Worth |
| 2. Debt & Credit | The five credit-score factors, utilisation, grace periods, the minimum-payment trap, avalanche vs. snowball | Card Payoff, Debt Payoff |
| 3. Investing Basics | Compounding and the Rule of 72, index funds vs. ETFs, expense ratios, a three-fund portfolio | Compound Interest, Investment |
| 4. Taxes & Income | Reading a payslip, marginal vs. effective rate, deductions vs. credits, the employer match, traditional vs. Roth | Tax, 401(k), IRA / Roth |
| 5. Long-Term Wealth | The 4% and 25× rules, rent vs. buy and the break-even horizon, insurance, estate basics | Retirement, FIRE Number, Rent vs. Buy |
Paisa Playbook — India
Real rupees. Real rules. Every number worked out.
Generic personal finance advice fails in India for a specific reason: the accounts are different. A guide built around 401(k)s and Roth IRAs cannot tell you whether to pick the new regime or the old, what your CTC actually converts to in-hand, or why the same mutual fund quietly costs you more in a regular plan than a direct one.
So this isn't a translation of the US book — it shares the five-part skeleton and the worked-example method, but the content is rewritten around Indian rules. It also covers freelancers properly, which most Indian personal finance writing skips entirely: advance tax, presumptive taxation under 44ADA, and when GST registration starts to apply.
| Part | Covers | Run it yourself |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Money Foundations | CTC vs. in-hand, budgeting that survives real life, emergency funds, where money should live, and income that isn't a salary | Salary, Budget, HRA |
| 2. Debt and Credit | How a CIBIL score is actually built, good vs. bad debt in the Indian context, the EMI trap, avalanche vs. snowball | Loan / EMI, Card Payoff, Debt Payoff |
| 3. Investing | Compounding, SIPs, index funds and ETFs, diversification, KYC and demat setup — and direct vs. regular plans, the costliest default in Indian investing | SIP, Mutual Fund, Compound Interest |
| 4. Taxes and Income | Reading a salary slip, new regime vs. old, deductions and when they're irrelevant, EPF/PPF/NPS, freelance advance tax, 44ADA and GST, capital gains | Tax, EPF, PPF, GST |
| 5. Long-Term Wealth | How much you actually need to retire, renting vs. buying, term and health insurance vs. what you'll be sold, nominees and wills | Retirement, Rent vs. Buy, Gratuity |
Which one is for you
Pick by tax system, not by preference. The method is identical; the rules are not, and the mismatch is not cosmetic. A US reader has no use for 44ADA, and an Indian reader gains nothing from a chapter on Roth conversions.
- File taxes in India → Paisa Playbook. CTC, CIBIL, EPF/PPF/NPS, the regime choice, GST for freelancers.
- File taxes in the US → From Paycheck to Portfolio. 401(k), IRA, credit scores, federal brackets.
- Neither? The two universal parts — compounding and debt payoff arithmetic — work anywhere, but the tax chapters won't apply. Both books say so plainly rather than pretending to be global.
Both are written for someone who has income and wants to understand what to do with it, but has never been shown the mechanics. Neither is for you if you already run a diversified portfolio and rebalance annually, or if you're looking for stock picks — and neither is a tax filing manual. They explain how the systems work; they don't walk you through a return.
An honest note on the numbers
The arithmetic is real and reproducible. Take any worked example and check it against the calculator on this site — that's rather the point of publishing them together.
The people are not real. Both books say so in their own disclaimers: Raj, Maya and Priya, and every amount attached to them, are illustrative and fictional, built to demonstrate a method rather than to represent current rates or promise an outcome. Paisa Playbook goes a step further with an appendix — Figures That Change, and Where to Check Them — listing which numbers date fastest and the official source for each.
And to be direct about what this page is: both books are paid products published by Venros, which also builds TallyBench. The calculators stay free, with no sign-up, exactly as they are. Nothing in either book is required to use them.