About

Hello there ๐Ÿ˜Š โ€“ Welcome to happythrifty! Thank you for checking my blog~๐Ÿ˜Š

My name is Vi – I love learning about personal finance and data visualization. I created this blog to keep track of my personal finance and personal growth journey, and hopefully help others to improve theirs along the way.

As of today, my credit score is 800+ and I have paid my personal/student loan within a year of starting my career in the US.

I am so grateful that I was able to pay off my debt, save and invest to reach FI mainly because of the below things:

  • Savings money ๐Ÿ’ธ aggressively and trying to cut costs on the things that don’t matter to me (I have to admit though, sometimes I still make a few mistakes because of my habit of impulse buying)
  • Increasing my income (either by negotiating salary or find a better job)
  • Investing the surplus
  • I have to say though – I was very lucky to have a software engineering degree ๐Ÿ‘ฉโ€๐Ÿ’ป. Having this degree helped me a lot!

Having grown up in a low-income family and seeing how my parents struggling financially, this experience really taught me to live below my means and prioritize my savings.

To me, money is not everything but it buys me more options. The option to quit your job, travel, pursue a riskier job, or even pursue an art career.

As a fan of Mad Fientist, MMM, and JL Collins’s work for quite a while, I have started investing in index funds (mainly VTSAX) four years ago. Financial independence is one of my long-term goals and my prediction I’ll able to achieve my FIRE number in the next couple of years.

A little bit more about me:

Currently, I have my 9-5 job as s a data analyst. Before this, I worked as a software engineer for 4 years. I enjoy both writing codes and analyzing data, but I like the visualization part of being a data analyst.

Making a career change is not easy, it takes a lot of courage and 5 seconds rule book by Mel help me defeat my hesitation habit.

I re-discovered my favorite childhood activity, which is writing – and I am happy to get to write on my favorite topics ๐Ÿ˜Š

It is an option that I hope to cherish forever.

As silly as it sounds, but I never understood how much important it is to work on the things you care about until my mid to late twenties. All I knew was I was going to go to school, get a stable job and start a family. Thus – I want to leave some space in my blog to write about it – hoping others will find it useful.

Thank you for stopping by and checking out my blog. I would love to connect with you. Please feel free to say hi and send me a message ๐Ÿ“จ at happy.thriftytoo [at] gmail.com!

-Vi