I figured out early in life that finances or money could play an important
part in your life.
Going back to my childhood, where we kind of struggled with the money,
that experience kind of like gave me the motivation and the discipline to save
money and being financially disciplined.
My name is Dr.
Hassan Sheikh.
I'm 33 years old.
I make $250,000 a year, and I live in Orlando, Florida.
My compensation is broken into two parts.
The most significant part is the base salary, which is around 75% of my total
income, and the remaining 25% are the stocks and the bonuses annually.
I bought my home on September 27th, 2021.
I paid 10% of the down payment.
With the closing cost, everything come out to be $60,000.
It took me only about six months to save about $60,000.
As of this moment, I have around six credit cards for most of the
part. I pay them every month, but I always do credit card
churnings So after every year or two I get this new credit card with
0% APR with like 25 month payment plan or something like this for 0%
APR, I would use that as much as possible and then would pay the minimum
payments for like 24 months and at the end of the tenure I would just pay
off everything that's left on the card, cut the card and start everything again.
I've owned total three cars during my stay at Orlando.
My strategy for buying cars is that I try to get as
bad of an APR and deal as possible
and use this as a leverage to reduce the Msrp.
So when they reduce the Msrp, I try to pay off my cars in 2 to 3 months,
which I recently did.
I have a 401 K account through my employer.
I also have an HSA account.
Then I also have a private brokerage account which I contribute on monthly basis.
The fourth account is the ESP program for Intel Labs,
so I regularly contribute 15% of my income monthly in the ESP.
All the discussions between my parents is like, Hey, how would we pay the next bills?
Are there any other opportunities that we could use to increase our income?
What about the prospects of like the brothers to get better jobs and all these things?
So that was kind of like the most discussion I could remember from my childhood.
My financial life as a PhD student was a mess, I would say.
I would get $1,400 a month for nine months in a year and no funding for the
summer. So managing with this little amount of money, paying rent, paying
for food was a big task for me.
I was literally living under the poverty line for like four years.
When my day to day job at Intel Labs is as a machine learning research scientist.
So I primarily work on improving the state of the art machine learning algorithms.
My core area of research is reinforcement learning.
So what I'm trying to do right now is I'm trying to improve the
computational efficiency of reinforcement learning models.
I was always interested in humanoid robots, and during my
undergraduate I was very, very ambitious and I wanted to build a humanoid robot that could have
real interactions and could understand you as a real human being.
So I started becoming more and more specialized in each area of artificial
intelligence. I basically settle down on reinforcement learning, which is like the
greatest part of learning machine learning.
I spent most of the time outside of the work in doing home improvement
projects. I generally do not go out.
I do not like to be outside.
I would say so.
I spend most of my time improving the home, cleaning the home
or at the gym.
My social life is almost non-existent, I would say.
When I was a graduate student, I had a very good social life.
All my friends were here, but after graduation, everybody started moving to California.
I think my social life is pretty terrible right now, but I'm trying to improve it.
I'm trying to go out more often.
My major splurge are tools.
I spend a ridiculous amount of money on tools that I would probably use only a couple of
times. I keep all of my tools in the garage, so my garage is filled
with tools from yard tools to the power tools.
I recently bought a stone cutter to cut like three
stones with a diamond blade, so the whole thing costed me like $500.
I've used it only once and it's still like sitting in my garage.
I like building stuff with my own hands.
It gives me a lot of pleasure when I build something.
I work on something and it comes out like, really, really beautiful.
The best project I'm really proud of is the tiny little
door I've built for my cat.
So I've built a gateway for my cat from the living room
to her little room, and I decorated as a mini castle.
I'm really proud of it because it required me to work with the micro
drills and using stone cutters and everything in between and working with the
electricals to light her pathway I'm really proud of.
Besides DIY stuff and work, I absolutely love to cook.
And the other big expense I would say is my food expense.
From time to time, I indulge into delicacies in expensive
ingredients. So there's always like a set of expensive ingredients.
In my fridge, I would buy caviar, foie gras or Wagyu beef from time to
time to treat myself so similarly like DIY projects.
If I need to buy tools that I would only use for once, I would happily
buy that tool to make that dish.
The biggest goal, I would say, for saving all the investments
and everything is early retirement.
At the beginning of my job, I made a self commitment that I would need to save
$100,000 every year in investments.
So my annual goal is to contribute $100,000 into my investment
accounts, including the 401 K and HSA altogether.
This would allow me to enjoy my life.
Let me travel without sacrificing the quality of life.
I am very happy.
And the reason for that is that I have worked really hard to be
here and I am seeing the goals of my hard work getting
their fruit, which gives me a lot of satisfaction, I would say.