Tapabrata Biswas

I started The Money Decoded after learning what financial planning actually means, not in a classroom but through a decade of lived experience.

For years my father, my uncle, my elder brother, and I ran a family publishing business. It earned well, and because it did, none of us ever built a financial plan. Then in 2011 a change in government policy ended it almost overnight.

Trying to recover, we mortgaged our home and borrowed ₹10 lakh from United Bank of India to start a new venture publishing books for schoolchildren. Against an established competitor, and with little capital, we could not keep up. That business closed in 2017, and we could no longer pay the loan EMIs.

In 2018 I joined InfluxIQ Tech Pvt. Ltd. as a Project Manager, and my elder brother moved to Dubai to work in a restaurant, so our combined income could carry the family. In 2019 the bank moved to auction our home, and it tried three times without finding a buyer. We sold our old publishing house, asked friends and relatives for help, and set aside part of both our salaries month after month. In March 2021 we cleared the full debt and interest, and the bank returned the deed to our home.

What actually pulled us through was not a single savings plan. It was a network: an asset sold, a brother who emigrated for income, two salaries saved down, and people who lent without being asked twice. That kind of informal family support is common in Indian middle-class households and nearly absent from mainstream personal-finance writing, and it shapes how I cover money here.

I am not a financial advisor or a certified planner. I am someone who learned personal finance the hard way and spent years researching what I wish I had known earlier. I built The Money Decoded to explain personal finance in plain English, so you don’t have to learn it the way I did.