What happens when someone who has spent years understanding finance professionally looks back at the mistakes he made with his own money? In Paisa Vasool? Not Quite., Harsh Soni turns those mistakes into honest, relatable, and often humorous lessons about money, investing, and the choices we make along the way.
In this conversation, Harsh talks about the experiences behind the book, the lessons he learned the hard way, and why understanding money is about much more than simply knowing the numbers.
1. You've spent years working in finance and advising companies on their money, yet you openly admit to making 15 major mistakes with your own finances. What made you decide to turn those mistakes into a book?
Honestly. It started as a marketing exercise for NYVO. Show your scars, build trust - the standard playbook.
Then somewhere around Chapter 10, when I had to write about my father, it stopped being marketing. I realised I was writing the conversation I wish somebody had had with me at 22. Nobody has that conversation in India. The people closest to you are awkward about money, and the people furthest from you have something to sell.
So I wrote it down. All fifteen. Including the ones that still sting.
2. The book begins with you losing ₹25,000 as a teenager after putting your entire ₹34,000 into the stock market. Looking back, what did that experience teach you about money that has stayed with you all these years?
Never put everything you have into one or two of anything.
That's it. That's the whole lesson, and I have watched very smart adults forget it repeatedly in the twenty years since. Two stocks. One company's ESOPs. One "sure-shot" tip from your cousin's friend at a wedding. Concentration looks like conviction when things are going well. It looks like devastation the day they aren't.
₹25,000 was a cheap tuition fee for a lesson that important. Some people pay it in lakhs. Some pay it in crores.
I was just not able to buy my own bike, with my own money.
3. One of the most striking ideas in the book is that knowing the theory of money and being good with your own money are two completely different things. Why do you think even financially knowledgeable people struggle with their personal finances? Because they're two completely different sports.
When I built an IPO model, I had a process. Assumptions, checks, a second pair of eyes, a deadline. When I bought a ULIP for my niece, I had a Sunday afternoon and a feeling that I knew what I was doing.
Nobody audits your personal finances. There's no reviewer, no committee, no quarterly close. And there's ego - when you work in finance, you don't ask for help, because you're supposed to be the help.
That's how a man who has read a thousand prospectuses ends up paying the minimum amount due on a credit card.
4. Across the book, your mistakes involve credit cards, mutual funds, insurance, crypto, home loans, lifestyle inflation and more. Which mistake was the hardest for you to admit to yourself?
Chapter 10. The conversation I never had with my father.
The rest are funny. I can make jokes about credit cards and crypto and thirty-two watches. That one isn't funny. My father ran a business for two decades in Bhopal and I could not have answered a single basic question about how his money worked. Which bank. Which CA. What insurance. Who owed him, who he owed.
When he passed away in 2017, I spent eight years of savings and two years of my life untangling something one hour over tea would have solved.
That chapter took me the longest to write. I avoided it for weeks.
5. A recurring theme in the book is that many of us make financial decisions based on emotion - FOMO, social pressure, the desire to upgrade our lifestyle, or simply the feeling that we "know better." Which of these do you think is the biggest threat to building wealth?
The upgrade. Easily.
FOMO is loud - you notice it, you can catch yourself doing it. Lifestyle inflation is silent. No single decision feels wrong. A phone every three years. A watch every couple of years. A slightly nicer holiday. Marble you didn't need. None of it is a big deal.
Across thirteen years, mine added up to ₹30–50 lakh that simply never got invested. That's a fully funded long-horizon goal that quietly never existed.
The one rule that fixed it: income jumps go to savings rate first, lifestyle second. Salary goes up 30%, the SIP goes up 30% the same month - before any new spending decision is even discussed. What's left is the new lifestyle budget.
6. You write very candidly about becoming a father and realising that you had started investing for your daughter three years later than you should have. How did fatherhood change the way you think about money and financial responsibility? I stopped thinking of our wealth as one big pile that "belongs to me."
When Nysha was born in 2019, I put ₹1.5 lakh a year into Sukanya, told my wife "we're sorted," and patted myself on the back. But 95% of our money was still sitting unallocated, in my name, in one undifferentiated pool. Nothing was tagged to her. Nothing had her timeline. There was no separate compounding clock running for her.
Three years of compounding on a twenty-year bucket. That's an expensive mistake. When Neel was born in 2024, I did it on day one. Named folio, named horizon, named owner. The lesson I wish someone had handed me in the maternity ward: the moment your child is born, you've acquired a very long-duration financial liability with a name and a face. Treat it like that. The hospital paperwork takes a week. The financial paperwork takes an afternoon.
7. The book is about serious financial mistakes, but the writing is full of humour and self-deprecation. Why was it important for you to tell these stories with humour rather than writing a conventional personal-finance book?
Because nobody finishes the conventional one.
There are excellent, rigorous personal finance books in India. Most people buy them, read eighteen pages, feel vaguely guilty, and put them on a shelf. Money advice fails not because it's wrong but because it's boring, and because it's usually delivered by someone standing above you.
I'm not standing above anybody. I lost money on Bitcoin that I bought at $85. I own thirty-two watches. I insured my phone before I insured myself.
If you're laughing at me, you're still reading. And if you're still reading, somewhere around page 60 you'll go "oh god, I do that too." That's the whole trick.
8. You initially started writing the book as a marketing exercise for NYVO, but it eventually became what you describe as a "public reckoning." What changed during the writing process?
I had to actually sit with the numbers.
For years I'd carried these mistakes as vague feelings - "the home loan thing was probably not optimal." Writing forced me to compute it. The prepayment cost me somewhere between ₹55 and ₹65 lakh in opportunity cost. I had never written that down, because I was too lazy and too guilty to.
Then came my father's chapter, and that one broke the marketing frame entirely. You can't write about a ₹26 lakh tax notice arriving in name of my father after he has gone and then pivot to a call-to-action.
Around there I stopped writing content and started writing a confession. Better book. Probably worse marketing.
9. Your personal experiences eventually led you to start NYVO Money. What did your own financial mistakes reveal to you about the larger problems ordinary Indian families face when managing money?
That I wasn't special. Different zeros, same mistakes.
The families I meet have products. They don't have a plan. Ask them what their retirement number is, or what happens if one income disappears tomorrow, and there's a silence. That's the single biggest mistake Indian families make - buying products without being able to say what the product is for. Nobody asks the only question that matters: what job is this ₹5,000 a month doing, and by when?
And that isn't a philosophical question, it's a portfolio one. Asset allocation solves about 80% of the outcome - how much sits in equity, how much in debt, over what horizon. Fund selection is the last 20% that everybody spends all their time on. You cannot get the allocation right without
goals, because the goal sets the horizon and the horizon sets the allocation. Goals first, then allocation, then products - in that order. Most families run it backwards: product first, and no goal at all.
That's not their fault. It's structural. The top 0.5% of Indian households get real advice - planners, tax structuring, actual thinking. Everyone else gets a salesperson with a brochure, because the unit economics don't work.
The wealthy get advice. Everyone else gets products. NYVO exists to close that gap.
10. If you could go back and have one conversation with your 22-year-old self on his first day of earning, what would you tell him about money - and what is the one lesson you hope readers take away from Paisa Vasool? Not Quite.?
One sentence to 22-year-old me: pay somebody good, today, to look at your money with you, every quarter, for the rest of your life.
That single thing would have caught the credit card spiral early. It would have insisted on health insurance at 22, not 32. It would have stopped the ULIP. It would have run the math before the home loan prepayment. It would have built the emergency fund.
And the one takeaway for readers: name your money. Money that has no name has no purpose, and money with no purpose gets spent on whatever emergency or temptation shows up first. Nightmares first, Goals second, Dreams third.
That's it. Not clever. Just done early, and stick with it.
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