More than ten years in finance. Then I opened my own books.

I was seven the afternoon my mother asked our neighbour for a hundred rupees. She needed it for groceries and promised to return it within days. He said no.

A hundred rupees is less than two dollars. It was not a large sum, and we did not have it. What I remember is not the money. It is her face on the walk home.

I did not sleep that night. The next morning at the bus stand I overheard two mothers worrying that their sons had failed a Hindi test and there was no tutor to be found. My father had taught me Hindi properly.

That evening I told my mother I was going to see a friend, and knocked on their door instead. I was seven, and I was there to apply for a job. They said yes. A hundred rupees a month, the exact sum my mother had been refused. I taught those boys for two years.

The lesson I took from it was simple: earn more, work harder, and the door stays open. It is very nearly true. I ran on it for the next twenty years.

When my father chose to educate my sister and me, relatives told him he was wasting money on daughters. Some of them laughed. I decided to answer them with a qualification rather than an argument.

I paid for it with a job in a stockbroker’s office, a call centre, and more tutoring, and borrowed the exam fees from friends when I could not cover them. I became the first person in my family, and the first in my village, to earn a professional finance qualification. My first real salary arrived in November 2014. I have never felt so much like myself.

Then my husband wanted to move to Canada, and I did not. We landed with four suitcases: summer clothes, winter clothes, cooking utensils, enough groceries to start, and cash.

Canada set my qualification aside. Without Canadian experience there was no job at my level, and without a credit history there was no apartment, so we took a basement. I applied for more than fifty jobs. Five called back.

By August the account was down to $1,800, about one month’s rent. We were filling in applications for coffee shops and a thrift store. On 14 August, four months after we landed, I was offered a role well below the one I had left, and I took it.

I had the qualification, the work ethic, and sixteen years of saving without a missed month. And I was sitting in a rented basement doing my father’s arithmetic.

So I did the one thing I know how to do properly. I opened the books, my own this time. Every month since 2007, into a savings account and fixed deposits. Safe, sensible, and doing almost nothing. Seven years of that before I genuinely started investing, and I was training in finance the whole time.

My father worked his whole life and kept a diary of every rupee. I worked just as hard. Neither of us had been shown what to do with money once we had it.

Working in finance does not make you good with your own money. I could read a company’s books. I could not have told you what would happen to my family if something happened to me. Saving felt responsible. I mistook it for a plan. That was not a discipline problem. It was an information problem.

So I started again, on the right thing this time. I read the Canadian system from the first page, the way I had once read a textbook. An emergency fund first, so one bad month could never undo us again. Then investing properly, with a plan instead of a feeling.

Somewhere in the middle of that I heard what this work actually involves, and recognised it. It was what I had just spent a year doing for my own family. So I got licensed, to do for other families what I had just done for mine.

People meet me and assume I am an extrovert. I am not. I am poor at networking, worse at public speaking, and still not comfortable in front of a camera. I studied for my licence while working that job, with a baby at home, in a country I had lived in for less than two years.

I do it anyway. I know how many families are sitting where I sat that August, and I know what one plain explanation would have been worth to us.

We have an emergency fund now. My money has a job. I know exactly what would happen to my daughter if something happened to me, a sentence I could not have said three years ago.

I do not lie awake doing my father’s arithmetic anymore. That is the whole achievement.