Ahmedabad to Jersey City at Four
Key Lessons from This Article:
- Saving 20–30% of income was a cultural norm for Ken’s Gujarati family, not a sacrifice
- Real financial discipline comes from knowing what you’re building toward, not just cutting back
- Ken’s Columbia and Harvard education opened doors; his Jersey City apartment taught him what to do with them
I was four years old when my parents brought me and my sister to the United States. We flew from Ahmedabad, India. I don’t remember the flight.
I remember what came after.
We landed in a one-bedroom apartment in Jersey City. My sister and I shared a pull-out couch. My parents had one bedroom and no furniture worth mentioning. This is the actual building, our first apartment, near Journal Square.
My mother took a job that started at midnight. My father worked days. For a long stretch of my childhood, one of them was always at work.
I was a worried kid. I worried about my mother most nights she was gone. I understood, the way children understand things without being told, that a woman going to work alone at midnight in a big city in an era of street crime on television was not necessarily safe.
I never said any of this out loud. There was no point complaining about things that were not feasible to change in the short term. My parents set the standard through their choices: a life gets built by not spending time on the things that cannot be changed.
We did not eat out for the first five years. Even afterwards, Pizza Hut, once every six months or so, was the occasion we looked forward to.
The pizza was not better than what my mother made at home. We went because eating in a restaurant, even a Pizza Hut, was a small splurge of belonging to a country where such things were possible.
Saving was never described as a sacrifice. It was simply what you did. My parents came from a part of India where putting twenty or thirty percent of your income aside was an ordinary expectation, even on incomes that would seem impossibly modest by American standards today.
The habits came with them across the ocean. They didn’t discuss them for the most part. They just lived them. And by osmosis, so did I.
“My parents never called it discipline. They called it Tuesday.”
I was four years old when my parents brought me and my sister to the United States. We flew from Ahmedabad, India. I don’t remember the flight.
I remember what came after.
We landed in a one-bedroom apartment in Jersey City. My sister and I shared a pull-out couch. My parents had one bedroom and no furniture worth mentioning. This is the actual building, our first apartment, near Journal Square.
My mother took a job that started at midnight. My father worked days. For a long stretch of my childhood, one of them was always at work.
I was a worried kid. I worried about my mother most nights she was gone. I understood, the way children understand things without being told, that a woman going to work alone at midnight in a big city in an era of street crime on television was not necessarily safe.
I never said any of this out loud. There was no point complaining about things that were not feasible to change in the short term. My parents set the standard through their choices: a life gets built by not spending time on the things that cannot be changed.
We did not eat out for the first five years. Even afterwards, Pizza Hut, once every six months or so, was the occasion we looked forward to.
The pizza was not better than what my mother made at home. We went because eating in a restaurant, even a Pizza Hut, was a small splurge of belonging to a country where such things were possible.
Saving was never described as a sacrifice. It was simply what you did. My parents came from a part of India where putting twenty or thirty percent of your income aside was an ordinary expectation, even on incomes that would seem impossibly modest by American standards today.
The habits came with them across the ocean. They didn’t discuss them for the most part. They just lived them. And by osmosis, so did I.
“My parents never called it discipline. They called it Tuesday.”
What I learned in that apartment
I have come to believe that what I learned in that apartment has shaped my life more than anything I learned at any school I attended: that discipline is not a burden, that the future comes faster than you expect, that what you defer today plants the seeds for the freedom and life that you build tomorrow.
Despite their limited means and frugal habits, one area my parents always encouraged and stretched to invest in for my sister and me was education.
I went to a Jesuit Catholic high school in Jersey City, where the priests took my education more seriously than I sometimes did. I then went to Columbia University in the City of New York in 1987 and graduated in 1991 with a degree in Computer Science and Economics. Due to my record in undergraduate studies, I was offered admission to Harvard Law School after that, and graduated in 1994.
Both of those degrees mattered because they opened doors to worlds I never knew existed and had little prior access to before attending top universities.
However, neither one was a substitute for the values and habits I learned from my parents and the pull-out couch and my mom’s midnight shifts.
The schools taught me how to argue and how to read carefully. The apartment taught me why any of that was worth doing.
The Gujarati Community
I hail from a state in India called Gujarat. It is an arid region in Northwest India bordering Pakistan and the Arabian Sea.
Gujaratis are shrewd business people. That’s a generalization, and generalizations are sometimes dangerous, but this one is true enough that most Gujaratis and really anyone who knows them and their reputation would nod in agreement.
The family gatherings I remember from childhood were not organized around religion, or sports, or even mainly food. They were organized around talking about business opportunities and commerce: who was starting what, who had bought which business, who was making a run at what. My friend and investor Mohnish Pabrai, a non-Gujarati, much later wrote an excellent book called “The Dhandho Investor” with a hat tip to Gujarati business acumen.
The room was always full of that talk, and the talk was warm. Nobody thought money was vulgar to discuss. Nobody thought striving was tacky to admit to.
I grew up assuming everyone did this. It took me until college to realize most families didn’t.
I sometimes wonder what my parents would have made of the specific work I do now. My father is 86 and his memory is not what it was. My mother’s memory is still sharp. They are both full of opinions and share them freely.
Neither of them ever expected me to be a professional investor. They probably expected me to be a professional like a doctor or an engineer.
What actually crossed the ocean
The apartment in Jersey City is not where I stayed. My parents moved out of it to a two-family house that they still own and rent out, and then to another house. My sister and I both went to good schools. My father, remarkably, still has the same Rado watch he got when we first immigrated here.
They brought their belief that the future is a place you build with today’s small decisions. They built theirs, in a very literal sense, one twenty-percent-of-income deposit at a time.
I have spent my adult life managing money for families who mostly came to it a different way. Many of them did not grow up on a pull-out couch. Most of them did not have a mother who worked midnight shifts.
Their money is no less theirs, and their goals are no less real, for having taken a different path to get there. But it does mean that when I sit across from them and explain that discipline is not a burden, that the future is real and worth investing in, and that what you defer today is what you build tomorrow, I am not repeating a slogan from a textbook.
I am repeating what a one-bedroom apartment in Jersey City taught me before I was old enough to know I was learning it.
Here’s to building lasting wealth.
— Ken
Important Disclosure: Ridgewood Investments is a registered investment adviser. This publication is educational commentary and does not constitute personalized investment advice or a solicitation. Consult your own advisor for your specific situation.
You received this email because you subscribed to The Intelligent Investor’s Almanac. If this is not useful to you, please unsubscribe here. No hard feelings. [Update preferences] · [Unsubscribe]
FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Who is Ken Majmudar?
Ken Majmudar is the founder of Ridgewood Investments, a fee-only fiduciary wealth management firm. He immigrated from Ahmedabad, India to Jersey City, New Jersey at age four. He holds a Computer Science and Economics degree from Columbia University (Class of 1991) and a JD from Harvard Law School (1994).
Q: What is the Gujarati approach to saving and investing?
Gujaratis, an entrepreneurial community from the northwestern Indian state of Gujarat, traditionally treat saving 20–30% of income as a baseline cultural norm, not a sacrifice. Business discussion is embedded in family life, and wealth-building is approached as a communal practice. This culture produced investors like Mohnish Pabrai, whose book The Dhandho Investor formalises these principles.
Q: What is The Dhandho Investor?
The Dhandho Investor is a book by Mohnish Pabrai that distils the low-risk, high-return investment philosophy of Gujarati business operators. “Dhandho” is a Gujarati word meaning business with minimal risk and maximum upside. Pabrai is a personal friend of Ken Majmudar and an investor he references.
Q: What is Ridgewood Investments’ investment philosophy?
Ridgewood Investments is a fee-only, fiduciary firm focused on long-term compounding, tax efficiency, and wealth architecture. Ken Majmudar’s approach is grounded in the discipline of deferred gratification, shaped by a family that treated savings as an ordinary default, not an exception.
Q: How did growing up in Jersey City shape Ken Majmudar’s approach to wealth management?
Growing up in a one-bedroom Jersey City apartment, with parents working opposing shifts to build savings from scratch, Ken Majmudar learned that financial discipline is most meaningful when it comes from a clear understanding of what you’re building toward. He applies this when advising high-earning clients who lack similar reference points.