This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Sundas Khalid, a Google employee in her 30s who lives in Seattle. The following has been edited for length and clarity. Growing up, my family didn't have a lot of money, and I wasn't very financially literate. I was always into saving, but investing was like a foreign world to me. In 2013, I broke into tech with an internship at Amazon, which led to a full-time data engineering role, and I started earning good money, $77,000 in my first full-