What Pakistanis get wrong about saving and investing money

An engineer by day, a finance creator by night

The episode opens on a contradiction Muzamil finds interesting. His guest, Wali Khan, has spent nearly twenty years as a telecom engineer — electrical engineering at NED, a master’s in data communication from the UK, and a career that settled into radio-frequency work for a wireless operator in the UAE, where he has now lived for about thirteen years. That is a serious, technical life. And yet at night he talks about money on YouTube.

The framing Muzamil uses is timely. Inflation is eating away at cash savings, not only in Pakistan but worldwide, and most people are too busy earning that money to notice they could be growing it — smartly, at low risk, over time. Wali is the rare person who learned to do exactly that on a salary rather than a windfall, and now shares the method.

His own engineering choice was not really a choice. Back in 1999, in Karachi, the options were engineer, doctor, or at best IBA. He wanted computer science at FAST. His family did not. He did electrical engineering instead, hated the early years, and only warmed to it once time passed and the work started flowing. He is not bitter about it. “After that time, you ask me, I wouldn’t say I made a mistake,” he tells Muzamil — the experiences are what made him who he is.

Why a degree is not a job, and never was

Both men spend a moment on the recurring social-media argument that degrees are obsolete. They reject it, but for a specific reason. “University was never supposed to be a factory for workers,” Muzamil says. “It was not vocational training.” It gives you a baseline and a way of thinking. He no longer writes code, but computer science taught him problem-solving he uses in everything, including the podcast.

Wali’s version is about soft skills. The degree is worth doing, he argues, but you have to add the skills the degree won’t give you. His example is Ali Abdaal — a doctor who transitioned into something else entirely, carrying forward small advantages like the fact that he could type fast. The point is that engineering in Pakistan is, by and large, considered dead as a career, not because the discipline is worthless but because the work isn’t happening there. The few who get out and find exposure abroad do fine. The rest are stuck.

That diagnosis quietly sets up the rest of the conversation. If your domestic earning path is constrained, the money you do make matters more — and most Pakistanis handle it badly.

A nation that saves badly

Muzamil lays out the numbers. Pakistan’s savings and investment rate is roughly 14% — about half of India’s and Bangladesh’s. In America, close to 75% of the working-age population holds equity in some form. In Pakistan, it’s under 1%, with only around 250,000 active stock-market traders in the entire country.

So where does the money go? Real estate. Every graduate with savings pumps the property market, and Muzamil is blunt about why that’s a trap. It’s a gamble first, because there’s no legitimate data telling you whether prices will rise. It’s non-productive, so it doesn’t help the economy. And because it’s non-productive, no real wealth is being generated — it’s wealth being redistributed. Everyone pools their money in, a few people pull theirs out, and the rest are holding lottery tickets.

Wali agrees and adds a cultural layer. Even when Pakistan’s GDP per capita matched India’s, its savings rate was lower — so income isn’t the excuse. Indians, generally, have better acumen toward saving and investing. And Pakistanis sometimes route the question through religion in ways that don’t hold up. Muzamil presses on this irony: Islamic law actually demands that you take risk. A real-estate project marketing a “guaranteed 40,000 in rent” is closer to the un-Islamic thing than a stock, where you genuinely share the company’s risk and reward.

Don’t try to beat this year’s inflation

When Muzamil asks the core question — can investing protect the value he generates from being eroded by inflation — Wali’s answer is a warning before it’s a prescription.

Pakistani inflation is brutal; some food commodities have doubled in a year, and the official 30–40% figures may understate it. But the worst move, he says, is to look at that number and decide you must beat it this year. “If you get caught in that race, you’ll end up doing harm,” he says — you’ll chase crypto, reckless trading, “ulti seedhi cheezein,” all in pursuit of beating a number. Zoom out. Look over a long period. And accept that this is a game of persistence, not heroics.

Diversification carries the weight. You don’t put all your money in the stock market. Gold belongs in the mix, but only a little — globally, 5 to 10% of a portfolio is enough, because gold generates no income or revenue. Stocks and REITs let you ride inflation in the underlying assets: if building-material costs rise, a position in cement stocks adjusts for you. The mistake is measuring any of it against this week’s absolute inflation figure. That’s the wrong race.

Where a beginner actually starts

Muzamil plays the overwhelmed novice — a young man saving a thousand dirhams a month who has never invested anywhere and just wants a first step. Wali’s first rule is mindset: don’t make someone else’s experience your benchmark.

The practical path he describes is access. There are platforms that let you invest in US stocks directly — buy Amazon or Apple individually, with very low fees, or hold a simple ETF over the whole market. The catch is plumbing: because of FATF-related rules, these platforms generally require you to fund from your own bank account, which is straightforward for a UAE resident with an account open but harder for someone moving back to Pakistan trying to deploy, say, ten thousand rupees. There are local platforms for that case too. The recurring theme is the same one he applies to everything: if you’re persistent, it happens. “Agar aap persistent hain, toh bahut kuch ho sakta hai.”

Gold, the dollar, and a war under the surface

The conversation widens to the macro debate everyone was having that year. Muzamil sketches the landscape: the crypto crowd calling Bitcoin “digital gold,” the geopolitical shock of the US weaponising the dollar through sanctions after Russia’s invasion, the resulting talk of de-dollarisation, and the idea that BRICS might launch a currency that’s dollar-weighted, or gold-backed, or something new. Under the surface, he says, there’s a war going on, and the dollar is the target.

Wali stays grounded and personal. He isn’t an economist, so he speaks at his own level. The dollar is probably the preferred target and is genuinely under pressure — India has signalled it won’t always continue in it — but he expects it to sustain, and even if it doesn’t, he can’t abandon dollar-based assets. You can’t drop the US, or US companies. On gold he’s honestly puzzled: through COVID and the inflation that followed, gold barely moved, and he doesn’t fully understand the scene. On crypto he’s skeptical for a structural reason — governments will never allow it in its current uncontrolled form, and the moment they regulate it to permit cross-border payments on their terms, it stops being crypto in any meaningful sense.

His resolution is the same word again: diversification. Gold for a Pakistani still makes sense as an inflation hedge, because rupee inflation is largely dollar-based and gold is priced in dollars — even if it misses the full move by 20–30%, the exposure helps. For people outside Pakistan, he thinks it matters less. Hold a specific, modest amount of gold; hold dollar-based assets rather than dollars; from 2000 to 2015 the US market did nothing, so a simple US ETF would have underperformed Pakistan over that window — which is exactly why you diversify across gold, property, stocks, and your own monthly income. That last one is why he started creating content in the first place: another income stream, though one he wants to eventually convert into something sustainable, a business rather than just cash flow.

Why FIRE doesn’t survive a devaluation

Muzamil brings up his brother asking for his “FIRE number” — financial independence, retire early. Wali explains the mechanic plainly: take roughly 25 times your annual income, invest it somewhere that beats inflation, and in principle you can draw on it for life. He runs Muzamil’s example — fifty thousand dirhams a month, six lakh a year, 25 times gives fifteen million dirhams as the target.

Then he takes it apart for anyone living in Pakistan or the Middle East. FIRE works in Europe, the US, or Australia, where the state provides some welfare floor — healthcare, a safety net, things you don’t have to fund yourself. In Pakistan it’s very difficult to calculate. Someone who set a FIRE number in 2020 watched devaluation and 40% inflation destroy it. And the costs that retirement is supposed to absorb keep climbing — private healthcare insurance for someone over 60 can run 20,000 to 25,000 a year. So unless you have a solid business model and strong cash flow behind it, building a FIRE number to carry a whole life here isn’t sustainable. This, he notes, is just “borrowed intelligence” — you can’t lift every concept from one place and drop it into another.

Globalising your way out

The most aspirational thread is about leaving — not as escape but as leverage. Muzamil describes the moment Dubai changed his sense of what was possible: a bank account that opens fast, an apartment document, a Stripe account approved in two minutes. In Pakistan all of this carried anxiety. In Dubai he registered a company, hired himself, and moved. Once he realised he could build a digital business on top of that, he could plug himself out — and the same playbook exists for the UK, the US, Canada, New Zealand, even Portugal and Spain, which are now loosening visas to attract people earning digitally and spending locally.

But Dubai’s cost of living has rocketed, and both men weigh the alternatives candidly. Wali, having lived in the UK, says he’d eventually choose the US — purely on the numbers, the same job pays more after tax than the Gulf, and US expats are rare abroad precisely because there’s so much opportunity at home. Muzamil leans toward Portugal for its middle-ground climate, despite the language barrier, and its proximity to Middle East and Africa markets. The logic underneath is consistent with everything else in the episode: don’t anchor to a single source of income, a single country, or a single asset. Wali points to the content creators who got golden visas the moment they hit the limelight, and to the people moving to Saudi for 1.5 to 2 times their Gulf salaries as it liberalises away from oil. The opportunity is real, but “you need a take-off point. You have to be standing on the runway, otherwise you can miss out.”

How they read the region

Muzamil closes with the question he’s been asking everyone in Dubai: how do you see the Middle East, and Asia, in 2050? Wali is optimistic about the Gulf and clear-eyed about home. Dubai isn’t going anywhere — he’s watched it resolve serious regional tensions amicably, keeping Iranian trade trucks rolling in even at the peak of friction, and absorb people from every conflict zone, from Russia and Ukraine to Pakistan, Egypt, and Sri Lanka. Saudi is here to stay. On Pakistan he isn’t hopeless — the population alone is too large to write off — but he expects it to keep going much as it is. On India, he’s careful to separate the macro story from the micro: the country is on a different trajectory now, even if the benefit hasn’t fully reached ordinary people, and he sees it in the Indian trucks, the Tata SUVs, and the freelancers he interacts with every day.

The throughline of the whole conversation is quieter than any single asset call. Your money is a translation of the value you’ve generated, and inflation is constantly draining it. The work is to stop handing that value to a property gamble or a savings account, diversify across things that actually compound, and stay persistent long enough for it to matter — and, if you can, to give yourself the optionality of where in the world to do it.