Nischa Shah – Detailed Biography

Nischa Shah is an accountant and popular finance YouTuber.

This former investment banker has over two million subscribers on her YouTube channel Nischa.

Introduction

Nischa Shah was born in 1994 into a joint family in the United Kingdom.

Her father is Uganda-born whereas her mother is India-born. The former is an entrepreneur while the latter is an employee.

Her parents, both first-generation immigrants, moved to the UK in the early 1980s and started from scratch.

Nischa is the middle of three sisters.

A geek

The young Nischa was a finance geek.

She was very close to her father and their dinner conversations often revolved around business, finance, money and entrepreneurship. She developed an interest in these things.

Thanks to those conversations, Nischa later developed a flair for finance and entrepreneurship.

Her father used to look after her and her sister, as her mother used to leave for work.

Nischa spent most of her early years in the back of her father’s transit van, accompanying him to his business meetings and observing him and other people doing business.

She was the studious and nerdy one in her family, even though the atmosphere around her was mainly of business rather than education.

Film & finance

Nischa did her schooling from The Latymer School, London and did A-Levels in Maths, Economics, and Media and scored 9A*-As in GCSEs.

She did film and photography for A-Levels in Media as a hobby but little did she know at the time that she would become a YouTuber in the future.

Nischa studied for a 3-year undergraduate degree in Finance, Accounting and Management from University of Nottingham.

She is a ICAEW Qualified Chartered Accountant.

At the time, she believed in going to school, getting a job and climbing the ladder.

From modelling to banking

Nischa did modelling at school and first year of university. Later she quit it as she shifted her focus towards finance, business and entrepreneurship.

She applied for a number of summer internships, during her second year of university, mostly for middle office functions that can sponsor the ACA qualification and got sponsored to complete the accountancy qualification.

Nischa got an offer from Deutsche Bank and made it to the client magazine by talking about how to empower and inspire millennials. Thanks to this, she got a full-time offer at the bank and moved to the front office.

She worked as an Associate in structure trade & export finance in Deutsche Bank from 2013 to 2018 before joining Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation (SMBC) to work as Vice President – Capital Markets, in London, from 2018 to 2022.

Then, Nischa worked for three months at Crédit Agricole CIB before becoming a full-time YouTuber.

To inspire & impact

Thanks to the habit of journaling, Nischa self-audits herself at the end of every year and writes down what she would accomplish in the following year.

“What would I want to experience in life if time and money weren’t an issue?” was one of the questions that she asked herself in her Law of Attraction Planner in 2021.

Among many answers was doing something that she enjoys whilst impacting and motivating others using her core strengths.

After reading The Almanack Of Naval Ravikant book, Nischa learnt that starting a podcast or YouTube channel has many benefits.

At the time, even though she was doing fine at her day job, she wasn’t enjoying it. She felt mentally and physically drained to work at her job and felt all-time low.

Out of her desire to try something completely different, she started her YouTube channel Nischa on 4 December 2021.

As she was doing finance for many years, she had knowledge of business. She was also learning many things and decided to document her learning publicly through her channel and at the same time, inspire and impact people.

Nischa noticed the financial videos to be complex and full of jargon. So, she decided to teach finance in simpler terms and at the same time, earn from YouTube.

She used to do property investing on the side and earn through rental property. She bought a property in North London, in 2017, to live in.

As many of her friends were curious to learn about property investing, her first video, published in December 2021, was on it.

Working on her channel became an escape from her day job.

Finding her “why”

Once, one of Nischa’s close colleagues and mentor in the team, who worked in the job for nearly two decades, was let go. At the time, the bank was amidst one of the largest deals.

This disheartened Nischa as she realized that the company doesn’t owe one anything except a paycheck.

She got promoted to her mentor’s position. She couldn’t celebrate as she felt that she couldn’t always be lucky and might not always hold down her job.

Nischa realized that she is only as good as the hours she can dedicate while working for someone else and her earnings are directly linked to her time. She wanted to be financially free and have more control over her financial life.

She decided to learn about money and stop overspending it.

Nischa realized that her habit of overspending money wouldn’t leave her with many choices and freedom like she bought a white convertible Audi with her first paycheck and paid for it for several years which she later regretted.

She learnt to save, spend, invest and budget and this wasn’t difficult as she was in banking.

For Nischa, only the first few years of working in the corporate career were fulfilling and intellectually stimulating.

Eventually she started losing interest and feeling unfulfilled and it started taking a toll on her mental health.

Nischa signed up for therapy sessions. In her second session, her therapist suggested she see a life coach.

Instead, she went home and spent a few days introspecting herself in solitude.

Nischa tried to understand the reasons for her dissatisfaction and realized that she had no interest in her job and was doing it only for paycheck and social status.

Also, she asked herself how would she feel if she continued with her job for another five to ten years and as she felt dreaded by the thought, she decided to walk away from it.

Nischa understood that her passion lay in inspiring people by teaching them finances. So, she decided to continue working on her YouTube channel, courses and workshops, teaching people finances.

She didn’t quit her job immediately even though she found it difficult to continue with it as she was using her salary to build up an emergency fund and other side hustles and pay for her investments of stocks, properties, index funds and gold.

From spare bedroom

Nischa used to work at her job from Monday to Friday and on the evenings and weekends, she used to produce videos for her channel and learn about video editing in her spare bedroom and this was her creative outlet.

She also bought many courses and online programs to learn various aspects of video production like using a camera and video editing.

Within just two months of starting her YouTube channel, Nischa bought a £1500 camera and also a new mic. She was able to do this as she was earning enough money from her day job.

Once-in-a-lifetime opportunity

At the end of 2022, Nischa gave herself three months to completely dedicate to her YouTube channel.

She had just 300 subscribers at the end of the third month. So, she started working at the new bank.

But around that time, Nischa’s video, “A Day In My Life As An Investment Banker,” published in September 2022, blew up and her other videos also started getting traction.

She started getting 1,000 subscribers daily and it went up to around 5,000 by the end of the week. She had a total of 40,000 subscribers in her first week of joining the new bank.

Nischa had signed for a guaranteed bonus of £100,000, the biggest in her career, which she had negotiated for months at the bank.

She would receive it if she works at the bank for at least two months but she found it difficult to work both at the bank and her YouTube channel.

Nischa felt working on YouTube to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

So, she chose this over the six-figure bonus, resigned from her job and took 84% pay cut from her $300,000 banking job and became a full-time YouTuber.

Nischa decided to let go of the bonus as she feared that she would delay quitting her job and following her passion by a few years if she accepted the bonus.

At the time, she was unfulfilled with her banking career but used to receive a lot of appreciation both on YouTube and Instagram from people about how her content positively impacted their financial lives.

After working hard for nine years to build her investment banking career, Nischa resigned in 2023, in her late twenties.

Everything falls into place

It was the hardest day for her when she got on a Zoom call with her manager to inform him about turning down the bonus and leaving banking.

At the time, Nischa wasn’t fully confident if she could earn decently from her YouTube channel but she chose to work fulltime on it anyway as she was impacting real people unlike corporations in her job.

She also felt a massive guilt while resigning as she felt she was wasting her parents’ sacrifice to get her onto a stable career.

Also, up until that time, Nischa built her identity around her banking career and she found it challenging to let it go.

At the time, her income from side hustles matched her fixed costs of mortgage and basic living expenses and she was earning an additional £300.

Being childfree and having an emergency fund which would last her 9 months in case something doesn’t work out gave her the confidence to quit her job.

It took Nischa 11 months to start earning from her channel. In 2023, she started earning a six-figure income from her businesses.

She made more in a year as a full-time entrepreneur than at the end of her nine-year banking career.

Currently, Nischa has over two million subscribers on her channel and has a team helping her with the channel.

The real hero

Initially, when Nischa’s channel started gaining momentum, people started sharing her channel to the WhatsApp groups of friends and acquaintances where she was ridiculed for openly sharing her salary online.

But she was doing it to build transparency and help people take decisions with money.

Nischa felt trapped in the initial stages of her career. So, she wanted to help liberate people, through money, who felt trapped in their careers.

At the time, when she used to get around just ten views on her videos, her father stood by her side. He encouraged her to not give up and appreciated her work for doing good in the world.

Nischa’s father supported her YouTube endeavor even though he previously worked hard to support her to make a career in banking.

She also received support from her partner, mother, sisters and mentors.

Choosing black

Initially, while working on her YouTube channel along with her job, Nischa wanted to eliminate all the decision making which would prevent her from working on her channel. She wanted to create a system instead of relying only on motivation.

So, she chose to wear mostly black outfits in her videos as she didn’t want to keep thinking about what clothes to wear.

This carried on even when she became a full-time YouTuber.

Personal life

Nischa is married.

She is an introvert and journals a lot.

Nischa lives in London and is an avid reader.

So, how are you inspired by the success story of Nischa Shah?

Share with me in the comment section below.