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Yes, ordinary dill — the kind you find in every garden. At the age of 14, a teenager was carefully growing it with his own hands on a small country plot. Later, he would become a familiar and rather unusual presence among the traditional row of “dill grandmothers” — elderly women selling bundles of greens at the local market.
The company did not bother him. What mattered much more was the ability to achieve results independently, driven by a constant desire for self-realization. Real self-realization — business and scientific — would come later. But in the late 1980s, Soviet teenagers did not have many options.
From a Bundle of Dill to a Business Mindset
“My father was a fairly well-known scientist in narrow academic circles, and my mother worked as an economist at the same research institute. She was extremely worried that, just a meter away from the institute where they worked, their smart Jewish son was selling greens,” Igor Lupinsky recalls.
But his innate entrepreneurial spirit easily outweighed his mother’s concerns.
At the same time as tending his garden, the teenager was winning school competitions, entering university without entrance exams, and writing a microbiology research paper that received high praise from the Russian Academy of Sciences. The work earned him an opportunity to travel abroad through an academic exchange program.
It was 1991. The Soviet Union still existed.
And a young Igor Lupinsky was on his way to Ireland.
“Any trip abroad back then was an adventure in itself. You had to jump incredibly high to get such an opportunity. If I remember correctly, only 15 high school students were selected from the entire city of Yekaterinburg. It was a real competition: we wrote research papers and defended them. PhD candidates probably didn’t defend their dissertations as passionately as we defended our work to get that chance to go to Ireland.
It was 40 years ago, but I still remember the title of my paper: ‘Transmission of Electronic Impulses in Neurons Through Protein Pumps.’”
Meanwhile, the “dill business” gradually evolved into a “kiosk business.” Until 1995, it developed with mixed success — much like all private entrepreneurship in the post-Soviet era.
It was a time of uncertainty: criminal groups, protection schemes, conflicts, arson, and other realities of the early business environment.
No one knows what those kiosks might have eventually become if Igor had stayed in Russia.
When Success Isn't Enough
But at the age of 21, he emigrated to Israel, where he launched his own Russian-language newspaper — combining news and commercial advertisements.
Within three years, what had started as a small local publication expanded across half the country.
The newspaper was successful and interesting. But, as history shows, no media business can completely avoid politics.
As long as Igor’s views and interests aligned with the country’s political forces, everything worked smoothly. But then came 1999.
“One political force split into two opposing sides, and I found myself caught between them. Yesterday’s allies from both directions began pulling me apart little by little.
The Failure That Changed Everything
Looking back at that situation today, I would probably have taken a much tougher position than I did back then. Today, I have more experience and a better understanding of what you can and cannot do.
But a 25-year-old guy, even with all his confidence, ambition, and courage, is still just a young guy.
People started involving me in all kinds of favors and obligations that cost me nerves, money, relationships, and much more.
That was the first issue.
The second was that nobody had ever taught me how to calculate properly — how to measure profitability, how to evaluate whether my decisions made financial sense.
And because many entrepreneurs quickly develop emotional dependence on their own product, it becomes extremely difficult to stop when that relationship turns from something positive into something destructive.
You understand that you should have stopped long ago, changed direction, or abandoned the project entirely. But you keep moving forward along the same path, hoping for a brighter future that, more often than not, never arrives.”
There were many attempts to keep the business alive. But eventually, the newspaper had to be closed.
The outcome was undoubtedly painful. Yet this experience became a turning point in Igor Lupinsky’s entrepreneurial journey.
Looking back today, he identifies one main reason behind the collapse of his media business: a lack of financial literacy.
Had he understood financial management better at the time, he believes, he would not have feared bankruptcy so much. He would not have postponed the process for six years — a delay that only made his financial situation worse.
Today, he sees bankruptcy differently.
For him, bankruptcy is not an ending. It is a tool — a way to “escape the rat race” and start again from a clean slate, provided it is used correctly and at the right moment.
In 2006, while still undergoing bankruptcy proceedings under the old legal system, Lupinsky became deeply immersed in business intelligence. He began working with the collection and analysis of data from fragmented systems, combining them into a single structured source of knowledge.
And along the way, he discovered that he himself possessed a surprising number of skills and abilities needed for this field.
Many of them had actually been developing since his eighth grade.
Discovering That Money Follows Behavior
Today, after many years of consulting and teaching, Igor’s primary mission is to help people recognize the skills they already possess — skills they often fail to value.
“Once you uncover these abilities, start using them and strengthen them, your overall state begins to change — including your financial situation. I have never met a person who has absolutely no resources,” he says.
Not everything comes down to money.
Alongside finances, there are other forms of capital: time, knowledge, information, and skills. And when you carefully examine these four areas, you may discover that your actual resources are many times greater than you ever imagined.
While working in business intelligence within the high-tech sector, Igor studied how the Israeli macroeconomic system functioned. For a curious, analytical, and relentlessly inquisitive 33-year-old mind, it was not difficult to apply this understanding beyond the corporate environment and identify a new professional niche.
His attention was drawn to two analysts — former military specialists who had mastered the American system of financial management, or more specifically, one of its specialized fields: financial therapy.
In Hebrew, the concept is closer to “family finance consultant.” These analysts adapted the methodology to Israeli realities and created educational programs around it.
The courses impressed Igor because they revealed something fundamental:
“At the level of a country, a business, and a family, financial mechanisms are essentially the same. The mechanisms are the same, and the decision-making systems are the same.
The most important thing is that decisions are made by the same creatures everywhere — and they are called human beings.”
Humans are naturally prone to self-deception.
“It happens when a person is alone with themselves. It certainly happens at the family level. And exactly the same thing happens at the level of governments, companies, and absolutely any organization.
That is why there are rules of the game that work equally well for completely different scales of budgets.”
According to Igor, people need to understand that financial management is a discipline that goes against intuition. Decisions that feel natural and obvious are often the wrong ones.
This became one of the first principles Igor Lupinsky began teaching in his courses, seminars, lectures, and in his school with the very fitting name:
“Where Is My Money?”
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
After gaining a new understanding of financial management through those courses, Igor decided to test the approach on people close to him.
“I realized: yes, this is interesting. Yes, it works. Yes, people really need this.
So I went back to those same experts and trained as a consultant myself.”
In 2015, he began independent consulting. That same year, he founded his own school — the one that still carries the name “Where Is My Money?”
“It was the question people asked me most often. So I simply made it the name.”
Today, Igor could probably be described as a financial psychotherapist.
The second fundamental principle of his approach is simple:
Psychology matters more than numbers.
He believes that the biggest challenge in managing personal finances is not mathematics — it is human emotions and psychology.
“Everyone is interested in one thing: ‘How do I get through this particular crisis today?’
But the fact that, while overcoming today’s crises, they may not just be digging a hole for themselves but creating an entire Mariana Trench — that rarely concerns anyone.
People prefer to solve the closest and most painful problems first, without thinking about tomorrow.
And that is fundamentally wrong.”
We have already mentioned one of the school’s core principles:
Everyone has resources.
Even when a person has no financial savings, they still possess time, knowledge, information, and skills.
Using these resources consciously and effectively can become the key to changing one’s financial situation.
The fourth fundamental principle of the “Where Is My Money?” school is investment literacy — understood not only as the ability to invest money, but also as the ability to let money go and share opportunities, knowledge, and profits.
“Investing can be viewed as two separate skills.
The first skill is the ability to part with money.
Because if a person cannot let money go, it is impossible to invest consistently and systematically.
And if someone is also unable to share opportunities, profits, information, and other valuable resources, while hoping to achieve results entirely alone, successful investing simply will not happen.”
Over the past 10 years, around 10,000 people have passed through the school.
They did not simply learn to answer the question “Where is my money?” — they also learned how to manage it further.
Starting as a family finance consultant, Igor later obtained an international license in financial planning, allowing him to build personalized investment strategies for clients.
Today, he is also studying to become a tax consultant and will soon have the official qualification required to provide clients with professional tax support.
But that is not the end of the story.
Building the Future of Financial Discipline
Do you remember the old joke about Karl Marx?
“Sure, I can shave off my beard — but where am I supposed to put all that intelligence?”
In Igor’s case, this question never arose.
In March of this year, combining his accumulated experience working with people and his deep knowledge of behavioral economics, Igor decided to move beyond the traditional format of his school.
Together with a team of partners, he began developing his own online platform.
And the process moved so quickly and successfully that today, even in its beta version, the application already has around 200 clients actively using it — although they have signed confidentiality agreements.
But once again, we are getting ahead of ourselves.
“I work with people, and I needed a tool that would help me somehow monitor and manage their finances.
When I start working with beginners — and they come with completely different levels of preparation, including different levels of psychological readiness — I always emphasize one thing:
The specific tool you use is not important.
A notebook and pen, Excel spreadsheets, or a specialized application — it does not really matter.
What matters is that you begin to develop the habit of tracking your finances.
Without this, nothing will work.”
More Than a Finance App
This is the fundamental difference between Igor’s platform and the existing financial applications on the market.
Most of today’s solutions are essentially simple aggregators. Their main purpose is to collect information from different systems and display it in a convenient format.
“But that is like watching a gym through a window. You can watch people exercising as much as you want, but your own muscles will not become stronger because of it.”
The same applies to personal finances.
Simply seeing data is not enough.
The tool that the “Where Is My Money?” school is preparing to launch will require users to actively enter their own information and, whether they like it or not, interact with their financial data.
They will practice financial behavior.
Over time, the application will adapt to the real needs of each client, removing unnecessary functions and reducing information overload that often prevents people from making decisions.
The result will be a complete ecosystem designed not only for financial awareness but for building financial discipline.
The official launch of the platform is scheduled for the end of this year.
However, the waiting list is already open for those who want to join.
And it all started with a bunch of dill.
Where Is My Money?
The story of Igor Lupinsky is not just a story about finances.
It is a story about recognizing hidden resources, understanding human behavior, and learning to make better decisions.
From a teenager selling greens near a research institute in Soviet Yekaterinburg to a financial consultant helping thousands of people rethink their relationship with money — the path was anything but predictable.
But perhaps the most important lesson from this journey is the one Igor now teaches others:
Money is only one form of resource.
The real challenge is learning to see, manage, and multiply what you already have.
