An immigrant from China who bought her first home at age 10 has detailed how she became a successful financial analyst.
Amy Hu Sunderland, 43, arrived in the US 34 years ago – not knowing a word of English with just the clothes on her back.
Today, she is among the top 10 female investment managers in the country, and lives in Utah with her husband Seth, she told Deseret News this month.
Posing for a photo from a sauna overlooking her home in a desirable suburb of Salt Lake City, she described how she’s grown her real estate investments over the years, and is now living what she sees as the American Dream.
This comes after she grew up poor, with dirt floors, no electricity and no running water in Hunan province, she said – a lifestyle she escaped after emigrating at age nine to go live with her father, who had made his way to the US just months before.
‘I didn’t know what interest rate was,’ she told the newspaper of her mindset at the time, then a young girl fresh off a plane at the Salt Lake Airport.
‘Thank goodness, because it was 12 percent,’ the mom-of-four added of the home she and father Yijiang ‘John’ Hu came across as they struggled to make ends meet, paying $200 in rent a month for a small apartment in Salt Lake City.
That said, it was her, not her father, who found the listing, while watching the daytime soap operas that taught her English, the portfolio manager at investment firm Grandeur Peak Global Advisors said.
It appeared on an ad that ran between the day’s installments if ‘General Hospital’ and ‘All My Children’, and featured a then famous local figure known as Dan the Realtor,
The TV agent was showing off a house he said was available for $200 a month – $50 less than the new rent their landlord had just put in place.
Eager to help her father who had working three jobs, Sunderland called the 800 number that had been flashing on the screen.
On the other end she was met with Dan, who listened to her call despite her age, she recalled.
‘I saw your commercial. I want that house on TV,’ she reportedly told him.
‘I don’t have that house,’ he answered back. ‘But I can get you a house. When can I talk to your parents?’
The rest fell into place rather quickly, with the realtor going on to meet Sunderland and her dad before quickly realizing who had been the plan’s mastermind.
Taking control, Sunderland – only a year into learning English – explained to him how she wanted a guarantee the payments would never exceed $200.
Dan vowed that he had been telling the truth, and added how the father and daughter would own the house outright in 30 years.
Then delivering the Salt Lake Tribune each morning to bolster her father’s take-home as a dishwasher, busboy, and food handler, she managed to scrounge together a down payment.
Within weeks, the dishwasher and fourth grader had become the proud owners of a house in downtown Salt Lake City, for which they had paid just $22,000.
But it still took years for success to come to the family, after Mao’s cultural revolution forced them to pursue a better life in the US.
But things did get better – with Sunderland eventually returning to China to care for her ailing mother who stayed behind.
She was able to bring her to Utah, before eventually using the equity she gained from that first house purchase to pay back family and friends who had laid out money to help her and her mom.
Soon, she had enough money to go to college, and graduated magna cum laude from the Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah.
There, she did so well academically that she was hired by Goldman Sachs before she even graduated, where she met her husband, a fellow financial analyst.
The two soon began to start a family, and soon, thanks to a combination of the initial property, waitressing, working at TCBY Yogurt and Goldman Sachs, she was able to pay off all of the family debts.
Today, her real-estate holdings now total dozens of residential units and a few commercial properties all in Salt Lake City.
But despite all these accomplishments, along with her success as an equities analyst, Sunderland still downplays her success.
‘I think I’m just some village girl trying to figure out what’s going on,’ she told the Tribune during a profile piece they did on her in 2013.
‘We never had TV, we’d never seen cars, we never had faucets.
‘At that time, I was very mad at my parents for taking me away from all the things I knew,’ she added. ‘It was quite a transition.’
She went on to describe how that first purchase made it all possible.
‘We kind of got lucky because our house that we bought for $20,000 had appreciated to about $100,000,’ she said.
‘We took out some of the equity and just started buying rentals,’ she said, recalling the need to pay all those who had been helping her and her family back.”
‘Your environment pushes who you are,’ the successful consultant concluded. ‘My parents are very frugal and I inherited that, too, as I don’t like to spend and waste money.’