How's your paper thosai private degree doing ?

 

This is a good time to revisit one of my harshest critiques of private degrees in Singapore. You can read this old classic here. 

The article came out in 2015 and was so harsh, tuition agency blogs wanted to reproduce it (probably to scare parents). Over the years, I think there have been some positive changes that warrant a revisit of the contents of this classic. 

First, I think we should think about what has not changed. The gap between a private degree and a local degree continues to be wide - as high as 33% in some cases. In fact, the situation has become much worse.

The rule of thumb we should apply is that a diploma will get you a salary of around $2,000. Upgrading a private degree will add $400 every month, but this is a far cry from a local degree that pays around $3,600. 

To make everything sound politically correct, some bloggers have been trying to appease readers by suggesting that the pay gap between private degree holders and local degree holders is discrimination which I have always argued to be ridiculous because SME bosses would love nothing more than paying 33% less for good headcount. 

Then why do local degree holders not just command a 33% higher pay but still enjoy a higher employment rate?

Maybe some readers will be butthurt, but in Terence Ho's book Refreshing the Singapore System, on page 224, he actually suggests that it is actually the $400 private degree premium above a diploma that is illusory because these polytechnic graduates have been trying to take generic management degrees that add very little value to their polytechnic diplomas. 

The final outcome is like eating a paper thosai - gives a nice feeling but hardly satiate your hunger. The question is whether we should even allow Singaporeans to waste years of their youth over a signalling exercise that does not signal very much after fees have been paid and lives wasted.

But I have good news. Private degree paper thosais may become an artefact of the past.

SUTD and Ecole 42 is setting up a degree program that has no instructors. This is important because there are no A-levels exams to take and no diplomas to complete. There is one online test, and then students will be whittled down by a one month programme that's like being thrown into a swimming pool and those who sink will be let go. 

For folks with real talent and who claim to have a bad start in life, this is a life-saver, allowing someone to get the hottest coding skills with no tuition fee. I don't expect 42 graduates to be as proficient as the CS Master Race of NUS who are the smartest in their generation, but it should produce a kind of scrappy autodidact who can possibly cope much better with industry changes, rejection and failure. It's also good that we can tell those overworked academics "You don't be CB !", some folks can graduate even without your guidance, at least a small portion of them can actually support our startup ecosystem. 

I think the 42 system is the real solution to the private degree problem. 

It's probably easier to start with a software engineering program instructor-free, but I think once it works, we should really be reforming humanities education along the same lines. The liberal arts should be a system of self-inquiry and we can prevent left-leaning academics from polluting our pool of humanities graduates. And we should come up with an MBA that is done 42-style as well. 

I will be closer to my 50s when 42 launches, and I'm feeling the effects of my loss of crystallised intelligence, it's taken me ages to stake my UST for 19.5% returns even though I ought to do this months ago. Financial independence has also sapped my motivation. 

But 42 is an education revolution that I really must be part of if only they would take me in.

I'll try out the online test, even though I may not be accepted. I'm up against folks who are fresh from A-levels and poly diploma programs, not to mention guys will full-fledged degrees who want to pick up coding.

If I'm lucky to get through, I'll see you guys at the Piscine.

Small chance there may be a space for a fourth-degree after all!

Free food, so must write something

 

This week investment writers have been invited to a session with Keppel Pacific Oak REIT to have a discussion on their latest results. I don't want to steal the thunder away from writers who might discuss the details, I will just share some points that were not discussed that day:

• I have a decent amount of Keppel Pacific Oak and this is still one of my more profitable holdings as I bought a position when there was uncertainty over taxation rules of US REITS listed in Singapore.
• Keppel Pacific Oak continues to be shortlisted in my factor models, but my students have decided not to pick it up in the last round early this month.
• I actually disagreed with my student's analysis after this pleasant luncheon and consequently supported the counter when I sent my research to iFast for clients of their Introducer service. If anything, it will boost the yield of the portfolio substantially. 

One point discussed quite fervently was the food delivered to us for the talk. I had a fairly large portion of Nasi Lemak that not only had a drumstick but also a sausage. I found the meal disappointing as the sambal was so-so, the achar too tart, and ikan bilis a little too soggy after delivery. I had an opportunity to swap it for the beef bourguinon but was too late for my email but it seems folks who ordered the beef were not too impressed with it. 

Another interesting point of discussion is US Politics. 

When I meet the CEO of a US REIT, everything is already in their latest quarterly results, so I prefer to talk about generic US politics and I find a discussion with David Snyder really enlightening. 

( I do the same when I meet Europeans who run the REITs I own, enquiring about fertility rates in Poland and how popular right-winged parties are in Eastern Europe. )

From my discussions with business people from the US, they always give me the impression that they lean Republican. The first time I had a luncheon with KepPacOak, I asked them about the odds of Elizabeth Warren becoming US President and they told me that no way in hell it was going to happen so it allayed my fears. 

This time around, I asked them whether the exodus of tech talent into Republican states will swing the states towards the Democrats. 

Shockingly the answer is yes. I was told that tech workers actually succeeded in "defunding the police" in blue dominant counties in Texas even though it is largely a Republican stronghold.

You can imagine the incredulity of the businessmen in Republican states, angry Americans are fleeing California because of high taxes and once they get to their destination, they are bringing their progressive values to end the friendly regimes of their adopted new homes!

Anyway, I hope to get more luncheons in the future, I don't think I need to speak any more about the REIT given that my personal ownership speaks for itself. 

If anything, I will order beef anytime and avoid the default option in future.

Will Goh Keng Swee buy Cryptocurrencies for Singapore ?

 

I thought that after doing up my article on investing like GIC (link), this blog should have a discussion on more advanced topics that cannot be answered even with access to advanced data, so it falls to my blog readers to speculate on possible answers.

Goh Keng Swee's contribution to Singapore as a founding father is uniquely consequential. He made decisions that were counter-intuitive for its time such as employing exchange rate controls to prevent inflation and keeping the nation competitive instead of managing interest rates as central banks in other countries. He was one of the earliest politicians to recognize that investing in equities can lead to higher returns. He was also very much of a "buccaneer", buying 100 tons of gold at $40 an ounce through a secretive private deal in 1968. 

So the question I have for everyone is: Will Goh Keng Swee buy Cryptocurrencies for Singapore?

Imagine if Goh Keng Swee is still around and in his prime. He has powers of influence over GIC, Temasek, and MAS. 

Would he include cryptocurrency in Singapore's asset allocation?

The answer may need to be answered in multiple parts :

a) Should Singapore include cryptocurrency in short-term foreign reserves under MAS?

MAS tries to keep the Singapore dollar within two boundaries. If SGD becomes too strong, MAS will sell SGD for more foreign currencies. If SGD becomes too weak, we will buy back SGD using our foreign reserves. This was we can either control inflation or make our exports more competitive. 

Will these reserves benefit from a small allocation to bitcoins? 

My knowledge is quite shallow. In my opinion, there is currently no need to do so because we don't do actual business in SGDBTC. If a major trading partner makes Bitcoin legal tender, this cannot be discounted. 

b) Should GIC's policy portfolio include cryptocurrency?   

To meet GIC's long-term objectives, a team will determine what asset classes it can deal in. GIC was an early adopter of private equity so I don't see what impediments there will be to prevent cryptocurrency to be added to the mix. I would expect that if GIC were to do so, positions would be very small and diversified across many other cryptocurrencies. 

There will be a lot of impediments to making this a reality. Financial experts need to contend with new forms of risk ( like smart contract risk or oracles getting manipulated by hackers ).

One area that possibly needs to be addressed is volatility drag. The calculation for Geometric mean returns is not just the arithmetic mean returns. We have to deduct half the variance from average returns to get actual geometric mean returns.

GBTC returns (on Portfolio Visualizer) over the past 3 years are an annualized 66.39% with a standard deviation of 82.21%. The actual geometric return you will experience over time is 0.6639 - (0.8221^2) / 2 or 32.6%. 

It's still not too bad, but not as hyped up as many investors make it out to be.   

I suspect Goh Keng Swee will jump right in since GIC's time horizon is really long and no one will really know how much GIC really has. 

Anyway, readers are free to share given what you know about our history, what your answer would be.

   

Interesting encounters in my line of work...

One of the dilemmas about investment training is which target market you would like to pitch your product to. 

My approach is to build a course with actionable ideas and hands-on practice so some amount of maths and financial theory is unavoidable. To earn more, I can widen my reach and even increase my price if I water down my material - one approach is to make my material more motivational just like the property gurus, but I suspect I won't be able to sustain this as I would feel that the material belongs to someone else. Also, doing this would put me up against someone with a much bigger budget, who can really get in your face every time you visit Youtube. 

So with a more targeted niche audience, sometimes I get more interesting encounters that put an interesting spin on the materials I present to the public.

Last week, a fairly sophisticated attendee commented about how my presentation is a unique spin on M&M and almost flat-footed me during Q&A. Fortunately, I remembered that M&M stood for "Modigliani and Miller" who came up with their idea that the company value is unaffected by its dividend policy. This idea of dividends irrelevance arises from the idea that issuing a dividend reduces the firm value by the same amount.

I've got financial advisors trolling me in the past, almost all are intellectual light-weights, and this is the first time someone brought up M&M in my talk so I felt that a better answer from my session last week is in order.

While I do emphasise the employment of dividends for early retirement, the yield of my student portfolios are really nothing to crow about, it's about 5%, just a tad higher than ETFs. You can easily beat my 5% if you lump HPH Trust, Asia Pay TV Trust, United Hampshire REIT and Elite Commercial REIT in a portfolio and buy it in equal shares. In my program, we try to optimise the Sortino ratio, so we max out our risk-adjusted returns to make it friendlier for financial leverage, and it just happens that the high-dividends factor currently works in Singapore. 

I can't read the mind of the attendee, maybe as our models employ capital gains and dividends, maybe an argument can be spun that we align with M&M because we rank capital gains in the same category as dividends.

Now, that being said, after some thought, I can possibly put up an argument that dividends can be superior to capital gains in Singapore. If you sell your stock to free up cash for personal expenses, you will need to pay a brokerage fee. A dividends investor gets the dividend delivered into his bank account for free. This is not a strong argument in the world of equities, but it may be very consequential in the world of cryptocurrency when gas fees in the ETH blockchain are killing crypto bros. 

Anyway, I doubt that I managed to sell an actual ticket to the attendee, even though I'd admit that I do want more students of that calibre. I've trained CFA trainers, Phds and MAS regulators and someone like this can possibly teach me a thing or two about finance theory. Having more folks like this will also raise the level of my community which is getting closer to 600 in size.

But trainers like me are doomed to stay small and niche. 

I can imagine myself trolling some options guru in the Y2K-era and talking about Modigliani and Miller and at least one famous guy from that era is known to say to his critics," That's why you don't have the mindset to be a millionaire."

Anyway, don't lose any sleep if have no idea what I'm talking about in this article. 

 

The Financial Jackass of the Year

 

One of my favourite movie franchises was Jackass. In this movie, a bunch of clowns basically do crazy stunts and someone records the reaction of the crowds who get to witness it. Some of the stuff they do is tremendously anti-social. In one episode, the team actually visited a contractor and took a crap in the toilet bowl that was in the showroom. In another scene, someone urinated on a snowball and then tried licking it like ice cream. 

I am ending 2021 like a Financial Jackass. 

As I've just gotten my final paycheck, I was able to close the books in 2021. 

2021 cannot be a worse year for business as the release from lockdowns reduced demand for financial courses. It does not help that other areas of the economy are forcing more people into this field creating excess supply. I was mentally prepared to lose 50% of my revenue from 2020, but since I did not expect to have much use for my earnings in 2021, I decided to be a financial jackass for the year and see how much pain I can endure, so I did two things :

• Maxed out the $15,300 into SRS and poured it into stocks very similar to what's taught in my programmes.
• Recorded all my revenues and pumped 37% into CPF, making voluntary contributions across all accounts. 

Both moves are tax-deductible and I expect my tax bill to be really tiny in 2022.

The final result was extremely painful. Imagine compounding a bad year by taxing all revenues by 37% and then deducting $15,300 from what remains. I ended up digging into my dividends to make contributions a couple of times. Do note that I maintained my promise of farming a significant portion of my trainer fees into my student-built portfolio as well. 

But with great pain comes great wisdom. 

I wanted to do this in response to 15WW's suggestion that someone my age should do CPF voluntary contribution ahead of SRS. After a year of doing both, we can compare the results of both approaches. 

If you are 47 years old, a voluntary contribution provides 3.3% returns because it is a blended mix of CPF-OA, SA and MA contributions. On the other hand, my SRS was invested prior to the pandemic still returned an overall XIRR of 13.22% on a beta of 0.84. 

Overall, my feeling is that I would still prioritise SRS over the CPF voluntary contribution. 

While the risk is much higher, equity returns are more attractive if I can stretch to age 62. The only advantage to CPF is that I can actually my money much earlier at 55 instead of 62 for SRS. You should also not forget that you can make an emergency withdrawal from SRS, just pay a 5% penalty and withdrawals are taxed as personal income tax. 

There are, of course, some mild regrets in hindsight. All this money into CPF could have been put into a stable coin and staked at 12%. I doubt nothing could stop me from getting more substantively into the crypto game in 2022 and don't mind falling behind younger guys in making crypto profits.

Finally, kudos to other sole proprietors or business owners who can do both CPF VC and SRS at the same time, it feels like a huge struggle over the short term but your future self will thank you for it.

Likely my next Jackass stunt would probably be inspired by 1M65 Mr. Loo Cheng Chuan. 

Right now, I am still quite butthurt from all this CPF contribution in 2021, maybe I'll start in 2023.  

 

Letter to Batch 23 of the Early Retirement Masterclass

 Dear Students of Batch 23,

It’s been a great honour and privilege to be able to conduct a 5-Day Early Retirement Workshop for you.

With 2021 coming to an end, we have concluded our final class of 2021. We’re ending the year on an aggressive note as the STI reaches 3,200. At the end of the tunnel, there is light as humanity begins to deploy a COVID-19 pill that can be a game-changer for office, aviation, and hospitality stocks.

Value investing may even become more profitable locally throughout 2022 for local stocks. One of the possible futures is that with the winding down of the Fed’s bond-buying, we may be seeing interest rates rise in 2022. Ending an era of low-interest rates may result in a sea-change of factors models that lead to outperformance. We have just witnessed the success of value investing factors in the local stock markets for the first time.

This class is also unusually savage with discarding stock suggestions. We’ve got an elegant 14 stock portfolio that is more concentrated than previous batches confirming that this class is quite discerning about what stocks they want in their portfolios. I have also decided to allow two banking stock picks the first time as we expect higher interest rates in the future.

Finally, I must say that while the class is quiet compared to previous batches, the quality of the questions asked in class was relatively high. One question that stumped me concerned whether having a margin account would affect the TDSR for getting home loans. Look to the Facebook group as I draft my opinions on what I think the answer is.

Lastly, I hope that Batch 23 will participate actively in the FB group.  In December 2021, we should be meeting up for an online webinar on integrating Early Retirement principles into Cryptocurrency investing.  

Hope to see you then!

Christopher Ng Wai Chung

TIme management and why the lives of digital nomads suck

 

When philosophers write books on personal development, what you get are excellent prose and very clear reasoning. What you do not get is a strong list of actionable items.

But I don't think that's the aim of Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. If I am to summarise the work, the idea is that since Singaporeans tend to live up to 85 years old, we have about 4,420 weeks to live so it's not a good idea to focus on productivity and try to fit everything into a to-do list. Instead, given the fact our time on Earth is short, we have to focus on living well and actively reject even some fairly useful uses of our time.  

As much as reading his books will probably not change my life, he's a deliciously subversive author who forces you to rethink common tropes in self-help. 

Remember the story about fitting stones, pebbles, sand and water into a jar made famous by Stephen Covey's book that's quoted to death by your pals? 

Burkeman's insight is that it's never about fitting everything into the jar. In life, there are too many large stones in the first place, so you need to decide which ones get into the jar. Productivity frameworks like GTD may not have the right answer for you. 

This book is a gem because it raises a good point about the FIRE movement and Burkeman is not such a big fan of digital nomads. 

The reasoning is quite novel. Most of these digital nomads have lives that we envy, which is why Tim Ferriss ideas have gained so much traction over the years, but according to Burkeman, even though digital nomads travel to many countries, they are actually quite lonely people.

Why?

Because time is a networked good. Digital nomads and FIRE folks spend many years ultimately getting control over their own lives, but time can only be valuable only if we are surrounded by folks who also have the same control over their time. The psychological research to back this idea up came from Sweden when they found that the sale of antidepressants drop only when everyone gets a long holiday together.

I think that this is a really good argument against the Retire Early leg of FIRE. 

No matter how financially free I can be, I can only travel when my kids are having a holiday. Even though I can afford to travel during school term, I can't find a travel buddy who is as financially free as me. Even if there is a person who is financially independent, we need common interests and hobbies to make good travelling companions.  Maybe a good gamer friend can have one major trip with me, but he may exhaust his assets while I can reset and fly again after a one month break.  

One way of solving this is for FIRE bloggers to have more meet-ups. More connections mean a higher probability of finding good travelling and eating cmpanions. I think that will happen as we slowly emerge from COVID-19. We need a larger group to scale our operations and promote our side hobbies, FIRE should be something like the Toastmaster's movement. But FIRE also attracts intensely introverted individuals.  

Alternatively, most of us should just lower the bar. After my law school experience, I prefer hanging out with younger folks because they have fresher ideas and are fairly crypto proficient. There's probably no need to travel too far and break our budgets. So I prefer to play small, organise hikes, have cheap meals. 

Maybe when there is a closed group of pals, we can travel to Malaysia together one day.

This blog will take a break as I am conducting a course beginning tomorrow. I will see you guys on the weekend !

What can we do in case we become unemployable one day?

I read with dismay some of the stories in this CNA article on mature PMETS. As I have tried to work in the public and legal sectors before, the idea of being unwanted because of m age is not new to me.   

But the story on pseudonym Siva really takes the cake. 

This is a mechanical engineer who claims to have IT and project management qualifications and yet, does not know how to google the web on steps to become a private-hire driver. Is it fair to sympathise with the fact that he was unable to find a job for the last 7 years?

Sometimes, you really have to spare a thought for hirers as well, who's got the time to teach folks the basics like googling the web. Businesses are not charities.

I realise how scary the Siva's in Singapore are. I'm 47 years old this year, will I become a Siva in a decade? Will the older Millenials become a Siva in 20 years? 

If 50-somethings in Singapore lack the basic skills to be employable, some may actually join an SME and tar their hiring experience. Over time, HR professionals will join an alarm every time a 50-something candidate arrives. One day even a decent candidate will be turned down if the SME has had negative experiences before. I heard of at least one rumour that one large law firm has a policy of never hiring SMU JD graduates. These things happen.

Even I'm not getting any younger. If I become irrelevant one day, it may be due to the following reasons :

a) Quantum Computing - This is the largest paradigm shift that can make even a fresh grad today obsolete. 

Once computers no longer run on 1s and 0s and instead on qubits, the foundations of computer science becomes useless. Instead we have to pick up new ideas with Bloch Spheres and Hadamard Transforms, currently taught in local physics programs. 

Even the social sciences are betting transformed, In 2022, a book on Quantum economics will be published. 

I'm struggling to understand this now, but it's harder than anything I've ever done before. 

b) The Metaverse - We don't even know what this is

One day, young folks will just disappear from the Web. They may emerge in a VR world where they work, play and earn some universal currency backed by the FB central bank. I cannot even imagine what devices will be required to jack in into the Metaverse, but some crazy computer scientist will invent an in-metaverse computing platform so we have a platform within the space. 

I suspect by then, I will be too old to play this new game which is the Inception movie in real life.

The only silver lining out of this is that Gen X will enjoy watching Gen Y grow into their 40s and begin their mid-life crisis. My generation is still quite conscientious and enjoyed half of the property boom. It will be entertaining to see how avocado-eating work-life balance advocates with their version of a mid-life crisis where they get displaced by Gen Z. 

How to prepare for the day we become unemployable?

a) Invest aggressively

To resolve the issue, there is an age-old FIRE movement to be able to live on investments before obsolesces kick in. I expect younger guys to incorporate a large cryptocurrency component to their version of FIRE, which I am building, not for me, but for my kids.  Defi in particularly is very friendly to the FIRE movement. 

b) Entrepreneurship

Beyond financial investments, starting a business or dabbling in entrepreneurship may no longer be optional. The savvy employee may take a break from employment to try their hand on business with a full view that failure may see the back in employment. My bet is that running businesses may become a way to cope with mental health issues, where Gen Z will take a break to run a small business when their workplaces become too toxic. 

The idea is that one day, you can afford to employ yourself. 

Anyway, do read the CNA article. 

If anything, just don't become a Siva ok?

  

A Holistic Approach towards Personal Development

 

I'm a little slow to the game as Atomic Habits by James Clear is already one of the biggest hits in the personal development space. The book looks really tiny and small in the premise - It is a powerful tool for you to design and emphasize good habits while diminishing and letting go of the bad ones. But upon closer inspection, it is really a book about engineering lasting personal change. It is well-researched and has set a new bar in self-improvement and hopefully, we can allow academics to replace the horrible gurus that plagued self-improvement over the past 20 years. 

This book had a really strange effect on me. After reviewing it, I realise that we've really been too micro when it comes to personal development. Self-improvement is way broader than that.

Interestingly, the mental model I propose is the Self Development Stack that is similar to TCP/IP or OSI stack we use today on the web. I think there are 7 layers to personal development each with its associated discipline and readings. 

Mastery of the entire stack may take a lifetime of personal cultivation.

So here's my model :

a) Identity

At the highest level is your identity. This is your personality and it may not be totally malleable. The best way to model your personality is the OCEAN personality model where each aspect of your personality has a biological analogue. Agreeable people have higher levels of oxycontin, openness to new experience has a larger amount of neural connections.

You learn more about your identity, you can use personality tests. The MBTI comes into mind but folks also use models like the Enneagram. Our current non-fiction lists is dominated by books based on the DISC personality model. 

b) Philosophy

This is the level where gurus like Tim Ferriss fits in. Personal Philosophy is the operating system of your mind. A Stoic who sees life as an endless series of challenges will have a different worldview of an Epicurean who wants to enjoy himself and immerse himself in different sensations.

Thankfully for the rest of the world, there is still no such thing as pop philosophy. Understanding his segment is hard because you may have to disentangle how you feel about truth (Epistemology), beauty (Aesthetics) or even the nature of god (Metaphysics). If you go far enough, this can even get you a PhD.

This will always be subordinate to your personality. No matter how attractive the Christian Gospel of Prosperity is, I will forever be disagreeable and will prefer to grow my own Tree of Prosperity.

c) Motivations

The following levels are your motivations which I have explored amply in my previous articles. By telling stories about yourself and discovering what makes you proud of your achievements, you will be able to define your core motivations in life. 

The skill you need to master this layer is the ability to craft narratives about yourself. What is your Hero's Journey? Joseph Campbell's writings will be useful in this regard.

For me, growing up in a retail environment saw my parents forever being subject to paying rent to their landlords in spite of being businessmen themselves. So control to me is always about rent-seeking.

I am forever bound to control the chaos in my life.

d) Goals

Below your motivations are your goals. At this stage, this is where you pull out your SMART framework to define the goals that will guide you in your daily life. Goals need to be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-Bound. 

Popular in the 90s, goals have come under attack as many folks fail in achieving their desired weight and net worth even after paying gurus thousands of dollars. 

Naval Ravikant has possible my favourite definition of that a goal is :

A goal is a contract you make with yourself to stay unhappy until the goal is reached. 

I still think that goals belong to the personal development stack.

e) Systems

If your goal is to attain financial freedom by age 40, a system is a method to turn your earnings into saving and convert your investments into passive income. Even after you meet your goal of becoming financially free, your system can keep running to make you even wealthier. 

Goals set the limits of your personal success but systems can limit how far you can fail.

The current trend is that systems trump goals because systems are designed to kick in subconsciously and kick in when an event occurs. Systems are like Windows Services that run in your operation system. 

At this stage, you need to consider the environment that will anchor your habits in the next step. Suppose you want to trade in cryptocurrencies, your challenges are to have a system to convert fiat to crypto, a system to stake and obtain APY from crypto, and finally a system to spend your crypto. 

Personally, I'm struggling to put a system in place to trade crypto. 

f) Habits

Systems consist of habits which are micro-programs and API function calls that allow the whole system to work.

Your system to convert savings into investments may contain a habit that automatically transfers $2,000 from your bank account to your Interactive Brokers account on your pay-day. Another habit is to buy an equity and bond UCITs ETF through successive limit orders at night. 

This is why you read Atomic Habits by James Clear.

g) Actions

Finally, habits are nothing but a series of actions, all designed to happen instinctively so that you can invest your mental energy into something else. 

This is the hardest part of personal development. Taking action.

Actions are not just bounded by your personal energy, they are bounded by the limited time you have on this earth. 

So there you have it, my Personal Development Stack that can act as a framework to slot all the self-improvement books you read and guide you for further action. I leave this to you for discussion in the forums, a more detailed write-up is scheduled for the Dr. Wealth blog.

Before I leave, I will show you how different the stack is for someone who emphasizes earnings versus someone who focuses savings: