Is financial literacy considered cultural capital ?

 

I will see whether I can try to blog twice this week, as this discussion has some merit. I was told that in the mainstream press, someone said that demonstrating financial literacy is a signifier of cultural capital. In some parts of Singapore, it can be quite a "flex." I thought I would delve deeper into this issue because I'm deeply interested in alternative forms of capital, like social or cultural capital.

Looking at the surface, I was unconvinced that financial literacy is cultural capital. It is basic knowledge that every Singaporean should know, but the finance industry has cultivated a team of commissioned salespeople to gatekeep his endeavour. Furthermore, rudimentary financial knowledge may subtly hint that you might be a commissioned financial advisor - someone that polite society should avoid in, especially in shopping malls and MRT stations.

Nevertheless, I was able to do some Googling to find out what constitutes culture. We can then apply some analysis to see whether this is true, tapping into ideas from sociologists like Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Clauge Passeron.

a) Cultural capital can be embodied.

Sometimes, you can cultivate your cultural capital by joining a profession or being born into privileged circumstances. It's rare for someone outside the legal sector to "come alive to an understanding of" something or view something as "apposite". So, these vocabulary markers might hint at being someone from that sector. 

Workplaces focusing on style rather than substance can be places of cultural warfare. An associate was shamed for loving K-pop and asked to watch Andrew Lloyd Weber instead. 

A taxi driver taught me that he knows clients are poor if they speak in absolute numbers, like a watch costing $14,000, but wealthy clients who drop off at posh locales almost always speak in percentages, like a rate of return of 7%.

Whether financial literacy can constitute cultural capital will depend on whether some part of language use is considered "atas," and I don't think that matter has been resolved yet. No matter what some people say, talking about "safe rate of withdrawal" or "sequence of return risk" is not considered posh yet. I also think that dividends in Singapore have a stronger relationship with hawker food than Michelin fare, judging from the food pictures in the Dividends chat group.

b) Cultural capital can be objectified

This is irrelevant to our discussion, but owning something can be seen as cultural capital. Art objects often play this role because they are superfluous and costly.

Not all branded goods denote cultural capital, but brands like Hermes artificially create scarcity so that their Birkin bags can claim that role. 

I believe books can signify cultural capital, but you really need to understand the genre to make this work for you. An old copy of Security Analysis by Graham and Dodd might say something about you, but only if it is a copy that is worn from use.

c) Cultural capital can be institutionalised

You can also gain cultural capital by getting some form of qualifications. This is the same reason parents want their kids to enter law or medical school; it allows their children to qualify for a different stratum of society.

For this to work, the qualification must be hard to attain. The CFA does this by failing 50% of candidates at every level, but I imagine the full qualification to become an actuary is even harder. 

Exams should not be enough to be really valuable. The best professions have their own exclusive access in the form of guilds and a specific way of communicating with each other. 

After this analysis, I don't think financial literacy is yet ready to be considered part of cultural capital. While being practical, claiming some rudimentary grasp of financial literacy is not something you wave around in a cocktail party. In fact, talking nonstop about crypto on a Tinder date is universally scorned by Singaporean women. 

But cultural capital evolves over time. In the past, quoting Shakespeare might create an impression of cultural sophistication; these days, I think you'll be much cooler if you quote Game of Thrones or Dune.

At the end of the day, discussions like this should not really matter; if a reader wishes to develop and cultivate his cultural capital, he should simply make an effort to read more than his or her peers.

Read to make yourself more knowledgeable.

Read to be able to handle a magazine like the Economist. 

The cultural capital will come with more literacy.

What am I struggling with in my business right now?

 

As I approach turning 50, I will reflect on some of the challenges I have been struggling with. I'd like to start with the most complicated area of my life, so I'll discuss the earned income component of my life.

My earned income component has been the least successful area in my life. That also sucks up most of my life energy because I've always felt that it's an essential area of struggle. After all, it answers this question: 

Post-FIRE, what are the possible career moves to enjoy a good income and quality of life? 

Sadly, I don't have a better answer than anyone else after a decade, but I'm here to show everyone my working.

a) My training business

I'll forever be grateful to Dr Wealth because I found an alternative to the back-breaking legal career I initially planned after my JD. The first three years as a trainer brought me 2x my salary in my previous job and paid off my school fees in 6 months, confirming that this is a viable career. It also allowed me to develop skills I could not acquire in my earlier career. A seven-digit revenue for ERM, followed by an appearance on Money Mind, can't hurt my resume. 

Like all businesses, that golden era appears to be over as interest rates begin to go up, but I enjoy the work of investment training a lot. It has even made me a much better investor now. Once I started coding my investment advisors and using AI to generate analyst reports, I could tolerate the work even as a sideline that generated a small allowance. 

Nevertheless, my training business will be in an existential crisis in 2025. I will either need to make adjustments and change the price point of the courses, or the business may need more time to justify the time I spend on it. 

b) My role as an adjunct lecturer in a tertiary institution

To preserve my training job and to earn a more stable income, I spent the year taking on an adjunct lecturer role in a tertiary institution teaching adults Corporate Law and Legal Technology. The value of doing this is exposing myself to life with a more conventional role with the skillsets I developed at Dr Wealth.

The initial plan was to introduce a more stable income to my fluctuating revenues without giving up my business. I would also need a "barbell" strategy in my earned income strategy: a volatile and high-earning job and a stale one that even pays a bit of CPF. 

But this job has its own set of challenges. Contract renewals are done in drips and drabs, so you cannot project your income with certainty a semester moving forward. I was initially unhappy that I was only retained for one subject next semester, but as more contracts arrived, I was too happy to complain about being overbooked. 

Payment platforms can be improved, and you often wait an additional month to be paid. 

Nevertheless, after a year of struggle, during which unhappy and sometimes entitled adult students often yelled at me, I can now sell more weekly lecture hours. 

The system is not designed as a leading source of income, but it's okay if you have a day job and plenty of passive income. 

Is a portfolio career easy compared to a conventional one?

There have been moments this year when I wanted to quit everything and start looking for a conventional job ( likely in AI ) because there were moments when I was just doing administrative unpaid work just to keep this portfolio career machine running. 

The numbers need to look better as well. I'm averaging $4k+ when my basic family expenses are close to $6k a month, so some digging into my dividend income was necessary in 2024. But this is easily the worst year of the decade, and I've already rebounded from 2023. 

But from another perspective, this is a massive win because many post-FIRE folks complain about needing a real career identity, which we are primarily conditioned to do in Singapore. When people ask me what I do, I tell them I teach investing classes over the weekends, but I'm also a law lecturer at a local institution. Afternoon swims, fooling around with my kids, and meeting folks for coffee when they have a work break doesn't hurt. 

If I sound very theoretical right now, I'd like the more savvy readers to recall Coarse's theorem about the firm in Economics. Firms are hierarchical structures that prefer to contract work that can be well-defined to someone else who can do the job better. 

My Dr Wealth work is something society contracts out to me to perform. I'm subject to the same business forces and cyclicality as every other entrepreneur. My work with a public institution puts me in a complicated bureaucracy, where a bulk of my work is administrative in nature, just to get the system working. 

There may be no way out if you want a portfolio career. 

You must have a passive income flow, actually a large one, to avoid going crazy.

Insights from my volunteering work at Raffles Institution in 2024

 

While I can still give pro bono financial seminars, I would do my best to present to any secondary school willing to have me. Even so, only Raffles Institution has a systematised programme to invite speakers from around the country to talk about special topics like Finance as part of their Gap Semester programme, which targets 16-year-olds exempted from doing the O levels by being ultra-smart. Picking someone to speak in another secondary would require a lot of red tape, and perhaps my slides, which do have controversial material, would not pass the scrutiny of the more orthodox educator.

However, Raffles Institution thinks that my material is acceptable for their students, so this is the fourth time I'm conducting "Millionaires of a Better Age." In 2024, I was invited twice due to the positive feedback from the students themselves. 

This time, I have to be careful as some folks managed to find my blog, so teenagers will be reading my posts these days. 

Firstly, I tried using the very crude MBTI survey tool I built myself for my investment courses and found that the smartest teenage boys tend to be INTJs/INTPs. They are incredibly logical, and some may not be as conscientious as the RI brand name would imply.  

Next, I wish to address something strange that happens when I openly talk about volunteering in RI. I get brickbats from social media, implying that I am helping the rich get richer. I agree—teaching dividend investing will always give the folks with more investible capital an advantage. But it is unfair to talk about this when I volunteer in RI because I've been asking around to help even in my own secondary school. 

There's no system for me to do a similar programme elsewhere because O level preparations are more important.

I have, in RI's defence, conducted a survey on pocket money they receive. 

The majority get about $100-$200 monthly, so parents can decide on pocket money based on this data. Do note that there will be outliers. I detected two whales who get over $500 monthly, but about 4 have very little pocket money. 

The savings data is also quite interesting.

Except for the same two whales (maybe they were from ACS Primary), most teenagers find it hard to save money.

Finally, folks must remember why presenting ideas to intelligent teenagers can be rewarding. Some specific points in this latest encounter left a deep impression on me.

a) When I entered the classroom, the kids updated each other that Iswaran had been sentenced to 12 months. I got the news from them because they actively monitored it throughout the day, whereas I wondered why the bubble tea in the school canteen was so expensive at $4! They must be trained well to be intrinsically motivated to follow current affairs. At their age, I'm more interested in who the current WWF Heavyweight Champion was. ( Those days, it was always Hulk Hogan or The Ultimate Warrior. )

b) The first really great question was whether knowing some kind of URA  15-year master plan can lead to the possibility of buying houses that increase in value over time. I was stunned because even I didn't follow the master plan when I bought my EC. To answer the question, I explained that knowing public information may not lead to outsized gains because other people see the information as well, which I had to explain second and third-order thinking to the audience.

c) The second impressive question was whether introducing Central Bank Digital Currencies or CBDCs would be a bullish or bearish indicator of cryptocurrencies. It was not designed to impress because students thought about both scenarios in painful detail. I told him I didn't know the answer, but I am more inclined to agree with his argument that transparency in digital currencies will drive grey and criminal use cases to employ existing crypto or Monero even more fervently. 

I have graduated with 700+ students in my ERM class, and my students include PhDs in finance, board directors, and MAS regulators. I can't get the high-level Q & A participation like what I get from these 16-year-olds. 

At this juncture, just to entertain readers, let me share the stupidest question I ever got from someone 2-3 years older than the RI youths who study in a tertiary institution I will not name on this blog. The question was," You are a millionaire, but I want to make my first million earlier than you. Can you teach me how to do this?" I was stunned like a vegetable for a moment at how dumb this was; I could only mutter, "Maybe you can do some sales job because of the unlimited upside." Even today, I pray that the person who asked me this was a troll, not an idiot. 

I can't, honestly, coach someone on something I cannot do myself.

This gives readers an idea of why I always make some room in my schedule when RI contacts me. 

But that should not stop other schools. I've also been dying to do a pocket money survey on ACS and Chinese High.  

Three guaranteed ways to make people hate your content in personal finance.

 

In the age of Social Media, there is no such thing as bad publicity. 

If you say something positive, unless you are as cute as Moo Deng, the pygmy hippo, you will not likely get much traction or eyeballs. Love and positivity are not monetizable, but hate is a different matter altogether. If you write something that can make people hate you, you might get somewhere in the race to turn eyeballs into revenue.

Based on what I know, there are three consistent ways to make people hate you in the personal finance space:

a) Claim to have $100,000 before you are 30

Getting $100,000 before age 30 is like a coming-of-age ceremony for financial influencers. For folks of my generation, this is not an easy target to reach; you need a reasonably solid job as a professional or a salesperson to have a decent shot at meeting this target. Over the years, thanks to inflation and higher starting salaries, $100,000 before 30 has become more accessible.

But the hate has not changed over the years. I got a fair bit of attention, which did quite well for book sales in 2005 and even garnered 100+ pages of discussion on YPAP BBS and EDMW forums if I recall correctly. However, the vitriol against female influencers was much higher than what I experienced with Budget Babe and MissFITFI.

I suppose commenters are more concerned by why they CAN'T get $100,000 by age 30 and seem to have some kind of defensive mechanism when faced with women who can do it. It's like gatekeepers in the computer gaming space - they are primarily incompetent male gamers.

b) Claim to be retired early

The most ridiculous public censure against someone who claims to be early retired was directed at Rebecca Lim, the TCS 8 actress, when she did an advertising campaign with NTUC Income. 

Once your audience is fed up with hearing about your $100,000 net worth, your next move is to claim that you have retired early. This attracts much more vitriol, as many fellow citizens feel stressed and imprisoned by their day jobs. They last want to know someone who can retire early in Singapore. 

I actually see a system of defences to deal with folks who claim to be retired early. The first is to pick on your status as a single person or someone married without kids. Reminding financial influencers that they are single makes people feel better about themselves. Investment Moats and AK71 seem to be criticised quite a bit for this.

Another approach is to examine retirement status with a fine-tooth comb. You may not be considered fully retired if you are taking your foot off the accelerator in your intense professional job. Ashish Kumar still does some debate coaching on the side, and I receive revenue as a trainer and lecturer—work that I enjoy.

Finally, people will inquire about your investment strategy. Most will only be satisfied if you can show that you can live entirely on your passive income. If you have a mix of ETFs, you need to have a safe withdrawal rate to convince people how robust your plan is.

Claiming retirement in your 50s does not receive as much brick-bats. I just want to take this opportunity to congratulate CoryLogics for retiring recently at 54. 

c) Insult the national religion of Dividends Investing

Dividend investors are having a great time right now as interest rates are down again. The dividends chat groups are full of fabulous food pictures posted by folks celebrating their dividend payouts. In many ways, Dividend investing is like religion in Singapore. We have rituals like a thanksgiving through food posting on Telegram, a religious doctrine on sustainable free cash flows, and a congregation of worshippers in dividend-paying company AGMs. And dividends are a miracle of Singapore capitalism - money appearing in your bank account without you lifting a finger tax-free.

Therefore, it is perfectly logical to attract eyeballs by insulting people's religion. Just say that dividend investing is suboptimal or irrelevant. Kelvin Learns Investing is the latest guy to do this (link), which has created quite a lot of unease in the dividends chatgroups. 

I just reviewed the video and found that it actually motivates dividend investing! 

His arguments against dividends are weak and a rehash of Modigliani and Miller, which many of us know. He also cherry-picks examples to make his case and rarely assesses dividends as a factor in factor studies. His arguments become very persuasive when discussing the advantages of dividend investing, which was littered throughout the video. I hope everyone will not be too hard on Kelvin, as he needs eyeballs to make money and does not disapprove of dividends all that much.

My views on dividend investing obviously clash with many others, but you can read about them here. 

Finally, I don't include blogs designed by financial advisors to get angry eyeballs in my discussion. That's so good; it should be a business model in an MBA textbook. The blog I miss the most is Money Maverick. Since he no longer has an FA license, it's not as maverick as before. 

Financial influencers who want eyeballs should stick to my three-stage formula for getting attention on this social media space. 

What kind of mumbo jumbo is Financial Independence, Retire Meaningfully ?

 

What is particularly heartwarming for dividend investors who own banking stocks is that they have surged as interest rates decline. This surge represents meaningful attempts to offset lower net interest margins with wealth management fees. As an investor in all three banks, I believe in this thesis, but I maintain that investing in REITs for the next year or so is better. Based on my backtests, rising interest rates favour banks, and lowering interest rates favour REITs. 

I can't help but detect attempts by banks to move very gingerly into FIRE territory recently, but it seems that positioning a banking product as an aid to FIRE is a tough sell, given how stingy the movement is when it comes to investment expenses. 

But lately, I disagree with the idea that FIRE can be supplanted with FIRM - the Financial independence, retire meaningfully movement. As a bank stock investor, it is puzzling to me how this can meaningfully raise wealth management fees. 

It also is a veiled attack on our movement that warrants a firm response. 

Before I begin, let me understand how FIRM works, given that no formal definition exists. The idea is that leaving the workforce early can lead to loneliness and even early death. Therefore, it is better to take a more conventional approach and save about 10% of your income to reach retirement later. While not explicitly stated, the person is invited to use a financial institution to do the strategic allocation for you so that you can focus on your day job and hobbies.

Here are my points for readers contemplating FIRM, an approach endorsed by financial institutions, versus FIRE, a grassroots movement of many who own financial institutions.

a) Does FIRM imply that FIRE aspirants live a life devoid of meaning?

As the incoming DBS CEO has a prestigious Oxford PPE degree, she might know what a false dichotomy is. The question is whether, if I live on 10% of my income, my life is somehow less meaningful than that of someone who lives on 90% of their income. Is saving inversely tied to meaning?

Over the years, there have been FIRE folks who have adopted a Stoic philosophy of life. They might be environmentally conscious and find that this extreme form of frugality gels with their outlook on life. 

Asceticism can be a life a lot more meaningful than conspicuous consumption.  

Some early retirees can be way more philosophical than many bankers; I can name Ashish Kumar as a gentleman who has developed his own approach to early retirement, which is a little more sophisticated than most relationship managers I know.

b) The dangers of conventional and late retirement cannot be underestimated.

I recently lost two friends, both aged 49. One was overworked as he was a warrior at the frontline of the COVID-19 battle. I felt that his aggressive cancer diagnosis came from the toxic and political workplace he worked in. He was manipulated to confront his incompetent supervisor, and in revenge, his job scope grade was quietly shrunk without his knowledge. The second was an unemployed IT professional who took his life about 2 months into his new job. He was despondent and withdrawn after losing his previous job. It was difficult for me to attend two wakes in a single week. 

As my friends died, there was simply no justice for what they endured at work. 

I've done a lot of work at this level; if we track PMET salary data, we can expect a 5% increment when we start work until age 45 when it mysteriously tapers off. This is also the age when Gen X faced the largest amount of ageism; if we take the risk of ageism and retrenchment seriously, we must confine the buildup of our dividends portfolio to be complete before entering this age of chaos. If we shuffle our feet and start planning late at age 35, then at $2000 monthly savings compounded to $500,000 within a decade, we will need an impossible 14.1% return to meet our deadline. 

Planning for retirement is not mathematically feasible for most Singaporeans, given what's waiting for us in the workplace in our 40s. 

I was a pioneer of the FIRE movement because I started work around the time of the Dotcom crash, and I saw the outsourcing wave affecting a lot of senior engineers of my generation. Now, AI is expected to replace some of the headcounts. 

c) Financial institutions may not dare to talk about specific performance that can enable retirement to actually happen

While there is much sturm and drang about how meaningless our lives are, we are not getting the specifics. We need to get under the bonnet and know how our investments behave.

• How transparent are our investment fees when we buy a product? Can we find the full amount on a website, including trailer fees? 
• What are the standard deviation and Sharpe ratios accompanying the latest results for these funds?
• Given our risk appetite, based on Merton's Share, what is our allocation for each asset class?
• Can a Monte Carlo simulation show us the probability of success of our retirement plan?

If financial institutions could meaningfully discuss numbers and probability, we would have a better idea of which model suits us better. 

So, what can you do as a reader?

Wealth management marketing will evolve as interest rates drop. If you see that FIRM will occupy the minds of many who read about it, the solution is simply buying local bank stock. 

For example, if DBS can credibly raise the dividends from 54cts to 60cts a quarter, there's still room for a 6%-paying blue chip. As it has endorsed a message that challenges the existential meaning in my life, I should demand 60cts in 2025, right?

In fact, use your CDP, and you can attend an AGM every year—and you may yet fight for a sumptuous buffet spread!

No management fees, no capital gains or dividends taxes. 

Maybe in next year's Seedly festival, I get to debate this topic live in front of everyone!

If you're not investing, it's fine. 

Don't let a financial professional tell you whether your life has any meaning. This is something you can figure out yourself. 

Letter to Batch 35 of the Early Retirement Masterclass

Dear Students of Batch 35,

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

The markets have finally become bullish after a long wait since March 2022, and the community portfolio has begun to experience a remarkable recovery. I will not try to be too enthusiastic and rejoice too much; instead, I will let the market speak for itself. Still, we have repeatedly shown that this recovery is just the beginning and that there is plenty of equity risk premium for Singapore investors.

It should also be noted that this batch of students' portfolios is 7.28%. As the batch size is small, we have created a very focused portfolio consisting of 12 stocks. We have built a barbell-like structure that combines low-volatility investments with higher-risk instruments that produce double-digit yields.

This course has reached another milestone. Students are given practice sessions on using large language models to generate analyst reports. The community will receive samples of reports on BRC Asia and Kimly. The final investment decision incorporates analysis from both ChatGPT and brokerage houses.   

These automated investment reports still need to be improved further, but ERM is now poised to benefit from future improvements in artificial intelligence. I can confidently say that we are no longer tied to analyst reports from brokerage houses and can now generate reports on local stocks that are not covered by investment analysts.

Lastly, I hope Batch 35 will participate actively in the FB group. I look forward to seeing you at the following community seminar, which is slated for Q4 2024, having not done one for so long as we have been preparing to use LLMs in this programme.

Hope to see you then!

 

Christopher Ng Wai Chung

My Psychology of Spending

 

I've just completed Money on Your Mind by Vicky Reynal. It is one of the rare books that talks about money but does it from a completely different angle. The author is a financial psychotherapist, so she proposes that we look at our financial habits from a psychological perspective. Perhaps some kind of childhood trauma drove some of us to overspend or be overly stingy. 

The book had a very novel interpretation of Buffett's financial success. A common understanding of Buffett's fan base is that he got much of his economic acumen by modelling his father, a shrewd broker, so he set up a company after the Great Depression. But the book proposes a different interpretation - Buffett had to find solace in the certainty of numbers because his mum had a mental illness that caused her to explode in anger when Buffett was growing up. 

I like this interpretation a lot because I hated how humanities were taught to my generation in secondary school. We were made to memorise entire paragraphs of text, and the teacher gave exam tips to the girls in the uniformed groups who pleased him. I was driven to maths and science because there was certainty in scientific answers, and I had a field day arguing with my teachers that they got their answers wrong. During my time in secondary school, I never lost such an argument as I had A-level texts on my side. 

But I digress. 

For those who want to benefit from the book, you may need to examine your own behaviour and then go through the painful process of unpacking your personal experiences to explain why you behave this way. While I spend quite little compared to my peers, I can think of many folks in this FIRE space who need therapy more than I do. 

So, instead, I will share a bit about my approach to spending money. Different kinds of money evoke different levels of shame or guilt when I pay them. This may apply to some readers, but many of you may have a distinct hierarchy compared to me, and that's ok. It's quite challenging not to put our assets into different buckets, so some amount of feeling and emotion can influence the way we spend. 

a) Inherited capital

I find that inherited capital triggers the highest amount of shame or guilt when it is spent. It feels like my dad gave me a cow, and I've decided to bring it into the shed and blow its brains out. And I've never spent my inherited capital before. The thought of it is painful to me. 

However, I do sell and reposition that portfolio, even though I always buy slightly more than I sell. I don't think I'm stubborn enough to spend inherited capital if I'm faced with a life-and-death issue, actually.

b) Earned capital

Second on the list is most of my earned capital, blood money earned from effort in the past, which I have converted into stocks. I might have liquidated some stocks I bought a while ago to put a down payment on my condo, but I also feel terrible if I have to sell stocks to cover my expenses. 

c) Dividends - Inherited vs Earned

Most of my spending comes from dividends I get from my investments. I often do not spend all of it, but I have accumulated about a year's worth of expenses just so I don't have to pay (a) and (b). Even my dividends are categorised. I have dividends from earned income, which I'm happy to pay, but I used inherited dividend flows to build up cash reserves.

I have tapped into inherited dividends twice before, once for my mum's angioplasty and now once more for some dental expenses for my kids. I consider tuition expenses and enrichment justified to be tapped from this pool.

d) Salary

Fortunately for my sanity, I don't consider my salary "blood money" because my life is post-FIRE. I only earn because I have great business partners or the work is enjoyable. I'm not fast and loose, but I draw from my earned income first, then from my dividends. Excess is farmed back into dividend stocks. 

Please note that I no longer earn enough to pay all my family expenses and support my mortgage. This bothers me a bit, but I have plenty of dividends to cover the shortfalls. 

e) Rental income from Malaysia

When it comes to spending money at this stage, I let my hair down.

We have some rental income denominated in Malaysian Ringgit. It's like having a weird cow that produces chocolate milk that is so ugly that no one wants to buy it. We rush to drink the chocolate milk before it curdles.

My ringgit is the funny money that enables me to be generous with friends, and there's a greater urgency to just spend it away. Our tenant has been around for 30+ years, and the sums, while very small,  will replenish every month.

f) Government $$$ handouts and Academic vouchers

My kids are all right; we get vouchers for their academic performance. I will quickly buy the popular voucher from them with cash to buy books from the bookstore. I can often find an excuse to wipe all vouchers in one visit. 

Last month, I also received $200 in my bank account from the Singapore government. This is the most guiltless kind of money I receive every year, and I blew $100 on wine and backwards with fellow SGFI telegrammed a few days ago. Because I don't have rarefied tastes, spending $100 on wine that I can't differentiate from $20, brandless bottles is out of character for me - BECAUSE IT IS A LOT OF BAKKWA! 

Nevertheless, I had a great evening because this has been paid for by the Singapore Government.

I'm aware that all this I'm sharing is an example of mental accounting, but we are human beings, after all. 

I hope that readers will spend some time thinking about their own spending and various money-related neuroses after reading this article. 

Rising against all challenges or floating through life?

 

What kind of life would you prefer to lead?

One possibility is to lead a life of challenges and obstacles, then grow and become a better person as you slowly overcome them.

The second possibility is a blissful life with few obstacles, and you float through your personal existence carried by a cloud.

Some folks pick the first because life seems like a roller-coaster ride, and it is an exciting choice. You are constantly being challenged and become a better person over time. But as I hit my 50s, I just want the rest of my life to be as blissful as possible, so I will pick the second scenario as far as reasonably possible. This is why I tell my friends that my preferred existence is to float through life on a cloud of dividend payouts. Then, my friends inspired me to prompt for the AI photograph shown above.

But sadly, we can't really control the circumstances of our birth or what kind of cards are dealt to us. My Malaysian Chinese pals start the day at 4 a.m. just to travel to study in the same secondary school as I do. These days, in the institution where I teach, colleagues half-jokingly tell me that the Malaysian Chinese and foreigners are the most punctual, with the most latecomers coming from Tampines.

So, if you are going through life blissfully at this moment, it's better to start planning for a change in your personal situation because change is inevitable. Very few of us will go through life without encountering problems. Sometimes, you get restructured, or your kids turn out neurodiverse, or an elderly parent develops dementia. 

 

The "cloud" needs to be built with meticulous planning. So, even in good times, you need to "shake the box" and conduct "business continuity planning."

When circumstances are comfortable, you must actively find ways to improve and develop capabilities to deal with more significant problems in life. Financial education is an obvious answer, but some universal skills and talents will be helpful regardless of circumstances, like public speaking, entrepreneurial knowledge, psychology of personality, peak performance, and, to this day, some self-therapy skills. If your kids are happily enjoying a stable family environment like me, then find ways to stretch them. 

I've had a really awful 49th year. There is a Chinese belief that all 9th ages are challenging years. At 19, I was languishing in NS. When I was 29, my IT department was outsourced from P&G to HP. It was almost like a fall from Heaven. When I was 39, my career dramatically exploded when I got into two consecutive toxic work environments outside the private sector and pulled the plug. Now, at 49, my Graves disease returned, and I developed double vision and needed prism lenses. My business is still going through a bad patch, but I'm ramping up other sources of income through adjunct teaching work with very mixed results. 

In every scenario, my investment income came to the rescue. Luckily, I'm positioned well in the financial markets, and I expect a rigorous recovery from REITs as rates begin to fall. I can't even imagine how my private property can increase in value with loan rates falling across the board in Singapore. Changes in the LTV are justified in preventing a housing bubble from forming, but it will stop real estate prices from rising steadily. 

But more is needed. The year that follows is always about learning new things and reinventing myself. If my investment training business folds, I need to expand my capabilities, so I need to get back to school to get an ACLP to see whether there are future opportunities to train adults, this time aided by Skillsfuture credits. 

A cloud of dividends can take you to many places, but sometimes it's ok to get your shoes on the ground occasionally if only to build a bigger cloud.

Does being in GEP raise the odds of attaining FIRE?

 

Of all the reforms proposed by PM Wong in this year's National Day Rally, the changes to the GEP system are the most polarising. Some GEP alumni on social media did not like the changes because they felt that leaving their primary schools allowed them to find a new group of friends they could fit into. Another group alleged that they were bullied so severely in the GEP program that they welcomed the new system to allow gifted kids to stay in their original primary schools.

Who is right? I don't know. 

But I might have an idea of who is wrong. 

GEP alumni should not be entitled to think that the government owes them a personal clubhouse to protect them from the world. Folks like me would have benefitted dramatically from friendships with GEPpers if I had had access to them earlier, so they should not have been taken away from us.  

Given that taxpayer money is being deployed to give them special treatment, the GEP is clearly a pipeline for the government to mould leaders in the future for the greater good.  If there is a secondary objective, I guess the aim is to create a superior breed of high-IQ citizens via assortative mating. The strategy must have worked, as the average IQ in Singapore is about 106, but worldwide numbers are about 97. The third reason is that all societies need to prevent the rise of anti-elite, intelligent people who can weaponise their intelligence to engineer a societal collapse. Therefore, GEP as a safe space for special needs students is an incidental side effect of the government policy.

But what do I know?  I'm not really here to engage in intellectual masturbation on this blog because I think there's undoubtedly a group of folks who blow a more giant load than me. 

I'm here to address a more straightforward question - does being GEP help attain FIRE?

To answer the question, I will divide the population into three groups, Normies—average Joes who probably have better things to do than read my blog. GEP-adjacents - like myself who passed a round of GEP testing but were not smart enough to enter GEP, and the GEP itself, Goh Keng Swee's attempt to make Plato's Republic a reality by breeding a future generation of Philosopher Kings to rule the country. 

To create a more straightforward analogy, 

• Normies pleasure their partner with their fingers. 
• The GEP-adjacent, maybe with just one standard deviation above the median IQ,  pleasure their partner with a feather. 
• GEPpers, with two standard deviations above the median IQ, use the entire chicken. 

If we observe the other folks known to have attained FIRE, I do not see the same gifted traits of my GEP pals, who have strange, quirky obsessions, hobbies, and complicated fandoms.

• Normies may write a love letter to their partners on WhatsApp. 
• GEP-adjacent may use Shakespeare's Sonnets somewhere. ( I did use 116 on my wedding album sadly, no one caught it )
• GEP will compose a poem partly in Klingon-Quenya-High Valyrian, apply a hash function to it, and then send the garbled text to their partners ( Ok, I'm kidding, but if a girl does this, she's a keeper )

I'm not seeing that weirdness on folks who think being cool is counting their dividends this quarter on their blogs. 

FIRE is the opposite of giftedness. It requires the obstinacy to shut off from consumerism and invest using simple means, often involving dividends, which is frequently not novel enough for brilliant folks.

But I suspect the FI forums might have many GEP-adjacent members. Moments ago, someone shared some questions about Physical Olympiads on the SGFI Telegram group. But this is the SGFI chat group, not the Dividends Investment group, an entire of good-natured uncles and foodies. 

Like Warren Buffett said, anything above an IQ of 120 is wasted if someone is looking at investments.  

Today, I had the pleasure of giving a finance talk to Sec 4 students at Raffles Institution; they asked me whether they should dedicate their careers and investments. I told them that if they did so, it would be a severe waste of the government's investment in them. 

They should be doing complex surgeries, saving lives, fighting complicated litigation cases, and engineering large M&As. 

However, dividend investing can be used to make money for them while they hyper-focus on their professional careers. 

What is a PUA kind of workplace

 

Since leaving conventional employment over 10 years ago, I have been fascinated by modern developments and ideas about how local workplaces have evolved over the years. I will write about something new I have learned about the world of work. 

So, this particularly toxic work culture belonged to a financial institution that has been paying solid dividends into my pocket for quite some time now, and a friend who worked there described how their middle managers are trained to handle their subordinates.

According to my friend, the management culture wants its employees to always be filled with self-doubt. Sometimes, managers criticise their employees' grammar, accusing them of using English worse than a primary school student. Other managers will criticise your approach to work—if you devise some initiative to do something, it will always be wrong, and a better approach will always be shared with you. 

As it turns out, the people from the PRC were the first employees to figure out something was wrong. They said that this is called PUA work culture in China. It is a management philosophy derived from pick-up artist books like The Game by Neil Strauss. In these books, there is a technique used by pick-up artists called negging, where a pick-up artist approaches a woman in a singles bar and then criticises her continuously to lower her self-esteem; the idea is that it's easier to get a one-night stand with a woman who thinks lowly of herself. 

My friend is naturally furious that he is being manipulated by middle managers at work. So, he now asks me whether dividends and passive income can be used to wage war in the office, given that he's no slouch in the passive income department. His idea is to fight back to challenge any middle manager who questions his ability - he is, in my view, correct to believe that any supervisor who is decked head to toe in designer suits and Rolexes is no match to a dividends-earning Uniqlo uncle who is ready to make a case to HR. 

Of course, I was flattered by his suggestion, but I told him to think twice before doing this. The logic is that many Gen X workers may be collecting rent and dividends from multiple sources, and if we are too eager to fight in front of HR, it will create a disincentive for such banks/MNCs to hire a 50-something-year-olds in the future because they might be secretly a landlord. 

This can make ageism worse in Singapore. 

I offer an alternative. 

If you can already identify that someone is deliberately trying to lower your self-esteem, you've won half the battle because you know it's not a performance issue. Secondly, as you can live on your dividends, you can start playing a nefarious game of your own because every month you earn an income is a month you pick up a few victory points and can continue playing this game until the next 360 appraisals. 

The game is simple. 

(1) Challenge yourself to block criticism, preferably with a proper tech tool. The most common criticism is concerning grammar. Would it be possible to pay for a Grammarly subscription and then chain ChatGPT and Grammarly together to write your documentation. A paid version of Grammarly can even teach you a thing or two about Grammar rules. Make your manager fight Grammarly, not you. 

(2) Distract him with a glaring flaw. Sometimes, there is no AI to help refine your work, so there's no way to escape criticism, deliberately make a big glaring flaw and be ready with an amendment. Your manager may be so pleased with himself that he will approve your second draft. 

(3) "Greyrock" your manager. Sometimes, your manager wants to elicit suffering, pain, and drama because they are attention seekers and inspire fear. The defence is to adopt the personality of Grey Rock and be pleasant but bland so that the manager will pick on someone else. 

(4) Be careful and document everything. If the manager makes a contrarian suggestion about how you can do your work better, he will eventually contradict himself. Then you can bring up the contradiction in front of other staff. If you do this in front of your supervisor, you might have to start brushing up your resume. 

Of course, if all else fails, you can invoke HR and fight like my friend suggested, and if you lose the battle, turn to Glassdoor to air your grievances. In this case, he can even attend the AGM as a shareholder. However, you need to ensure that you do not commit defamation while doing that. I think the better winning move is to collect 12 paychecks just to mess up your manager in the next appraisal exercise. 

Techniques like malicious compliance and passive aggression can help you see how long you can play the game with your manager.  You can Google them.

Finally, middle managers should worry about folks quietly accumulating dividends in the background. While passive income is small, the employee is ideal - he will accept a lot of iniquity in the workplace because he still needs a job to get even more dividend income. 

But suddenly, once a threshold is crossed, he can be a living nightmare once there is evidence of employee abuse. 

As such, employees who are always dressed in designer gear and have the best holidays are safe because they are stuck with golden handcuffs and will be obedient in the workplace. However, beware of the guy who eats chai png every day and spends most of his time in libraries. 

You will not know what kind of a monster he can become once he is financially free.

 

Re-evaluating everything about our lives.

 

This may be one of the most brutal National Day holidays I ever had to live through as I attended two wakes - one for a secondary school classmate who fought cancer and another for an ex-colleague who suddenly passed away. I thought perhaps for my own mental health, I highlighted some of my thoughts on this blog, just to get this out of my system.

a) Signal that middle age is coming

One of the surest signals of middle age is when you get fewer wedding invitations and begin showing up for more wakes. This should be a sign to change your approach to life. Some would go through a midlife crisis, and others must think much deeper about their relationship to work. 

b) The purpose of wakes

While it might sound morbid, I suddenly have some insight about funeral wakes. 

What is a wake for? Wakes cannot be for the dead as they don't even know you are there. While it might be for the loved ones to grieve, your presence can't improve the situation.

The wake is ultimately for the attendees to find closure, determine what happened, and whether the family can move on. In both wakes I attended, it was a way for folks who had long lost contact to get together again to catch up on what had transpired. In many wakes I attended, my friends made a promise to meet up under much happier circumstances. 

c) Shifting from achievements to joy

The hardest part about both wakes I attended was that both deceased were 49—the same age as me. Did my friends find any joy in life? Or were they still in the throes of seeking achievement in life? I highly doubt that Singaporeans my age have started to smell the roses. 

Everyone knows there will come a point in life when you take your foot off the pedal and start seeking more pleasure and improving relationships at home. But no one knows when the right time is to do that because we don't know how many good years we have left to live. 

I've been off conventional employment for a decade. I sometimes question my decision to drop a decade of earning power to build a portfolio career that paid a fraction of what I used to earn. 

After this week, I don't think I have any regrets anymore. 

d) What gives you happiness

Only three things cause happiness - oxytocin, serotonin and dopamine. Secretion of these chemicals is not fully under our control. 

Before middle age, we try to sacrifice short-term happiness to bring long-term satisfaction. In the process, we give up some health and mess up our lives a little. If we are lucky, we get some money in the process. In the middle, we are not too ready to take our foot off the pedal, but the search for long-term achievement and satisfaction reaches a state of diminishing returns. 

Some of my pals can't quit their jobs, but some practical fixes suit middle-aged people.

If we can't pick up more positives, we can aggressively eliminate the negatives. It's a concept in IT Security; we can reduce the surface area of attacks. 

I advised a friend recently who had an old friend who had recently grown bitter and made every social encounter quite unpleasant. This friend liked questioning her spouse's achievements or showing off what some rich people were doing, and it's been happening for years.

In Singapore, we have normalised this behaviour (because of Chinese New Year ) until we have grown to accept it as part of our social lives.

But Gen Z knows better. I've always wondered why we don't turn to a younger generation for their wisdom?

I explained that her friend feels insecure and has chosen nasty, defensive behaviour to amplify my friend's insecurities. This is a red flag in Gen Z relationships, and she needs to re-evaluate it for her own mental health. I then told her to consider "grey-rocking" the relationship—another innovation from Gen Z where you behave like a boring grey rock to disinvite further attacks from narcissists. 

The problem with us Gen Xers is that we do not have the psychological vocabulary to recognise people's attempts to inflict trauma on us. Gen Z has all sorts of wonderful lingo like gaslighting, cookie-jarring or what a situationship is. 

At this time, we're still in the middle of the seventh month Ghost Festival. 

We can get back into regular programming soon on this blog. 

 

Thinking about the state of humanities and social sciences education ( ex-economics )

 

Not too long ago, NUS revealed that their enrollment in the Arts and Social Sciences enrollment has dropped by about a third. You can read the finer details here. This has caused some consternation online, which is no dissimilar to the shenanigans when it was said on mainstream media that the arts were non-essential during the pandemic. 

The question is how serious this is. Are Singaporeans abandoning the arts and humanities en masse, being more attracted to qualifications that can land better paying jobs?

It isn't simple, as the intake of humanities majors in NTU and SMU was not hit so badly. The main reason is that NUS decided to merge the Arts and Science faculties, so students of the combined school had more flexibility to choose their majors. Naturally, the folks with study loans obviously want something that can get them higher-paying jobs, so there will be a bias towards more quantitative subjects. 

So, is this a good thing or a bad thing?

This is a good thing that will elevate the status of the humanities or social science major. 

At the broader level, I think modern societies need to understand what happens if they overproduce Arts graduates and the industry fails to absorb them and provide them with good jobs. Arts and Law graduates are articulate enough to form a counter-elite. This is the subject of Peter Turchin's book End Times. It talks about how counter-elites are the seeds of political disintegration in societies in the past, like the Roman Empire. I suspect LKY was quite cognisant of this when he started limiting the number of Law graduates decades ago. 

As it has become harder to get into the College of the Humanities and Sciences, the arts graduate, regardless of major, would have at least ABB for A levels, so they would have some general intelligence to make them good hires. At least during my time, I know that FASS top students get selected into government departments like ISD, which is supposed to provide wonderful sinecures and pay their officers well.

I was fortunate to know many intelligent humanities graduates when I was at NUS and subsequently in SMU law school. I learnt a lot more from them than my peers in Engineering school because they employ different mental models to attack some of the common problems we face as young adults.

But I feel sorry for them as they must transcend the stereotype of the "Arts slacker" in the 2000s, the folks who barely made it into NUS, so they had to settle for any faculty that would accept them. The stereotype is that many end up selling insurance or squeezing into NIE to land secondary school teaching jobs after getting knocked up early in life. 

So, with a minimum grade of ABB, the Arts slacker is now an endangered species, if not extinct already. 

In fact, it would be fascinating if you met an individual who did well in the A levels and volunteered for a so-called "useless" subject like English Literature or Philosophy. In the past, this may have signalled laziness or incompetence, but now it can be a mark of higher social and economic status or very high personal agency—this guy does not care about what you think about his degree major! And that's cool!

Formal education may not be the best answer for many mere mortals like us who need a practical professional degree to attain FIRE. But there's nothing stopping you from giving yourself some humanities training after office hours. 

• Will and Ariel Durant have a great book called The Lessons of History that helps laypeople appreciate history and how to appreciate change in societies. 
• For literature, you can try How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas Foster.  
• For philosophy, you can try The Philosopher's Toolkit by Peter Fosl and Julian Baggini. Do not go for that book for poseurs called Sophie's World. 

In tandem with the shrinkage of the Arts faculty at NUS, they should apply less pressure on the professor to publish but instead create micro-credentials in the humanities and social sciences so that older mid-career dudes like me can explore and appreciate the humanities at a later stage in life. 

I need technical skills at an earlier stage in my career, but as I reach mid-career, I may want to discover some knowledge of what makes us human as well to round up my professional credentials. I visited Istanbul last year, and my trip would have been richer if I had understood the history behind the Fall of Constantinople. Some of the harder war games I play exist in a historical period involving states like Pomerania, and I may have to wage war against the Burgundians. 

Personal Update

 

It's time for another personal update, as my blog frequency has been down lately.

a) Was down with stomach flu this week. 

Last Sunday, after some retail therapy at second book stores, I ate some scissors curry rice in Bugis at around 5.30pm. Everything was fine until Monday morning when I realised that I was feeling queasy and I had lost my appetite; then I emptied all the contents of my stomach, and I spent the rest of the day vomiting and getting diarrhoea.

I was so concerned about not being able to see the doctor without a diarrhoea attack I decided to install an app called Doctors Anywhere and used telemedicine to get my medical fix. The experience was really positive - I paid about $80, including medication (delivered in 3 hours), which included some non-essentials like electrolytes and probiotics. Still, even those came in handy for my recovery. The only downside I noticed is that the system does not recognise that I'm a CHAS orange card holder, which would have been much cheaper if I visited the neighbourhood doctor in person.

I imagine telemedicine to be handy for gout sufferers who struggle to walk 500m to the nearest clinic. 

b) Enjoyed a night of Japanese karaoke in a micro lounge. 

Another thing I did was to join some friends in a Japanese lounge in Shenton Way to understand why folks would spend $50-$100 a week on alcohol and some talking company. This act is way off my character, but I should also let my hair down occasionally. 

For those who are unaccustomed to nightlife, this experience was quite educational. Folks who run nightlife establishments are expert small-talkers, and it's an excellent way to keep company over a weekend. Conversations are nowhere as intense as when I hike with other bloggers like RetireBy50 when I often regret not taking notes because of so many lifehacks I can pick up from them. 

I will share the most family-friendly conversation snippet I can produce on this blog; for the rest, you need to ask me for a coffee or a long hike. We were talking about weird travel buddies, and someone was talking about heading towards a far-out location in Bangkok just so his weird friend could buy some watermelon juice. Apparently, this FOMO guy wanted watermelon juice because the seller had massive breasts. It was funny because I asked how a juicer with big breasts could produce better-tasting watermelon juice. I was also pretty sure that massive breasts can be found in other areas in Bangkok. 

The funny thing is that I missed most of the conversation because I was singing almost nonstop for three hours on the Japanese Karaoke system, as we were the only customers there. The equivalent fee to do this in Cash Studio may be much higher for a dedicated device that serves Japanese songs.

Anyway, I wonder if this lounge can survive if all their clients are like me, I only drank Soda Water and ate snacks, and with a cover charge, I spent $44. $44 might be a little on the high side if you benchmark against buying beer from your nearest supermarket. 

But I think if done properly, it should be compared with therapy. In such a case $44 is cheap. 

c) My single focus: Generative AI for investment analysis

My illness earlier this week derailed a lot of momentum as I'm on a crusade to being ChatGPT into my Early Retirement Masterclass. The work has been extensive, and it involves taking Udemy courses at x1.5 speed, reading research papers, and then reading O'Reilly books like the ones above to create a set of prompts to assess the future performance of local stocks.

While it does give me little latitude to raise fees, the investment in picking up prompt engineering skills will allow me to create similar materials for the legal sector when I run Legal Technology classes next semester.  

I hope to present some interesting results on this blog for investors to follow in the upcoming few days. 

d) What's happening in geeks, games and comics?

More distracting than a bout of stomach flu is the impending launch of the 2024 Dungeons and Dragons ruleset, and plenty of new reveals are going on. As the new rules are revealed, the usual theory is being crafted, and the following ruleset is being complained about. People are already unhappy with the new Ranger without knowing how the new rules work. However, there will be a lot of excitement on the 1st of August as the NDA gets lifted, and game influencers will start discussing in detail how the new game will be played. 

Of course, I can only update you by talking about how much the new movie Deadpool & Wolverine will rekindle the fortunes of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. There's even bigger news that Robert Downey Jr. will be the next big bad, Dr. Doom. 

It may not bode well for fanboys over the long term. There's a woke faction creating shitty stories like the Acolyte that may kill Star Wars eventually, and there's another faction that will never be happy unless you develop a lot of nostalgic fanboy service like Avengers End Game or Deadpool and Wolverine.  

Can Disney create new storylines and characters to entertain the next generation of geeks and otakus?

I don't know. But at least I can watch The Boys on Amazon Prime. 

Do horny people find it harder to FIRE?

 

As younger Millenials and Gen Z begin their journeys towards financial independence, it becomes very useful and instructive to examine their own personal approaches to early retirement. And recently, one can't actually ignore the new rising star among our ranks as Ashish Kumar drove even the thought leaders here to refer to their dictionaries with a new word, "aroace".

Aroace stands for someone who is aromantic and asexual. If you are aroace, you experience very little romantic or sexual attraction towards other people. This is a novel concept because we know that most FIRE thought leaders here are single, with me being a rare exception with my wife and kids. So, it's not really arguable that being single makes it easier to make extreme financial decisions and engage in personal austerity programs, but being aroace takes singlehood to a whole new level because it may have to act at a fundamental biological level - you leverage your lack of horniness to attain earlier financial independence. 

The question for me is - Is it even ok for the FIRE movement to have its own sexual orientation?

I'm old-fashioned - for me, financial independence is a tool for family formation. I will earn passive income to better support my family in the future, and I expect my own kids to carry this forward. FI is a means to an end. It's not an end in itself. But I can accept that younger generations that have grown more individualistic would not consider family formation a life goal - I don't think any amount of cost-benefit analysis would justify getting hitched, and it's worse for young women. 

In previous articles, I've stated that family formation in Singapore can be lucrative if you scale the BTO/EC ladder and take advantage of economies of scale. Still, in essence, this works well only for assortatively mated couples, such as folks in the top universities who date and ultimately marry each other. 

If you run out of arguments, you have to hit the books, which is why I leveraged the book Red Flags, Green Flags by Dr Ali Fenwick, which has a fairly nice section on dating. 

The book does not discuss money much, but it highlights some issues with his decision to stay single. Singlehood works as a short-term strategy because you have the freedom to work on yourself, but studies on loneliness make it a bad idea over the long term. From my vantage point, I observe that singles are quite happy tight up to their 50s, then bitterness sets in, and they stop making new friends or lose the ones they already have. Many single folks don't have a real strategy for loneliness as they can't account for their personality changes over time. 

I was clear why I was single until my early thirties—I wanted enough passive income to live on and support my family. You need to know what you are working on. Maybe you are prioritizing your career, on a healing journey, or just trying to figure out your preferences.

The decision to stay single can also be a serious red flag. 

If you have stayed single for too long, becoming too stuck in your ways is straightforward. You also need to gain the skills and the willingness to handle relationship conflicts, such as my wife not liking my three straight days playing Baldur's Gate 3.  

The book offers a straightforward solution: When you run out of excuses (but being aroace is a valid reason to skip the marriage market) for being single, you should start dating casually to learn some social skills and about yourself. 

The consequence can be found in a recent CNA documentary. 

One fine day, your neighbours will complain about the smell coming from your flat, and folks will be called in to clean up your dead body.

Thoughts about my latest Cohort Reunion and 50th birthday celebration

 

As opposed to how awful my last weekend was (which will be a topic for a future blog article), this week has been pleasant as I attended a gathering of Swiss Cottage Secondary School's 1990 graduating batch's 50th birthday celebration. As I belonged to the "study" clique in school many years ago, I did not expect to be at the centre of social interactions. Still, I deeply enjoyed observing the proceedings yesterday, and I have enough readers in that event to be able to pen my thoughts on reunions.

We're still basking in the glow from last night's celebration, with some folks in the financial sphere claiming to know my cohort mates. My mum commented that the ladies looked dynamic and young even though we were half a century old. But the wisest thing a classmate told me last night was that class reunions can be a tense affair for some people and that those who decide to show up are the most satisfied with their lives. So, at least 30 happy people from the cohort. 

That being said, some topics of conversation are interesting enough to make it on this blog. 

Investing in Malaysia

So, the background is a classmate who is a Malaysian working in Singapore kicked me up and drove me to the event. He was discussing investing in Malaysia with another classmate, and that other guy was quoting from this blog about my anti-Malaysian investing thesis. You know the rest, I don't agree with the 1M65 mobs at all, and I believe that political and forex risk will damn Singapore investors in the future if the incumbent loses power. And I speak this as someone who owns an income-generating shophouse in the JB suburbs. 

But it's unfair for a buddy to be contradicted because of what I write on my blog. Malaysian Chinese have a significant advantage in earning SGD and becoming landlords in Malaysia. This is because they can shift their expenses to SGD or MYR and are slightly less affected by forex changes. My current JB shophouse yields about 6%, so I don't see an issue of a Malaysian Chinese earning SGD to play JB Monopoly to systematically buy shophouses and then swap them for a motel later in life. 

But good luck if you are a Singaporean facing information asymmetries and a ringgit that may plunge further.