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.