What's marriage really competing with ?

When the government said that they want to have a sustained campaign to promote marriage to younger folks, a lot of folks took the opportunity to start whining about why Singaporeans are choosing to accumulate wealth over settling down.

I don't agree with this line of thought. This light of thought has been used in many scenarios.

Why are Singaporeans rude to each other? Because they are too concerned about money making.
Why are Singaporeans not getting married ? Because they are too concerned about money making.
Why some people are failures can't hold onto decent jobs ? Because other people are too concerned about money making.

I beg to differ about money making because, very often, guys save money in order to settle down and start a family. If marriage gets delayed, it is because we're not saving fast enough.

Wealth reinforces families and makes development possible. Wealth accumulation is not the enemy of family creation - it is an enabler. And vice versa. Married people pool assets creating a portfolio of financial and human capital that is more diversified than that of 2 singles. Marriage raises conscientiousness of males resulting in better overall health, longevity and wealth creation. Children, while a burden when young, provide income smoothing at the late stage of a person's life.

There is enough literature to establish marriage as generally a positive stabilizing influence on personal wealth.

Now let's talk about the real issue of Single-hood.

Marriage has to compete with the one valuable resource singles have can may not be as willing to give up easily - Freedom. Being single is just plain fun !

Many singles make enough to lead decent carefree lives. They can travel anywhere, buy whatever they want. Promote causes that they believe in. That translates to a whole lot of mobility. Generation Y would also not want to be shackled by the norms of Gen X society, they want to carve a set of values for their own.

In this world of readily available sex, tweets and Facebook, I'm betting that it'll be hard to sell the younger folks an ancient institution like marriage.

What price are we putting on their personal freedom ?

This leads to my very dark conclusion for policy makers.

What will happen when the campaign fails ? What will the PAP do ?

I would propose more draconian measures. Let me give you guys a small hint :

Since children produce income smoothing in most cases and function as annuities, CPF Life can be opted out by parents living with their kids.

I'm sure our government can do something along these lines...

Regards

How to study engineering ?

A number of readers may be engineers who want to get into investing so do comment on this article whether you agree or disagree with it.

A friend wanted to me to give some advice on how to study engineering. In particular, would there be fundamental ideas and equations that can make a person a good electrical engineer.

I can't answer that question directly. Like finance, engineering is a mixture of disciplines. Engineers need a strong foundation in mathematics, physics and computing before you can really start doing work in research, programming and systems integration. Finance majors need statistics, accounting and economics to even start making meaningful investment decisions. Finance majors in the future probably need C++ programming to engage in statistical arbitrage and high-frequency programming.

What I can offer is a set of strategies on how to study engineering that is unique in the physical sciences and not anywhere else.

Here are my tips :

a) Study of engineering subjects always involves solving problems.

You can understand or memorize an equation or physical theory but the rubber meets the road in solving problems. This is why sometimes great engineering students look at a typical problem in a tutorial first before diving into the lecture notes. Equations and theories exists as a means towards the ends which is to resolve a technical problem.

This means that the much-maligned 10 year series method of learning is actually the ideal one to master engineering subjects.

A savvy engineering is always hunting for new problems to solve using their newly learnt theories.

b) Best engineers use their foundation in problem solving to imagine or invent more complex problems.

This is the difference between a B student and a dean's lister - the ability to imagine problems of greater complexity and solve them independently of the lectures. We all learn about resistors in series or parallel in secondary school. A smart physics student can mentally arrange resistors in a three-dimensional cube edge or a mesh and use the basic equations to solve problems of this complex nature.

c) Best engineers have toys which reinforce their understanding of technology.

Engineers must align their hobbies with their discipline. This allows them to gain a kinesthetic understanding of the technologies needed to create value for their employers or clients.

If finance lets you buy the biggest toys, engineering is the professional discipline with the most absorbing toys.

The modern engineering student has a really nice set of toys to play with outside school. Find a VC trained in finance who likes the stuff you build and he'll then proceed to buy you even more toys. Android phones are programmable in Java. Arduino is a very simple, low-cost way to understand micro-controllers. Even better, Android phones can control Arduino microcontrollers.

Advertisement to get singles to settle down and start families.

Today is a double-shot weekend. Here's my idea on a different way of positioning family life which the Government might consider.

The advertisement starts with two characters.

Toyboy is a guys with model killer looks, some sort of a Aaron Kwok figure.
FatFish is the opposite, a fat and ugly but with laughing eyes.

The first scene shows Toyboy working in the office. It shows FatFish dating FatChick.
The second scene shows Toyboy sipping on a martini and cruising in a Ferrari. It then shows FatFish proposing to FatChick.
Third scene shows Toyboy visiting the Eiffel Tower. The scene shows a quick scene with FatFish in bondage gear being pulled back into his bedroom by a chubby pair of arms.
Fourth scene shows ToyBoy playing a Playstation next to his pool in a bungalow. It also shows FatFish with FatChick pushing a pram full of babies and laughing amongst themselves.

Final scene shows ToyBoy aged to about 50 years old walking around the Orchard Road of the future. To his horror, everyone in Orchard looks like a carbon copy of FatFish or FatChick. A little kid walks by with FatFish's face photoshopped to his own. Policeman looks like FatFish, foodcourt lady looks like FatChick.

Screen blacks out.

White words appear with the MCYS logo.

"So who has won ?"

Fairness is what we strive for. But equality may turn out to be a really bad idea.

Well I think the GE fever will be upon us very soon. I just want to spend a short amount of time to talk about two concepts which tend to confuse voters and get them to support the wrong causes.

First of all, if I'm reading my fellow citizens right, Singaporeans want to be treated fairly. Singaporeans want to be hired for jobs which they are qualified for and given a days fair wages in return for a day of hard work. Fairness means that you get paid for your contribution and folks who who contribute less should get less. The mechanism to price your labor should be the free markets. It's not a perfect system, but if one works towards adding value to others, it's not going to be hard to get 3 meals a day here.

I'm personally all for fairness.

I'm a little upset at how liberals in Singapore want some more equality. Equality is a more disturbing concept. There are overtones that people will get something no matter how much contribution you make. I don't think Singaporeans want the hardworking nurse or the taxi driver to be paid equally as the poet who write poems about fornicating dead cats ( Unless this poet is a Lady Gaga like figure who attracts hordes of tourists who like seeing him fornicate dead cats at the Esplanade ).

While I want more opposition parties to gain headway I'm very disturbed that some of the more left leaning parties want more equality and the best way of doing this is by minimum wages and welfare.

Make no mistake, minimum wages will push business to create fewer jobs and if unemployment goes up, we'll lose our rock solid stability. Welfare is not going to come out from minister salaries, it will come from taxation. You either pay for welfare with a larger GST or higher income taxes.

Just want to remind readers once again to keep your eye on the government if you're not happy with them. But don't declare war on your fellow citizens. Some local people like this place because it allows them to raise decent families with low taxation.

Once again I appeal to the opposition to create a good framework for Singaporeans to draw their CPF out in difficult times rather than resort to taxation and welfare schemes. It's populist and the low road towards prosperity. It's also high time Singaporeans get to do more with that CPF-OA instead of being stuck with investing only 35%.

Article on my iPad and homemade stylus.

I took a recipe from the web and made an Ipad stylus that also works on my android phone.

http://polymathprogrammer.com/2010/08/16/homemade-ipad-stylus/

Somehow a friend found it interesting enough to make a blog article out of it.

National Day Rant : No one is out to ruin your Singaporean Dream, lah !

I don't really feel like blogging these days. But occasionally some things occur in the blogosphere and I suddenly find that I can't really help myself.

This National Day, a lot of bloggers have taken this opportunity to talk about the Singaporean Dream and of course partake in the tradition of PAP-bashing. A lot of what the Internet has been for the last few days can be summarized by something said by a famous blogger called Kitana who wrote this classic :

" In Singapore, it is difficult to dream. Difficult to dream of anything beyond the material. I don’t wish for a future where I am stuck in my dead end job wondering what the fuck I want in my life. I don’t want a future where I die to myself, murder my idealism and my dreams of being different, simply because ‘different’ is a bad word in Singapore. "

If Kitana is reading this, I'm really sorry.

I don't buy your message.

Sure, I had my share of failures and disappointment in Singapore and I was certainly not part of the scholar-mandarin caste in Singapore. Note that I will probably also vote opposition next election too.

This is my opinion, and I welcome you to challenge them here:

a) No society is obligated to make your dreams come true.

Sure, liberals want welfare and minimum wages. That is the Singapore Dream for them. With a welfare society, a liberal can spend his days drawing pictures of the Singapore River or compose poems about his dead cat. But welfare comes with taxes and wages come from the businessmen creates the jobs. Do we want some dreams to be funded from the nightmares of other people? Too much of the gripes are disguised as attacks on the PAP but they are actually thinly disguised attacks on fellow Singaporeans. Yes, fellow Singaporeans who work hard on their jobs and enjoy low taxes or work hard to CREATE jobs for other Singaporeans.

b) No society is out there to stop the pursuit of your dreams.

While Singapore is not obligated to realize the dreams of everybody, Singapore can never stop you from pursuing your dreams. You cannot be stopped from chasing your dreams. You might be stopped from actually attaining it but that happens to the best of us.

The ultimate power of a citizen is that he can give up his citizenship and take his productivity elsewhere, that's if he refuses to vote in the next election. Singapore has to fight for global talent too. Don't like MM Lee, no problem ! Pauline Hanson will welcome you with open arms down under.

c) Materialist dreams are not spared in this society.

The truth is that my own dream is a fairly materialist one. My dream is to live on dividend pay-outs generated from my earned income. When i shared my dream with readers, all I got was 21 pages of hate-filled postings on Channel News Asia. I don't believe that materialist dreams will be spared from the wrath of the disgruntled fellow citizen. People will attack you if potentially what you are doing is interesting and will make them look stupid.

d) If disapproval from fellow Singaporeans is preventing you from dreaming your dream, you must be quite a sad person.

One of my formative years which made me like this way was at the age of 10, my ACS kid neighbors decided that my ET BMX bike which my dad got for me was not cool enough. They said it was fake and I spent a large part of my youth dodging 7mm plastic pellets from their Thunderboy handguns.
The RI kids were'nt any better, they made fun of me because I went to a neighbourhood school.

If I'm going to gripe about the years where I was a geek kid getting wedgies, developing complicated neuroses about branded secondary schools, I would miss out making friends with many ACS and RI alumni today, many have become my best friends and they can count on me if they need help.

I'm just using this story because like many of you unhappy Singaporeans, I was too poor to qualify for ACS and too dumb to qualify for RI. ( Too Ang-moh to enter Chinese High )

I worked on my academic credentials in university and now I'm going through the journey on financial independence bit. I'm confident I'll get there before I'm 40.

The fundamentals of success does not vary from society to society. It certainly would not vary whether RP or PAP is in power.

Work your butt out, strive to be likeable and don't take things for granted. Look after your family and everything will take care of itself.

As a bonus, you'll earn the respect of your most vicious critics.

That is my Singapore Dream.

ipad is overrated?

Well I just got my iPad and am writing my blog using the device. While the device scores on ease of use and user friendliness, I am personally not sure if it's all that useful for Singaporean users. You can't really get kindle books with it unlike my google phone and iBooks will not sell you any books as well.

This just illuminates a point that we need to protect ourselves from marketing hype.

I'll look forward to an android tablet later this year. Hope that my investment returns will let me get one then.

Liberal Arts #2 : What can we learn from the Mohists ?

I've not been updating this blog lately. My focus is now in Android programming and coming up with a program to make my D&D games smoother. It's been about 10 years since I wrote programs seriously and now I have to relearn Java on a mobile platform.

Well today's is not so much an article but some advertising for a friend's online publication called "Singularity" which is an inter-disciplinary magazine.

I did an article on Mohist philosophy which reviews their key disagreement with the more familiar Confucianist philosophy and glean useful insights in living the modern life. I want to explore new ways of monetizing income and volunteering an article for my friends online magazine is a good way to learn a little about publication. This platform, if managed well, has some potential.

Anyway, if you are into Eastern philosophy or modern self-help, you will find that the article useful. The cost is minimal as my friend will need to pay his bills as well.

Link to the Polymath Programmer

Fruits from the Liberal Arts #1 - Alexis De Tocqueville on Singapore ?

Here's a short snippet on how my journey towards equipping myself with some skills of a Liberal Arts are bearing some fruits.

Alexis De Tocqueville was a French politician with a liberal outlook in life. He wrote a book after visiting America called "Democracy in America". Some statements he made can be easily reapplied to the local context:

a) Citizens displayed great melancholy in the bosom of abundance.
b) The is disgust of life in the midst of an easy and tranquil existence.
c) Tocqueville's thesis is that at the centre of democracy and freedom lies great ennui.
d) Freedom allows citizens to adopt a single minded pursuit for material goods.
e) Men who live in democratic times have multiple passions, but most of their passions end in the love of wealth.

Now I read only a summary of his books but this has certainly ignited an interested to read the entire book just to see if Alexis has predicted our Singaporean way of life over a century before Singapore gained independence.

Another possible use of Alexis' works is to give us a glimpse of how China's growth will change their people and outlook in life, there is already talk of China being like the US a 100 years ago.

I won't really be dismissing the liberal arts now that I've discovered this gem.

My views on how Singapore can adopt the Liberal Arts.

My journeys in wealth creation has stretched most of the technical disciplines. In Singapore, that's what most of us are built to do. Work hard, get a degree and then get employed rapidly to start building wealth for the future. The economy of the future almost ensure that an engineering education will but be enough to sustain a career beyond a decade.

Moving into a management role will require a person to be more aware of the subtleties of corporate life, which means that the advantage will shift towards a manager who is more human and can solve problems with very little structure and live with truckloads of ambiguity.

It is this realization that I disagree with the government's approach towards the liberal arts. Right now, the trend is towards training law and medical students in the liberal arts where they remain elite and give them this opportunity to delay graduation by a year to become more well rounded human beings. All this does is make the program more expensive and delay the money making years by a year for the smartest guys in our education system.

I think this approach will fail. Debt ridden students are more likely to game the grades system to maximize their starting incomes. Humanity can always come later.

Furthermore, the industries in the future will still be run by us Generation X's. We're a ruthless and unforgiving generation who has been trained to be very unsentimental in work matters. The burden will be upon the debt-ridden Generation Y and the Millenials to wrestle the thought leadership from the Generation X's - it would not be ceded more easily.

So i think that a liberal arts education will widen the generation gap between Singaporeans.

I believe that way forward for a liberal arts college should be the opposite of what the West has intended for their people.

The Liberal arts should become an alternative to the EMBA, to allow executives who have reached a level of comfort with themselves to learn more about their past and humanize themselves into better managers. The liberal arts multiple and amplify the years of wisdom already gained by engaging in the workforce. It will also open the minds of the folks in the economy who need it the most.

It will also make execution much easier, mid-level executives can afford to pay for the low lecturer-to-student ratios and discussions between working peers can also attain a level of gravitas as yet unattainable from a bunch of young adults. I bet the academics want a more mature discussion too with cases drawn directly from the working world.

I hope that the Universities will consider making the liberal arts a postgraduate qualification, where senior managers will come back to school to re-school themselves in grammar, logic and public speaking.

Because if you look at the quality of Singapore management today, we're in a dire need for self-improvement.

Presentation at BlinkBl_nk - The Philosophy of Finance.

With the ever pragmatic Government of Singapore looking at the establishment of a liberal arts college here. Folks like me who had a very "functional" education will need to re-look at ourselves and ask ourselves if our skills will be outdated when the next batch of graduates, many armed with a very deep understanding of context and critical thinking, arrive in the workplace.

The value of the humanities is immense and even the most hardcore engineer or investor can benefit from a very simple grounding in the Trivium - Grammer, Logic and Rhetoric - the Foundation of a classical education.

My next gig will be at Blue Jaz where I will be talking about the Philosophy of Finance.

I will present a framework drawn from a famous philosopher and explain how a similar process can be used in a pragmatic setting like Personal Finance to rapidly bootstrap folks along the journey to becoming their own financial guru.

Venue : Blue Jaz Cafe
Address : 11, Bali Lane, Third Floor
Time : 19th May 2010, 7pm

Click here for details

Talent-based career choices versus knowledge-based career options.

Chin Yong who has his own blog, commented on my presentation, which can be found here:

http://thinkingnectar.com/

I think it's worthwhile talking about this here as a full blog post.

My presentation in bar-camp highlighted ways in which employees can perform work at the higher end of the value chain, moving from mechanical work to service oriented face-to-face work and finally to knowledge-based work which involves manipulation of symbols to solve problems for the company they work for.

After the presentation, Chin Yong asked a really good question.

How should political work be categorized ?

Chin Yong touched on a very good point because one category of work which I did not elaborate on during my speech is talent-based work. Politicians, performers, sportsmen, artists and designers often fall into this category.

Talent-based work is hard to fit into my model of self-help because of the unpredictability of the pay-off. In talent-based work, remuneration functions in a broad pyramid-like structure where work at the entry level is paid below that of perhaps some mechanical workers. At the upper echelons of talent-based work, you could well be paid millions a day. Just imagine how much a struggling musician is paid busking in Orchard road MRT compared to the pay Lady Gaga gets after every public appearance. The difference is huge and defies common sense and explanation.

When a person has to make a decision to join talent-based industries, a prerequisite is very often passion. But almost everyone else in this industry has passion too, so the X-factor which makes all that difference is still natural talent coupled with an intense passion to pursue a calling.

Just how do we develop talent can also be a difficult problem. Authors like Malcolm Gladwell recommends 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become a world-beater in any endeavour. Imagine getting into an industry where everyone is willing to put in that number of hours of deliberate practice in the industry as well. So you will need to ask yourself : where do you stand on the talent score-chart ?

My current personal opinion is that between knowledged-based work and talent-based work, choose knowledge based work because it's at least a more predictable way towards financial independence. You could be wrong about your personal talents and you may even underestimate the personal sacrifices needed to become someone, like, Rain, who has a fairly sad personal history.

But publicly, it's not very practical for a finance author to tell people to shelve their dreams of becoming a mover and shaker in the world of the Arts or becoming an International King of Pop.

There will always be one Lady Gaga to give aspiring stars some hope and prove finance authors wrong.

Anyway, this is where my thinking has been stuck at. There is still a lot of conventional wisdom when parents tell their kids to study hard, get a professional degree first to get that backup plan in place before pursuing a high risk career move like that in the Arts.

But do share with me if you have a better alternative.

Barcamp 2010 - A Hacker's Guide to Financial Independence

Barcamp occurs twice a year to allow hackers, geeks and assorted hobbyists to come together to share ideas with each other. This year hundreds of people came together at Singapore Polytechnic to talk about tech start-ups, cooking, light sabers and programming.

I was very privileged to be able to share the gist of my financial ideas with this crowd.

The video of the presentation I made prior to my 30 minutes presentation can be found here. Unfortunately, this requires Veoh which means that a special client may be required to view the entire presentation.


Watch A Hacker's Guide to Financial Independence in Educational & How-To  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Expect a subtle shift as I attempt to incorporate lectures and presentations in this blog.

Blog updates will slow.

All fans,

Thanks to all your support. Updates to this blog will slow down due to the upcoming preparations for Bar Camp and my efforts to monetize my gaming hobby.

Expect updates to this blog to slow down from now on until I can figure out a better way to make online income.

Regards

Cognitive surplus as an asset class.

I've just learnt of a new term this week - the cognitive surplus.

Your cognitive surplus is the amount of mental energy you have remaining after going through your workday. With the Internet allowing new business models to be created in seconds in the form of blogs, mobile applications or websites, its no wonder that at a global level, this is an asset that cannot really be ignored.

While the self-help gurus are trying to make sense of cognitive surplus as an idea, I'm going to step forward to say that the cognitive surplus is something which needs to be invested just like an asset class. In fact, your cognitive surplus should be part of your human capital and managing it well can mean more financial capital to fund your retirement or travel ambitions in the future.

The reality of cognitive surplus immediately kicks in after you are willing to consider it as yet another form of investment.

In this reality where a business can be built in minutes and torn down in seconds, saturation of the Internet as a media makes it very hard to generate a positive ROI within any reasonable time-frame.

In my personal case, selling my time for money at work seems efficient enough. Investing my wealth for dividends has also been relatively frutiful. But an honest examination of how I am using my cognitive surplus reveals that there are many areas of improvement. In fact, I can safely say that I'm losing money and time from my cognitive surplus ( maybe there really is such a thing as a cognitive deficit. )

Only one out of three of my books has broken even. My on-line boutique does not really sell due to high prices and my e-book has only allowed me to get back my capital. Like any business, employing your cognitive surplus requires capital and you will need to husband the steady flow of income into something which is repeatable, it's like turning your ideas and brain juice into an annuity-like financial product.

As I have yet to get my formula right, I can only guess what's the next step for me :

a) To leverage on cognitive surplus, first seek a platform where you can easily reach your niche market. My RPG books sell in RPGNow.com.

b) Use a small project with little time and money and then seek to break even to push yourself up the learning curve.

c) Using sales figures as feedback, employ deliberate practice to adjust price points and optimize expenses accordingly.

d) Seek secondary benefits, like skills you learn can be applied to your day jobs or refine the way your invest your financial capital.

e) For me at least, the cognitive surplus simulates a deeply out of money call option. Until you can find a niche or a consistent set of customers, you are more likely to never get into the money. As many options expire worthless, many out of office efforts only lose time and money.

Right now, I consider myself lucky. As it turns out, my day job and investment income funds my dreams of a being a writer. I could also be finding other ways to squander my cognitive surplus like spend my time watching TV or playing computer games.

But it's humbling to know that there is a long way to go before my cognitive surplus can be converted into an annuity payment.

I hope someone with better luck out there can share some ideas with me on managing this new 'alternative investment'.

If women are not choosy, men will have no standards.

I was privileged enough to read this article from another blogger in Singapore.

Rachel Zeng's Tirade

Personally, Rachel is a idealist who wants the world to conform to her liberal conscience. There is a better way to get the message across to Singaporean men if she has issues with them. Coming up with an essay to shove egalitarian down Singapore's throats will only result in being ignored.

Get this :

A) We Singaporeans do not want equality.
B) Every election result is a proof of this reality.
C) Meritocracy is not equality.
D) Some people do get a lot more than others. And their kids get even more than that.

If I were Rachel, I would approach the problem in a different way.

When men accuse women of being materialistic. The proper answer from feminists should be,"Well, so what's YOUR problem, not man enough to meet our standards izzit ?"

Many of us privileged Singaporeans who live carefree lives to the point of being able to blog about it know that we exist because our mums married correctly.

Our mums chose our dads who then proceeded to raise us, send us to school and give us enough support and advice to have great careers. In short, our mums had GREAT TASTE, that's why we are getting along in Singapore !

A human female, unlike a human male, invests a lot more in parenting than a human male. As such, evolution has armed women with a nose of sniffing what's best for kids. Tall, athletic men with symmetrical features signal healthy children in the future. Wealth signals availability of resources. Women are so-called materialistic because Mother Nature ( being a woman ) intended it.

This comes back to my biggest contribution to resolve the plight of the Single man of Singapore.
The magic figure is an income of about $4,500 a month. This puts you somewhere along top 30th percentile in earnings that will make you acceptable to the average female graduate who forms the biggest pool of single women in Singapore.

Work hard, get this resolved first, then focus on other areas like your dress sense, sense of chivalry, vocabulary, etc. Failing which, take your income to country where people make dramatically less. Statistics are beginning to show that Singaporean men are approaching this golden era of being God's greatest gift to Asia. Our GDP per capita is solid and we're growing 6.5% this year.

I have advice for women:

a) Don't wait too long.

I sound like the PAP now but us guys will accumulate our wealth and in time, we will become great catches in SE Asia or North Asia. Singapore men are appreciating assets like growth equity. Singapore women need to keep yourselves looking good. If Singaporean are going to accept that Singaporean women are realistic, then get real about about what we Singaporean men really WANT from a relationship.

b) Turn men down decisively, be cruel if necessary.

It's very painful to listen to stories of rejection from my single friends because it's such a long drawn out affair that destroys morale.

We men recover from rejection fast and we're good at moving on.

After all, we were rejected from top secondary schools, the gifted program, OCS and some local universities. Don't say,"I not free this Friday but next week maybe but my dog got birthday. " That's weak and you're wasting our time.

Say something like this,"You do not fit into my image of what a husband should be like." or " I don't think my family will be proud of me if I bring you home." Over the long term, we will appreciate this.

c) And look after your own finances.

I tell my wife this since I started dating her.

I wanted her to have her own financial resources because infatuation does not last long - 2 years at most. Enduring love in a marriage is more like respect and companionship but women need to account for straying men. When men hit mid-life crisis, they will do all sorts of things to prove their virility so women should maintain a piggy bank of their own.

Adventures in Monetization via e-publishing.

For months, my personal time was spent thinking of ways to generate Internet cash flow. I refused to employ methods espoused by Internet marketers and wanted to see how far I can go using only open sourced tools and some free websites.

Employing only Open Office Writer was quite a challenge as I realized that there is a need to relearn all the user interface features of new software. When it got to desktop publishing, I used Scribus, a free product which had difficulties importing from Writer tables I spent days churning out. The open sourced world gets your done eventually but the learning curve is much higher and it encourage a sort of "work-around" mentality which is crucial in the IT industry these days when things are very dynamic everyday.

Anyway, my e-book broke even within 2 weeks of being on sale on a specialist online RPG store. It's not a lot of money, about $20 US dollars which confirms that my short project was a success. Perhaps within this year I will redeploy my templates to build a few more products to generate more cash flow so see if I can generate a steady stream of $50 a month.

There are some lessons I learn here :

a) On-line businesses are hard to start. Until you can confidently generate income, use only your personal time to so stuff.

b) There are sites which sell generic e-books, odds are that you won't sell anything. A website that caters to your audience will have a smaller traffic but will have more people who will take a liking to your book.

c) Blogging to preview or advertise your product can help greatly.

So far I think the jury is still out on Internet Marketing. I do know that, for most ordinary people, creating on-line products and selling them is an inferior strategy of generating passive income. Far better to get decent work with your qualifications and then aggressively invest them in income generating real estate and equities.

But I going to keep on trying to prove that I am wrong in this regard. I can take my time because i still have a day job.

The result of my game product can be found here :

Noble : A Martial Controller for the 4e D&D game

A blog which promotes my Dungeons and Dragons 4e product is found here :

Noble Design Blog

Some solutions to population growth and foreign workers.

Today I will present a solution for population growth and foreign workers.

Population Growth

Population growth can stimulated by asking ourselves firstly, how much GDP will we allocate into having future generations of Singaporeans. Russians, apparently, are willing to allocate 1% of to stimulate population growth. Whether this 1% comes from education or defense, it does'nt matter, figure this number out and stick with it for the next 10 years.

When a Singapore couple have a baby, the mother gets up to 6 months no-pay leave. They need to raise the kid for a year on their own, but one year later, the parents can receive a bonus equal to the pool divided by the number of new babies made last year. This is a one-shot, bullet payment into their bank accounts. At 1% GDP, this number should be quite significant.

This will incentivise Chinese couples to have kids in inauspicious years, prevent overcrowding of resources and eliminate discrimination against working mothers.

Foreign workers

Yes, foreign workers keep many Singaporeans poor by lowering costs but they also contribute to the dynamism of the Singapore economy. When the government raise the levies, they get hammered and lose votes.

Let's look at Low Thia Khiang's solution of the dependency ratio and then add a price setting mechanism to push the onus of cost setting to employers. This is much like the COE mechanism but now its applied to foreign workers.

Governments should only decide how many foreign worker permits Singapore can accept based on the tolerance of the citizens. Every year, HR companies will bid for foreign worker permits. They will set a number of licenses and how much they are willing to pay. Bidding is done in one pool and banks bid in the same category as the construction sector. Minimum bid per head is a low $100.

Price discovery of the value of the foreign worker is based on the bids of the employer. They decide how much they are willing to pay for foreign workers, after which they will pay in one lump sum of the bid.

The government will stop screening foreign workers and instead screen for criminal records and diseases. Employers will bid for licenses and then hire from abroad, approval will be streamlined and determined by whether employers have the permit or not.

Proceeds from the bids will determine how much governments should pay for productivity improvements.

By the same token, rather than spend money paying civil servants to screen foreign workers, allow them to pay for PR status. Allow about 10k to 15k of foreign workers who have spent at least 2 years in Singapore to take up PR status by bidding for this. When they succeed, their employer will no longer need to have a permit to hire them so they can get higher pay. This may even force competitive bidding to become more than $50,000 per PR status.

For citizen conversion, allow PRs of at least 2 years to bid for citizenship. Have a low number 1,000 citizenship licenses for bidding. This number can even hit $200,000 in a bullish economy.

Share proceeds with existing Singaporeans with income tax offsets or CPF credits.

Regards

Carebears and a discussion on personal strengths that are useful in investments

The Carebears are an accidental creation which is something that is worthy of mention. I have some sort of mastermind group which is composed of close friends who are generally into self-improvement, financial mastery, abstract mathematics, sociology, Goatse, philosophy and other high-falutin ideas which many Singaporeans will disapprove of if they join us for a beer session in Ang Mo Kio or tea session in Tea Chapter.

The name arose from our accidental run-in with a group of competitive board-gamers who only meet when the World of Warcraft servers are down on a Tuesday. They call their meet-ups "Tuesdays with Assholes". I called for a dinner session last night calling it "Tuesdays with Carebears", carebears being a term for folks who play games for non-competitive, social or affiliative reasons, and the name somehow managed to gain traction within the group. Just hours ago, the gang started taking personality tests to figure out which carebear they most resemble them. And we're talking adult STRAIGHT men here.

So here's a toast to the power of ideas.

Ok, let's talk about personality tests.

I first learned of the Strength-finder 2.0 through Singapore's top blogger Mr.Wang. He took the test and recommended it for his readers. Being a Mr. Wang fan, I promptly bought the test and took it for myself.



My Gallup strengths are :

Analytical, Input, Intellection, Competitive and Activator.

I think these strengths lend very well into investing:

a) My Analytical inclinations forces me to see numbers before committing my money and I'm always looking for clear picture of cash flow before investing in a dividend stock.

b) Input as a strength makes it easy to read all the investment journals, take the CFA exams and absorb large amounts of boring statistical data.

c) Intellection is a strength that allows me to create internal dialogues to challenge my own investment beliefs, it also predisposes me to philosophy which introduces ideas like that of Karl Popper who taught me to come up with ways to falsify my own investment ideas actively to refine my portfolio.

d) My two other strengths of Competition and Activator gives me the motivation to become financially independent by benchmarking my status with my peers and pushes me to make snap decisions with a sense of urgency.

Over the many months I've known my fellow Carebears, I've noticed that there is a common thread in that almost all of them feel a compelling need to know more about themselves. It could be because they want to delve into the meaning of Life or wish to make a decision on whether they are in the right career path. As an amateur life-coach, I have always directed them towards using the Strengthfinder 2.0 to frame their decision based on what their Strengths are.

Right now, it's still to early to see results but I'm keeping my fingers crossed that when a person is still going through some introspection, it may be useful to look into their personal strengths and withhold judgment until they can learn more about themselves.

They may well find a trump card in their hand which can make a difference in their journey in this world.

Singlehood versus marrying a foreigner. Which is the bigger threat if you are single and looking for someone ?

According to a survey done in 2000, only 5% of Singapore singles want to remain single eventually. Although the faith in marriage as an institution has eroded, many singles are still interested in settling down. This article tries to arm singles with what to look out for when choosing a mate.

A discussion with a friend yielded some insight into what a single Singaporean should be looking out for.

Let's start out with a few assumptions:

a) If there are more singles than people who marry foreigners, singles are choosing single-hood because it is a better choice than marrying a foreigner. Pro-marriage singles need to compete with the concept of single-hood to find a spouse.

b) If there are more people who marry foreigners than singles, then marrying a foreigner is a better choice. Pro-marriage singles need to compete with foreigners to find a spouse.

The original discussion was focused only on Singaporean men marrying Vietnamese foreign talent, obviously that number is small so I've constructed a more interesting question that can yield itself to statistical measurement.

According to statistics which you can look for in the web, we can say with confidence that less than 20% of the Singapore population will be single once they reach 45 years old. ( According to census in 2000, number of singles in is about 15.5% for men and about 14% for women. )

Now, let's look at marriage trends. Based on recent marriage trends, only 52.5% of marriages registers in ROM are Singaporeans who marry other Singaporeans, deducting the number of marriages of foreigners with foreigners registered in ROM, about 40% of Singaporeans marry a foreigner these days.

So let's come up with an approximation of numbers to answer the question :

20% of Singaporeans prefer and thus, stick with single-hood. The rest are married.
Given recent trends, 40% of marriages are local-foreigners. 60% of marriages are local-local.

The final breakdown is as follows :

20% single, 48% married to a local, 32% married to a foreigner.

So clearly, the argument that a Singaporean will need to compete to single-hood versus foreign talent is not as convincing as the argument that Singaporeans will turn to foreigners if they cannot find a local spouse. This argument remains even stronger for Singaporean men as more Singaporean men are married to foreigners in 2008 than Singaporean women.

What insight can you possibly wean from this conclusion ?

a) If you are looking for a spouse, you need to be better than a foreigner. For men, it may be accumulated wealth and facial symmetry. For women, it will likely be based on waist to hip ratio and other predictors of sexual attractiveness.

b) If you simply cannot find a local spouse, it is possible to find a foreign spouse. This occurs often enough in Singapore to be a major lifestyle option.

c) But if you can't even find a foreign spouse, you will need to consider the possibly that you are not doing enough self-improvement to defeat singlehood which is currently the "weaker opponent". The solution is continuous self-improvement to become a better person for marriage.

I think this analysis is not complete. it would be interesting to break the figure down for Singaporean men versus Singaporean women. Most marriages with foreigners are committed by Singapore men. There is still a possibility that Singaporean women rather be single than marry a foreigner.

Regards