From Chai Png to Haidilao

 

In case readers are not aware, I stopped being frugal when it comes to food quite a while ago. My 20s were basically all about eating chai png and the occasional vegetarian bee hoon breakfast to keep my expenses low but after I became financially independent, I started eating like a normal person again. 

Recently due to COVID-19, I have been eating rather well and as I can't restock Dr. Wealth's pantry after a successful run of my program ( a pre-COVD habit I developed), I decided to buy a meal for the Dr Wealth staff who supported me faithfully during this rally tough period of the business. Furthermore, this is not a personal expense but a business one, with mini-meeting included, I can go all out on the meal budget. Also, the fact that the STI has rallied and I am getting November dividends clearly made the expense negligible.

I've always wanted to eat at Haidilao but somehow could not because my pals do not like eating there when we have gatherings claiming that it is expensive. Instead, I eat at a lot of Mala outlets in Chinatown. 

My curiosity about Haidilao is two-fold :

• What kind of service and food offering makes it command such a high premium?
• Is the company worth investing in if we just see it as day to day business?

For the service, there were two points which I liked. I was served drinks and snacks while waiting for the table to prepared. The staff really behaved almost like air stewardesses and even informed me that someone else will take care of us when there was a change of shift. Sadly, I was not able to witness the manicure offerings for the ladies because of COVID-19 measures.

For the food, I can only say that it is generally of high quality. Beyond the iberico pork and sliced beef, the beancurd skin stood out as well as sausages made of flour and mozzarella cheese. Against common sense and warnings from the staff, I chose the most unique spicy beef tallow soup-base, which was not that easy to stomach but the food was really fragrant. I ended up retreating to the tomato and chicken soup base to reduce the pain on my tongue.

Beyond the bells and whistles, was the $75/pax worthwhile? For a business meeting, definitely. But for me, I'd prefer to eat at a cheaper outlet at Chinatown. I can forgo some snacks for a 50% discount on prices. 

But Haidilao may be decent as an investment, the management has systematised great service and have been able to scale it around the world. I can imagine the same business system delivering Swiss Fondue or shabu-shabu to other parts of the world. 

Still, I will convince my family for another meal. But I think no spicy soup base for me the next time round. Spiciness can be delivered via condiments. 

Random perspectives on emigration

I don't have very much to talk about today, I just want to share some friendly perspectives on emigration. I had an update from an old friend and I thought his experience was interesting. As it turns out, some of the folks I gamed with over a decade ago are no longer located in Singapore. 

One, in fact, had left for Australia. Personally, I was kinda glad he did so because he isn't a big fan of Singapore and, if he stayed, I thought he may be a target for radicalisation.  

But my old friend had a much more interesting story. 

He left for New Zealand after securing a job posting there and spent a year or so enjoying the suburban life there. He tells me that he lives in a small town of 50,000 and there's a game shop serving the Warhammer and D&D communities there. Even more impressive is that kind NZlanders open up their large homes to gamers on weekends and six to seven tables of gaming groups can be joined if you contact the community over social media. 

Sadly though, my friend was unfortunate as he was on a business trip in the middle of the pandemic lockdowns and was shunted out of the country. The company failed to renew his work permit but managed to transfer back to Singapore. 

The whole process seemed demoralising and his family no longer wishes to settle down in NZ. A lot of money was wasted as he paid NZ taxes and contributed to their economy before failing to get his PR there. My friend tells me that when his family is ready again, he will attempt another country but this time his wife will insist that it would be Asian with Japan as a number 1 choice.

The second story is more interesting. A top data scientist friend is planning to come back to Singapore from Japan after spending many years in Japan. I really look forward to his return because somehow I think we can think of some interesting project to do together as we have mutual interests. 

The trigger is also the pandemic. After living in Japan for quite a while, my friend feels that he is not getting enough for the taxes he pays and it is much better to get back to Singapore where we get to save or spend more of the money we actually earn. 

For every course I conduct, students are invited to assess the feasibility of living in a foreign country with dividends picked up from REITs and other income investments. Over the months I have witnessed the power of our dividend stocks powering retirement plans in foreign countries, sometimes enabling retirement lifestyles in Western countries if students are able to stomach some leverage in portfolios.

Our paper exercise does not capture the difficulties and adjustments needed to settle down in a foreign country and pay taxes that we Singaporean PMETs will never get used to. In the case of NZ, you need to work for at least a decade before you can be entitled to a pension. 

If you have emigrated or are planning to emigrate, do share your perspective with me. 

I'm now sitting pretty in Singapore, but I will always be prepared to go in case my children can't make it in a highly-strung society like this.

ERM Community Webinar - 24th November 2020 7.30pm

 

On 24th November 2020 at 7.30pm, the ERM Community would conduct another Community webinar that is open to the public. We will be doing one such session every quarter where we showcase some of the more advanced concepts to share with our graduates. 

For the session on coming Tuesday, we will cover the following :

• ERM students are taught traditionally to buy and hold dividend counters. We will examine how to employ a data-driven TA trading methodology can be used to minimise regret. This will be reinforced by a demo by Ivan Fok of Pyinvesting.com to show how his tool can assist in this regard. 
•  An update on the ERM along with some concerns on the possibility of underperformance for the next 3 months as investors go risk-on. 
• There will be a 1-hour presentation that will rehash the presentation made to Republic Polytechnic entitled "Financial Independence!". This is a motivational presentation for absolute beginners on how to win the game of life.  

You can sign up for the talk by following this link.

Money is the Modern Equivalent of Monkhood

There is a spiritual dimension of Financial Independence Retire Early or FIRE that mirrors Eastern Religions that is hinted in Naval Ravikant's Almanack which I would like to explore in this article.

First I'd like to explore two concepts :

a) The Lesser Wheel of FIRE

The Lesser Wheel of FIRE is what we would typically associate with the FIRE movement - you have a history of basic expenses that you hope to care of with your investment income. When your investment income begins to cover your basic expenses, you gain Nirvana-like freedom from the capitalist world and it opens up whole new possibilities in lifestyle design. 

For REDs, you can start a business for world domination. For the rest, it can range from a cessation of corporate ambitions, farming entire salary to stock portfolios, or leaving the workforce entirely for personal hobbies if you are Green.

In many cases, investment income continues to rise after financial independence. Adherents to the Lesser wheel of FIRE may improve their quality of life and spend based on what was lacking during their FIRE pursuit, normalizing expenses to that of a normal Singaporean.

It is difficult to go beyond The Lesser Wheel if you conduct retirement courses because the bulk of the aspirations of Singaporeans probably stop here.

a) The Greater Wheel of FIRE

I tried hinting at the existence of the Greater Wheel of FIRE in many speeches I made in the past. The pursuit of the Greater Wheel is to strive for total independence from material wants. It is theoretically possible that a person not goes beyond quitting a day job, future increases in investment income come without an increase in expenses. 

You have transcended materialism. 

I'm not at this level, I may not even be at the Lesser Wheel because my life-energy exchange is so high, it would be irresponsible to my future generations if I stop my training work. My children may not be able to have a career that is a more optimal life-energy exchange. 

The Greater Wheel does not stop spinning until investment income reaches infinity. The highest need is to have no need for anything at all beyond daily survival. 

Still, I have a few rough ideas on developing this level of FIRE to this level of proficiency: 

• Break the contradiction between frugality and hedonism - If you have cold baths for a week, a hot bath will feel good. I take cereal with yoghurt for lunch so that dinner feels a lot more enjoyable. 
• Having children to inherit your wealth will lessen the desire to spend it down - Imagine being single and have over $10 million, you may not have the years to enjoy it till the end. Children solve that problem because it is natural for human beings to want to benefit their loved ones. 
• Personal accomplishments, not material goods, should form a bedrock of your identity - If you have your self-esteem tied to personal accomplishments and not material goods, you will have fewer wants that can be attained by spending money.
• Observe folks who study the Humanities - There was a joke that says that with a liberal arts degree you can be philosophical about the fact that it attracts such low salaries. You can be philosophical without a liberal arts degree.
• Leave one material weakness - If you know what you truly like and spend on it out of passion, you would come very close to reaching the ideal of the Greater Wheel, spending on everything else is superfluous. Don't feel bad if you have a weakness of PS5 Games. But avoid watches as they can cost a king's ransom. 

If you explore the duality of the Lesser and Greater Wheel, Money actually becomes a new kind of Monkhood. 

I'm not spiritual, but I have the potential to pursue a pecuniary form of enlightenment. 

Singapore's problem is encouraging Lifelong learning for "Green" personalities

This week I did something unthinkable in my 20s - I switched universities just before completing a course specialization. 

As it turned out, I no longer wish to pursue my studies in Digital Marketing. The University of Illinois has a decent program on Coursera but the material was too macro and high-level for me. I just wanted to bring more readers to this blog and then figure out how to start a better social media campaign. To continue this agenda, I will continue by reading some technical texts on content marketing. As I dislike marketing and prefer Dr.Wealth to handle the bulk of it for me, I prefer to keep this kind of selling to a minimum.

EDHEC Business School, however, has a program that is just designed for my skill level in Investment Management Python. The program dives deep into financial programming and expects students to be proficient in programming. This program is designed to be just challenging enough for me. 

For a Dominant RED personality like me, I take charge of my learning and will jettison any project that no longer gives me any ROI. My current course allows me to develop insights and improve my web app with new features every day, so my product grows in functionality and I grow in developing market insights on local stocks. If you study under a MOOC under Coursera, you should be familiar with thousands of ambitious RED and super smart BLUE personalities hustling to get their scripts marked, many from India and Sri Lanka. 

Singapore's policy-making cannot about REDs unless it is to get REDs to create jobs - something we'd like to do because it gives us some minions to boss around. 

I think Singapore's lifelong learning problem deals with GREENs. The steady, warm and accepting citizens that are the majority in Singapore. How can you convince unambitious GREEN folks who are contented into becoming unhappy, discontented, or worried enough to sign up for a program. 

There are many dimensions to the problem that is not within my pay grade to solve :

a) The first problem is that the majority of human beings hate programming which is where the best paying jobs are at the moment. Some startup guys can even know when someone gives up on Computer Science - at the point recursion or pointers is being taught. During my JC days when computer science was an A level subject across all JCs, the dropout rate for the first three months of JC ( even in a top JC ) is about 50%. 

b) GREENs may take the easy way out even if they come from the right industry. You hardly hear of 40-something guys talk about Tensor Flow or Keras, but there's always a way to escape via project management, AGILE, Enterprise Architecture or Scrum qualifications. Stuff that does not involve copious amounts of mathematics that is in high demand today. Mickey Mouse bullshit that does not add value to the world today. 

c) The only time a GREEN gets desperate to upgrade is when he gets retrenched, then all the years to pick up foundations for harder skills are lost. Government struggles with this group because they cannot fit into the jobs available in the market at the moment. 

So here's the thing : If the government fails or sees it as something beyond their pay grade, the private sector picks up the slack. 

Here is one thing I know: My course has a very BLUE/RED dominance.  It is, after all, fairly rigorous for a fun weekend that could have been spent in a zoo. I know my constituency -  ambitious RED guys want more money to push their ambitious into the investment and business realm, they are here to improve their own investment models, not to pick a new one up from me. The analytical BLUE guys want the tools to secure their portfolio so they can sleep better or sound more intelligent in their analysis. 

RED wants FIRE to kick ass. BLUE wants FIRE so they can stop their asses from getting kicked by REDs in the office.

If I follow the industry, I think I can make myself 2x richer if I shift my focus to GREENs. Just water down the course and promise a tool to generate a portfolio at the press of a button. Just teach folks how to press the button, then triple the price and focus on legal disclaimers. Focus on motivation, creating a subjective feeling, and engender a ruinous desire for money. Any simple TA strategy will do, the important thing is that you feel good about yourself. 

I know - I can rent a Lambourgini and stop wearing bermuda on weekends replacing it with suspenders and a bow tie. My motto should have been "Shake Leg your way to Retirement". 

Does that sound familiar?

You know what prevents me? 

I'm not a saint, so it's not my conscience. 

What stops me is the fact that my community will then be full of GREENs Jonesing for stock tips every day without really develop the wisdom to disagree with me every now and then. 

It's not a community. It's a cult. It's the reason why you guys hate all these Youtube guru videos. 

If you think about it, what the fuck is the discipline of marketing all about?

Having slogged painfully at my Digital Marketing Certificate, I think that marketing is all about getting  data from GREENs over and over again using cookies, so you can fuck GREENs by making them unhappy and inadequate because they are too lazy to know any better. 

We know that the majority of humankind is bogged down by personal inertia, they are agreeable and naive, why don't we track their movements on the web and hit them when they are most vulnerable? 

Let's show them a sportscar and make them feel bad for not having one!

I actually think it started with Procter & Gamble, where I learnt how to be a loyal employee. How to make housewives envious so they buy detergent. Hence Soap Operas! 

Now bloody copywriters are telling me to tell the angry customer that the reason they fail is that they're not diligent in following my formula. I think this disclaimer works if the customer is GREEN, the argument that they are not diligent will almost be universally true. You did not do enough qualitative research or read 10 years of financial reports, that is why you lose money.

I can't do that because my customers are smart. They know that they may lose money. But their only guarantee is that their trainer is leveraged so he stands to lose more, so he has tried his best.

So, maybe instead of listening to a copywriter ( who probably imbibed the same drivel from the 1990s Internet Marketers ), maybe you can bet on the portfolio customers have built and try to make a living out of that.  

Republic Polytechnic Talk : After-Action Review

At 4.30pm yesterday afternoon, I gave a 1-hour talk to students of Republic Polytechnic. This talk was attended by a decent number of lecturers, adult-learners and possible a smaller cohort of actual RP students, as the talk was voluntary, numbers are not big - the audience was between 30-40 attendees. If you measure that against my previews - I often get over 100 attendees every week. 

Here are my thoughts on that event :

a) On hindsight, the material should have been more technical as I had a fairly savvy crowd

I think the idea when we came up with the program was because 50% of RP students were on financial assistance, but here is what I learnt from giving out free seminars: If attendance for the talk was made voluntary, only the most self-motivated and moneyed students will volunteer to attend, and the quality of the questions asked would be of the highest quality. 

As such, I feel bad after Q&A because I should have prepared for a more technical talk. I had very good questions on robo-advisors, derivatives and one required an in-depth discussion on why standard deviation matters in measuring portfolio performance.

If I do get a gig with Singapore Polytechnic next year, I will stop pulling punches.

b) That single best martial arts manual for Singaporeans

One question that took me off guard was which book to read to get to grips with investing in the Singapore markets. I recommend several books in my preview but I struggled to recall the title that answers the question. In fact, I think I got the author wrong in my talk yesterday. I said "a book by Ben Fok" who has a few decent book, but it should have been Fong Wai Mun. 

Anyway, the book is here :

Fong Wai Mun taught my MSc cohort in 2001 and I recall my classmates saying that his exam was quite formidable. Other than that Christopher Tan book I gushed about in this blog but was seriously outdated, Fong Wai Mun and Benedict Koh's textbook is still used in local universities. 

This is the closest thing to a beginner's manual for local investors. 

c) How to become a millionaire at 30 

My favourite question came from a plucky RP student who said that he wants to become a millionaire earlier than me at age 30 and ask me what advice I would give to him. 

He does not know that as a troll myself, I love entertaining troll questions:

I told him that I was unqualified to answer as I made the first million way after that age in my late 30s. But I told him that I have a few educated guesses. 

My first answer is to join sales. Sales is a tough job that does not rely on educational qualifications and being in the top 20% of the sales pyramid can command salaries several factors that of a degree holder. I did remind the audience during my talk that 80% sales professionals earn next to nothing so they have to be outgoing and really like interacting with people to be top 20%. My second answer is to start a business and aim to IPO or exit before his desired age. 

No, I did not ask him to sell drugs.

For members of the public who are curious about the talk I gave to RP. 

On 24th November 2020 7.30pm, I will be repeating that performance to my ERM Community. 

You can sign up on this link here.

Personal Update - Several projects I am working on

 I did not manage to really enjoy a short one-week break I had last week due to a nasty bout of gout on my right knee. Nevertheless, I was able to advance a few items on my agenda :

a) Talk with Republic Polytechnic

My secondary school talk with Springfield Secondary has been enhanced by about 25% and will be performed with the Republic Polytechnic audience tomorrow. I was told that several lecturers and adult learners will be attending the talk, so I eagerly await the participation from lecturers. For folks who do not want to miss out on the performance, I will be conducting an ERM Community Webinar on 24th November to members of the public. 

More details will arrive on the blog later.

b) Retirement Simulation Tool launched to ERM Alumni

I guess an Early Retirement Masterclass would not be very much if alumni do not have retirement planning tools, so I deployed a tool to simulate and calculate the rates of retirement success if the student can provide information on their retirement portfolios. Use of the tool requires some training as users need to know not just the risk-return characteristics but the program accounts for skew and kurtosis as well. 

The ERM program already employs a significant number of bespoke tools I wrote using Python, Django and Streamlit :

• Simple Stock Analysis Tool.
• Retirement Simulator.
• Qualitative Data Crowdsourcing Tool ( For me to conduct classes )

The problem is that I currently use the free hosting on Heroku so the tool is not even close to final. I intend to migrate to AWS once I get the yummy $5,000 computer credits from Amazon. I suspect many founders would be unable to exploit this perk since larger startups may already be hosted in a different provider. 

c) ERM Preview attendance is off the charts 

The market recovery is not the only thing that's happening. I think investment course previews are having a mini-resurgence on its own. I will be having a preview tonight, so if you are interested just Google "ermintro" and take the first link to come to my talk tonight.

With the US elections over, the bulls are back and I expect students of all my latest to do well especially those with leverage. 

d) My journey with an incubator has begun

Last week I attended my first session with SMU's Incubation unit, I would be getting my meeting with a mentor this week and I will be mostly focused on admin matters like getting my Pte Ltd company set up.  Hopefully, some government funding should not be too far away as I would like to launch more retirement planning tools for my community. 

The aim would is to launch tools to replicate a significant portion of what a professional advisor can do for my community to strengthen DIY investing and retirement planning in Singapore.

Different Personalities in FIRE

 

The idea of this article started when I having a shit. 

I was using the Coursera iPad app and attending lectures on Digital Marketing by the University of Illinois and wondering to myself what excuses other 40-somethings have when it comes to reskilling and Skills Future when you can actually attend university lectures and even complete some quizzes which taking a crap in the toilet. This led to other crazier ideas, like whether someone can actually debug a computer program or compose legal documents while making some brownies in the outhouse.

The book Surrounded by Idiots by Thomas Erikson added an extra dimension to my thought experiments. For years, I have heard of a personality profiling system called DISC but no literature was accessible in the bookstores. This book was the first one that brought this simple personality profiling system into popular business non-fiction medium.

I suppose from the DISC personality profile, people who attend university lectures while taking a shit can be pigeon-holed into folks with the "Dominant" personality. Folks who are Dominant or those with a Red personality are also the same kinds of people who will wonder why other people are so inefficient and will not consider writing computer code or even make submissions to the court while bombing Hiroshima in the privy.

But maybe this blog should not be fixated with the topic of shit, let's leave that to some forums with commissioned financial advisors and instead focus on how the DISC personality profile can be applied to FIRE. 

a) Dominant - Red personalities

A secondary reason I joined the public sector was that they are willing to water thousands of tax-payers dollars on profiling the personality of civil servants. My friends knew I was Dominant but no one could figure out my secondary mode, so I eagerly jumped at volunteering to coordinate a vendor to test my department. I was sorely disappointed to find out that my secondary mode - was also Dominant! This led to the conclusion that working for the government is really bad for my mental health. 

Not all Reds get to lead in organizations. We just end up getting frustrated at the navel-gazing, inertia, and cheap talk in most organizations. Ultimately Red's strength is that thought and action are the same things. This is also their biggest weakness in FIRE.

One of the things I had to acknowledge even after concluding my FIRE journey is that regardless of my 5-digit monthly investment income, I will always somehow do better by exerting my effort to make more money. Some simple truths are obvious, labour is cheap and amenable to leverage at a more profitable rate in a serious pandemic - hence my joining of the SMU startup incubator in the search for interns.

On the other hand, I still have some really bad Red habits when investing in the markets, many which I am happy to admit but will not teach my students because rookies cannot afford to be so cavalier about investment research:

• Generally, I prefer to buy the stock before I start my research on it.
• Also, I hate long drawn discussions on details like the WALE of REITs, the profile of REIT lending preferring to "spray and pray" a REIT sector which I expect to out-perform. I favour broader statistical odds of a portfolio of 10-15 stocks. I currently have 60-70 stocks and I can't track them all.    
• I really hate long-drawn arguments about safe withdrawal rates, I prefer to aggressively attack the problem head-on. One Python program is one page long and takes half a day to write, maybe another day to host on the cloud.  If there's a weakness in my methodology, I debug and amend in 20 minutes tops. Then everyone in my community can figure this out on their own with my tool.

In summary, I can move very fast but can be a disaster where the details matter. 

This is the primary reason why I actually fear becoming a real lawyer. One tiny clause can get me into trouble with a client. I spent my training contract worrying over comma placements and documentation.

I suspect Reds will not like FIRE that much because they may prefer to run their own companies. FIRE also involves a degree of number crunching that reds may not have the patience for. My initial attraction to FIRE was because I was competitive and thought an additional income can put me silently ahead of my savvier colleagues even if they get promoted earlier than me. 

b) Influence - Yellow

Yellow personalities are eternal optimists and the best salesmen in the group. They are often the most popular folks in any click. You can identify the Yellow guy when the Hokkien Peng calls him "Siao eh ! Ho bo? " My best buddy is Yellow and I suspect yours is as well. Yellow is often extremely eloquent and persuasive.  

Unfortunately, pathological versions of Yellow can be exasperating for Reds like me. They can't keep to time and, when they start talking, you will not be able to get a word in. Worse, hardly any conclusion can by when a group of Yellows come together to make a decision. Extreme Yellow personalities are least likely to able to maintain their attention span in an investment class and even if they spend thousands on it, would not have the discipline to carry out FIRE. 

I had a quintessential Yellow friend who was well-loved by everyone but his personal life was a thick mess because he attracted a lot of drama. He passed away some time ago because he could not maintain his medical regime. We miss him a lot today, but we have to admit what a train wreck his personal life was.

Yellows probably make better investment trainers than Reds because of their charisma and personality, but this may not be in the investment realm because investment requires a basic level of numeracy and discipline. If I scale my business, I will ensure that I maintain my syllabus and hire a Yellow to conduct the lessons. 

Students probably will enjoy the classes until they realise that the instructor has money problems of his own.

c) Compliance - Blue

Holy shit, Blue guys can be intimidating because many end up being my customers and fans. Where Yellow is all about the Oral, Blue is all about the Anal. 

If you want to audit someone, hire a blue. If you want audit matters resolved, hire a red. 

Make no mistake, Blue is the color of FIRE. If someone FIREs early, my bet is that he is primarily blue. 

Blue guys are natural accountants. I teach Factor investing with Z-Scores and I can spot a Blue student  a mile away. The Blue guy wants more investment factors into his model, he may want to toss PB, PE and PS factors into his model at the same time. He also wants to adjust factor weights in Z-Score calculation. One of the ways I catch up with Blues is to use my leisure time writing Python programs to answer the questions they pose which cannot be answered by experience or by hand, which often are the most challenging intellectual questions I grapple with. 

That being said, Blues can be crippled by their inability to make decisions when investing that are often time-bound. By the time you are 100% sure that a REIT is safe, the RED would already have Parkway Life and Keppel DC REIT at 2x leverage in his portfolio and laughing at the Blue's shitty yields. 

My customer base is strong Blue and I lose a lot of sleep to keep them happy by repeatedly updating my preview and lecture materials. It's thanks to the blue audience customer feedback of my course has gone from 6-7 to about 8-9 over the past few years.

d) Steadiness - Green

And then there is a deep forest of Green that dot the entire population. Green is a stable, supportive and sincere part of the population and forms the largest number of your colleagues. 

Nothing much can be said about Green because they make the bulk of your acquaintances, the world would be a horrible place if we're all Reds and Yellows, it is the Greens and Blues that keeps systems running and are happy and content with the status quo.  

The problem with Greens and FIRE is that Green's often lack drive and ambition. FIRE requires a ramp-up of adrenalin at earlier parts of your life so that you can ramp down earlier but Greens will argue that they already feel quite relaxed now. 

It is very difficult to overcome the inertia of Greens, but the question is whether do we truly want to?

One of my priorities is to hire some administrative support to improve the design of my slides and keep an eye to attention and I think I should be finding a Green to be my first employee. I am very afraid of hiring a Red to my team. It's always some guy with poor paper qualifications who keep wondering why is he surrounded by so many idiots and why I can't run my business properly. 

All this being said, an investment course would keep in mind to consider Greens when marketing themselves. A very ultra-Green pal told me that my course actually has a fairly decent component for "lazy" investors and walked me through how he would employ his learnings in practice without doing a single minute of stock analysis, I added his feedback to my previews and manage to improve conversion rates. Maybe this is something I need to look deeper. 

Let me end by sounding out a note of caution. 

Humanity is fairly diverse and the simplest personality profiling techniques used by academics involve five factors like Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Open-minded, Neuroticism and Extroversion. If you can reduce a friend to one out of four pigeon-holes, you are running into the bias of stereotyping. The context determines which personality a person adopts - just try observing your Green friend turn Red after getting retrenched if he has a mortgage.

I suppose the idea of rapidly positioning someone into one of four neat categories is something a Red like me would love because it is just such a better use of my personal time. 

FIRE parallels in other domains of self-help.

 

One of the things I picked up from Naval Ravikant's Alamanak is that there are parallels of FIRE in other domains of self-help. To assist the reader of this blog to do this, you need to understand financial independence from two key processes that determine its success :

• A reductive process you apply to expenses. 
• A multiplicative process you apply to assets via compounding. 

Driving these processes is, first of all, will-power or the ability to delay gratification. You need to put in some mental effort to motivate yourself to save money to commit to the reduction of anything in life. Secondly, you need some open-mindedness and knowledge to multiply your money better. This requires a degree of risk-taking and trying out new stuff. 

Because you seldom find a combination of willpower and open-mindedness in the same person, this is probably why so many folks fail in the self-help domain. It is also the reason why authors and trainers can thrive in these areas: demand for training and books is perennial but it seldom leads to people being able to solve their own problems completely. 

Here are two areas that I still struggle with  :

a) Health and Nutrition

I am still recovering from a nasty gout attack that struck my right knee for the past few days. A week ago, I went to meet a few friends in the pub and had a really nice $17 ribeye along with some alcohol. The result is over a week worth of pain and a $50 medical expense. If I can exercise the same discipline to FIRE as health and nutrition, I would not have to go through all that suffering. 

Intermittent fasting the equivalent of budgeting in FIRE. You reduce your intake of food to 8 hours out of every day and get to burn fat the rest of the 16 hours. This led to a 0.5 point improvement in my blood sugar. 

While you can't grow your nutrition, you can multiply the variety of your food intake. This, I do not do well in my life right now because I think a diabetic at my age should find a way to get better nutritional supplements. What prevents me is the sheer amount of MLM and corporate-sponsored research out there that confuses a lot of issues. 

Personally, I hope this matter will be resolved soon with a proper meal replacement like Soylent which can be a hit with hacker types in the US. This is almost the equivalent of a nutritional robo-advisor.

b) Knowledge and Meditation

 I can tell that Naval Ravikant is a really spiritual guy because he promotes meditation a lot.

Meditation is the reduction of stray thoughts. As someone who failed in picking up meditation quite a few times in my life, I am aware that this is something that requires quite a bit of self-discipline. This is possibly something I need to pick up again soon. It's getting harder to keep my mind clear as I always have a financial programming problem I have to solve every day. 

The second process is of course reading and the accumulation of knowledge. Reading is probably the most important skill in the modern world, but I see many problems even with folks who self identify as voracious readers. In this sense, we should try to aspire to what Navikant or Munger does which is to multiply the mental models that you have. Over time, you will have a number of models in your toolbox to tackle life situations - it can compound your personal effectiveness. 

Doing this is hard. You have to read stuff out of your usual comfort zone or you may disagree with politically. I have issues even with financial experts who read only finance books - you get this tool blabber on and on about Warren Buffett but lack the historical depth to know that richer folks like Jacob Fugger exist.

Reading opens the mind.

These days, I find my own personal disdain for English Literature unsustainable once I realised that the obsession of Mr. Darcy by Victorian era chicks was due to the passive income he derives from Pemberly Estate. Sometimes when I mention this to English Literature types, I do not know they are impressed or totally disgusted by my ability to reframe their holy religion solely in solely monetary terms. 

The trope of female hypergamy is so big I wonder why this is not taught to boys in secondary school. 

The Mr Darcy of the Past is the Christian Grey of the modern era. 

 

The Final Word on the Safe Rate of Withdrawal

This is going to be a rather abstract post on the safe rate of withdrawal because too much ink has been spent on this problem. 

I think the bigger tragedy is that too little code has been written to address this issue.

As of this week, I have been able to inch closer to resolving this for retail investors by combining several programs I wrote on Python. 

Here's how I think the issue can be resolved once and for all:

a) Define a retirement portfolio that generally works and is uncontroversial.

This can be done by any advisor. I did this with a 50/50 portfolio of VT and AGG. A large global equity ETF combined with a US Govt Bond ETF.

Once we have defined this, we can look at historical returns. In such a case, we programmatically find out the statistics of using such a portfolio over the past 10 years. My program output looks like this.

The numbers are not too bad for a 50:50 Stock:Bond fund. Even better, the period coincides with a recovery from the 2009 recession so it's not too different from the current climate. 

b) Generate a probability distribution function with the same statistics as the numbers obtained.

This is the hardest part of solving the problem. 

If we assume that returns are normally distributed, we will not be able to account for the skew and kurtosis (fat-tails) of financial markets. I was googling for an answer and managed to find a function that can do that on Python. 

However, mathematicians are warning that it can be inaccurate, but I'm an engineer and not a mathematician and really don't give a flying fuck.

Source-code is attached. It was a bitch to debug the code done by the original guy. 

import numpy as np

from statsmodels.sandbox.distributions.extras import pdf_mvsk

import scipy.interpolate as interpolate

def generate_normal_four_moments(mu, sigma, skew, kurt, size=100, sd_wide = 3):

    variance = sigma*sigma

    f = pdf_mvsk([mu, variance, skew, kurt])

    x = np.linspace(mu - sd_wide * sigma, mu + sd_wide * sigma, num=1000)

    y = [f(i) for i in x]

    yy = np.cumsum(y) / np.sum(y)

    inv_cdf = interpolate.interp1d(yy, x, fill_value="extrapolate")

    rr = np.random.random(size)

    return inv_cdf(rr)

The pdf turns out to be really unlike any distribution of a balanced portfolio proving that mathematicians are not really jiak liao bee and are worth listening to, but such are the limits of what can be done using Python at the moment:

c) Build 1000 imaginary portfolios and see how many are successful and how many fail.

Once the pdf is defined, the question comes from generating 1000 portfolios with random returns from the probability distribution function. I start with a capital of $100,000 and I spend the withdrawal rate every year for 40 years but subject the capital to randomly generated VT:AGG market returns.

An example set at 5% withdrawal rate looks really pretty.

From the analysis, in 1000 alternate universes, 982 can sustain a VT:AGG portfolio with 18 fails, failure defined as a portfolio 80% lower than the starting value ( < $20,000 )

Clearly, spending 8% is asking for trouble :

There are a lot of problems employing this approach and I'm not sure whether professional tools actually have a way to resolve it :

• If you take a 20-year backtest, the return statistics of the retirement portfolio changes too drastically and can impact the number later. 
• Mathematicians say that it is not straightforward to generate a PDF with four moments of return, variance, skew and kurtosis. So the function call itself is suspect. 
• No one really withdraws a percentage value. Your cost of living is likely a fixed number. 

I don't know how professional tools do it, looking at some spreadsheets on the web, it may sample from actual historical data. This can be a problem for local folks trying to retire using Netlink Trust and ABF Govt Bond Fund which does not have a historical track record. 

But with whatever I have, I should be able to launch a web app for my community to play with soon. 

But right now my stand does not change, if you don't feel secure, aim for a withdrawal rate of 3.5%. The field of mathematics and computing may not be ready to solve your problem. 

How does a guy turn into a BBFA ?

 

Japanese authors Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga continue to produce "idea dividends" in their second book on Adlerian Philosophy entitled The Courage to be Happy. Some of the frameworks in therapy can be really useful in deconstructing fellow Singaporeans. Today I will apply the Adlerian Stages of Problem Behaviour to study, and shed light, on how Singaporean become Bui Bui Forever Alone,  a special breed of Internet troll that exists in our local interwebs. 

Let us first discuss the context of dating in Singapore. Unlike women, men can be judged by their success in life. This is often material or financial in nature. When men gather, they often sort themselves based on hierarchy loosely based on material and financial success. So men who are trying to mate have to contend with female hypergamy. It's not that Singapore women are materialistic - Singapore women may find that having some material success corresponds to psychological traits that make good dads, like conscientiousness and punctuality. 

With the context in mind, we can examine how problem behaviour exhibited by wayward students can map directly to a guys' apotheosis into the life of a BBFA.

Here are the five stages of problem behaviour:

a) Demand for admiration 

Every guy wants to be admired. During the first stage, a guy has this idea that, by simply being himself, he should be able to, occasionally, get a word of praise from women. Because he is new to this game, he often acts like a normal, card-carrying member of society to get the praise he craves. Often they enough from mums at home. 

This is where the problem begins. 

Women won't praise you for being yourself. ( Gen X women may even insult or rebuke you for being too normal. ) Men soon learn that being normal hardly resolves their craving for love in Singapore society.

b) Seeking Attention 

 

The guy realises that he needs to seek attention to stand out. He's also competing against other guys so he needs to set up a marketing department and do some SEO (for his genitals). At this stage, he often gets a gym membership. Others guys may, to the detriment of FIRE, get involved in conspicuous consumption.

This is no longer a personal game. It has to be played against other men. The logical conclusion in ferocious dating markets in Shanghai is that a guy must burn a huge amount of their life energy to buy an apartment to qualify as husband material. 

c) Power Struggle

Everybody cannot win at the mating game. Some men will find that they will fail to seek the attention and love they crave, so instead of attaining a privileged position, they start to challenge women. Popular dating books encourage this bad boy attitude. This is where Millenial guys invented this horrible technique called "negging". Criticizing women and lowering their self-esteem to get ahead in the mating game. Some of my single friends still get very hyped up when talking to my single lady friends on social media, they pick stupid fights betraying their personal lack of sexual access.

A lot of mansplaining occurs at this stage.

d) Revenge  

Things start to spin out of control at this stage. Feeling rejected, and failing to get attention even after negging a woman pushes a guy eventually off the edge.  He begins to take revenge on women.

Some men take to trolling (like me - I love posting offensive relationship articles when I was in my 20s), but if it gets out of control, this is the stage guys talk about Men's Rights and join the more hateful movements like Gamergate. Apparently, games researchers find that the men who criticise and try to exclude women from gaming circles are also the more incompetent players. 

If you are not careful, the law needs to be called in to deal with guys going through this stage.

e) Proof of Incompetence

At this stage, the transformation to BBFA becomes complete. Every attempt a guy has made to get a woman's attention has failed. Trying to stand out failed. Trying to neg them failed. Even revenge did not earn any more than indifference.

The last stage is to simply give up and join the Brotherhood of BBFA. They finally enter a stage of despair. The idea that, at this stage, only a specialist can be called in to help.

Modern society is designed to not really give a shit about leftover guys, they get labelled Bare Branches or Hikkikomori. We will be seeing a lot of men in retreat as we recover from the pandemic as many men will never rejoin the labour market.

Alfred Adler suggests that this problem can be nipped in the bud in a classroom setting if teachers treated students with more respect, but this is kinda hard to apply to single males in Singapore. Women, who have evolved to be the pickier gender due to higher rates of parental investment, cannot afford to sacrifice their own personal interests. 

What if a guy they don't like were to keep sticking to them? 

I have a son. My own personal solution is to shower him with unconditional love but have him be aware of the relentless competition in the dating markets. He somehow has to realise that his parents love him, but society is ready to be completely indifferent to him if he cannot contribute to the country.

But I think a lot of us knows this.

It is entirely possible that no one is thinking about us as we go about our day. 

I know that thought drives a lot of single women crazy.

On the FIRE movement's enemies...

 

I realised that I've developed a new superpower lately - People are starting to dislike me without ever interacting with me, or even reading my blog. 

A buddy of mine has other friends and have been explaining to them about my approach to conquering personal finances. He tells me that after a while, his contacts often began to get upset when I become the topic of the conversation and even became hostile after a while. Case in point, some small-time entrepreneurial types think that making money by allocating capital is somehow criminal and dishonourable so I get conveniently installed as the Satan/Thanos in their multiverse.

In the book Courage to be Disliked,  a possible explanation of the resistance against the FIRE movement can be made using the concepts in Adlerian psychotherapy. Alfred Adler is one of the greats in the field of psychology and often compared to legends like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. 

One way of addressing resistance to FIRE is that we often take a causal stance to our personal finances.  A lot of my critics, even some ex-colleagues, believe that starting circumstances determine their odds of attaining Financial Independence. Other words, you may fail to FIRE because you come from a humble background, or lack paper qualifications. As a trainer, I am particularly vulnerable to justifications like this because I come from a fairly well-off family - I don't have a rag to riches Cinderella story where I helped in my dad's hawker stall which studying in front of a candle at night. In some forums, I've seen really salty readers dismiss a decent article because the author is a billionaire. 

This psychological defence is considered very Freudian. In fact, the atas term is Freudian Etiology. We often claim that we cannot succeed because of the past, or some obstacles we inherited through no fault of our own.

Alfred Adler has helped a lot of kids with developmental issues, and he proposed a workaround. He suggests that we replace Freudian etiology with Adlerian teleology. 

The idea is that people resist something by saying that they have a past that prevents them from succeeding but, in essence, staying unsuccessful has a hidden purpose or goal. Case in point, some guys claim they can't get a girlfriend because they are nice guy, when in essence, staying single means never becoming vulnerable or ever facing rejection - hence my strong BBFA readership.

So when we address FIRE's enemies or critics, we need to understand not the socio-economic reasons for their resistance, but how this kind of resistance adds value to them. 

Here are some possible reasons some folks resist FIRE :

a) They can maintain a moral high ground when they do not FIRE

There is something dirty about capitalism so collecting dividends is sometimes an immoral act because we are profiting from the labour of others. So when you work with your hands and never FIRE, you stay moral and untainted by greed. You are channelling the nobility of a peasant lifestyle and a life of toil, some religions reinforce such beliefs. 

This is very common amongst the woke Millenials and you often this resistance paired up with an obsession with inequality and minimum wages.

b) They will not have to endure the humiliation of failure after trying hard, so it is safer not to try.

FIRE is hard - you need to earn, save and then invest to have a decent chance of success. 

• If you fail to earn, it signals that society does not value your time or your skill. 
• If you fail to save, you have no grit and cannot delay gratification. 
• If you are bad at investing, you lack foresight and have poor judgement.

All aspects of failure can reflect a flaw in your character or personality so why allow yourself to be judged in the first place?

Those students that refuse to study so that they can get a lousy grade but justify that they did not put in much effort anyway fall into this category. This is a very common defence.

c) They are comfortable this way and don't want the discomfort of change

The last but most common reason is that we're comfortable with our worldview and don't see the need for change which can be uncomfortable. These are folks who downloaded and installed the Great Singapore Script. Study hard, get a degree, get married, buy a HDB, have kids, retire. Why let any competing worldview interfere with their script.

I think having inertia is fine, but a conventional approach will yield conventional results. Just don't get all salty when an old friend with a five-digit investment income spends more time drinking coffee in a kopitiam when you do.  

Regardless of whether you stand with me or against me. Go read the book. It is very difficult for Japanese self-help to emerge onto the global stage and this book really opens my eyes on how help can given to other people by installing a life philosophy.

I look forward to adopting this to my Republic Poly talk in the near future. 

Thank you Springfield Secondary School !

 

Thanks for the really forward-looking staff of Springfield Secondary school, I was able to conduct a successful talk to secondary 4 students via Zoom this morning. I don't believe that pro bono work is truly pro bono, I think I probably learnt quite a bit from my engagement today.

Do note that this event is attended by students who self-selected to attend. Unlike the RI sample space who are semi-obligated to show up, the students today all volunteered their own time to do this.

a) Pocket Money surveys do not show the massive difference in both samples.

The most curious question is whether neighbourhood schools have a significant financial disadvantage compared to an elite school. I did not find a significant difference in my pocket money surveys, but you should note that my sample is small and you cannot really compare apples and oranges.

So unless ACS has someone enlightened or insane enough to invite me, this will be a curious side project at best.

b) Participation was active and super-aggressive

Teachers who worked with me commented that they have never seen such aggressive participation for such talks in recent memory. Some Q&A could not even wait for the delivery to end. This is why I love doing this. 

The talk I designed is totally different from the clinical delivery I gave to RI. I gave the students a choice to choose their destiny and to do better even than there more academically well-endowed peers. Thanks to friends on social media and this blog, I think it succeeded in its basic mission.

c) The best question asked was whether I see myself as a happy person.

Make no mistake, the Springfield secondary who showed up for my talk were whip-smart! 

I entertained really thoughtful questions on the Supplementary Retirement Scheme (WTF right ?), the feasibility of leverage, and FOREX strategies. ( I suspect parents are prompting them! ) 

My favourite question, which took me off guard, was whether I considered myself a happy person.

I wanted to give as thoughtful an answer as possible, so I said NO.

In the pursuit of anything worthwhile, there will be pain and suffering. What is the point of getting grilled by a few super-kwailan Millenials half your age during International Moots if it did not teach you to stay calm and composed under fire? I told the students point-blank that I used to be able to process 20+ exams in a quarter because I had to update my Microsoft Certifications when studying for my Masters, CFA and FRM exams. 

Your state of mind while juggling so many balls in the air, cannot be happy at that time. I think I developed hyperactive thyroid after that.

But something happens as you are clocking your personal accomplishments. Instead of happiness, you get a sense of deep satisfaction. You see your finances taking off, your families growing, and if you are a wee-bit sadistic like me, folks from more elite backgrounds falling off the wayside as you methodically advance up the ladder.

So don't aim for happiness. 

Aim for satisfaction. 

In a future CNY gathering, some of them will be compared with that cousin who becomes a lawyer or a doctor. Whip up your bank account, and show them how much you saved because you started work after getting a diploma at age 21. Mathematically, you can maintain a wealth advantage with the right compounding rate for almost all of your years being single. Most lawyers gormlessly spend it all on alcohol anyway!

In my next pro-bono project, I will be speaking to Republic Polytechnic, I will be refining this speech I just gave to customise it to an older audience. 

Keep a lookout on developments on my blog. 

Letter to Batch 17 of the Early Retirement Masterclass

 

Dear Students of Batch 17,

It’s been a great honour and privilege to be able to conduct a 2-Day Early Retirement Workshop for you. 

So many things could have gone wrong in Batch 17.

First, we launched the ERM crowdsourcing tool, but I found out last minute that the web-hosted database will reset all recent input information whenever the website goes into sleep-mode. I had to run my web program from my personal laptop as a last-minute hack.

Second, the fundamental back-testing tool was not running properly as a code-fix made last night bungled up a data download from the provider. Fortunately, Ivan Fok, founder of Pyinvesting.com, was able to fix it 20 minutes before we started on our practice session.

This is my first taste of the ERM Masterclass as a startup where we often have to learn to eat failure for breakfast. If we survive, we will get capabilities beyond anything done in the past. Today, we can witness a taste of how a class can crowdsource qualitative information on investments and build an investing hivemind. My vision is for the students of my program to function as collective intelligence – the opposite of artificial intelligence that is trendy is startups today.

The most exciting part of Q&A concerns a million-dollar question that I can’t answer adequately to anyone’s satisfaction. How do we anticipate a downturn and avoid losses to the portfolio?

If I were to have a definitive answer to the question,  my personal Dunkirk moment, when I had to deleverage my margin account aggressively, would have been avoidable, and I would have been able to buy the markets at its bottom after that. While we do teach four possible ways to predict a market crash, not a single predictor allowed us to anticipate a pandemic in 2020. This failure is the reason to be humble and avoid hubris when investing with leverage.

One solution is in budgeting our risks. We keep loading a portfolio with bonds until the effective-shortfall metric on the Stocks Café dashboard becomes a number that we can tolerate moving forward. But this will inevitably lead to sub-optimal returns if markets rally aggressively when a vaccine is approved.

Being a retail investor will be challenging even if you are trying to fish for dividend yields. The choices were quite stark today, with every safe dividend-yielding counter producing meager yields. This is why we have a Facebook group to guide our community towards a higher level of investment proficiency.

Moving forward, I hope that Batch 17 would participate actively in the FB group. We should be able to see each other again soon as I am preparing for a webinar for all ERM graduates in November.

Christopher Ng Wai Chung

Personal Business Update - Startup ambitions are on !

There are a lot of things happening this week, the market for training courses is slow, but I am still running a class starting tonight so I'm surviving. But there's good news in almost every other front.

a) Got selected to join SMU's start-up incubation program

While juggling all the balls in the air, I created a pitch to see whether my startup plan can qualify to be part of an incubator. The attraction for me was to initially was to subject myself to "Shark Tank" grilling by business veterans and then maybe explode and fail in a dramatic manner. If I succeed, then I get to teach myself how to build a proper start-up. 

Problem is that beyond ERM, most of my ideas are half-baked and experimental. So the pitch creation was designed to be candid about my business prospects and explain my weaknesses - I focused on my poor Millenial engagement numbers, difficulties of scaling, and the problems of a single-man outfit.

The panel was really nice in the end. Questions were thought-provoking but hardly comes across as brutal. One particularly fun question was "Millenials got no money, how can they pay?" which led to a fairly technical discussion on pricing strategy if I launch a different product. I was lucky I forced myself through a Digital Marketing course on Coursera.

So odds are I will be incorporating soon. But some obstacles were thrown in my way recently:

•  The government no longer incentivise internships for fresh grads, I have to start considering mid-career folks. I was just complaining that I can't even design a career for myself, much less for another 40-something-year-old. But the incentive is such that I need to think about this seriously if I need a pair of hands to free me up to strike deals and create new products. 

b) My next pro-bono talk is likely to be Republic Polytechnic.

So my secondary school talk is next Monday and lecturer from RP has spoken to me to engage for another discussion so there is some good news on that front because I get to shape a totally different talk from the perspective of polytechnic students. Apparently, RP has quite a number of financial assistance cases, so it would be an interesting challenge to craft this speech. 

I suspect the secondary school talk may have a bigger influence on the angle than the RI talk.  Will share more once I get more data from RP.

c) Launching a crazy new tool this week to my ERM Batch 17 students

If you aren't failing enough, you are not pushing yourself hard enough

I am crazy enough to push my MVP product through to my students of this latest batch this weekend. I gave myself a crash course in developing web apps in Python Django and was able to repurpose a simple blog app (A blog is the simplest thing you can build on Django) into a crowdsourcing tool to guide qualitative stock selection. 

This solution is designed to have students do data input which is about qualitatively reviewing analyst reports and articles. It captures their willingness to include the stock in their final portfolios and even allows groups to comment and vote for their favourite stocks which I can then rank based on likeability.

It also has simple reporting features that allow me to cut and paste into a spreadsheet. 

I just pushed my code to the cloud and it looks like runs fine for now. Hope it would not crash on me on Saturday.

Anyway, I feel pretty pleased with myself because I'm not too aware of any other financial trainer that can code an launch a SaaS solution not the cloud for the benefit of their own students.

Letter to my Son : A project with Felix Cheong

Felix Cheong: " A good short story must have an eye-catching opening, can someone suggest an opening sentence to his short story? "

*I raise my hand*

Felix: "Chris"

Me: "His nipples hurt."

Something special happens when quantitative and numerical types get to collaborate with cultural and aesthetic icons. When software engineering meets fantastic design, you end up with a trillion-dollar company like Apple. 

At a much smaller scale, I am firmly aware of my personal biases and relish any collaboration opportunity with artists or poets. But that is hard because personalities can clash and projects delayed indefinitely. Imagine the sparks that will fly if some collaborator-poet discovers that I want Donald Trump to win in November! 

But something interesting cropped up during Phase 1 of the lockdowns. 

Felix Cheong, who was my instructor when I signed up for his writing classes eons ago, asked me whether I would like to contribute to his project where fathers were invited to write a letter to their son. This was huge risk for Felix because he suffered through my extremely pornographic fictional troll writings, the kind of fan-fiction you read on 4chan or reddit. 

Felix Cheong is one of the most prolific writers in Singapore with so many books under his name. His projects are also eclectic, spanning from poetry to prose and he might even have composed songs or plays. He has a serious business dimension too as I used to read his articles on The Edge. 

He is also a great dad - I know because I was able to spend some time talking to his son who is a Dean's Lister in SMU Law School. In contrast, I'm struggling to stop my son from streaking butt naked around the house. 

 

So for the next few weeks after being invited by Felix to participate in this project, I dived into this aggressively as I have not published anything for a very long while. The idea that I can publish with a very credible publisher under the traditional publishing model (as opposed to self-publishing and waiting for some paycheck to come from the distributor) was a very important milestone for me. Getting some contact with a good publisher is important on my next step as I start building a serious business. 

Without spoiling anything, I did not write some soppy letter to my son telling him that he can pursue any passion he wants, society has pretty firm rules on who gets to win the game of life and who gets to struggle in their parent's basement, remaining forever inconsequential and unloved in society. My son is still 5 years old, I pray he would not read it with scorn like the ranting of his old man when he finally sees it when in his teens. 

My letter falls firmly under the work or career management category.  

For folks who miss my writing, you can pre-order the book here via this link. 

OK Boomer, Let's Talk

 

Maybe it's the recent talk I was planning in a secondary school, I've been trying to get to grips with the war between the Millenials and Boomers in the US. I chose a very one-sided book by Jill Filipovic that really does nothing to win any empathy from her detractors. The basic thrust of the author's argument is that US Millenials are doing badly because of racism by Boomers - Millenials in the US are less white than Baby Boomers.

I am not vested in her argument either way, but I am bothered that Singaporeans are importing the cultural wars and identity politics from the US. Somehow, a few local idiots think it is funny to translate #BlackLivesMatter to #BrownLivesMatter. We really need to fight a battle against this because what the US is experiencing is magnitudes worse than Singapore.

Here are some things we don't have here in Singapore:

a) Student loan debts cannot be forgiven by becoming bankrupt in the US

I do not know the basis for this policy, but bankruptcy should be a chance for someone to achieve a clean slate in life. But in the US, study loans cannot be forgiven by bankruptcy, which means that young people who weighed down by an expensive education may be enslaved for a lifetime by the folks who lent them money to study. This is really punishing for minorities who get less financial aid and often have a higher dropout rate in schools.

In Singapore, we do the opposite - organizations like Mendaki actually provide generous scholarships to encourage academic achievement. 

b) Redlining of black neighbourhoods

There is this horrible process where poorer neighbourhoods get marked out in red and wealthier neighbourhoods get marked in blue. The government will then invest more heavily in wealthier neighbourhoods. 

In the US, suppose a home seller sells a house and receives an offer from a black family but a lower bid from the white family, neighbours will often intervene to make up the difference to prevent the black family from moving in. 

In Singapore, we have policies to enforce racial quotas to prevent the formation of ethnic enclaves and ghettoes. 

In fact, NUS researchers found that Malay home-owners will often part with their homes with a lower COV when selling to an incoming Malay family. The kampong spirit is still alive.

c) Opioid crisis

This really baffles me. In the early 2000s, the government decided to subsidise pain-killers but that also made it easier to get prescription pain killers for recreational use from pill-mills. This affected the mortality rate of Millenials, and more of them die compared to Baby Boomers of equivalent age.

Over in Singapore, we still hang drug traffickers. Most doctors will not risk their licensing by prescribing these drugs willy-nilly. 

Anyway, I'm not trying to say that we should ignore poverty in our own backyard, but if you are from the political Left reading this, go read the rants and tirades from your counterparts in the US and ask yourselves is the situation really the same here. 

Maybe in a future article, I may even argue that since Singapore Millenials are still employable, the closest generation to US Milllenials are SG Gen-X because economic opportunities are evaporating really fast.