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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

b) Claim to be retired early

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

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

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

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

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

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

c) Insult the national religion of Dividends Investing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, what can you do as a reader?

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

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

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

No management fees, no capital gains or dividends taxes. 

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

If you're not investing, it's fine. 

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

Letter to Batch 35 of the Early Retirement Masterclass

Dear Students of Batch 35,

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hope to see you then!

 

Christopher Ng Wai Chung

My Psychology of Spending

 

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

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

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

But I digress. 

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

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

a) Inherited capital

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

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

b) Earned capital

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

c) Dividends - Inherited vs Earned

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

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

d) Salary

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

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

e) Rental income from Malaysia

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

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

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

f) Government $$$ handouts and Academic vouchers

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

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

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

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

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

Rising against all challenges or floating through life?

 

What kind of life would you prefer to lead?

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does being in GEP raise the odds of attaining FIRE?

 

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

Who is right? I don't know. 

But I might have an idea of who is wrong. 

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

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

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

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

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

To create a more straightforward analogy, 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is a PUA kind of workplace

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

This can make ageism worse in Singapore. 

I offer an alternative. 

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

The game is simple. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Re-evaluating everything about our lives.

 

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

a) Signal that middle age is coming

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

b) The purpose of wakes

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

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

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

c) Shifting from achievements to joy

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

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

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

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

d) What gives you happiness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Personal Update

 

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

a) Was down with stomach flu this week. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

c) My single focus: Generative AI for investment analysis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do horny people find it harder to FIRE?

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The consequence can be found in a recent CNA documentary. 

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

Thoughts about my latest Cohort Reunion and 50th birthday celebration

 

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

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

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

Investing in Malaysia

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

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

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

 

Should you prioritise Financial Independence over starting a family?

 

I want to answer a reader's question that was posed to me lately. This person found someone very attractive, but she wants to prioritise early marriage and children. However, because this reader is close to FIRE, he is conflicted about choosing FIRE or jumping into the relationship. 

It is time to share my updated thoughts on this blog because I suspect my earlier articles may have had an undue influence on him. I am OK with changing my mind on this blog as I age. 

First, there are solid arguments for a single guy to choose FIRE over starting a family. This would be my choice in my 20s, having only started dating when I could live on investment income (because I can pay for every date with dividend payouts). For a guy, his bargaining power grows exponentially as his portfolio grows, and you be fixated on a kind of woman, but not a specific one, so go for someone only when your bargaining power goes up. Truth is, for most guys, the dating scene can be very cruel, with dates on Tinder trying to sell ILPs to you and most women going after that "6-foot-five investment banker with blue eyes." 

But as I got older, my mind started to change on this matter. 

Suppose you are a guy, and you've already been shopping around. You are already in your mid-30s with a solid career and educational qualifications. You find someone more attractive than your previous set of dates, and she is similar in professional credentials. 

I fail to see why her desire to start a family should stop you guys from going ahead; you're adamant about attaining FIRE. 

Some points of consideration :

a) Suppose there is a fear of divorce. The national statistics should not apply to readers of my blog. Suppose the rate of divorce is 30% in Singapore. Your probability of divorce should be much lower if both of you are not married at too young and have degree qualifications. Adjust your probabilities as you know more about your date. 

b) The idea that marriage and kids can slow down FIRE does not account for the government policies that are specifically designed to maintain a heteronormative society via the BTO/EC systems. While a single guy can probably FIRE much earlier, he will lose out on the capital gains from a leveraged residential property that only married couples can buy. So far, the increases in my EC valuation exceed how much I spend on my two kids. 

c) Folks don't understand that marriage and kids can build one of society's most potent economic units as you reap economies of scale. Statistics show a retired couple spends less than two singles living separately. 

The final point I want to make is that many readers may be fixated on the remaining single FIRE thought leaders, but I don't believe that they will have the last laugh.

Just because a person is wise with money does not make them wise regarding relationships. If someone has money and is unattached, it may even say something about their personality!

I don't believe that any of my happily single friends have a plan to counter loneliness, which can kill at a rate faster than heart disease, and it actually gets more complicated to form friendships as a guy after your 50s. I don't see Gen Z running up to me to get me to play D&D with them. 

At the end of the day, we can learn from the tragedies we read about in the press, the cases of Yang Yin  

and Mitchell Omg / Audrey Fang may be lurking in the corner, waiting to pounce on the elderly who are financially independent.

Who will spend your money in the end?

Some advanced thoughts on Malaysia and KL

 

After returning from my trip to KL, it might be time to talk a bit deeper. I hope that these random thoughts can moderate some of the feelings of folks who are caught up in the fervour started on some Telegram groups about buying homes in JB or KL.

a) Conscious currency conversion between SGD and MYR

While in KL, I often divided the cost of any item I wished to buy by 3.5 to calculate the equivalent cost in SGD, and I would always conclude that the price was low. Malaysians in Singapore do the opposite. They apply a multiplier of 3.5 and always conclude that everything in Singapore is costly. 

I had an attitude adjustment from a Malaysian friend who works as a PMET in Singapore. He has to travel to and from every week to give his family a better life. He is the only person who provides a unique perspective on all this. He says that Singaporean food is very cheap compared to Singaporeans' salaries. 

Imagine what it's like to pay MYR $15 for economic rice as someone who works in Malaysia. 

b) By the numbers, KL would make an excellent retirement destination for Singaporeans

If you look at the situation from a pure numbers perspective, my ERM students researched and showed that an expat in KL can live on $20,000 SGD a year, including rent in a one-room apartment. This means that a 4% withdrawal rate and a $500,000 portfolio can provide a working retirement plan for a single person. 

Beyond the numbers, issues like political stability, changes to the MM2H scheme, and safety will still be a big impediment for many Singaporeans. Having close relatives nearby and being a good driver can greatly help your retirement journey. 

c) Buying Malaysian real estate is still a terrible idea

After my trip, despite all the news about more collaboration between our two governments, buying property is still a bad idea. Singapore's land scarcity is unique to us, and we can't transplant our ideas about owning land to Malaysia. 

KL has old towns like Cheras. KL also has townships which are has-beens like Subang Jaya and upcoming yuppie enclaves like Putrajaya. The fates of house valuation will be based on these shifting tides.

It's nowhere close compared to the millions of dollars of equity you made buying your EC during the PM Lee era. 

That being said, there is nothing wrong with renting a unit in Malaysia using dividend payouts or HDB rents from Singapore. 

d) Education and being stuck in the lower parts of the value chain is an issue

Bank Negara has been trying to hype the Ringgit for the rest of 2024. They might be right in the short term, but I can't see how the Ringgit can maintain its current value against the SGD over the next 10 years. The locals need to improve their English proficiency, and I can't even speak English to someone in an up-market European-themed eatery. Also, the convenience store clerk of a Japanese outlet would turn your business away, claiming no loose change.

PM Anwar surprisingly knows about this problem but has chosen to anger his nationalists by asking us for help with English teachers. After I visit KL, I can understand how urgent this request is. Of course, how we respond will be equally entertaining. 

I encourage intrepid Gen Z types to consider trying out some kind of digital nomad lifestyle centred around KL. Earing in SGD and spending in MYR is da bomb! 

It's still relatively easy to fit in culturally, and for the more enterprising guys, you'll never know whether you can find a spouse while you are there. 

My latest trip to KL.

 

Last week, I took a trip to KL to enjoy the last few days of the school holidays. The trip was funded by rental payouts from JB property, which I could not unload at a reasonable price, so the feeling of the powerful SGD was diminished as I was spending primarily the rental income earned in MYR. Nevertheless, we put ourselves up at a better place at Ampang for $150 SGD a night - a far cry from previous trips where I preferred low-cost accommodation at Petaling Street. 

In many ways, KL has not changed. The "software" that Singaporeans take for granted was simply not there, with staff in convenience stores refusing to provide change and waitstaff at high-end eateries like Paul's being unable to converse in basic English. However, you get what you pay for, and the experience is still cheap and pleasant as you no longer feel the budgetary restraints that fetter your spending powers in Singapore. But there are certainly many areas where KL wins hands down - the Grab Taxis are fast and cheap, and we are better off just meeting our relatives at many foodie destinations instead of expecting them to drive us there. 

KL will always be the place to go for me because it now has three fantastic bookstore branches. The Kinokunitya bookstore at KLCC boasts a better RPG collection than the Singapore branch. There is also a well-designed Tsutaya bookstore at Pavilion Bukit Jalil and a fantastic Taiwanese bookstore, Eslite, at Bukit Bintang. Singaporeans will likely have to fly to KL one day to visit the bookstore as our national libraries crowd out the local bookstores here. 

Other than books, the only thing I can really talk about is food. I'm fortunate to have spent two days with a secondary school pal who drove me to distant eateries and two days with relatives who brought me to a different set of restaurants.  

Before discussing my pleasant food experiences, I want to express my disappointment at the much lower standards of my usual Prawn Noodles at Bukit Bintang Lot 10 food court. The lady boss remained the same, but the prawns were overcooked with the "black veins" still intact. We paid a ridiculous sum of MYR 280 for the meal, and I can get cheaper and better Prawn noodles next to my home in Woodlands. That is my last visit to the outlet. 

That aside, here are three of the better places I ate in.

a) Village Park Nasi Lemak

Village Park Nasi Lemak was the best nasi lemak I had ever tasted, but it was priced at a ridiculous $12.50. Comparisons with Coconut Club in Singapore are pointless, as I heard that Coconut Club's Nasi Lemak was based on this original brand. Like Coconut Club, the best part was the succulent chicken, which was crispy on the outside and soft-and-juicy inside. 

b) Siu Siu Restaurant

The second epic place where I had a meal was a local institution called Siu Siu Restaurant, where the local zhi char was excellent. We were disappointed that they ran out of crabs, but we still enjoyed many meat dishes and fish. Clearly, it is advantageous to go where the locals eat, and the food was not only cheap but excellent.

c) Porto Romano Restaurant 

The last choice was purely accidental. As we lived in an old but relatively upmarket mall called the Intermark, we found a classy-looking Italian eatery that served reasonably priced food. We had a decent pasta meal, and on the last day we were in KL, I tried to blow the remaining budget on a Surf and Turf item, and the price/quality exceeded our expectations. 

All in all, it was a good trip. I originally intended this trip to be for book browsing, but having friends and relatives drive us to far-out places really enhanced the foodie experience for me. If I go to KL again, maybe at year-end, I want to refocus on museum visits and their handicraft centre, which I cannot do on this trip.