Often people asked me, how I manage to quit my job, build my parent’s dream house, spend time doing things I love, spend time with my family at age 27? I knew they are curious about my income because most of the people at my age are working for somebody or starting their own business. I decided to share some of my thoughts and experience here.
Most of us work for the sake of work, for the sake of being able to provide for the family, without truly understanding what is our goal or needs. We just follow blindly what we were taught at school: get good grades, get a good university, get a good job and hoping to get promotion every year, marry somebody and have kids, buy a house, buy a car, work until old and die. I don’t mean this type of life is bad, our education system trained us to become the perfect employee, in my personal opinion, I think we should be exposed to more options other than being the perfect employee. We were educated that this is the only way, the only good one, the normal one, to spend our life. In fact if we plan to do something different from others, we are abnormal or irresponsible. If I can time travel to my childhood time when I was having lots of business idea, I would have force my parents to hire an expert to teach me business from A to Z, then I will make an action and try out all my ideas. I would have concentrate in testing out all my ideas and ignore what others said or think about me. (My first tip: Explore more options other than being an employee, see which suits you best.)
Fortunately, I was able to step out for the first time at age 13. I worked as an ‘illegal helper’ in a phone store, getting RM300 a month. Since then I worked in different industry as different roles, earning few hundreds to thousands per day. That’s when I realized our education system nowadays do not teach us how to plan for our own financial too. We were taught to save up as much money as possible after our own expenses. In fact, I strongly disagree with this. In my opinion, people tends to spend much more when they earn more. For example, a fresh graduate getting RM3000 a month, his monthly expenses maybe let’s say RM2500. When this person is getting a raise to RM4000 after three years of working, his monthly expenses might increase to RM3500 even though everything remains the same. This is human nature. Personally, I agree with paying own self first before paying others. This means no matter how high or low our monthly salary, we should cater a fixed fraction of it for saving. Normally for those who are single, I would recommend at least 40% of monthly income goes to saving, balance 60% goes to all the bills and daily expenses. For those who are married or with kids, make it at least 20% of monthly income goes to saving. Based on my personal experience, I would highly recommend people to get a job in a country which have higher currency conversion value compare to own country, eg myself getting a job in Singapore speed up the process of building my own wealth three times faster than if I were to work in Malaysia. (My second tips: Pay own self first before paying others, set a target amount and do it consistently.)
This is where all the magic happens. I worked full time for 4 years, every month I managed to save up at least 50% of my income. When I over spent in some of the months, I look for some business opportunity to cover up, eg doing survey to earn some cash, selling second hand items or do some freelance work. After three years I managed to get my desired amount of capital for investment. I started my investment journey and passive income started to roll in. At the same time I continue to save up same amount of money every month and fund in to my trading account as the effect of compound interest speed up the whole process of building my wealth. (My third tips: Compound interest truly speed up the entire process.)
So this is end of my sharing today. For the moment I’m still trying all sorts of business. Will share some of it in my future post soon.
