This forum has gone eerily quiet yet again. What's up guys?
Thought I start the ball rolling with this piece - "Life is a journey"
We have heard this refrain "Life is a journey" many times. It has it's ups and down, much like like a real journey, especially long ones. Many times one will find obstacles along the way and take detours, or in the worst case, go backwards. As a 56 yo, I have already "travelled" some way in my life's journey. I have taken detours, go backwards a little bit, fallen down, reached high points and cruise at times. Looking back, life is interesting that way. That's where fond memories are created, strength in character and patience are moulded. Everyone will have his own journey. Already, I see that my children's journeys are way different from mine. Not necessarily easier but different. I grew up in the pre-independent Singapore days, where my whole village was poor. My children only know condo living. I walked 15 minutes each way, everyday to school while my children were driven to school when young, and took
MRT when older. But today, I wanted to talk about a different kind of journey, the journey to financial freedom.
I started paying attention to my finances only in my early 40s. Before that, i didn't/couldn't bother because many major events were happening- settling into a job, fighting for promotion, getting married, buying our first home and car, children coming along, getting them into schools etc.. That was a hectic phase of my life's journey.
There was another reason why I started to pay attention to my finances in my 40s. At that point, I was going through mid-life crisis. Deciding whether to jump ship to another job or stay put or take a break from working. I saw good friends and colleagues leaving and this affected me. At the end, I stayed put and soldiered on. I have now worked 31 years with the same company.
At the start, looking at my financial situation was quite discouraging. We have a big housing loan (about $460k loan, a private property) and only about $10k in our
cpf and maybe $50k in cash and FDs. Maybe this was the reason I decided to stay put and not take the risk in a new job.
My wife and I resolved to dig in, trimmed our housing loan, trimmed our expenses to accelerate our savings. In 5 years, in our late 40s, we brought the loan down to below $200k, and at the same time built up meaningful savings - enough for us to put as down payment for a condo. The condo that we now stay.
With a stroke of luck, our old property went enbloc, and with the money, we paid up our current condo and put the rest into the stock market to earn passive incomes.
As we are still working, and don't need the passive income, we reinvested them and are seeing the compounding effect! And seeing that property investment has rewarded us, we bought into another property in our early 50s for investment.
The financial journey, like life journey, is on going, and we are at the cruising stage right now. We are now enjoying both.
Don't be discouraged by its ups and downs. Remember, when things are down, they can only go up!