Paying down your debts or invest the cash?

If you have spare cash, would you dump it to make a partial payment of your mortgage loans or would you invest it so that you can generate more returns? Sooner or later, I think that's the question that you will have to face in your life. The philosophy and the baggage that you carry with you will determine which decision you'll make.


Let's put in the context. I used HDB's loans with interest of 2.6% pa, spanning over 30 yrs. My monthly mortgage, all paid in cash since I have no or little CPF, is about 2k. Each year, based on the monthly mortgage payment of 2k, I would have paid a sum of $24k (2k per month x 12 months). Me and my wife had saved up $24k and I was wondering if it's good to make a partial repayment of our loans. Since the loan is by HDB, there isn't any penalty for early repayments for loans, so this is quite unlike most private bank loans. I guess even bank loans have their own terms and conditions, so penalty for early repayment is not a given; it depends on the contract you've signed on.

Pay down your debts or invest it?

Effectively, if I were to make a partial repayment, that means I'm paying a total of $48k this year - twice as much as I'm obligated to. What's good and bad about this? The good thing is that if I maintain this yearly, I can shorten my remaining 27.5 yrs loan to just 11 yrs. There is going to be huge interest savings in this. The bad thing is that I'll have less cash available for investments. This is especially true for me because I pay off in cash, not using CPF. In other words, I have a higher opportunity cost than if someone pays off in CPF (yes, I know CPF earns 2.5% interest pa and cash inherently has near 0%). What kinds of investments are we talking about? Not just restricted to stocks, but also property.


I've blogged before that I would take the middle path. I would pay off a big portion in the form of partial repayment in my early years of the loan period, until the monthly mortgage becomes 'manageable', before conserving the cash and reserve it for investments/property etc. I've changed the plan a little though. Initially I wanted to make partial repayments and choose the option that allows me to reduce the monthly mortgage instead of the option that reduces the mortgage loan duration. I didn't take into account the fact that the paper work involved for both of them differ. There's a whole lot of paper work that needs to be done to reduce the monthly payment, like changing the GIRO amount, writing in to HDB etc etc. Nah, too much trouble. I'll just tweak my plan to reduce the loan duration initially. When it makes a substantial difference then I'll switch to reducing my monthly mortgage amount.


Anyway, it's not as if all these is going to end in 2-3 yrs. It's more likely going to be an arduous 10 to 15 yrs. Long journey to go, so no point being caught up in paper work every year. Maybe after the 5th year of such repayments, I'll review and see if it makes sense to reduce the monthly amount.


Interest that you owe to others is guaranteed. Investment returns are not. I guess we have to make a compromise between these two.


* After putting in the extra cash of 24k, I noted that I've shaved off 2.5 years off my 30 yrs loan period. A future payment of 1 yr equates to 2.5 yrs of savings from future payments. Hmm, depending on inflation, it might or might not be worth it.


Date: 7-Nov-2013

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Thoughts after 1 month of YNAB

I've finally reached the 1 month mark of using the personal finance software, You Need A Budget (YNAB). It's the first time that my expenses are measured to the cents, inclusive of all the accounts that I had. In the past, I didn't include the cash in my wallet and neither did I group all the spending I had using my credit card and cash together. For example, if I've spent $100 on food using cash and another $50 on food using credit card, I didn't take into account that I spent $150 on food. It's a simpler inclusion in my spreadsheet to do it, but I just didn't do it. I guess there's no real reason for me to do it.

Well, using YNAB didn't give me a choice.

Hence, I uncovered a few things about my spending:


1. I spend about $540 on food. These includes groceries trip, hawker/food court and also restaurants. Since me and my wife take turns to pay for restaurants, my restaurant bills also includes her share. But I think it averages out, since my wife also help to offset my bills by paying for me. 30% of the food bills come from restaurants trip, another 68% from hawker/food court and the rest are groceries. I think if I need to cut anything, it'll be restaurant bills.


Another interesting thing is that I grossly underestimated my food expenses. As a rule of thumb, I count it as $10 per day ($5 per meal) for 30 days per month, amounting to $300. Then I include another $100 for restaurant bills, chalking about $400. I didn't include groceries at all in the past. So now, the new metric should be $20 for food per day, everything in.


2. I used to be very concerned about spending a lot on gadgets. I mean when I don't spend, I really don't spend. But if I do, it'll be $xxx to $xxxx in one shot. This is something quite different from my wife, as she is used to spending $xx but very reluctantly to do $xxxx. I set up an account called 'play fund' to purchase all these computer gadgets/games/peripheral computer stuff. Busted it this month when I spent a few hundreds for my handphone. At least I don't feel so guilty now, since I already put in a budget for it. That's one of the main reason why I wanted to do a budget - so that I can spend without feeling guilty, otherwise I could save too much. A happy problem, but a problem nevertheless.


3. I have missing cash here and there in my 'wallet' account and occasionally, extra cash. It's not a lot of money. $1 here, 50 cts there, 20 cts there. It's funny because I recorded in every single transaction. The only way that I could lose or gain these small sums of money is because I seldom count in detail the change that I get from others. It's just a quick visual look and I'll put the change aside. Either that, or my wallet has a small hole that I'm unaware of. This unaccountable sums of money that I can get from time to time is classified under 'reconciliation balance', and it happens when my actual amount of money in my wallet is different from the amount of money I should have in my 'wallet' account in the software.


Things are much much cleaner and clearer. I thought it's good enough using spreadsheet but now I probably couldn't go back to using just spreadsheet. The integration between mobile phone and desktop is perfectly suitable for my needs and it saves me a lot of time double checking.


Certainly one of the best things that happened in this aspect of my life. I'm a big fan of anything that improves my productivity.

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I don't know

It's so easy to say the three words, "I don't know". By saying that, you don't have to put more effort anymore. You don't have to try anymore and you certainly don't have to blame yourself for not knowing. Just by saying I don't know, you absolve yourself of all responsibilities. Suddenly, it's other people's problem - those who 'know' - and you just have to wait for them to help you solve it.

The difference between a good student and a bad one can be seen by how easily they say those three words. Good students face as much difficulties as bad students when they encounter something new, but their attitude makes all the difference. They seldom say I don't know. In fact, they seldom give up. They'll work on a problem until the problem gives way. If they can't do it, they'll try it again and again. If they can't solve it without some guidance, they'll seek the necessary guidance and find the necessary skill set and knowledge to solve it. They own the problem. They want to solve it. It's their focus and never say die attitude that makes them winners, eventually. Good students work on a problem longer than others, outlasting those who say "I don't know" the instance they encountered difficulties.


Bad students are just like tissue prata on a rainy day. The moment the first raindrop hits the prata, it crumbles and soften, losing all shape and structure. They lack the tenacity to fight and they certainly don't own the problem. If you don't own the problem, it's not your problem, so you don't have the motivation and determination to finish it till the end.

Like a prata hitting the first drop of rain. Can you imagine it?

This kind of attitude will last long into your adult life and beyond your student days. If someone ask me what's the point of learning 'cheam' trigonometry and differential equations and integration, this is what I would tell them. In learning a particular subject, there is a set of syllabus laid out by MOE and a hidden set of syllabus of LIFE. The syllabus by MOE are the learning objectives for that particular subjects. These outcomes will be tested in the exams but will be soon forgotten once the student leaves school. However, the hidden curriculum - the syllabus of LIFE - these are much much more precious and have long lasting effect in your life, well beyond the context of the subject. To succeed well in maths, besides knowing how to do the content well, you also need to have a set of characteristics. In maths, it could be logical thinking, carefulness, tenacity and creativity. For example, no matter how good you are, if you're not determined, as soon as you hit an obstacle, you'll give up. In that way, you'll never be able to do well in the subject. Those little habits you do while doing maths - like forcing yourself to try again and again, or checking, or asking around for help but working through the sums yourself - reinforces good character over and over again throughout your study life. These things last, long after you forgot the solution to the integration of ln x and differentiation of cot 2x.


I must have learn tenacity by playing computer games. In those days, SEGA games seldom comes with autosaves or save-any-time-you-like. You only save at a certain point, or mostly, none at all. I remember playing contra or sonic, carefully working through levels and levels and not having a save point anywhere in sight. You die often. You try again. You die again. You try again. UNTIL THE GAME GIVES UP OR YOU GIVE UP! The reward for not giving up and winning the game is often just that you can see a lousy pixellated victory at the end game and perhaps some sob story to convince you that the hero won against all odds.

So, do yourself a favour. Don't say "I don't know" so easily. Fight hard and fight harder.

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5 reasons why you need YNAB (and 3 reasons why you don't)

This is an unpaid review of You Need A Budget, also known as YNAB. I bought it last month from steam at a discount, but had long heard of it by others who gave rave reviews about this personal finance software. Since it's at a great discount of 75%, I decided to plunge into it and try it for myself. Prior to this leap in using the software, I already had a working excel spreadsheet that works for me for the past 5 or so years. The spreadsheet is meant to keep tabs on my expenses and also keep records of all my transactions in the form of a cash flow statement, balance sheet and an income statement. I record all my expenses and the income flowing from my handphone using just a simple note taker, afterwhich I'll transfer the information to my spreadsheet in my computer after forthnightly or weekly.

As you can see, I'm not so hot about changing a system that works for me and that I'm so comfortable in using. But there's a few things about my system that I don't like. Firstly, it's hard to reconcile bank statements. Secondly, it's lacking a graphical interface. Call me shallow, but between a system that works 100% but is ugly and a system that works 90% but is pretty, I'll go for the second one. The nice interface makes me want to do this forever, not that I'm lacking in motivation.


 YNAB is basically a budgeting software. You decide, at the start of the month, how much each dollar you would give to different envelopes, like food, entertainment, handphone bills etc. They also have a free android app (I checked, they have an app for iOS as well) that ties in very nicely with the software that is installed on your main computer. The information between the app and the one in your computer can be synced using dropbox. All the backup and data are placed in the dropbox, so you can start your YNAB budget from one of these autosaved points, which can be very handy in case something horrible happened that wiped out all your hard work in keeping tabs on your personal finance.

Nice clean interface makes you want to key in something!

I realized that I'm using this software less like a budgeting software, but more like an accounting software, where all my transactions between accounts and cashflow in and out of accounts are recorded and kept track of. I guess this would take some time to adjust because as mentioned, I've never done budgeting before and I already knew roughly what my expenses are for different categories. But I always say we can do better, that's why I did a system overhaul by adopting this new software.


One of the good things I like about YNAB is that because it's all programmed nicely, it's exceedingly easier to change things and make sure that everything is still tallied. During the past one month of using the software, I had to do some major changes to my account. In the past, using spreadsheet, I've to comb though the worksheets of the previous months carefully. But for now, I just have to key in the new changes, and everything else is taken care of. Needless to say, I'm suitably impressed. Though I'm not expecting much major changes going forward, it's still a nice feature to have knowing that any new way to partitioning your personal wealth is easily down with a click of a few buttons. Effortless.

The YNAB app on mobile phones makes it very easy to key in transactions and it auto syncs.

I keyed in all my accounts in YNAB, including all the marked to market value of my various investment portfolio, insurance cash value, and all the shitloads of debts that I owed HDB. Straightway, I can see my networth displayed with superbly clean charts and nicely tabulated figures. If I need to see my income vs expenses, there's another tab to click to see it too. I can compare data across the years, the past 3 months, this month and the year to date. This is something that I can't do easily since I divided my expenses spreadsheet physically year by year. I can, of course, combine them, but again, it's the ease of use in YNAB that blows me off.

Nice pie chart showing you the different categories of expenses according to timeline that you set

In summary, here's what I like about YNAB:


1. Extremely easy to check and reconcile accounts. 

If your actual statements and the one you had in YNAB differs even by a cent, it'll alert you and you can do the necessary checking. Saves me a hell lot of time for this little function.


2. Very clean and nice graphical user interface

Clean and nice. The reports generated are also very good, if you're into this sort of thing. Makes you want to keep checking it.


3. Ability to change things easily and keeps backup on dropbox

If you make a fatal mistake, you can return to the last autosaved place. Changing something automatically changes everything from the past to this moment. You won't appreciate this until you got something major to change, so trust me on this one.


4. It has an well integrated free app on android.

I used to key my expenses into a simple note taker in my phone, then transfer the records over to my spreadsheet over at my computer. This doesn't take much time but it still takes some time. With this app, whatever I keyed into my hp automatically gets synced to the software at my main computer. That makes my life soooo much easier. Just this alone makes this software worth adopting.


5. Very nicely integrated philosophy behind the programming

Once you start downloading the software, you'll be in a short but useful online lecture program on how to jumpstart your failing financial management knowledge. You'll be exposed to very good advice to save up, to do proper budgeting and basically good personal finance habits. Even I find it useful. I particularly like a phrase which they used very often - "Give every dollar a job!". If want to learn more, there's even free live classes that you can sign up and learn about various topics. It seems like the people behind YNAB is really interested in making you financial healthy. They are really serious in making you change your mindset to have real change in your life.

Rule number 1: Give every frakking dollar a job!

Here's what not to like about YNAB:


1. Poor integration of financial aspects

If you're looking for something that can keep track of your investments, this is not for you. It works very well in what it aims to do, and this is just not one of its function. I still using my trusty old spreadsheet for that purpose.


2. No auto download of credit card statements or bank statements

Actually maybe it does have but I don't like the idea of it at all. If you want to keep tabs on your expenses, then do so. The act of doing it will bring a lot of benefits rather than downloading the statements automatically from the bank. However, if you really want to, you can download credit or bank statements, then upload it to YNAB. It can accept .OFX , .QFX, .QIF and .CSV format. I wouldn't recommend it, neither do the people behind YNAB.


3. Tracks the amount of money right to the cent

What's not to like about this? Well, usually when I'm keeping tabs on expenses manually, I disregard anything less than $1. I also don't count the money that I've in my wallet. This program forces me to count each and every cent. There are many times that I noticed that the amount of money that I had and the amount of money that I'm supposed to have in my wallet do not tally. I need to reconcile the differences. This means I must have missed out some stuff...Not a big sum (<$15), but can be irritating when the software highlights to me that I missed something out and I'm the sort of person who then have to correct the mistakes. It's making me anal fussing over 10 cts here and 20 cts there. Granted, this is the point, afterall.


I really think this software is worth putting the time and effort to learn. For newbies who are starting out to earn their first drop of cash, it'll make you learn a few good habits that can last you for life. That alone is worth the price of this software. For those who had been tracking your expenses fastidiously all along using excel spreadsheet, perhaps a little more graphics, a little more automation can make an easy job even easier. Do try it as they have a full featured demo for 34 days - more than enough time for you to try it out to see if it can fit in to your life. No harm trying right?

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Redefining your 'self' is the key to anger management

Most people love themselves more than others. It is entirely understandable, though it is self centred and egoistic. Human nature perhaps. Is it possible then, that if the concept of self is widen to include others, then the self centreness will be morphed into compassion and empathy for others? By changing the paradigm of "me against others", to "us against others", onward to "we against you", and finally just "everyone against no one", is it possible to change selfishness to selflessness?


I was very angry with someone recently. For the sake of this conversation, let's just call him Ajit. I felt that Ajit is the one at fault here because he is being selfish and irresponsible. I've been doing my share of work but he didn't and the fact that he's constantly sick, and therefore can't be healthy enough to do his fair share of work is just ridiculous to me. I always think that if you don't mind, it doesn't matter. For me, duty and responsibility is paramount, but apparently Ajit didn't share my philosophy here. Nevertheless, the underlying point is that I'm angry with him. Very angry.


I went to shower fuming. Ten thousand evil thoughts flickered through my mind. You know, when you're angry with someone, you'll replay 'the' conversation again and again, with each subsequent iterations punctured by remarks more poisonous and hurtful than the last. It certainly makes my heart pound faster and faster as I replayed those fantastical conversation with Ajit again and again in my mind, complete with all the mean things I'll say and all the counter points I'll make. Soap opera at its best, except that I'm the lead and the director and the script writer.


I remembered something that I read, essentially that's the first paragraph of this article. If I can extend my definition of self to include Ajit, then his failure is my failure and suddenly all became clear to me. There's no me against Ajit; simply put, there's just me thinking about Ajit making me angry. Since Ajit is an extension of myself (actually it's all in my mind because I'm just imagining how he reacted. I 'conversed' with him through whatsapp), I'm angry with myself. This notion is ridiculous, hence I stopped the anger and become (more) at peace.

From http://advaitatoons.blogspot.sg/

Thus, instead of following the poisonous script in my mind when I was showering, I changed my tack to something more inclusive and ultimately more useful in solving the problem at hand.

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Budgeting your time and energy

I bought a personal finance software not too long ago, ironically on a website that sells computer games - the infamous "Steam". As usual, my day begins by checking out on the latest offer on the gaming website. Sometimes, they sell games at 50% or even 75% discount. Even though I play games much less frequently now (I prefer to read, if anything), I still want to be in the know in that industry. It's out of interest, and also because it gives me some talking point to create rapport with my students. More of the former than the latter. Anyway, steam gave an offer I simply could not refuse. Instead of the recommended retail price of 60 USD, it's selling at 15 USD - a whopping 75% discount. Hoot lah, I say.


I knew of this software, aptly named You Need A Budget or affectionately called YNAB by users, from Drizzt. If you subscribe to his facebook and twitter, he'll have this automated post every now and then coming up saying that you'll get more confidence from savings. Yes, but no need to make that an automatic post right?! (haha, 50% joking, 50% poking to Drizzt)

Budget your time - taken from lifehacker.com

But this is not a review of that software. It's a little premature to give a review when it's less than a month since I bought and used the software. Perhaps by the end of this month I'll give my thoughts on YNAB and how it can benefit people who haven't got a clue as to where their money flows to, and to others who had been tracking their expenses fastidiously (like me) on excel spreadsheet.


I've never put myself in a budget before, so using the software makes me think of a few things related to budgeting. To budget is to realise that you have a resource that is scarce and precious, hence you have to proportion it to different places in the manner most beneficial. It's a subjective exercise and nobody can say that his or her budget is better than yours. Even though I say that, there's clearly a line between a good budget and a foolish one. If you budget until your spending far exceeds your income, that's obviously a foolish one (You have to wonder why certain governments can make such foolish mistakes when they budget their country's wealth). On the other hand, if your budget makes you save and save without spending proportionally, that's also a foolish one, though it takes a little more insight and wisdom to see why and that's out of the scope of this post (but it also makes you wonder if our govt is following such a roadmap).


Question: Have you ever thought about budgeting your time and energy?


For a large part of my life, from my student days to the first few years of my working life, it's like this:

Career & Money : 80%
Body & Health: 5%
Spiritual: 0%
Family and friends: 15%


Career, when I'm a student, is simply about being a good student. I seldom do sports unless I have to and you can't really say that I'm taking good care of my health. It's hard to define spiritual aspects of my life, perhaps you can say it's religion, perhaps it's also a bit more than religion. The best definition I can give is this: that which gives you peace and happiness. Needless to say, for most part of my life, it's quite tumultuous. Almost never spent a single dime of energy and time towards the betterment of my spiritual self. Family and friends are not a big part of my life. I'm quite a loner.


Let's look at now:

Career & Money : 60%
Body & Health: 20%
Spiritual: 0%
Family and friends: 20%


There's a greater shift of my energy/time towards body and health. I try going to the gym at least once a week. I haven't passed my IPPT since like 5 or 6 yrs ago (used to be silver, alas..) and now I'm working towards passing. Never felt fitter in my life than at this point in time, and I realised that the benefits of having a better body/health spills over to other aspects of my life too. Still not a party person, but the increase from 15% to 20% in "Family and friends" means that I spent quite a bit of time with my wife. As I get older, I realise that you have less and less friends, but you have more and more intense friendship. Good trade-off if you ask me.

How true! - taken from www.babble.com

Ideally, my time/energy should be allocated like this:

Career & Money : 25%
Body & Health: 30%
Spiritual: 25%
Family and friends: 20%


Remember, there's no right or wrong budget. Your budget best reflects your life and only you can clearly define them. I'll try to work towards this budget of my time and energy and this should be the workplan for the "middle age" of my working life. You can see that I really wanted to spend more time and energy on developing my spiritual self - something that I've been neglecting. Health should take a bigger priority of my life and career/money, well, let's just say that something has to pay the bills while you're still alive. More time and effort should be spent doing the things that you like. Hopefully, that's work, lol!

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Is your financial goal your Procrustean bed?

It's interesting that these days, there are more and more young bloggers who are financially enlightened. They started having the idea that retiring early is a worthy goal of their life, hence the way to achieve it is to increase savings, tighten expenses and work on their investment skills to increase their passive income. The funny thing is that I've been there (but can't say that "I've done that!" though) and I no longer am actively seeking to be there. Strangely, I don't think I've ever said that I wanted to retire early in my blog post (someone prove me wrong pls?), but I did mention a few times that I wanted to achieve a level of passive income to offset my expenses. And I'm a strong advocate of having a strong savings discipline as soon as you start getting money.


A few people (notably a blogger I affectionately called PG) also blogged about the same issues. Started off wanting to retire early and before long, life caught up and he's no longer so actively seeking that goal. I believe he has the same thinking as me. It's not that it's no longer importantly, it's just that it's no longer the sole purpose of living. These days, I dare to say that if I can't achieve financial independence before the self defined retirement age (usually 35?), I'm going to be okay. I'm not a failure and I hope I can sincerely say that I'm not jealous of others who can do so too.


So what happened to diminish this worthy goal? I'm not so sure I can say it's this reason or that. I've a feeling that it's more like a straw of this and a straw of that and soon, the straws become a substantive enough mass to proverbially break the camel's back. Let's see if I can identify a few straws:


1. The realisation that I can lead my life in different ways

2. The realisation that retiring early at an early age has a cost that I do not want to burden myself with

3. The confidence that I'll be okay even if I can't retire early and have xyz passive income flowing in monthly


I reserve the right to change my opinion at a later point in life, once information changes, as I had done in the past. Haha, life is complicated and I'm certainly not simple too.


I want to point out that not having a goal of wanting to retire early and having xyz passive income does not mean that I act irresponsibly towards my own financial situation. After tracking my expenses and understanding how I treat money, I have the confidence to say that even if I were to turn my financial tap looser and let the cash flow out, I still wouldn't be a spendthrift. It just isn't me. Neither am I saying that people should follow my ways.


You're free to lead the life you want, and ultimately you're the person responsible for it. I'm just saying you shouldn't take a goal that seems so fashionable nowadays and try to mould yourself towards it. Don't be like Procrustes, the Greek who cuts off people's hands and legs so as to fit into a iron bed that he had. Ask yourself if this is really what you want.


You know, in my line, not everyone wants an A for exam.

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Multiple prices for Multiple income streams at Multiple avenues

The world is a strange place.

For Robert G. Allen's upcoming seminar on 19th August, which is supposed to talk about how you can be a millionaire by having multiple income streams, the price differs from place to place. I'm not sure whether it's done purposely by the organiser of the seminar to create price differential in the different platforms that they advertise. But look at all these different price for the same course on the same day:


1. From AK's blog - $64 original price

Upon entering promotional code, you can get a 10% discount for limited stocks only, thus it'll cost $57.6. This is especially worrying when I learnt about the email exchange between AK and the organizer. It would seem that the organizer had misrepresented the pricing and spirit of the 'special' offer for his loyal readers. It turned out that the price of the offer is not specially cheaper (in fact, it's the most expensive). But one cannot argue that it's not a special meant only for AK's readers. None of the other people get to purchase their tickets at so high a price! LOL!

**New updates**
Apparently the fishy business runs deeper. For a full account, please read AK's post on I will not attend multiple streams of income seminar.


2. From greatsage's blog - $57

There's no mention of any promotional code, nor limited time or limited stocks. Turns out AK's special deal is a non-event. Even without entering any codes, the price bought from greatsage's link is cheaper. Bummer.


3. From kiasuparents forum - $30 for 1 ticket (early bird) and $57 for 3 tickets (early bird)

This one beats all the rest. What is the qualifying period for the early bird discount? I've no idea at all. But $57 for 3 tickets definitely beats $57.60 for 1!


God knows how much cheaper it can get when you really run a more thorough search in other places where they advertised for the seminar. Wow, what's up with their techniques of marketing? I think the organizer is trying to do some guerilla marketing technique. Maybe by advertising at different places with different ticket price for the same seminar, they are really creating multiple streams of income, lol! Or maybe there's really no such thing as bad publicity, so the more controversial it gets, the hotter it'll be?


Maybe the organizer would like to leave a comment here to let people understand why there's such a huge price differentiation on different marketing avenues.


In the meatime, I'll continue to say that this is a strange world.

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The social cost of reits

Reits are hot hot hot. With the low interest rate environment, where investors are looking for a place to park their money to beat inflation, the yield of reits is indeed alluring. I've invested in them and they had made a fair share of profit for me. But because I've also went to the other side of the equation, I realized that there's a huge social cost in reits being so hot.


As reits are public company, they owe it to the shareholders to increase DPU year after year. That way, the managers of the reits can also get more performance fees. But who are the ones really paying for the increase in DPU? It's those people renting to do business! I've heard stories of rents increasing from 5k to 8k in those malls that are in the heartland managed by one of the listed reits. How are people going to make a living when the next time their rental are renewed, there's a jump of 30 to 60% increase? It's just not sustainable.


Even when a building is not managed by a reit, as the price of the rental in a reit manged building increases, it causes a trickle down effect to all the neighboring areas. The landlord in a non-reit managed building must be thinking that, hey, just across the road, those guys can charge so high, so why can't we do the same? So up and up the rental rates spiral, and down and down the margins of the business goes. It's just crazy when maybe 30-40% of your profits are all given to the landlord and passed on to the reits.


This will eventually end up very badly. The party will end when the rents are revised so high that few would dare to take up the space. Honest hardworking entrepreneurs who are out to make a decent living would be hard pressed to set up business. Everyone suffers. Including, eventually, the shareholders.


I know there are many ways that the reits can increase DPU without raising rental rates. I'm just ranting the pervasive idea of a reit always working to increase the rental at all cost, without regards to the human cost behind those numbers. How would you feel if your boss, in the pretext of accounting to the shareholders, decided to reduce your salary so that the company's share price can increase?

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A new journey begins

While having a shower, I was mentally calculating the kind of money that I can save, given my 'new' circumstances now. 'New' because it had actually been a while - 2 yrs to be exact - that I had my own cosy hdb flat, I'm married and I've a pre-owned car. Realistically, these two things would add up to the expenses that I spend on a monthly basis, so it also goes to say that I would find it more difficult to save the magic 4.2k per month. Why 4.2k per month? Because 4.2k x 12 will add up nearly to 50k - that challenge that I set myself seemingly so many years ago.


It had also been a while since I tabulated my monthly expenses. I had always been keeping track on all the items that I spend on, noting them down fastidiously in my handphone before keying it into my spreadsheet. This habit started so long ago, after I wanted to find out exactly where my money flows to each month. I initially wanted to stop after 1 month, but got so used to it that I had done it for 6 years (I had to look at my excel file to realise that 6 yrs had passed!). A quick calculation on excel shows that that, indeed, my expenses had increased. Nothing surprising there.


Here's the breakdown per month:

Mortgage payment for hdb (including insurance for property) - 33%
Personal expenses (includes petrol, entertainment, food) - 25%
Personal insurance (whole life, term, disability etc) - 13%
Parents -16%
Tax- 4%
Utilities -3%

Total : 100%


I'm sharing half the expenses with my working wife for those shared expenses like housing and car. Most of the items I can't and don't want to cut. If there's any expenses that I can cut down, it'll be on personal expenses. Maybe if I reduce some more discretionary spending, I can push the expenses down a bit more. Bah, but what's life without all these perks...I'm happy with these figures.


As for savings, maybe I can start with 30k per year. This should be a comfortable figure to begin with. I don't want to begin with any number lesser than that.

25 k per yerar - 2.1 k savings per month
30 k per year - 2.5 k savings per month
35 k per year - 2.9 k per month
40 k per year - 3.3 k per month
45 k per year - 3.75 k per month
50 k per year - 4.2 k per month


With 30k per year, I would need to save 2.5k per month. I've been keeping track of my expenses since 2008. Since I know what my monthly expenses are, I'll just add the amount that I need to save and I'll get my target income. It happened to me many times in the past...once you put your mind to a figure and let the universe know about it, things will happen in your life to make it happen. Of course you must come with a prepared mind and seize the opportunity as they come along.


But unlike in the past, I'll take it easy this time. This shall be my game that I can play comfortably, not a competition to hoard as much as I can. I think I can do a fine balance this time round.

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Antifragile

I've not done a book review in ages, believing that one should read a book in order to derive a personal experience that the book can only impart to he who reads it. Every reader will get something different. So, this is not a book review. This is my personal experience with this book by Nicholas Nassim Taleb, one of my favourite philosopher-finance writer. It's called Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder.


It's not the easiest book to read, but if you plough through it all, you'll recognise the kind of person that he is. I've read through all four books of his: Fooled by randomness, The Black swan and The Bed of Procrustes , and lastly Antifragile, with the last being his book of all books, his magnum opus, his unified string theory. The concept of antifragile springs from the fact that there is no suitable word for something that benefits from volatility. If you disturb something, there's only 3 ways that it can behave - it can stay more or less the same (robust), it can become worse (fragile) and it can benefit from it (antifragile). It ties in all the ideas from the other books and integrate it into this one. If Fooled by randomness is Star wars episode IV, Black swan is episode V (some say it's the best of the Star Wars episodes) and Bed of Procrustes is episode VI, then Antifragile is the Episode I. It's the book that brings you back to the beginning, so that you can see all the other episodes in its respective glory. Note: It does NOT have the suckiness of Episode I though, lol

A few key points that I take away from the book:

1. It's easy to tell whether something is antifragile, robust or fragile, but rather impossible to know when or even what kind of black swan event can stress it. As such, focus on the detection of the state of its antifragileness (or fragileness) rather than predicting the rare event or worse, the probability of it happening, that will rock it.

E.g. Antifragile is characterised by low downside risk, high upside rewards. If it looks like a sunny day and I'm about to leave the home in 10 minutes, do I hang my clothes out to dry till I come back? If it rains (black swan event), it's very bad. If it didn't, my clothes will benefit slightly only. So I don't hang it out, if not it'll fragilize the system.


2. For antifragile systems, the more volatility (read: shocks) it experiences, the more it will benefit, up to a certain point. Vice versa for fragile systems.

E.g. The human body is a great antifragile system (so are most things in nature). Small shocks to the system is ultimately good for the body. Short periods of fasting, short acute exercises, short acute stresses, short period of illness...all these will build the body up and it will benefit from these shocks, again, up to a certain point.


3. The antifragility of a system depends on the fragility of the components that make up the system. We need individuals to fail so that the whole system can benefit and become progressively more antifragile.

E.g. If individual shops don't fail, the next batch of shopkeepers won't learn from the mistakes, and the eventual failure will be worse and magnified beyond repair. We must learn not to intervene all the time, and trust in the antifragility of things to take care of itself. Small failures, if they are prevented from occurring, will lead to ultimately bigger failures.


4. If things had been around for a long time, you can bet that it'll be around in the future for a long time too. Only the antifragile survives the stress of time.

E.g. The author wrote that he only drinks beverage that had been around for many many years, like wine, coffee and water. No soft drinks, no aspartame diet drinks, no isotonic electrolytes drinks. Probably a good idea to look at the way you cook things. No microwave food for me, as far as I can help it. I'll rather eat it cold than have it blasted with electromagnetic waves.


There's a lot more, of course, but I leave it to the reader to find out. His books always sets me thinking. It should do to you too. Alvin from BFP blog did a book review on this. Probably writing it way more comprehensive than I can ever do. Do read his reviews.


You might be interested in what I've to say about the ideas postulated by Nichoals Nassim Taleb:

1. Black Swan book reflection
2. Black swan revisited
3. Fooled
4. Living life in an uncertain world

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Being comfortable with who you are

As I get older in age, hopefully more mature in thinking, I realized that I'm more and more comfortable with being myself. When I was younger, there's a lot of insecurities because there's a lot of people that you feel that you ought to model after and ought to follow, maybe sometimes also to lead. I think I was young and likely impressionable, so whoever is successful in whatever ways, I would like to model after him or her. As a result of such imprinting in my earlier years, I've a mish-mash of characteristics that I think is good for me in my development as a human being. It's not always easy to change your own characteristics, because it takes a lot of effort to do so and requires a lot of change. And change always require much much more than just passively following, isn't it? It requires you to really want to do it.


But I'm getting more and more comfortable being who I am. I see less and less need to mimic others. This also comes about because I realized who I am and who I am not. What makes people happy might not truly make me happy. Now that is an important realization because the key to happiness is to know what makes you happy. Blindly following what makes other people just wouldn't cut it. This is, after all, a journey that you take yourself.


I don't have to keep on comparing whose balls are bigger and whose pecker is longer. I'm glad that my job don't put in a situation where I constantly have to prove to others that I've arrived. I sympathize but I can never truly empathize with people who are in the cobra-corporate world who always have to feign happiness and fake success. Is work all about getting progressively higher and higher pay, bigger and bigger bonuses? It might be if that's what makes you happy, but I suspect that for many others, it's not. Which is why we see so many people, in the midst of a successful track career groomed for all the greatness to come in the cobra-corporate world, suddenly come to a halt and switch to a totally different career. Mid-life crisis, they say. If that's the term for 'suddenly' realizing that what makes you happy is a total change in career, then so be it. I will welcome it with open arms.


I realized, surprisingly not too long ago, that I don't really talk much about retirement and having a passive income and all those fun stuff. It dawned on me that it's not really what I wanted in life. Is it sacrilegious, for a financial blogger like me, that it's not my goal to achieve this numerical value before certain age? Maybe I shouldn't call myself a financial blogger anymore. Just because I occasionally blog about personal finance and very occasionally about stocks (nowadays) doesn't qualify me as a financial blogger, just like you wouldn't call a cashier a financial guru because he handles money. Let me qualify it further - while it's not my goal to achieve financial independence, it's still something that's on my mind, specifically at the back of my mind. It's just that I no longer obsess over it.


Define obsession. Here's what I did in the past:

1. Read a book about stocks / personal finance / money for 1-3 yrs, about one book a week. I cleared shelves of books in my local library until it comes to a point where there's really very few books that I haven't read.

2. Keep on trying to squeeze more time out to do more work to earn more money to hit my savings target, broken up into annual, monthly, weekly and madly enough, daily targets.

3. Keep on trying to reduce my expenses by cutting on food, drinks, transport and what have you.


It's not making me any happier, I came to realize. I must have carried it to the extremes of my limitations, hence the fatigue and therefore the unhappiness. But obsession is important because there lies the motivation to go on fighting when others have long given up. However, like a horse, if you don't control the unbridled power of obsession, it'll consume you.


So what am I now that I'm so comfortable being? I'm not a perfectionist - It's okay if I fail to achieve my goals and lack the discipline to follow my convictions. I'm not always consistent - I'm bashing others over lack of discipline in some areas and I'm advocating others to be less disciplined. I'm idiosyncratic - I don't buy drinks when I eat alone to save money but I spend big bucks on gadgets to save time. I'm not a rational person but I'm a rationalizing person - I act on my right brain but use my left brain to explain to others what I did. I'm an idiot in life but I do pretty well in school. I can be jealous - I'm envious of other's success and sometimes explain the success by luck or more satisfyingly, by inheritance. I can be vengeful - in my mind's eye, people who crosses me had died by horrific contraptions to extort the most pain in the most vivid manner.


If you still like me, or worse, are like me, then good. We can drink, eat and be merry and occasionally talk about how we survive this crazy world at this moment and how we're planning to survive in the future. If not, farewell and be glad that our paths, though different, had a chance to mingle and criss-cross, at least for a while.


Life is just like this, isn't it? Beautifully repulsive, sickeningly attractive.

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How pride gets in the way of having fun

I've the fortune of teaching very young children in a group setting. From there, you'll learn a few things by observing how they interact with each other. There was an incident where two best friends are arguing over something. It could be trivial to us, but for the children involved, it must have meant the world. This is because one of them said in anger, and perhaps with a bit of tears in his eyes, that he'll never talk to the other one ever again. Such harsh words. Never is a long time.

Perhaps not too long. In less than 2 minutes, they are talking again. In less than 5 minutes, they are laughing and playing like nothing had happened before.

It makes you wonder how come small children can swallow their pride and concentrate on what really mattered to them - having fun - but adults couldn't. If pride gets in the way of having fun, screw pride.

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Bullythebear AGM 2013

Notice of Annual General Meeting

Bully the Bear Private Limited

(Incorporated in the Republic of Singapore)

Company Registration No. 8888168IP4

General information

NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN that the 1st Annual General Meeting of the Company will be held at a secret location (only to be revealed to people who are attending),on 6th July, Saturday at lunch time.

To be in line with the garmen initiatives of ‘Pay as you use’ scheme (i.e. ERP), attendees of the lunch AGM will be required to pay for their own meals. Yes, we are going Dutch. 

Due to our social ineptness, the number of attendees will be kept at around 6 to 8 people. Please register ASAP to book your place.

If you would like to attend the lunch AGM, please email: cboxgathering@gmail.com 

We will transact the following business activities during the AGM:

Ordinary Business

1. To receive and adopt the Directors’ Report and Audited Accounts for the year ended 31 March 2013 and the Auditors’ Report thereon.

2. To re-elect Mr La Papillion as CEO.

He is from Paris, France. He is the founder of Bully the Bear Private Limited. 

3. To re-elect Mr Patty as IT Director.

He graduated from an atas overseas University and has lots of experience in IT management. He is very knowledgeable in lots of stuff.

4. To re-elect Mr Cw8888 as Finance Director.

He has a trove of experience in planning investment for the company. Using his proprietary “Pillow Strategy”, the company has managed to profit from both the bull and bear! We have consistently outperform other companies.

 5. To re-elect Ms Sfry as Mentor Director.

She graduated from school of itchy hands. She does not come to work often but she gives invaluable advice for the company when needed. She spends most of the time cleaning the company goldfish tanks and extracting information from Kdrama.

6. To re-elect Mr Beary as Toilet Director cum Procurement Director.

He used to be a toilet cleaner at Suntec City. During his stint as a toilet cleaner, he mastered the techniques of how to keep customers by providing 5 stars toilets. After implementing his toilet strategy, the company sales increased by 342%.He is the lobang King and Bao Kar Liao King. With his extensive networks of lobang, the company has managed to keep our expenses down.

7. To re-elect Mr AK71 as Property Investment Director.

He graduated from the school of “Speak Good Ang Moh”. He is in-charge of all REITS investment for the company. He is always hungry and like to ask “Can eat or not?”

8. To re-elect Mr Cory as Business Development Director.

No information is available.

9. To re-appoint ao LLP as Auditors of the Company to hold office until the next Annual General Meeting.

Ordinary Resolutions

To consider and, if thought fit, to pass, with or without modifications, the following resolutions as Ordinary Resolutions:

1. Establishment of “Feed Beary” Fund. Our director, Mr Beary, said that he has no money to attend the lunch AGM. We are looking for sponsors to pay for Mr Beary lunch AGM expenses. If you would like to see Mr Beary at the lunch AGM, please donate generously to the fund.

2. To approve the release of Polar Bear, Koala Bear and Panda into the wild.

3. To approve the purchase of 500,000 fishing nets. 

--------------------------------------------------------------

Kind and special thanks to ao who drafted this interesting AGM invitation for our cbox gathering and pretty much organised it. Small lunch, nothing much and don't expect too much. I'll make time for it.

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Reflections on owning a car for 1 yr

Having owned a pre-loved car for slightly more than a year, I wanted to reflect on whether it's a good way to burn the money and also to gauge what's the real cost of owning a car. I did some calculation before buying, now it's time to check back those assumptions and verify it once and for all whether those assumptions are rubbish or not

*Items that are estimated means that I take the amount spent for 1 yr and divide it by 12 to get an estimated monthly charge

One time expenses:
First car inspection before taking the car: $142
Downpayment: $16,000
Major car servicing: $560

Total one time payment: $16,702

Monthly expenses:
Season parking : $65
Fuel : $260 (estimated)
Cashcard: $50 (estimated)
Insurance: $120
Carpark Coupon: $4 (estimated)
Car wash: $5 (estimated)
Monthly installment: $359

Total monthly payment: $863

Even before the new rules set in, I'm already paying 50% down payment and borrowing the rest. I've the money to pay it all down but I just don't think it's wise. Anyway, the total interest is $1.2k over 4 yrs, so I think it's alright to borrow money since it raises my liquidity, which is more impt for me. My wife and I are sharing the cost, so it works out to be half of whatever is calculated on top.

My share of the one time payment is $8,400
My share of the monthly payment is $430

Is it affordable? I think so. A lot of people who say that they can't pay for a car is because they didn't look at the secondary market. If you need to smell the fresh leather seats of new car, then don't complain that the cost of owning a car is so high.

Anyway, these are the cost. In accounting, there's got to be something to balance the cost. Here's the benefits:


1. Less energy wasted taking public transport and walking

This reason alone is good enough to make me want to own a car. After work, I still have the energy to go to other places. It's like everyday I start off with 100% energy, then as I work, travel, walk...I spent those energy. Having a car conserve my energy level and spend it slower than walk & public transport. I'm not spoilt or anything (most of the time, my wife drives instead of me) but having a car will make the journey much less taxing on my energy reserves. It makes me more energetic once I reached my destination, rather than tired and sweaty and generally worn out.


2. Saves time

I used to take several buses that will reach my destination in 15 mins but with the waiting time added in, I've to go 35 mins ahead. The extra 20 mins goes like this: 15 mins for waiting, another 5 more in case the bus is too full or 2 buses come at the same time or the bus arrives earlier than expected. It's a tremendous waste of my time. When you value your time and energy more than money, you know that that's the time to get your own transport.


3. Ability to go several places in one day

I've not had that experience before, since my family don't ever own a car. I could be in one place having lunch, then vroom to another place to get something, then vroom to yet another place for dinner. Just because I can do so. The kind of freedom that it gives me is worth the money. I wished I had bought it sooner, actually.


The benefits do not have a dollar value, but that doesn't mean that it's not important. The cost has a price to it, but the benefits are literally and metaphorically priceless.

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Learning to say no

I need to learn how to say NO.

Perhaps it's the up-bringing or the circumstances that lead me to think that being a nice-guy, you have be as agreeable to everyone as much as possible. Even to the extent of sacrificing yourself for the 'greater good'. But experience had told me that there is no greater good to sacrifice, most of the time. Whatever passed off as greater good is just someone's or some group's selfish personal agenda. Hence, whatever sacrifices you made so that there a greater good is served is just pure delusion, mostly on my part, egged on by my false sense of what being a nice guy entails.

I am one who usually don't exert my rights to others. I'll just suck it up. But it's time to change. No point being a nice guy when others don't play nice. AND more importantly, I've to realise that it's okay to say no. I won't become a devil by saying no when I really mean it. I should practice saying no everyday. These are a few examples:


1. Can you help me with this? No, I'm busy.

2. Can you come over at this time because I'm only free at this period of time? No, I'm not available at other times.

3. Sorry I mixed up your orders and added ice to your drink, is it okay for you to take this nevertheless? No, I want it to be replaced without ice, sorry.


I guess part of the reason why others can say no easily is because they are not afraid to exert what is right for them. I always 'system-think' too much instead of exerting my own individuality. I should be more individualistic instead of group thinking too much. Part of learning how and when to say no is also the fact that I become more attuned to what I really want. I want to live a life for myself instead of living someone else's life. I shouldn't take myself so seriously and think that when I say 'no', things will fall apart. Things will most likely carry on with or without my affirmative yes.

Yes, life will still carry on with or without my participation.

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The year 2012 viewed in the eyes of books

I always like to note down the books that I've read and note down the ones that I might want to re-read again. By looking at the books that you've read, I'd like to review the year that had passed in 2012 too. It's a bit late, I know, but better than never, haha!

I've read a total of 35 books, way lower than the usual 52 books per year. I know I've said that I no longer want to count the number of books that I've read, but the funny thing is this: when I stopped counting, I stopped reading. Or reading as much. Sometimes the target to always read 1 book a week just makes me scrimp and collect all the weird pockets of time to do some bit of reading. To finish reading a book, you need discipline. As simple as that. A good book will help you to finish it in double quick time, no doubt. However, I realised that before you start to like a book, when the characters are strangers to you and you don't give a shit whether they are alive or dead, you just need to hit that psychological milestone pages before you can get 'into' the book. That requires discipline.

For those parents who dish out ipads and multi-media tablets to kids, beware of raising a generation of kids who can't delay their gratification and who wants instant rewards, especially when it comes in visually appealing graphics and nice sound effects. When you're reading, your mind creates all these itself and there's no need for external stimulus to make reading enjoyable. I feel this is very important to train in the youth these days, especially when it's so easy to get our kicks from the ubiquitous ipads. Something to think about.

Anyway, here's the list of books that I've read in 2012:

Alien Interview - Lawrence R. Spencer

Writing Tools: 50 essential strategies for every write - Roy Peter Clark

Fengshui for the classroom - Renee Heiss

Thick face, Black heart - Chin-Ning Chu

The elements of Persuasion - Richard Maxwell & Robert Dickman

Courage to teach - Parker J. Palmer

The truth about teaching - Coleen Armstrong

Influence - The psychology of persuasion - Robert B. Cialdini

The 22 immutable laws of branding - Al Ries

Guerrilla Marketing for Free - Jay Conrad Levinson

Secrets of building multi-million dollar business - Adam Khoo

The Night Eternal - Guillermo Del Toro / Chuck Hogan

Advertising for Dummies - Gary Dahl

The Fall - Guillermo Del Toro / Chuck Hogan

The Strain - Guillermo Del Toro / Chuck Hogan

I am Legend - Richard Matheson

The Last Colony - John Scalzi

The Ghost Brigades - John Scalzi

Old man's war - John Scalzi

The bed of procrustes - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The sea of swords - R.A Salvatore

The Silent blade - R.A. Salvatore

The spine of the world - R.A Salvatore

The end of days - Zecharia Sitchin

A Thousand Orcs - R.A. Salvatore

The Cosmic Code - Zecharia Sitchin

Wool Omnibus Edition (1-5) - Hugh Howey

A Clash of Kings - George R.R. Martin

The Chaos Curse - R.A. Salvatore

The Fallen fortress - R.A. Salvatore

Night Masks - R.A. Salvatore

In Sylvan Shadows - R.A. Salvatore

Canticle - R.A. Salvatore

Speaker for the Dead - Orson Scott Card

Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card

Those at the bottom of the list were books that I read in the earlier part of the year, and it's arranged chronologically. The ones I've highlighted are the top 5 worth re-reading again.

Let's see:


1. Wool omnibus (1-5 books)

This one is by Hugh Howey. I don't really buy physical books, but I will buy his books for keepsake. That's how good his works are. I recently also bought another omnibus, a series of 3 books by the same author from Amazon. If you like wasteland, fallout, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it kind of apocalyptic books, this is for you. That song from Fallout by Inkspots kept playing again and again in my head when reading this...tsk tsk... By the way, my list of books to re-read seldom include fiction. This must be one of the rare ones to appear in the list.


2. Secrets of building a multi-million dollar business

I don't usually like Adam Khoo's books, but I think this one is quite a easy read. It's good for people who wanted to have a brief overview of starting a business. If anything, Adam Khoo is a successful businessman located in Singapore. It's good to see what sort of viewpoints or advice he can give to someone starting out in Singapore too. That's plenty of general advice in other books, but this one is local and so it's more tailored to our unique context. I've read this twice already, and I'll probably read this again. It's still in my list of books to read in the future.


3. Guerrilla marketing for free

A marketing guru - Jay Conrad Levinson is the authoritative voice in this aspect of business. It's good for everybody because we're all salesman in one form or another. It gives you ideas - plenty of it - to think about and to use as you see fit. It's very readable, not like those textbooks for formal studies and I'm pretty sure some of the techniques work good too, because I've tried it myself. Definitely a good book to re-read in the future.


4. Influence - the psychology of persuasion

Oh man, I can't recommend this book enough. I've read this for maybe 2 times? Remember this name "Robert B. Cialdini"...if you see his books, just read it lah, can't go too far wrong. If you notice my books list for this year, I've already read another book co-authored by him, called 'Yes!'. If you ever need to persuade people, and we need to do it on a daily basis, then you should read this book. You should read it per year like me, just to remember the lessons learnt.


5. Alien interview

Usually this isn't a book that I'll recommend...I'm quite sick of reading about aliens. But this book is special because it's about an interview with an alien that survived the crash in the Roswell incident. You can take it as fiction or fact, it doesn't really matter. It's the ideas that count. The theory that is explained by the alien is so mind blowing that I think it can explain all the sort of things that I'm puzzled about. It's like the encompassing theory to tie up all the loose ends about the different religious beliefs regarding life on earth. Mind blowing, I repeat. It's a very short read, so I will recommend this to anyone interested in the mysteries of life on earth, about reincarnation, about aliens and ancient astronaut theories...very very refreshing read. Again, I stress that there's debate on whether this is real or just a work of imagination...it doesn't matter to me. Either way, I treat works of facts like fiction and fiction like works of facts. The essence is what is important here.


Special mention: Cleric Quintet (Canticle, In Sylvan shadows, Night masks, The fallen fortress and the chaos curse) by R.A Salvatore

The author should be a familar name for those who love fantasy books like the Drizzt series. Having read many books on Drizzt already, I found it pretty repetitive. There's only so much adventure with the infamous dark elf ranger. That's the reason why the Cleric Quintet is so refreshing. It's a very engaging series of 5 books, following Cadderly, the prodigy cleric and his monk wife Danica. If you like the style of writing by Salvatore, this is going to be a great journey for you. Prepared to have nights where you just spent reading so deeply that time seemed to fly past.

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How the things that I'm familiar with no longer exist

I was lamenting to wifey that a lot of things in Singapore had changed, for better or for worse. This  came on the weekend when I visited Bras Basah complex near City hall / Bugis area. I was there, intending to go to one of the restaurants there for dinner and alas, I realised that the restaurant had closed down. It's now changed to some sassy Korean BBQ place that is sprouting out like here and there all over the island. The place is complete with posters of Korean actors and actress with their smiles and poses.


Oh how I missed the steamy hot xiao long bao, the soft twirls of the white buns and the juicy meat inside the Chinese pizza... I would have visited it again if I had known that it's going to close down. But that's just part of life - you had to deal with the uncertainty.

Tian Jin - the restaurant I'm talking about. Photo courtesy of  ClaireChing's blog

I've many memories of that place, having visited it a lot when my wife and I were dating. I bought a few friends there for dinner too, so to me that place is more than just a place for food. It's also a place for small talks and big dreams. It's gone now.


During that weekend, when news of the veteran actor Huang Wenyong's passing reached me, it just deepens this sense of loss. It's a very generic sense of loss of something intimate and familiar to you, a loss of something that will trigger your memories whenever you see it.


Here's a list of 3 things that are precious to me but is now replaced/gone:

1. My primary school - Bedok View Primary school is no longer around. It's replaced by a special needs school for children. Spending 6 yrs of your life in a place means that the building isn't just a building to me anymore, it's like a second home. Near the school compound, there is an ancient tree that is cut off to make way for new buildings around the vicinity. THAT is unforgivable. In my old home, I can see THAT tree from the view through my window and that tree is part of a landscape that is supposed to be FIXED. The tree had been with me since I was near the sand pit playing hopscotch. It's gone now.


2. Marina sq - this place is filled with memories. I spent quite a fair bit of time here while dating. There used to be 2 or 3 food court in that place alone. I wouldn't use 'food court' in the modern sense of the word, it's really just a few plastic chairs and tables with metal frames fixed to the floor...a tad dirty but who cares, the food is great. I used to frequent the one nearer the cinema area, where there used to be a sort of tze char stall, called Ron's seafood. Beside spending a lot of time there with my wife, I also remembered spending a lonely Christmas eve there with a friend. It's supposed to be a group outing, where there's at least 3-5 people attending, but everywhere can't make it in the end. It's not a good experience but it's just my memory. It's gone now.


3. Tanah merah hills - this is the latest invasion of the old and the familiar. This is my neighborhood. I spent a a few decades of my life here and I recognised some of the trees that grew up with me. A condominium that sprang up not too long ago just bulldozed in and literally tore down a big part of that tanah merah hill. Ironically, the name of that development is called eco. It's very very sad when people treasure man-made landscape instead of natural ones...those trees are ancient, and they have to make way for new things to come. Eco my ass...if you have to tear down old trees so that you can plant new ones and call it green living, I want no part of it.


All these small things are pushing me away from this place. Maybe when the proverbial final straw came in, you can see me pushing all these away for good too.

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Learning how to fail

Would you do the same job that you do now, if you do not need the money?

I think not many people would say yes, after all, we have to be practical and not follow our passions all the way to the long kang, especially if our passions cannot support ourselves financially. It's kind of sad, isn't it? Life is not too long nor too short, and here in Singapore we spend a good part of our lifetime educating ourselves. Thereafter, we spent another good part of our lifetime working, likely in a job that if we can afford to do so, we'll never do it willingly.

I'm sure you've heard many times about following your passions, and then the money will follow you. I won't say it's false, but sometimes, the problem is that our passions are really not marketable, or that we're really not good at something even though we're passionate in it. Kinda sad, but that's reality.

Therefore, I'm extremely fortunate that I stumbled upon something that I like to do and will continue to do so as long as I'm able to do so. I like teaching. It's not so much about loving the subject that I teach (some subjects I don't even like it myself) but more about teaching people. I love teaching young people. I love the sudden sparkle when they heard something for the first time, or see the world in a different lens that they've never used before. That is electrifying and very addictive to me. I feel more energised after teaching. When I feel depressed, I feel better after teaching. I really think that teaching is the way that I got myself out of depression in the past.

I wrote this article because the last few days, I knew of this very intelligent primary school girl who is suffering from mild depression because of stress in an elite school. It was so bad that she had to take MC to recover from all the issues from school. This is a complex issue revolving around low self esteem and inability to take failures. I was asked to help her out and I think I did something meaningful to at least let her forget her troubles for a couple of hours. I let her play with LEGO, something that girls of her age is not familiar with.

I did it out of instincts, even though I was asked to help her out on maths, which is the area that is causing her stress. But I thought that the root problem isn't the math itself but something deeper, so the best way is to use a non-threatening environment to tackle the root problem - low self confidence. What is LEGO if it's not a toy? So after conducting the lesson and letting her build a model of a race car, I guided her to come up with theories and then testing it to see if it's true. I want her to experience small failures in a very safe environment, where there are no marks or exam papers for everyone to see her failings. She also had some problems fixing the LEGO bricks (usually girls don't get to play with LEGO, so that sort of hampered her ability to connect the bricks compared to boys of the same age), so solving her own problems independently with my supervision will create that kind of safe environment to fail.

My idea is that the confidence and self esteem is like a muscle. To train it, you got to learn how to fail in small ways and progressively fail in bigger ways without letting that negative feelings overwhelm you. After all, to be successful in life is to be progressively defeated by bigger and bigger obstacles. If not, you're not growing.

I hope I've made her day. She probably had no idea that she taught me a lot more than I taught her.

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How to register as a user in the cbox

Hi folks,

Those who had been to my site at bullythebear had always found that the cbox is one of the best things that this site has to offer. You can see a lot of people who came from all walks of life coming together to talk about almost everything. I had met a lot of people from different age groups that I would never had met if I had not the fortune to set up this cbox. I do hope that you would find it as meaningful and fortunate as I had.

Due to the nature of the cbox's structure, there had been quite a number of irritating incidents where you find regular nicknames being imitated. I think that's very irresponsible because there are some people who would use this as a way to create all sorts of mischiefs. In order to better regulate the authenticity of the users identity, and also to make this community an extension of the face to face meet ups that we have every now and then, I decided to make this cbox a little more exclusive.

New users who wishes to join the cbox can no longer log in directly. Instead, he/she now has to email me (my email is all over the place, do take some effort to find it!) and I'll assign the nicknames and password. This way, there will be less bot spammers and less human spammers, besides the obvious advantage of regulating the authenticity of the user identity.

Obviously this would create more work for me, but it's alright. I'll strive to reply the requests from new users as soon as possible, within 24 hours maximum, so that you can participate in the cbox as soon as possible. If the nickname is not used for 3 months consequentively, it would be deleted automatically and the user will have to re-register again so as to free up the nickname to others.

I take these steps to regulate the cbox to make it a more enjoyable experience, not to monitor your ip or your real name or any other nefarious schemes. Rest assured that whatever information you shared to be a registered user of the cbox will be not be used for any other purpose. You have my word of honour on it :)

LP
Blogmaster of bullythebear

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