Falling from the peak

Borrowing a phrase from the Taiwanese, the late Mr Lee Kuan Yew described those Singaporeans born from the eighties onward as “The Strawberry Generation” because of the perceived lack of resilience. Indeed, compare to him, many Singaporeans don’t have the experience of living in the World War II period and thus do not understand what hardship really means. Due to this, we often lose the fighting spirit of our fore-fathers in overcoming life obstacles. This is especially so when we start falling from the peak of our lives.

Contrary to what most people thought, the difficult part of mountain climbing is not the ascending phase. It is actually the descending that is more treacherous because after reaching the top of the mountain, the climber would have expended all his energy and fatigue began to set in. He would not have put much thinking on the journey downward and because of this, he become complacent, which led to his downfall literally. In fact, statistics have shown that most climbers die on their way down the mountain, rather than on the way up.

Similar to our education system, you need years of training to build up your body stamina and fitness in order to scale the highest mountain. You would realize the lack of oxygen at high altitude and it’s all about mental endurance once you are up there. If you are not careful, you would fall. In Singapore, we spend at least 16 years to obtain tertiary qualifications and then enter our first jobs to start earning incomes. This is a very long period of gestation time but nevertheless, you need to ask yourself honestly whether the paper qualifications prepare you well for the challenges that you face in your daily life. If so, good for you! If not, then what are you going to do in order to change the game?

Survival skills

Frankly speaking, the subjects that I learned in school don’t really prepare me to handle the adversities in my life. In my opinion, important life skills like emotions management, personal finances, social skills and career management are not taught nor emphasized in school. We have learned to accept the fact that these survival skills would have to be picked up through life experiences or during our job journey. But then again, I am not proposing that Singapore youth should stop going to school because education is universally critical to transforming lives and enable social mobility to take place. Instead, Singapore youths should identify their passions in their lives and think beyond what are being taught in the textbooks.

In school, we are often taught to think in logical manners, conform to rules and to solve problems using fixed formulas. Creativity and innovation are often discouraged and ridiculed in the school because the policy-makers believe in Confucianism style of education. But very often in life, there are no fixed answers and magic formulas to resolve issues. You will also realize that what works in the past may not be applicable in today’s circumstances. If Singaporeans persist in the old-school style of doing things, very soon we will lose our competitiveness at the global stage due to the fact that we are unable to come up with new tricks.

What went wrong for PMETs?

In recent years, there were many articles of white-collar workers in their forties being retrenched in Singapore and unable to find jobs for many years. In today’s rapid changing society, they don’t realize that their skill sets have become obsolete at an unprecedented pace. The fault began when they work very hard to climb up the corporate ladder and subsequently reached the peak. Like many mountain climbers, they failed to anticipate the risks associated with the journey down the ladder and neglected to learn new skills in order the change the game. The world is very unforgiving, particularly in Singapore. It’s practically every man for himself and if you don’t start thinking on how to grow yourself, you will live to regret it.

Besides saving for a rainy day and up-skill ourselves, we must have a passion to learn the art of growing your money through investing. Making money from the stock market is one way of building wealth but you need more than just knowledge. I have seen many people who claimed to do tonnes of research and reading but still end up losing monies in the stock market. Why is this so? Are they really lazy or did they not do enough homework or is it due to bad luck? I beg to differ.

Re-inventing yourself

To achieve success in the stock market, you must know how the market works and more critically, you must develop your own strategy. At the end of the day, it does not matter you are right or wrong in your stock picks, but having a system or investing philosophy can guide you through good and bad times. Easier said than done, I know.

For the Strawberry Generation, understanding the market dynamics and developing individual style is a tough learning process. Many have spent a lifetime paying expensive school fees to the market but still can’t figure out how to win the market. But what if there is a way to shorten the learning curve? To this end, SG Wealth Builder is pleased to form a partnership with fellow investment blogger, Dave, from Smart Passive Cash Flow to introduce his new membership site – See How I Trade. Like Dave, I share the notion that to be successful in investing, you must have the commitment to keep learning and earning. As a trader, Dave shares investment related articles that range from stocks, bonds, commodities and derivatives. Members can enjoy the below exclusive privileges:

1) Dave’s Daily Potential Trades

2) Dave Daily Trend Analysis

3) Dave’s Spotting of Big Boy’s Movement

4) Dave’s Weekly Trend Analysis

5) Dave’s Weekly Dow Component Analysis

6) Dave’s Recent Trade Summary

7) Strategies to use in different situations

8) Entries, Stop Loss and Targets

9) Exclusive Articles of unique movements

10) Wealth eBooks specially written for VIP Traders

For just USD60 per month, you can have a powerful investment tool that can help to level up your investing prowess. To get the discount subscription of USD49, remember to quote discount code: “sgwealthbuilder“. By investing this small amount of money, investors can benefit from Dave’s analyses, his strategies and how to set stop-loss.

When it comes to spending monies on sharpening investment knowledge, I know the perennial thinking is that you can do it alone and that there are a lot of free resources in the internet, so there is no need to sign up for exclusive memberships. But just think about it, cheap things don’t come good and good things don’t come cheap. There is no free lunch in this world and nobody owes you a living. Sometimes, in order to get ahead of the competition, you have to spend a little premium to get that edge above the rest. If you ask me, this amount of membership fee is definitely worth it. After all, what can you do with USD49 a month? Instead of wasting it on movies or food, why not invest it on yourself so that you can make even much more money?

So start educating yourself in the art of making money and master the analysis skill on reading the game. Enjoy the ride and have fun.

Join me in my investment journey and read my financial adventures for free! Through the sharing, my vision is to improve and change people’s lives. In school, we don’t learn how to budget, manage our finances, build wealth and invest our money. Instead, we are taught useless subjects which we would never put to use most of the times during our working lives.

Yet, managing our money is an important life skill that is critical to our survival in the society. Many people start to realize how it is importance of managing money only when they face the prospect of financial ruins, by then which would be too late for remedies. Thus, I started this blog to share articles on finances which I aspire to make a positive impact in others’ lives.

You can opt to subscribe email updates on my articles for free by entering your email address below.

Magically yours,

SG Wealth Builder