Freedom

 I cannot overstate how important freedom is.

I am free and I don’t take it for granted and I hope will never.

Drive safely, don’t rage

Exercise 

Eat well

Enjoy fine things in life you can afford to without going bankrupt. Don’t be a miser

Manage to investments and expenses wisely so you don’t lose this freedom by going back to work for a paycheck. I don’t wish to see a paycheck again.

Freedom to read any books, watch any shows, try any hobbies, just laze around to enjoy a nice coffee and weather. To just sit back and think about life, or just mindless watching of YouTube 

This is precious. Very. 

values values values

 What are values? These are things I believe I should do, rules of life that I follow. 

First of all, be honourable, honest and have integrity. 

Be respectful and polite by default. But stand your ground so you are not a pushover. Don't harm others, but be ready to defend and protect with all your means.

Be responsible. To your family, especially your partner, children and your parents.

And, keep your word. Don't make promises you cannot keep or have no intention of keeping, especially to someone close. Don't belittle what's important to someone else.

And if you do end up making one and breaking it, take ownership of the consequences and apologise. 

Personally, I am dealing with the consequences of a promise someone made but broke on me. Its horrible. It's an open wound that did not heal. 

As much as I want to let it slide, I can't.

Why?

Because, in order to let it slide, I had to take action to rectify a situation. And taking this action, to me, violates my values. And this is very hard to live by.

I know what I need to do to rectify, but at same time, I know it will be a big mistake on my part, and something that I will carry with me as a wrong thing to do, and I am quite unsure how I will live on with it. 

I have not done it yet, but I will have to do it within next 12 months. 

Meanwhile, I try to be as happy as I can, but I know something is coming. 

And I still do not know what I will actually do. Or how I will actually feel and then react when the deed is done. I will do a good job for sure, but what happens after it's done? Will life be normal? Or it will spiral down out of control? can't tell at all.

There's a very strong intent to sort things out, and then leave. Not an escape, but a relief from this misery.

Because, this is like me doing it all alone, to fix something which I am not 100% responsible for. There are no companionship, no support, no empathy. If I make a mistake, it's my fault again. If I do good, no one will appreciate.

The pain is huge. Not being heard by someone close. Being glossed over. 

its lonely. 

I can say and talk, but there's no feedback. There's no understanding. There's no compassion on the difficulties I will face.

"your problem" is what I felt. 

Body maintenance

Your body needs maintenance. 

You can work and grind hard at your job

BUT, you must always take some time to maintain your body. 

Else you will have to pay for it in future. If it can be fixed, you pay for it with $ and suffering while it’s being fixed

If it cannot be fixed, you pay for it in perpetuity suffering, and also $ to find and find solutions 

Always exercise. Strength training, stretches to keep joints nimble, runs and walks to keep heart strong

Always watch what you eat. Ensure you have sufficient protein, fruits, etc. eat your greens, drink milk. Take vitamins, they are really cheap these days. Just pop a multivitamin a day. That’s costs like $0.30 per pill. Don’t be stingy. It’s cheaper than your useless Starbucks coffee.

Always take time to clean your teeth. Brush them properly, use good paste and brush, then floss properly. If you can afford it, get a good electric toothbrush, it will do wonders for your dental health. You won’t want to lose your teeth before 60. That would be a horrible way to live, imagine not be able to eat what you want when you actually retire and have money and time. Find a good dentist and listen to him or her. Do your 6 monthly scaling and cleaning at the dentist. 

Always watch your weight. Get a decent modern scale that measures many things and tracks it on your phone. 

Always invest in decent sports wear. Socks, shoes, shirts and shorts. They don’t have to be top end. There’s online sales, there’s decathlon. 

Always go for your annual health screening

All these may seem unimportant compared to your tasks at your job, your meetings and your bonuses. But trust me, they are bloody important.

Remember also, inflation. It means medical treatment will just get more and more expensive as you grow old. Don’t inflate your body issues with it. You won’t be able to afford it comfortably.

I am retired at 50 now. I did some of the above and and paying a price. Fortunately most can be fixed - and I am working and focusing on them now, given that I have time and some money. I got lucky. Don’t depend on luck please.

Security

 We all want security.

Personal security 

Economic security 

Emotional security 

In this modern world, as long as you live in a capitalist country, I believe, for all practical purposes, economic security is what you must strive for. It is the bedrock for everything else in your life.

No one will have mood to enjoy music, joke with your partner, take time to whip up a nice meal, if they are struggling economically, unsure if they can afford to have a roof over their head, or food on table

Boredom or laziness

 It’s more laziness than anything in these days of ultra conveniences and internet. 

We can read any book we want anything

We can drink any coffee by just going to a nice cafe and spend a hour there 

We can prepare any nutritious food we want with all the fresh produce available in supermarkets 

When you have time on hand, no work commitments, good health and have some money, you can do anything 

Don’t say it’s boring

You are just fucking lazy 

AI and layoffs

Meta yesterday laid off 10% , or about 8000 of their global workforce. Probably some of my acquaintances were affected. I feel for them. I hope they saw this coming and are prepared. 

Layoffs and reorgs at Tech firms are not new. It has been happening since 20 years ago. 

So what's different this time?

Previous layoffs are mostly reactions to market dynamics and external economic situations. Think the DotCom crash, the subprime blow up leading to the great recession, wars, pandemics.  Also, move to cloud, where in-house IT shop workers were laid off. 

But this time round, it's a fundamental shift in how IT is delivered as service. Every IT shop now banks on AI to deliver services or most of it. This include creating the services itself (e.g writing a new application).  And then, such services will also replace the actual human workers that do the jobs today. e.g. translators 

The big tech like Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, they are showing the way now. They need to eat their own dog food, which is industry term for consuming what you produce. It's like Microsoft making its own staff use Windows Phone (what?? lol) , using its Bing search engine. But now, it's making their staff use their LLM agents that were borne from their in-house models. The tech giants are huge with easily 100k of employees, who are well educated and tech savvy, so it make sense to run your products through these folks to get real good feedback and iterate and iterate to compete. 

So, there had been reports of tech companies putting as KPI, the amount of AI tokens consumed by employees. This ensures each one is using AI for their "work". This indirectly trains the models to be better and better, and then...layoffs. You basically train your own replacement!

Somehow, this is quite similar to the early 2000s when outsourcing of IT services was all the rage. Enterprises IT heads where pressured to lower IT delivery costs, and vendors were eager to provide outsourcing services so they can grow and scale up into giant "body" shops. The outsourcing process required the existing in house IT folks to document everything, and then hand hold the vendor's staff for a few months. Once these vendors learned the ropes and take over, its lay off time for the in-house IT team, with a skeletal team of senior engineers and managements left to manage the vendors. 

This time round, the tech workers in big tech are being outsourced to AI agents. They trained these agents and get laid off. 

But it's worse. There is no place to go. Previously, laid off IT staff from enterprises can be offered similar positions at the vendors which outsourced their jobs, though most of time, there will be a pay cut. 

But what about now? Your job is replaced by an AI agent, which your big tech company could jolly well sell it to any other company anywhere in the world. You don't find a job again in the same role.

This is rather brutal. Lay offs are normal business cycles. But this time, you are laid off without a good chance of finding a replacement job unless you change your job role. The roles are gone, not just the headcount. 

Out of this burn, I believe new roles will emerge for others to take up. It's not easy for anyone who is 40 and above to switch to new role. 

The tech companies will continue to do well, as AI brings value to the economy. But this is a painful transition for many tech workers, especially software developers. 

Those not affected, be prepared. Do yourself a favour, start planning for it. 

Imagine what happens when AI and robotics merge. Even manual labor will be out. 

Will we reach a perfect world as described by some AI founders, where humans will no longer need to work and will just enjoy the fruits of labor done by AI???

All the assets and company owners, they provide goods and services, and if all these are produced mostly by AI, who will have the money to consume such products? The consumers don't have jobs and income!

So someone said, everyone will get a monthly spending credits as a basic human right. So who dishes out the credits? Who gets more?

The asset owners and company owners get more?

So rich gets richer and , worse, the rich now has full control of you. That's a nightmare to me. 

Maybe uncle is overthinking

I am not worried about myself, since I am retired. But I worry for my children. 

marriage and money issues

As I reflect on my journey thus far, I felt I got really lucky, even though I am sure I worked very very hard compared to most as well. Without that luck, things would had turned vastly different. 

One of the fortunate thing that I had was marriage + money

My wife and I, so far, had never encountered money problems since we started working and then got married. Now, let me explain.

There are many roots of money problems.

First will be your family, i.e. your parents and siblings if you have any.

We were lucky. There were no money problems originated from either side of our parents and siblings, so far. This itself is already very lucky. There are so many people who were tied down by money issues created or faced by their parents and siblings. These are blood ties, you can't just walk away and live your materially comfortable life and let your parents and siblings suffer, at least when you were still young. Now, at some point in time, if you had helped enough and these folks continue to not pick up themselves, you have to decide. Anyway, we didn't have such problems. Our parents were prudent, responsible and likely resolved things on their own to avoid spilling over to us. Thank you all for that. Our siblings, that's the wild card. But once they are all full grown ass adults, they should take own responsibility, so I am pretty sure me and my wife are in that phase already lol. We are that old hahaha. As for nieces and nephews, those are quite distanced as in we should not be responsible for their money issues.

Now that we have a solid base to start our life, the next luck we have are alignment of expectations of lifestyle. Both me and wife definitely enjoy finer things in life. We have our share of loving luxury and branded items, expensive things etc, but we know our limits and we never over stretch and got into card debts. We both don't wear hats too big for our heads.

Next, we got lucky in our careers, as in, we mostly were gainfully employed since we graduated. That long streak of salary coming in every month helped a lot. It provides a solid base for wealth building and living our lives as we expand our family.

I firmly believe that this luck streak ( and I can only hope it will continue, but the past streak has already allowed us to be prepared for future) , plays a huge part in our marriage happiness. We never worry about money so far, and that meant, we don't argue over it. It's just usual nagging by uncle (me!) to wifey to try save more for retirement. Nothing contentious, nothing hurtful. I believe many marriages broke down due to money issues. It can create trust issues, constant stress and anxiety. Then it affects the children. 

Oh yes, children. A financially stable (not necessarily well off) family provides a solid bedrock for children to grow up and learn. I believe we gave our kids all the support they need to grow up and learn. In fact, we have to introduce some scarcity to ensure they stay grounded, vs giving them whatever they want (not that we can really do that lol). But you get what I meant. Our resources allowed our kids to either grow up spoilt and entitled, or money smart and respectful. We want the better outcome. It's a happy problem.

I think I mentioned this in some older post...our goal is to stop burdening our kids as we grow old, financially. Meaning, we will be financially independent and do not need our adult children to pay for our expenses. I want us to be the last sandwiched generation. 

 

retired early, confidence

Retiring earlier, while seems enviable (and should be!), is kinda scary TBH

All the computations and analysis done to ensure financials are in order were key.

Even then, there is always a risk of something going south. That's why the plans have backup, which themselves have backup.

Still, once you made the leap, there's almost no turning back. You can turn back to find a job, but its going to be hard (once you tasted the honey of freedom, which I did, its very hard to accept its loss)

Now that I made the leap, I am on my own. There is no safety net of a job, and large corporation that pays the bills and medical expenses. 

I have to be on my toes on financials, not everyday, but still, be very conscious on expenses and projected expenses and if there are looming changes coming. 

You will want to not step onto something that gives way to your weight, if you get what I mean. 

Still, confidence takes time to grow. Bit by bit. It takes discipline, stick to your plans, be brave to take on unexpected changes, ensure there is backup. And keep yourself healthy. 

I am rich

 No, not about the $$ I have, though I think I have a decent amount relative to others

I am rich, because I am free. I have time to do things I want (not any thing, but thinks I can do)

I am rich, because I can be there for my kids anytime...

Meet the teacher? No problem. 

Need to get something urgently from the store to do a school project? I'll do get it!

Need to accompany my spouse to all her medical appointments, even those which simply involve waiting for a long time ? I'll be present. I don't have answer to other things that can override my choices on how I want to spend my time. 

I am therefore, RICH. 

Don’t take freedom for granted

 The freedom I am enjoying now is Awesome

I must remind myself how precious it is, lest I start to normalize it and take it for granted.

When we are chained to our job to make ends meet (and then some), we yearn for the day we can break free of the chains. The deadlines, the meetings, the networking, the schemings, the anxieties, the yearly performance targets, the stress etc. at those moments, we dreamt of freedom. 

But when we actually get freedom, we may ironically say we are bored. Now that’s very ungrateful. 

I must never be ungrateful to my freedom. This is hard earned by myself with some dosage of luck of meeting the right people who helped me. 

Really appreciate it.

Will take good care of myself, my health and my mind and my family and my resources to fully appreciate this freedom !

I have nothing to do

 Now, that's a statement that can be made by anyone.

I say that when I was still working

I say that now that I am retired

But it has a very different meaning

Before retirement, saying you have nothing to do is probably born out of boredom that comes from too many things to want to try with too little time, where time is so short that its not enough to even do one thing.

With retirement and all the flexible time on hand, say you have nothing to do can still come from boredom, but it's a a different kind. 

With all the time on hand, you are limited by mostly the resources (mostly money lah) you have, as well as, if you are old fart like me, also limited by what your stiff joints and dwindling muscle mass allows.

So that naturally cuts down, from a theoretical unlimited list of things to a more reasonable list of things you can do.

And with all the time on hand, you can do all of it!

But you can still say you have nothing to do when someone asks what you are doing now.

It's a happy nothing to do state, not one that is unhappy, unfulfilled. It's a peaceful state. It's a state of freedom.

I have nothing to do now with my time, so I just laze around and rest and enjoy my coffee and my free air. And I look around my house and admire its beauty and grow some gratitude that I can live in a nice apartment while retired.

Isn't that beautiful, nothing to do?

Alas, this isn't how my days are all the time, if so, that's a big problem lol.

Enjoy your day 

Income tax payable 2026 YA

 $692 

Probably my last time paying income tax lol

That’s about $50 per month

What a relief 

watching your kids grow

when you have kids, you gave dilemma 

Why

With the ease of digital media, parents have easy access to all the videos and photos of their kids since the day they were born. 

This is double edged

Yes, the ease of retrieval of old photos and videos is nice, especially when you want to reminisce the cute times. But have we thought about the impact of our behaviour on our still growing kids?

How do they actually feel when their parents keep showing them their cute photos as babies and toddlers?

Will they feel that their present form is no longer as appealing to their parents?

Will they think their parents are just happy when they were babies?

As parents, the time and energy we expend on looking at old media meant we lose time and energy to appreciate the "present" form of our kids.

its ironic, but we end up taking lesser and lesser videos and photos. 

Yes, babies and toddlers are cute, but so are teens and young adults kids!

Let's not abuse the tech we have at the detriment of staying in the now with our kids. 

Build that bond, regardless of tech improvement. The newest phone, gadgets etc will keep coming, but the time spent with kids won't show up again if we miss it

poor and rich vs happy and unhappy

Now, if someone who has no worries whatsoever on their living expenses and material life, comes and tell me they are unhappy with life and has so many issues and feel so down...I cannot understand it on surface. 

But I can also understand it.

Why?

We all need our basic needs, think safe home, food, clothes, internet, entertainment. 

If you don't have basic needs, you will be miserable most of the time, but you can try keep your mood up sometimes with positive thinking. But you will generally still be unhappy.

Once you have your basic needs (so some) covered, you have a baseline of happiness that you can hit easily. But the human mind is never satisfied. You will now have time and energy to find faults with things. The food isn't so good, your home isn't that nice, your spouse isn't good enough etc etc.

So, to the unhappy and miserable rich man....how about you give away all your riches and go back to working for others? And then find happiness from that position? 

Or you prefer to reset your mind, stay in your comfortable home and life, be grateful for your situation, while work on becoming happier?

Yes, there will always be someone happier than you from your view, but likewise there will always be many more who are worse off. Some don't even have confidence of having food or shelter tomorrow. 

I am not going to starve. I live a reasonable comfortable lifestyle. But yes, I have my share of unhappiness just like anyone else. BUT I am also always reminding myself how lucky I am and how things could had been much worse. This perspective gives me motivation and hope for any issues I have on hand. 

Of course, sometimes the human psyche is magical. It can make you do silly things that are illogical. 

So happy and not happy, it's complex. 

But let's stay simple and happy