Have you ever thought about becoming a millionaire before?

It was never on my bucket list. I grew up in an environment where being rich was frowned upon. So, I never actively strove for money, and instead dedicated myself to more noble goals like traveling and learning.

But wait. Why not?

Whether you want to become a millionaire or not, we all have some extra money in the bank and could make it work harder for us.

I want to share two fundamentals.(Needless to say, I am no financial expert nor advisor, so take everything with a grain of salt)

You cannot multiply money you don’t have. Hence, build up savings. Of my net income, I save about 60%-75%.

In the Middle Age, people in a village got sick after eating bread. It turned out that a fungus had infested the local grains which made people get high fevers. A particular group of people did not get sick - those were old women at the outskirts of the village, too poor to afford bread.

Because noone in town knew about the relationship between the fungus and the bread that caused high fever, town people started to assume that those women were the reason for why people got sick. The church helped to spread the belief and eventually those women were called witches and so the witch hunt began…

We have not changed since our Middle Age ancestors. Today, with the outbreak of the coronavirus, the (Western) media uses facts about the virus to spin blockbuster stories.

Some people have asked me whether I made New Year’s resolutions, and while I have no active bucket list, I did write down routines I’d like to adopt in 2020.

Some thoughts on the routines below:

I try to keep Sunday evenings free of dates or any social obligations in order to get a good full 8-9 hours sleep and start the new week fresh. It’s bad to drink on Sundays and feel hungover by Mondays…

I’m having most difficulties with adopting to my new food routines - I’ve been following the whole vegan vs. performance conversations, and still don’t know if it’s better to go vegan, or low carb or keto or whatever is the current truth. I try to remind myself to go meatless on Mondays and no sweets/sugar on Tuesday as an initial attempt to eat healthier. I have yet to pick up those routines though…

Otherwise, I try to be more kind this year and offering my help more often. Perhaps it’s karma, but I feel like there is something about paying forward. So while before I would ignore most of it, now, I try to at least write back to the MBA kids that reach out on LinkedIn for help.

Last week, I had an average mid-40s German managing partner come visit me in the office. He wore a suit, had greying side hair and wrinkles on his face and when I greeted him, he was surprised.

His body language and his subequent questions (ie whether I came to Singapore alone or with a family) were clear signs of gauging my age, as he was trying to reconcile in his head how someone so young could lead an entire regional office.

It’s not the first time I felt that looking young was hindering my credibility.

Now that we are in our late 20s-40s, we have more money to spend, more new skills to learn, more travels to experience and I’d like to believe that we live more freely than in our early 20s.

Of course, subtly, we are aware of getting older. Prefer going to a chill bar and go to bed at midnight rather than dancing in a club ’til 5am? Have started to spend too much money on anti-wrinkle creams? Experiencing a hangover from just a bit of red wine?

I recently listened to a Talk at Google which really intrigued me. The talk was about why we age and why we don’t have to.

I mean why DO we age?