In 2007 I was 25 — broke, about $5,000 deep in credit card debt, and walking down a hospital corridor I’d walked a thousand times before.
Somewhere along that corridor, something landed on me. Not a voice. More like a picture: if I kept doing exactly what I was doing, nothing was going to change. I’d end up where my family was — loving, but broke, fighting about money, stuck. And the thought that came with it was clear as anything: love is nice, but I want a better life than this.
That was the year I started planning my exit.
The math nobody wanted to say out loud
Looking back…I realized…NOBODY spoke about the salary even as a student doing internship, or by the lecturers or by other fellow students!
I was earning $1,700 a month as a fresh grad occupational therapist in a public hospital.
That was BEFORE CPF deductions, so it’s $1360 after 20% deduction and before I got confirmed. At confirmation, it’s $2050 before CPF deductions. Meaningful work, real skill, patients who got better — and a ceiling I could see from a mile off.
To move up, you waited for a 1-2% increment and performance bonus or promotion.
This increment…when given, you need to be grateful for it. And you need to need to be able to politick your way, play along with drama (or at least know how to sidestep and build allies…which obviously I dont know how or just wont, cos I’m too direct and naive, at least then). There was exactly one manager’s seat, and more than ten people circling it who had been waiting for many, many years — most of them better at corridor games than at the actual work.
I looked at that and did the simple arithmetic. If I stayed, my income was capped by a system that rewarded the things that I’m naturally not interested nor attuned in, and my best years would go into waiting for a raise smaller than inflation.
That’s not a complaint or me whining – it’s just what the system was built to do. The mistake would have been expecting it to do something else.
The day I handed in my notice
When I resigned to go freelance, my mother screamed at me to call my boss and beg for my job back. She’d call me, screamed at me, and then hang up. She did that, 4 times.
Look, I get it.
In her world, a steady paycheck was the whole point. You didn’t walk away from one — you held on with both hands. And I understood it. She’d lived through scarcity. Of course she’d protect the thing that felt safe.
But safe and stuck turned out to be the same address.
What actually happened
First month freelance, I earned $4,800.
Nearly three times the salary I’d left — and not because I got lucky. It was because the hospital had been keeping most of the value I produced and handing me back a sliver.
The moment I went direct, that gap was simply mine.
It wasn’t a clean ride after that.
After I saved enough (and after getting married to the woman of my dreams), I decided that anyone can become a freelancer, and we need to go up vertically to create more distance and moat against other freelancers – it was time for our first clinic.
I selected a shophouse in Joo Chiat Terrace, and it was being rented for $2300 then for upstairs and downstairs – I thought to myself, hmm, let’s do the shop downstairs and live upstairs. We spent on renovations, putting in air con, making a glass front, and it was also then when I started learning about
- considerations of how to renovate and use space for a physiotherapy and hand therapy clinic
- sales: when I visited doctors in Parkway East, they asked me to print referral forms, and I had never thought of it nor seen one before, and they gave me a copy to start/reference – this was my first foray into print collaterals for the business. And doing door-to-door sales.
- SEO and website: I signed up to creating my first ever website, and I remember churning out so many articles in the first week…and I got 3 clients in the first week itself. SEO then was crazy easy haha, so different from now.
I still could remember that entire event like it was just last week.
Unfortunately, I’d lose that clinic to a landlord who played me…cos he didn’t declare that he has termites infestation. The 2nd floor was shockingly starting to sink in cos of a cabinet on it…and I was fearful that the cabinet will fall through the 2nd floor and onto us or patients.
We had to call it a day, and lost our life savings.
We got back our 2 months deposit of $4600 though haha. And I still pass by that place occasionally – the same glass frontage is still there, but it’s no longer used for business.
That was one of the earlier experiences I made most of the mistakes in the book before anything really worked. But that first jump — $1,700 to $4,800 — that was the biggest shocker and it taught me the one thing the corridor never could: the ceiling was never my skill. It was the structure I’d agreed to stand inside.
Why this
I didn’t grow up with any of this.
No business in the family (though my dad did door-to-door sales for a while, but he gave that up to marry my mum and have a stable life).
No one a few steps ahead to ask. The default I inherited was simple: get a stable job, hold on, don’t rock it. My mother wasn’t wrong to want that for me — it was the only safe thing she knew.
But I didn’t want to live by the default I was handed. I wanted to build something on purpose.
That’s the whole reason this site exists. I’m not here to sell you a dream or a shortcut — I made the mistakes the slow, expensive way. I’m here to show the working: the real decisions, the real numbers, the reasoning underneath them. Starting with the first one — the day I stopped waiting for a 2% raise and bet on myself instead.
If you’re standing in your own version of that corridor, this one’s for you.