There are three of you.
- The you from the past. The you reading this. The you who has to live with what the first two did.
- The version of you sitting here today didn’t appear out of nowhere. You are the cumulative invoice of every decision and non-decision the past you made — financially, physically, relationally. Almost nothing about your current situation is sudden. It was ordered years ago. It’s just being delivered now.
- The you in future, your future self.
I learned this the expensive way.
What I traded without noticing
When I started building businesses in 2008, I went all in. Learning, refining, keeping things afloat.
I told myself it was a season.
The bill arrived in pieces.
My body first. I went from a fit 75kg to an unfit, cuddly plump 95kg. Stopped exercising. When I got sick, I got properly sick — back injury, neck injury, and one blackout after a stressful confrontation at work back in 2008 or 2009, when one of the CFOs in a public listed company was giving me a challenging time, and I dont miss her one bit.
Then the bill I couldn’t pay back.
Through those years I ran on a quiet operating assumption: make the money now, connect with the people later. My dad passed away in 2014, in a very short timeframe of 2 weeks, and it was truly painful cos Louise and myself finally could afford our 5-year delayed honeymoon so there was a nice high…and when I came back, I came back to my father having a nasty cough to which I remember making him specific manuka honey to help him heal and forced him to go to see the doctor
. There was no later. No final proper conversation, no meal, no reconnection…cos he couldnt breathe, and the doctor decided to put him on ventilation. He never woke up after that, and a series of chest infections compounded with too strong ventilation that sheared his lungs made it a stronger infection bed for his lung tissues, which sealed his fate and death on 24th May 2014.
The “later” I’d been banking on was never mine to schedule. I was the fool to assume time was on my side (Luke 12: 19-21).
That’s the thing about deferring what matters: you’re writing cheques against an account you don’t control. Our days are in God’s hands, not ours. I learned that as a fact before I learned it as a doctrine.
The same arithmetic runs your money
Here’s why I’m telling you this in a post about finances: it’s the identical mechanism.
If past-you overspent for years, present-you is servicing the debt — and probably adding to it, because debt makes people anxious, and anxious people spend. If past-you saved 10%, 20%, 50% and invested it consistently (DCA ie dollar cost averaging) over time, present-you is holding a buffer measured in months or years of freedom.
Same person.
Same income, roughly (this is before factoring increments, windfalls, bonuses and upskilling income increase etc)
Completely different present — because of decisions made when the consequences were still invisible.
Debt works like a hole and a slope at the same time. The deeper you are, the harder the climb out, and the ground keeps tilting against you. Compounding doesn’t care which direction it’s working in. It will faithfully multiply whatever you feed it — savings or interest payments.
What I’d tell you to actually do
The mechanism is boring, which is why it works:
Spend less than you earn — meaningfully less, not symbolically less. Invest the difference in something broad, boring, and low-cost. Reinvest what it produces. If you’re in debt, add one line at the front: pay it down — but keep saving something even while you do, because the habit is the asset. The act of saving, repeated, rewires you.
The money is almost the side effect.
In 2019 I would have told you “safe dividend stocks.” I preached that for years. I’ve since changed instruments — today I’d point at a single global index fund — but notice what changed and what didn’t. The vehicle changed. The arithmetic didn’t. Past-you funding future-you is the principle; everything else is implementation detail.
Is cutting back a sacrifice?
It definitely feels like one — for a while.
But look closer at what you’re actually cutting. I’m not a hardcore frugality guy. I like my lattes, eating out, travel. The cuts that matter are the ones where the spending wasn’t making you happier anyway: the upgrade you didn’t need — the purchase that was really just restlessness with a receipt.
I still refused to buy a car in Singapore even till today, in 2026, with three kids. I rather move closer to town and MRT/bus stops where public transport is reliable and affordable, and I can always order or hail a private hire car or taxi whenever I want. I run phones into the ground rather than upgrading on schedule. None of that cost me any happiness.
All of it fund the version of my life I actually wanted.
And here’s what I’d say differently from the 2019 version of me: the goal was never “passive income so I can escape work.” That’s the internet’s framing, and it’s thin. The goal is stewardship across time — handling what passes through your hands today in a way that the future you, and the family depending on him, inherit strength instead of cleanup.
You can’t change the invoice but you can change the order.
What’s done is done.
If past-you did well, you’re enjoying it — steward it. If past-you made a mess, the mess is real, but it’s also finite, and today is the first decision the next version of you will inherit.
Every dollar you direct today is an instruction to the future. Most people send their future self a bill.
Why not send him a strong foundation and future instead?