Build Business, Wealth & Family. By Design.
There are three of you. 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 … Read more
Last week my son David — nine years old — started playing “Dumb Ways to Die” in this the show he’s watching. I knew it instantly. That song is from 2012 — an Australian train company made it to stop people walking in front of trains. I’d half-forgotten it existed. Fourteen years later it’s colonising … Read more
By every rule of the early-retirement genre, I’m doing this wrong. The genre says you build the assets, hit the number, and exit. The whole point of the machine is to stop needing to work. And yet here I am — past the point where work is compulsory, opening two new clinics this year, by … Read more
In 2019 I wrote a post about how to stop complaining. I just reread it, and the strangest thing in it is one word I used without noticing where I’d taken it from. I wrote that repeated negative thoughts become “strongholds” in your mind. That’s not a self-help word. It’s Paul’s word — and I … Read more
In December 2019, I published my money theory. Point three read: “Invest ruthlessly in very defensive, dividend paying stuff (I tend to avoid growth stuff).” That wasn’t a passing comment. It was core, central of the engine of the whole plan I was preaching: “Live off dividends and interests and passive income. All active income … Read more
If a patient walks in with a fractured bone and you strap a plaster over it, the photo looks fine. The patient looks treated. Everyone in the room gets to tell themselves something was done. And the fracture goes right on being a fracture underneath — quietly getting worse — until the day it announces … Read more
My first salary as a physiotherapist at Changi General Hospital was $1,700 a month before CPF. After confirmation it went up to $2,050. If I had stayed on that path — salaried, public, dependable — I would not be earning more than $6,000 today, two decades in. I want to be careful how I say … Read more
Most people try to acquire their way into becoming. Buy the car, wear the watch, and somewhere in there, become rich. It runs in that order in their head: have the stuff, and you’ll be the thing. It’s backwards, and it doesn’t just fail — structurally, it can’t work. You’re trying to install a result … Read more
People hear the numbers and assume the goal was to stop working. It wasn’t. I saved hard so I could build freely — and those are two completely different lives. Here are the numbers, plainly. From 2008 to 2017, my wife and I averaged around $10,000 a month combined. Over ten years, roughly $1.2 million … Read more
Nobody ever sat me down and taught me money. I had front row sits since I was 8 years old, money fights after money fights, and it broke my heart how two loving people who werent equipped with decent regulatory functions combined with financial illiteracy kept fighting each other, not realizing it’s TWO of them … Read more