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 what that means, because for years I said it wrong.
For a long time my story was simple: I escaped, and the people still on that path are stuck. And underneath it ran an even quieter story about my own father, who worked his whole career, maxed out his EPF so he could draw down RM5,000 a month, and was set to retire in 2014 — the year he died, after waiting and working his whole life, at 59. I read that for years as a man who deferred his living and never got to collect on it.
I don’t think that anymore.
I caught myself doing the exact thing I’d warn anyone else against: scoring another man’s life with my own scorecard.
I wouldn’t have lived his way, so I marked it down as not-living. But I can’t actually know that. He could jolly well been content on the road he chose. The only thing I know for certain is the thing he told me himself — he couldn’t retire earlier, because the capital to do it was never there…and that he saw that he could (or no choice) retire on EPF so that’s why he worked hard all the way to hire retirement year. That isn’t a man who failed to live. That’s a man who was handed a path that gives you a plan and never gives you a choice.
That’s the real thing, and it took me years to see it cleanly: the default path doesn’t manufacture choice. It manufactures ceilings.
My father’s ceiling was an EPF drawdown — a good, responsible plan, with no door in it.
Mine, on the salaried road I started on, was around $1700 a month — a at best, MEH salary.
I KNEW that I couldnt get married nor start a family with that. Or maybe I could, but I wont want to….how? If I stayed the course, I would definitely be terribly scared of quitting after 20 years of being an employee with dependable salary, whatever the politics and whatnot. We’d both been handed the same kind of script, one generation apart: stability in exchange for optionality. Do the work, collect the plan, and never once get to decide whether the work is something you want or just something you have to keep doing to keep the lights on.
So I zagged.
I left the path with the ceiling and started building the kind that has a door in it — the clinics, the holding company underneath them, and a trust I am funding deliberately so that by around 51, money no longer gets a vote in my decisions. Not so I can stop. I expect I’ll still be building at 60…maybe 70.
Maybe, till God calls me home, simple because I enjoy building.
The point was never a finish line where living finally begins. The point is to change what the work means — from something I do because the bills demand it, to something I do because I chose it.
That’s the part people get backwards.
They think financial freedom is about money. To a large, simple and superficial extent, it is.
Though mentally, spiritually and operationally, that’s just part of the story. It’s about getting money out of the driver’s seat so your finite time goes where you actually want it to go — whatever that is for you. I build block by block today, with a designed future in mind, and the building itself is the life. There is no “later” I’m waiting on. There is only a structure I’m assembling now, so that the choices stay mine.
But here’s the deepest reason, and it has almost nothing to do with me.
A good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children. I used to hear that as a line about money. It isn’t — or not only. The richest thing I can hand my kids isn’t a number. It’s the door: an option that neither my father nor my younger self was ever handed. My father couldn’t give me what he didn’t have. I would rather break that link than pass it down intact.
So when you look at the road you’re on — the salaried one, the safe one, the one that hands you a plan — ask the only question that actually decides anything. Not “is this a good income?” It probably is.
Ask: is there a door in it?
Because a plan with no door is just a longer hallway. And you tend not to find that out until you’re standing at the far end of it — the way my father was, in the year he never got to spend.