Having Money Is Important

Before you go on to scream at me as being materialistic, stop and think for a few moments. Sure, there may be poor and happy people, as well as, rich and unhappy people. However, I am not trying to equate happiness to wealth in this post. It is almost impossible to quantify happiness in the first place. Therefore, my only intention here is to explore what we can do with money, or what we cannot do without.

In a nutshell, I always believe that Money gives us freedom. With money, there are many things that we can choose to do such as going for that holiday, eating the stuff that you want and so on. Recently though, I attended a camp to join PTO and Peter Tan, a multi-millionaire, opened up another perspective. He simply asked a series of questions and summed up with the fact that not having money will force us to make a series of painful decisions.

One of the questions he asked was related to life support. He illustrated this scenario: your loved one is in coma and needs life support of $2k USD/month. Would you choose to pay for the life support or feed the remaining of your family with the money? As you can see, $2k USD per month is a lot for most of us and ultimately, we have to struggle with the tough decision of whether to break life support or to feed ourselves. This painful decision need not be made if we have money in the first place.

After this few hours of group conversation, I feel that there is a lot of things that we can learn from people who have made their mark. If you want to feel the energy that these people can give, just attend the talk of any Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) company. I am not endorsing any MLM companies, but rather suggest that they are a good avenue to learn from and develop yourselves. I also do not have anything against MLM, since I do like the MLM concept, but I just don’t like most of their products.

Back to the topic of the importance of money, there is a good example that relates to most singaporeans and it is related to housing. There are many people here that get married just to get government housing, which is cheaper. I feel that there is no romance in this kind of marriage and people should get married because they want to, not because they need a house. I won’t be surprised at all if divorce rates in Singapore increases, especially when couples get married just to get that house. I mean how romantic can it be when someone proposes and say “We need that house, let’s get married.”

I was born in a poor family too and often choices are made because of the lack of Money. For example, I was always eating porridge and canned food when I was young. My mother always used to said that eating light stuff is healthy, that’s why we always eat that. So, why is it that when she has slightly more money now, I don’t see her eating healthy food? Don’t misunderstand though, I do respect my mother for bringing up 3 kids single-handedly. I feel that she has done and suffer a lot for us and that is why I stopped getting money from her since 18.

My point is that many times when we are poor, we can’t give the best to our loved ones. Do you think I want my Mom to work so hard and get herself burned by cooking oil? You bet I don’t, but I simply don’t have the means to ask her to quit working now. However, I do strongly believe that things may be different after 3 years though.

If you really love your family, why not work harder to provide them with a better life? Sure, you may or may not succeed, but at least you put in your best. What do you think?