Singapore 50 - Still land of opportunities ...

Singapore has started preparation and getting ideas from it's people for its 50th year independence celebration in 2015. 50 years is deemed long by some people, but comparing with other developed nation, we are still a young one. In the recent years, there were many issues raised such as high hdb price, runaway condo price, high car price, food prices have also increased, everything has gone up except for salary which has not kept in pace. The young (aged 20 to 25) started asking about their future and if there is still opportunities in the land where they were born. More than 1000 students attended the Ministerial forum 2014 with PM Lee recently to understand his thoughts on these.

As I gathered with a couple of friends during our usual CNY gathering, I looked at them and they are pretty successful in their own ways. Though not very rich, all of us have a roof over our head, all drive car because of needs, kids in neighborhood school and all doing well in their career. We are the Generation X and our 2 generations before us had contributed to growth of Singapore and now in my generation we are still contributing.

Every generation had its challenge, the earlier generation had theirs. In our generation, We witnessed the fast transformation of this country, from a ticketed non-aircon bus to now using card. There is now also more competition in school and in jobs, given our open economy. In job, we had to compete with the FT, some got displaced of their job. I was fortunate to have my previous 3 very professional FT hiring manager. We also experienced firsthand dot com crisis, 911, SARS and Lehmen collapse. These had taught us to understand that if one is able to use the cycle to your advantage, the rewards will follow. This is not the first time COE is so high, it had happened before. And if it's high, then don't buy now cause knowing that it will normalized some time in future again, though no one knows when. Same goes to property price as well, it reached all time high before it crashed during the Asian Financial crisis.

To the young, importantly, spend less than what you are earning and don't make common sense financial mistake because just one mistake it can set you back many years. If you abide by these rules, you should be comfortable as these were the rules that my friends and I followed as well. With the amass cash, your opportunity will come in the next cycle.