Our New Perspective of Saving

My growing up years were filled with images of Mum and Dad struggling to make ends meet.

Taxi driver Dad was seldom home as he had to put in the majority of his waking hours on the road to provide for the family.

Mum was the homemaker, sorting out the daily chores to keep the family well fed, clean and healthy.

And we somehow survived through the years, though I vividly remembered that the periods just before the Lunar New Year were the hardest, as household expenditures were at its yearly peak.

How my parents pulled through financially in my earlier years, is still a mystery to me till this day.

But I believed that it was their decision to stay frugal and not live above their means, that kept them going to raise their boys.

How wealthy you are, is never about how much you earn, but how much wealth you can accumulate.

But of course, the higher earning power you have, the more you can potentially save.

Though the above is technically true, in reality, the rampant media that we come in contact with ever so often, promotes consumerism. The media and the advertisers behind want the general public to live a high consumption lifestyle. Hyper-consumerism today is mostly driven by peer pressure and personal ego, to "show to the world", how successful one is.

One of the television advertisements which I had chanced upon years ago had been distinctly engraved in my memory. It was an ad for a local supermarket with a well-known celebrity promoting the slogon "Buy More, Save More!".

WHAT NONSENSE!

But unfortunately, I also grew up to be one of the rats in the rat race society, blindly chasing for ever more expensive and luxurious goods. I had unknowingly (and without any awareness) fallen into the hyper-consumerism trap.

It was only about 6 months prior 2018 that my wife suggested that we track our monthly expenses to attempt to save money, as we now have clear financial goals to meet in our later years. Admittedly, we had been leading a consumerism lifestyle and was living from paycheck to paycheck. Literally no savings at all!

As kindergarten wealth accumulators today, one of the basic rules which we had devised was to set aside a fixed amount of money as "money to be saved", as soon as we received paycheck. Prior to this, we usually saved what's left after our monthly expenditure. No prizes for guessing that we saved zits prior mid 2017.

Only now can we fully appreciate the concept of being frugal and living below one's means.

The second book which I read in 2018 <The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas J. Stanley> had explained and clearly illustrated the merits of being frugal and being a Prodigious Accumulator of Wealth (PAW).

The book had also devised a formula to calculate your personal net worth, as a benchmark to meet your wealth accumulation goals:

Net Worth = (Your Age x Pre-tax Annual Income)/10

As I reflect on my parents' decision on being frugal, I know now the kind of lifestyle that my wife and me are going to subscribe here on.

Do share with us your personal ways to consume less and save more, to accumulate wealth and to achieve financial independence!