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There’s an old Chinese saying, “how much you eat and how much you clothe is fixed in this lifetime.” Older chinese folks believe that everyone of us can only ‘hold’ so much wealth in our lives. For example, if you can hold $100,000 and then win a million bucks in a lottery, chances are, you’d lose 90% of it in good time.

The older I get, the more evidence I see, in myself and people around me, that this is the way things work.

So, should we just give up and accept what is?

Hell no!

Like any computer programming bug, there’s a couple of ways that you can ‘beat the system’ and get more from life. This post talks about one of them - going on a vibrational spending spree. [Read more]

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About a decade ago, I put together a retirement plan that will yield a monthly income of about $2,500 when I turn 65 in about 25 years.

The recent chain of events in the financial sector and global economies have set me to re-think that plan again.

This post outlines what these economic trends are and they will impact any retirement plan. [Read more]

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In today’s age of easy credit, real luxury lies in being debt-free. I can still vividly recall a couple of weeks back when a younger friend, W, walked into my office and proclaimed how relieved he felt. W had trimmed his debt down 80% and was only a couple of months from clearing them totally.

Being Asian and a Chinese Hakka (a dialect tribe famous for thriftiness), I can easily switch to a ’saving’ mode whenever the need arises. In fact, the mode will kick in automatically and dependably after a short spending spree.

This post delves into this Hakka man’s bag of tricks and summarizes them into 10 easy steps for you to start saving more money. [Read more]

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This is a follow-up article from Why you should care about Inflation.

Over time, inflation will erode both your standard of living and your savings. I am a firm believer that life should improve constantly. Once I identified inflation as a threat to that, I started learning and trying out ways to beat it.

This post summarizes 8 ways that I’ve used to counter inflation. [Read more]

Photo by basykes

Inflation is when you pay fifteen dollars for the ten-dollar haircut you used to get for five dollars when you had hair.
~ Sam Ewing

We only have to go to a local grocery to know what inflation is all about - rising prices. The worry we have is that our income is not rising as fast and we don’t really know when it will get better.

I am going to put to you that inflation is here to stay and you cannot sit and wait long enough for it to go away. This article explains the cause of inflation and why you should care about it. [Read more]