What if, at some point in the future – The concept of assisted suicide is made possible. An option where people can choose not to wait till “that day comes”, but rather make a proactive approach to end your life in a hassle-free and convenient way?

It’s ironic that I just came across this article unintentionally about the concept of assisted suicide in Sweden. It looks a pretty attractive option, especially for countries with aging population. I believe that there is a limit to how much developed country should continue to increase their average life expectancy, except for a select few who wants to live as long as they possibly could given the technologies available. What I’m thinking however, is that there’s an increasing number of people who has opt out of longevity beyond retirement age.

You might want to read this article, and assess whether this is relevant for you.

Inside the Dignitas house | Society | The Guardian .

It gets into this situation. I am skeptical of any good news regarding the current crisis the world is in, and is tired of hearing more Doomsday news and call-outs. 

In the end, there’s so many directions the future can lead us to from this crisis. Nobody have the confidence to predict what will happen to the entire market. There might be wars, riots, jobless rates etc. But somehow or rather, people will survive it. That’s where our world starts all over again.

The advice I follow is – Be yourself and live life normally. Live within your means. You are not safe hoarding up on cash because inflation rates might shoot up. Your currency may devalue. There may be chaos and unrest.

You are not safe spending all your money either – I won’t need to elaborate more on that. You might think it’s a good time to buy stocks cheap, but this crisis is unlike any other crisis – The confidence in financial markets, and financial institutions are at an all-time low.

Some key quotes from the article. Probably I need to research on where MAS stands in our monetary policy. From what I see on the surface so far, they are doing a pretty decent job.

“Indian banks are not levered like American banks. Capital ratios are 12 and 13 percent, instead of 7 or 8 percent. All those exotic structures like C.D.O. and securitizations are a very tiny part of our banking system. So a lot of the temptations didn’t exist.”

“A lot of Indians, when you push them, will say that if you spend more than you earn you will get in trouble. Americans spent more than they earned.”

“Savings are important. Joint families exist. When one son moves out, the family helps them. So you don’t borrow so much from the bank.”

Seventy percent of the banking system in India is nationalized, so a strong regulator is critical, since any banking scandal amounts to a national political scandal as well. 

Was reading through this article and it crystallized what I felt back in university. While reading my texts, I felt that there was too much “financial” and “money” magic in this industry. This article did a better job at describing what I should also have questioned during that time.

Probably I would have been attracted to the industry if there was not such a distinct differences on the prestige between the front-office, middle-office and back-office.

With the severity of this recession/depression, it will be weird for finance students to study and extrapolate the equity market trends and returns over the next few years. Chances are, finance students will have to study the market all over again.

That being said, I still believe in the fundamental value that the banking system provides to the economy – In terms of identifying the lemon companies, and also to provide a basis for valuing the company.

The fundamental flaw with equity market theories, or with any public companies, is the increasing pressure to deliver year-on-year profit growth. The underlying cause of this flaw can be attributed to capitalism, which states that the welfare of an economy can be measured by tangible and material consumption of the people in the economy.

The emphasis on consumerism to sustain a market based on capitalism is not feasible, and increasingly what I witness is a market trend towards a “buy more, buy more! Consume more, consume more!” mentality that is pretty retarded. People move away from their inner sense of peace and tried to seek comfort in the pursuit of material consumption.

The movie “Fight Club” summarized it well when it quoted that people have evolved to “work in jobs that they hate, to buy things that they don’t need, to impress people that they don’t like.”

mollymeek: Send this to the ST Forum 5: S’poreans Complacent and Greedy

Singaporeans are becoming more and more complacent. They think that the government will take care of them. They are unable to go through hardship and are unwilling to work 18 hours a day. They are so greedy that they think they are entitled to overtime pay when workers are supposed to do work and not suck money from employers who are kind enough to give them work to do.

- To be a free agent nation . 80% of the people works as a contractor, temporary job, or micro-businesses (with 3-4 people). The goal is to make every industries either a blend of oligopoly and monopolistic competition. In essence, there’s a long tail of small businesses serving the niches that the market giants fail to serve.

- Office buildings to be set up at residential areas to relieve traffic congestion from the city centre. More online stores to reduce the reliance on our natural constraint of lack of space. More home businesses consultancies to be set up. Startup hubs with decent facilities and contacts could be set up to encourage collaboration between different companies.

Social Welfare

- Waiver of GST on medical facilities, school fees, and costs (with the exception of cosmetic surgeries such as LASIK). These are basic welfare necessities that citizens should be entitled to.

- Families whose income per family member under S$800-$1000 to have their utilities bills waived for a certain reasonable limit, such as $50/pax.

- Increase in minimum wage of blue-collar workers. Local (Singapore citizen or PR) workers to be increased to S$9/hr and foreign workers to increase to S$12 per hour.

Transportation

- Privatizing feeder-bus services in Singapore. It is a waste to have large single-deck buses with unused capacity going around during off-peak hours. It would be more beneficial to have private mini-buses (capacity of 8-16 pax) at 2-3 minutes interval going between towns. The extra feeder buses that are freed up could be used to serve the public more extensively during peak hours.

- Carpool lanes in expressways, and heavily congested roads. ERP to be waived for carpool lanes. Implementing bus-lanes on heavy traffic roads (such as Marymount Road)

- Taxi-bus door-to-door transportation service available. Consumer can book a cab online or through phone SMS (no booking charges) and receive a fixed quote and expected time and pickup location which will be charged to his online account automatically.

- Increase in COE prices by 70%, except for vehicles registered by businesses. This will reduce the number of cars on the roads.

Technology

- S$10-$20/month for unlimited mobile data plans usage. 100MB mobile data plans included in all mobile plans. Mobile companies are hurting their profits if they fail to even encourage their customers to try out their mobile service. Think about it. Would you have such a heavy volume of SMS without the extensive number of free messages that comes embedded in your service?

- The ability for us to receive our credit card and utilities bills or statements online. (And to give us the option to stop paper-delivery of our statements). The ability to receive free itemized billing if we take up the option of online-delivery of our bills.

- The ability for us to view up to 7 years of financial transactions with our bank accounts. Not the pathetic 2 months that we currently have now.

Median monthly starting pay for cleaners and labourers has in fact fallen by nearly one-third, from $860 to $600, between 1996 and last year. To save money, he has stopped eating out for all his meals. Dinner is a simple meal of bread and Milo. To save electricity, the bachelor does not switch on the lights in his one-room Telok Blangah flat. Even then, he finds himself running out of money before the month is up. ‘I’m already very thrifty but the money is still not enough,’ he said in Hokkien. Source: We can barely stay afloat. Straits Times

Increase in cost of living:

THE cost of meals at hawker centres and restaurants look certain to rise after food supply costs, particularly for imports, rocketed for the second month in a row.

The Singapore DSPI (Domestic supply price index) showed that prices of live animals were 24.5 per cent higher in Oct than a year ago, while those of dairy produce and eggs soared 41.6 per cent.

Vegetables and fruit prices rose 5 per cent. Fish, however, cost 0.5 per cent less than a year ago.

Source: Food retail prices set to rise as supplies get more costly. Straits Times

Increase in cost of doing business:

SINGAPORE companies are under pressure to raise their wages more than they had earlier expected, in view of higher inflation next year, said human resources services company Hewitt.

Source: Pressure on S’pore firms to raise wages by over 5%. Straits Times.

More negative commentaries on the poverty situation in Singapore. Enough said. No comments. Could be interesting to do a project estimating the cost of living in Singapore later on.

All these activities makes sense. They force us to think about our life from a broader concept as opposed to living our lives as corporate drones who depends on job security to sustain our living. Twenty years from now, I don’t see much hope in job security for anybody above the age of 40. One of the core principles in finance is that of the time value of money. In a nutshell, it means that a dollar saved today is worth more than a dollar you receive ten years from now. The reason is that a dollar saved today can be invested, and thus that dollar will be worth $3 in future. It makes sense logically because instant gratification is always worth more than future gratification for items of the same value.

But there is more to life than money. The time-value concept can also be applied to other intangible areas of your life, which includes happiness, enjoyment and fulfillment. An excessive pursuit of financial freedom in sacrifice of other areas of your life results in an imbalance. Fivecentstencents pointed out that financial freedom is a journey and not a destination. The blog succintly summarizes the point in a single paragraph.

And so it is with financial freedom. Many of us see the end point or the destination of this process of financial freedom as being able to quit our jobs and do what we REALLY want in life instead of our work and business. The absurdity of it all of being in a rat-race is that we trade our time for money and use the money to buy back time, all the while forgetting that it is the experiences we gather through the journey that is life, that is living.

Do what you are born to do. Contrary to popular beliefs, some of us are born to lead. Some are meant to follow. Remember that if you engage in any productive activity and do it well, your efforts will eventually pay-off. you don’t have a guarantee of financial returns, but you guarantee at least that you lived a life worth living.

However, I believe a common sales tax-rate across the board punishes the middle-class and lower-income families un-necessary. Ideally, we need a tiered sales-tax system. To start off, the tax system have to distinguish between the needs and luxurious items that we consume. Healthcare (excluding cosmetic healthcare), Groceries, insurance services, and “non-restaurants and cafes” F&B and “compulsory” school textbooks should be exempted from the GST. In its place, a GST of 15-20% could be imposed on luxurious items exceeding a certain value which “provides limited benefits on top and over that of another non-branded consumption good.” Examples of such taxes could be made on luxurious vehicles or housing which exceed the certain stipulated fair-value. However, this would most likely be met with huge protests by the multinationals, who might threaten to abandon their operations in our country.

I did not like the idea of the government relaxing the prices on the COE, only to raise prices on the ERP later. It caused more congestion, and only increased the cost of living. We are no better off than before. It does not make sense for new car-owners to sell their cars as easily as the ERP rates are revised. There are too many tiers of cash outflows from owning a car in Singapore.

Perhaps a change also needs to be made for us to have a steeper progressive income-tax system. However the risks of having the rich leave the country to maintain their extravagant lifestyles would be a key concern. The next key question to ask is – How will Singapore be impacted when the top 20% of the rich leaves the country? Will we be better off, or worse off? I don’t know the answer to that question, and what it could imply.

If you believe that leaving the country is the way to go, I advise you to think again. Rising costs, and the lack of job security is a world-wide problem. The effects of globalization will eventually haunt any nation that fails to keep up with the rest of the world in terms of competitiveness.

Let me try to examine Singapore’s key concerns. The first problem is brain-drain, where the rich and/or smart leaves the country in search of better prospects. The second problem is the over-reliance of our economy on big foreign corporations. We have to fragment the economy by breaking it up into a strong network of small businesses, which is independent of the help of the government. We have to look further, think further and move faster. Yes. I’m going to preach about entrepreneurship again.

When you think about entrepreneurship, think beyond starting a consumer/retail trading business (import/export), or F&B that is constrained by space. The morals of these business are not wrong, but they are fundamentally flawed. The largest constraint on trading and F&B busineses are in rental prices and import-based inflation, which is Singapore’s weakness. Any business we should start need to follow at least one of these 3 factors:

1. Scalable – The ability to accomodate growth in your business with minimal space and human resource constraints. To keep it simple, think of your email or webhosting providers. In essence scalability involves technology.

2. Service-based – Where you charge by the hour for some intangible services, such as graphics design, programming, development, research, writing etc. This relates more to consulting services, or freelance services.

3. Passive-income generating – Where you earn income without being actively involved. This normally relates to financial investments, royalties from selling books, affiliate marketing, or advertising revenue. Imagine a writer has to write a book once, and he receives income for every copy that sells without putting in any work.

The point is – We should not worry about affairs that we cannot change directly. It’s time for us to start thinking what we really want to work as, and how we can provide our own financial and job security without depending on multinational corporations.

Note: Apologies for the lack of coherence, the grammatical errors, and for losing my focus halfway through. I did not get to put my arguments as strong I liked. I personally find that this is quite a bad write-up, but I have no wish to continue further.