Welcome to my humble digital house, Seng-Lee.com. My name is Seng Lee and I live in a small corner of a “little red dot” known as Singapore. I have been a househusband since 2015.
You can say that I had experienced a “retirement” life for the past few years.
Why I Became a Househusband?
I quit my fulltime job of 13 years as I see no future in what I will be doing. I only need to see what my supervisors are currently doing to know what I will be dealing with in the next 10-20 years. I don’t like what I see, a dead-end job.
Way before I wanted to quit my job, the thought of looking after my own child is already at the back of my mind. I wanted to experience taking care of my own child, and not outsourcing parenting to others. It’s challenging yet fulfilling but super tiring at the same time.
Neverending Expenses
So technically I had no income for the 5 years, but expenses are still ongoing. Yes, my savings started to dry up pretty steadily.
No matter how hard I tried to cut down my own expenses, it still amounted to about S$20,000 per year for my own expenses.
A savings of S$100,000 was easily used up in these few short years!
It became very clear to me that no one is able to retire at retirement age! Unless you have a super huge saving by then.
4 Financial Lessons I learned from my “Retirement”
1) Working in a job is not a long term solution.
The upside of our salary growth is usually capped and limited, and what happens when we stopped working? No income!!!
So, we need to also work on a side business that is able to give us unlimited profit growth, and the excess revenue can be reinvested back into the business or be invested in other investments.
2) Our savings will be depleted.
It is evident to me that the average joe cannot afford to retire, no matter how much savings we have. There are fixed expenses that need to be spent no matter what.
Using myself as an example, a family of 3 requires about S$50,000 per year to have a comfortably basic life. (Basic day-to-day expenses, basic insurance, basic entertainment)
A savings of S$500,000 will be depleted in 10 years after retirement!
3) Multiple sources of Passive Income is a must.
Passive income is money that continues to go into your bank account when you are not actively working.
What we earn on the job is active income, so we must learn to make passive income on the side.
I was lucky to have put a portion of my savings into stock investment and it generates about 5% dividends yearly. It is a form of passive income and is a great help to me.
Now I am helping people to save money and make passive income for themselves through the Atomy system.
4) We cannot depend on our children for financial support.
They will have their own challenges and things are only to get more and more expensive in the future.
Internet Business
I get to know about Internet Marketing at around January 2007.
The business model looks interesting and the idea of starting an internet business keeps popping up in my head.
The good thing about an internet business is the low start-up cost as compared to traditional business, but the amount of hard work required is no lesser.
After studying a bit here and there, I realised that it is not really as easy to start and profit as it may seem. But knowing that it is virtually impossible to break away from being a servant of money just by working, I have got to start learning other ways of sourcing income and this is my 1st step and the many steps in the future.
With the Internet World becoming ever more popular than before, I see the opportunity of earning some $$ from it.
I believe that 90% of the problems that we face today are caused by money, with just a little bit of extra money, most of the problems can be solved.
I am lucky to learn of the Atomy eCommerce model where I can turn my household expenses into income.
I am still learning from the Atomy business and will be sharing with you on this blog.
“My site’s mission statement is to provide you with the knowledge that you can save money and make money with household products that you are already using.”
Thanks for visiting.
I can be contacted at admin @ seng-lee.com
ps. Saving a Little Per Day = Something Big One Day