Very true - people tell me it is very 'sayang' to give up my PR after so long living in Sydney. I think chances are very high that i will eventually have to give up my PR because it is very hard to meet the '2/5 years stay' condition esp when coming back to stay in Sydney will be like going to 'prison'.

Time now is 8pm so it is good night to all. Talk to you guys tomorrow.

U must be so desperately wana contribute to the retire early die early statistic.

There is no permanent Permanent? For NZ PR, there is an initial period where you must satisfy some conditions for it to be renewed. After a while, it becomes real Permanent with no expiry date.

Wonder why they call it "permanent" when it is not permanent.

If you look at my signature at the bottom, you will not need to guess my age.

yes, agreed to FIRE! started earlier, plan it earlier , i am 28 married with 2 kids.
my plan is : 3 years, 5 years, 10 years plan with mission.
example: we invest in property, 3 years later i would like to hv passive income from there.
we will set up an online business to get extra income as well.
we will try our best to lower down expenses as we can.
5 years later, we may upgrade if we dispose a property. put money in to FD maybe . or invest to ppl to work for us.
10-20 years is the long journey to see our investment return.we may paid off some of the property , then we will hv passive income to serve our life expenses.

some suggestions to TS:

On the first post, it would be nice to have some figures, e.g., how much of basic savings is required to achieve basic FIRE, as mentioned by @j.passing.by

And maybe can have some basic FAQs on the first post.

The reddit r/FI is a very informative forum, but it is too US/Western-based. Will be nice to have something for Malaysians on FIRE

Perhaps just tell that you are the business owner which run a small investment management firm. (where the only source fund is ur own $$).

Afterall, its important to foster kids doing well in personal finance and positive attitude & values. If these passive streams work well till end of our life, they're the one to keep to ball rolling afterall.

Workplace is changing drastically with all sort of automation, robotic... I'm no longer set much expection on academic which emphasis on memorizing (the fact is most of formula, history, vocabulary just a click away)... and all these unlikely guarantee them excel in their adult life.


I read an analogy lately, working is like an exam... if you given 3 hours, and you smart enough to complete it within 1.5 hours, would you still stay in exam room? Are you defining your retirement based on your age or your financial & mental readiness.

Very simple. Don't show them you have wealth. Don't shower them with unnecessary luxury items. Bring them up as how you are bought up. Poor, frugal. Let them learn to respect money. If they never respect money, they will spend it all away.

Do meaning work. Spend more time with them. Go for their sports day. Hang out with them. Be their driver. They will appreciate you more for it.

Regarding about FIRE being selfish, you have already work so hard, so why should you not take a break anymore. The economy needs to learn how to survive without FIRE people.

For individual i guess RM 3K-3.5k is enough monthly.
So in order to FI need about RM 600K-700K put in ASx fixed fund.

I think after FI, will still be working....so i dont really get the RE part

being extreme frugal means lower quality of life...i guess putting in a fixed percentage for entertainment, savings, personal development would help balance things out. We dont know when we will rip....what's the point of saving max and suddenly we are unable to enjoy the fruits.

I think it will be a lot easier to achieve FI for singles and couples without kids. Couples with young kids may have to defer the FI timeline by quite a significant number of years esp those parents that are thinking of an overseas education. Kids nowadays cost a bomb and unless you have both partners earning significantly, that figure for achieving FI may have to start with a 6 (i.e. 60s) . Even though public education is free in Aust, i think i have been able to retire a lot earlier than my peers due to me having no kids.

P's: I noticed there are quite a lot of financial-savvy contributors judging by the comments that have been posted in Finance, Business threads.

This post has been edited by Garysydney: Sep 17 2018, 05:42 AM

Wow!! You are very direct but i like your honesty.

Australians are more indirect (even though they are dying to know!!). I used to have this Msian colleague (who retired quite a while ago after having worked with me for more than 20 years) asking me all the time and kept wanting to know why i don't have kids.

Now let me tell you my life history - even though i was from quite a relatively comfortable family, i hit a very bad patch in 1987 because i started short-selling the stock market in 1986 and into the early-1987 in anticipation of a crash. I had to square my position around Mar 1987 because the broker wouldn't give me any more credit - the Oct 1987 crash came too late to save me. I owed the broker quite a lot of money but i was allowed to repay slowly and i didn't clear the debts until 1995!! Now why did the broker give me so much credit in the first place?? My brother had about A$500k in govt bonds in 1984 and the bonds were yielding 17%/yr at that time. The bonds were under my name (my brother had complete trust in me) so i pledged all the bonds as collateral to one broker (Bain &Co). I then got to know the famous Mr Lee Ming Tee (Sunshine/Enacon/Hastings Deering group) and he introduced me to another broker. This broker thought i was very rich as i had unlimited credit given to me by Bain&Co but he didn't know about my security arrangements with Bain&Co. He was trying to potong jalan the other broker so he also offered me unlimited credit to trade as well. I stopped trading with Bain&Co and got all my collateral back!! I was trading with this new broker (who was a Honkie). When i was asked to square my position, i owed the broker A$700k and this was in March 1987. I had no way of repaying it - i told them they can bankrupt me and they get nothing since by that time, i had transferred the bonds back to my brother because he wanted to buy a house for his kids. I was also not even a PR yet in 1987 so can always elect not to come back to Aust. After a lot of negotiations, i had to only repay 10% of the debt. It goes to show what young immature kids (like me in those days!!) will do just to get richer!! Just as a comparison for you, in 1987 a 2 bedroom apartment in the city of Sydney costs only A$90k and that apartment is worth A$980k today. You can see what size of debt i owed in 1987!! Anyway, this is 30 years ago and not many people know about this sad facet of my life and it is one part of my life that will be buried and carried to my deathbed.

After going through such a difficult patch in your life (i was only 25 when i got into trouble!!), I found that life can be very hard/harsh so i decided that i will not be having kids!! My wife only got to know about it after we got married but she supported me a lot during that difficult period.

Glad you emerged from your predicament and become wiser.

Only people who have experienced hardship and set back will become prudent and thrift. Those gungho are likely novice never experience economic recession or set back.

Actually i don't want to reveal such a personal and distressing story as i may one day meet-up with a forummer when i go back to KL but there is nothing wrong with people knowing a bit about my life history.

Due to my strong credit standing, i was approached by one of Alan Bond's (chairman of Bond Cord and was one of the richest man in Aust) associates in 1986 to 'warehouse' some of his holdings because at that time Alan Bond was slowly getting into financial trouble and needed people to hold a large parcel of his Bond Corp shares and I was given 'incentives' to do so. This made me so brazen because all the banks were 'chasing' to give me credit because when i showed them my trading statements (which was all on borrowed money from the broker), they went 'head over heel' to chase my business. Actually with hindsight, i could have made a lot of money because i had 2 brokers giving me unlimited credit. I was not street smart enough to handle the situation because i was very egoistic then - have you heard about the phrase 'Pride comes before a fall'?

I was lucky that the property that i eventually inherited from my mum was not registered under my name otherwise i would have lost that. My mum only transferred it to my name in 1996 after my dilemma.

I am now a 56 year year old man and with such experience behind me, i am a lot more conservative than before because at my age now, there is no more 'second chance'.

You have kept this secret for many years, must be a relief to spill it out.

This post has been edited by icemanfx: Sep 17 2018, 02:48 PM

Actually, the one who had the biggest shock was my brother - he nearly fainted when he found out i had 'pledged' it to the broker. I had plenty of time to close the account at Bain&Co (June 1985) and in fact, i was making money initially in 1984-1985 because i was long and the bull-run went all the way till Oct 1987. In March 1986, i felt the market was in need of a correction so i started 'shorting' a lot of stocks. One stock that i lost the most was Enterprise Gold. I started shorting from 80c all the way till $2.45 (when my credit ran out). The stock peaked at $2.80 in Oct 2017 and it crashed all the way down to 30c (in 3 days) before being delisted. Those were the 'cowboy days' and money was everywhere for those with good credit.

I was lucky i didn't get my Honkie broker into trouble because i was a 'corporate' client and all the bad debts went into the corporate debt. The broker would have been wiped out if i had been a private client. When i watch that show (can't recall the name of that movie) about Barings Bank being brought down by Nick Leeson, it reminded me of my young, immature days.

I think nowadays a lot of broker firms have come a long way and credit is a lot harder to get compared to the 80s.

Easy and cheap credit fuel assets growth/inflation. Leverage is double edges sword, amplify profits as well as losses.

In the short term, market is on random walk, could be irrational and tipping point is difficult to determine.

On a hintsight, knowing the stocks price was unsustainable, instead of short them; If you had liquidate them, that would be another story. People are often blinded by greed especially profits was easy and effortless.

This post has been edited by icemanfx: Sep 17 2018, 03:31 PM

I think the main reason why they allowed 90% of the debt to be written off is because i was only 25 years old then and it was partially their fault because their credit-checking protocol was virtually not-existent. I think at that time when i got into trouble was at a time where broking firms were very profitable (since the bull run only stopped in Oct 1987) so writing off a debt of my magnitude didn't pose much of a problem to them.

I was lucky to come off the whole saga without a criminal record or a bad-credit report. However paying off the 10% was not an easy task. I was lucky to have a second-job as a cab driver - obtained the cab license in Nov1983 (after my final exams before i got my Bachelor's degree). During those days, we could just drive a shift (12-hour shifts) and make A$200-$220 per shift for a weekend shift. I was young and full of energy so driving 12 hours was nothing.

When i had to repay the 10% balance, i drove like crazy because the money was so good - i remembered driving one weekend shift (drove for 48 hours with a couple of 2-3 hour sleep in between) and i made A$700 in that 48 hours. I didn't have to pay any tax because it was all cash in hand. Imagine going from a share trader to being a cab-driver!!

This post has been edited by Garysydney: Sep 17 2018, 05:03 PM

Garysydney, you are lucky you are not trading in malaysia at that time. They will sue you until bankrupt. And assign your debt to debt collectors. That would be hell...I remember there were many horror stories during 1987 and 1994 in malaysia.

Nice sharing....I hope the young readers here can take away something from your experience. If a young investors only started investing for the past 10 years in stock market, they haven't experienced any major crash yet. Sun will not always shine in the sky. There will be thunderstorms in between sunny days.

To relate to this topic, how many people incorporate into their retirement plan a few years of downturn ? A plan could be seriously affected in a major crash, and he has to slowly crawl out of the hole. If a retirement plan's expected return is 7%, is this return expecting a few years of negative returns ? Or worse, what if the capital takes a 50% or even 80% hit ? RE at 40 years old would not be possible, and he may need to start all over again

Garysydney

Thank you for your sharing and glad that you have made your way out of the debt long time ago
Your experience will help a lot of young generations to remind them of the cruelty of financial markets

Having said that, I understand the feeling of anticipating a market crash, like the during Feb this year, only few days of drops caused a lot of people to anticipate market crash/major correction. In fact, many people start waiting for a major correction for years, but it didn't happen until now (literally without any major correction except 2011 and 2014 but they are really short). Perhaps one of the main reason is too many people anticipating a correction/crash and hence it wouldn't come. So I have learnt not to anticipate a crash, it probably wouldn't come when you expect it, and it will come when you least expect it to.

Back to the topic, yes, you can afford to make mistake while you are young, but not when getting older
Investment is really important to achieve FI. Yes there is a risk, but if without risk then sitting at most 4% per year is surely a loss (to inflation). I didn't see other way out for ordinary working people other than investment. So I will take the risk to invest while I can afford to, and try my best to ensure that the risk is always within manageable capacity

Cheers

Garysydney nice sharing... both your luck and hardwork counts for the come back.

Showtime747 angmo terms it as sequence risk.

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Many "young & smart" properties flipper feel the heat nowaday.. while I guess the bitcoins exposure in Malaysia still relative low.

Wandering what's the next GFC will looks like. Many angmo reached their FI path relative easy due to a decade of bull run in their index fund (8-9% return). And yet many countries were "subsidy" the US indirectly for their mistake during subprime bubble. It could be a disaster to them if China really overtook US in future and US dollar lost their prestige.