Innermost thoughts
I have a very complicated relationship with lifestyle inflation.
In personal finance literature, lifestyle inflation is bad, full stop. It is the ruin-er of life, the reason for debt and bankruptcies and subsequent financial hardships, broken families and in the worst-case scenarios, suicides.
Yet even knowing this, and even as I write this as a personal finance blogger (who is supposed to know what she’s doing), I, too have let lifestyle inflation happen in my own life.
Let’s just skip the whole ‘why reading is important’ part because you already know that and I don’t want to insult your intelligence.
After showing you the contents of my bag, today I want to show you another aspect of my personal life: the books I read. These are the worldviews and ideologies that shape me: I am who I am because of these materials. Everything I write is directly or indirectly influenced by these authors.
My bookcase contains more than personal finance books. I read a wide variety of topics, mostly non-fiction. If you want personal finance-specific book recommendations, do check out these articles instead:
Without further ado, let’s start. I’m not going to list ALL of my books, just the ones that truly made me think and self-reflect, even years after I read them. Some of them also inspired RoR articles (I’ll link them too).
Have fun checking out what’s on my bookshelf. As if you need a reason to buy more books, lol.
What are the limits of your abilities?
That’s an unpleasant question to ask yourself, isn’t it? No one likes to think of their own flaws.
Yet as the world prepares for the new year decade, all excited to start their financial goals, I can’t help to go the other route and think of where and what I’ve failed to do in the past.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a negative person. In fact I’m annoyingly optimistic.
(“Crashed your expensive car? Thank God you still have your life”; “Lost a limb in the accident? Insurance payout time kachinggg!!”).
It’s just, I’m battling a dilemma. I want to make financial goals, because failing to plan is planning to fail and all that.
But do I make ambitious financial goals and fail (again) but at least ‘miss the moon and land among the stars’, OR do I make super-realistic financial goals and not feel challenged or excited by them at all?
After thinking about it, I decided that the former is a better alternative than the latter.
But what if we… combine them? Set ambitious goals which are also realistic. To get there, it’s not a bad idea to do some risk-reduction activity – think of where I have failed in the past so I can (try) avoid the same problems.
So here are all the financial goals I’ve failed before, to ground me back to Earth.
This is old, deep feelings I’m digging out. Late teens, early 20s stuff. See, I’ve never really gotten over the fact that I’ve never gotten a scholarship.
You might say yeah Suraya many others didn’t get scholarships as well, but let me just counter back – almost all of my best friends during high school got scholarships. I was the stupid less-clever one, the one who didn’t study enough.
The only reason I got an overseas education is because of my parents’ money, not of my own merit.
(Well, maybe a little bit of my own merit. Just a tiny bit)
I might also add – oh gosh I’m so embarrassed to admit this – I actually failed my admissions interview into UiTM Shah Alam, too. Yes, the university known to help Malay people.
Underlying core problem which contributed to the failure: underpreparation
Before Suraya-the-personal-finance-writer, there was Suraya-the-social-worker. Up until my mid-20s, I was working in a few NGOs, including for intercultural exchange, SOGIE rights, HIV/AIDS, refugees and women human rights, just building experience.
I’ve since left the field and industry, but sometimes I still think about the ‘what ifs’. My ultimate goal then was to work in the United Nations, where salaries are high.
Like really, really freakin’ high. I thought, well that’s a nice two-birds-one-stone situation. I would satisfy my lifegoal of ‘doing good’ while making money at the same time.
Why didn’t I still pursue this goal? Well I think I realised that I’m simply not angry enough to make a good activist, the type that demands rights and drafts policies and organises protests and all that. I’m too comfortable with my privileges to act.
Underlying core problem which contributed to the failure: cowardice
Related: [PERSONAL] Malay and Money: A Reflection
Sometime back, circa 2018 or early 2019, I bragged about coming up with a new business slash website idea – BestDealsMalaysia.com. It’s like HotUKDeals.com, the deal-hunting website but for Malaysians (obv). I even made an article about its creation process: The Exact Steps I Use to Build & Launch BestDealsMalaysia.com in 7 Days
I was so excited about the project in the beginning. But as time went on… I got lazy, and just stopped working on it.
No excuses really. Once I did the beta website, the passion for the project died off :/
Underlying core problem which contributed to the failure: Laziness; loss in motivation
Generally speaking, there are two ways to get sales/clients: inbound and outbound marketing.
So far in with RoR, I’ve relied mostly on inbound marketing, ie clients liking my work and/or personal brand and coming to hire me directly. It’s a good strategy.
In the past few years, and especially after the publication of the Money Stories from Malaysian: Volume 1 book in early 2019, I’ve challenged myself to be more comfortable with doing outbound sales, ie approaching target clients/customers directly.
And let me say… it’s still hard. Some days I have the confidence to do it, but other days, no.
I want to say small progress is better than no progress, and that is absolutely true, but I also want to push myself harder. Sometimes I even wish I had a boss who’d force me to do sales so I’d have to do it! But no, being a solopreneur means all the initiation and motivation must come from my own self.
Underlying core problem which contributed to the failure: my fear of rejection
To be really, really honest with you, this post was originally supposed to be a list of my financial goals in 2020.
But I thought instead of just sharing with you what I want to do, instead let’s use this space to
(1) remind you that I’ve failed more times than I care to admit, and so does everyone else;
(2) failing is completely normal, don’t be too hard on yourself, shit happens, and
(3) you only truly fail if you don’t learn and grow from your mistakes.
Thus with that logic, financial goals are bars you set for yourself, yes, but also above all its a tool for self-growth. If you achieve it, good. If you didn’t, also good – knowing what you didn’t know you didn’t know is also valuable information!
So. Having said all these. I want to know – is the process of goal-setting is an easy or hard process for you? What have you learned from your own failed goals? As always, do share in the comments section 🙂
Wow. 2020s is coming. It’s weird to be welcoming the year that is also used to signify ‘the future’, isn’t it? It feels crazy to be entering a new decade, even though I know that’s just how the normal, brutal, unstoppable passage of time works.
(YES I KNOW TECHNICALLY THE NEW DECADE STARTS IN 2021 BUT LET ME HAVE THIS OKAY)
I’ve spent the 2010s being in 20s and early 30s, and learned so much, though I know there is much more to learn still. Please indulge this writer’s self-reflective post – I’ve always wanted to write something in the ‘for my younger self’ style.
Dear younger Suraya, if you could do it over, please take this advice which older Suraya learned from experience:
In my late 20s, I finally decided to act on something I’ve been self-conscious about all my life – fixing my crooked teeth by wearing braces. The treatment took one and a half years, and I took it off for good last January 2019.
Note: It was fast because I got Damon braces. See 3 Things to Know About Braces Cost in Malaysia for types of braces and cost comparison.
Now that the braces are off, it feels like a distant dream. In a, ‘wow, I can’t believe I went through with it’ way. I thought I’d jot down everything I spent before, during and after my braces journey before I forgot all about it.
I hope this article will help everyone planning to do braces (or going through it now) to plan your budget, and perhaps help in choosing tools to buy/avoid. I’ll divide it into three sections – things I paid before, during and after wearing braces.
Oh boy. This is a hard article to write.
Right. Let’s start with this. My name is Suraya. It’s an obviously Malay name. Even though technically I am of mixed parentage, I am 100% culturally Malay.
This is embarassing to admit, but when I was younger, I went through a period of being ashamed of my own race. I wanted to erase that identity. So much that when I was living in Japan, I went by Aya. When I was studying in the UK, I took the name Sue.
I’m no longer that person. I’ve learned to accept my Malay-ness. I love my name. In fact, I insist on it – always call me Suraya, not Su, not anything else.
But why was I embarassed of my Malay identity in the first place? How did I eventually accept it? I wanted to pen this essay to just kind of, dive deep into this complicated, complex psyche, through the lens and intersection with personal finance and money management.
Here we go. These are all reasons why I detached from my Malay identity. Read until the end – this article only makes sense if read as a whole.
I love my clients. They are freaking awesome. The best. They pay AND treat me well.
I feel like it’s time for me to be forward with my experience working with great clients, because if social media is to be believed, well-paying and respectful clients are supposedly hard to come by.
But let me just say – they’re not. I’ve had the odd bad apples, but in my four years (so far) working in self-employed capacity, the majority of my clients were nothing but absolute joys to work with.
(Note: I have two types of clients. Those who hire me in my capacity as Suraya the communications consultant and corporate writer to write reports and stuff, and those who hire me in my capacity as Suraya the blogger from Ringgit Oh Ringgit to promote their products and services. Both are amazing).
This post is a jumble of self-reflection – how and why do I get these amazing clients? I still don’t know for sure, but here are my theories.
“If I’m rich, I would ____”
Take a second to answer that before you continue reading. What’s your answer?
There is usually an answer. I mean, most of us have daydreamed about being rich. I have. You have. Even rich people dream of being even richer.
Because I have no life and spend pretty much all of my time on social media, I’m quite familiar with the types of answers to this question. It’s almost always a variation of:
Recently, I thought of what *I* want if I were rich. What is my desires, and how much they would actually cost me? Here’s my list.
Wow, it’s been almost four years since I work from home full-time. The last time I wrote about it, I was only one year in!
It’s still a little bit surreal. Like many of you, I grew up thinking that 9-6 working days is the default. It’s even more surreal when I remember that this work from home thing was an accident. The plan was actually to do a bit of freelance writing to make some extra income while I find myself a new, stable job.
Then somehow work turned to more work and I just never stopped and here I am? Sometimes I still catch myself thinking ‘ah how nice would it be to work from home wait Suraya you do work from home you dolt’.
I describe myself as frugal, but once in a while often, I cross the ‘cheap’ line.
And I don’t want to be cheap. Being cheap puts me in a scarcity mindset, as opposed to the abundance mindset. You can’t be someone who is both ‘I believe I can earn as much as I want’ and ‘why buy the better option when the cheap option exists’. They’re contradictory of each other.
In May 2019, I started a 30-day decluttering challenge with the following objectives:
