My Non-Spiritual Wealth Creation Hobbies and Consuming Passion

In planning for my semi-retirement, I had in February 2006 designed 2 MS-Excel financial templates, one for tracking the family's household/personal expenses and another for tracking the family's assets/liabilities.

I diligently performed the tracking daily, and soon found myself consumed by it - a great joy and fun (passion) doing it and doing it well. I shared my templates with some of my colleagues and friends. Very soon, I felt that this was an area where I could "help and minister" to others, with my personal financial testimony to back me up. Besides, I could draw a good enough income from it. I would also be doing what I felt happiest with, as a 2nd career.

In the past when as a young kid, I was extremely passionate about real estate and property but due to filial piety and obedience to my father, I studied engineering (father's scholarship). However, I still ended up in property management and eventually corporate/information systems planning jobs. Back in 1994, I took a real estate agent course with my wife, passed and obtained a Singapore Institute of Surveyors and Valuers certificate but did not train as a property agent, though at that time I was quite unhappy with my "glamorous/highly secretive" but monotonous, unexciting planning job. Indeed, God has been gracious to me for when the first wave of en-bloc sales started, I put into practice what I have learnt about plot ratio, development potential, etc. I was eventually blessed with an en-bloc sale in March 1996. My hobbies gave me more wealth, great satisfaction compared to my salaried job (not that bad though except heavy responsibilities).

A year later, the property market crashed, though rising again in 1999 (a small 2nd en-bloc wave). I soon lost my passion in real estate and moved on to financial portfolio management, learning on the job (a hobby too) with my theoretical knowledge, by reading, following the industry and also through trial and error. Real estate and financial (now wealth) planning have been my interests due to my inclination to numbers, which I love to do it mentally even.