Here is the full transcript of author Sissi Goh’s talk titled “How Not To Lose The Billion Dollars You Didn’t Know You Had” at TEDxTanglin Road 2023 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
They say money doesn’t buy happiness. We’ve all heard that saying, right? So why don’t we believe it? Why don’t we live by that statement?
The Pursuit of Material Possessions
Every many of us truly believe the opposite, that money does buy happiness. I mean, how else can we justify the amount we spend on clothes every quarter, gadgets every month, or entertainment every week? What if we flip this well-known statement on its head? What if we say that happiness comes from money?
But I’m not talking about cash in the bank. I’m not talking about gold bars. Let me explain by telling you a story. Here are the pictures of my grandparents when they were young.
My Grandparents’ Story
They looked pretty good, right? Nice clothes, great hair. My grandparents were lookers. My great-grandfather owned a pharmaceutical company. He lived in a mansion in the central area of a metropolitan city. He didn’t just have a house. He had a nearby bungalow, too, where the people he hired to help the family stayed. My grandpa received very good education since a young age.
He became a Fulbright Scholar studying in the United States. Then he met my grandma, whose father also studied economics in a renowned university and working as a C3 executive in a bank. Everything was going well until my great-grandpa died in an accident. He fell down a staircase.
The Consequences of Poor Financial Planning
It was traumatic for my family, not just emotionally, but also financially. For a man as smart as he was, as well-off as he was, he had absolutely no financial planning at all, not even with Will. You could imagine what happened next. Everything went haywire.
Business was sold at a discount. Family members start suing one another for a piece of his estate. Court cases went on for years. When there’s disharmony in a family, you make other people, like lawyers, rich. The family was basically left with nothing.
You see, having a good education does not necessarily mean one knows how to manage money. My family sold assets without realizing its potential value. It hurts my stomach to think of the time when my grandparents came back and told me that they purposely sold a property to a non-family member at a spiteful price of $200,000 just to make their siblings angry.
The joke is clearly on them because today that property is worth well north of $200. Now everybody should be angry. That’s probably where the saying, “cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face,” comes from. What I took from my great-grandfather’s story and what I want you to take from it is that many people, or rather most people, they know how to accumulate money, how to make money, but they have no idea of how to preserve and distribute their money, and that’s a huge problem. Never let the wealth you have painstakingly built over the years become the source of contention and disagreements for your next generation.
My Mentor’s Story
On the other hand, my mentor, on the day when he was born, he was retired. You might be thinking, how is that possible? Here’s how. His parents had the foresight of investing a annuity plan for him, which meant that he would have a steady stream of income for the rest of his life.
So thanks to this early planning, my mentor didn’t have to worry about financial insecurity. Instead, he spent all his time pursuing his passions as a full-time student. He has three masters, one PhD, and one doctorate. He’s well-known for his career achievements, and he’s a great philanthropist as well. On top of that, he still has time to hang out with cool people like me. It’s not just me. He’s also helped many others to achieve the same level of financial security that he has.
I love the saying of his, “Imagine you have a tree. The tree is strong because the roots are strong. The roots of the family is the income that the family has. The tree of the family is the assets that the family has.” So if you cut the tree from the top, while the roots are still strong, the tree will grow back.
The Importance of Income Protection
But if you cut the roots, the strongest tree will also fall down. Pretty powerful stuff. You see, most people, they focus on asset protection, asset accumulation, and asset distribution, when what we should focus on is income protection, income accumulation, and income distribution. Because it’s impossible for everyone in a family to know how to manage money.
In fact, most people don’t know how to manage money. So if you pass down the asset as a lump sum, someone in the family will squander it away. But if you pass down the income, even if they have no idea of how to manage money, they will still be able to survive. Some people say that they will never leave anything to their children other than a good education and good values, because with that, they should be able to make it on their own.
Pursuing Your Passions
But remember what I said in the beginning of the talk, what if happiness comes from money? Think about how many people do not dare to take the needed risk to pursue their passions, because they’re afraid that they can’t live without a paycheck, they can’t afford to. And that’s why they choose not to jump into a new job, or start a new business, or even start a family. What if you have the streams of income that can allow you to pursue your passions?
Would you make a different choice in life? Now you see what I’m talking about when I say that happiness can come from this kind of money, passive income.