For over a decade, I worked in diverse roles including education, community engagement, and policy, planning, and strategy.

While working hard, I pursued my hobby (many have called it a passion or obsession) of writing and public speaking. I have been “a worker by day, writer by night, and speaker by weekend”.

From these experiences, I learnt many useful lessons, so I thought it was useful to pen down key learning points as a reminder to myself.

In this post, I am focusing only on lessons related to personal finance.

While some lessons were gleaned from bitter experience, others were picked up from amazing books like Morgan Housel’s The Psychology of Money.

A careful reader might see that some of the lessons from books made their way into my mental models.

These personal finance lessons are easy to learn, but challenging to apply. They have to be constantly reviewed and applied.

But I think there is great value in setting these lessons out and I hope they are useful to you, just as they have been useful to me.

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Be humble when financial decisions turn out to be right, but, more importantly, be compassionate to yourself when they go wrong. Luck plays a role in how things turn out. It is true that success can lull people into complacency. But failure can equally seduce otherwise sound people into blaming themselves when sometimes financial decisions turn out to be wrong because of pure bad luck. Be humble; be forgiving.

Similarly, accept that there are things outside your control. Life will not always be just and fair. There will be ups and downs. You just need to focus on the parts of life that you can control, like saving a portion of your income, budgeting carefully, and planning your asset allocation. But for those parts of life that are outside your control, you have to learn to accept them and roll with the punches.

If your boss recognises your value, talent, and hard work over the years, and there are good prospects for you in the organisation, it makes sense to stay on in your job. But, if your boss does not consider you worthy, you could consider going where you are loved, valued, and needed. Someone’s opinion of you need not become your reality. You can change your own reality (with effort and hard work, of course). Someone out there might be willing to recognise your talent and give you a chance to prove yourself.

In personal investments, we do not always get everything right. What is important is to learn the right lessons from our mistakes. Learn from mistakes and keep moving forward. Try to get better every day. See life as a constant work-in-progress. Be resilient. Fall down seven times, get up eight.

In an economic crisis comes investment opportunity. Be flexible and adaptable to take advantage of financial opportunities that arise. I’m sure many of us know people who became financially successful during the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic.

In life, you must put out the day-to-day fires, but also pursue a long-term agenda. It’s often said that life is what happens to you when you are making other plans. This is true.

Be paranoid of ruinous risk. There is no reason to financially risk what you have and need, for financial gains you don’t have and might not need. Know when you have had enough gains. No financial risk that can wipe you out (no matter how small a probability) is ever worth taking. Avoid single points of failure, because everything that can break will eventually break.

Only the paranoid survive. What the COVID-19 pandemic from 2020 to 2022 has reminded everyone is that we cannot be complacent. We cannot assume that yesterday’s success translates into tomorrow’s good fortune. Many businesses’ plans were unfortunately destroyed when the pandemic struck.

Try to save more money and be more frugal. Saving is a hedge against life’s inevitable ability to surprise you at the worst possible moment. Saving serves as protection.

Have a bigger room for error. Or to borrow American economist Benjamin Graham’s famous phrase, have a bigger “margin of safety”. This is because things that have never happened before happen all the time, so you must have a buffer, a margin of safety.

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I hope to these lessons are as useful to you, as they have been for me. Going forward, I will no doubt learn new lessons, read new books, and glean new experiences, and pen them down. But that is another post, for another time.

Stay safe on your journey towards financial freedom.

(Adapted from an online article I wrote in January 2022.)