Category: Uncategorized

Two months into my 3 months gardening leave now. Time to take stock of what I have done so far, with the goal of looking to reinvent myself in order to move to the next chapter of my life. I had given myself up to March next year to try to develop all the non-bank related leads to see if I can springboard myself into a new area of business that can sustain me for the next 5 to 10 years of my mid-career halftime move.

On Monday, I finally completed my first Skillsfuture course. It was 8 weeks of Monday evening classes for the Science and Business of Wine which I signed up with 3 good mates. In the final class, we had to do a project presentation, sit through an assessment exam and a blind tasting session. What I will cherish most will be some of the after-class whisky gatherings we had after 1045 pm with salami, cheese and oysters and the long lunch sessions 🙂   This was a great course to sharpen my appreciation of wines and learn about many things that were new to me even after drinking wines for more than 30+ years. The best part of it was that the $800+ course was free for me, after the early bird, seniors > 50 discounts and the skillsfuture fund subsidy.

Before I completed my last work day in mid-Jun, a colleague kindly referred my name to a private financial training firm. He figured that with my previous banking experience, being a trainer would be a good fit for me. I have always had an affinity to presenting to a group and imparting my knowledge to the younger members of my team. Teaching was something I liked to do. The person in charge finally connected with me this week and mentioned that she is looking to prepare the 2018 training calendar. We agreed to meet up in person in 2 weeks time to discuss further.

The Myanmar opportunity is developing into the next stage. My ex-colleague, the new CEO of the micro finance firm, had reviewed my cover letter and resume. He recommends that I should send them to the group CEO and CFO early next week and to open up the possibility of a face to face meeting with them in Yangon next month. Recently, my wife had also helped to introduce me to someone who had also recently started a business in Myanmar through his church group. We met for coffee and had a very good exchange of information about the current business climate onshore.

As part of my goal to reinvent myself, I have also signed up for more training into the next few months. On 27 Sep, I will be attending a one-day introductory seminar on Big Data Analytics ($350 after the early bird discount). It will be a good chance for me to see if I can leverage on my past marketing experience to go into this new exciting sector. I have also confirmed another course on “How to Start a Small Business” (8 evening sessions over 4 weeks from mid-Oct). This course is a steal at only $81. I had always wanted to start my own business and this will ensure that I avoid the common pitfalls.

Last week, I also had the chance to meet up with the organizer of the Non-Profit Leadership  (www.cnpl.org.sg) initiative to see how I can offer my services to certain NGOs which I may have a passion for. I also reconnected with the person whom I had been discussed about the retirement village concept since 2012. We caught up with each other, to see what each of us had been doing over the last 12 months.

On the business opportunities front, I will be heading to Bangkok next week. I will be reconnecting with a childhood friend who had moved there in 1999 and had since started a family there. We have known each other since we were 8 years old. Accompanying us will be another person from my secondary school days who currently has some business dealings there. Hopefully, we can discuss and explore some business openings. My family and another family will join me a few days later and we will do a nice pig-out cum shopping vacation there. Really looking forward to this trip!

Thanks to technology, we are entering into a new era of social interaction with the sharing economy. The possibilities are limitless and AirBnB/Uber are prime examples. In China, you can now rent an umbrella or a basketball anytime you need them, when it starts to rain or if you are at a basketball court and just decided to shoot a few hoops. We can now share almost anything, even a couch in your living room. The Millenial generation is not too hung up about owning physical assets like cars and homes now as they can enjoy a more cost effective way of sharing resources within the society.

I had to send my car for servicing and new technical issues last week. It cost a bomb and I had to reconnect with Uber again for transport as the car was in the workshop. Uber had an offer at that time that gave me $4 off for the next 7 rides. Some of my short trips were free and it was so efficient.

I also recently discovered the world of station-less bike sharing platforms. My son was using them to take a ride from the bus stop to our home. Apparently, for this month of Aug (being National day month) all Obike rides were free! For the rest of the week, I started my morning run to the Botanic Gardens and then had a walk in the park (to satisfy my Pokemon Go addiction) before taking an Obike ride to my favourite coffee shop for brunch. Just yesterday morning, I went to the East Coast park for a walk and then used Obike to cycle around the beach area. Total cost : Zero. I used to rent a bike for $8/hour and obtained another hour free, ie. $4/hour. Now it is free… The existing bike rental shops are certainly going to get crushed now, like the taxi companies after Grab and Uber entered the market.

I expect more industries to be changed dramatically by the sharing economy going forward. Maybe one can even share stationary next time!

Sent my CV and cover letter to my Myanmar contact on Wed. Let’s see if this opportunity does develop further from here. It will be an interesting new chapter to my career if it happens, believing in the micro finance cause and seeing a visible positive effect on a country, leveraging on my past experience.

Had a great dinner with a group of ex-colleagues last night. We last had one about 4 months ago and the theme was : great food and whisky. Since then, our in house chef had perfected the sous vide process and seared a fantastic tenderloin plus a rack of lamb last evening. We also had Jamon with melon, freshly shucked oysters, pate, cheese, salami and assorted cans of octopus, mussels and sardines. All these rich foods with multiple shots of fine whisky : a wonderful dinner with good friends indeed.

I had a call from an ex-colleague last week. He was coming to S’pore this week for a seminar and suggested that we meet up for a possible business opportunity. He has just become the CEO of the micro finance arm of one of the largest agriculture groups in Myanmar.

In my previous job, the company was a fully owned subsidiary of one of the largest sovereign funds in the world. Our mandate was to invest in Financial Institutions in Emerging Markets. In my 3.5 years there, we have been very bullish on Indochina and I had made numerous trips to Vietnam, Cambodia and Myanmar.

We started new micro finance NBFIs (Non-Bank FIs) with JVs between some of the top onshore FI partners. We made it a point to staff the new companies with local people as much as possible while we provided support and expertise on a consultancy basis. I was helping to develop the treasury expertise, set up the ALCO framework and help them to seek new funding from banks. It was very rewarding to see our value add to the enrichment of the lives of the common people, as we provide credit to the persons who need them most.

The farmers, wet market vendors and provision shop owners needed small loans of a few hundred dollars up to a thousand dollars in order to grow their business. This segment normally does not have access to credit lines at all and even if they manage to get it, interest charges are exorbitant (> 50%p.a.), making their business even harder to succeed. We created a structured framework at a lower cost for them to borrow via transparent processes, either with or without pledged collateral. Seeing the country progress, as its middle class grows with our help, was a way we could give back to society. We were able to use our financial strength and reputation as a sovereign fund to breach the gap between the individuals’ demand for loans and the banks which we had access to. With our past experience in the evaluation and credit scoring of the micro finance sector in Indonesia, China and India, we were able to make a business case for each project.

Met my ex-colleague on Thursday for lunch and he expanded on his proposition. He was a month into his new CEO role and he was looking to set up his advisory committees to run the micro finance arm effectively. Having worked with him for a few years, he was comfortable about introducing me as an advisor for his ALCO team. I mentioned to him that I was keen to explore further as I was also looking to do something different now. As a next step, he will introduce me to his boss and this may result in a trip to Yangon next month. Let’s see how all this will develop and play out.

Retirement as a global vacationer?

As a follow up to my Chiang Mai trip last week, I have been reading a lot about a retirement lifestyle which I have discovered recently as part of my research preparation. Retiring overseas has been a trend for many years that has been very popular for people in G10 countries, moving to a lesser developed countries.

Even with a pension plan, most active retirees cannot maintain a comfortable lifestyle as costs have soared in their home country. With the same amount or much less, they can enjoy a better quality of life moving overseas. They can either sell their assets now or rent out their current homes to generate more passive income to sustain their nomadic lifestyles, living in a few cities around the world for months or years at a time. If for health or medical reasons eventually, they can then return home permanently and then dip into their savings. Given that it is very common to see active 80-year-old people nowadays, it does mean that your global overseas retirement vacation can last for many years!!!

I came across many online materials that provided comprehensive information on each and every livable city that suits an active retirement lifestyle. Most allow for a relatively comfortable means of survival for under $2,000 a month, either as a couple or individually. This will work out to just $24k per year. Hence a half million of funds set aside can last you for 20 years! Of cost, if there are emergencies, you will have to tap into your other retirement savings. But if you have passive income (rentals or pension like CPF Life), then technically your retirement funds need not be touched at all.

I found a publication online (International Living Australia – see link below) that was helpful and choke full of shared experiences from people who have been there and done it. Some have started as early as in their forties and others are still going at it into their seventies. It is a trend that is going to happen more actively for us going forward. The amazing thing is that most of these recommended cities are just in our backyard, around the Asia regions. Countries like Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Malaysia regularly pops up.

https://internationalliving.com/au/

As long as you are healthy and mobile, one can travel the world and not break the bank account. Think about it. For 9 months of the year, one can move to 3 cities and chill out for 3 months in each of them, to really explore the place at our leisure. Bangkok, Hu Hin, Chiang Mai, Phuket, Koh Samui, HCMC, Hanoi, Danang, Phnom Penh, Sihanoukville, Siem Reap, Penang – just a few cities within Asia which retirees are flocking to. All the cities do have an active expat retiree network of associations which one can tap into to seek for information.

This alternative lifestyle is workable and already been tried and tested by many. The attraction is obvious. Of course, if you are a home body, then this may not work for you. But what if you just do this for a few months a year?

 

As I had previously mentioned in my blog, I have had a keen interest in the setting up of active lifestyle retirement communities in Asia. I see it as a growing market as my generation ages. We are different from our parents and tend to have a more western concept of leading an active lifestyle after retirement with like-minded people as we are more aware of the importance of maintaining a healthy way of life and hence living longer. This is also partially due to medical advances.

This retirement concept is not new for countries like the USA, Holland, Australia, and Japan. My country is only just beginning to realize the growing demand for this service while we have absolutely zero supply at the moment. I tried to get a business going last year after talking about it for a few years but the deal fell through as I could not get my 2 principal partners to agree on the concept and to work together. We did our numbers and estimated that the conservative demand was for at least 6,000 of such units here. The project would be like a condominium of around 300 units on a lease basis and the IRR can be in the mid-teens.

Chiang Mai is one of the cities that had come up on my radar recently. It has attracted a lot of older Aussies and Europeans for its low cost of living and nice environment. I decided to pay the place a visit this week to check things out, given that I had time on my hands. There were a number of retirement resorts there and I arranged for a visit to 2 of them.

The last time I was there, I was on a backpacking trip with my uni mates in the late eighties. That was almost 30 years ago, where we were young and gung-ho with a tight budget. How things have changed there as I had discovered.

Booked my flights on the budget airlines and the hotel was also relatively cheap ay $50 per night, located near the night bazaar area. I flew in this week on Tuesday and stayed until Friday morning. On day 2, I hired a car with a driver for half a day and made my way to the 2 retirement resorts which I had made appointments with via emails.

The first visit was to Care Resort. The head nurse Tanya greeted me and proceeded to give me a tour of the grounds. It was a former hotel resort which the current British owner turned into a retirement concept. Currently, they are full and there are 22 long stay retirees mainly from America and only 2 were from Asia. Technically, one was a Thai-Amercian lady who had spent many years in America. The place looks a bit small and oldish. Most of the people seem to have a bit of dementia. The resort is looking to double its capacity by expanding and opening a new wing by Sep.    http://www.careresortchiangmai.com/

The next place I visited was Vivo Bene and Khun Aoy was there to show me around. The place was pretty impressive and modern looking, resembling a Swiss/Japanese setup. They have 6 large villas that each have 12 individual rooms with common living and kitchen areas and are able to accommodate about 90 people. I was told that it is owned by Swiss operators with Thai partnership. Given that it was opened in 2014 at a cost of THB 250 million, I was surprised that they currently only have 8 retirees after opening for almost 3 years. 1 patient has quite severe dementia while I see 2 other elderly men exercising in the gardens. I suspect that this could be the pricing, as they are relatively high, targeting Swiss nationals who have more pension funds. I guess the original aim to attract mainly Swiss demand did not really work out.  http://www.vivobene.co.th/

Overall, the retirement villages here seems to cater more to the older folks (at least 70 years old)  who require some form of assistance. For those that seek active retirement lifestyles, they can still do it on their own as the city offers cheap private accommodations ($350 to 1k per month) and there is already a big network of expat associations where one can reach out to.

Spent the rest of my time doing a Mae Ping river cruise and a rickshaw city tour. Massages were really cheap, only $8 for an hour of foot reflexology. So I did a 1 to 3 hours of massage every day. The night bazaar street comes alive at night but it was raining most nights except for my last night. Went to watch live bands and have an ice cold beer with nice Thai seafood meals most of the time.

 

I start to see this new ICO (Initial Coin Offering) bubble building up and it reminded me of the IPO craze that we participated during our university days way back in 1990.

At that time, IPOs were like a 100% sure thing to make money as the stock would fly on the first day of trading. It was a new thing in Singapore and every father, mother, son was jumping on the bandwagon to get in.

We were undergraduates doing our uni life and finance was an area that we would eventually major in, as it became a career for most of us later. I decided that this was a good business opportunity to practice what we have just learned from the professors. I managed to talk to 5 other mates to get into this “collective investment scheme”.

It was then already very difficult to get an IPO allocation if you applied for a small number of shares, almost like a lottery ticket. As there was little to no regulation on IPO financing then, banks were tripping over themselves to offer 99% financing to anyone. Being the gung-ho guys that we were, we all decided to bid for 1 million shares (1,000 lots of 1,000 shares each)…

As relatively poor students then, we did not even have a cheque book amongst us, so we all had to deal in cold hard cash only. We agreed on the following day to each bring about $1,000+ cash to campus to pool up our resources to make up the 1% in order to get a cashier’s order, apply for the 99% bank financing and then submit the IPO application. As I was the only one that had a stock broker at that time, we will then submit our bid to my remisier.

The night before, I suddenly had cold feet and wondered what if our consortium had some disagreements later? Luckily, we were had done Law 101 in our first year as one of our modules. I quickly drafted a legal one pager and made sure all of us signed it in the presence of everyone the following day when we gathered the cash.

One of the guys had a girlfriend that worked in the branch of a local bank, so we went over to pass her the cash to obtain the cashier’s order and apply for the 99% financing before rushing over to the stockbroker to hand him our IPO documents.

The first sign that something was not right was when we met Peter, my remisier. He commented that it was a busy day and that we were his number 21 client who had submitted the documents to apply for 1 million shares on the Kim Eng IPO. “TWENTY-ONE !!!”  @$*&&^%$^##@

Guess what? Kim Eng became one of the most oversubscribed IPO in S’pore and maybe the world. It was 705 times oversubscribed!!!!!  The Jan 1990 IPO to raise S$32.5 million attracted an eye popping record S$22.9 billion in subscription monies. It went on to make a stunning debut as its share price tripled on its first trading day.

And what did we get for our 1 million shares application? ONE FREAKING LOT of a thousand shares…. We decided to sell off the miserable lot to take profit but one of the guys in the group decided to buy it over (it was still on physical scripts then) as he thought that there was potential for further upside. I remembered that the price we sold to him was S$1.61 . The poor guy never did see the price go much higher in the next 20 years…

The cost of the 99% financing for 4 days worked out to be about S$800+ for an almost S$800k loan. After deducting all the costs (not including the transport cost, sweat and tears etc), the net profit for each of us was about 50 bucks each… enough for a nice meal to celebrate our “success”…

What an unforgettable experience… The same group of friends still get together periodically and we sometimes talk about this crazy episode after all these years.

 

A week of restlessness for me, wanting to do something more while sitting in front of the computer screen every afternoon for a few hours, trying to optimize my time.

Saw too many youtube videos, thanks to the orange president and his son’s crazy tweets this week. Signed up for more online courses but sad that Coursera is now a fee-based service. Thankfully, Udemy is still around and there are many free ones to try. As a friend had recommended, I am now doing 2 short courses on Mindfulness.

My friends and I did check out a possible business opportunity this week, but it seems that we all want to be silent partners to provide the funds but not wanting to do the hard work, nor do we have any relevant previous experience to contribute to the business relationship. I really do not see what is the value add I bring to the table to a successful entrepreneur other than trying to throw small money at them, which they may not even want.

I had talked about wanting to do something different now as it gets more and more difficult for older PMETs like myself to survive and stay in the banking industry as technological advances like blockchain disrupt the status quo. Now is the time that I walk the talk, learn new skills to seriously upgrade myself to prepare for a new career path. I had just signed up this week for another evening training on how to start your own small business that will start in Oct.

In 2 weeks time, I have also planned a fact finding trip to Chiang Mai on my own to check out and do some research on some existing retirement resorts. This was my pet project last year. I am also on the lookout for business opportunities there as I really think that the Indochina region has huge untapped potential. This will lead to another trip to Bangkok in late Aug to meet an old friend to explore other business leads.

While I never know what all these will bring me to next, I must not stop exploring and learning. While these actions invigorate me, the fear of the unknown is always lurking very near behind me. With age comes risk aversion, a greater fear of failure. The millennial generation is now taught to welcome failure as a learning tool, to embrace change for it is the only constant nowadays. I will have to openly accept this new paradigm shift in order to reinvent myself and remove my old mindset.

 

Although every day seems to sometimes drag along so slowly, time does flies and it is already 3 weeks into my 3 months of gardening leave. There is my personal urgency to want to do as many things as possible, plan events, explore opportunities and finalize on what I want to do next. But I was mainly occupied with doing a lot of exercises, morning gym sessions almost every day. But this week, 2 events made me smile.

The first happened on Monday, where a group of good friends and myself finally attended a course which we committed to sign up for last month. The course was heavily subsidized by the skillsfuture initiative and on top of the early bird 10% discount plus another 50% discount for being above 50 years of age, the eventual bill was ZERO!

This is a 8 weeks (3 hours every Monday evening) course on the Science and Business of Wine. It was interesting to see a wide range of participants (17) from all walks of life as we had a get to know you session to kick start the first lesson. Looking forward to networking with everyone else over the subsequent weeks. Besides us “ex-bankers”, there was another one. The rest were from diverse sectors like F&B, hospitality, asset management and chemical industries.

We had 4 wines to taste that evening and 3 were actually quite terrible. Maybe the instructor was trying to manage our expectations and looking to start at the bottom?  Each of us was given a thick booklet as course notes to study and there would be an assessment at the end of the 8 weeks course.

http://www.sp.edu.sg/wps/portal/vp-spws/pace.courses.short.list.details?WCM_GLOBAL_CONTEXT=/lib-pace/internet/short+courses/science+and+business+of+wine

Anyway, the 4 of us celebrated our first lesson completion by having a shot of Yamazaki whiskey and finger foods when it ended at 1045 pm.

The next memorable event happened on Tuesday. It was a lunch gathering that was fixed a few weeks ago. This is actually a periodic event I started a few years ago with a group of university guys from our facility (Business Administration, class of 1990). We created a Whatsapp chat group which we used to (1) wish each other happy birthdays and (2) share dirty jokes… The last lunch happened in Apr last year and I thought it was timely that we had another one.

We had a final turnout of 12 guys and everyone was busy catching up with each other, learning about the ages of our kids (the oldest was already 24) and reminiscing about the old days in uni where life was simple where we had not faced the real world yet.

Lunch was 2+ hours long and it was followed up with another coffee session with a smaller group till almost 5 pm. Amazing how time flies by and it has been 27 years since graduation. Some of us are already at the tail end of our careers and have already moved on to the next phase of our lives, into our 2nd half-times. We all agree that we have truly crossed more than the half way mark of our lives that it is ok to be addressed as “uncles” now…

My favourite picture of the week : the Putin and Trump image below. It is timely since they officially met up yesterday and the outcome is as expected. Lotsa bromance and fake news. Guess who is the puppet master and the puppet here?