Money

Peeping tom!?

I’ve never felt the lust for more money until earlier this year.

Now, I’m looking all over the place for ways to earn more money.

I could use my savings to buy a condominium and rent it out, using the collected rent to pay off the bank loans for the condo. But current condo prices are too high and even when combined with my mum’s savings, we don’t have enough for a decent unit at a decent location.

Later this year, some government policy might affect condo prices, and with the recent increase in flat supply from the government, we might see prices going down.

I ended up tossing the idea of buying a property in Australia because I’m not comfortable with not being able to “see” the actual property and have worries of being scammed.

I’m also thinking of setting up a company on my own, providing web solutions, customized web applications, running on a subscription-based business model. SaaS.

Just today, I woke up at 5am and couldn’t get back to sleep.

So while lying down on my bed, I kept thinking of money-making ideas and ended up with an idea for a phone app to organize my manga collection. A bit of research reveals that there are some apps already doing the same thing but they either have a crappy interface or not as convenient as what I have in mind.

There are so many ways to make money. Just need to put in lots of hard work.

Policies

When the company makes a policy, because of one misbehaving employee, it goes to show that the upper management does not want to confront that misbehaving employee.

So they make rules that make other employees unhappy, just so that everyone else directs their unhappiness towards that misbehaving employee, making his/her working life miserable.

We’re stuck in the nineties. Help!

Golden period

Things have been going very well for me these days.

Landed 2 freelance projects. 1 has potential to bring in lots of money in future, the other has been giving me a good opportunity to build my base code which caters to my style of PHP scripting, allowing me to build new apps faster in future.

I spend about 2 hours, 2~3 times a week after office hours, at any random place on my laptop working on these projects. So I usually reach home at 10pm~11pm, with enough time for a shower and some anime before I sleep.

Thanks to these projects, I found out what I want to do in future for my career. Web applications.

Things at work have been getting better. My salary has finally reached an acceptable level. I’ve been pushing for work that interests me to the point I don’t mind coming back on Saturdays to work some more.

Having less time for Final Fantasy XI now but since I spend almost the whole day during weekends on FFXI, it’s a good balance.

Also trying to go into property investing to earn more with my savings. One feasible suggestion for my low budget that I’ve gotten so far is to buy a small apartment (SGD$200k~) in Australia and rent it out to people. Much cheaper and safer than buying a condominium unit in Singapore (SGD$500k~700k) and renting it out.

Got to find out how to do this quick!

Never felt the need for earning more money until certain “incidents” that happened early this year. While I felt depressing for quite some time, it’s just what I needed for me to change for the better. Right now, I’ve never felt happier in my life.

I’ve also begun taking driving lessons. Hopefully I can buy a cheap second-hand hatchback car for myself by the end of this year.

One group of friends who are health concious invited me to jog together once a week. Maybe it’s this jogging thing that’s been giving me the energy for this busy schedule.

I like jogging. Once I get warmed up, I can jog for an hour or maybe even more. Sadly my knees start hurting after about 40 minutes. Only regret here is not jogging regularly after I started working full time. :(

Japan Earthquake 2011

After reading all the articles about the earthquake that happened in Japan recently, and despite the fact that there may be more earthquakes in future, it only further fuelled by desire to live there.

Many shops remained open to provide free shelter to people who couldn’t go back home when the trains had to stop running.

When they had problems with their power supply and requested everyone to co-operate by cutting down electricity usage, many shops did. In Akihabara, the famous electronics district, shops switched off their monitor displays. Some remain closed for business.

Square-Enix shut down their FFXI and FFXIV game servers too and offered to compensate players by making the month of April free.

Everyone is working together to overcome this huge challenge placed in front of them.

In Singapore, we’re fortunate that we’re safe from all these natural disasters.

But in return, it has made a lot of it’s citizens pretty selfish and uncaring towards others.

Update:

I’ve also did my part and made a small donation to Red Cross Japan via google.

I’ve never made donations before and I probably never will in Singapore with all the donation scandals that’ve happened here before.

Life on a weekday

When I don’t have any appointments after work, life for me usually goes like this.

6:40am: wake up and prepare for work

7:35am: leave for work

8:40am: breakfast at Maxwell Food Center

9am: report for work

6pm: leave office

6:30pm: find some place near office for dinner and start working on personal projects like TTTO.

9:30pm: laptop’s battery goes flat after 2 hours, time to go home!

10:30pm: simple workout at home for about 20 minutes.

10:50pm: play FFXI or watch anime.

12am~1am:  sleep