Are You Team Y.O.L.O or Team F.I.R.E?

Instead of living for the weekends, or counting down the years until retirement, you need a reason to get out of bed every day. And that reason needs to stem beyond money.

After all, what are you going to do with the money you earn? You need a purpose beyond accumulating wealth just for the sake of it.

At Providend, we believe that money is just an enabler to aid you in leading a meaningful life and not a goal.

Watch this short video as Christopher Tan, CEO of Providend, shares his personal experience on finding the balance between living his life now and accumulating for the future.


Hello everyone. Thank you for watching this video clip.
We hope that through this way, we would be able to share some of our thinking and hopefully leave some food for thought and make a small impact on your financial and non-financial life.

Today, I want to talk about a certain ideology that has been going around in social media.

One of them is Y.O.L.O. And you might be familiar with it. It stands for You Only Live Once.
And the Y.O.L.O ideology is about living your life to the fullest now and just enjoy life and don’t think about tomorrow.

And the second ideology is F.I.R.E, which stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early.
So, you scrimp and you save and hopefully, you will be able to retire as early as possible.
Now at Providend, we do not believe in either extreme because we believe that there must be a balance.

If you go by the Y.O.L.O ideology, then you will spend everything that you have and leave nothing for the future. But if you go on the F.I.R.E ideology, then before you retire, you might expire and you have not lived life yet. And I think a more balanced approach would be to first decide the kind of life that you want to live.

And life does not start at retirement. Life starts now.
And based on the kind of life that you want to live, you set aside enough to make life happen but also enough for you to save towards your retirement.

Some time back, I was living a life whereby I was just working every day and I wasn’t taking holidays and I wasn’t spending enough time with my family.
Something happened that made me realised that I was losing my children. They were growing up very fast and I wasn’t making enough memories with them. So sometime in 2013, in November of 2013, I decided that it is going to change and I’m going to take my family for a long holiday every year.

That particular year, I took my family to England because I remember my son telling me that one day, he would like to go and watch Manchester United play. And we went, we did just that.
We went to Old Trafford and we went to watch Man U play against Arsenal. That season was the season whereby Man U, they just had a new manager and they were doing badly.
And when we were there, I was praying very hard that Man U will win. Man U won, 1 – 0.
And until today, my family including my wife, who is not a football fan at all, she remembered that match. It was a memory worth putting money into.

And so, at Providend, we always believe that money is an enabler and not a goal.
And so, if you find this video to be helpful, please share it with your friends.
And thank you very much for watching.

We can design a plan for you to get the right balance between your current responsibilities and future aspirations.


We do not charge a fee at the first consultation meeting. If you would like an honest second opinion on your current investment portfolio, financial and/or retirement plan, make an appointment with us today.

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