When I was in high school, my family ran into financial difficulties. This was one reason I went to university in Japan, where I received a full scholarship and a living allowance.
At university, I supplemented my allowance by working part-time as a research and teaching assistant, a waiter at a Chinese restaurant, and a helper at a local pickle farm.
I managed to save some money, but not enough to fully fund my postgraduate studies in the UK. So I borrowed money from my relatives.
Asking relatives for money was one of the hardest things I had ever done. I remember feeling embarrassed and needing a lot of courage to make those expensive international phone calls. Fortunately, several of my aunts were generous enough to lend me the money I needed to continue my studies.
In the UK, I kept my expenses low. I cooked most of my meals in bulk, often having sandwiches for breakfast and boiled broccoli or Brussels sprouts for dinner. Meals at Cambridge dorm were reasonably priced, while LSE had a cheap sandwich bar. When companies held recruitment sessions on campus, I attended many of them for the free food (banks and consulting firms tended to provide good food).
I also worked part-time for a real estate company that offered plenty of free snacks. Even though they were mostly unhealthy, highly processed biscuits and chocolates, I tended to overeat and gained quite a bit of weight (hence my diet challenge). I guess that’s why we should have occasional cheat days, and free food isn’t really free, especially when you have a scarcity mindset, as I did back then.
After completing my postgraduate studies, I considered pursuing a PhD but decided to work instead. I wanted to repay my debt as quickly as possible, wasn’t sure whether a PhD was right for me, and wanted to become financially secure sooner.
For the first several years of my career, I remained frugal. I focused on my work, spent little, rented a small room in a flat, and slept on a mattress on the floor. Everything I owned fit inside that bedroom. It was only after I met my wife that I rented a flat of my own. And many more years later, after I have kids, when I bought a TV and slowly revisit my childhood hobbies. Thanks partly to a relatively high starting salary, I repaid my debt within a few years.
This period shaped my goal of becoming financially independent. I enjoyed my work, but I wanted the freedom to pursue other things if I chose to, and enough financial security that money wouldn’t dominate my decisions. Ultimately, it was about having agency and being able to choose how to live my life.
In Chinese, there’s a saying: “First bitter, then sweet” (先苦后甜). It fits my tendency to be overly prepared, delay gratification, and save the best for last. That said, I didn’t feel that I was making a sacrifice. If anything, being a minimalist allowed me to focus on my work during that season of life.
But As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “We are always getting ready to live, but never living.” After about 15 years working in the finance industry, I feel there are better ways to spend my time and grow as a person. Now that I’m in midlife, I want to be more present and live life on my own terms. As John Maynard Keynes argued, once the economic problem is largely solved, we should devote more attention to the arts of life.
Excerpts:
The love of money as a possession—as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life—will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semicriminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.
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We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin.
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Meanwhile there will be no harm in making mild preparations for our destiny, in encouraging, and experimenting in, the arts of life as well as the activities of purpose.
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