Lim Kopi Fridays Videos

00:00 :

Hello everybody, welcome to Lim Kopi Fridays with Adrian. My name is Adrian and in this channel I’m going to share with you tips and ideas on how you can manage stress and anxiety relating to your finances. And it is something that is not very much talked about. So I thought that it might be good for me to address this and to hopefully help you get out of the rut and to live the life that you really wanted. And in this video I’m going to share with you a personal story about myself and why am I so passionate about helping people to get out of their ruts. Now, more than 10 years ago, I just got married to my then girlfriend who is now my wife and something terrible happened in the first year of our marriage.

00:46 :

So we got married at the start of the year. We were busy with our lives and towards the end of the year, unfortunately my wife, who was diagnosed with cancer. Now at 28 years old, diagnosed with cancer is something that people will think, why is this happening to me?

01:04 :

And that episode taught us a very good lesson is that we can never be too prepared for emergencies, and we can never be too prepared for things that are outside of our control. So back then I was in the midst of a career change, so I decided to quit my job hunting and to look after her 24×7 because at that time was most important for me, would be her emotional well-being Fortunately, the illness was at the earlier stage and the treatment was relatively fast.

01:39 :

It was completed within about close to six months or so. There was this period of six months where I was unemployed. But fortunately previously she had done some financial planning with her agent. There was some payout for the insurance because of her illness to tide us through the difficult time. Now insurance was something that I’ve never thought about when I was younger. I don’t know about you. Probably now the awareness is much better than 10 – 15 years ago, but back then all my focus was on investing or saving and not wasting money on insurance. There was that. But through this episode I realize that overly saving for the rainy days or overly invested may not be a good thing at all.

02:35 :

Because with everything, you got to have a balance. It was during this period of time where we just got married and suddenly because I had to take care of her 24×7, so is like we were together. So that was our first time where we were spending 24 hours every day for six months. Now Can you imagine two people from two different background, different habits just got married together and we even had didn’t have the time to really iron out our differences.

03:03 :

We are being forced to stay together and we have been forced to iron out our differences there and then. It’s like a crash course for two people just to get to know each other and 24×7 within that six months. Naturally, there were a lot of conflicts that we had, but eventually we strive towards a common goal, and that is to nurse her back to health. That episode taught me a very valuable lesson. And that is sometimes we may have to look further than what monetary can give us because at that point of time, my emotional support, my physical support were very important for her.

03:48 :

And I wouldn’t want to exchange that for anything in the world. But imagine if we didn’t have the payout, we just eroded all our cash from our wedding, from buying the house, the down payment. So we didn’t really have a lot of savings left. So if we didn’t have the payout, I’ll have to be forced to go out and work, and to work part time probably, to juggle my time between work and to look after her at the same time. Remote work wasn’t something that is prevalent at that point of time. Then yeah, so this was something that I’ve learned that sometimes when we are prepared for emergencies in times of need, some of these can come back to help us when we really need it.

04:34 :

So I was managing her emotions and I really wanted her to feel not so stress about her illness. So we did a lot of things together. We baked together, we went out for walks together. We had a lot of conversations, and these are conversations that we probably wouldn’t have had if not for what happened to her. Not that I’m saying this is good, but why wait till this time to have a conversation with your loved ones around us? Most people who are facing financial stress tend to keep to themselves, either because of the fact that they feel that it’s no use talking to others. What can others help me with? Now, you may be surprised that just the action of talking to people can actually relieve the stress that you have inside your head.

05:32 :

And because of this situation that happened in the past, after my wife recovered and she went back to work, I was left alone. Because I was unemployed and I decided to jump in to financial advisory because during that six months, I spent a lot of time trying to research into this thing called financial planning and I became more interested in the topic. And I realised that back then my personal finance was very lopsided. Heavily on savings, heavily on investing, but none on the risk management side.

06:13 :

And I believe that there are many people in this world, they are having financial plans that is lopsided in any areas, so sometimes they can be heavily invested or heavily put their money in their risk management, which is insurance, which may not be right as well. So the key thing here is to strike the right balance and to allow us to not only have the financial means to save and to invest, but also to protect our downside with insurance. So I hope that this mini lesson from me can help you to supercharge your financial plans and to bring you less financial stress and anxiety moving forward. See you in your next video.