Unexpected happiness

Unexpected happiness
- by Kelvin Ng (member of St. Columbs)

There’s been lots of changes in my life in the last 6 to 7 years. Here I just want to talk about my work and finances.

I used to invest professionally for a living. But from 2014 onwards I made 3 to 4 consecutive investment mistakes and started badly lagging the good fund managers out there, and by late 2016 - early 2017 I decided to just invest with those fund managers and do something else entirely. In effect I fired myself.

It was a very difficult time. I’ve been raised from young to view career and financial success as the number one priority in life. So what I perceived to be a career failure really knocked my sense of self, much more than I thought it would, given that I am a Christian and am not meant to view those things as that important.

I did think that it’s just as well my mother had passed away already – she’s with Christ in heaven now, but if she retained her previous mentality she’d be rolling in her grave.

I’m now training to become a Pilates teacher, and it’s become a passion and I feel really engaged and worthwhile helping these aging and injured bodies to move better. There’s something really satisfying about helping people directly that giving money away does not engender.

And now I live in a bedsit, whereas a few years ago I had a lovely house in Surrey Hills. Some of my friends in my Bible Study think that I should call it a studio apartment to make it sound cooler, but I prefer to call it a bedsit. But seriously I discovered that none of that matters – a place to live is just a box – it can be a beautiful box or a not so beautiful box, but at the end of the day it’s just a box. (The only thing is that I’d prefer to have a gas stove instead of an electric stove, as an electric stove top doesn’t help my already limited cooking skills!)

Truly, I feel happier now than I felt when I was at my career and financial peak 7 years ago.

I think that God brought me to this point. I am very thankful to God in giving me the opportunity to train to become a Pilates teacher and in teaching me the relative unimportance of money and career success but there is a caveat. I do realise that this attitude about money and houses is easy for me to say – I’m not married, I don’t have a family and kids to house and support – a good friend said to me recently that he and his wife spend as much on childcare as on rental! Now that’s something I don’t understand. All I know is that until I have family, I’m as happy in a bedsit as in a big house.