Hello, welcome to Cash Color. I started this blog as a way to share my thoughts and experiences on financial issues, ideas, and skills. This blog is also a reminder to myself to be on top of my goals.

About me: I am a 30-something single guy.

My mission: To retire by the age of 35, with my dream house and multiple steady streams of passive income. By blogging, I hope to contribute to the community by sharing my life experience and ideas I have, the mistakes and smart decisions I’ve made.

My background: Now more about myself, let us go back to the year 1999….

I graduated with a degree in accounting and finance at the age of 21. I had a brief stint in audit before quickly switching to retail sales. I was earning a lot of money. At least, it felt a lot for a freshie who has only worked in audit before for peanuts.

Delighted by my newfound wealth, I started looking for ways to use my money. I bought my first book on financial planning. I learned of the possibility of retiring and living on passive income. Only one problem. I need RM3,000,000 of investment to produce the amount of passive income needed to support the lifestyle I desire. I wasn’t disheartened. It wasn’t impossible to achieve.

My colleagues and bosses were gamblers. Being young and impatient (to amass the RM3million), I started joining them in gambling. What started as short gambling sessions after work soon became regular trips to the casino. The occasional winning sessions and greed blinded me from seeing the fact I was losing more often than winning. But I didn’t think too much about it because I was earning good money from my job.

When I was 24, there was a management shake-up in the company. I resigned soon after. I was unemployed for a long period. Desperate for income, I turned to gambling online. I used my savings to finance my gambling. Eventually I lost all my savings.

At 25, I finally found a job in accounting. I continued to gamble using various gambling techniques, systems and strategies I learned from the internet. The same strategies as professional gamblers claimed they use. However, I continued to lose.

At 27, I saw that my life was going nowhere. I decided to stop gambling. I sourced for other types of investment and found some High Yield Investment Programs (HYIP). All the members of these programs were making a lot of money. Against my better judgment, I used all my savings and borrowed against all my credit cards to invest in the HYIP. Within less than 3 months the program collapsed. Turned out the program was nothing more than a “pyramid scheme”.

I had no savings and I owed my credit cards almost RM30,000. This was the lowest point in my life. I could barely meet the minimum repayments of my credit cards. I knew I was facing bankruptcy.

I took me a couple of days to draw up a financial plan to repay all my debt. I borrowed RM10,000 from my brother to pay down my debt. The monthly repayment became manageable.

For 1 1/2 years, I lived on a very tight budget. And finally the day came when I was debt free. I was 29 then. I started saving again. I also began to invest into a little known but not new industry, the domain industry.

And here I am today. Still working on my retirement plan, but this time with more realistic goals. I have chosen the slower but surer path to financial freedom.

Update: At age 31, I managed to accumulate my first one hundred thousand networth. It’s a significant milestone in my life for financial freedom.