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Turning Golden

Just checked my EPF account, and I saw that they have created an "Akaun Warga Emas" for me. This account, apparently, is where my salary deductions will be placed from now on. I am grateful to Allah for the rezeki, but I now have one major concern. I am healthy, but not wealthy.

Health is wealth, they say, but you will need to be wealthy to be healthy. Healthcare ain't cheap. Now, as I am still gainfully employed, my employer is forking out the expenses for my health care.  I still have five years to go, but, I have a kidney condition that requires me to take medications. If I do not have to see the doctor (which I have reduced the frequency from quarterly to half-yearly) the cost of the meds alone is about RM120 a month. That is if my kidney (I have only one functioning) does not deteriorate further. From, my calculation, I will have exhausted my EPF in 3 to 4 years, after I pay off all my liabilities to the bank.

So, I now must find another source of income. Preferably, a passive one. In my spare time, (I have been skipping lunch, to lose weight, but end up gorging down dinner, so that's not working), I googled on ways to make money and, disappointingly, all of them require me to work on something, like writing a blog that everybody wants to read (eye roll emoji), or sell digital things that people can download, or buy a property and rent it out... I mean, sure, if I am twenty or thirty years old, I have the time and energy to slog night and day creating something that may (or may not) be popular (or viral in today's speak) that will, in turn, make me money while I play with my grandchildren or tend my garden or trim my bonsai tree. Bonsai trees aren't cheap, also.

Also, as I get older, I get lazier and crankier. Because, when you have lived a long time and you realize how stupid you were when you were young, and you see the young people around you doing all the stupid things that you did when you were their age, you get exasperated, and you get angry. Because you try to talk to them to tell them, don't do this you dumb kids you'll regret it when you get old, and they just look at you like you are some old annoying smart-ass trying to tell them what to do with their lives. Then again, that is what you are... an old annoying smart-ass.

But, I don't have much choice. Many times, as I stare out blankly into the tail light of the car in front on my way home from work, I wished that, if only I can transplant my current brain into my twenty-year-old self, I would have been a Jack Ma or, at least, a Tony Fernandez. If I had not been so calculative about time for leisure and lepaking, and realize that my potential is so much more that I give myself credit for, I may even be a great artist, a renown musician, or a best-selling author. Well, it's too late now. You can try to teach an old dog a new trick, but, it's kind of awkward when even he's learned the new trick, he will have to compete with the younger more energetic dogs... especially, when the other dogs call him Pakcik.

That's how it goes. The best I can do is try to make my children not to make the same mistakes I made. And, hopefully, they will be better off than me. That is all the legacy I can afford to leave them with.

In the meantime, I will continue to google for "Best ways to make a ton of money without doing anything."

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