Things I wish I knew sooner

Apparently there are some things that we as humans just do. Some of us will learn these things very much later in our life and will be at a disadvantage. I would like to pen these things down so that more people can know of these earlier. These include simple habits/rituals for your physical, financial and mental well-being. You will realise a lot of the people around you are already doing these. These are the unspoken “common sense” knowledge, that most of us aren’t aware of. These are categorised as Work, Financial, Beauty, Digital Security.

How much sooner?

I learnt of these in my late twenties, I hope I knew of these in my early twenties!

Who am I?

Important to know who I am and where my opinions come from:

I am a software developer with (at the time of writing) 7 years of work experience. I am (yes, still) figuring out adulting. These are just some things I figured out in the past few years and would like to share with others.

1. Work

💼Choose your Job wisely💼

When you are working for a company, remember you are not a slave in the company. You have your own life as well. You can and should be able to take breaks, speak your mind, work comfortably and without fear.

I can only speak for the tech industry, and trust me, such companies do exist. Where it’s alright to start work later as long as you are completing a day’s worth of work. Where it’s alright to leave slightly earlier some days to pick up/care for your kids.

Such companies understand that if you treat your employees well, the employees will be more productive. This includes mental health leaves, not providing a mandatory medical certificate when one is sick (because guess what, one can be sick and just resting at home can fix that).

Some tips when choosing your next company to work for:

• Ample annual leaves

• No need to justify sick leaves with medical certificate

• Pay is around market salary

• Transparent route to being promoted

• 360 feedback culture (usually after each interview round, providing feedbacks is a good indicator)

• Colleagues should not be competitors but be working as a team (personal preference)

• Good manager (would actually chat/speak to manager a couple of times before joining)

• Mental Health leave days / counselling provided

• Acceptable female/male ratio

• Flexible work hours/ work from home capability

• Team bonding activities are payed for

• Medical is covered

Trust me, such companies do exist. You just got to widen you network and ask around.

I usually also try to find people who work for the same company/department on LinkedIn and ask them questions that weren’t covered in the interview rounds.

2. Financial

💰Investments > Savings💰

I am sure everyone understands about saving and spending less. That’s definitely a habit we should keep. Avoid buying unnecessary things and live minimally. But guess what you do not need to skip your coffee runs from Starbucks all the time, if you are smart with your money.

Once we have our 6 months of emergency funds in your savings account, what do we do with the rest of the money accumulating? Let it earn the almost 0% interest rate in the bank account? OH HELL NO…

Welcome to investing. Simply put, investing means you buy a part of a company/ a group of companies, for example $10 worth of its shares today. Then this same portion of shares, overtime will increase in value and be worth $100 (maybe over 5 to 10 years).

You will be surprised to see the amount by which a company’s value increases. Look at Nike for example ~$50 in 2017 to ~$150 in 2021. If we had left that $50 in the bank it would still have been ~$51 in 2021🤭.

This is just an example not financial advise.

We should be investing as early as we can and it should be a monthly if not once in 3 months thing (dollar cost averaging). Every month, set aside some money from your leftover cash for investments. Better still, enable auto payouts from your bank every month to some stock/ETF. Then, leave the money there for minimally 5 to 10 years. (Thank your younger self later)

Once you find a good brokerage app, you can set alerts/reminders for yourself. You can even buy more when there is a dip in price, so that once it increases, your money value increases accordingly.

Factors to look out for before jumping in:

• Can you withdraw your money easily? Should not be locking your money.

• What’s the broker’s commission? Do a comparison with the other brokers available.

• Do you fully understand what you are buying?

Different Brokers available:

• AI roboadvisors

• Human (your financial consultant)

• Exchanges where you buy and sell on your own

I personally use both roboadvisors and the regular exchanges (holding both individual stocks and ETFs) and have set up auto monthly payouts in them. I will probably let this go along for the next 5–10 years.

🤹🏼Multiple sources of Income🤹🏼

Now understand this, you are earning well from your job. You have even built a whole lifestyle thanks to your salary. But what this means, is that you are at the mercy of the company that has hired you, for your lifestyle. In the future, even if the company does not do well / treat it’s employees well, you would have to tolerate working for this company because you have a lifestyle that is courtesy of this company. Recently, many people were even retrenched (due to covid) and people had to rush into other professions/companies.

Sure, the strategy in this case is to be strive to be the best in your field of work and try to always be interview — ready so that you can easily switch to another company. Which means, you need to know how to pass an interview.

I am from a software development background which means I have to spend time outside work hours to read up books and practice Leetcode. Not that I do not enjoy it, I love being a software developer! It just means I have less time to spend on non-programming related hobbies.

Multiple sources of income allows one to not rely on their job for their lifestyle. Of course, if you are just starting out, you should be concentrating on being at your job first. But once you are comfortable, it’s time to look into other sources of income to fund your lifestyle. It helps to have other skills in this case like being a good salesperson, public speaking, photography, financial knowledge, marketing etc.

Investments are definitely one stream of income. But they tend to take time to actually reap profits.

Some examples of other sources of income are:

• Side business like selling cakes, breads, artwork, etc

• Providing part time tuitions

• Launching a course out there (eg. Udemy)

• Content creator (eg. Youtuber, Instagrammer)

• Renting out a home that you own

• Part of the gig economy (freelancing, uber driver, photographer, food delivery, etc)

Remember the aim here is to not be at the mercy of any company. And just like everything in the world, this is not easy, but it’s something everyone should understand.

Disclaimer: Make sure you can have other sources of income when you work for a company, as some companies do not allow it 😅!

📊Personal Budgeting📊

Every month we should set aside 1 hour to go through our expenses. That means accounting for every single expenditure and income. This allows us to ensure we are not spending more than our means. Also, gives us a chance to cut down unnecessary expenses like subscriptions we are not using anymore or source for other ways to pay less (share netflix accounts 😛)

Personally I use Microsoft Excel’s Personal Budget template.

Press enter or click to view image in full size

Personal Budget Template

This allows me to have a bird’s eye view of all my expenses. Believe me, sometimes it’s a nice wake up call and has dramatically reduced my spendings…

3. Digital Identity Security

🤫Password Managers🤫

For those who do not know what these are. These are softwares that hold all your passwords so that you only need to remember 1 password.

In this day and age, there are still some people who use 1 password for most of their accounts. This is really bad and makes hacking your accounts really easy because one can only remember easy to remember things.

A strong password is at least 16 characters long with a combination of alphabets, numbers and symbols eg. “b/?6?~TQay3MQc#v”

No one can remember that, even if you do, you are not supposed to use this same password for more than 1 account.

Therefore, enter password managers. These are as secure as they can be. Only your registered devices hold these passwords. So only if you registered a device, you have access to the password manager on the device. What this does is, as you are logging in or signing in to a website, it suggests a strong password and with 1 click it saves it in the password manager or (if you are already logged in to the manager) allows you to just log in with 1 click. This could be Chrome’s password manager or Mac’s Keychain as well!

These are especially useful for those sites that do not have “Sign in via Google”. Super safe, super efficient.

I personally use a software called 1Password (paid software).

When you try logging into sites, it will ask for 1Password password

Walaa, one click sign in.

You mostly do not even need to see your password. Of course the 1 password that you do need to remember is that for the password manager and that should be as complex a text that you can remember.

4. Aging

🌞Sunscreen, sunscreen, sunscreen🌞

Apparently we should be applying sunscreen on our faces (probably even body) even if we do not directly expose to the sun. Like even as we are working from home, every morning apply a tiny amount of sunscreen after moisturisers (which is another obvious thing to be applied every day and pause for dramatic effect night! 🤷🏻‍♀️)

Why you ask?

It prevents wrinkles! But if you are not already applying sunscreen everyday, you have probably been living in a box! Ask around. (you will be surprised how many people are already aware of this!) I only found out about this in 2021, thanks to more time spent on Instagram😅.

With the advancements in science, we are probably going to be living longer and if so, might as well look good while at it. That is also the reason why you have noticed the increase in popularity of gyms.

👋🏼Conclusion👋🏼

Thank you for reading through and hope this helps you. These can be the topics of your next few conversations with your friends, you will be surprised how common these things are and yet no one talks about these things.