Seven Dollar Millionaire - Happy Ever After: Financial Freedom Isn’t a Fairy Tale

1. Chapter 4
2. Chapter 5
3. Chapter 6
4. Chapter 7

The Seven Dollar Millionaire

This edition first published 2021

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is Available

ISBN 978-1-119-78072-4 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-119-78074-8 (ePub)

ISBN 978-1-119-78073-1 (ePDF)

Cover Design and Illustration: Jo Sanders and Koh Soo Peng

First and foremost, thank you for buying this book, or at least thinking about buying it long enough to read this far. The Seven Dollar Millionaire project is not-for-profit, and any money we make doing this will help us reach more people who can't afford to buy books that teach them how to build a more secure future.

The world needs to change, we need to change how, when and how much we teach people about money, and it will need a lot of people picking up a lot of books to create that change.

This book alone has already needed a lot of people. It needed my older daughter Aliya asking me How much money should I save to become a millionaire? to come up with the Seven Dollar Millionaire pseudonym we now use for all our projects, reading and editing along the way. It needed my younger daughter Maya to make videos for the Indiegogo campaign that enabled us to launch our first title The Thousand Dollar Journal. That both of them have now opened savings and investment accounts makes this book a success for my family at least!

It has needed the invaluable support of the organisers, volunteers and students at migrant worker organisations in Singapore, in particular HOME and ASKI Global, to patiently let me teach their existing materials, review them, try out new ideas and provide feedback all the way along, for what worked and what didn't. Thanks also to the international volunteer students at the National University of Singapore who helped test these ideas out, and particularly Dalis Chan for always being ready with an answer or idea.

The illustrations of Jo Sanders and the designs of Soo Peng Koh at Nimbus Design have been vital in transforming the text into something much more visual and engaging. Thank you so much for contributing to this project in ways I couldn't begin to imagine.

Thank you also to the supporters of the Indiegogo campaign that helped us launch The Thousand Dollar Journal, and give away more than 1,000 copies of that journal to migrant workers: Dan Liebau, Jon Foster, Velisarios Kattoulas, Herald van der Linde and The Woke Salaryman chief among them.

Thank you also to the team at Wiley, led by Syd and Purvi, who have guided this along so seamlessly. They have enabled a book that really was initially intended just for my daughter to hopefully reach many more people's daughters, and perhaps even some sons, and for that I am extremely grateful.

And, of course, thanks to my wife, Salina, who patiently believed I was working on a book and not just browsing the internet when glued to my laptop in early mornings and through weekends. Thank you for that, and of course, everything else!

Everything that follows was originally written as a gift to my daughter as she was planning to leave home and attend university halfway across the world.

When she was little, I promised myself I would write her stories, fairy tales of rainbow unicorns, dragons and adventurous quests, but I never did. I was too busy working to write fairy tales. Lots of nights I was too tired or just not there to even read stories to her that other people had written.

I was still busy trying to make money as I wrote this, waking up at dawn to write before work, but I did it to help her learn how to make sure she never becomes too busy with work to pursue her own dreams.

She wasn't the only person I wrote this book for. I also wrote it for students I taught at HOME (Humanitarian Organisation for Migrant Economics) and Aski Global in Singapore.

Every Sunday, migrant workers attend classes organised by these and other charities to learn the basics of budgeting, saving and investing. They have travelled thousands of miles in search of a better life, often coming from tiny villages or remote islands with little evidence of modernity, to the world's most advanced and expensive cities. They risk so much: many are women whose jobs require living with a strange family for years. There are far too many horror stories to recount here, but still they come, risking so much in the hope that they will be able to save enough from their higher income abroad to change their families' lives at home.

I wrote this book, a course based on it and a subsequent saving planner called The Thousand Dollar Journal to be a guide for them, a route for them to lift their families out of poverty and support them on their road to financial independence.

At all points in between these two totally different readers a privately educated university student and migrant domestic workers we live with a poverty of financial education. This is a poverty of knowledge that creates real-world financial poverty as well as other extreme social problems:

1. Fifty percent of all American households have not saved enough for retirement, according to the National Retirement Risk Index, which recommends saving 15% of your income over your life. The US personal saving rate was 2.4% in 2017, one sixth of that requirement.