The time Dad gambled away my college fund

The risks we take to have it all

Tuition was due, and the bank account still said zero.

Me: Were you not able to get the money out?
Dad: Well, lesson learnt the hardway. I thought Singapore is safe, well it’s not
Me: At least it’s not all of our money
Dad: well almost all
Me: All our free cash ya?
Dad: yaaa.
Dad: the plan is for you to withdraw all your payout for your next year school fee.

I thought everything was set. My family had finessed our way out of many thin-wallet situations. We finally had our break when my grandfather gifted us money from his house sale. How did we lose it all?

The signs that I would be a cycle-breaker first showed up in high school. I was applying to overseas colleges, aiming for a full scholarship.

I looked at the local Indonesian universities first. Dad had saved up enough for a business school just ten minutes away. If I got in, he’d get me a car.

Before I filled in the application form, Mom encouraged me to apply overseas. Maybe Singapore? She told me to dream bigger and go for Hong Kong.

It didn’t hurt to try out my luck, so I applied for both. To increase my chances, I had to get international qualifications, not grades from the Indonesian examination system. I tried my hand at the SATs, got perfect scores for math but kept scoring low in English. I did the test three times. Each time, I fell short of the Singapore Management University threshold by ten points. The morning before my fourth try, I got an admission offer to the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology with a one-year scholarship.

My parents were frank with me. This sounded great. But they didn’t have the money to pay for years two, three, and four.

“Well, you’ve got one year so you might as well go,” Dad said. “Hopefully we’ll figure out how to pay for the rest by next year.”

He didn’t, but I managed. I worked some student jobs around campus to earn extra cash to cover my living costs.

Working was not new to me. When I was in junior high, I asked for extra pocket money to go to the mall with my friends. They said I had to earn it myself. I figured that starting a business would earn me some quick cash. I sold cassava chips to my friends before my teachers found out and banned commercial activity on campus. I gave the faculty room free samples and I was allowed to sell my chips again, my teachers being a loyal customer base. I raked in so much profit in five years that I bought some gold following my parents’ financial advice.

All that glitters didn’t amount to a college fund. I maxed my student working hours (my student visa had limitations), toured all the different school departments to beg for money (the university sat on a lot of cash), and applied for every grant I was remotely eligible for. I collected US$7,700, a full semester’s worth of tuition fees.

Over Christmas break, in between family photos and penny-pinching our festive meals, I overheard Dad venting to Mom, “This is your fault. You taught Becky how to dream. Now we're crushing her dream because we can’t afford it.”

The miracle came in my junior year. My grandfather sold his house to be closer with his children. He kept some of the cash for himself, then split the rest to his two daughters and three grandkids.

We paid off the semester’s tuition fee and I entrusted Dad with the rest of the money.

It was around this time that we met up with a close family friend from our sojourn in Singapore. She had her cash invested in her boyfriend’s brokerage, a new snazzy fintech company called Six Capital that was yielding her 3%-6% a month. We visited their offices that looked like a trading floor but with vibrant tech company colours. The walls were blue and yellow. A scrolling ticker screen hung from the ceiling, alerting traders of every market movement.

It was a rate unheard of but the markets were growing in 2016. Surely a company based in a country as regulated as Singapore was a safe bet. Dad thought it was a great way to stash our cash instead of having it sit in a bank and be eaten up by inflation. He put all of our family’s newly gifted funds in.

After six months, he withdrew a semester’s worth of tuition and we were covered. We could finally breathe, our money finally working for us.

I still worked three jobs, though. We had an unspoken pact that while my parents covered tuition, I would cover my own living expenses. Still, Hong Kong wasn’t cheap. I did data analysis work for the MBA office while my two roommates fiddled with their engineering homework. There were many times I felt burnt out. I texted the girl I was seeing at the time over Snapchat, “It’s so unfair that I have to work this hard just to get by. I just want to give up.”

The next summer break, we did the usual routine: family photos and penny-pinching our meals. A week before I was due to fly back, Dad put in a request to withdraw funds amounting to the upcoming semester’s tuition fee.

It never came.

My parents called their friend in a flurry of panic. I asked for a payment extension. The company went bust. We’d never see those funds ever again. Dad took out a loan and I got my degree.

A year later, Dad and I received an email saying that we’re technically creditors for the broker so we have priority to receive the money. Based on my corporate accounting course, I knew that liquidators suck up the rest of the money to cover their fees. There would be nothing left for us.

*

My parents knew a bit but they thought they knew a lot

They knew the good stuff. They correctly identified the safe havens based on their life experiences: gold and US dollar are safe and a lot more stable in value compared to the Indonesian rupiah, which lost 10x its value against the USD in 1997. Dad taught me about stocks when I was 11, handing me “Rich Dad, Poor Dad for Teens” and purchasing a subscription to a business newspaper so that I could read the stock price of a brick company I was invested in every morning.

Now that I’ve learned more about personal finance, I realized my parents also had some “bad” habits when it comes to their finances. They bought and sold stocks daily instead of investing. They put my college fund in a fintech.

Last week, my therapist Angie asked me, “Are you angry at your father for not providing for you?”

“Woah, I can’t say that!” I said.

“Why not?” she challenged.

“It’s not his fault he lost all the money.”

“But are you angry at him?”

In truth, I felt betrayed. My parents had promised me that they would fund my studies. They didn’t last far beyond the first year, and that only happened because I got a scholarship in the first place.

At present, I’m the only person in my immediate family earning a regular income. My parents still fall asleep stressing about money. I help out my younger brother with his school fees because my parents couldn’t send enough.

In the end, we’re all where we are because we took a gamble.

Dad gambled on a fintech. Mom gambled I’d get into a good university.

One paid off and one didn’t. And in turn, I gambled as little as possible and chose stability. Full-time corporate job, investing in indexes, and diversifying across four brokers.

Dad said to me last month while driving on hour seven of a cross-island road trip, “You’re young. You should be putting your money in more profitable investments instead of just the S&P 500. Look at how much the Indonesian stocks shot up in the last year!”

I looked at the open highway, muttered a “yeah I guess so,” with absolutely no intention to do so.

Thank you to the conversations that encouraged me to write about this,

Rik

and

Kat Koh

.

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Update log:

• 📖 Reading Good Work by

  Paul Millerd
  (53% completed). Paul is a living example that centering a life around Good Work is possible. It’s a long game. My journey to good work will be endless and I just have to be patient.

• 👋🏼 I’m officially part of the editor gang for the last run of Write of Passage. If you’re joining, I’ll see you in the hallways.

• 🎥 Discovered the Sunny Sixteen podcast. I’m obsessed with these four photographers & videographers. I need more of them.

• 🔥 Used a blow torch for the very first time. I can crank the heat up higher next time. I made se’i asap.

• 🥹 Peter McKinnon’s Bucket Shot 2 video made me cry. What a great photo to do all of that for.

• ✍🏼 Bite-Sized Creativity book progress: 3 chapters; 3,260 words.

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