Step out into the Central Business District during lunchtime, and you’re surrounded by young professionals earning salaries their parents could only dream of at their age. They’re in tech, banking, consulting, and law. Yet, if you sit down and have an honest conversation with them, a bizarre phrase sometimes pops up: "I feel poor."
The Straits Times recently published a highly insightful article breaking down this exact phenomenon: young, affluent Singaporeans experiencing deep financial anxiety despite pulling in high incomes.
As a 24-year-old university student among many preparing to enter the corporate grid, this piece hit hard. It perfectly captures why so many people get trapped on a financial hamster wheel. It made me reflect on my spending and consumption habits. It highlights why my Dividend Investment slow and steady approach to building wealth isn't so commonly embraced.
Why $10,000/Month Feels Like Zero
The article correctly notes that this isn't literal poverty. It's a psychological and structural squeeze driven by three main factors:
- Running A Hedonic Treadmill: As Dr. David Teo from Connections MindHealth pointed out, our brains rapidly adapt to rising living standards. Upgrading from food courts to cafes, or economy to business class, feels incredible the first time. By the fifth time, it simply becomes your expensive new baseline.
- Relative Deprivation: Human beings are wired to compare. Social media has turned lives into public theater, meaning we are constantly exposed to other people's curated highlights. We only see luxury holidays, flawless home renovations, and massive investment windfalls. We see their spending, but the debt or parental inheritance financing it remains completely hidden.
- Asset Inflation: For young Singaporeans, missing out on the property ladder feels like missing out on the Singapore Dream itself. With private property prices rising faster than wages, even high-earning single professionals feel an intense, localized pressure to accumulate millions just to secure a roof over their heads.
In my view, the squeeze has only been exacerbated by the advent of Generative AI and the subsequent K-shaped economy.
In a classic economy, a high starting salary in corporate roles (like junior banking, tech, or law) guaranteed a predictable upward trajectory. Today, GenAI is aggressively flattening the entry-level corporate layer. Junior white-collar knowledge work is being automated away or optimized to the point where fewer fresh graduates are needed to do the same volume of work. This creates a looming sense of career fragility.
This creates the K-Shaped Economy:
- Upper Arm: Capital owners, AI allocators, and those holding hard, scarce physical assets see their wealth expand exponentially as productivity skyrockets.
- Lower Arm: Pure labor earners, even high-income ones, face stagnant real wage growth, heightened job insecurity, and intense competition, all while being systematically priced out of real-world assets that inflate faster than their wages do.
This looming K-Shaped Economy and career fragility should logically drive us to hoard capital. Instead, it has turned the already-difficult task of wealth building into a seeming insurmountable task for young people.
Building Wealth Feels Like Poverty
The Straits Times article reminded me that success can be highly performative.
When you spend $6,000 on a trip to Europe, it is highly visible. It’s on Instagram, it’s a conversation starter at lunch, and it provides immediate social validation. Your brain signals: "I am successful."
When you buy 1 lot of DBS, that $6,000 vanishes from your savings account into a sterile, digital brokerage interface. You can't show off a brokerage statement at a gathering. On the surface, your liquid spending power just went down. You artificially made yourself "poorer" today.
Choosing to invest means fighting our urges and base desires. It takes massive cognitive effort to override the urge to consume now, especially when the economic environment around you (skyrocketing housing and car prices) screams that things are only going to get more expensive if you don't enjoy life today.
But a high salary does not automatically mean that we will have high wealth. Salary is a temporary stream of income generated by your labor. Wealth is the net value of assets that we own, generating more cash without our labor. When we mistake income for wealth, we easily end up trapped in a dangerous "splurge-save" cycle, using high salaries to fund an aggressive lifestyle rather than buying back your future time.
Dividend Investment Breaks The Treadmill
This brings us right back to our core investment philosophy. Why am I so focused on dividend-yielding Singapore equities, banks, and REITs? Because they are an antidote to the anxiety described in the article.
The article notes that stressed professionals often seek fast dopamine hits through panic-shopping or lifestyle splurges. Dividend Investment harnesses that exact same addictive psychological feedback loop, but turns it into a wealth-building mechanism.
Seeing cash deposited directly into your account every single quarter creates a profound, tangible sense of progress. It makes saving and investing feel like a game where you are winning real rewards just for buying shares and staying vested.
The high earners in the article are running on a treadmill because they use their high incomes to fund current appearances. The antidote to that specific anxiety isn't a higher salary; it's changing what you view as a "luxury."
True luxury isn’t the First Class flight or the branded goods. The ultimate luxury is having Optionality, knowing that our accumulated shares are quietly spinning off cash flow that buys back our time, our career flexibility, and our peace of mind in an unpredictable world.
Ending with the same quote I used in my first blog post from almost one year ago. All Huat !!
Do you know the only thing that gives me pleasure? It's to see my dividends coming in.
- John D. Rockefeller
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