My Thoughts on Buying a Property

Last night, I met up with my friend, CH, for a catch-up dinner at a local Chinese restaurant in the Tiong Bahru neighborhood. CH is originally from Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. He came to Singapore in 2010 and naturalized as a Singaporean citizen in October 2022 after being a permanent resident for several years.

One of the first major things CH did after becoming a citizen was to buy a publicly subsidized apartment, known as an HDB unit, built by the Housing Development Board of Singapore. The property he bought is located in a relatively central area of the city, within walking distance from the subway station. It has a floor size of around 950 square feet (88 square meters), and cost him around SGD 825,000 (USD 634,000) before the renovation expenses.

CH paid SGD 325,000 (USD 250,000) in cash, and took out a mortgage for the remaining SGD 500,000(USD 384,000), payable over the next 15 years. That represents a monthly payment of SGD 3,400 (USD 2,600).  Assuming he gets around SGD 2,000 (USD 1,500) in CPF, Singapore’s mandatory social security savings scheme jointly funded by the employer and employee, he only needs to pay SGD 1,400 (USD 1,100) out of his take-home salary.

This is quite a reasonable sum to pay for an apartment of such a comfortable size. CH is also wise in that he didn’t overleverage himself in buying this property. He and I are about the same age, having less than 15 years to go until the retirement age. While leveraging can be good for you if the market swings in your favor, the opposite can also be true, so we need to be cautious.  I’m happy for him that he found such a good buy. 

Having said that, the downside for CH of buying this property is that his commuting time has gotten much longer than before. Currently he commutes to work and back spending 70 minutes each way, significantly eating into his precious hours of sleep every night. As I require a sufficient amount of sleep to function properly at work, I probably wouldn’t be able to cope with such an exacting schedule.

My plan is to keep renting a centrally-located apartment, so long as I remain employed. I spend around 20 minutes on my way to work and 30 minutes on the way back, a reasonable amount of commuting time. While I don’t consider myself obsessed with money and professional success, one thing I do appreciate is the value of time, so it’s imperative that I live in a place close to my workplace.

After I retire, I’ll no longer have to worry about living close to work, affording me more flexibility in choosing a property of my liking. Even after becoming location-independent, my top priority in selecting a place would still be proximity to the nearest subway station and supermarket, as I’ll need to cater for my physical strength, which will inevitably weaken as I age.

Unlike other metropolises in Asia such as Tokyo, Shanghai, and Beijing, the beauty of living in Singapore is that the city-state is so compact-sized that you can get to most places within an hour by train, no matter where you live. It also helps that Singapore’s subway network is still expanding, bringing even more convenience to residents. As such, I’m not too concerned about which locality to live in, so long as my place is close to a subway station.

Although I’m not in a hurry to buy a place, property investment remains a fascinating topic for me, and I never get tired of checking out property listings on the Internet. I’ll spend the next few years saving up more cash and reading more books on the subject. Undoubtedly, it will be the biggest purchase I’ll ever make, so I’m determined to do it justice by preparing fully.

How I Transformed Myself into a Reader

Last Sunday, I discarded a whole bunch of books and magazines in my apartment in an effort to tidy up my surroundings. It took me more than two hours to sort through my bookcases, but determining which items to discard and which to retain was relatively easy, so I didn’t find the task too stressful.

I have rearranged my bookshelves in such a way that the books that are of current relevance to me and therefore I want to read the most are placed in front for easy access, with the remaining books placed further back. As my interests and priorities shift over time, it would be a good idea to rearrange my books from time to time.

Currently, I have books in Japanese, English, Chinese, and French—my favorite four languages—with Japanese books taking up the biggest proportion. My interests are mainly non-fiction and self-help books, but I also read novels occasionally for language-learning purposes. I also have quite a few manga comic books.

Up until now, the longest fiction that I have read is The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, which took me five months to finish. It’s often cited as the greatest work of literature ever written, but I found some parts of it too arcane and difficult to slog through. Despite the sense of accomplishment I felt when I finished reading it, I don’t feel like reading it again, at least not in the near future.

Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm by George Orwell, on the other hand, are books that impacted me deeply. They had special significance for me because I had firsthand experience of living in Mainland China, which was still pretty much a socialist and planned economy with very little personal freedom back in 1986, when I first went to Shanghai to study.

I felt a general sense of unpleasantness and suffocation about the whole vibes of that society, but being a 12-year-old boy, I didn’t possess the vocabulary to put my feelings into words. Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm are remarkable in that the author successfully verbalized in precise and refined language the inner workings of a Communist regime and how they affected the way people lived and behaved in that dystopian society.

These two books resonated with me in a profound way decades after I lived in China. It feels like George Orwell vicariously expressed the discomfort I felt during the six years I spent there, validating my antipathy to living in a society that’s full of toxicity and hypocrisy. I am truly glad that I read these books, especially in the original English language.

Incidentally, unlike the bibliophile that I am now, I used to hate reading when I was a child. I grew up in a family where neither parent was good at tidying up and there was clutter all around me—hardly a conducive environment for any kid to settle down to read a book. 

Having an extremely short attention span, I much preferred watching TV to reading. There was also this vicious circle of not having sufficient vocabulary to read through a book, hampering my eagerness to read, which further limited my chances of growing my vocabulary.

The turning point came thanks to my love for learning the English language. Pursuing my dream to become fluent in English, I studied tens of thousands of words and phrases from high school all the way to university. By the time I was 20, I had acquired sufficient vocabulary to read through English novels, either contemporary or classic.

It was then that I began to read in earnest, so my reading journey began in English rather than my native Japanese. As I gradually developed the habit to read, I branched out into Japanese and Chinese books, and much later, into French books too.

I’m glad that I was able to transform myself into a reader, after spending the first two decades of my life not reading at all. Reading always gives me new perspectives, enabling me to tackle various issues in my life in a more informed way and enriching my life immensely. I don’t know what the next few decades hold for me, but I’m determined to continue reading for the rest of my life.

Sorting Out My Father's House

It’s been three weeks since my father passed away. I cried profusely on the day of his funeral and the following day, but have since accepted his absence as a new fact of life and regained my composure.

Since even before my father’s death, my primary area of concern in recent years has been what to do with the house that I will inherit from him. Before I can even think about whether to sell it, rent it out, or even tear it down, my most pressing task is to tidy up the place so that I can figure out its real worth and potential, while identifying the areas that need fixing.

Neither my father nor my mother had ever been a neat person, and over the past few decades they accumulated piles and piles of things in the house. Some of them are of decent quality, but most of them are worthless junk. The sheer amount of stuff is overwhelming, so I’ll need to hire professional help to sort out the items to be retained or thrown away.

I have already disposed of almost all of my parents’ clothes. Books and pottery are relatively straightforward, so I should have no issues sorting them. The problem is what to do with their photo albums. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of photos in the house, and only my sister and I can decide which ones are worth keeping and which ones need to be thrown out. As such, we can’t rely on professional help for this particular task.

The same goes for documents—mainly the legal documents like the deeds of the house, but there are also hundreds of letters that my father wrote to me during the six years I spent away from home studying in a boarding school in Shanghai, China.

Being a testament to my father’s love, these letters are, of course, priceless for me. Unfortunately, I don’t have the space to safekeep them indefinitely. What I plan to do is to sort them in chronological order and scan them into picture files before throwing out the physical letters, much to my chagrin.

While I consider myself a relatively neat person now, for the better part of my life I’ve been very messy and disorganized. As previously mentioned, neither my father nor my mother was capable of keeping things tidy around the house, so I grew up being surrounded by clutter until I left for Shanghai at the age of 12.

Based on my first-hand experience, I can say definitively that living in a messy household ain’t no life at all. Despite the fact that both my parents were nice and kind-hearted people, I don’t look back on my childhood with fond memories, just because my house was so embarrassingly messy.

When I was growing up, I felt utterly depressed every time I came home to a messy and dirty household, especially when I had just been to my friend’s house where things were tidy and organized. I felt completely helpless as I didn’t know the fundamental cause of the mess in our house and how it could possibly be resolved.

Feeling suffocated by the clutter, I couldn’t concentrate on my studies. It affected my attention span so much that I literally couldn’t read through a single book, a major learning disability of mine that persisted until I was around 20.

It was certainly a slow and long journey for me to transform myself into a neat person. Spending time away from my parents at a young age turned out to be a blessing, allowing me to learn to look after myself in a dormitory room. Since then, I was no longer a messy child, and was able to maintain my room in a relatively organized state.

However, the real turning point came for me much later, in 2015, when I chanced upon the book titled “Goodbye, Things: On Minimalist Living” by Fumio Sasaki, a Japanese minimalist guru. It completely upended my thinking as regards acquiring and maintaining household items, and as a result I was able to let go of numerous things that I held onto in my apartment. It became a joy for me to have fewer things around me and my quality of life has improved immeasurably since then.

Now that I’m fully equipped with the ability to tidy things up, I’m no longer daunted by my impending task to clear things away from my father’s house. Granted, it’s not going to be a walk in the park, but I will address it calmly and in a way that’s respectful of my father’s memories. I’m sure Dad will cheer me on from heaven while I painstakingly clean up his house.

Thank You Dad, I'll Miss You!

My father passed away 11 days ago, on July 24, 2024, due to complications from his diabetes. He died alone at home during the night, and was discovered by the social worker who came in the morning to help him with the household chores.

By the time he was found, his body was already cold. He was moved to the university hospital in the city where the medical personnel tried to resuscitate him, but to no avail. My father was then pronounced dead. He was 82.

I was working in the office in Singapore when I received notice of his death from my sister. I immediately booked the plane ticket and took the flight back to Japan the following evening. I was able to get to the undertaker’s in time for the wake. 

His body was lying in the bedding on the tatami floor with his mouth wide open. He looked as though he was sleeping. Later, the mortician cleaned him up and gave him make-up before placing him in a coffin. After the clean-up, he looked a bit too proper, quite different from his usual sloppy self.

As was the case with my mother’s passing four years ago, a multitude of memories coursed through my head when I learned of his death, and I couldn’t sleep a wink on the first night. I was too much in a state of shock to cry.

On the evening of my arrival in Japan, the Buddhist monk of our family’s go-to temple conducted the wake, with only my sister and I attending. The monk chanted a long prayer to Amitabha, which was completely unintelligible to me. It seemed to clear the air for the deceased, nonetheless, and I felt peaceful afterward.

We held the funeral the next morning, where we invited around 10 to 12 people, mainly relatives. Once again, the monk said a long chant, and each attendant burned incense in front of the coffin to pay their respects.

We placed a bunch of flowers in different colors inside the coffin so it looked as though my father was sleeping in a flowery bed. Before the lid was finally closed, I kissed his forehead multiple times to bid him farewell. It was then that I was overtaken by emotions and cried for the very first time since his death.

We moved to the nearby crematorium to cremate my father’s body. It took around an hour to reduce his body to ashes, during which time the attendants had lunch and I gave a tearful speech reminiscing about the extremely close relationship between my father and I. If I do say so myself, it was a nice and moving speech, which would have made my father proud.

I was in a daze the following day, and couldn’t get to the administrative tasks until late in the afternoon. In the meanwhile, I engaged in a job that I was good at—cleaning up around the house and sorting through my father’s possessions. With the exception of one T-shirt that I kept as a memento, I placed all of my father’s clothing items in numerous plastic bags and had them collected by the municipality for recycling.

My father was living alone, and as he was a bit of a hoarder, the house he left behind was full of clutter. As I have inherited this house, my overarching tasks for the next year would be to run the probate process and to dispose of almost all his possessions and make the house tidy and livable again.

I have yet to decide whether to sell the house or rent it out, but as I continue to clean up the house over the next few visits to Japan, I believe that the conclusion would naturally present itself in due course.