The Universe Has a Funny Way of Making Sure You Commit the Sins You Mock.

We all know someone who has very firm opinions about what kind of person they would never become. You know this person. You might be this person. I am, at times, absolutely this person.

We do it quietly, the way you don't notice you're holding your breath until you already need air.

My mother swore she would never raise her voice the way her mother did. I watched her become her mother on an unassuming Wednesday, over something small, something I've since forgotten. She didn't notice. You rarely notice when you cross the line you drew.

We grow up watching the adults around us fail and we take notes. We write the first draft of who we'll be in contrast to who they were. We watch someone lose themselves to grief, to rage, to need, and we file it under weakness, a category we have very confidently excluded ourselves from.

And then life, with its impeccable comedic timing, takes notes right back.

"You don’t get to graduate from a lesson by spectating it. The universe doesn’t warn you. It just quietly builds the exact circumstances that will make you understand, from the inside, every person you ever looked down on. You just wake up one day already in the middle of the lesson."

I've watched people (brilliant, self-aware, genuinely good people) do the exact things they once publicly despised. The man who swore he'd never become his father comes home one Tuesday and hears his father's words in his own mouth, aimed at his own child. The woman who used to judge her colleagues for staying in bad situations stays in one for three years. The activist who wrote essays about empathy becomes, under enough pressure, unkind in very human, very ordinary ways.

We’re told empathy requires imagination until it requires experience. And most of us, if we are being precise and a little brutal about it, are working with imagination. We think we understand addiction because we've read about dopamine pathways. We think we understand grief because we've lost something. We think we understand what makes people cruel because we've seen cruelty.

Understanding a thing from the outside is not the same as knowing it from the inside. And the universe, in its great indifference and its equally great precision, seems to know the difference.

There is a girl I grew up with who stole. Small things, from the provision shop at the corner, slipping sweets into her pocket with a practiced calm that unsettled me. I thought she was reckless. I thought something was missing in her. Years later I found out her family hadn't been eating properly for months. The sweets were sometimes the only thing she put in her mouth before school. I had watched her survive and called it recklessness.

"What looks like a character flaw from the outside is sometimes just a person doing the only thing that made sense with what they had."

The most frightening cruelty is the kind dispensed by good people in the name of good values. The parent who cuts a child off to teach them responsibility and never considers that the lesson landing might be: you are alone in this world. The friend who delivers a truth without care for the wound it opens and calls the wound evidence that the truth needed saying. The person who decides someone has suffered enough of their patience, as though suffering runs on a schedule they get to manage.

These people sleep fine. Nobody is the villain in their own story. It’s a little unsettling.

The most evil person in the room isn’t your typical cartoon villain. The one who is genuinely, thoroughly convinced that what they are doing is right, or necessary, or the only option anyone reasonable would choose. The one who has built, brick by brick, an entire belief system of justification so internally consistent that they have become, to themselves, the protagonist of a morality tale.

This is most of us, at various temperatures.

The deeply religious person who preached loudly about sin finds themselves, quietly, committing it. And the most exquisite part, the part that makes the universe seem almost petty in its thoroughness, is that it is always the specific sin. The one they named. The one they performed the most disgust about at dinner tables and in group chats and in the careful curation of their public self.

It would be funny if it weren't so ruthlessly precise.

A child who grows up without enough becomes an adult who cannot stop accumulating, and we call it greed. A child crushed under too much pressure becomes an adult who cannot tolerate failure, and we call it arrogance. We name the wound wrong and then we judge the bleeding.

Every trait we find contemptible in another person has a genesis. Follow it back far enough and you find a child who was just trying to get through the day.

"Evil does not usually arrive in a dark coat announcing itself. It arrives warm, well-intentioned, holding something that looks almost exactly like care."

And this is where the coin analogy breaks down. We keep imagining good and evil as two sides with a clean edge, a face you flip to when the other is facing down. But there is no edge. No moment of crossing. There is just the same water, moving, taking different shapes depending on the vessel and the temperature and the hour. A Möbius strip, smooth and continuous, where if you walk long enough in one direction you find yourself on what you thought was the other side, without ever having felt yourself turn.

The mercy can arrive wearing the face of loss. The thing that destroys you opens you. The path paved in what looked like cruelty becomes, twenty years later, the only road that could have taken you there.

The strongest people I've known are the ones who fell apart and did not build the same walls back up. They came out with less certainty and more room. Room for the mess of other people. Room for contradiction. Room to say, quietly, without performance: I don't know what I would have done in your position. And mean it from the stomach, the way truth has to mean things to count.

That sentence requires something of you. It requires you to have been somewhere you didn't plan to be. To have wanted something you were ashamed of wanting. To have made a choice you cannot fully defend but also cannot fully regret. To have committed, in some small or shattering way, the exact sin you once pointed at in someone else.

The soul does not expand in comfort. It expands the way the lungs expand, under pressure, when there is no other option, when the only way to survive is to take in more than you thought you could hold.

In all the pain and brutality, I believe the universe is completing you.

Not because suffering is noble. Please, let's retire that particular romance. Suffering is not noble. It is often ugly and boring and repetitive and it smells bad and it makes people on the outside uncomfortable. But it is experiential. It writes things into you that reading cannot. It builds in you a particular quality of knowing that has texture. The kind you can give another person when they need it, not as advice, but as presence.

The soul is not a fixed thing with fixed contents. It is more like a territory. And certain territories can only be reached by walking. Not by studying the map. Not by talking to people who've been there. By walking. Through the part you swore you'd never walk through. Through the thing you used to judge from a safe and self-congratulatory distance.

And when you come out the other side, if you come out, because some people don't, some people set up camp in the shame and live there for decades. You find something strange waiting for you. Not wisdom, exactly. Not strength. Something quieter. A kind of spaciousness. The ability to hold more. To be surprised less by the darkness in other people because you have finally, properly, met it in yourself.

I am not saying do the harm. I am not saying invite the darkness over and call it soul work. I am saying something more uncomfortable than that:

You will not always get to choose.

Some things will happen to you. Some versions of yourself will emerge that you did not plan and would not have selected. You will look in the mirror during a season of your life and not entirely recognise the person looking back because you are more yourself than you've ever been willing to be. More complicated. More contradictory. More human, in all the ways human is not a compliment and also the only thing worth being.

And the people who get through it (not unscathed, nobody gets through unscathed, that's the premise) are not the people who stayed strong. They are the people who stopped confusing strength with imperviousness. Who let the experience enter them. Who sat in the discomfort of becoming someone they had not planned to become and did not immediately reach for the nearest narrative to make it mean something clean. They just sit with the mess.

"The most dangerous kind of self-knowledge is the kind you arrive at yourself, without invitation, in the middle of something you cannot control. That is the kind that stays."

There is a strange, dark peace on the other side of this.

It does not feel like peace at first. It feels like something has been taken from you that you didn't know you were holding. A certain cleanliness. A certain confidence in your own goodness. The comfortable clarity of knowing which side of the coin you're on.

But under that loss, if you sit with it long enough, if you resist the urge to rebuild the old belief of certainty, there is something else. A loosening. The faint but unmistakable sense that you no longer have to manage your image of yourself quite so relentlessly. That you can look at another person in their worst moment and not flinch, not advise, not quietly congratulate yourself for being different.

Because you know now. You know what it costs. You know how slowly and how quietly a person can become the thing they feared, and how that becoming is not the end of them. It is, in some terrible and necessary way, part of what makes them whole.

The loop closes. The coin has no sides. The saint and the sinner are in the same body, with one beating heart. And the kindest, wisest, most expansive human beings I have ever met are the ones who know this because they lived it, and stopped lying about what the living taught them.

In the mess and chaos, you arrive somewhere true. Where you can sit next to a person in their worst version of themselves and recognise it. Where you can look at the thing you once called evil and understand how someone got there.

"Perhaps the question is not whether something is good or evil. Perhaps the question is whether you are willing to be expanded by it - even when the expansion feels, from the inside, exactly like being torn”

That is, I think, the whole point.

The Room You Were Born Into

How social class shaped my career before I even knew there was a game being played

I want to tell you about the room.

Not a metaphor yet. An actual room. One master bedroom in a flat in Pasir Ris that belonged to my mother's friend. Four of us lived in it. My mum, my stepdad, my younger brother, and me. I slept in the living room. We didn't have a house. We'd had a car once, and savings once, before a bad investment and a betrayal by people my parents had trusted completely dismantled the version of our life that might have been.

We were what people call sandwiched, not poor enough to qualify for help, not stable enough to feel safe. Low middle income, which in Singapore means you are exactly the wrong kind of struggling. You earn too much for the safety net and too little for the cushion. You exist in the gap and you are mostly invisible there.

My stepdad left for work before 5am. He was a prison officer. He had to do  long shifts, heavy work, the kind of job that asks your body for things it doesn't give back. He'd come home around 8 or 9 at night, exhausted in a way I didn't have language for as a child, just a knowing. He ate. He rested. He got up and did it again.

He was the steadiest thing in a house that wasn't steady.

My mother is more complicated. She is still more complicated. I love her and I am still working out what it means to love someone who was often somewhere else even when she was standing right in front of you. She spent most of her nights out late, drinking, disappearing into a version of herself that had nothing to do with us. When things got bad enough, it wasn't just alcohol. We watched her fall, and then we watched her try to get up, and sometimes she did and sometimes she didn't and we were children and we absorbed all of it quietly because that is what children do.

There was love in my house. I want to say that. But love that is real and love that is stable are not always the same thing. I knew I was loved. But I was not always sure the ground would hold.

---

Now let me tell you about Sofia.

Sofia is not one person. She is everyone I have sat across a decision table from and tried to read like a manual. I studied the ease in her posture, the way she takes up space without apologizing for it, the way she speaks in meetings like she already knows she is allowed to be there. I have studied her the way you study a language you desperately need but were never taught.

Sofia's father was a director at a consulting firm. Sunday mornings in her house looked like this: a kitchen that smelled like coffee, a father mid-phone call, business language floating over breakfast like it was nothing. By the time she was ten, she had absorbed everything without anyone ever sitting her down to explain it. It came natural to her that authority was something you engaged with. Not something you endured.

When Sofia didn't want to finish her vegetables, she made her case. Her parents listened. Sometimes they conceded. She thought this was just family. She did not know she was being trained.

She visited her father's office before she had a word for what an office was. She shook hands with people whose names appeared on glass doors and buildings. She watched her parents walk into rooms and orient themselves without effort. Her nervous system absorbed the lesson before her mind did.

Nobody handed Sofia a manual. She grew up inside one.

Me? I grew up learning a different set of lessons. My childhood was a quiet, careful dance. I was learning how to be small so the house didn't feel so heavy. I was taught to wake up without a sound, solve the problem before it reaches a parent’s ears, handle the friction of life until your hands are calloused by it. When I didn’t finish my vegetables I was being wasteful. There is no room for negotiation. The only mentor I relied on was my survival instincts. I figured things out alone because everyone I loved was already running on empty.

The first time I walked into the office tower, the silence actually hurt. The air-con was so cold it felt expensive, and the marble floors were so polished they echoed the sharp, hollow sound of my cheap heels. I stood there, heart hammering, feeling like a glitch in the system. I didn't feel "success." I just saw a world that wasn't built for people like me. My body was coiled, waiting for a hand on my shoulder to tell me I was trespassing.

That is not nothing. As survival training, it is extraordinary. But it is not the same as being taught that the rooms you dream of are rooms you are allowed to walk into.

---

The thing I Didn’t Know I Was Missing

In 2003, a sociologist named Annette Lareau published research that changed how I understand my own childhood. She spent years sitting inside real families watching what parents actually did.

What she found was this: professional-class parents practised what she called concerted cultivation. They coached their children to question authority, negotiate with adults, advocate for themselves, engage with institutions as equals. Every dinner table, every disagreement, every after-school activity was quietly preparation for the rooms their children would one day need to occupy.

Working-class parents practiced natural growth. Children were loved and given freedom, but the lesson underneath everything was: respect authority. Stay out of trouble. Work hard and wait.

Neither is a wrong way to love your children. But only one of them is the native language of every gatekept institutions.

My stepdad gave me things that cannot be taught in any classroom. He showed me what it looks like to show up completely, every single day, regardless of what the day asks of you. To be the quiet constant when everything around you is noise. I carry that in how I work. In how I refuse to quit. In the part of me that gets up early and figures it out.

But Sofia's father was teaching her something else alongside the breakfast conversations. He was teaching her institutional fluency. The assumption, absorbed so early it became structural, that she belongs in rooms like this. That her voice has weight before she has proven it. She just gets to arrive. 

I had to learn that feeling from scratch. As an adult. In real time. In front of people who were already watching.

“Employees from lower socio-economic backgrounds take 19% longer to progress through grades, a larger disparity than those linked to gender, ethnicity, or disability. This study, covering 16,500 staff, identified socio-economic background as the strongest barrier to career progression.”

— KPMG Social Mobility Progression Report, 2022

When I first read that statistic, something in me exhaled. Because for a long time, I thought I was just slower. Less ready. Still catching up. I was taking a structural gap and wearing it as a personal failing.

It was the room I was born into.

---

The Rules Nobody Told Me

Let me be specific. Because I think specificity is where this stops being an essay and starts being useful.

Humility can work against you.

I was raised to be grateful for what I had and quiet about what I wanted. It was a survival skill rooted in my culture. In a home where the emotional weather could change without warning, making yourself small was often the safest option. Don't “show off”. Don't add to the noise. Let your work speak.

I carried that silence into every performance review, every pitch, every conversation with someone senior. When I won, I called it "luck." I thought I was being charming.I thought I was being easy to be around. I didn't realize that in their world, my modesty looked like a lack of ownership. My seniors just saw someone who didn't understand the magnitude of what she’d built.

The little  girl sleeping in the living room learns to take up as little space as possible. But the woman building a legacy in these glass towers has to unlearn every inch of that training.

Today I say: "I built the strategy. It returned X%. Here's how."  

I had to rewire my nervous system to accept that stating a fact is not the same as being arrogant. It is simply knowing your worth. You need that clarity especially in rooms where decisions are being made about your future while you aren't there to defend it.

The salary I didn't negotiate.

I accepted my first offer without a word. It felt generous. I was grateful. I didn't know that the number on the table was an opening position, not a final answer. I didn't know the person sitting across from me was genuinely expecting me to push back.

When you grow up in a house where money is anxiety and asking for more of anything feels dangerous, you do not negotiate. You accept. You are relieved. You say thank you.

Sofia countered. She had watched her father negotiate since she was old enough to follow a conversation. She knew it was part of the process. She asked for more. She got it.

That gap, the one opened by not knowing you are allowed to ask, does not close. It compounds. Quietly, across decades, into something enormous. And it starts with one conversation where you didn't know you had permission to speak.

Networking felt like begging in business casual.

For most of my early career, it did. Walking into a room full of people who had things and performing friendliness until they gave some of those things to you. In my world, you don't trouble people. You earn your own way. The whole practice felt, if I'm honest, a little shameful.

What I eventually understood is that framing was entirely wrong.

I was looking for people who could help each other grow. I had spent years building a career in the belly of these institutions, proving I could navigate their systems as a dedicated professional who outworked the room. But I realized that my value goes deeper than my output. It goes deep into my roots.

When I walk into a room as a Malay woman with deep, lived insight into communities that the people in that boardroom will never meaningfully reach, I take up space. I am bringing a professional record backed by a perspective that can’t be bought, taught, or faked. I don’t need to beg for a seat at their table. I am building a table of my own, a circle of collaborators for a mission they don’t yet realize they need.

That reframe changed everything. But I had to arrive at it alone, and late. After years of walking into the wrong rooms with the wrong story about why I was there.

An estimated 70 to 80% of jobs are filled before they are ever publicly listed — through referrals, informal conversations, and networks built over years of proximity.

I spent so much of my early career refreshing job portals and wondering why applications disappeared into silence. Sofia was having coffee with people who already knew her name. We were not playing the same game. I didn't even know there were two different games.

---

The Part That Lives In Your Chest

There is a specific exhaustion that comes from having built stability out of instability. From having made it into rooms your childhood gave you no map for, and then spending every moment in those rooms managing the distance between who you are and what the room expects.

I have sat at work dinners, my pulse steady but my mind doing frantic calculations. Which fork to use. How to hold an intelligent conversation about the market while secretly monitoring the grip on my wine glass. I’ve laughed at references I didn't understand because, in that world, asking feels like a confession. It feels like exposing a gap I was supposed to have filled years ago.

I have watched myself disappear in real-time. I’ve adjusted my voice without even deciding to, making it slightly slower, slightly more careful, scrubbing of the rhythm of home. I only realize I’ve done it on the bus back, sitting in the dark, replaying the evening and wondering whose voice was coming out of my mouth.

That is the part that lives in your chest. The constant, quiet labor of translating yourself so you don't get lost in the transition.

Code-switching. Researchers have a name for it. It is the energy you spend translating yourself into the language of the room before you have spent a single unit of it on the actual work.

While I was managing how I came across, Sofia was focused entirely on getting ahead. She didn't know there was a gap to manage. It had never occurred to her that she might need to translate herself.

And then you go home. And the gap is there too. Just reversed. You earn differently now. You move differently in certain rooms. You have grown in ways that are real and difficult to explain to people who knew you before all of this. You are not fully at work and not fully at home, and there is a loneliness in that in-between space that nobody warns you is coming.

Researchers call it class identity dissonance. I call it the tax of moving up.

“Nearly 60% of working adults in Singapore have experienced imposter feelings, particularly among younger professionals and women.”

— Well-Being Champions Network, Imposter Syndrome in Singapore Workplace (2023)

In elite institutions, the friction of being working-class, Malay, and female is cumulative. It creates a redundancy of effort: where Sofia simply exists, I must architect my presence, managing a complex matrix of cultural codes and systemic filters just to reach the baseline of participation

I was not imagining it. I was not being weak. The data had a name for what I was carrying. And I had been picking it up every morning and calling it my own fault.

---

What I Know Now

I want to say something clearly before I go any further.

Sofia's advantage is not her fault. She didn't choose her dining table or her father's title or the ease with which rooms opened before she'd earned anything. Having privilege is not a character flaw. Not knowing it exists is.

And I am not a victim of my upbringing. My stepdad showed me what it looks like to be a person of complete integrity when the circumstances give you every reason not to be. My mother, complicated and human and still mine, taught me by contrast what I refused to become and that refusal shaped me as much as anything else. The chaos gave me a hunger for stability that has driven every good financial decision I have ever made. I built because I had seen what it cost not to.

The room I was born into was hard. It also made me.

But I do wish someone had handed me the map earlier. So here it is.

Your background is not your ceiling.

The room you were born into shaped your first language, your first understanding of what people like you are allowed to want. It is a starting point, not a sentence. The gap in your knowledge is not a gap in your worth.

Learn the language of the rooms you want to be in.

Not to lose yourself. But to become fluent enough to move through them without spending everything on translation. There are people who actually transcend class.  You don’t need to perfectly imitate the people who are already there. You just have to learn the code well enough to hack it, and then show up so fully, so distinctly you, that the room has no choice but to make space.

Build the network before you're hungry for it.

Find the people two or three steps ahead of where you want to be. Be genuinely useful before you need anything. And find the other first-generation professionals in your field. The ones who also learned the rules by breaking them, who also know what it costs to be between worlds. They will not need you to explain yourself. They already know.

Be kinder to yourself about how long this takes.

You are learning the game while playing it. That is harder. It takes longer. The 19% is not a measure of your ability. It is a measure of your starting position. You are not behind. You are running a different race on a different track, without the training Sofia received before she even knew she was being trained.

Do not confuse where you started with how far you can go.

---

The Room We All Deserve

Today, I’m where I’m at. Not because I was exceptional, but because I was so afraid of the alternative. I knew what it felt like to have no ground under my feet, so I became tactical about building it. The chaos did that. My stepdad’s 5am shifts did that. Learning from my parents’ mistakes did that.

I still code-switch sometimes. I still feel the friction of entering rooms that weren’t built with me in mind, that slight sense of wearing clothes that almost fit but not quite. I still carry things I am only now learning to put down.

But I know something now that I didn’t know when I was a child making herself small in someone else’s house.

The barriers were real. They had names. I wasn’t imagining the gap or being dramatic or making excuses. I was navigating something genuinely hard with fewer tools than the person sitting next to me, inside a home that was not steady, and I did it anyway.

---

If you recognize yourself in this, if you have ever felt the weight of a gap you couldn't name.

I need you to hear this:

You are not behind. You are not less. You are not broken.

You are learning the map a little later than some people did. And that is okay. The map still works, even when you had to draw it yourself in the dark.

So reach back when you get further along. Do not just walk through the door; dismantle the lock. Be the strategic leverage you never had.

Because this was never just about the titles we negotiate or the rooms we finally occupy. It’s about the signal we send back to the ones still in the chaos. For the children perfecting the art of staying invisible. For the ones on living room floors, absorbing the silence, quietly deciding they will find another way.

They need to know the map exists. They need to know that ambition is not a transgression.

We were born into different rooms. We will not die in them. And we will leave the lights on for everyone coming after us.

---

SOURCES

1. The Sociological Framework

Lareau, A. (2003). Unequal childhoods: Class, race, and family life. University of California Press.

2. The Economic Data (The "Class Pay Gap")

KPMG, & The Bridge Group. (2022). Social mobility progression report: Mind the gap. https://socialmobilitycommission.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Mind-the-gap-KPMG-Social-Mobility-Progression-Report.pdf

3. The Psychological Landscape (Singapore Context)

Well-Being Champions Network. (2023). Imposter syndrome in the Singapore workplace: Addressing the internal and external barriers to professional growth.

4. The Hidden Market Data

Fisher, J. F. (2019, December 27). How to get a job often comes down to one elite personal asset, and many people still don’t realize it. CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/27/how-to-get-a-job-often-comes-down-to-one-elite-personal-asset.html

5. The Cognitive Tax (HBR Research)

McCluney, C. L., Robotham, K., Lee, S., Smith, R., & Durkee, M. (2019, November 15). The costs of code-switching. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2019/11/the-costs-of-code-switching

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If this hit you somewhere real , share it. Send it to someone who needed it. These conversations are how the map spreads.

I'm Syainda. My last piece about buying a home at 21 started a lot of conversations. This is where we keep going.

Poverty Finance: How I Bought a House at 21 and What Nobody Tells You About Getting Out

A raw, honest account of survival, strategy, and the psychology of building a life from nothing

There’s a version of this story that sounds inspiring from the outside. Single teenage mom. No family money. Bought a flat at 21. Built a life.

What that version leaves out is the $60 second-hand fridge. The food rations. The nights studying after everyone else was asleep. The burning, grinding, relentless cost of choosing yourself when everything around you is designed to keep you small.

I’m not here to sell you a dream; I’m here to give you the data. This isn’t rags-to-riches fantasy. It’s about owning assets. I’m writing this because survival is a logistical problem, and at 17, I needed someone to tell me how to weaponize the resources I did have instead of mourning the ones I didn't.

Where I Started

I was 15 when financial support from family stopped. By 16, I was fully on my own. I worked retail as a part-time assistant. Other kids did it because they wanted to build character. I did it because I had no other choice.

At 17, I had a baby.

I won’t go deep into the family dynamics. What matters is this: I found myself navigating motherhood, housing, school fees, and survival simultaneously. All this with no family help or financial safety net and a legal system that wouldn’t let me sign a lease because I wasn’t 21 yet.

I went to my MP’s office in Woodlands and explained my situation. I sat there, a teenage mother, and I asked for help. They expedited my case. The flat was registered under my abuser’s name because legally, mine didn’t count yet. That came with its own set of complications. That’s a whole other story for next time.

But I got the flat. That’s the point.

The Real Monthly Math

Let me show you what surviving actually looks like, in numbers.

01. Fixed Housing & Essentials

Expense Item	Context / Strategy	Amount
HDB Rental Flat	Secured via MP appeal and intervention; subsidized rate due to unemployment.	$50.00
Town Council Fees	Mandatory maintenance for public housing.	$60.00
Utilities (SP Group)	Baseline for a small rental unit.	$115.00
Childcare Fees	"Special Case" subsidy; rental flat scheme.	$5.00
Annual Maintenance Fund	Pro-rated for unexpected repairs/burst pipes.	$25.00
HOUSING SUBTOTAL		$255.00

02. Debt & Institutional Load

Financial Obligation	Context / Strategy	Amount
Private Debt Clearance	$3,000 principal; 24-month repayment plan.	$125.00
Financial Advisor (FA)	High cost for a teen; essentially a "lack of knowledge" tax.	$200.00
NYP School Fees	Diploma in Marketing course; Investment for future leverage.	$85.00
OBLIGATIONS SUBTOTAL		$410.00

03. Survival Variables (Baby & Self)

Daily Needs	Context / Strategy	Amount
Baby Formula	3 tins/month; non-negotiable.	$180.00
Premium Diapers (Huggies)	Necessary due to extreme skin sensitivity.	$80.00
Public Transport	Commuting between work, school, and home.	$120.00
Food & Groceries	Leveraging wet markets and food rations.Invest in whole foods for health.	$150.00
SURVIVAL SUBTOTAL		$530.00

Total Monthly Outflow

$1,195.00

My Income? Unstable. Roughly $900/month on a good month. I cobbled together from odd jobs: marketing distribution, selling water dispensers, admin work, telemarketing, nightlife, gigs on freelance platforms, cold-calling companies to offer my marketing services, helping charities with design and campaigns.

And it still wasn’t enough.

And I have a baby to feed.

And in school.

The math never fully worked. There was no savings column. There couldn’t be.

What Actually Helped

Here’s what I did that I don’t see talked about enough:

I wrote in to every welfare organisation I could find. ComCare, social workers, school assistance funds, anyone who might help. I explained my situation clearly and honestly, every time. Some months I received $600 in support. Some months $900. They review your situation regularly and check your accounts. I wasn’t embarrassed about it. I needed it.

I applied for every bursary and scholarship available. At school, through charities, through government schemes. Any financial support that existed. I found it and applied for it. My ego had no place in this equation.

I furnished my home on almost nothing. A $60 second-hand fridge from Carousell. A mattress my dad gave me. A TV donated by an aunt. A small drawer from my dad’s place. Secondhand sofas added over time. It wasn’t a showroom. It was a home built slowly, piece by piece, with whatever was available.

I talked to the HDB sales officer like a partner, not an authority. I asked about every grant, every scheme, every possible loophole. I had my social worker talk to the officer. We drafted a plan together. That’s how you navigate a system: you learn its language and you use it.

Build Relationships With the People Who Can Help You.

This one is underrated. And I want to be direct about it because I don’t see it said enough.

The people in your corner: social workers, case managers, charity coordinators, school counsellors. They hold doors you don’t even know exist yet. But you have to show up to find out what’s behind them.

I know the calculation you’re making.

If I go to that social worker meeting, I lose two hours I could have spent working.

Work = money. Meeting = no money.

That logic makes sense when you’re running on empty. But here’s what that math misses: one good meeting, with the right person, who knows the right scheme, can be worth months of income. A grant. A waived fee. A referral to a programme that changes your situation entirely. The ROI on showing up is often higher than a shift at work. You just can’t see it until after.

So go. At minimum, once a month. Check in. Give them an update on your situation. What’s changed, what’s harder, what you’re working toward. Ask specifically: What resources are available that I might not know about? Who else should I be speaking to?

And if your social worker doesn’t seem to care? Make them care. I mean this practically, not emotionally. Schedule a meeting. Show up prepared. Bring your numbers, your expenses, your documentation. Show them the reality of your situation clearly and without shame. People in helping professions respond to people who demonstrate they are genuinely trying and genuinely struggling. You are not asking for charity. You are asking for the resources you are entitled to. There is a difference, and carrying yourself with that distinction changes how people show up for you.

The broader principle: relationships are leverage. Not in a manipulative way. In a human way. The world runs on who knows you, who trusts you, who remembers you when an opportunity opens up. This is true at every income level. At the bottom, it’s even more critical, because you often can’t buy your way into opportunities. But you can earn your way into them through consistency, honesty, and genuine connection.

Talk to your school. If you’re no longer in school, join that Alumni circle. Reach out to charities. Talk to people doing the work you want to do someday. You don’t need to have it figured out to start those conversations. You just need to be curious and real.

Financial Literacy Is Not Optional. Stop Letting Financial Advisors (FAs) Do Your Thinking For You

I’m going to be blunt here because I learned this the hard way.

When I was a young single mother with some money and no knowledge, I was approached by financial advisors constantly. Multiple of them, over the years. And I let them manage things I didn’t understand, which meant I was at the mercy of what they chose to explain and what they chose not to. Commissions ate into returns I didn’t know I was losing. Products were sold to me as “great deals” that were great for them. I didn’t know enough to push back, to compare, to ask the right questions.

The Retail Trap: You’re Being Harvested, Not Advised

There is a massive structural difference between high-net-worth private banking and the retail FA market. When you are starting out, the system isn't designed to grow you, it's designed to harvest you.

• The Commission Squeeze: When your assets are small, a significant portion of your potential returns is cannibalized by commissions. You are paying a premium for a sales pitch, not a growth strategy.

• The Literacy Gap: FAs rely on the "black box" of finance. They frame complex products as essential to keep you from realizing that, at a retail level, simplicity is usually more profitable for you than it is for them.

• Ownership vs. Giving Up Control: If you don’t understand the underlying mechanics of your money, you are merely a passenger in your own life. You’re not owning your own finances.

Never Hand Over the Keys if You Don't Know the Route

Think of your money like a vehicle. Giving up your financial power before you understand the basics isn’t "outsourcing". You are a passenger in your own life while someone else chooses the destination and charges you for every turn.

You don’t need to be the mechanic who can rebuild the engine, but you must be the driver who can read the dashboard. If you don’t know how to read the map, you’re just paying someone to drive you in circles while they collect a commission for every mile. True autonomy is built on comprehension. Command the system, or prepare to be driven exactly where the incentives are highest.

The Literacy Ceiling: How Outsourcing Stunts Your Growth

• Direct Accountability: You cannot push back, compare, or ask the right questions if you are operating from a place of ignorance.

• Strategic Insurance: Financial literacy is insurance against exploitation. It’s the difference between being a "special case" and being a decision-maker.

• Hire for Excellence, Not Absence: Only hire people who can perform the task better than you, but never use their presence as a substitute for your own thinking.

Know the rules of the road so you can ensure you’re moving toward wealth, not just fueling someone else’s tank.

FA Red Flag Checklist

If you are currently working with an FA, watch for these signs that they are treating you like a "product" rather than a partner:

• The Vulture Approach: They target you specifically during periods of high vulnerability or transition…. like early motherhood…. (like me) knowing you have the money but lack the time to verify their claims.

• The Black Box Defense: They use dense jargon to explain simple concepts. If they can't explain it in plain English, they are hiding their own incentives.

• The Comparison Pushback: They discourage you from comparing their products against low-cost alternatives.

• Emotional vs. Logical Framing: They use fear about your children's future to bypass your logical evaluation of a product.

The Bottom Line

Engaging an advisor as a shortcut to avoid learning is a risk you literally cannot afford.

Stop letting someone else hold the keys to your autonomy. Learn the system, master the rules, and then, and only then, delegate the execution.

The ghost of poverty doesn’t just vanish when your income goes up. It lives in your nervous system, dictating how you handle every dollar before you even realize you've made a choice.

The Trauma Loop: Why You Can’t Just "Save More"

Financial trauma creates two extreme scripts that keep you small. Without literacy, you’re reacting to old wounds.

• The Scarcity Spend: This is the "get it while it’s there" reflex. When you grow up with nothing, money feels like a temporary guest. You spend it immediately because you’ve been trained to believe that if you don't use it, the system, or life, will take it from you anyway. It’s a survival mechanism that tells you immediate gratification is the only guaranteed return on investment.

• The Stagnant Hoard: This is the "fear of zero". You keep every cent in a low-interest savings account because risk feels like an existential threat. You think you're safe because you can see the number, but you're actually watching your future power evaporate through inflation. You are trapped in a cage made of "safety" that will never allow you to scale.

Why Literacy is Your Weapon?

Financial literacy is the only tool that interrupts these survival settings. It moves you from emotional reaction to strategic execution.

1. It Stabilizes the System

Overwhelm is the enemy of progress. Literacy provides the frameworks and decision trees that stabilize your mind. It turns "impossible" goals into logistical targets by giving you the data to back up your ambition.

2. It Weaponizes Your Ambition

Financial literacy is strategic insurance against exploitation. It gives you the technical confidence to walk into any room and negotiate without shrinking, because you know the rules of the game better than the people who wrote them.

3. It Stops the Intergenerational Bleed

You’re building a blueprint for the people following you. By mastering your own psychology now, you ensure the next generation doesn't have to choose between the trauma of spending or the prison of hoarding.

Here’s where to start, practically

You have tools now that didn’t exist when I was figuring this out. AI can explain compound interest, CPF contributions, investment vehicles, expense ratios all in plain language, in minutes, for free. Use it. Ask it to explain anything you don’t understand until you do. There’s no shame in asking a machine the questions you’re embarrassed to ask a person.

Beyond that: MoneySense (Singapore’s national financial literacy portal) is free. The NLB has books on personal finance you can borrow at zero cost. YouTube has more financial education than most paid courses. Investopedia breaks down concepts clearly. You have access to more financial education than any generation before you. The only question is whether you’ll use it.

If you do work with a financial advisor, learn enough first to ask them hard questions. What is your commission structure? What is the expense ratio on this product? What are the alternatives? How does this serve my specific situation? A good advisor will welcome these questions. One who doesn’t? Leave.

Financial literacy is not glamorous. It is not fast. But it is the difference between spending your whole life working for money and eventually having money work for you.

A Word on Trading Courses, Real Estate Seminars, and Get-Rich-Quick Anything

You’ve seen them. The Instagram ads. The free webinars. The guy with the Lambo promising to teach you how he makes $10,000 a month trading, flipping properties, leveraging AI, whatever the current packaging is.

Some of these courses are genuinely good. I won’t pretend otherwise. There are educators out there who know their craft and teach it honestly.

But here’s the question I want you to sit with before you spend a single dollar on any of them: if this person’s method is so reliably profitable, why is selling courses their business?

If someone has truly mastered a system that generates consistent returns, trading, real estate, options, whatever, the returns from doing it full time will far exceed anything they’d make selling weekend courses to strangers. So ask that question. Ask it out loud, directly, if you can. Watch how they answer. The good ones will have a real answer. The others will deflect with testimonials and urgency.

The deeper issue is this: these courses are often sold to people who are desperate for a shortcut. Desperation makes you a bad decision-maker. When you’re in poverty and someone is offering you a way out that sounds faster than years of slow, grinding effort, of course it’s appealing. That’s not a character flaw. That’s a human response to a hard situation. But the people selling those courses know that. And some of them are profiting specifically off your urgency.

There is no such thing as getting rich quickly.

I need you to really let that land. Even the people who appear to have done it? They had years of learning, failure, and compounding behind that moment of apparent overnight success. What you’re seeing is the highlight reel, not the decade of craft underneath it.

AI won’t change this. Crypto didn’t change this. Real estate doesn’t change this. Every tool that promises to shortcut the process still requires you to understand what you’re doing with it. If you don’t know the fundamentals: how money moves, what risk actually means, how compounding works, what you’re buying when you buy an asset, then you are at the mercy of whoever is explaining it to you. And if they profit from your convenience, your laziness becomes their revenue stream.

My advice: do your financial literacy work first. Get solid on the basics. And you’ll find something interesting happens, by the time you genuinely understand how money works, you can evaluate these courses properly. You can see which ones are teaching real craft and which ones are packaging basic information in a hype wrapper. You’ll be able to self-learn most of it anyway. And the courses that remain useful will be obvious, because they’ll go deeper than what you’ve already figured out on your own.

Build the foundation. Then decide what to build on top of it.

Education: The One Thing That Compounds Harder Than Interest

Let me address the dropout myth directly, because it gets people killed financially.

You’ve heard the stories. Steve Jobs dropped out. Mark Zuckerberg dropped out. The narrative goes: school is a scam, real learning happens outside, credentials don’t matter anymore.

Here’s what those stories leave out: those men had safety nets. Family support. Access to capital. Networks built over generations. They didn’t drop out into poverty. They dropped out into opportunity, which is a fundamentally different thing.

If you are in poverty, you do not have that runway. Dropping out without it isn’t brave. It’s cutting off the one reliable path to a credential that opens doors regardless of who your parents are.

I was told to quit. A new mother, exhausted, working multiple jobs, barely sleeping and people told me it wasn’t worth finishing. I finished. And that diploma has opened every professional door I’ve walked through since. I don’t have a degree. I wish I did. But I have that diploma, and I kept the future open.

Here’s what I want you to understand: education is not just a certificate.The certificate matters, but that’s the floor, not the ceiling. The real value is in what you extract beyond the curriculum.

Talk to your lecturers. Not just in class, go to office hours. Tell them what you’re trying to build. Ask them about their career path, the industry, the mistakes they made. Most educators are genuinely glad when a student shows real interest. They remember those students. They open doors for those students.

Go to every industry talk, every career fair, every networking event your institution offers. You are paying for these with your school fees and your time. Use them. Every professional you meet at those events is a potential reference, mentor, or future employer.

Use your school library, not just for assignments. Use it to read around your industry: history, case studies, real business failures, what actually happens behind the polished LinkedIn profiles. The people who get out of poverty aren’t usually the ones who just did what was required. They’re the ones who used every available resource like their future depended on it.

Because it does.

And if you’re in a situation where dropping out truly feels like the only way to survive right now…okay.

I’m not going to pretend circumstances don’t sometimes force that. But if you drop out, your obligation to yourself doubles. You have to be relentless about upskilling, self-education, industry knowledge, building credentials through other means. Because without the formal path, you need to build an alternative one deliberately and that requires even more discipline, not less.

The trap is thinking that surviving is the strategy. It’s not. Survival buys you time. What you do with that time is the strategy.

The Psychology Nobody Talks About

Here’s the part that’s harder to put in a table.

Money isn’t just math. It’s emotional. It’s psychological. And when you’ve been in survival mode since you were a teenager, you don’t automatically know how to handle money when you finally have some.

I was impulsive. When you’ve never had stability, spending feels like proof that you’re okay. That you made it. That this moment is real. I understand now why so many people from poverty backgrounds struggle to save even when income improves. It’s not stupidity. It’s a nervous system that was trained to consume resources immediately because tomorrow was never guaranteed.

Knowing that doesn’t fix it. But naming it is the first step.

The shift for me came when I had consistent income for the first time. A real full-time job. Before that, I was in pure survival mode. You can’t build strategy in a war zone. You just try not to die.

But eventually, the war slows down. And when it does —that’s when the real work begins.

The Unfair Advantages I Used (And You Should Too)

I want to be honest about something: some people will read this and say, “You’re lucky. You had privilege somewhere.” Maybe. Probably. I won’t pretend luck played no role.

But I also made choices that other people in the same situation didn’t make. And I leaned into every single unfair advantage I had, without apology.

Being broke, in Singapore, is actually an advantage in one specific way. The social support system here is real. HDB rental schemes, ComCare, childcare subsidies, school bursaries, social worker assistance. These things exist and they are designed for you. The biggest waste I see is people who are too proud to use them. Your ego is not your friend right now. Use the system. That’s what it’s there for.

I used my looks and social skills to generate income. In a period when I was going through my divorce and had no stable income, I got paid to go on dinner dates. Companionship arrangements, nothing I’m not proud of and nothing I’d explain to people who haven’t walked in my shoes. I made one particularly smart decision during that period: I asked to be compensated in stocks rather than cash. Judge that however you want. What I know is that it taught me what investing felt like before I even understood the mechanics. And it built a foundation.

I’m not recommending this path. I’m telling you I made my own choices with what I had, and I kept myself safe while doing it. What I would tell my younger self is this: you had so much more to offer than you knew. Your skills, your mind, your strategic instincts. Those were worth more than you were charging. Build on the things that compound. Looks don’t. Skills do.

I finished my diploma.People told me to quit school. I was a new mother, working multiple jobs, barely sleeping. But I knew, I knew, that piece of paper was going to open doors that nothing else would. I didn’t get my degree. But I got my diploma, and I kept my future options open. Education is one of the few things poverty cannot immediately take from you once you have it.

Practical Principles That Actually Work

These are based on my lived experience.

Start with a 50/20/20/10 framework when you can. When you’re in full survival mode, this isn’t possible and that’s okay. But the moment you have any breathing room, even $50 extra a month: 50% needs, 20% savings, 20% investment or growth (education, tools, courses), 10% for things that make you feel like a human being. Adjust the ratios as your life changes.

Your wet market is your best financial ally. This is Singapore-specific but true: $1 of fresh vegetables at the wet market beats $4 at the supermarket every time. Learn from the aunties there. They know value. They know how to select food, stretch a dollar, cook from scratch. That knowledge is wealth.

Thrifting the right things is curation. I bought secondhand clothes on Carousell. I found deals on AliExpress and ezbuy. I dressed well on almost nothing because style is not the same as brand. Brand is ego. Style is self-knowledge. You can look completely put-together and polished for a fraction of the price if you know what you’re doing. And how you present yourself matters, not for vanity, but because the world responds to it. When you show up looking like the person you’re becoming, you start to be treated like her.

Every purchase gets one question. Does this contribute to my survival, my health, my growth, or my genuine happiness? Or is it driven by what I want other people to think of me? The $15 highlighter that makes you feel confident? Buy it. The designer bag to signal status to people who aren’t paying your rent? Skip it. The new phone that lets you work and create on the go? Probably yes. The latest phone because everyone else has one? No.

This sounds simple. It is not simple when you’ve spent your whole life being told explicitly or implicitly that your value depends on what you own.

Look the part, but know what it’s actually for. Investing in how you present yourself, your appearance, your clothes, your energy, is a legitimate financial strategy. It’s not shallow. The world has always rewarded people who show up as though they already belong where they want to go. The goal isn’t to perform wealth. It’s to embody the version of yourself that earns it.

Read everything. Not just finance books. everything. Books are the cheapest access to the best thinking that has ever existed. Your local library costs nothing. The people who got out of poverty without formal education got out because they educated themselves relentlessly, in whatever form they could.

What I Want You to Hold Onto

I’m aware of my own privilege in this story. The fact that my stepfather gave me shelter at a critical moment (after I’ve given birth). The social infrastructure of Singapore that exists for people in my situation. The specific timing of Covid that made it possible to attend classes while working. Luck is real. Circumstances matter.

And I fought like hell within those circumstances.

There are people reading this for whom the situation is harder. People with fewer resources, more barriers, less support. I see you. And I’m not here to tell you that if you just try harder everything will work out. That’s not true, and it’s not what I believe.

What I believe is this: you’re allowed to be strategic. You’re allowed to use every tool available to you. You’re allowed to take the help, ask the questions, apply for the scheme, use the social worker, write the letter, visit the MP. You’re allowed to lean into every advantage you have, including your appearance, your intelligence, your network, your pain, your story.

And you’re allowed to not be grateful for a system that made survival this difficult in the first place. You can hold both: use the system and be angry at it. Work within it and want it to change.

The system helped me. And the system also failed me in ways I’m still unpacking. Both are true.

What Alignment Actually Looks Like

People talk about “manifesting” and “mindset shifts” like they’re magic. They’re not. But they’re also not nothing.

When I got my head above water, really for the first time, something shifted. It’s that I could finally see clearly enough to make choices that pointed in a direction. When you’re drowning, you don’t choose which stroke to use. You just try not to go under.

But when you get some stability, you can start being strategic. You can ask: what do I actually want? What am I building toward? Is this decision bringing me closer or further from that?

I didn’t do this perfectly. I’m still learning. But the moment I started asking those questions, the answers started rearranging my life. The right job, the right connections, the relationships that made sense. They found their way in when I stopped making decisions out of fear and started making them out of direction.

This is what I mean when I say finance is psychological. The numbers matter. But the numbers follow the mindset, not the other way around.

The Part Where I Tell You It Gets Harder

The next income bracket is its own trap. The help dries up. The subsidies phase out. The margins feel tighter in some ways, not looser. The people around you assume you’ve made it, so the pressure to perform that narrative becomes its own financial drain.

I’m not saying this to discourage you. I’m saying it because I want you to be prepared. Getting out of poverty is not a destination. It’s a transition into a different set of challenges that require a different set of tools.

Keep learning. Keep adapting. The person who survives the early chapter has already proven they can figure things out. Trust that.

Final Words

I was written off. Statistically, socially, practically. I was the person who wasn’t supposed to make it. Teenage mother. No family money. Unstable income. Incomplete education.

I said “F**k off” to that story.

Not because I was special. Not because I didn’t feel the weight of it every single day. But because I wanted out badly enough to stay disciplined even when I was exhausted. To study at night when I should have been sleeping. To show up looking like the future I was working toward, even when the present was brutal.

You don’t have to be better than anyone else. You have to be relentless about being better than yesterday’s version of yourself.

Blame the system and then learn it. Use it. Find the loopholes. Ask the questions. Take the help. And when you get out, and I believe you can, remember who was there when you had nothing. Pay it forward.

That’s what community is. And it’s the only thing that’s ever actually changed anything.

Written from lived experience. Not financial advice, just financial honesty.