September 22, 2008 - Posted by Marge- 2 Comments
1.
It was stitched at the bottom-left corner of the navy blue bath towel hanging from a hook; sewn in a girlish loopy script in pale pink silk thread was her name, Belen.
Sitting on the loo with a hand resting on my chin, that one word stared at me at eye-level and suddenly brought on a wave of melancholy. My grandfather must have had the same matching navy blue bath towel, with his own name etched on the bottom-left corner: Lino. But it had been two years since his death and my grandmother had folded it away in a box along with his other clothes to give away to relatives or the electrician.
Now that she was the sole owner of the bathroom, there was no need to hang up a towel with a reminder of whom it belonged to. There would be no confusion over whose towel it was, no countering that the other one’s towel was out in the backyard hanging on a clothesline to dry. It was the only bath towel left, it was only my grandmother who was left.
2.
She cut most of her hair off in a surprisingly chic bob. The cut suits her wavy pearl hair. I’ve never seen her sport such a short cut before; she always had thick long curly hair that she kept up in an old-fashioned bun near the base of her neck. It has since become the uniform hairstyle I associated with grandmothers.
The only times I saw her with flowing, unbound hair was when she and my grandfather spent the night over at our house. Clad in a nightgown, she would brush it out carefully before going to bed. As a child whose mind was filled with fairytales and books, I thought she looked like a lovely, albeit haunting, Victorian lady.
My mother was ecstatic upon seeing her new look; she gushed that she should’ve had it cut a long time ago. My grandmother merely smiled and I, sitting next to her in the backseat, wondered if she cut her hair off as a symbol of mourning, the same way Native American wives do when their husbands died in battle. Or maybe she saw her hair as a heavy weight binding her and wanted to be free of it. I read in a book that memories are retained in our hair; the longer it gets, the more memories are stored in each strand. Maybe that’s why our hair weighs us down, our heads heavy as we walk around. I used to be one of those girls who took out her problems on her hair. During my student days, I invariably found myself heading for the salon for a quick cathartic snip when the solution to a particular problem eluded me.
Whatever the reason, my grandmother refused to divulge and leaned back on the seat, lifting a hand to absently pat the base of her neck, like trying to remember a phantom memory from long ago.
3.
There were deep scratch marks gouged in one of the armchairs in the living room, courtesy of my cousin’s stupid dog. The mantelpiece was cluttered with photographs of her grandchildren, eighteen in all, minus the one who had died as a baby—my sister. There were new paintings on the white walls, presumably to brighten up the room with their vibrant hues. There were no noticeable traces of dust on the furniture, but nevertheless the room gave off a feeling of neglect, of abandonment.
My grandmother, seated in the other armchair that was not victimized by the psychotic dog, seemed content to sit there the whole afternoon as she chatted with her daughter-in-law about a particular case of a failed marriage of the present day, spanning a total of four months before the couple got an annulment. Young people nowadays don’t try hard enough to make their marriage work because there’s an easy way out, she muses. She married her best friend just before the Japanese invasion, in order to have a husband to protect her from the soldiers’ filthy raping and pillaging. After the war was over, she could’ve separated from him, but instead went on to spend 60 years of marital bliss. That was the rule in the old days, but today a marriage like theirs was the exception.
After all the children have grown, it’s inevitable that they leave home. That’s just how life is. I listened to her words and thought, has it been worth it? She has six children but no one remained near to take care of her, even after their father died. She seemed to blend in the furniture of this place, becoming part of the silent atmosphere of the forgotten. I made the conscious decision to remain close to my parents a long time ago. I didn’t have a choice if you look at it morally. I was the only living child they had. Who would take care of them in their old age? I couldn’t bear the thought of either one of them being part of a silent room, watching dust motes dancing in the air as they sit in broken chairs, thinking, that’s just how life is.
4.
Still breathing, was my grandmother’s reply to how she was doing. She said this with a laugh, like it was the punch line to some cosmic joke. I hugged her good-bye, telepathically telling her to keep breathing until Christmas, until I turn thirty, until my wedding day, until I place her first great-grandchild in her arms. Until I can show her that I can try hard enough to make my marriage last a lot longer than four months.
I suppose love makes it all worth it, as cliché as it sounds. Love is what continues to sustain you to live after loss, to sole occupancy of an abandoned room decorated with gossamer dust from the past. She doesn’t need her hair to retain the memories; she keeps them alive all around her, of a home filled with the sounds of laughter and footsteps of six boisterous children and a husband that protected her from the meaning of singularity, of loneliness.
September 22, 2008 - Posted by Marge- 0 Comments
Work today was interesting for a change, since Prof. Andy Ferreria of AIM came to visit as a guest speaker for our WIL monthly meeting. His topic was on Achieving Financial Freedom: A Guide to a Happy Retirement.
I initially attended only for the sake of attending because I personally didn’t think the topic applied to me, being several decades away from retirement. But it turned out to be surprisingly a serendipitous moment for me that I think I’ll remember for a long time to come.
Prof. Andy retired at the ripe old age of 32 because he was able to be ‘financially free’ by then, which meant that he was able to achieve his financial goal of saving up to a certain amount that he can live on—making the money work for him, not working for the money anymore. After ceasing to be a corporate slave and becoming financially independent, he started to do what he really wanted: to teach. It didn’t pay much and he even shouldered his hotel and airfare expenses in order to teach at a distant university in Zamboanga, but he didn’t care because it was his dream, and he had the money.
Sounds unbelievable right? But he went on to spend an hour and a half sharing with us his secrets to attain this seemingly impossible feat.
- Live within your means. If you earn P100, don’t spend P120. Who will pay for the P20? Your credit card. Which means…
- …Settle your loans as quickly as possible. For me, that means paying off my credit card debt instead of routinely paying only the interest rate or minimum amount due. Otherwise I’ll be a slave for life if I keep on spending outside my means and building up my debt.
- Follow the 80-20 rule: Spend 80% of your salary and save the 20% every month.
- The 80% you spend (aside from the monthly expenses such as food, utilities, rent, etc) should be spent on an item that increases value and not decreases it. A good example he gave is jewelry: if you need to buy jewelry, buy gold instead of silver. Silver tarnishes over time but the value of gold increases. And if ever you need the money, you can pawn gold jewelry. (Same goes for watches: buy the original ones instead of the cheaper ones because of its escalating worth.)
- The 20% you set aside should not be kept (and he couldn’t keep on stressing this enough) in a savings account. Why?
- Here’s why: first of all, if you’re really serious about setting a financial goal for your retirement, you need to sit down and do the following things:
Make a list of everything you want to retain in your lifestyle once you retire and their corresponding cost today. (Me I want to be able to travel abroad once a year.) Then sum up the total cost. Then you need to compound the amount, which involves the annual inflation rate. So for example, if the total cost is P100 this year and the inflation rate is 10% every year, then your cost will be P110 next year and P121 the year after that. So compute it until you reach your retirement age, say 30 years from now. That amount will more or less be at least the figure you need to save by that time in order to live the lifestyle you want by the time you retire.
- So going back to the 20% you set aside, you need to manage your personal wealth wisely. You don’t need to be earning big bucks in order to achieve your desired goal; you just need to start earlier, the better. Your money you save should be more than the inflation rate every year. You can’t achieve that by living on the measly 2.5% interest rate in your savings account while the inflation rate jumps up from 9% to 12% on a good day in our economy. Instead, you should invest your money. Which brings us to:
- Speculative investment, Capital or Owner investment, and Lending investment. A good combination of the three kinds of investment in the pyramid is the key.
- Speculative investment: lotto, casinos, 5-6 etc. This investment is advisable for those in their 30’s, since if they lose, they’re young enough to start over again. High risk, high pay-off.
- Capital or Owner investment: Small businesses, real estate, government or corporate bonds, mutual funds. Good for those in their 40’s. Income takes longer to generate but lower risk.
- Lending investment: You lend your money to the bank which their clients use to borrow as a loan. (I forget what this is called) You live on the interest, which is much higher than the savings account or time deposit can offer. Advisable for those near retirement age. Consistent income and lowest risk.
- The Capital investment, specifically mutual funds (with 20% interest per annum) caught my attention. He phrased it in a creative way: if a smoker can invest the P40 a day he’s using to buy a pack of cigarettes in a mutual fund instead, do you know he can be earning P14 million in 30 years just by that amount alone? Interesting right? Instead of nagging a particular smoker I know to quit smoking because of the usual dangerous consequences to his health, I can just casually rattle off this number and watch his inner entrepreneur and nicotine addict struggle for domination.
- Tip on real estate: when you buy a property, make sure you have a plan for it. Are you planning on building a condo later on and renting it out? Or are you just waiting for its value to appreciate then sell it after several years? Which brings us to the fact that you should choose the location of your property. The areas where you purchase it should be a place where the land is increasing in value and not the other way around. Your best bet is the pre-development value, which is usually 40% less than the development value of the property. Also, you need to be careful in choosing a respectable developer, someone who will be sure to develop the land and subsequently catapult its worth. Otherwise, you’re stuck in pre-development hell forever.
- Going to small businesses… of all the financial instruments, do you know this is the investment where you can get the biggest and fastest gains? Prof. Andy gave us some pointers on this: You need to have the passion for your product or service; you have to personally love or be interested in what you’re planning to sell. Second of all, you need to have a market for your product. This is a package deal: you can’t have either/or. Next, you need to be able to provide this product (food, for example) with consistent quality. And finally, you need to start your business small first, as a sort of actuarial feasibility study. One of the examples he gave us was a simple barbeque stand. Start small: set up your barbeque stand in your garage, open your gate and let your neighbors be your customers. Your product needs to have consistent quality; that is, same taste every day. If you gain a lot of customers, you’re ready for an expansion. If not, well, at least you don’t have to worry about food for the rest of the week.
- He also mentioned a good point: who says you don’t have the time to manage a small business? I f we spend an average of 7 hours on sleep, 8 hours at work, 1 hour for breakfast and dinner, and 2 hours on the road a day, what do we do with the 6 hours left? He brought up the idea of a setting up a night school supplies store in your local barangay. Lots of kids inform their working parents of their last-minute needs in school for projects only during dinner when they get together as a family. By that time it’ll be too late to go to the mall. So where can you go to buy the supplies? A nice small school supplies store carrying the basic last-minute items students forever need: illustration boards, cartolina sheets, glue, etc. Sell them at prices 30% more than at the bookstore and you’ll still sell them because it’s an oasis to desperate and overworked parents. You can be open at 7 to 12 pm and earn extra income right there.
Interesting stuff for me. I know it is because I was able to jot all of these points down from memory. This insightful talk made me realize a life-altering idea: I don’t have to be a corporate slave until I’m 60. If I can manage my personal wealth as early as now, I can achieve financial freedom at a much younger age and pursue my life’s dream of being a writer. The day will come when I can afford to sit down and write my novels because I’m not working for money anymore; I’m making money work for me. 
