What is money?

In school, we were never taught on the subject of money. Nobody taught us what is money and how we should use it. Have you ever thought about this? How could something be so important yet totally being neglected by almost every education system in the world? If you happen to be smart and able to get into university, you are being taught Economics 101 – the basics of money. Can you imagine? Money revolves around you every minute of the day and yet, you are only taught ‘what it is’ in your university year. After that, you are on your own. Thus it is no surprise that many do not know how to value money, and even worse, how to use money.

Money is of special importance to me, and so I make it a life mission to truly understand what it is and how to use it well. Although I am still not very good at it, I do know one or 2 things about it due to my years of reading & research. For those close to me, should realize that I can see the future value of money. Basically I understood that, money not spend now, will/can be double in future. It is like growing a banana tree. Everytime you plant a banana tree you need to wait for it to bear fruit. And the moment it bears fruit, you go & cut the fruit to eat the banana. You kept doing that because you are impatient and you thought of eating bananas as akin to living a good life. Others kept telling you that if you don’t eat the banana now, it will rot and you will waste it. Others kept telling you that if you cut the bananas now, you will get more banana in future. The tree will continue to grow bananas, non-stop. Others also tell you that you should enjoy your fruit immediately because you worked very hard to grow the tree. In fact, others are so convincing that they can even tell you different remedies to cook your bananas. So delicious bananas oh bananas.

Yet, the others are usually people who will do more harm to you than help you in the long run. Since they tell you one million ways of cooking & eating the bananas, they must have been consistently eating their own bananas for a long time. Let me ask you, if you ran out of bananas to eat, will they give you their bananas to eat? I don’t think so. Everytime, they have bananas, they will eat it immediately, so what makes you think that they have spare to give/borrow you? All of us have such ‘others’ around us. In fact, almost everyone around us is the ‘others’. Grandparents, father, mother, wife, cousins, colleagues, best friend even that nice neighbor auntie. I am always caution with such people (the others) because knowingly, they will poison you with their ‘banana-cutting’ thinking.

My new home backyard has a couple of banana trees (yay!). I personally do not like banana trees but I do think they give good representation as money. You see, if you cut your banana fruit a few times and then you get bored of cutting it, you let it grow more. Banana fruit is a funny fruit. If you leave it and let it grow, you can see how the fruit actually multiplies on its own. And in time, you can see that, banana fruit is a big big fruit with many many bananas. To me, only when you get to see that many bananas, you can cut & eat your banana fruit at ease J

So, my objective in life is to grow many banana trees & see each of them grow big big banana fruits. This will take years, but the day will come when I have my chance to cut the fruit. By then, I will prove all the ‘others’ that my knowledge and thoughts about money is right. But till then, I will have to stick to my way. I hope my wife will be supportive of me all the way till then.