MONEY THOUGHTS: Aspirational Wealth

New Straits Times

08-06-2025

HAVE you ever wondered why and how voids drive values?
If we suffer from a scarcity of health or time, most of our days are spent fixating on those lacks or, if you prefer, the "voids" in our lives. However, once we have overcome those challenges, our season of want (regarding those essentials) ends and stress levels fall.
Might this also apply to monetary wealth?
Going back centuries, the semantic root for the English word "wealth" stems from old words for "well-being", namely "wela" and later "weal". This reinforces the idea of holistic wealth — that for us to be truly wealthy, all facets of our overall being should "be well", hence the focus on "well-being".
Nonetheless, "wealth" today almost always refers to material or monetary plenty.
All my life I have been fascinated by money's divergent effects upon people, families and even whole countries. Consider this: A severe lack of personal wealth means impoverishment, while having enough of it, often, supports a contented lifestyle.
Tragically, though, too much wealth sometimes leads to arrogance; a smug, inconsiderate ignoring of the plight of the less fortunate; and possibly self-destructive behaviour ranging from individual drug and alcohol abuse, to nations waging war and building weapons of mass destruction.
Conversely, great wealth in the hands (and portfolios) of good people can catalyse a cascade of bounty to the world at large. (Consider Bill Gates' goal to eradicate malaria — for elaboration visit www.gatesfoundation.org/our-work/programs/global-health/malaria — as just one out of millions of disparate initiatives worldwide by caring human beings to make life on Earth better for everyone.)
FOR GOOD OR EVIL
So, considering how wealth may be used for good or evil, it is obvious that it is a magnifier which enlarges a person's (or a company's or a country's) capacity to do good things or bad things.
(Note: More than two dozen years ago, when my wife and I incorporated our small company, in April 2001, the name we intentionally picked for this business vehicle was RD WealthCreation Sdn Bhd.)
At its crux, wealth today stems from rising productivity, commonly achieved by harnessing human teamwork and digital technology.
If you're interested in my daily work as an LFP (a licensed financial planner) who focuses on retirement funding solutions embedded within a holistic financial planning practice, you can imagine how often I use the word "wealth" (too often to keep track) when consulting with existing clients, onboarding new ones onto my practice, speaking to public and corporate audiences about financial planning, and writing about this crucial aspect of human life.
Yet even as I return time and again to the importance of building wealth, I always reiterate that money is NOT the most important thing in life.
MEASURED IN TIME
Most of us already know that. However, we often tend to forget that truth during our exhausting, exacting trek on life's upwardly inclined treadmill. That's why financial guru Robert Kiyosaki's assertion that true wealth is, ironically, not measured in dollar terms but rather in time, rings so true to me.
You'll better appreciate Kiyosaki's incredible insight if you first mull over one piece of advice from the ancient Roman stoic philosopher Epictetus, who lived about 1,900 years ago, only a few decades after Jesus Christ traversed the dusty plains of Judea.
Epictetus declared, "Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants." His first two decades of life were as a slave in Rome during the reign of the mad emperor Nero.
Now, please reread what Epictetus said, really focusing on his words. After that, we can circle back to Kiyosaki's assertion that wealth should be measured in time. To illustrate this, let's consider two men whom we'll call Adam and Zeke.
Both have just retired and so no longer earn money from active labour. To simplify things further, we will assume they have both parked their respective nest eggs in a savings instrument that exactly matches their personal inflation rates.
If Adam spends RM5,000 a month in his first year of retirement and has a starting nest egg of RM500,000, he'll run out of money — compensating for inflation — in 100 months or eight years and four months.
And if Zeke spends RM20,000 a month in his first year of retirement, then even if he has RM1 million, his money will only last 50 months, or four years and two months.
So, by Kiyosaki's interesting yardstick of measuring wealth in time — specifically the amount of time their money will last them, although Adam really has only half the money Zeke possesses, RM500,000 versus RM1 million, Adam is actually twice as wealthy as Zeke because his pile of wealth will last twice as long, eight years and four months versus Zeke's four years and two months.
Do mull on that. Then spend the coming week figuring out how wealthy you are, not in terms of dollars or ringgit, but rather in time.
Next week I will take things further and explain how we may generate infinite wealth (measured in years) even though our actual pile of wealth (measured in RM) is decidedly finite.
Till then, do also focus on enhancing your overall well-being.
© 2025 Rajen Devadason