How to Frugal

I almost made us meet at Starbucks.

It was instinct, really. One Tampines Hub, need a spot, Starbucks is right there. Shao Chun replied that the hawker centre would do fine.

That $6 latte I didn’t buy tells you everything you need to know about Shao Chun — and embarrassingly, everything you need to know about me.

Shao is hard to miss. Put him in the right robe, and you could genuinely mistake him for a Shaolin monk who got lost on the way to the temple. The bald head is real. The demeanour — unhurried, bright, like someone who has stopped checking his phone for notifications that don’t matter — is also real.

His CV reads like a millennial highlight reel. NTU banking degree, 2010. Equity analyst at Merrill Lynch. Then JPMorgan. Then the pivot to tech — LinkedIn, and eventually Google, where he stayed for nearly eight years before a round of layoffs made the decision for him.

Most people in that situation would have panicked. Shao moved to Chiang Mai.

His wife is Thai. (I told him that a foreign spouse is a Singaporean’s best retirement plan. He agreed without hesitation.) The cost of living is a fraction of Singapore’s. He makes YouTube videos for his channel, 9to5millionairemindset, at a pace of about one a month. He has around 20,000 subscribers — which, if you know how YouTube economics work, is a long way from stable income.

But here’s the thing about income. It’s not just what comes in. It’s what comes in minus what goes out.

And Shao has engineered the “what goes out” side of that equation with the kind of precision he probably once applied to equity research.

His friends tell him he doesn’t need to be so frugal. He could make more videos, build the channel faster, ramp up income to match his old lifestyle.

He told me this and I waited for him to say he was considering it.

He wasn’t.

We ended up on the businessman and the fisherman — you’ve probably heard some version of it. Businessman meets a fisherman on the beach, catches enough fish each day to feed his family, spends the rest of his time napping and playing with his kids. Businessman tells him he should scale up, build a fleet, IPO the operation, and then — only then — he’d be able to relax on the beach.

Fisherman asks: what do you think I’m doing right now?

Shao is already the fisherman. The beach is Chiang Mai. The fish is sufficient. Why would he go one big round just to end up exactly where he already is?

I had no answer for him. I still don’t.

A few days after we met, a friend messaged me on Instagram. How’s family, how’s work?

Family is great, I replied. Work… is work.

And that’s the honest version. No matter how you frame it — fractional, gig, part-time, portfolio career, whatever language makes it sound like a choice — work has a way of being annoying. It follows you. It has opinions about your calendar. It exists, with needs, on days when you’d rather it didn’t.

I want to retire by 55. I don’t know exactly what that looks like — some version of enough, I think, where work becomes optional rather than load-bearing.

But I also have four kids. Shao’s equation works because he built it to work — fewer obligations, lower overheads, deliberate choices about what he actually needs versus what he’d been conditioned to want.

I haven’t made those choices yet. I still suggested Starbucks.

Frugality, I think, is not really about money. It’s about figuring out the smallest number of things you actually need to be fine — and then protecting that number from everything that wants to inflate it.

Shao looks like a monk because he’s done the accounting. Not of his bank balance. Of his actual life.

The hawker coffee was $1.20. It was fine. It was, genuinely, fine.

I think about that more than I expected to.