Our Journey

I think none of you will ever hear me shout, “I WANT TO BE SUPER RICCHHHHH !!”, because I never really aspire to be the next Riadys. Seriously, if I wanted to be filthy rich, I wouldn’t have spent several years of my life teaching. But I’m extremely worried about our finances.

Firstly, our country’s inflation is horrible! Although the government said that the inflation rate is quite low (not more than 5%), I’m skeptical that they can keep that up.

From IMF:

Optimistically, we can say that inflation is approximately 10% every year, with the exception of the evil year of 1998-1999, where inflation went 58% and 20% respectively. Well, 10% is still pretty bad.

Second reason, everyone in Indonesia is forever threatened by the danger of unemployment. It can happen to me or hubby , or anyone !

Third reason, somehow everything is getting so darn expensive! Obviously, we’d like to have a child in the future and education doesn’t come cheap at all. According to friends – who have kids and are battling with the expenses – as well as various observations, the price for education in decent schools here, increases by approximately 20% yearly!
We don’t even dare to aim at those super expensive, highly prestigious international schools. We thought, we just need some decent schools with good quality and disciplines, so our kids won’t become thugs or worse .. suicide bombers T_T. The price tags (based on 2008 prices): Rp 5 million to 17.5 million to get your kids into kindergarten plus a monthly fee of Rp. 400,000 to Rp. 1.1 million !
And that’s just kindergarten, what about primary school, high school, universities?? -_-”

Fourth, as what we all know, there’s no such thing as social security in this country, a pension? what pension?? Even if we have one, the amount will be extremellyyy small. And I can’t blame the government either, they have so much homework to do. So we,as good citizens should really shut up and not bother them too much.

How much money do we need to keep us happy from the first day of retirement to the day we die? If we were to retire next month, and need approximately Rp. 2 million/month to keep us happy. And assuming we live for the next 20 years. Then we will need about: Rp. 24 million/year. The year after that we will need Rp. 26.4 million and 19 years from that, we need Rp 146,781,817 /year. The total of post-retirement living cost will be …. Rp. 1,374,599,988.00 but what if we live longer than that and suffer from some crazy illness??

So what will Sandy do? Keep being a cheapskate ^^, stock on gold, invest invest invest, and keep looking for opportunities. ABBA-therapy to keep the stress away: