Dear readers,

I’m finally debt free after fully repaying my education loan to the bank. No more monthly deductions and no more stress over working for the sake of money.

Here’s my story…

When I started my part-time degree course two years ago, I made up my mind not to take up any loans and pay cash every semester by prudent saving my salary. This was not a problem for me as I made careful calculations and budgeting before I signed up the course.

So why did I eventually take up an education loan? Did I miscalculate? Was I wrong?

Well, the truth is shortly after I started my course, I was fortunate to have met an investor on an online forum. He shared with everyone his theory and beliefs about moving away from paper investments such as stocks and bonds, and move to hard assets such as gold and silver investments. After doing some reading of my own, I was convinced that the economy was heading down in the next few years and recognised the potential of investing in gold and silver.

After purchasing my first few gold coins in a couple of months, I realised that they were making double digit returns. I decided to take up an education loan since the returns can easily cover the interest charged for the education loan.

Fast forward to 2009. While the economy has really headed down and investors were seeing red in all their investments, my gold and silver assets were still all seeing 10-20% returns as I invested whenever I could while gold and silver prices were down. After repaying the loan in full, I still retained a few gold coins from the investment.

I would say that I’m very lucky to have met the right people along my life journey and thankfully, I seized the opportunities available to me. In all honesty, opportunities are all around us. It is up to us to discover them and seize the day!

PS: The title is entitled debt free for now, because I recently purchased a new pigeon hole for the family. But that’s another story, for another day.