It is easy to oversimplify any investment discussion by focusing on money. Yet, as any beginner investor will tell you, diving into the diversity of investment opportunities can fast become overwhelming.
Someone who is very familiar with beginner investors is Hazelle Soon, CEO and Chief Trainer at The Joyful Investors, a financial education platform she co-founded with Kathy Soon, and Keith Ng. Together, they’ve built a brand that boasts thousands of subscribers and followers across their social media channels and run multiple workshops, courses, and webinars for students at all levels of investing experience. Hazelle also creates useful educational videos on managing one’s portfolio that you can find on The Joyful Investors YouTube channel. While a lot of what Hazelle’s educational focus is on helping her students develop good investment strategies, I learnt in our short 40-minute chat that she does have an overarching philosophy and methodology that resonates with our #EveryDayInvestor ethos.
Peter: As a financial coach, what is the one message you want your students to learn?
Hazelle: I often remind my students that the most impactful investments they will ever make isn’t just in the financial markets or the stock markets, but actually in themselves! Knowledge, skills, or even relationships, health, and mindset, all these are important investments that you make in your life. It’s about carving out time for your personal growth and nurturing a meaningful network.
All these are investments that will compound over time, and they can deliver greater value than any investment portfolio can to your life. So, for me, the word “investment” is an act of alignment. It’s about asking yourself, you know, where am I placing my attention today, so that I can build the life that I want, or I dream of tomorrow.
Peter: So “investing” for you is not just about money?
Hazelle: Yes, money, financial investments, they are certainly still a part of the equation, but the bigger value, I believe, is about the mindset, the values that you want to look at, the bigger picture. So, investing, most of the time, it also involves the element of delayed gratification also. Investing for me is a practice where we’re looking at delayed gratification, and having some strategic vision for yourself, to believe that you can invest for future growth in life, whether it’s for personal finance, relationships, or for your business.
Peter: I love the intentionality of your perspective on investing! Is this something you grew up with?
Hazelle: My family does influence the way I look at personal finance. I grew up in a family that valued financial literacy.
My parents taught me how to manage my expenses prudently. My elder siblings, through their careers, also showed me how money works beyond just earning and spending. They helped me see money as a tool for you to create freedom and opportunity for yourself.
My elder sister Kathy and I have a rather wide age gap, and she passed down many of the money lessons she acquired through her own experiences to me. In fact, she was also the one who first introduced me to the concept of investing while I was still in school, and that sparked my early interest in it.
Peter: How did your education influence your investing philosophy?
Hazelle: For most of us, the first investment in ourselves is our education. It is a very important investment that we make in our lives. I graduated from NTU with a bachelor’s degree in accountancy. Looking back, I think that was one of the most practical investments that I’ve made for myself.
Attending business school equipped me with many skills relevant to my life today. It taught me how to analyse financial numbers, interpret ratios, understand businesses and how they’re built and sustained.
All these are very relevant when it comes to personal finance and what I’m doing right now. With my education as the foundation, stepping out into the workforce reinforced all of that that I’ve learned, and taught me soft skills, like meeting tight deadlines, thinking critically and systematically under time pressure, and how to navigate through uncertain tasks, but still have the resilience to press on. That’s the delayed gratification I mentioned earlier. When you first start out on this investment of education, you don’t know what’s going to happen next, but you need to just let the results compound over time, and eventually, you’ll see the growth that you were looking out for at the start.
Peter: What “investment” do you feel has given you the most delayed gratification thus far?
Hazelle: For me, it’s building up my financial literacy knowledge, and maintaining a healthy relationship with money. An average person will usually spend about 30 to 40 years of life in the workforce to build up wealth so that you can retire by your sixties. I believe that financial literacy is very essential because it is the key to shorten this long journey ahead.
Early in my own journey, I realised what we learn in finance is not enough on its own. A lot of times, people understand what they should do, but they don’t actually do it because they’re overwhelmed with real world situations, and real world volatilities.
So, I believe it’s important to bridge that gap between knowing what to do and being able to take the action to do it. And that is when you know you have truly built enough financial confidence in yourself.
For example, when the markets are volatile, you need to manage your investments with a cool mind and execute your strategies without being affected by your emotions. Financial literacy is not just about investment strategies or technical skills, it’s also about managing your emotions. That’s why we call ourselves The Joyful Investors. For us, “joy” is about being able to find purpose in your investments, in what you do, having that resilience, that’s where the joy can then come in.
Why Investing Starts With The Right Mindset, Not Just Chasing Returns
Though these answers only capture a fraction of my conversation with Hazelle, one thing that came through was how having the right mindset was important, not just as an investor, but in life.
Hazelle helped me see that being adaptable was more important than worrying about short-term gains and losses. Having the right foundations of education and financial literacy will give you the stability needed to weather even the most turbulent situations and set you up for the long-term.
Just like Hazelle and The Joyful Investors are imparting this investment philosophy to their students, we too believe it’s the mindset that all #EveryDayInvestors should start with.
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