Work harder to settle loans or just laid back and blame the economy

I used to believe loans are bad for personal use. Once a loan was made, I felt happy for a while since my objective to acquire things have been achieved. After a few months, the burden to pay the monthly installment will kick in. I will lost new opportunity to buy other things or invest the excess money. One thing for sure, I have to work harder and smarter to get more income. So, when I want to buy my second home, I calculated I must have a consistent part time income every month.

The question is what kind of part time job should be done. Well for starter, I started with my available skills which is electronic design. Initially, I just followed my friend work on designing automation system using PLC. It was an expensive solution at the time. I want to use custom made microcontroller based design. But, I have difficulty to find the resources at the time. Since the profit was still reasonable using PLC, we save a lot of development time.

At the same time, my hobby was to learn to write programs for Microsoft Windows operating system. It was a hard thing to do at the time since www was at infancy and there was almost no book on it at the time. During my degree program, it was not part of the curriculum. It was a big challenge for me but I love it. After several months learning the tools, my friend asked for my help to build a simple database for Ms Windows OS. It was an instance yes answer even though it was not much. But the experience and the thrill to produce something out of my hobby were really exciting! Another friend of mine ask me to translate the learning process in Bahasa Malaysia and teach his staffs. It was a new challenge to me because I have never teach programming before. Then, my electronic projects demanded me to integrate the electronic designs with database and GUI.

So, my hobby have become my consistent part time job. Even though it was difficult, I really had fun doing it plus the profit keep increasing over the time. And since it was my hobby, I have no problem to accept any new challenge until I manage to reverse engineer Variable Message Signage (VMS) for Perbadanan Putrajaya. My part was worth about half a million but the total project cost was more than six million. It was huge for me.

At the mean time, my property investment worth and rental fee kept increasing. So, I believe if I did not do any property investment, I will just laid back on the couch and enjoy the TV and video shows every weekends. Why bother to find more money when my salary as a lecturer was stable enough.