Posted: 15 Nov 2008 01:02 AM CST

The Straits Times article, “Labour Chief Slams DBS,” shows how powerless unions are in Singapore. The benefits of joining a trade union in Singapore are more social than economic. You get to join the NTUC Club and get other benefits but when it comes to protection of your rice bowl, it means close to NOTHING.

Unions will give you more bargaining power to make employers pay you some form of retrenchment benefit but it will not protect you from losing your job as DBS management shows how it is done, “Singapore GLC” style. I once talked to a man who used to be the top man of the 2nd biggest trade union in Singapore. He shared with me the heydays of unions in the late 50s and 60s. But since the Government formed NTUC to effectively control trade unionism, their primary aim of protecting the jobs and terms and conditions for employees basically become ineffectual as Singapore’s laws and regulations actually provide very little real protection as businesses and employers come first in the scheme of things.

It’s more important to take your own steps to form your own little union that takes care of YOUR interests.

How can you do this? By considering how you can pluck money out of thin air through growing your means.

Growing your means
One of the challenges I learnt in my journey towards financial freedom was in coming out of my comfort zone and taking risks and being open about growing my means. If you, like myself, are an employee, you will find that your job is your primary means of income. But does that mean it has to be the only means? This is where “growing your means” is about thinking and trying out different ways to make a higher level of income. Some ways are straightforward. For example, if you are paid on a hourly basis, doing more over-time will help you earn more but you need to balance this against time taken away from your family or personal life. You can also excel in your job and get that promotion and increment. But there are limits to how much you can do as not everyone can get promoted and not everyone can get a good appraisal each year to qualify for merit increments or even basic increments.

So what else can you do?
There are actually plenty of things you can do. The internet has opened up many opportunities for people to get some additional income. It’s simple but it’s not easy. If you enjoy writing and aggregating information about specific niches, you can write a blog and put up advertisements to make money from the traffic that comes to your blog. You can also write articles or review websites for a fee. You can buy and sell stuff on eBay or online auction sites. You can offer consultancy skills over the internet via email or sell an ebook. You can create a user forum that runs itself and monetise it using advertisements. You can do affiliate marketing by selling other people’s products and services. Just google “making money online” and you’ll find tonnes of links to how people literally pluck money out of thin air. It’s possible.

In order to find out what you can do to grow your means online, you need to invest time to read and sieve through the various ways in which the web economy moves. There are many books you can read or borrow from the library. I just finished reading “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More” by Chris Anderson and am amazed at the fact that the internet has made endless numbers of products and services available to people by reducing the costs of searching and matching buyer and seller.

Because the internet makes access by small buyers and sellers, i.e. you and I open and at a low cost. We can reach out to buyers and sellers easily as a small producer or a consumer. I recently launched my complimentary eBook, “Panzer’s Guide to Financial Freedom: It’s Your Money and It’s Your Life”, on my blog here and 45 people have downloaded it to read it in the first week or so since it has launched. The numbers are encouraging because based on my RSS feed, I have about 60 odd regular subscribers but my readership hit a high of 343 some time back.

I decide to publish the eBook because it was a way for new readers or existing readers to have a framework in understanding what personal finance and this blog was about. In addition, it was a way for me to crystalise my thoughts on financial freedom and personal finance in one short book and allow me to reach out to my audience in another way other than just individual blog posts.

In the short-term, I intend to work on a newsletter for another of my blogs, Singapore Fixed Deposits and consider my second Panzer’s Guide but be more focussed on certain aspects of financial freedom. I may decide to monetise my 2nd book and see how is the response. Even if I make one sales of one hundred sales, I will be happy because it’s something of value that I created as an alternate source of income besides my AdSense and related revenues from my blogs.

How you can pluck your money out of thin air

Even as you are reading my article, there are some ideas already floating in your head to develop an alternate source of income. I encourage you to do mini-trials and test it out. Do keep on your day-job and focus on it during weekends, evenings when you are not watching television, pubbing/clubbing or playing your PSP/Xbox360/PS2/PC game, consider learning more about how to develop a means to make money online through value-adding activities and not scams or ponzi schemes.

The internet has created more opportunities for people to get involved in the value-chain in new ways never seen before. Where was Google ten years ago – nowhere! They were incorporated as a private company in 1998 and now they are one of the most profitable internet companies today.

Think about it. The internet provides many possibilities to learn, grow and to monetise ideas.

How will you tap on it?

If the DBS retrenchment article doesn’t scare you into action, I’m not sure what will.

Be well and prosper.

_{»crosslinked«}