Today, I realised something that is a manifestation of my cultural upbringing. In my post about Macbeth, I wonder why Macduff didn’t bring along his family when he was trying to flee from Macbeth’s pursuit. After all, the swordsmen in the Chinese martial arts dramas I used to watch would assassinate their enemies’ families so that their opponents’ children won’t be able to hunt them down and seek revenge in the future. But two Stackers mentioned that in the context of Macbeth, it would be considered drastic and crossing the line to kill off Macduff’s family.
Just wow.
What has that got to do with tracking my net worth, I hear you ask.
On my country’s personal finance site, someone asked the following question about net worth recently:
Quite a number of my countrymen replied in the affirmative. Apparently, they use Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel to record down their assets, keeping track of their net worth. It’s a norm endorsed and encouraged by our government.
The government came up with SgFinDex to make it easy and convenient for us to tally our financial assets from participating financial institutions. Insurance, fixed deposits, equities, you name it, the app has it. Unfortunately, crypto isn’t included in the picture.
On a boring afternoon, I actually signed up with SgFinDex, but didn’t finish the entire process, because any self-respecting Bitcoiner will refrain from giving so much private information to strangers, right?
Anyway, since my country is mainly Chinese and Chinese people are stereotyped to be mercenary, I assumed that everyone else in the world dutifully tracks his/her net worth. But maybe what we Singaporeans do will be considered too extreme for the rest of the world out there. Let me know!