The constant
I've always cared about people first
As a boy, I wanted to be a missionary. Underneath that was something simpler that has never left me: I care about people before anything else, and I can't sit still in front of a problem. Wherever I looked, I saw pains and quiet struggles I wanted to help carry — I wanted to be useful to people, to be part of the solution rather than a bystander.
Everything I've done since has really been a different shape of that same instinct.
A camera, and a question about love
For a while, I wanted to film weddings
While I was studying engineering at university, I fell for photographing and filming weddings. It came straight out of my own experience of love — how staggeringly beautiful it is, and, at the same time, how genuinely hard it is to truly become one with another person.
In a world that so often treats love as shallow and betrayal as ordinary, I wanted my films to move people to go deeper — to look past the shine and fight for the real, difficult, worth-it thing underneath. That was the dream: to inspire people to seek deeper into their love.
Where money caught me out
I was given everything — except how to handle it
Here's the part I'm most honest about. I grew up blessed. My parents provided for me and cared for me, and I never once had to worry about money. That's an enormous gift. It was also a blind spot.
Because when my own turn came — a home, a marriage, renovations, the thought of children one day — I realised I had no idea how to plan for any of it. Nobody had taught me. I didn't understand money, or how the machinery of the world actually worked. And the financial adviser I trusted back then wasn't much help; some of what I was put into in those years I'd undo today if I could.
The pain I kept meeting in myself turned out to be the one almost everyone carries quietly: we're handed adult money with no manual, and left to guess.
So I became the partner I wish I'd had
The same calling, a different shape
Those three threads were always one thread. A person who cares about people, who can't leave a problem alone, who wants to help others go deeper into a life and a love that are real. Finance is simply where that finally landed — because the fear and confusion around money is one of the biggest things standing between people and the life they actually want.
So I decided to become the partner I wish I'd had. Not someone selling you things, but someone whose whole aim is that you come to understand your money as well as I do — or better. Built on trust and transparency, because those are the only foundations worth building a thing like this on.
What I want for you
That money stops being something you worry about
I want to walk it with you — the flat, the wedding, the children, the market wobbles, the long horizon — as a partner, not a salesman. I want you to be so clear and so equipped that, one day, you look up and realise money isn't a worry humming in the background anymore. It's just doing its quiet job, so you're free to live your life to the fullest and love the people in it well.
That, to me, is the whole point. It's the idea this whole site is built on, and it's what I'd love to help you build: a life worth living, with the money part finally at peace.
— Jonathan
The through-line
What I believe about money
Everything on this site grows out of a handful of convictions. Here they are, plainly.
Money is a tool, not a scoreboard.
It exists to fund a life worth living — not to be counted for its own sake. Start with the life you want; the numbers serve it, not the other way around.
Clarity beats complexity.
Most financial products are more complicated than your situation needs. If something can't be explained simply, that's usually a reason to be cautious, not impressed.
Enough is a real number.
Name it. Knowing what enough looks like — for the flat, the wedding, the pile — is what turns money from a source of anxiety into a source of peace.
Incentives are everything.
Always know how the person advising you is paid. I'd rather sit on your side of the table and tell you to do nothing than sell you something that's good for me and wrong for you.
Protect cheaply, invest boringly, behave well.
Insure the real gap with term, put the rest into something broad and low-cost, automate it, and don't touch it in a panic. Boring, repeated, is what works.
You're only as secure as the people you love.
If someone who depends on you isn't prepared, their crisis becomes your plan. Looking after them in advance is part of looking after yourself.
It isn't all ours to begin with.
I hold money as a steward, not an owner — something to manage well and hold with an open hand. Being intentional with what you've been given is the opposite of anxiety.
The relationship is the point.
Not the transaction. This site, and the way I work, are built to earn trust slowly and keep it — because clarity, given honestly, is the most useful thing I can offer.
If these ring true, the rest of the site is simply them worked out in detail — season by season, number by number. And when it's your own situation you want to think through, that's what I'm here for.
A note
Jonathan Wong is a licensed financial adviser representative in Singapore, currently between firms — during that period he is not able to provide financial advice. You can check his registration yourself on the MAS Financial Institution Representatives Register at eservices.mas.gov.sg/rr. Everything on this site is general information, not financial advice tailored to your circumstances.