You know, sometimes when I read posts—Reddit posts on the Malaysia subreddit, Malaysian personal finance, or Bolehland—I notice some people mentioning things like, Oh, my salary is around 5,000 ringgit per month. Is that enough?
Or I’m making five figures per month in my 20s.
And I wonder, how do you even reach anything above 4,000 or 5,000 ringgit per month?
If I assume you only have a bachelor’s degree at most—because you’re in your 20s anyway, and Malaysians usually don’t get their PhD until at least their 30s—then how does that happen? Unless you’re exceptionally smart and skipped grades or something, which is pretty rare.
So I really wonder—what am I doing wrong?
Even some of my friends are struggling to reach 3,000 and above, and for me, it’s even harder, to be honest.
I seriously wonder—what are we doing wrong in our 20s that makes it so hard to reach a 5,000+ ringgit salary per month?
Are we in the wrong field or something?
I know research and academic fields don’t pay that well, but the disparity between those and jobs in, say, finance is so huge that it honestly makes me feel bad.