More OFWs now saving and investment-savvy

Very early this morning, I was sitting across an Aklan-born, but Californian ex- accountant retiree who spends two hours everyday trading stocks online as his personal hobby.

It was so refreshing to hear him speak with a faint lilting Visayan accent that is so adorable, an accent countless of corporate meetings working in the US thankfully failed to erase.

As he was trying to combat his jet lag, he turned to me and asked, “What about you? Don’t you want to work in the States?”

I had been asked this question too many times. “No, I like it here.” (…and my blog, and the company I work for, and going to the market every week, and being with my kids, and having time to play Monopoly with the kids etc. etc.)

We talked about the “OFW phenomenon” and how the government is benefiting from the collective sweat of more or less eight million Filipinos toiling abroad. I used to be depressed whenever I think about the social costs of parents leaving their children to earn dollars but there is some good news you all should know about.

Our top business story today quotes no less than the International Monetary Fund, who has noticed that more Filipinos working abroad are now more savings and investment-savvy. Read the story here:

“Given that some 80 percent of families that receive income from abroad as their main source are now middle- and high-income families, it is much more likely now than in 1991 that the uses for this income go beyond consumption and subsistence, and are put toward saving and investment,” the report said, quoting the IMF.

Simply put, more and more remittances are no longer being used to buy the latest unit of mobile phones and home appliances, but into savings and investment vehicles – hopefully some are even placed into businesses that are profitable.

You won’t see this in investment figures just yet, but the IMF believes the economic indicators will prove this soon. Hey, I say this is reason to celebrate! Let’s all do a virtual happy dance.

Of course, there’s still a lot of things to be done for this to be established as a trend but hey, small triumphs like these need to be acknowledged. This is a long way from the sad stories I heard all the time from bankers working with overseas workers who find that when they came home, they not only realized they didn’t have savings but also that they didn’t even have a spouse.

We are sending more highly skilled workers abroad now who are naturally more interested in long-term saving and who are more prone to love fiddling with sophisticated investment instruments. That’s another reason for this trend.

So here’s a toast to you, to the work that you do, to your search for financial independence, to your dedication to your family, and to your willingness to learn and take risks.

Here’s to more sharing — of your struggles and hopes, of your dreams and challenges. Feel free to share that defining moment when you knew you would let nothing stand between you and a retirement spent sipping pinacolada on whatever beach in the world that catches your fancy.

Personal finance may be full of talks about banking, insurance, mutual funds, stocks, taxes, cold money and credit. But the truth is, what we have begins with what we think, and how we stamp out the fears that keep us from reaching for financial freedom. If it’s possible to spark this defining moment in others, then perhaps it’s time to share your story :-).

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