Chinese New Year is upon us, and the year of the Rat is looking good. The first animal of the Chinese zodiac, The Rat in Chinese culture represents wealth and surplus, making this a fantastic start to a potential journey into investing and growing your money. That being said, we thought it'd be fun to get a couple of people at the office tell us about how much they've gotten over the years in ang bao money, and how much they could be making if they had saved all of the money and invested it at a 7% return.

Lean Sing, Client Experience Lead

Chinese Zodiac: Pig‍

Amount of ang bao collected: $500
Years collected: 15 (he's 37 today)
Savings: $19,935
What he did with it: Saved it.
Lean Sing is our friendly Customer Experience Lead, and helps people to understand Endowus better daily. Based on our calculations, it looks like Lean Sing would have made $59,967 if he had invested his money. Oh well. On the bright side, Lean Sing now spends his days helping clients (present and future) and puts his financial knowledge to good use.

Gregory Van, CEO

Chinese Zodiac: Snake‍

Amount of ang bao collected: $5,000
Years collected: 26 until he got married (now at 30)
Savings: $159,104
What he did with it: Saved it.
Greg tells us that it's pretty typical in HK to give larger "lai see," so that's pretty awesome. $5,000 is no small haul. He also calls himself "cheap", so we know for a fact that even young Greg wouldn't have spent this amount of money frivolously.
Well, if Greg invested his money, he'd have, according to our model, $377,419. That's a serious sum of money, and would go a pretty long way. Since we know Greg well, he's most likely saved it all, and more.‍

Shengshi Chiam, Personal Finance Lead

Chinese Zodiac: Snake‍

Amount of ang bao collected $500
Years collected: 30
What he did with it: Saved it.
Savings: $18,566
Our most passionate personal finance advocate, Shengshi still gets to collect ang bao money at the ripe old age of 30. He spends his time working on content and financial literacy here at Endowus. He also spends his time in the office making sure all of us stay passionate about investing. However, he of all people, didn't invest his ang pow money (but only because his mom has been holding his ang bao money hostage). You might want to take that back Shengshi, since you've clearly shown us what you're capable of now.

Sin Ting So, Head of Client Experience

Chinese Zodiac: Rabbit ‍

Amount of ang bao collected: $1000
Years collected: 32 years
Savings: $39,869
What she did with it: Spent it.
Sinny is our Head of Client Experience. She's built the customer experience function up at Endowus from the beginning, and is pretty much one of the nicest people ever. She's also been in finance, having worked at Nomura and Morgan Stanley so she absolutely knows what she's talking about when she helps you with your questions. She did, unfortunately, spend all her money when she found her ATM card, but if she didn't, she'd have gotten a whopping $119,933 if she had invested all that money.‍

JX Lye, Chief Product Officer

Chinese Zodiac: Rabbit‍

Amount of ang bao collected: $2000
Years collected: 10 years (started late, got married, but aged 32)
Savings: $25,134.
JX is one of our newest additions to the Endowus family. Coming from a deeply consumer-focused background with stints at Lyft and Dropbox, JX is responsible for the Endowus user experience. We've done the math, and if JX had just saved some of it, he'd have $33,567. Pretty solid wealth accumulation!

Takeaways:

And there you have it, folks. From most of the people we interviewed, we noticed that most people had their parents take their money away and put it in a savings account after Chinese New Year. We think that's a great initial idea to show kids why they should start saving, but many of us ended up spending our money a little too early in our teens when we started buying things we didn't need.
So what were our lessons learnt? None, really, but this was a fun exercise for us as we think about money this Chinese New Year.