He stopped checking his bank balance three months ago.
Not because he didn’t care.
Because his body wouldn’t let him.
Every morning at 7:14am, the DBS notification would light up his phone on the bedside table in their 4-room flat in Anchorvale, Sengkang.
The blue glow against the ceiling.
The soft buzz that his wife never seemed to hear because she was already up, warming the milk for their seven-month-old daughter.
Wei Liang would pick up the phone, swipe, and for a second, everything in his chest would go tight.
Like the air got thinner.
Then the number would appear.
And the tightness would spread to his jaw, his teeth pressing together until his ears hummed.
He’s 36. Project manager at a logistics firm near Tanjong Pagar.
He takes the North East Line every morning, stands near the door because the seats are full by Buangkok, and stares at the route map above the door like he hasn’t memorized it already.
He earns what most people would call decent money. Enough, on paper.
But paper doesn’t account for two children, a $1,800 mortgage, his parents’ $500 monthly allowance, infant care at $1,340 after subsidies, and the insurance premiums that come out on the fifteenth like clockwork.
So he stopped looking.
The changes came quietly.
He switched from kopi-C siew dai at the kopitiam below their block to kopi-O. Forty cents less. a
He stopped ordering the fish soup he liked at lunch and moved to the cai png stall two units down. One meat, two veg, $4. He told his son they didn’t need the dinosaur nuggets at FairPrice anymore because “Papa found better ones.” He reached for the house brand instead.
He used to be the guy at dinners who said “just order lah, I cover.” Now he split the bill to the cent on PayLah.
And something turned in his stomach every time he did it. Not the saving itself. The smallness of it.
The way he’d stand in the NTUC at Riverdale Plaza comparing two bottles of cooking oil, doing the per-millilitre math in his head, and catch himself wondering when he became this person.
His son turned five in March. They had the party at home instead of the play gym.
Wei Liang blew up the balloons himself until his fingers went numb and his lips were raw.
Shu Ting made the cake.
She found a YouTube tutorial for a dinosaur cake that used three packets of Betty Crocker mix and green food colouring. Their son loved it. But Wei Liang sat in the kitchen afterwards, scraping buttercream off the counter, and his throat closed up for no reason he could name.
One Tuesday night, after the kids were asleep, he sat beside her on the sofa. The flat was quiet except for the standing fan oscillating in the corner. He said they needed to talk. About money.
She went still. Her hands were in her lap, folded over each other, and he could see the knuckles whiten.
He said they might need to cut back more.
Maybe reduce his parents’ allowance by a hundred.
Maybe pause the insurance rider on their daughter’s plan. He said the words quickly because if he slowed down, his voice would crack, and he didn’t want that. Not now.
She didn’t respond for what felt like thirty seconds.
He braced himself.
Because the heat was already climbing up the back of his neck, the way it does when you know something is about to break and you’re the one holding the hammer.
But she didn’t argue.
She stood up. Walked to the kitchen.
Opened the second drawer beside the fridge, the one with the tape, the scissors, the expired coupons. She came back with a notebook.
Blue cover. The kind from Popular.
The kind their son used for spelling practice.
She put it on his lap.
𝗛𝗲 𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗱 𝗶𝘁 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗱𝘀 𝘄𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗰𝗼𝗹𝗱.
Pages and pages of columns. Her handwriting, the small neat letters she’d had since JC.
Dates in the left margin. Categories across the top. Groceries. Transport. Subscriptions. Utilities.
Every dollar tracked, every adjustment noted in blue pen.
She’d been doing this for three months.
She’d cancelled Netflix and Spotify and switched to free versions of both.
Called SingTel and negotiated their mobile plan down by $24 a month. Set every aircon in the flat to 26 degrees and bought a $39 standing fan from Shopee to make up the difference.
The electricity bill dropped 15%. She batch-cooked on Sundays, portioned everything into containers in the freezer, so they wouldn’t order GrabFood during the week.
And she’d switched entirely to NTUC house-brand, timing her grocery runs for the midweek promotions, never missing a single one.
$400 a month.
She’d found $400 without him noticing.
He stared at the page. The columns blurred.
She said, quietly, that she didn’t tell him because she could see it.
Every evening when he came through the door, she could see it in his shoulders. The way they sat higher than they used to. Like he was bracing against something he couldn’t put down.
And she didn’t want to add to whatever he was carrying.
So she carried it herself.
He couldn’t speak.
He pressed his thumb into the page so hard it left a crescent mark in the paper. She reached over and put her hand on top of his.
And they sat like that on the sofa in their Sengkang flat, with the fan turning slowly between them and the blue notebook open on his lap.
The next morning, the DBS notification lit up his phone at 7:14am.
He was sitting at the kitchen table.
The blue notebook was beside his coffee.
Shu Ting was in the bedroom getting their daughter dressed. His son was eating cereal, the house-brand kind, and didn’t seem to know the difference.
Wei Liang picked up his phone.
𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗲, 𝗵𝗲 𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗱 𝗶𝘁.
The number was still small. The mortgage was still there. The infant care bill was still coming on the first.
But the notebook was beside him.
And the person who wrote it was ten steps away, singing something off-key to a baby who didn’t care about the melody.
He looked at the screen.
Then at the notebook.
And for the first time in three months, the tightness didn’t come. Not because the number changed.
Because he wasn’t staring at it alone.
There are a lot of Wei Liangs in Singapore right now.
Standing on the North East Line with their shoulders too high. Switching from kopi-C to kopi-O and pretending they prefer it.
Doing the per-millilitre math on cooking oil at 10pm in an NTUC that’s about to close.
Carrying the weight so quietly that the person beside them on the sofa doesn’t even know how heavy it’s gotten.
And there are a lot of Shu Tings, too.
People who see the weight even when it doesn’t speak. Who’ve already started carrying it in their own way, one cancelled subscription and one batch-cooked Sunday at a time.
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗲𝗶𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗺 𝗱𝗶𝗱 𝘄𝗮𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗧𝘂𝗲𝘀𝗱𝗮𝘆 𝗻𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁, 𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘆 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗽𝘂𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗻𝘂𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗯𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗲𝗲𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗺 𝗶𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗱 𝗼𝗳 𝗯𝗲𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗺.
So if you’re carrying something right now, try this.
This week.
Sit down with the person you trust most.
Open the notebook.
Not a literal blue one from Popular, just the numbers. The real ones. Put them on the table. Not with shame, but with honesty. Say “this is where we are” and ask the one question that changes everything: “What do we do about it together?”
Because the person beside you has probably been carrying more than you realize.
And the moment you stop fighting the squeeze alone is the moment it starts to feel survivable.
The tightness in your chest won’t ease because you earned more. It’ll ease because you finally let someone else hold it with you.
Who’s carrying the notebook in your house?
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