I was 13 the night the power got cut.
The fan slowed to a stop. The lights gave a last flicker. Then silence.
Through the window I could see my neighbours’ flats, lit up, TVs murmuring, lives still running normally. Ours had stopped.
It wasn’t a surprise. The mailbox had been filling with red-lettered final notices for months. My dad couldn’t hold a job — alcohol, cigarettes, the mahjong table, a lottery ticket every week that was always going to be the one.
But the worst of it wasn’t the darkness. It was watching him pawn my mother’s wedding jewellery, the dowry she’d kept her whole marriage, for money that lasted a fortnight. She didn’t shout. She just went quiet.
That night, in the dark, I made myself a promise. My family would never sit in darkness again.
Here’s the part I didn’t expect.
What changed my life wasn’t a mentor or a lucky break. It was the air-conditioning at the public library.
I went for the cool air and a quiet desk. Out of boredom, I drifted to the business section. Biographies, mostly. Carnegie. Walton. Franklin. People who built something from nothing, slowly.
Then I found Warren Buffett — a man who got rich without checking prices every day, without chasing the next hot thing, without a shred of luck. He bought good businesses and waited. Let them grow while he got on with his life.
My father chased the winning hand. His friends sat around the mahjong table waiting for luck to turn.
I decided to do the opposite. Buy boring businesses with predictable earnings. And hold them.
They needed luck. I needed time.
That one idea carried me out of that flat. I opened my first brokerage account at 18 and kept buying whatever I could afford.
Then a choice arrived that scared me. A scholarship: full tuition and an allowance, in exchange for four years bonded to a job after I graduated. The pen felt heavy in my hand.
Every stroke of my signature was four years of my life I was signing away. But it also meant the money I’d saved could stay invested, compounding, the entire time I studied.
I signed. And while my classmates spent their allowances, I lived on almost nothing and fed the rest into good businesses.
By the time my career started, I had a six-figure portfolio. Not from a big salary. From letting compounding do the work while I did everything else. Financial independence came at 31.
And this is the part I most want you to hear.
I didn’t have an edge. I had the opposite of one. No money, no role models, no head start.
What I had was time, and the patience to use it. If that was enough for a kid doing homework in a library for the air-con, it’s more than enough for you, with a steady income and a few good decades ahead.
That’s the whole reason The Lunch Break Investor exists. Everything that got me from that dark flat to here, written for the next person trying to work it out, so it takes them less time than it took me.
This is the book 13-year-old me needed. I couldn’t give it to him. I can give it to you.
Thomas