How Much Money Is Actually Enough?
Timothy Tiah sold his company and felt nothing when the money landed. An honest take on how much is really enough, and what chasing more actually costs you.
There was a time when the money from selling his company hit his bank account, and Timothy Tiah felt nothing. No party. No champagne. He opened the banking app, texted his banker to check the money really could not be pulled back out, and then went home and life carried on exactly as before.
Tiah is one of the few Malaysian entrepreneurs most people can name. He co-founded Nuffnang, the blog ad network he took all the way to a stock market listing, and today he runs the coworking brand Colony and is a partner in the bakery Dough by Meg. He is, by any normal measure, someone who won. He is also the first to say the win felt smaller than he was promised it would. His conclusion after all of it: the amount of money you really need is a lot lower than you think.
1. The exit that felt like nothing
For years the plan is the same in everyone’s head. Work up to the number, hit the number, then relax and be happy. Tiah reached his while he was in the deepest stretch of a depression, telling himself that if he just hit the amount, that would be one less thing to worry about.
It happened. He was flying back to Penang for Chinese New Year when his banker messaged to say the money had landed. He checked, texted back to confirm it could not be reversed, felt a small relief that the deal was finally over, and that was the whole event. No celebration. His wife said okay, the money’s in, and they bought nothing. Life just went on like normal.
That anticlimax taught him something a lot of high earners find out too late. A baseline amount of money genuinely matters, because it removes stress and gives you the freedom to choose. Past that baseline, the extra does far less than the brochure promised. When he dug into it honestly, the figure he actually needed to feel settled was much lower than the one he had spent years chasing.
2. The goalpost that keeps moving
The reason enough feels so far away is that the target keeps sliding. You tell yourself your first RM100,000 is the finish line. You get there and it is not enough, so it becomes RM500,000, then a million, then two, then three. The chase never resolves because the number never sits still.
This is not only an entrepreneur’s disease. It runs straight up a normal career too. Becoming a manager is enough, until you are one, then it has to be director, then some international version of director after that. Same treadmill, different job title.
Tiah is candid that a lot of his own drive came from an old, unhappy place: growing up bullied and compared to others, carrying a sense of never being good enough that followed him into adulthood no matter what he achieved. He asked an AI chatbot about it recently and the answer stuck with him. Self-criticism can motivate you for a while, but once it becomes insatiable, once the goalpost will not stop moving, the voice inside stops sounding like a coach and starts sounding like someone telling you that you are worthless. Keep that up long enough and you collapse, mentally and physically. As a country we tend to celebrate ambition and say very little about being content, and plenty of quiet unhappiness grows in that gap.
3. What chasing more actually costs
Everything you choose in life has a price attached, including the choice to keep pushing for more when you already have enough. That price is your time, your focus, your mental health, and the very real risk of losing money you already had by reaching for money you did not need.
The bill usually arrives at home first. Tiah’s wife told him recently that she felt lonely. He was confused, because he was around all the time. She explained: you are here, but you are not really here, you are on your phone, your mind is somewhere else. She did not say it as a complaint. She said she would get used to it if this was the new normal he wanted, and that was exactly what made it land. He ran the maths that every driven person avoids. If he became much richer or more famous in ten years but lost his wife along the way, would it be worth it? Not even close.
He is honest that the balance is never clean. It works more like a yo-yo, where you drift too far into work and then something, a spouse, a family need, pulls you back for a while before you drift out again. The point is not a perfect nine-to-five boundary, which he admits he has never managed to keep. It is being willing to listen when the people around you tell you the cost is getting too high.
4. The one number that cannot lie
If enough is the honest question in your personal life, there is an equally honest question in business, and most founders dodge it. They fixate on valuation. Tiah does the opposite. Colony was valued very highly in its 2019 round, and you will never hear him quote the figure, because to him it is close to meaningless. A valuation is a story people tell about your company, and stories can be inflated.
The number he trusts is free cash flow. Profit can be shaped by accounting. What is much harder to fake is whether your bank account grew or shrank by the end of the month, after everything is paid. That is the only figure that cannot lie to you. By that honest measure he does not even call Colony a runaway success yet, because the cash it throws off keeps getting reinvested into newer bets like its Jerry brand and into Dough by Meg, which he had to keep funding every few months before it finally took off this year.
He tells a story about a well-known restaurant owner he respects. When he asked the man what his restaurant should be valued at, the owner said he thought people placed far too much weight on valuation, and that his own was probably a little too high. Not the answer you expect from someone whose business is the envy of the market. That instinct, distrusting the flattering number and keeping an eye on the real one, is worth carrying into your personal finances too.
5. What your business gives you besides money
Two years ago Colony received two offers, both very high, one higher than the other. Tiah went to his investors, some of whom stood to make around four times their money, and told them his rule: he did not want to sell everything. He wanted to keep a meaningful stake, at least 20 to 30 percent, and carry on running it, because he still wanted the purpose. To his surprise many of the investors chose to hold too, and the company stayed independent.
The reason he is so careful here is a story he read about the creator of Minecraft, who sold the game to Microsoft for around two billion US dollars. He bought a Beverly Hills mansion, threw the biggest parties, and then sank into depression, because he had gone from being someone who meant a great deal to a community to being just another billionaire. He lost his sense of purpose and importance overnight.
So before selling, the question is not only the sticker price. It is what the business gives you apart from money. For a founder that can be identity, purpose, the colleagues, the work you actually enjoy, even the name people know you by. Ask what your life looks like the day after you no longer have it, and whether you are genuinely at peace with that version of yourself. Tiah’s own goal for Colony now is smaller and clearer than it used to be: build an asset that generates cash every year and can run without him, so it can quietly fund the thing he cares about, which is being able to help the people who work with him when they hit a crisis.
6. Why you are worth more than you think
The video was made with Volvo Car Malaysia around a simple exercise called the Selamat calculator, which tries to put a number on what your safety is worth to the people who depend on you. It asks about your role in your family, your responsibilities, the dreams you have not fulfilled yet, and returns a figure. Tiah’s came out at about RM21 million, and his honest reaction was that the real number is much higher, because his business could replace him and his family cannot.
He makes the point with his own son, who is old enough now to love luxury watches and understand what money buys. Offer that boy a hundred million ringgit to never see his father again, and he will not take it. Try the same trade in your own head, with your parents, your partner, your kids, and the answer comes back just as fast. We are worth far more to the people who love us than we ever credit ourselves for.
The trap is that we over-index on what we can see. A table in front of you obviously exists, so you believe in it. Money in an account is visible, so it feels real and important. The things that matter most, a marriage, your peace of mind, being genuinely present, are invisible, so we quietly treat them as if they count for less. His advice for protecting that unseen part is unglamorous and specific: surround yourself with people who lift you up, and put distance between yourself and the ones who make you feel small.
What to actually do with this
You do not need to sell a company to use any of this. A few of the moves carry straight over:
- Name your enough. Put an actual figure on the income and the savings that would let you sleep, and write down what it is for. A target you can name stops sliding the way a vague “more” always does.
- Price the chase honestly. Before you take on the next thing, weigh what it pays against what it costs you in time, focus and family. Money you do not need is expensive.
- Ask the people at home. If a partner or child says you are physically present but somewhere else, treat that as data, not nagging. It is the earliest signal that you have overshot.
- Watch cash, not the flattering number. Whether you run a business or a household, track whether the balance actually grew this month. It is the one figure that will not lie to you.
- Run the trade in your head. Would you swap the people you love for the next rung of money or status? The answer tells you what you are really optimising for.
None of this is a case for settling for less. The point is that a baseline of money removes real stress and buys real freedom, and that almost everything past that baseline is paid for in time, health and the people you would never actually trade away. Most of us will spend years grinding for the one good stretch that makes it all look worth it, and the trick is to hang on through the quiet years without losing what the money was supposed to protect in the first place. Work out your number, then go home and be there.
