There is a calculation almost every Malaysian working across the Causeway runs without thinking. A colleague suggests lunch at a place that costs 18 dollars. Somewhere in the back of the mind, a second number appears — roughly 60 ringgit — and a small, involuntary flinch follows. The salary is Singaporean. The instinct is Malaysian.
We talk a lot on Do More about money as a number. But the more interesting conversation is money as a frame of reference — the invisible currency you actually think in, no matter what currency you’re paid in.
The exchange rate you carry around
Economists call it a “reference point.” Everyone has one. For a lot of Malaysians, it was set years ago — the price of nasi lemak growing up, what your first salary felt like, what your parents considered expensive. That anchor doesn’t update just because your payslip does.
So the Malaysian nurse in Singapore, or the engineer in KL who once worked abroad, ends up living between two price worlds. Earning in one, feeling in another. It sounds like a small quirk. It isn’t. That gap quietly decides whether you feel rich, stuck, or behind — often independent of how much you actually have.
Why a “weaker ringgit” isn’t the win it looks like
There’s an assumption that Malaysians working in Singapore must love a weak ringgit — every dollar sent home converts to more. On paper, yes. In real life, it’s more complicated, and the people living it will tell you so.
A weaker ringgit means the home you’re planning to return to is quietly getting more expensive relative to the life you’re building away. It means the friends and family who stayed are absorbing higher costs. It means the “I’ll come back eventually” plan keeps getting rewritten. The remittance looks bigger; the future it’s meant to buy looks smaller.
That tension — earning away, belonging home — is one of the most honest money stories in Malaysia right now, and it rarely fits into a headline.
Three questions worth sitting with
If any of this feels familiar, these are worth an honest answer, ideally on paper rather than in your head:
- What currency do I actually think in? Not the one on your payslip — the one your gut converts everything back to before it decides how you feel.
- Is my reference point still true? A price anchor from ten years ago can make a perfectly reasonable life feel like falling behind. Sometimes the number that needs updating is the one in your head.
- What am I actually optimising for? The bigger remittance, or the life the remittance is supposed to build? Those aren’t always the same thing, and it’s worth knowing which one is steering.
The point isn’t the ringgit
The exchange rate on the news changes daily. The one in your head changes far more slowly — and it has more say over your decisions than any central bank does. Money stress, for a lot of people, isn’t really about the amount. It’s about the distance between what you earn and what you still, quietly, count in.
Closing that gap doesn’t require a raise. Sometimes it just requires noticing the second number — the one that flinched at a 60-ringgit lunch — and asking whether it’s still telling you the truth.
This is the kind of question we keep coming back to on Do More — money not as a spreadsheet, but as the story you tell yourself about worth, home, and enough. If it resonated, the conversations go deeper on the podcast. Explore the Money Matters episodes →
