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Is A SGD 1 Million Dividend Portfolio Enough For Me To Retire?

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One of the questions I see many financial bloggers and "fin-fluencers" talk about frequently on social media is "How much money is enough to retire"?  Some people swear by the 4% rule, which is a good gauge for a start, or even 3% rule for more conservative investors.  Others say you need SGD 2 million or even SGD 3 million before you can sleep peacefully at night. As for me, I have never been fixated on a particular net worth.  My goal has always been much simpler.  Build a portfolio that generates enough reliable dividend income to fund my everyday life (anything that generates an annual dividend that is 1.2 to 1.5 times annual expenses is a great safety net according to my previous writeup .)  If my portfolio eventually reaches SGD 1 million, then perhaps that becomes my finish line, not because SGD 1 million is a magical number, but because I believe it represents a portfolio that is resilient enough to weather life's inevitable financial storms. As I look t...
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What Past Crises Taught Me About Preparing For The Next One

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One thing I have learned from investing is that nobody knows where the next crisis will come from. Every crisis feels different while it is happening.  The headlines are different, the causes are different, the fear is different.  Yet when I look back at history, I notice that the lessons are often surprisingly similar.  Markets panic, asset prices collapse, people become fearful, and eventually, life moves on.  As investors, we do not get rewarded for accurately predicting every crisis.  We get rewarded for surviving long enough to benefit from the recovery. That is why I find it useful to study past crises, not because I think the next crisis will look exactly the same, but because understanding how previous generations navigated difficult times can help me better prepare my portfolio, my finances, and my lifestyle for whatever comes next. When I look back over the last few decades, four major crises stand out: the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, the 2000 Dot-...
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Why CPF Became The Empress Of My Portfolio

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When I was younger, I never viewed Central Provident Fund (CPF) very positively.  Like many Singaporeans and PRs, I saw it mainly as restricted money.  It was money deducted every month from salary, locked away for decades, and inaccessible during the years when financial pressure felt the heaviest.  At that stage of life, CPF did not feel empowering.  It felt limiting.   However somewhere in my late 30s and early 40s, my thinking about money changed quite significantly.  I stopped viewing investing mainly through the lens of maximizing returns.  Instead, I started thinking much more about stability, future vulnerability and long-term survival, basically, managing an entire portfolio as a whole.  Aging changes financial psychology very deeply.  Once parents grow older, healthcare risks become more visible, and retirement starts feeling real rather than theoretical, stability suddenly becomes extremely valuable.  That was when I slo...
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Sixth Month of Phase 1 Barista FIRE

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This post is just for personal reference, to record my personal income and expenses in my journey towards Barista FIRE. For the month of June, nothing special happened.  It was just a normal month, with normal expenses.  The only event that will impact my finances partially is the end of lease for my tenant in Johor, and he will be moving to KL for other work opportunities.  This meant that my unit will be empty again, and I will rely on my agent to help me seek another tenant as soon as possible so that healthy cashflow returns for my finances in Malaysia.   In addition, I would like to praise my home country, Malaysia, as quite a few improvements have been implemented recently which made my life easier.  One of them is I am now able to renew my driving license via online app.  So this saves me time and eliminates the need for me to travel back to Johor UTC to queue and renew.  This month will be the Johor State Elections.  I should return...
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Portfolio Update Q2 2026

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This month marks the end of the 2nd quarter of 2026.  Thus it's definitely a good time for me to record the performance of my portfolio to track how it has been. To recap, I started my SG Dividends Portfolio in late 2017, and I began tracking the dividends and all reinvestment done starting 2018.  To date, my SG Dividends Portfolio consist of banks, REITs and defense technology.  On the other hand, I only started the US Growth Portfolio in late December 2021, but I have since liquidated my entire US Growth Portfolio in September 2025 to pay off my Malaysia mortgage loan.  In March 2026, I started the MY Dividends Portfolio, which currently consist of only banks and consumers.  The purpose of this is to complement my SG Dividends Portfolio, and hopefully generate dividends in MYR to hedge against forex risks when I FIRE.   Being a relatively conservative investor, I prefer to dollar cost average (DCA) into the market to slowly build up my portfolio....
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