Catch me on Chills 276: The Smarter Way To Build Wealth While Working Full-Time

Most people trying to get rich faster are optimising the wrong variable. They're looking for a better fund, a better broker, a better entry price — when the portfolio is still too small for any of that to matter. That was the starting point for this week's Chills with TFC episode, where The Financial Coconut put three of us in one conversation: Chris How (semi-retired, retireby50.me), Chris Chong (ex-accountant, 45K-subscriber FIRE channel), and me. One commenter in the video called it "Chris's universe" — accurate, and a reasonable summary of how the hour went.

The core argument won't surprise anyone who's read Growing Your Tree of Prosperity or sat through my $100,000 challenge material: for someone in their 20s or 30s, the return on a small portfolio is noise compared to the return on growing income and controlling spending. Financial independence is a cash-flow engineering problem before it's an investing problem. Salary truncation — fix the lifestyle cost, direct the surplus, invest it on a system — still does more work than any stock pick. That hasn't changed since 2005. It's just less interesting to say than "which counter should I buy."

The more useful part of the discussion was what's aged badly, and why. Not just a list — the reasoning behind each one:

• Crypto hype rewarded timing, not process. Most people who made money were early, not right, and the strategy doesn't survive being repeated.
• Thematic funds chase last quarter's winner into your portfolio at the point it's most expensive, with a fee structure built for the fund house's marketing calendar, not your holding period.
• Job loyalty as a wealth strategy conflates tenure with security. It ignores that the employer's incentives and yours diverge the moment restructuring becomes cheaper than raises.
• Over-reliance on one strategy fails the same way concentrated stock positions fail — it works until the one condition it depends on stops holding, and there's no second system to fall back on.

We also went through robo-advisors, brokers, CPF, and regular savings plans versus the newer dynamic RSPs — and the thread connecting all of them is that every platform has an incentive that isn't automatically yours. A broker earns from turnover. A robo-advisor earns from AUM regardless of your outcome. That's not a reason to avoid them; it's a reason to know what you're being sold before you decide whether it fits.

Which is the real question the episode keeps returning to: not "what gives the highest returns," but "what game am I actually playing, and does this strategy fit my life?" Same question I put to students in the "Are You Investing or Just Collecting Stocks?" sessions — most retail investors can show you a portfolio but not a strategy, and the gap only becomes visible after something breaks.

Disclosure, since it's directly relevant to the RSP discussion: this episode is sponsored by Webull, and part of the conversation covers their Dynamic RSP — reportedly the first of its kind in Singapore. Mechanically, it adjusts contribution size to price: more when prices fall, less when they run up, instead of the fixed monthly amount a standard RSP commits you to. That's a variation on dollar-cost averaging worth understanding on its mechanics, not its marketing. Webull is also running zero-fee US stock and ETF trading — no commissions, no platform fees — separate from the RSP feature and worth checking regardless of which savings plan you use.