If FIRE is a trap, then why am I so happy with my life?

This weekend, the Business Times launched a new column entitled Switching Lanes. This column is after the hearts of many folks who read this blog because it focuses on the realities of life after a full-time career. I encourage blog readers to support this column, as I expect my own blog to issue rebuttals and support for such articles in the future.

And this is why I enjoyed Kenneth Goh's article, titled "The best investment in your 20s isn't your portfolio." This article, in my opinion, is rife with logical fallacies, and even though the author has disclaimed that his opinions are his own, I can't help but feel that the views expressed also coincidentally align with those of financial institutions.

First of all, the article proposes that the best investment in your 20s isn't your portfolio. That's hard to disagree with even for the stanchest FIRE advocate. Health is probably a much better investment of your time. Even some relationships are worth investing in. 

But the author does not mention health and relationships at all.

Instead, the authors begin by discussing the FIRE movement, and credit goes to him for referring to Jacob Lund Fisker, whom I consider a real father of the FIRE movement, rather than to Vicki Robins, who is very much a free spirit and an inheritor of wealth.

At this point in the article, the logical flaws begin to surface as the author constructs a strawman of the FIRE movement. A strawman is an exaggerated illustration that can be easily toppled by a simple argument. This strawman is a troglodyte, a caricature that saves so much money that he forgets to network with other people and build up his human capital, which the author deftly channels by invoking Nobel prize-winning economist Gary Becker. 

I've been into FIRE for 25+ years, and if you follow my blog and observe my LinkedIn, I suspect I've been building my human capital way longer than the author. I've also had personal correspondence with Jacob Lund Fisker, who is a very friendly guy and a brilliant Renaissance man, a Physics PhD and a handyman. In our private conversation, I remember admiring Jacob for his handyman skills, but told him that in Singapore, these skills can be outsourced for a low fee, and I can afford to build other competencies. 

Therefore, I don't think you can position people in the FIRE movement as antisocial troglodytes who sacrifice career networking for their investment portfolios.

This is a false dichotomy. There is no tradeoff. 

I can be frugal and also have coffee sessions with businessmen I admire (many as frugal as me!) . 

However, this article does have the benefit of prompting us to reflect on why people think financial capital comes at the expense of human capital.

A majority of the FIRE movement are INTJs; they are naturally introverted. So I can argue that even if they do not engage in portfolio building, INTJs can do many other things to keep themselves intellectually satisfied, like watch anime endlessly and argue with people on Reddit, learn Klingon, build AI bots, play Dungeons and Dragons, or anything but build their human capital through relentless networking.

Finally, the author and the financial institutions need to really do some soul searching on the people in their 50s today who CAN NOT RETIRE.

There are plenty of Singaporeans who spend their 20s building networks, playing office politics, and getting ahead. Not all of them succeed; some gain minor advantages and become addicted to a high-status lifestyle, but all of us eventually get older, and at 45, many Singaporeans see their salaries plateau. Soon enough, how can the author explain the many pre-sales consultant types retrenched in their 50s and forced to draw down on their assets?

At this stage, someone who read Gary Becker can argue that a significant amount of human capital has already been transformed into financial capital. 

So does it make sense to continue the endless circle jerk of professional networking and looking for a Patron in the office?

Beyond a particular point, you need real skills to manage your financial capital. 

It starts with a small VWRA or IWDA position with a custodian broker limiting your expense ratio to less than 0.5% a year. Then it evolves into a full-fledged portfolio spanning real estate, dividend stocks, and, yes, algorithmic advisors in Python to get sky-high Sharpe ratios. The human capital required to code, invest and reap your rewards is, in fact, quite immense.

But we need to ask ourselves this: Why do financial institutions genuinely hate the FIRE movement?

It is because we are so good that we prefer to invest our money ourselves. Wrap fees and expensive commissions are something for other people. 

So, why park my funds with you when I can buy shares in your bank? 

 ( Apologies, I gave a nice title to this article, but actually did not answer the question. LOL ! )

Levelling up before the Year of the Fire Horse

 

While the YouTube channel has not seen much new content, I've been quietly levelling up some of my skills. The most obvious is that I'm learning how to chain together Nano Banana, Grok, and the Capcuts to create video sequences so that future videos on my channel are not just PowerPoint presentations with financial content. You can click on the link above to see what I have in store for you in the future.

But of course, using AI tools and shaping better prompts hardly counts as levelling out in this modern context. 

In fact, for the first time in my life, I managed to write some Python code to trade directly from my IBKR account. I've been postponing this for a long time, as I've always preferred to use my programming skills to build advisors and keep an execution manual, but given that I've picked up some modern books on investing for programmers, I've managed to get access to some rudimentary ( and very buggy) code to get started on some advanced trading algorithms. 

For those who are interested, for now, all I can say is that you need Trader Workstation (TWS) for IBKR, a Jupyter notebook on your local machine, and a way to enable the required APIs in TWS. My first program purchased double the number of stocks I wanted because the original script demoed a market and a limit order, so I had the happy problem of buying double the number of shares, which has since gone up. The opposite tragedy could have happened to someone else. 

Sadly, as the setup is unauthorised for Singapore users and requires some technical proficiency, it will be some time before I can create a course out of this. I might work with Dr Wealth to have personalised 1-1 coaching on such complex technical setups, but this probably cannot come cheap.

There are some things I really like to get better at. I can build Python scripts that send prompts to ChatGPT and use responses to analyse local companies. I'm still struggling to use RAG to process downloaded analyst reports. There's also a desperate need to catch up on agentic AI, which remains a dynamic field, and to independently research and make investment recommendations on it, so there will definitely be a few Udemy courses I will need to start before CNY.

Hopefully, my YouTube channel will be back with new content as early as next week. 

Malaysia will not be cheap forever, you know...

 

I just returned from a short trip to JB with my mum to clear some paperwork with Tenaga National. This was a 2-day, 1-night trip to accommodate my mum, who might not be able to handle the heavy traffic across the Causeway. And this trip is a little special because I made some financial mistakes that I can share with the readers.

The first major mistake was booking the hotel directly. KSL charged me $120 SGD for one night for a superior room with two beds. It included breakfast, albeit a really bad one, valued at about $40 SGD for two pax. The experience at Tower 1 KSL was very negative as the wifi did not work well, a power socket could not charge my phone, and there was barely any hot water, even at the hottest setting. But it's only one night, so I can soldier through it.

The second mistake was eating the usual at Meng Meng Duck. We ordered a meat platter, some hot-and-sour vegetables, and even shared a plate of rice. The total bill was $104 MYR, which is quite high for an essential meal for just one person.

The third mistake was ordering a stingray in the area outside KSL. There's been a change in management, and a boisterous Chinese lady has been calling the shots. The food is no longer undercooked and quite tasty, but one medium stingray, some kangkong, and two bottles of mineral water cost is $110 MYR. And the entire place is so absurd that a family was playing firerackers in the midst of the open-air eatery! I would be fine, but it really annoyed the hell out of the stray cats in the area, and no one stopped them. 

So basically, if you don't manage your spending well in JB, even with the mighty SGD, JB can be expensive sometimes. The damage from one night's stay is equivalent to almost a week's rent I collect from my property there.

Is the experience still cheaper than SG? Sure, but in SG, I stay in a house I own and know where to get $2.80 chicken rice.

When Singaporeans think about investing in JB, there are definitely places heating up near Bukit Chagar, and some FIRE enthusiasts consider Malaysia a retirement destination. Heck, in my lessons, my students almost always do the sums to work out how much it costs to survive in KL each month.

But we need to think about second-order effects as well. With better transport links, more Malaysians will want to work in SG, and to prevent them from doing so, salaries need to go up across the board for service staff, which will impact how much Singaporeans enjoy their weekend trips.

In time, the JB discount will shrink, and Singaporeans will question whether the hilarious bad service staff who can't even count change is worth the trouble, why the jacuzzi's water is lukewarm, or why someone is throwing firecrackers within 2 metres of me while I'm eating an overpriced sting ray.

All these problems will come home to roost. And don't get me started on the oversupply of property coming to JB soon.

Ok, now let's turn to my content creation this week. I don't have a new video, but I have a collaboration with the Financial Coconuts on The Assembly Place IPO. Enjoy!

In which I present a useful framework to understand one's personality?

 

I've always believed that, in career and financial planning, a person needs a deeper understanding of their personality to succeed, but many frameworks exist, and adherents to one often pour scorn on others. For example, folks who subscribe to the Big5 OCEAN personality models pooh-pooh the folks who follow the MBTI framework. Of late, having exposed myself to the idea that personality can be determined by neurotransmitters, as in my last article, I am beginning to see the usefulness of treating all personality frameworks as a stack, like the OSI model in networking engineering.

If we can arrange theories of personality as a stack, we can start at low levels, examining biochemistry, and move up to models based on actual brain structure, like the OCEAN model. Above OCEAN are the more HR-oriented models, like MBTI. We can then go even further and incorporate ancient techniques, such as the Enneagram, above the MBTI. Above the more prosaic models are astrological and metaphysical models. In this way, we respect the models validated by science, but we also do not discard models that facilitate communication in pop culture or company culture (like MBTI) or models derived from our own cultures and ancestry (like Bazi).

As we build our personality stack, we can gain a deeper understanding of ourselves so as to effect consequential change in our lives. That's the application layer, where I tend to use personality models to explain why some people achieve FIRE earlier than others, and HR professionals explain why some people are suited to particular jobs. Couples can also spend countless hours examining their significant others' personalities.

So, with this insight, I reveal parts of my own personality stack.

a) Neurotransmitter - The Molecule of More by Lieberman and Long

Reading the book explained a lot about my behaviours in recent times, when I constantly feel I can never enjoy the present moment like other people do. These days, I stare into a blank space to think about the future of not just financial markets, my impending doom and whether my kids can make it as adults. And I'm always acting to remove future obstacles in my life. I have a dopaminergic personality, and I respond weakly to the "here and now" neurotransmitters such as serotonin and oxytocin.

b) OCEAN - Just Google a personality test online

The OCEAN model is best in class because each factor, Extraversion, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Openness to New Experience and Neuroticism, can be traced to a physical structure of the brain.

I'm quite familiar with my own personality here. I'm highly disagreeable and justly more conscientious than my peers. I should do ok with money matters, as I enjoyed being rude to financial advisors. They are not as well-trained as I am, and when I buy term and invest the rest, I really invest the rest.

c) MBTI - Also available in many places online

The MBTI does not need to be strongly validated by psychologists. The power of MBTI is that it maps to an easily identifiable stereotype that HR professionals can use. It is also quite dynamic and contextual. 

I tested ESTJ when I was 18, and I continue to be very data-driven and empirical, but I was raised by N, so I am quite intuitive and trust my gut before I make a trade so over the years, I shifted to ENTJ, and now as I get older I become more antisocial and AI rates me an INTJ when it reads my blog. So I pay more attention to ENTJ weaknesses, like being blunt, when I read notes on social media.

Today, I still identify more with ENTJ, but I'm less reckless with age and still enjoy hanging out more than my friends, who are getting more and more reclusive over the years.

In this layer, you will find many alternative models that generate significant revenue for consultants like DISC, Gallup StrengthsFinder, and Emergenetics. I have done them all and conclude that it's profitable to do this.

d) Enneagram

If you can accept MBTI and its lack of a variable to include neuroticism and how it shifts from context to context, then you will have no problem using a simple 9 personality archetype system like the Enneagram.

For me, I'm a type 3 Performer that is gradually shifting to a type 5 Sage because I'm an investment trainer. I don't find Enneagram particularly useful, but it's good for cocktail conversations.

You will also find other fun diversions like Kingdomality in this layer. Also, for folks who are into philosophy, some questions, like whether you tend to be a Stoic or an Epicurean, can reside in this layer too.

e) Bazi - Chinese Metaphysics

As we reach levels where models can hardly be validated by science or even conventional logic, why would someone like me enjoy analysing my Bazi?

If you follow Bazi experts like Joey Yap, you will notice that Chinese Metaphysics have evolved from fortune telling into life coaching, so Joey Yap videos are as fun to watch as TED talks or presentations from McKinsey Consultants. Also, I think it's very hypocritical to challenge Chinese metaphysics and believe that stock prices will bounce off a resistance level or any projection from an economist.

But I have a deeper rationale that might astound even Joey Yap - I use LLMs to analyse my Bazi, and I suspect that AI has somehow trapped my writings and content in its training models, giving the readings with an eerie accuracy that a human astrologer couldn't possibly predict. I will provide more content on this on the Chinese New Year, but here's just a small snippet.

According to Bazi, my favourable element is Earth, my unfavourable element is Fire. And throughout my decade of life, investments with an Earth theme have always done well for me, despite years of underperformance. I held AIMS APAC REIT until I have my full capital returned to me in the form of dividends. And yet, even when I identified Palantir as early as during my time in IDA, when it first came to town, invested in it early, and participated in its IPO, fate intervened to prevent me from making real money from it.

I would not use Bazi to make specific investments, but my Earth element ensures I will always hunt for a margin of safety, steady dividends, and a low beta in my portfolio. Even when I invest based on trend-following algorithms, which is a Fire endeavour, my algorithm has led me to commodities like Lithium (Metal or Earth investment), which has made me the most money.

Even if you discount the predictive power of metaphysics, there are two practical applications of metaphysics. You can identify a stance in the way you live your life. Earth is defensive, patient, long-term and trundles along slowly. Also, as you identify your elements, you begin to arrange events in your life into a more coherent framework to understand the meaning of your existence.

I'm still not at the point of paying for expensive consultations, but I strongly urge you guys to just try it out for fun with LLMs. I intend to do a more specific article on how to do this with a paid version of ChatGPT.

Depending on your culture, you would also find Western Astrology in this layer, which I intend to play with soon enough.

Conclusion - Build your stack

In summary, I am proposing a much more open-minded approach to understanding your personality so that you can make better decisions in life and derive more meaning from the events that happen to you. 

You can use some hints on where to find these personality tests, and do share with me how things go.

Dividends and Dopamine, that other D&D I play

 

I made the right choice to read The Molecule of More by Lieberman and Long last month, and the core idea is that almost all of our motivation comes from the neurotransmitter Dopamine. The book's idea is also useful, as I take some time to understand myself slightly better.

After 5 decades, I've been noticing some of my own personality traits that are very different from those of others and from almost all my friends. I plan so far ahead and create so many contingencies that I don't really have the capability to enjoy the present. Otherwise, I can enjoy anticipating a nice soak at the Onsen at Kallang Wave, but often get impatient once I'm actually there, taking the dip in the hot pools. I can't seem to find an MBTI or Big5 explanation for this until I read this volume. The closest character I can find is a Warhammer 40,000 entity known as Kairos the Fateweaver, a Greater Daemon of Tzeentch (shown above).

According to the book, I have a dopaminergic personality, which makes me more susceptible to a dopamine rush and less affected by other neurotransmitters like serotonin and endorphins that help me enjoy the moment.

Of course, the next thing I had to do was to understand my obsession with building a dividend portfolio that would allow me to live on my dividends, way before more people would even consider retirement planning a bad idea, so here is a powerful table of neurotransmitters that activate when a dividend hits your bank account.

As it turns out, dividends trigger different neurotransmitters, so psychological benefits accrue to people beyond the dopaminergic personality, but it is the anticipatory dopamine that drives the behaviour: self-denial, delayed gratification, and the obsessive frugality that enables FIRE to succeed.

Of course, the rabbit hole goes deeper. Do dividends produce different neurotransmitters than capital gains? ChatGPT has the following answer :

Capital gains may create a different chemical cocktail in the brain, which may explain the stubbornness of dividend investors and why it's not as simple as telling them to sell parts of an ETF to generate synthetic income.

I will leave some disturbing ideas for readers.

Once we know which neurotransmitter needs to be active to generate a financial behaviour, some crazy technocrat can find a way to stimulate a population into consuming recklessly. Technically, the approved technique is via a marketing campaign, but cocaine can throw a person's dopamine into overdrive. 

What if we're becoming unsure as to whether someone is really pulling the strings on our financial behaviour? 

I survived a nightmare scenario for CDP investors

 

Today's article is relevant to old-school investors who hold their stocks in CDP. I'm sharing my personal story for two reasons: first, to help CDP investors who haven't encountered this issue before; and second, to seek comments from other investors who have found better ways to deal with the situation.

So let's start with the investment that led to the fracas. I have an ETF called IS Asia HYG (Ticker: QL3). This is a good investment for me because it yields decently and is not correlated with banks and REITs on SGX, as it invests in high-yield Asian Bonds. It pays every 3 months at the end of March, June, September and December. Because payment is in USD, it is often delayed by a day or over the weekend, so it pays in the dividend dry months of January, April, July, and October in SGD directly into the bank account.

I was tracking the dividend, and on the 2nd of January 2026, not only did the dividend not arrive, but the Direct Credit Scheme, some sort of dividends pipeline that connects to a joint-account CDP of mine with a DBS joint account, was found to be suspended.

There was obviously some cause for panic, since this had never happened to me before, so I did the worst thing an investor can do: I consulted ChatGPT to find out why.

ChatGPT took me on a wild goose chase. It informed me that joint account connections are no longer valid and that banks will, based on events affecting the account, suspend these links in the future without grounds for appeal. 

As you can imagine, I panicked even further. 

I went online and tried to re-establish the link. On Monday, I went to the CDP office itself.

As it turns out, CDP no longer has counters. If you are physically present, there is a phone to dial in, and you wait like everyone else who calls a call centre. Eventually, I managed to get someone to explain to me that re-establishing the link was the right thing to do, and that the joint-account status just means the banks will take longer to activate the link. The call-centre staff explained that the breakage was a processing error caused on their side.

It took about 4 business days from link activation to re-establish the link, and the dividend came a day after that.

So the TL;DR of the story is: if a dividend is late, check the Direct Credit Scheme for the account; if it is suspended, just re-activate it using the bank account it was previously tied to.

 But the story is not over.

Before I even received my dividend, CDP decided to conduct a KYC check on me. Initially, I wrote back in anger, asking whether KYC was a prerequisite to re-establish my DCS, as it felt like a punishment when the processing mistake was theirs. 

At the moment, I submitted all my KYC documents as I did not want to delay subsequent payments, but that took at least 2 man-hours to generate my pay slips and bank statements.

So all-in-all, 2026 has been an administratively tough year because my dividend pipeline broke. 

I have no idea what would happen if the investor is an old boomer who suddenly finds his cash flow cut off and would need to go online to re-establish the link.

It's 2026 ! Happy New Year everyone !

 

2026 should be an exciting year ahead for Singapore investors, but I shall wait for Dr Wealth to publish my articles, so just hang on while Dr Wealth collates the input from all their trainers.

At the moment, I have yet to come up with a coherent plan for 2026. I would still have law lessons to teach, and I'm still forming my ERM class for March 2026. So there are no concrete plans to launch a new initiative as yet.

What is new in my life is formal singing classes, and I intend to do this until I can participate in a concert in April 2026. This is surprisingly uncomfortable and hard, as I've been singing wrong all this time at karaoke, and I'm going through the bottom of the J-Curve at the moment, as I can't hit my head voice yet. Still, I am patient and will see whether I can sustain this after April's milestone.

The rest of my plans will be finalised at the Chinese New Year. In the past, I have always been able to find something positive in every new year, as I follow both the horoscopes of the Tiger and Rat. (I was born in the year of the Tiger but the day and month of the Rat.) But according to some readings for 2026, both Rats and Tigers will have a challenging year ahead.

So right now I'm waiting for Joey Yap to release details on his projections. Joey Yap is my favourite astrologer because he sounds more like a management consultant than a Bazi expert. His advice is also good, even if you do not believe in astrology - it's probably the same thing that a business mentor will say.

The preview for me is that Rats need to experience some kind of change and pivot in 2026, while Tigers have strong academic luck. So I expect to find more creative ways to spend my SkillsFutures in 2026. I should also be attending a talk on PhD programmes in SMU. 

Anyway, here's to a fantastic 2026, and I will catch up with you for more updates over the weekend.