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.

Cry for Govtech if you wish, but you should be crying tears of joy

About a week ago, one of my very skilled first-year students asked me to write a letter of recommendation so she could get an internship at GovTech. I said no.

My student is not just one of the most highly skilled students in my class; she also has a lot of gumption, having personally led her team in hackathons, and is mature beyond her years. So I explained that while GovTech produces some pieces of software that many of us know and love, like Singpass, I told her that to grow in the organisation, she might pick up some bad habits from HQ, like ringfencing her work, backstabbing her colleagues, or stonewalling useful initiatives. I also did not want such a capable student to be hurt when joining an organisation with a different career ladder for scholars and farmers; perhaps her stint in ITE and N-level grades might be held against her. I told her that I would be more than happy to provide a glowing recommendation to a tech firm or a bank, and that she should have the confidence to aim higher in life.

Then, almost like a miracle, the news of GovTech's retrenchment of 93 employees hit, and I was stunned. So I decided to pen my thoughts on this blog.

The first point I wanted to make is that on social media, I've noticed little sympathy for folks affected by the reorganisation. Most private-sector workers and businessmen felt it was the right move, and that removing all the "dead wood" could result in a more dynamic and forward-looking organisation. So if folks are generally positive about this news, I actually believe civil service leaders should be blamed for not doing this sooner. I remember during my time, some of the things I had to do were patently absurd. One presentation I had to make to senior management was explaining what an API was (initially I thought I had to explain what a REST-based API was, but no, it's just an API, you know remote function calls ). My technological skills atrophied so badly that I, somehow, became a subject-matter expert in food catering, the only thing I'm good at, given that none of my procurement papers succeeded. 

The second point I wanted to make is just how wonderful the retrenchment package is. It's one month for every year worked up to 25 years, plus an extra 3 months! And too little credit went to AUSBE. AUSBE are the real heroes in this story. When I was there, having come from NTUC-ARU, I volunteered my time with AUSBE because I had learnt to respect non-degree associate staff from my NTUC days, and you will not find another group that so doggedly works for their fellow employees outside office hours. This package is so attractive that I know some folks who left GoveTech lamenting that, had they stayed, they would have been able to FIRE immediately with it.

The third point is that government and statutory boards are winners, not losers, in this restructuring effort. The biggest losers are the vendor organisations like NCS, HCL, DXC or even IBM as the government begins to move work in-house. Work will dry up for these organisations, and believe me, when they start retrenching tech workers, there will be no 25 months or 3 months' extra notice when engineers are asked to leave. There's no AUSBE to negotiate for these guys, and many of them are people I know. 

A final story of my days should include a personality we all had to take called Emergenetics. And I vaguely recall that a director had to apologise for the personality test results in the HQ organisation. The reason is that the only kind of personality that can survive in HQ tends to be Green or structured, conscientious types with low openness to new experiences, whereas higher flyers tend to be more yellow or conceptual thinkers or blue, who are analysts. The saddest part of the survey is that folks who "red" or people who have empathy and love interacting with people are noticeably absent in the entire organisation.

This restructuring will bring balance to the organisation, and I'm particularly pleased that the 93 retrenchments are just Phase 1. There are more phases to come, and, if executed well, could mean that no part of the government is safe from obsolescence. If we make our bed with a Tech career, we should never expect an iron rice bowl. 

So, I actually come from reading this with a sense of hope and optimism for GovTech.

Next week, I will return to class and tell my student that I stand corrected in recent events, and I am now willing to complete her recommendation letter to Govtech.

 

Personal Update - Cheating Death and Getting Diarrhoea

 

Today I wanted to take a different spin on a personal update and talk a little bit about my health situation.

Some time ago, I started on insulin jabs, and while I'm seeing improvements in blood sugar, they don't seem to be improving fast enough, and I'm tuning the amount of insulin I am getting on a daily basis. So there is obviously some fear that I won't live long enough, given my short-lived ancestors are kind of short-lived.

So longevity is of great interest to me, and I've been reading a lot of books on it. And the logic is simple - the longer I live, the longer I can compound my wealth, the longer time I can guide my kids on how to manage their finances. 

So immortality is the ultimate game-changer, and I will take personal and financial risks to extend my life just a little bit.

So this billionaire, Bryan Johnson, launched a longevity mix called Blueprint, and I decided to pay about $200+ for two packs of the mixture. You can Google the contents of the mix. I don't think the contents are revolutionary; it's just a mixture of various compounds, all purported to extend your life, in a single package so you don't have to buy them individually.

So I started on this mix based on the recommended dosage and ended up with diarrhoea for a couple of days, and I also experienced bloating and nausea. Then AI told me it's a known issue for folks who take this mix. So I halved my dosage, and I've been able to do this for more than a month already.

I've since been trying to Google the immediate benefits of taking this mix and have found the effects fairly subjective; some people report feeling more energetic, which I can easily get from a cup of coffee, so it's no big deal. Others claim it gives them better sleep, but for me, I have more vivid dreams I remember when I wake up.

Anyway, while I'm still in the middle of this regime, I found out that Bryan Johnson has developed some kind of autoimmune disease that really ruined his plan for immortality.

I think at this stage, what humanity has achieved, you can't cheat death at the moment.

Instead, you get a lot of diarrhoea trying.

Anyway, if any reader is taking this mix, do share your notes with me on how it has changed your life.

Personal Update - Books I am reading

 

The effect of moving funds to my CDP from the higher-turnover IBKR is that I'm more relaxed about financial thought leadership, can take a chill pill, collect more dividends every quarter, and read material beyond the finance domain. 

So one of the effects of being really into using AI to create portfolio management tools and streamlining my work is that I actually think that it's now warranted to pick up new technical skills. But these are not the traditional coding skills that engineers need to do their work. To utilise AI to become a stronger builder, one has to pick up skills in technical architecture, which is too steep a learning curve for me, as I lack the basic foundations to start. 

So naturally, I turned to AI to suggest a plan for me based on where I am and where I needed to go as a builder. 

And AI pointed to The Pragmatic Programmer by Thomas and Hunt.

This turned out to be an enjoyable, relaxed read, and the advice is so powerful and general that I suspect the skills transfer across domains. After all, a legal contract is just a piece of code in English, ultimately parsed and compiled by a human judge or the counterparties. Simple maxims like "Don't Repeat Yourself" and Orthogonality are useful even in contract drafting or hardware systems design. 

Looks like I might have to find an excuse to teach my Data Analytics students this if they aspire to higher education.

( For folk in Law, the equivalent text is Learning the Law by Glanville Williams, which Min Shan recommends every law student read 4 times before embarking on a legal course. I must be so mediocre because I read it only once. There is, sadly, no equivalent in finance; The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham is great but does not come close.  )

Of course, that's not the only book that was interesting.

Last year, I was crazy about Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive, but this year I found a series that topped it. 

Dungeon Crawler Carl is the flagship offering in the LitRPG genre, and the author likely has years of gaming experience to write a work as absurd and entertaining as this series.

The story is about a guy named Carl and his girlfriend's Persian Cat called Princess Doughnut, going on a dungeon crawl and starring in a reality show watched by almost every alien in the universe.

The most exciting thing about this book is that I was raving about it so much that my 10-year-old son has started reading it. 

Parents who read the book will note how violent and vulgar it is, but I'll do anything to get my own to read a book that is just words.

Ok, this summarises the personal updates on my blog. We will get back to regular programming on this blog after this.