STE's Stocks Investing Journey

Sometimes one chart tells a better story than many pages of numbers. The chart above shows my quarterly dividend and interest income since I started investing almost 30 years ago. The blue bars represent the income received in each quarter, while the red area represents the cumulative amount collected over the years. When I first started, the numbers were very small. A few hundred dollars of dividend income in a year did not look significant. There were also many years when progress seemed painfully slow. Yet, as time passed, the effect became more obvious. The quarterly income gradually increased, and the cumulative income curve became steeper. Looking at this chart today, I do not really see money. I see time. I see mistakes made during different market cycles. I see the Asian Financial Crisis, the dot com bubble, the Global Financial Crisis, the European debt crisis, the China slowdown, COVID, wars, Geopolitical tensions, inflation, interest rate shocks and many other periods when i...

When you finally cross the finish line and transition from accumulating wealth to spending it, the mental shift is massive. For years, you’ve been focused on growing the pie. Suddenly, you have to figure out how to eat it without running out before you die. In the local financial community, especially around Singapore, dividend investing is often treated as the holy grail of retirement. The idea of living off passive income, whether from REITs, blue-chip banks, or CPF Life , without ever touching your principal capital sounds incredibly comforting. It’s the classic "don't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs" philosophy. <AI Image> But if you look across the broader global retirement landscape, there is another heavyweight champion: the Safe Withdrawal Rate (SWR) strategy, often associated with the famous 4% rule. Instead of relying solely on whatever cash cash flows your portfolio spits out, an SWR approach involves systematically selling down a diversified po...