Quote:
Originally Posted by Unregistered
Congrats on your investment achievements and thanks for sharing how you did it. With property prices at current elevated levels, do you think a young guy like myself will be able to replicate your investment successes with property? Call me pessimistic but I feel that the golden era where people can make good money or even strike it rich with the right bets in property is now gone. Some young people can't even afford a roof now, much less make money by upgrading with a second cherry bite.
Someone else commented in this forum that much of the property boom was due to the liberalisation of CPF (people allowed to use CPF to pay for property purchases). I would like to add that opening up to foreign buyers also contributed not insignificantly (I remember reading somewhere about the 6-storey rule). Someone investing at around those times would have benefited the most.
So, if we take property out of the picture, I guess young people are now left with just this strategy and I over-simplify: save up diligently and buy good stocks, hopefully at good prices.
What are your thoughts? |
To have the complete picture, I must also share the hard parts (sacrifices). For one thing, we didnt own a car for a long time. And when we bought our first car, it was a second hand (6 yrs old) car. We didnt go on long overseas vacations until recently. Our yearly holidays were always to M'
sia, and to top it all, we stayed with relatives when there! Needless to say, eating out means eating hawker fares mostly except on special occasions.
It is all about choices. As middle incomes earners, we cannot have our cake and eat it too.
For us, our choice was to delay gratification till we have built up our nest egg. There is no right or wrong. We are just grateful that we are still in good health to start enjoying the fruits at this relatively young age (we are now 50+) than wait till we are unable to (physically).
Those starting off now certainly do not have the same circumstances as 20+ years back. For one thing property prices do not look like it they will go up few hundred percent anymore (also less chance of en-bloc), and they are also costly now. Another is the fact that long term employment is less of a certainty nowadays with shorter economic cycles. And inflation was always low the last 20 years - now it is 5%!
By the way, we are achieving 60K passive income annually (30K+ gross from rental and 30K from
CPF) only problem was the interest in
CPF could not be drawndown till we hit 55.