My wife and I are your typical, average, graduate working couple, 43 & 45 years old and earning $116k pa and $124k pa respectively. We are good at timing our property purchase and hence able to upgrade from a 4 room HDB flat to a luxury condo. We bought our first flat direct for HDB at a very cheap price (so cheap I am ashamed to mention here as it will invite jealousy). We stayed for many years and able to pay off the loan in less than 10 years. Then in 2006, we realised the market was down and we manage to buy a luxury condo for only $1m. We sold our flat at a big profit and bought the condo with a loan of $500k only. Now the condo is worth $2.2m and our loan left is only $200k as we used our bonuses to pay down the loan.

We plan to continue staying in the condo which is in a prime district for the next 20 years. When we retire, we will sell the condo and buy a cheap one bedroom suburban condo. We estimate we will have about $3m in remaining cash which we can invest in dividend stocks and REITs which will give us a 5% yield on average. So we can get $150k pa in dividends. As mentioned by some, we will get a condo next to an MRT station so that we do not need a car.