It was borne out of necessity that people are building up their own "pension" to sustain their retirement. Gone are the days where there were pensions to take care of people when they retire. Now, only a select group of civil servants have pensions. For the rest of us, we are on our own in our retirement.
Building up a solid investment that can provide sustainable passive income that besides being adequate, and can keep up with inflation takes time and substantial amount of money. It is therefore important to start the process of building up this fund early in your working life. Don't leave it till its too late.
in our case we started building up our investments late. When we started work, there was no Internet and information on investments and retirement were scant. To be honest, we also didn't bother with it. We now regretted not paying attention to this when younger.
But luckily for us, when we bought a bigger property to house our growing family, we didn't sell off our first property. Instead we rented it out to generate some income. A few years later, the estate went enbloc and we got back 2.5 times what we paid. With that, we bought yet another property to rent out.
And over the years, as our salaries grew, we were more able to save and invest.
To cut the long story short, after 30 long years of working, we have now 3 sources of passive incomes - property rental, dividends from stocks and interest from endowments, single premium insurances, bonds and
CPF. This year, we are expecting $120k passive income in total. To us, this will be our "pension".
Our advise - start building up your investment now when you still have a lot of time!