If you are wealthy, you should show empathy towards your fellow beings and be humble. If you are not wealthy, then all your proclamations below are hollow talk.

Anyway, I was going to share with guys on the talk given by CPF to prospective retirees like myself. The talk was titled "Your Assurance in Retirement".

At the urging of one my golf kakis, I attended the above talk recently. He said it was informative and quite useful, so I was curious to see what I might have missed since I thought I knew enough of the CPF schemes available for retirees from their website.

The presentation slides were catchy with abundant use of nice pictures and graphics to help in getting the message across.

What caught my attention and set me thinking was this. The presentation described the typical wealth cycle as a wealth accumulation phase (from the moment you begin to earn an income to retirement) and then wealth de-accumulation phase (from the day you retire till you pass on).

What went through my mind was how to break this cycle and prolong the accumulation phase and not get into the wealth de-accumulation phase. Obviously you will need to continue working as long as possible to prolong the accumulation phase. In order not to get into the wealth de-accumulation phase upon retirement, you need to be able generate passive income and this passive income must be in excess of your annual expenses to allow your wealth to continue to grow and keep up with inflation.

To sustain our desired lifestyle and the accompanying expense, I estimated that we would need a base wealth of $6m (today's value) in order to have a "perpetual" passive income generating machine.

Based on the trajectory of our savings record, we would need to work another year to achieve the $6m target.

By similar projection (ceteris paribus) working till we are 60 would push it $7m. Working till 65 like what some of my colleagues are doing would put us in the $10m band.

Right now, we just set our sight on the $6m first. A step at a time.