The SG Hustle

I hate my job. The strange thing is, my job is actually quite simple. The workload is manageable and there is quite a lot of free time in between. I am not constantly stressed by deadlines, I don't work crazy hours, and on most days I can leave work on time. If I were to describe the job to someone else, they might even tell me that I have it pretty good. So I asked myself frequently: if the job is really not that bad, why do I hate it so much? Eventually, I came to accept that maybe I don't actually hate the job. What I hate is the routine and lifestyle that come with having a job. Waking up early, getting ready, travelling to the office, spending most of the day there, going home, sleeping, and then doing the same thing again the next day. Five days a week, week after week. Yes, I have free time during work, sometimes quite a lot. But free time in the office is not really free time. I am still at work and still being monitored to some extent. I can't simply decide that th...

A few days ago, someone slid into my DMs and asked a simple question: "Hey, can you share your portfolio?" I stared at that message for a while before replying. And it made me realize something,  I've quietly stopped sharing my portfolio for a long time now. Not because I forgot, and not because I had some grand strategy of privacy. The real reason is a lot more honest, and a lot more uncomfortable to admit: I didn't think it was "nice" enough to show. If you follow other finance bloggers, you've probably seen the screenshots, seven-figure portfolios, dozens of counters, diversified across REITs, growth stocks, bonds, you name it. Mine isn't that. Mine is small. Painfully simple, even. And for a while, I let that make me feel like I had nothing worth sharing. But here's the thing, I think that mindset is wrong, and I want to correct it, starting with this post. Why My Portfolio Is Small Let's get the elephant in the room out of the ...

In my previous post, I wrote about the new SG Child Support Package announced at National Day Rally 2026, and how I have never touched a single dollar of the Baby Bonus Cash Gift my kids received. Every dollar went into ES3, the SPDR Straits Times Index ETF, and was left alone to grow. Today my kids, ages one and three, are sitting on a combined 7,200 shares. That post got me thinking further. The new $2,000 Child Credits, paid annually per child from age one to sixteen, is not a one-time gift like the Baby Bonus. It is fifteen to sixteen separate payments, arriving every single year like clockwork. So I did a calculation and simulation of my children's portfolio, to see what this could actually turn into if I kept doing exactly what I have been doing. Setting the Assumptions I did not want to build a fantasy projection based on the best years of the stock market. I wanted something conservative, a safe margin, so I used these numbers: Starting point: 7,200 shares, current...

Every year, I watch the National Day Rally not because I am particularly patriotic about policy speeches, but because I have kids now, and every announcement about family support means something different to me than it used to. This year, the government unveiled a new SG Child Support Package, and it is, without exaggeration, one of the more generous moves I have seen in a long time. Here is what it looks like, broken down. The New Package Every Singaporean child, from birth to age 17, will now receive close to $70,000 in direct support. It replaces the old Baby Bonus Cash Gift and Large Families Scheme with something flatter and simpler, where the amount your child receives no longer depends on whether they are your first, second, or fourth. The breakdown goes like this: A $10,000 Baby Gift , paid out in two tranches within the child's first year $32,000 in Child Credits , disbursed as $2,000 cash every year from age one to sixteen A $5,000 CDA First Step Grant , with...

I had an intern this year. She came from Singapore Polytechnic, and I was assigned to be her mentor. In the beginning, I did not think much of it. I asked her name, asked about her course, and moved on with the usual first-week routine. Then we went for an onsite visit to a client. One of the clients looked at her and said she looked young, then asked her age. She said eighteen. I did not really process it. I know polytechnic students are usually between seventeen and nineteen, so the number did not register as anything unusual. Then the client asked, out of curiosity, which year she was born. She said 2008. That was the moment it hit me. Not gradually, not gently. All at once. The Math I Was Not Ready For I was still a first year polytechnic student myself that year. I had not even started my working life. And now, without fully realizing how I got here, I am thirty five years old, with almost eight years of work behind me. I could not sleep that night. I kept turning the same...

Why It's Still Here Over the years I've cycled through quite a few SGX-listed names. Some I sold and never looked back, good riddance. Others, like Hafary, I regret letting go of. But there's exactly one stock I bought years ago and have simply held through all of it: OCBC. I got in at around $12 a share. I didn't have a grand thesis, it was affinity as much as analysis. I use the OCBC banking app daily and it's genuinely one of the better-designed banking UIs in Singapore, clean, fast, doesn't feel like it was built in 2009 and never touched since. My insurance is with Great Eastern, which turns out to be OCBC's own insurance arm. So in a roundabout way, I was already a "customer" of the group before I was ever a shareholder. That familiarity is part of why I never felt the urge to trade in and out of it the way I did with other names. Where the Stock Is Now That patience has paid off. OCBC last traded around S$30.92–31.00, and touched a f...

The Strategy My US portfolio on IBKR is no longer getting fresh capital from me. It now funds itself, premiums collected from selling covered calls keep it self-sustaining. But I don't consider that portfolio "passive." Running a covered call strategy takes ongoing effort: analysing positions, picking strikes, managing assignment risk. It's active income dressed up as options theta. What I'm now channelling my savings into is a genuinely passive income portfolio, built entirely from SGX-listed names. The capital is sitting in a warchest, waiting to be deployed. Below is what's on my radar. One deliberate choice: I'm avoiding individual REITs. Most single REITs are yield vehicles with limited growth, you're paid well, but the unit price rarely goes anywhere over the long run. If I want REIT exposure, I'd rather buy a REIT ETF and get the diversification instead of betting on one manager's ability to grow DPU. 1. Haw Par Corporation (SGX: H...

Recently, there has been quite a bit of news about F&B businesses closing down, with rising rental, manpower and raw material costs often being cited as the main reasons. Some of these businesses have been around for decades, and yet eventually they reach a point where they can no longer continue.  I know I might get flamed for saying this, but these are just my honest thoughts after looking at how the F&B landscape has changed over the years. I don't really believe there is such a thing as a truly loyal customer. A customer doesn't keep going back to the same ice cream stall, fish soup stall or coffee shop simply because they are loyal to the owner. They go back because they like the food, the price, the convenience and the overall experience. The moment they feel that another place offers something better, cheaper or more interesting, they will probably give that place a try. At the end of the day, customers don't owe any F&B business their loyalty. They spend...

I know I’m going to sound like a boomer saying this, but let me remind you, I’m only 35 this year. I’ve been noticing a worrying trend among youngsters, and honestly, it doesn’t seem to be stopping. More and more young people are growing up believing that they can become an influencer or, as we now like to call it, a Key Opinion Leader (KOL), and make a good living without necessarily needing an education or a conventional career. Now, before anyone jumps on me, I want to make it clear that I have absolutely nothing against influencers or KOLs. If you can build an audience, create good content, attract advertisers and turn your personal brand into a successful business, good for you. That is a legitimate career. The problem begins when young people start looking at influencing as an easy alternative to studying, learning a skill or building a proper career. Social media has made this even more dangerous because we are constantly exposed to the winners. We see the influencer driving a F...

 There's a sentence I hear quite often: "I want to quit my job and be my own boss." I understand the appeal. I've thought about it too. There's something attractive about waking up and knowing that nobody is going to tell you what to do. No manager asking where you are. No boss checking whether you've finished something. No one scheduling a meeting at 4pm when you were hoping to leave early. You become your own boss. Sounds like freedom. Except there's one small problem. You don't actually get rid of the boss. You just get more of them. I'm still an employee. And I also have a business. For now, I still have my job. At the same time, I have a side business that I'm building. And honestly, I think this is a useful position to be in because I get to see both sides. As an employee, I have a fairly obvious boss. There are expectations. There are deadlines. There are things I have to do even when I don't feel like doing them. But when the workda...

A while ago, I wrote about my company's restructuring. Like many others, it made me stop and think about something much bigger than just one company. Is job security still a thing? That question led me to another one. What does having a "valuable skill set" even mean in today's workforce? Ten years ago, the answer seemed straightforward. Marketing was booming. If you knew how to create videos, edit content, or run social media campaigns, you had an advantage. Those skills were in demand, and they paid well. Around the same time, being an influencer became a dream career for many young people. Throw a stone into a crowd, and chances are someone would tell you they wanted to become a content creator. Brands were spending heavily on digital marketing, and authentic personalities became valuable assets. Fast forward to today, and the landscape has changed dramatically. AI can now generate marketing copy, design graphics, edit videos, and even create virtual influencers. S...

A few weeks ago, my company went through a small round of restructuring. Retrenchment, if we're using the honest word instead of the corporate one. I was safe. My name wasn't on the list. I want to be careful here, because "I survived" is not a success story. It's just where the dice landed this time. But watching it happen up close taught me more about financial planning than any amount of portfolio modelling I've done for myself or my kids. So here's what I actually saw. The workload didn't disappear with the people. The first thing that happened had nothing to do with money. There's no backfill. The work those colleagues used to do didn't get retrenched along with them, it got redistributed to whoever was left. Same output expected, fewer hands to do it. Nobody warns you about this part. You assume surviving a round of cuts means things go back to normal. They don't. Normal was the headcount before. What's left is the new nor...

A few weeks ago I wrote about the AI simulation I built for my sons' investment portfolios, ang bao money, baby bonus, STI ETF, dividend reinvestment, projected out year by year all the way to 2046, when they'll be 21 and 23. I could tell you, with real historical data behind it, roughly what their portfolios might be worth in twenty years. I had a spreadsheet. I had assumptions. I had a plan. I could not tell you, six months ago, whether I'd be alive and well enough to see any of it. That's not a dramatic exaggeration. It's just what happens when you spend your evenings projecting compound interest for your children and zero minutes projecting anything for yourself. The gap I didn't notice I sit with numbers for a living, in some sense. I like modelling things out, contribution schedules, expected returns, what a portfolio looks like at year 8 versus year 20. It's satisfying to turn a vague hope, "I want my kids to be okay financially" int...