Our Story

This is my second time writing this post. My first self-hosted blog (also The Finance Smith) on WordPress is no longer active. To be honest, I’m still not sure what I did that caused the WordPress blog to be deleted. All I remembered doing was updating the template and the next thing I know – I had to reactivate my WordPress login details and my blog was gone!

Since it was a relatively new blog, I did not have that many posts on it (still, it was hours of writing!). But I didn’t back up the content so I lost all those posts. Needless to say, that experience was enough to make me try Blogger. Besides, I realised I liked writing and creating content but wasn’t so keen on managing my own self-hosted blog. I reckon Blogger should do fine for now. Let’s see whether this blog gets deleted in a month’s time. I can’t keep re-starting my journey every month on a different blog!

The About page should have information on what this blog is about and you can have a look to see what type of content you can expect to find. This post is about my background and why I started this blog. Since this is my second time writing this post, I just realised that I can refer to myself as Mr Smith and my wife as Mrs Smith. Just something interesting I thought of before having to re-introduce myself.

My wife and I met in university while studying in Melbourne. We graduated in 2009 and worked in Melbourne from 2010 – 2011 before heading to Sydney for work from 2012 – 2013. We moved back to Singapore in 2014 and have been here ever since. We learnt basic personal finance and investment skills from living together overseas since graduating and this is probably something I will mention more in future posts.

Having worked for a number of years, I started to wonder if it is possible to work because I want to and not because I have to. When we were living in Australia, we worked to get salary income that pays for our rent, utilities, groceries, entertainment etc. A portion of our salary income was designated as savings and another portion designated as investments. We were so caught up with building our life in Australia that we never really focused on increasing our investments.

After our return to Singapore to get married in 2014, we started to focus much more on our personal finance and investment skills. The idea that we should not rely on our jobs as our only source of income became a goal. Hence, the aim of this blog is for me to document our journey as a couple (two working professionals) towards Financial Independence. I will write about our personal finance and investment decisions and their impact on our net worth. To hold ourselves accountable, I will try to post actual and percentage figures of our assets, liabilities, income and expenses i.e. net worth.

As with any goal, the timeframe will shape the path I take. 10 years. That’s how much time I have given us to achieve Financial Independence. By 23 February 2026, we should be in a position to work because we want to and not because we have to. This means that we should have sufficient monthly dividend and interest income to cover our monthly expenses (both discretionary and non-discretionary) without any salary income. For the second time on my blog with the same name, let’s begin on this journey!=)