Milestone reached for investment portfolio and Coast FI

I have to clear my carried forward leave from last year by next month so I took these 2 days off to create a long weekend since Wed (public holiday). Not that my routine changed by much since I still dropped off our boy at my parents-in-law’s place yesterday after taking care of him the entire day on Wed. Anyway, we will have him from Fri to Sun so it’s nice to have a break in between. Not easy to look after him for consecutive days and still have to work from home. Even with a helper taking on a lot of the workload. He’s taking his nap now, hence giving me the time to squeeze in a blog post. While my wife catches up on her work.

I was reviewing my net worth Google Sheet to prepare for the end of month update next week after Mon 31 May. It wasn’t immediately obvious to me that something big had happened. My wife & I each have our own asset portfolio tabs where we split our investment portfolio holdings between the various components of ETFs, stocks, bonds, robo-advisors and cryptos. Along with our separate cash and retirement funds balances. I sum them up on a different combined net worth tab but I don’t look at this as often (only after the end of every month). Because I’m more focused on building up and monitoring our individual portfolio asset classes and their interaction.

It may have been due to us aggressively investing our cash in the first 5 months of the year coupled with a recovery in the equity markets that has led to this. Our investment portfolio has crossed S$1m for the first time. An achievement I have been working to unlock for the past decade since starting work in our first graduate jobs in 2010. I wasn’t chasing this as a life goal the whole time but it was more of a long-term target. Something elusive at the beginning but became more tangible in the last few years. I was expecting more of a reaction from myself after realising we had reached this milestone. But it’s surprisingly muted.

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Maybe it’s a function of the current heightened alert Covid restrictions generally putting a dampener on things. Or maybe it was never that important in the first place. Perhaps at the start but its meaning probably faded over time. Because what’s keeping me up at night is whether we are happy with the life we have built for ourselves. Our jobs pay us well enough for the hours we put in at work and the flexible work from home arrangements certainly help to improve work-life balance. As a result, we get to spend more time with our boy but yet choose to drop him off at my parents-in-law’s place on weekdays. Just so they get to spend more time with him too while we take a break. Until he goes to preschool in mid-Jul (it’s been delayed because of the whole Covid situation) and he gets to learn and play with other kids his age.

I read with interest recent posts from other bloggers about this concept of Coasting Financial Independence (“Coast FI”). Perhaps the most applicable FI lifestyle to us that we can identify with. We consciously manage our careers to get into jobs that have above average pay but decent hours. But we move roles every few years to keep the work interesting. We only have 1 passive income stream – dividend and interest income from our investment portfolio, which is not even that high. We don’t have other income streams because it just takes too much time and effort to build them up. We don’t have other skill sets that we can monetise or bothered developing them anyway. Our strategy is simple but lazy. Don’t overthink, overwork, overcompensate and just focus on building the life we want for ourselves.