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stackingmyexit

@stackingmyexit

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🇸🇬 Mid-30s DINK chasing FI before 40
📓 Thoughts behind the number, not just the results
👇 New here? Start with the FIRE number

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I used to think my FIRE number was one calculation. Annual spending divided by a withdrawal rate. Done.

Building it honestly moved the number by over a million dollars. Not the market. Just filling in every blank truthfully.
What changed:

Food & transport: budgeted at S$1,650/month combined, well above my actual S$300–600 and S$128. I'm funding the life I want, not the one my statements show.
Mortgage (S$1,400/month): mostly paid by CPF today. That stops with my salary, so it's now counted in cash.
"DCA" renamed: it's really a S$20,000/year contingency fund. Unused, it rolls over and keeps working.
Insurance: S$1,162 → S$2,323/year, the moment I planned for two people instead of one.
New line, S$5,000/year: food, vet, grooming, since a dog joined the household.
Travel, up to S$50,000/year: the one number I refused to shrink. The goal was never to just survive retirement.
Underneath it all, one percentage does the heaviest lifting: 3% SWR, not the standard 4%. A longer, more conservative runway, on purpose.

The number: S$4.95M at 3%.

Two sides to doing this properly. It got bigger than I expected. It also got a lot harder to argue with.
Follow along if you want the real numbers behind FI, not just the highlight reel.

If you've built your FIRE number once and never gone back to question it, what's the one line you'd bet is already wrong?

#SGpersonalfinance #FIREsg #SingaporeFinance #MoneyMindset #FinancialIndependenceSG by @stackingmyexit

I bought a plane ticket on a Tuesday afternoon.
Didn't ask anyone for leave first.
That's the detail that stuck.

5 things I learnt from a year of career break.

1. Freedom is not needing permission.
Buying the ticket before asking anyone. That's the part that hit differently.

2. Convenience is worth less the more time you have.
Fifteen minutes saved by Grab stopped meaning anything.
Food delivery wasn't buying back half an hour of work.
It was costing me a walk, and a proper meal.

3. Two is better than one.
My wife joined a few months in, once her own work wrapped up. Different experience entirely, with someone else in it.

4. Time still moves without a 9 to 5 in it.
Not working didn't mean nothing to do.
More to plan for. Everything more intentional.

5. All of it was always going to end.
The good stretches don't run forever.
Neither do the hard ones.
Worth remembering either way.

The break was the confirmation. What came back with me was a clearer read on what my time is actually worth.
That outlasted the break itself.

Following along if you're stacking toward your own number. This account is the journal, not the finish line. by @stackingmyexit

I used to think the FIRE number was the finish line.
It's not. It's just a portfolio size with a rate applied to it. $1,000,000 at 4% becomes $40,000 a year. That's it. That's the whole trick behind every "I hit my number" post you've ever scrolled past.

Here's what most of those posts skip. The 4% isn't a law, it's a default. And a default built for someone else's risk tolerance is still someone else's default.

I use 3 to 3.5%.
Not because 4% is wrong. Because it assumes one income stream carrying the entire plan, and I'm not building one stream. Lower withdrawal, more sources, less riding on any single one of them.

None of this makes the plan bulletproof. A bad run of markets early on can still test even a conservative rate. I still feel my stomach drop when the portfolio turns red, same as anyone would. The buffer doesn't stop that feeling. Zooming out does.

There are two sides to picking your own number. A lower rate buys peace of mind. It also means saving longer before you get to stop.

The math only feels complicated until you build in your own margin.

If you had to defend your withdrawal rate to a stranger, could you? by @stackingmyexit

Day 184

Early in my FIRE journey, I thought the first milestone would feel like reaching the top. It didn't. It felt like the start of the next climb.

I don't think I'm alone in this. In Singapore we grow up with a clear ridgeline: the degree, the job, the BTO, the car, the next number. Each one looks like the summit from below. Get there, and another ridge appears behind it. Psychologists even have a name for it, the arrival fallacy: the belief that arriving will finally feel like enough.

To be fair, a new ridge isn't a bad thing. Wanting to build more is part of what got me here. The problem was never the next goal. It was that I only ever looked forward.

I took this photo at the top of the Karwendelbahn. From the valley, those ridges look like walls. From up there, they look like a path.

So I've started doing something simple. At every milestone, I stop and look back. Where I started. What I didn't know then. What used to worry me that doesn't anymore. It's always further than it felt.

When did you last stop and look back at how far you've come?

📸: Fujifilm X-T5

{FIRE journey, measuring progress, arrival fallacy, moving goalposts, how far you've come, financial independence, FIRE Singapore} by @stackingmyexit

Last month I wrote that I would keep these updates honest, including the months that go the other way.

October was one of those months.

It started well. Earnings season was in full swing, and partway through the month the account touched a milestone I had been watching for. A few weeks later, that and more was gone.
Month to date, the portfolio was down 17.58%. The worst single day was 16 October, at -8.88%. No deposits, no withdrawals. Just the market swinging hard on every earnings call.

Zoom out to the year and it is still up 28.98%. A month ago that number was 56.68%. Roughly half of this year's gain came off in four weeks.

Where it sits now:
91% equity
4% cash
5% crypto

The crypto slice grew a little, partly because I added to it, mostly because the equity slice shrank around it.
All of that puts me 22.1% of the way to my FIRE target, down from 26.8%.

There are two sides to a month like this.

The honest side: watching a number you have waited for appear and then slip away stings. A drawdown reads very differently when it is your own account and not a chart in an article.

The other side: my read is that the market overreacted, and I am treating October as a healthy retracement after a strong run, not a verdict on the year. I expect some of it to come back over the last two months, but I am not building the plan around that happening.

And there is a quieter silver lining. I would rather learn what a 17% month feels like now, with years of runway ahead, than meet it for the first time the year I stop working. Every month like this makes the next one a little less loud.

How did you sit through October? by @stackingmyexit

14 stocks fell more than 6% after reporting earnings between 21 and 29 October. Here's each one, grouped by the reason most often cited.

AI spending and cash flow
Alphabet, about -12%: missed estimates, search ad growth slowed, negative free cash flow
Amazon, -6% to -12% after hours: missed on profit and revenue, AI spending weighing on cash flow
Meta, about -7%: revenue beat, profit hit by legal costs and AI spending

Software and security
ServiceNow, about -27%: worst day on record, profit slightly below estimates
Fortinet, about -25%: beat, but cut its service revenue forecast
F5, about -20%: beat, but guided slower growth next year
Beat, then fell
Twilio, -10% to -18% after hours: beat and raised, but the low end of Q4 guidance fell short
Reddit, -16% to -18%: beat, but user growth slowed and the Q4 outlook was cautious

Weak outlook
Intel, -17% to -23% after hours: Q4 guidance far below estimates
Roblox, -17% to -19% after hours: disappointing Q4 guidance
Pinterest, -8% to -14% after hours: missed revenue, Q4 guidance 4.7% below estimates
Sprouts, about -20%: weak quarter, steep cut to its Q4 outlook

Outside tech
Whirlpool, about -9% after hours: cut revenue guidance, posted an adjusted loss
Stryker, -10% to -13% after hours: missed revenue, trimmed profit guidance

The pattern: 11 of the 14 were tied at least partly to the outlook rather than the quarter itself.

Ranges reflect different sources and times of day. Netflix (about -5%) and Illumina (no confirmed reason) are left out. Not a recommendation on any company. Sources in comments.

What did you make of earnings season?

{earnings season, stocks fall after earnings, stock market today, tech stocks, US stocks Singapore, investing Singapore} by @stackingmyexit

Some weeks the market makes sense. This wasn't one of them.

Earnings season landed on the biggest names at once, and the screen went red. Alphabet had its worst day on record. So did ServiceNow. Fortinet lost about a quarter of its value in a day.

What stuck with me is that a lot of these weren't bad quarters.
Alphabet missed its estimates and fell about 12%
Fortinet beat, raised its revenue outlook, and fell about 25%
Twilio beat and raised its outlook, then fell by double digits
Reddit beat on revenue and profit, and fell too
The beat fell harder than the miss.

By the next morning, every move had a tidy explanation. Guidance. Valuation. AI spending. Some of that is fair. Fortinet did trim one part of its forecast, and the stock had already more than doubled this year. But the explanation always arrives after the price, written to fit it.

What I keep coming back to is that the market isn't grading the quarter that just ended. It's guessing at the ones that haven't happened yet. A beat everyone expected is no news. A small miss against a big hope feels like a shock. Over a few days, that guessing gets emotional.

Two sides, though. Irrational isn't the same as random. Sometimes a drop is the first sign of something real, like a core business slowing, and it deserves a proper look rather than a shrug.

But a price moves in a day, and a business moves in years. Over long stretches, prices have tended to follow what businesses actually earn. Weeks like this are part of the road there.

I don't need this week to make sense. I just need my plan not to depend on it.

Not a recommendation on any company mentioned. Sources in comments.

What's one move this week that surprised you?

{stock market today, earnings season, stocks fall after earnings, market volatility, investing mindset, long term investing, personal finance Singapore} by @stackingmyexit

Day 181

For six years I could not tell you what a single one of my trades was worth.

Not the outcome. The expected value. What placing that trade, again and again, was actually worth to me.

I had entries. I had opinions. I had a watchlist and a reason for every position. What I did not have was any way to tell a bad trade from a bad run, and those two feel identical while you are inside them. One means change something. The other means do nothing. I could not tell them apart, so I changed something every time.

Three numbers close that gap:

Risk to reward. Stop and target, both set before you enter. The distance to the stop is one unit of risk, and everything else gets measured against it. You would never sit down at a ban luck table not knowing it pays 2:1.
Win rate. How often the target gets hit before the stop. On a 2:1 trade you only need to be right a third of the time to break even.
Average win and average loss. The first two are the plan. This one is what the plan actually became, after a stop got moved or a winner got closed on nerves.

Put together, they give you expectancy. What one trade is worth on average.

Here is the part that took me too long to see. Hold the win rate at 40 percent and change nothing else. Hold the plan and you make a fifth of your risk per trade. Let it drift and you lose a third of it instead. Same win rate. Opposite account.

I was the second one. Missing stops, chasing a monthly target.

One caveat that keeps me honest. Expectancy is an average, not a promise. With a real edge and a 40 percent win rate, nearly two out of every five ten-trade stretches still finish down. That is not the strategy failing. That is the sample being small.

There are two sides to measuring all this. The numbers took the excitement out of trading. They also took out the hoping.

Which of the three could you answer right now, without checking?

#sgfinance #fireSG #investingsingapore #tradingsingapore #FinancialIndependenceSG by @stackingmyexit

Day 179

Earlier this month, October was shaping up well. Today my account is down 7.20% for it.

I still catch myself panicking when the screen turns red. Zooming out is the habit I lean on in market volatility like this, and this month I wanted to show what that looks like on my own screens.

A bad day isn't a bad week. A bad week isn't a bad month. Each step out answers a different question:
- A day is mostly noise
- A week is a mood
- A month is a stretch
- A year is a chapter
- A decade is the plan

So I switched from MTD to YTD. Same account, one step out: up 44.38% this year.

That line wasn't smooth either. It spent months below zero in the first part of the year, and came back to flat twice after that. Each of those stretches felt like the story at the time. None of them turned out to be the year.

So before I react to anything now, I step up one timeframe. It doesn't make the red go away. It gives the panic somewhere to settle.

There's a condition I don't want to skip, though. Zooming out only works if nothing forces me to sell at the bottom. If I needed this money next month, the long view wouldn't help me. It would just be looking away. Making sure I can wait is what the rest of my plan is for.

There are two sides to this. A bad month can turn into a bad year. And 44% isn't a forever number either. Zooming out has to work in both directions, or it's just picking whichever frame feels best.

But the further out I stand, the smaller each red day gets. That's been true for me this year, and it's what I want to remember the next time a month looks like this one.

Which timeframe do you check first?

{zoom out investing, portfolio down, market volatility, long term investing, investing mindset, personal finance Singapore, FIRE Singapore} by @stackingmyexit

Day 177

Hope is a strange word for a FIRE journey.

Most of what I do toward financial independence in Singapore is the opposite of hoping.

- Retirement planning spreadsheets
- A careful withdrawal rate
- Built-in contingencies

But the what-ifs still show up. That quiet money anxiety most of us carry.

Mine sound like this:

What if the market drops right after I stop working?
What if my portfolio has to carry everything perpetually?
What if my number keeps moving while I chase it?

On a trip to Fukuoka, Japan, I stood at Kego Shrine and watched people tie their omikuji to a wooden rack.
The custom is simple:

- Good fortunes go home with you
- Bad fortunes get folded, tied up and left behind
Either way, you read the slip first, because it carries advice too

That last part stuck with me.

Hope doesn't mean ignoring the bad slip. My what-ifs are worth reading. They're why I plan carefully and treat CPF LIFE as a bonus, not something I depend on.

But reading a fear is different from carrying it everywhere.
Psychologists describe hope as two things working together:
Believing you can act

Seeing at least one way forward

That helped me see the difference. Optimism waits for a good draw. Hope asks what I can still do with the one I got.
Some years will hand us a bad slip. The market won't care about our plans.

But we still get to choose what comes home with us, and what stays at the shrine.

What's one what-if you're ready to leave behind? by @stackingmyexit

Somewhere past the first million, I noticed 1% had started to feel heavier.

The rule itself hasn't changed. Since restarting with an actual method, I've defined my risk before every trade and kept it to 1% of the account. A percentage felt neutral, so I assumed it would feel the same at any size.

It doesn't, because the amount underneath it keeps growing:
US$10K account: US$100 a trade
US$100K account: US$1K a trade
US$1M account: US$10K a trade

That last one is more than three months of my first salary in 2017, on a single stopped-out trade. And I'm rarely in just one. I cap my total open risk at 10%, so at this size up to US$100K can be on the line at once if every stop hits together.

When an amount gets heavier than I can sit with, it rarely looks dramatic. It looks like closing before the take profit, moving the stop further away as price drops, or quietly stepping off the plan. I've done all three. My 2025 journal even shows it in the averages. On all three accounts, the reward I realised came in below the reward I planned. I can't say size caused all of that gap, but it's what the pull tends to look like on paper.
What helped most was slower than I expected. I added funds in batches, each small enough that the new 1% was an amount I could still sit with. The rule stayed the same, and the account grew into it at my pace instead of the market's.

Then it crossed a million, and pulled back slightly more than 10%. The two screenshots are from 5 Oct and 16 Oct.

There are two sides to this. No rule will make US$10K a trade feel small, and the pull will keep getting deeper as the account grows. But every batch taught me to sit with a slightly bigger number, and that ability grows too.

At what amount does a loss start to feel heavy for you?

{trading psychology, position sizing, risk per trade, stop loss, portfolio drawdown, risk management, trading Singapore} by @stackingmyexit

The Monday blues rarely wait for Monday. For most of us, they show up on Sunday night, somewhere between dinner and the last episode of whatever we're watching. Some people call it the Sunday scaries.

There's a proper name for it too. Psychologists call it anticipatory anxiety: the mind reacting to a week that hasn't happened yet.

What strikes me is how much of Sunday it quietly takes. We're still at home, but the mind has already logged in. Replaying Friday's loose ends. Rehearsing a meeting. Opening one work chat "just to see." In Singapore, where a weekend message from work can feel almost normal, that line blurs fast.
To be fair, there are two sides to this.

Going from rest back to responsibility is a real shift. Feeling it doesn't mean you hate your job.

Sometimes the dread is useful. If it's heavy every single week, it might be pointing at something worth listening to: workload, boundaries, or a role you've quietly outgrown.

But here's the part I keep coming back to. Research on chronic worriers found that most of what they feared never actually happened, and when it did, they usually coped better than they expected. The Monday we picture on Sunday night is almost always louder than the one that shows up.

This is part of why I'm on this journey toward financial independence. Not to escape work, but to slowly build a life where Sunday night gets to feel like Sunday night. That takes years, and there will be plenty of Sundays along the way. So for now, the small version is enough: a closed laptop, an evening spent on something you enjoy, and letting Monday have its turn when it actually arrives.

The lights are still on. So is your weekend.

What does your Sunday night usually look like, and what's one small thing that makes Monday feel lighter for you?

📸: Fujifilm X-T5

{Sunday scaries, Monday blues, Sunday night anxiety, dreading work, work stress Singapore, work life balance, financial independence} by @stackingmyexit