The asset nobody asks me about
When people ask about my portfolio, they want to talk about the properties or the SGX dividend stocks. Nobody has ever asked me about my bond portfolio — the piece of my Singapore-based investing that most FIRE investors overlook, but it’s the one I trust most. I understand why — there’s no story there. No dramatic purchase, no clever timing, no chart worth screenshotting.
But if I’m being honest about what actually lets me sleep at night, it’s not the exciting part of my portfolio. It’s the boring part.
Why I started building my bond portfolio alongside everything else
I didn’t build my bond portfolio as a single decision. It grew quietly in my 30s and 40s, running alongside my SGX investing and my two properties in Singapore — never the headline, always the background layer.
The logic was simple, even if it wasn’t exciting: rent and dividends can both move, one with vacancy or maintenance, the other with market sentiment. Bonds, held to maturity, don’t ask you to guess. You know roughly what you’re getting and roughly when you’re getting it.
What “trust” actually means to me
I don’t mean bonds are the best-performing part of my portfolio. They’re not, and I’ve never pretended otherwise. What I mean is that in a life that already had enough uncertainty — a corporate exit, aging parents, market swings I couldn’t control — my bond portfolio was the one piece that behaved exactly as expected, every time.
If you’re new to fixed income, MoneySense’s guide to understanding bonds is a solid primer on how bond pricing and yields work.
That predictability freed up mental space for everything else. I didn’t have to check on it. I didn’t have to think about it. It just sat there, quietly doing its job, while I dealt with the parts of life that actually demanded my attention.
The trade-off I made on purpose
I know the trade-off. Bonds won’t make me rich the way equities or property can. I accepted that early — this was never meant to be my growth engine. It was meant to be my ballast.
In a Singapore portfolio that already had rental income for daily expenses and dividends for reinvestment, my bond portfolio gave me a third leg that didn’t correlate with either. When one part of my financial life felt shaky, the bond portfolio simply wasn’t part of the shakiness.
What I’d tell someone building this today
If you’re assembling your own version of financial independence, I’d gently push back on the idea that every asset needs to be exciting to be worth holding. Some of the most valuable pieces of a portfolio are the ones you never have to think about.
Boring, in this context, isn’t a compromise. It’s the point.
If you’re figuring out how the different pieces of your own financial plan might fit together, my Start Here page walks through how I built mine, one unglamorous decision at a time.