People sometimes expect a portfolio story to come with a spreadsheet — every purchase, every year, laid out in sequence. Mine doesn’t really work that way. What I can offer instead is the thinking behind it: the principles that shaped how I chose to build an investment portfolio in Singapore, and why I built it the way I did.
Start With What the Money Needs to Do
Before I picked a single stock, I thought about function. One part of my money needed to generate income I could actually use. Another needed to grow, untouched, for decades. A third just needed to sit there and hold its value when everything else was falling. Once I separated those jobs, the portfolio stopped being one big undefined pile of money. It became three smaller, clearer decisions instead.
This is why my dividend investing sits apart from my bond portfolio, and why neither one is trying to do the other’s job. Dividends grow the portfolio through reinvestment. Bonds hold steady so I never have to sell equities at a bad time. Different tools, different purposes.
Why My Singapore and US Investing Look Completely Different
I didn’t approach both markets the same way, and I think that was the right call.
In Singapore, I invest in individual stocks. Being a CPA actually matters here. I could open a company’s audited financial statements and understand exactly what I was looking at — revenue quality, debt levels, whether cash flow genuinely covered a dividend rather than borrowed money propping it up. Singapore’s market is small enough, and familiar enough to me, that picking individual companies felt manageable rather than reckless.
The US market is a different story entirely. It’s too vast for me to research individual companies the way I do for Singapore. There’s no realistic way to read every company’s financials, not the way I can for a handful of SGX stocks. So for US equities, I use broad-based ETFs instead. No stock picking, no trying to out-guess a market that size. Just broad exposure, letting the index do the work I couldn’t reasonably do company by company. More recently, I’ve broadened this further with world equities ETFs too. Same principle, just extended beyond the US — to markets I have even less capacity to research individually.
Reading the Numbers Myself, Where It Actually Makes Sense
I don’t think you need to be an accountant to invest well. But for the part of my portfolio where I do pick individual stocks, reading the actual numbers behind a company — rather than relying on tips or headlines — changes the kind of investor you become. It slows you down in a good way.
That said, I also don’t think stock picking is necessary everywhere. Knowing where it’s worth the effort, and where a broad-based ETF does the job better and simpler, was as important a decision as any individual pick I’ve made.
I Never Really ‘Finished’ Building This Portfolio
I think the biggest shift in how I think about portfolio-building was letting go of one idea: that there’s a finished state. A point where the allocation is “correct” and you can stop paying attention.
Mine has shifted over the years as my life did: more caution added as caregiving responsibilities grew, more deliberate income focus as FIRE got closer, and even now, adding world equities exposure that wasn’t part of the original plan.
The portfolio wasn’t a project with an end date. It was something that kept adjusting to match what my life actually needed from it.
If You’re Starting to Build Your Own
Start with function before you start with tickers. Ask what each part of your money actually needs to do — grow, protect, or produce income — before you decide what to buy. And be honest with yourself about where individual stock picking is actually worth your time. Often, a broad-based ETF will do the job just as well, with far less effort.
If you want a framework for organizing this as you build it, I made my Investment Portfolio Tracker on Etsy for exactly this. And once you’ve built the portfolio, the three income streams that fund my financial independence picks up where this post leaves off, showing how the income actually flows.
— Eunice
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