Everyone assumes it’s the stock portfolio
When people ask how I fund my life without a salary, they expect me to talk about dividend yields and stock tickers. What they don’t expect is that my rental income and dividends serve completely different purposes — and that’s exactly the version of FIRE that rarely gets written about.
But if I’m honest about what actually covers my day-to-day expenses, it isn’t my SGX portfolio. It’s rent. Dividends do something different for me entirely — and once I realised that, the whole picture made a lot more sense.
Two properties, two very different timelines
I bought my first investment property at 36. I paid it off within three years — aggressively, almost stubbornly, because I wanted the certainty of owning it outright more than I wanted to optimise for leverage.
The second came at 39. That one I paid down more slowly, over six years, alongside building a bond portfolio at the same time. Different property, different pace, same goal: get to a point where the rent coming in wasn’t offset by a mortgage going out.
Once that happened — twice — rent became the layer of my finances that covers ordinary life. Groceries, utilities, insurance, the unremarkable costs that show up every single month, whether the stock market is up or down that week.
Why I keep rental income and dividends separate
Here’s the part I think a lot of FIRE content gets slightly wrong: dividends aren’t sitting in my account waiting to pay a bill. They’re doing something more useful to me long-term — they let me keep investing.
Because my rental income already covers my baseline expenses, I don’t need to withdraw from my SGX portfolio to live. That means dividends can simply be reinvested, compounding quietly in the background instead of being spent the moment they land. Rent gave me the freedom to leave my dividends alone.
If you want a primer on how different asset classes work together, MoneySense’s overview of investment types is a good starting point.
The unglamorous part nobody mentions
Paying off two properties over nearly a decade combined wasn’t thrilling content. There was no dramatic before-and-after. It was transfer after transfer, bank statement after bank statement, years of choosing not to touch the money.
Alongside that, I kept building a bond portfolio and made voluntary housing refunds back into my CPF OA — not because any of it was clever, but because it was consistent. The properties didn’t make me rich quickly. They made me free slowly, and they made room for my stock investments to keep growing instead of being drawn down.
What I’d tell someone starting today
If you’re earlier in your journey, it’s worth asking yourself which of your income streams are meant to cover today, and which are meant to grow for tomorrow. For me, rental income handles today. Dividends handle tomorrow.
Neither is more important than the other — they’re just doing different jobs. Don’t assume you need one giant pool of passive income covering everything. Sometimes it’s more resilient to let each asset class do what it’s actually good at.
If you’re mapping out what your own version of this could look like, my Start Here page walks through how I actually approached this, property by property, decision by decision.
— Eunice
My Fifty Freedom | Build the wealth that buys back your time