I have been managing our family finance a private wealth manager for over a decade. Here is a brief summary of our family finance between January, 2014 and December, 2025.
PAST FINANCIAL STATUS OF MY FAMILY (2014-2024)
All data that I have before 2014 is incomplete to do the calculations properly, so I skipped it intentionally. Between 2020 and 2022, we have been regularly saving over 80% of our Net Income, or Income After TAX.
| 2014-2016 | 2017-2019 | 2020-2022 | 2023-2025 | ||
| FI Ratio*: | 7% | 55% | 75% | 145% | |
| Saving Ratio**: | 73% | 77% | 85% | 78% |
* FI Ratio stands for Financial Independence (FI) Ratio which measures passive income divided by your spending.
** Saving Ratio measures the proportion of income After TAX that is saved.
In 2022, me and my wife have reached financial independence as our passive income can cover our annual family expenses. Despite being fully financially independent, we are still planning to continue working for a while to generate more capital for future investments.
CURRENT FINANCIAL STATUS OF MY FAMILY (2024)
I manage personal finance of my family based on detailed monthly budgets, and the overall annual budget for the year. I use incremental budgeting. This means modifying the annual budget at the beginning of each year based on the historical numbers from the past year.
The family budget tracks in details our Income (Active Income and Passive Income), Expenses (Fixed Costs, Variable Costs and Maintenance Costs), monthly Cash Flows (Cash Inflows and Cash Outflows) and the overall family Wealth (Net Worth or Equity).
Our family budget is planned until the end of 2026 (December 31, 2026), so it covers the next few years.
Honestly, I do see much benefits for my readers in writing any definitive numbers how much our Wealth is. Neither I want to do it publicly as I believe that private things in every family should be kept private. However, to give you some perspective how wealthy we are, I can say that the Net Worth of my family is somewhere in the range of USD$1,000,000–USD$3,000,000 as of today.
What is more important to me than making public the exact number how much money we own is that both my wife and myself were starting from USD$0. All of Wealth has been generated through hard work, reasonable spending, consistent saving and responsible investing. We are not trust-fund babies, neither we inherited nor were given large sums of money by our families.
FUTURE PLANS FOR OUR FAMILY FINANCE (after 2024)
We are planning to continue earning money from both active income from jobs as well as passive income from investments.
A. ACTIVE INCOME: My wife and I have been having stable Active Income from traditional employment over the past 10 years. I would like this to continue in the next few years without any significant changes until the end of 2026 at least.
1. Full-Time Jobs. Two full-time jobs earn Salary. Annual salary increases are usually between 5%-10% of the base salary.
2. Part-Time Jobs. A few smaller gigs throughout the year pay Wages. The payments usually depend on the workload and frequency of projects.
B. PASSIVE INCOME: In addition to Active Income, we invest all our savings into four money-generating assets to earn Passive Income. For portfolio diversification to manage risk, these four Passive Income sources are independent from each other – being different asset classes, based in different locations, hold in different currencies, managed by different financial institutions and going through different market cycles.
1. Real Estate. Residential properties earn Rent. This source is already completed in 100% without the need of adding any large capital anymore. It is well-established bringing in stable quarterly returns.
2. Bank Deposits. Long-term 3-Year bank deposits earn Interest. This source includes making 3-year bank deposits over the period of three years, and then let it compound indefinitely. I am almost done and will be finishing at the end of this year, all as planned. Let’s say, I have already achieved 90% of the target.
3. Online Business. The website earns Profit. This source includes building the website aggressively by publishing hundreds of high-quality articles to gain readers globally and generate earnings. At the moment, I have already achieved around 10% of the target.
4. Stock Market. Stocks, ETFs and REITs earn Dividends. This source includes investing in the US on NYSE and NASDAQ. I will be buying solid dividend stocks of American multinational companies, ETFs tracking the S&P500 Index and the total US stock market and a few REITs. I am still doing my homework learning new things about the stock market to prepare myself, so the progress is 0%. I am planning to start off by investing a few thousand USD$ to figure basic things out with my new brokerage account. Later, I will be making more regular monthly investments purchasing small number of shares each time.
By the end of 2026, each Passive Income source is expected to generate us roughly RMB100,000 per year (~USD15,000 per year) bringing altogether around RMB400,000 per year (~USD60,000). We can live quite comfortably on this amount of money anywhere in the world.
While we do not have specific long-term plans, after December 31, 2026, we could easily retire early anywhere in the world enjoying FIRE – Financial Independence Retire Early. To be honest, I believe that we can manage to live quite comfortably on this amount of money anywhere in the world.
