My wife and I have been tirelessly growing the wealth snowball for the last 15 year. We have used our hard work, knowledge, skills and internal resources to build Net Worth, or our family wealth.
For the last 10 years between 2010-2020, my focus was fast growth to earn and save as much money as possible. For the current 10 years between 2020-2030, my focus is more about stability and wealth preservation.
Estimated amount of our Net Worth
After consulting with my wife, we decided not to make public the exact amount how much the Net Worth of our family really is. Private things should be kept private in every family.
However, to give you some perspective, currently, our Net Worth is somewhere between USD$1,000,000 and USD$3,000,000.
Moreover, all of our Wealth has been generated through hard work, reasonable spending, consistent saving and responsible investing. Both my wife and myself were starting our adult life from USD$0.
Historical growth of our Net Worth
Here is the summary of how fast our Net Worth, or wealth, grows (comparing with a previous year) starting from 2012 until 2023:
2012: n/a
2013: 130% (Things were developing fine financially after entering the job market)
2014: 72% (Working hard)
2015: 48% (If you work hard, be organized and save money, your wealth will grow fast as a result)
2016: 34%
2017: 106% (One of the fastest ways to boost wealth is to find a better paying job)
2018: 63%
2019: 21%
2020: 19% (This is what stability looks like, either stability or growth – choose one, most likely you cannot have both)
2021: 28%
2022: 14% (Stability again)
2023: 18% (More stability)
All of the figures between 2024 and 2025 are quite accurate estimations:
2024: 17% (Even more stability, it seems like nothing disruptive happens in life anymore (…))
2025: 15% (‘Once a company or a country becomes a giant, its growth must slow down, otherwise it will end up eating the entire world.’)
On average, we have been growing our Net Worth grows at around 20% annually.
Allocations of our Net Worth
I always think about the best way to deploy our family savings. It is not as easy as it sounds, especially investing and reinvesting larger sums of money. When investing, as long as you have the money coming in, you do my homework, and you know exactly what you are doing and why you are doing it, you should be fine.
One of the popular mainstream strategies for building a model portfolio is to have 40% of your Net Worth allocated in your primary residence (house or apartment) with the remaining 60% invested in various investment products such as Index Funds, stocks, bonds, rental real estate, etc.
Currently, only 20% our Net Worth is allocated into our primary residence, or home. My wife and I own the apartment in Zhanjiang, Guangdong Province, China. It is a 2-bedroom apartment with additional huge living room connected with the dining room; has two bathrooms, two balconies and beautiful park view. It is located on the 26th floor of the high-rise building in the modern gated community with the swimming pool. That apartment is around 10 minutes walking-distance from the beautiful beach with palm trees. Zhanjiang is a very fast-growing city which is becoming one of the sub-centers of Guangdong Province.
The remaining 80% of our Net Worth is allocated into investments, mainly residential real estate and bank deposits. We are investing heavily when still relatively young to put our hard-earned capital into work. We continue investing all our savings into different income-generating asset classes that bring us Passive Income.
If you want to have money, keep money and grow money, you got to get to work.
How have we been growing our Net Worth?
My wife and I are growing our family’s Net Worth, or wealth, in two ways. We are still in the wealth-building stage of our life rather than in a wealth-preservation stage.
In the short-term, we intend to focus more on acquiring good-quality assets. They will continue earning us profit. In the long-term, our aim is to focus more on steady, stable and sustainable wealth accumulation. My general strategies for building wealth through developing passive income sources include the following goals:
- SAVE CASH. We are aggressively saving cash from our paychecks every month. One of the best ways to grow your wealth is to save a big portion of your paycheck every month. Small amounts of money put aside over a long period of time will result in a big pile of cash.
- BUY ASSETS. We invest all our savings in revenue-generating assets. These assets also earn money for us every month or quarter.
The easiest way to lose balance in life is to start comparing yourself to other people. That is why I do not really like writing down the numbers how much my current Net Worth is. While USD$1,000,0000 or even USD$2,000,000 is not that much anymore in developed countries such as the US, Japan, Western Europe or Scandinavia, it is still a lot in other developing countries like Thailand or the Philippines, and many regions in Eastern Europe, South America or Africa. Instead, I like talking about the methods and processes that can increase wealth, or Net Worth, in the long term.
I am planning to double our family’s Net Worth in the next four to five years through hard work and investing responsibly.
General tips to grow Net Worth
If you want your investment to increase faster, here are a few simple ways to grow a wealth snowball over time.
- Keep on reinvesting your capital together with earnings / dividends.
- Keep on adding new capital every month.
- Move your money to a different bank which offers bank deposits with higher saving rates, or buy different stocks that offer higher dividend yield.
In summary, our approach to personal finance is that on one hand continue earning money from full-time jobs and part-time jobs, and on the other hand that we put our hard-earned money into work to let our current money make more new money for us. In regards to the allocations of our family Net Worth (Equity), our investments account for around 80% of our Equity while our primary residence – our home in China – accounts for the remaining 20%.
