I Chose a Government Flat Over a Condo. Here's What I Got Instead.

I’ll be honest. There are moments, scrolling through Instagram or catching up with old colleagues, where I feel it. The quiet sting of wondering if I made the right call.

Everyone I know has a condo. Some have upgraded from a regular sedan to a BMW or Mercedes. Swimming pools for the kids on weekends. Function rooms for birthday parties. On paper, they’re doing better than me. And for a long time, that paper comparison was the only one I was running.

I’ve been reading Morgan Housel for a few years now. The Psychology of Money, Same as Ever, and his newest, The Art of Spending Money. No finance writer has made me think harder about what money is actually for. Three ideas in particular have quietly rewired how I make decisions. I want to share them here, not as advice, but as a record of how I’ve tried to apply them. For anyone navigating similar choices. And eventually, for my daughters to read when they’re older.

Define “enough” before someone else defines it for you

In late 2022, my wife and I bought a five-room HDB flat in Singapore. For international readers: HDB flats are government-built public housing. The vast majority of Singaporeans live in them. They’re practical, well-located, and carry a quiet social stigma among a certain class of professionals who’ve “moved on” to private property.

We could have stretched. The mortgage on a condo was serviceable, uncomfortable, but doable. Most of my peers made that stretch without blinking.

We didn’t. We bought the flat at roughly half the monthly mortgage repayment and half the downpayment of what a condo would have cost. The money we didn’t lock into property went into stocks instead. Over three years, those investments have compounded and, critically, they’re liquid. A condo would likely have generated more paper gains. But paper gains don’t pay school fees if I lose my job tomorrow.

Housel writes that the failure to define “enough” is one of the most dangerous things in personal finance. Not because ambition is bad, but because without a clear answer, you keep moving the goalpost. You hit the condo and want the luxury condo. You upgrade the car and start noticing the ones that are nicer. The finish line is always somewhere ahead of wherever you are.

We defined ours early. A flat we own comfortably, five minutes from an MRT station, walking distance to the girls’ school, a park, and our church. A balance sheet that gives us room to breathe. That was enough. It still is.

The most valuable thing money buys isn’t a thing

I spent several years in investment banking. Every six months, without fail, colleagues were walked out. Not bad people, not bad performers. Just individual contributors: highly paid, highly specialised, and easily replaced when headcount needed to fall. You learned quickly not to plan too far ahead. You couldn’t. The income felt secure until the day it wasn’t.

That kind of uncertainty does something to you over time. A low hum of anxiety underneath everything. You’re always half-managing the risk of the floor disappearing.

What I do now is different. Working in enterprise AI at a tech company, my value is less about individual output and more about orchestrating complex networks of stakeholders. That’s harder to cut. But I never forgot what the IB years felt like, and I never wanted to be that exposed again.

Housel’s argument is that controlling your time is the highest form of wealth. Not the car, not the postcode. The ability to wake up and not have your entire life contingent on a single income source that could disappear tomorrow.

My dividend portfolio isn’t there yet. I’m roughly halfway, with another decade of compounding ahead. But here’s what’s already true: I could survive today on half my current salary, supplemented by dividends, if something unforeseen happened. That’s not a boast. It’s a description of what lower fixed costs actually buy you. Options. The ability to take a breath instead of a panic.

I work hybrid, mostly from home. My kids see me every day. I eat dinner with them most nights. We talk around the table about nothing important and everything that matters. In an environment where AI is reshaping jobs faster than most people are ready for, having low fixed costs means your job stops being existential. That changes how you show up at work. It changes how you show up at home.

The unsung hero in the household balance sheet

This part doesn’t get talked about enough.

My wife and I decided together that she would stay home to care for our daughters after school. She’s a qualified accountant. In a dual-income household, she’d be earning good money. We made a different call, and we’d make it again regardless of the numbers. But when I actually sat down and thought about the numbers, I realised something most people never quantify.

The direct cost replacement is straightforward. A live-in helper in Singapore runs roughly S$800 to S$1,000 a month. Student care for two kids is in the same range. Home-cooked meals versus food court for a family of four, across lunch and dinner, thirty days a month. Even a conservative S$10 to S$15 savings per meal across sixty meals adds up to around S$1,000 a month. Altogether, that’s easily S$1,800 to S$2,000 a month in household value, tax-free, that never shows up in any income figure.

But the part that surprised me more is the enrichment multiplier.

We spend around S$1,500 a month on enrichment for both girls combined. Piano, Chinese, public speaking. These aren’t cheap. And every parent I know who sends their kids to similar programmes is spending roughly the same.

Here’s the difference. You can write the cheque and have a helper send the kids to the weekly lesson. That’s it. To actually get the return on that investment, you need daily practice, daily revision, preparation before the next class. A child who attends piano once a week without practising between sessions retains a fraction of what they could. My wife does that daily follow-up. She supervises the practice, checks the homework, keeps the routine.

My rough estimate is that consistent daily reinforcement gets you 70 to 80 percent of the value from any given enrichment programme. Without it, you’re probably extracting 20 to 25 percent. On S$1,500 of monthly spend, that gap is enormous. We’re not spending more than our peers. We’re getting three times the return on the same spend.

Homemakers are the unsung heroes of the family. The contribution is real, it compounds, and it almost never gets acknowledged because it doesn’t come with a salary slip.

The car we didn’t buy

This is the one that cost us something real, and I want to be honest about it.

No car means no spontaneous weekend drives. No singing along to bad radio on the expressway with the kids in the backseat. No falling asleep on the way home from a long day out. Those are genuine memories other families are making and we aren’t. I think about that sometimes.

But here’s where the money went instead. A family car in Singapore, factoring in loan repayment, insurance, road tax, petrol, and parking, runs to around S$20,000 a year, conservatively. We redirected that.

In the last few years, we’ve taken our daughters to Hong Kong, Macau, Tokyo, Osaka, Seoul, Malaysia, and Indonesia. We’ve sailed on Royal Caribbean. We did a staycation at Shangri-La Sentosa. We’re booked on a Disney cruise in March.

Housel writes about compounding memories — the idea that trading money for time and shared experiences compounds in ways that are just as powerful as financial compounding, just harder to see on a spreadsheet. I think about that every time we’re sitting somewhere new, watching our daughters figure out a city they’ve never been to before.

The road trip conversations didn’t happen. The airport conversations did. I don’t think we made a perfect trade. I think we made a deliberate one.

What I actually have

I don’t have the condo. I don’t have the car. My dividend portfolio is halfway to where I want it to be, with a decade of compounding still ahead.

What I have is a mortgage that doesn’t keep me up at night. A job I don’t have to cling to. A wife who is present for our daughters every afternoon, extracting full value from every lesson, every routine, every ordinary Tuesday. Dinner together most evenings. A family that has seen Tokyo and Seoul and the Pacific Ocean from the deck of a cruise ship.

Housel keeps asking the same question across all three books, just from different angles: optimise toward what, exactly?

I didn’t have a good answer for a long time. I have one now. And it turns out, having the answer is most of the work.