Hi all, just wanted some opinions on this: Would it be better to live in our BTO until retirement and save/invest excess salary in etf/reits/stocks, or buy a new smaller condo and potentially one more to rent out as a form of property investment with significantly lower investment in etf/reit/stocks?
For context, my husband and I are in our early 30s with one kid. We don’t plan to have another kid.
We are fortunate enough to earn a good income as regular office staff despite not being managers or sales related. In terms of salary we are earning 220-230k annually. Take home after taxes and CPF is 180-190k. In terms of salary growth, we expect it to grow about 4% annually with occasional higher bumps due to promotions.
We do not have a helper and have a family car.
Our yearly expenses works to be about 80k all inclusive, majority of expenses come from our car ~16k and kid’s enrichment and class ~17k ,8k budgeted to annual holidays, 12k to insurance, 4K for regular bills/utilities and 12k to our parents
BTO is fully covered by CPF at around 2.1k per month. Right now it has fulfilled MOP and we could sell it for 800k, with a net gain of 480-490k to our cash/OA after paying off the remaining housing loan of 300k and deducting agent fees
We save quite a lot as well, our liquid cash/stocks/OA combined is at 600k.
Our initial plan was to stay in this 5rm BTO until retirement and build up a big saving egg/portfolio. However, quite a number of friends in similar financial situation to us have been saying that we are wasting this opportunity that we have to own 1 condo with higher capital appreciation and potentially another studio that can be rented out so that effectively it is paying for itself. I tend to take a more pessimistic view that if the studio is not rented out, our cash flow becomes a problem while my husband is more optimistic about it. In terms of timeline wise, we are quite flexible, but if we were to buy an EC, we would need to do it before the second half of 2024 as our monthly salary will cross the threshold of 16k basic per month.
So I am just putting our situation out here to seek some opinions. Thank you