Picture this. Dinner is done.
The plates on the dining table is still messy, but nobody is in a hurry to leave the table.
The kids are in the living room, completely immersed in their own little universe - building something, arguing about something insignificant, laughing a few moments later as though nothing ever happened and my brain is on the back burner listening to their quarrels and fights and or the very dreadful silence when no voice from either of them.
The house is noisy in the background, but peaceful in a way that only family life can be.
And in the middle of an ordinary evening, amongst many things we discussed an extraordinary question quietly finds its way into the conversation.
“How much is enough?”
Not enough to survive.
Not enough to pay the bills.
But enough for a life well lived.
The conversation moved through many topics before landing there.
We spoke about the future, the kids, retirement, opportunities, responsibilities, and the kind of life we hope to look back on one day without regret.
At one point, we found ourselves talking about money - not as numbers on a screen, but as a means to something deeper.
One thought kept coming back to us.
Just drawing parallel - I said to Mrs. that we don’t want to spend our entire lives collecting money the same way we collect tickets at an arcade game centre.
We’ve all seen those games.
Some are genuinely fun.
Some make us laugh.
Some create memories.
And then there are those machines that simply reward the most tickets.
They’re not exciting. They’re not memorable. But because they pay out more tickets, we keep playing those just to collect more tickets. Without even recognising if it’s fun or if this is something that we really want to do.
The scoreboard becomes everything.
And at the end of the day, we walk out carrying thousands of tickets that must eventually be exchanged for something - or worse left behind altogether.
It reminded us of an idea Bill Perkins writes about in Die With Zero.
The book isn’t really about dying with nothing. It’s about recognising that money is a tool and that our ability to fully enjoy certain experiences comes with an expiry date.
There are things that can only be experienced in our twenties.
Other things belong to our forties.
Some adventures require healthy knees, energetic children, curious minds, or parents who are still around to share those moments with us.
Money can be stored. Time cannot.
And perhaps wisdom lies somewhere in balancing both.
Of course, these thoughts are easier to discuss than to live out.
One question naturally came up.
“What about the kids? Shouldn’t we leave as much as possible for them?”
And honestly, that feels like a beautiful intention.
We love our children deeply.
We want to give them opportunities we never had.
We want to create security, support their dreams, and leave them better off than where we started.
The challenge, though, is understanding where generosity ends and endless accumulation begins.
How much is too much? How little is too little?
At what point does building wealth for tomorrow prevent us from fully living today?
We don’t have perfect answers.
Maybe nobody does.
For now, we simply hold these questions with curiosity rather than certainty.
We still have goals to reach.
There are financial milestones that matter to us.
Buffers to build.
Mistakes to account for.
Unexpected life events that money can soften and be a security blanket and a cushion.
We’re not advocating for abandoning ambition or pretending money doesn’t matter.
It absolutely does.
Money buys options.
Money creates resilience.
But perhaps there comes a point where more money adds fewer meaningful choices, and what we truly seek isn’t a bigger pile, but greater freedom.
Freedom to try something new without fearing failure.
Freedom to spend time with aging parents.
Freedom to take the children on adventures while they still want to hold our hands.
Freedom to help people without constantly calculating whether our time could have earned us more elsewhere.
Freedom to choose meaningful work over merely profitable work.
I genuinely feel I want to try being a barista one day in a coffee shop without having to be guilty of I could earn more elsewhere - just because I want to try some new options and work at different places for the sheer pleasure of experiencing new things.
Freedom to wake up on a Monday morning and feel that our lives belong to us.
Maybe that’s what we mean when we talk about financial independence.
Not retiring from life.
Not escaping responsibility.
But slowly removing the golden handcuffs that make us trade years for things we no longer deeply care about.
And if we’re fortunate enough to get there one day, perhaps the greatest gift won’t be the money itself.
It will be the choices.
The choice to do what matters.
The choice to spend time with the people we love.
The choice to create memories while we’re still physically and emotionally capable of fully experiencing them.
The choice to say, with gratitude rather than fear,
“This is enough.”
And maybe that’s the real challenge for all of us.
Not simply learning how to build wealth, but learning when wealth has already given us what we were searching for in the first place.
Okay, now with some real numbers - on defining how much is enough!
The orange line indicates our monthly expenses and the blue line indicates if we decide on selling all our asset and live at safe withdrawal rate of 4% .
If you are wanting to decide and embark on this journey - I’d suggest doing the below:
Capture your networth everymonth
Capture your expenses over a period of year
This gives you a ball park or an estimate of what your yearly outgoings are
Use this as a number that you want to achieve with your passive earnings.
As far as we are concerned - we are progressing towards our destination. Only that the destination is a bit slippery slope and at times it does keep evading when our expenses spike up and or life happens.