Stop Chasing Revenue.
Optimize cashflow instead.

Everyone is grinding. Nobody knows their number.

Go to any entrepreneurship community in Singapore. Half the conversations are about growth, scaling, and revenue targets. "How do I 10x my business?" "What's a realistic revenue ceiling?" "Should I hire more staff?"

Nobody asks the question that actually matters: How much money do you actually need per month to live the life you want?

I spent years chasing revenue. Built Vivre from zero to over SGD 2 million annual gross. Ran the wheel strategy across three IBKR accounts. Automated this, that, everything. The productivity gains were real. The revenue was solid.

Then at 41, I stepped back and realized something: I had been solving the wrong problem the entire time.

I built a system to see my actual number.

Pull all credit card transactions from the past 12 months. AMEX and Citi, pooled with my wife. That covers 99% of household spend. Everything else is noise.

Categorize it. Transport. Dining Out. Groceries. Shopping. Utilities. Telco. Subscriptions. Insurance. Home. Pet. Health. Business (flagged separately, excluded from personal burn rate). One-off items amortized across months.

That gives you a clear picture: How much do you actually spend each month to maintain your current lifestyle?

Then cross-reference against your actual income sources. For me: options premium from the wheel strategy, share lending through IBKR, interest, dividends. Not one-off earnings or capital gains. Reliable monthly cashflow.

If monthly passive income exceeds monthly spend, you're done. You don't need to earn another dollar. You can retire tomorrow and the math still works.

If there's a gap, you know the exact size of it. You can then decide: Do I grind to close the gap, or do I optimize my spending?

I chose optimization over grinding.

I sold my Tesla 3. Not because I don't love the product. I do. The car is fantastic. But Tesla has a brand baggage problem in Singapore right now, whether fair or not. Negative attention on roads. Comments. All for SGD 20.7k annual depreciation.

I replaced it with a Nio Firefly below SGD 160k. Same thrill to drive. Better features per dollar. Same lifestyle. Six thousand dollars a year less in depreciation and road tax. And what other brand new car can you buy below SGD 160k in Singapore right now besides a Suzuki Swift? The Firefly is genuinely good value in that bracket.

I kept the Subaru BRZ because the COE expires March 2026 anyway, and I still want the driving experience. That's not cost-cutting. That's capital allocation.

The point: optimizing is not about depriving yourself. It's about removing waste without losing the parts you actually value.

Small cuts compound. Weird how nobody talks about this.

Firefly saves SGD 6k/year. Small.

But SGD 6k this year, SGD 6k next year, and ten years from now that's SGD 60k. Not invested, just not spent on something you don't care about anyway.

Add in every other small optimization. Insurance rerates. Subscription audits. Removing subscriptions you forgot about. Routing dining spend differently. Choosing restaurants that give more per dollar.

It adds up to SGD 12k, SGD 15k, SGD 20k per year. Enough to shift when you can step back from work-for-money entirely.

The world is ultra competitive. Everyone is grinding. They're fighting for revenue they don't need because they haven't measured what they actually spend. So they're winning a game nobody asked them to play.

A business that now costs almost nothing to run.

Here's a fun one. Vivre Activewear used to cost me around SGD 2k per month just to keep running, even after we deliberately scaled down from SGD 100k/month by going online-only. Staff, tools, logistics overhead, it adds up even when you're not trying to grow.

After I learned how to build software, I rebuilt the ops layer from scratch. Fixed monthly cost dropped to around SGD 100. Not a typo. One hundred dollars.

We also have some paying SaaS customers now from the tools we built along the way. So even if Vivre does SGD 0 in product revenue this month, the business is still net profitable because the cost base is basically nothing.

I'm not sharing this to brag. Most people's revenue numbers are not going to be affected by what Vivre does or doesn't do. But it's a real example of what happens when you stop accepting fixed costs as fixed.

Knowing your number makes retirement planning simple.

Net worth snapshot: IBKR portfolio. Property. CPF (being added soon). Cash. You're not aiming for some arbitrary mega-number. You're aiming for enough assets that the passive income covers your actual monthly spend. That's it.

If you're already cashflow positive, you're closer than you think.

My dashboard shows me exactly where I stand. Net worth month-over-month. Cashflow from all sources. Spend category breakdown. Property tracker. It takes maybe 10 minutes a month to update.

That visibility changed how I think about work. I don't need to say yes to projects I don't want. I don't need to chase clients who are painful. I can afford to be selective because I know the math actually works.

A party trick that turned interesting.

My wife brought some friends over recently and I did Bazi readings for four of them, plus some of their spouses. Not serious, just for fun. But something genuine came out of the analysis.

Some charts are locked. Whatever you do, the outcomes are more or less the same. The structure doesn't give you much room to maneuver. Other charts are wide open. Small changes in timing, decisions, or environment unlock completely different paths.

The eeriest moment: I looked at one chart and asked, what did you experience in 2021 that was really bad? Because you might be facing something similar in 2027. Harsh to say out loud, but the reading was pointing at it clearly. Apparently it landed accurately for things their own circle didn't even know about.

I treat it as a party trick. I told them the same. But it maps interestingly to the cashflow optimization angle: some people have structural flexibility to change outcomes, and some don't. Knowing which one you are shapes where you focus your energy.

The portfolio swung hard. Life goes on.

Full transparency since this is a post about measuring financial reality: my IBKR portfolio went from positive SGD 150k to negative SGD 600k month-to-date. That is a painful number to type.

But here's the thing. I don't depend on it for anything right now. The plan is to leave it untouched until my 70s. So a paper loss, even a big one, doesn't change how I live this month or next month. The cashflow from options premium still runs. The monthly burn rate hasn't moved. The math still works.

That's the whole point of building this system. Not to eliminate risk. Not to predict markets. But to make sure that when the portfolio has a bad month, or a bad year, it doesn't blow up the life you've built around it.

Separation of income and net worth is underrated. Most people treat their investment portfolio as if it's the only number that matters. It's not. Monthly cashflow is the number that determines whether you actually sleep at night.

Questions I get asked about this.

How do I know if I need to earn more money?

Calculate your monthly passive income and compare it to your average monthly spend. If passive income covers spend, you don't need to earn more. If there's a gap, you know the exact size of it and can decide whether to earn or cut.

What is the best way to track spending for retirement planning?

Pull 12 months of credit card statements. If your cards cover 99% of your spending, that's your data. Categorize every transaction. You will be surprised by what you find.

Should I focus on growing net worth or cashflow?

Cashflow first. If monthly income from assets exceeds monthly spend, you're already in a good position. Net worth matters for long-term trajectory but it does not determine whether you can stop trading time for money today.

Can a small business actually get to near-zero monthly costs?

Yes. Not for every business, but more than you think. Software replaces people for repeatable tasks. If you can build it yourself, even better. I went from SGD 2k/month in fixed costs to SGD 100. The ceiling on what you can cut is higher than most founders assume.

Kevin Chia is a Singapore-based entrepreneur and semi-retired business builder. He operates kevinchia.sg (consultancy and tools), Snapbook.ai (SaaS for Singapore SMEs), and Vivre Activewear (online activewear). He runs the wheel options strategy across three IBKR accounts and writes about business, personal finance, and what actually works at kevinchia.sg.