Hi, I’m Steve — a 40-something mechanical engineer from South Korea.
I’ve spent my entire career working with machinery: designing processes, testing equipment, and solving problems that have exactly one right answer if you’re patient enough to find it. Engineering taught me to trust measurement over opinion. If a number doesn’t reconcile, you don’t argue with it — you go find out why.
Money never worked like that for me. For most of my thirties I saved without a system, invested on hunches, and had no honest answer to a simple question: if I keep doing exactly this, where do I end up?
A few years ago I finally sat down and did the arithmetic. The answer wasn’t a disaster, but it wasn’t freedom either. So I started over with a different question — what would it actually take to build real income outside of my 9-to-5? — and I decided to document the answer in public, in English, where I couldn’t quietly edit the embarrassing parts later.
That’s this blog.
Where I actually stand
I started tracking publicly with about $96,000 in retirement and investment accounts. That number is the fixed baseline on my homepage — it never moves, because it’s the starting line.
As of July 2026, the accounts are worth just over $106,000, and they generated an average of about $153 per month in dividends over the trailing twelve months.
The goal in the blog’s name is $100,000 a year in passive income.
So let me be direct about the gap: at roughly $1,800 a year in dividends, I am somewhere around 2% of the way there. Not 60%. Not “almost.” Two percent.
I publish that number every month anyway, in a recap post with the same structure each time — total assets, dividends received, and how the allocation shifted. If a month is bad, the bad month goes up. The whole point of writing this in public is that I can’t skip the ugly entries. (All figures are converted at a fixed rate of 1,500 KRW to $1 so the month-to-month comparisons stay clean.)
What I actually do with the money
Every payday I move roughly $1,300 into my accounts, and it buys automatically on a schedule. No timing, no waiting for a dip. It is deliberately boring.
The core of the portfolio is S&P 500 index funds, held inside Korean tax-advantaged retirement wrappers — a personal pension account, a workplace retirement account, and an ISA. Around that core sit a dividend-focused ETF, a long-duration Treasury position, a small Nasdaq 100 allocation, a deliberately small thematic bucket, and cash waiting to be deployed.
I don’t pick individual stocks. I’ve tried, I wasn’t good at it, and I’ve written about that honestly rather than pretending otherwise.
I also run a long-range projection of where this ends: contributions through the mid-2040s, then a shift toward income. It’s a spreadsheet, not a prophecy, and I say so every time I reference it. Models are wrong; the useful part is watching how they’re wrong over time.
How I write this blog
I can’t do this alone anymore. I work with an AI assistant I call Mia, who helps me research, draft, and fact-check. She doesn’t decide what goes up — I do — and the accounts, the mistakes, and the responsibility are mine. But the honest version of “how does a full-time engineer publish two or three times a week?” includes her, so I’d rather say it than not.
Because this is money, I hold myself to rules I’d use at work:
- Every specific number gets verified against a primary source before it’s published — a central bank release, a government statistic, a company filing, or a fund’s own documentation. If I can’t confirm it at the source, I delete the claim rather than soften it. I’d rather publish nothing that week than publish something wrong.
- No affiliate links. Anywhere. When I mention an ETF, I link to the asset manager’s official product page — not to a broker, not to a referral. I earn nothing if you click.
- I write about my own accounts, not hypotheticals. The dollar figures here are mine.
- When I get something wrong, I correct the published post rather than quietly deleting it.
I also keep specific details about my employer and my exact age out of the blog on purpose. What’s relevant to you is the engineering mindset and the account balances — not my résumé.
What this blog is not
I’m not a financial advisor, a fund manager, or a licensed professional of any kind. I hold no credentials in finance, and nothing here is investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell anything.
I’m also not going to tell you I found a shortcut. There’s no course, no signal group, no “system.” The strategy is: earn, save a fixed amount, buy broad index funds on a schedule, hold through the scary parts, and let decades do the work. It is not exciting. That’s the feature.
Who this is for
If you’re in your late thirties or forties, you have a real job, you suspect you started investing later than you should have, and you’re tired of financial content that’s either a sales pitch or a victory lap — this is written for you.
You’ll find explainers on how index funds, ETFs, dividends, and retirement accounts actually work; monthly recaps of my real numbers; weekly summaries of the economic news that matters; and the occasional story about the parts of this that went badly.
I don’t know yet whether I’ll reach $100,000 a year. That’s genuinely undecided, and it’s the reason the record is worth keeping.
Thanks for reading. If you want to reach me, the contact page is the fastest way.
Nothing on this site is investment advice.