While most people battle feelings of insecurity, worrying whether they have saved enough for their post-retirement life, Wiwan Tharahirunchote has already achieved financial independence with about two decades left for her to retire from service.

Wiwan is a success story when it comes to financial security. In her career path, she has been doing well. She's now the managing director of Kasikorn Asset Management, the country's largest mutual-fund player, which manages assets of around Bt159.75 billion.

After 21 years of working, Wiwan says she could now retire as she has saved enough to travel around the world and live comfortably, in keeping with her lifestyle.

No, she is not an heiress of a billionaire, nor is she married to a millionaire. The key to her success is simply her financial discipline, which started many years ago with humble savings of Bt1,000.

"Everybody can save, no matter how low your salary is," she says.

When Wiwan was an undergraduate at Chulalongkorn University's Arts faculty, she earned her first salary of Bt8,000 and promptly set aside Bt1,000 in savings right away.

After obtaining her Master's degree from Northwestern University's Kellogg Graduate School of Management in the United States, she returned home to serve Kasikornbank, which had granted her the scholarship to study abroad. She then joined One Asset Management and after almost 14 years, returned to Kasikornbank's subsidiary, Kasikorn Asset Management.

Of course, her salary has been continuously rising. But also keeping pace with her rising income were her savings.

Wiwan says she has been a big spender since she was young but she has never found herself in any financial difficulty. This is because she has held on to one spending philosophy:

"The money I spend for my own satisfaction must be generated from the returns on investment. Otherwise, I have to get an extra job in order to earn more to pay for the purchase," she says.

When her savings reached Bt30,000, she invested it in the stock market. Once the returns had reached many hundreds of thousands of baht, she took out some of the money and started diversifying her investment portfolio.

Wiwan says she once really wanted to own a Volkswagen turtle car.

Rather than borrowing to buy it, and getting bogged down in paying instalments like most people tend to do these days, she began investing in her first condominium. She was willing to be in debt for the asset she believed would generate fruitful returns.

And it did.

Once her investment had started to yield fruits, which was adequate enough to afford the turtle car, she took the money to invest in something else, her second condominium.

"I've savoured the taste of being patient," she says. "A car is just a car, no matter what brand it is. But all types of cars have one thing in common - their values drop once you buy them. On the contrary, the value of the property is constantly rising," says Wiwan.

She raised a 10-year loan for her first condominium, but was able to repay all the debt within five years. The second loan was repaid even faster. She cleared up all debt in three years.

The unpredictability of the markets have confounded even experts, so how could Wiwan keep up her steady success, surviving the turbulence of the markets?

She reveals three principles that guide her investments:

n Don't be greedy

n Diversify your portfolio

n Set realistic targets and review them once

     in a while

In 2005, 50 per cent of Wiwan's investment portfolio was in equity. Due to the volatility in the stock markets, she lowered the proportion to 30 per cent while the remaining 70 per cent is a mix of fixed-income and property.

Besides being disciplined in her investments, Wiwan says that every time she achieves her target, she sets herself more challenging goals. She also says that in order to become financially independent, sometimes you need to take risks.

"You may think that investments in fixed-income deposits would be a safe bet. That may be true. But the risk in not taking risks is that you'll lose the cost of opportunity," Wiwan says.

Piyarat Setthasiriphaiboon

The Nation