Worker who started on W1.46m salary built over W2b in assets in 6 years

A salaried worker who gave up on the civil service exam and joined a small company has revealed how he built assets worth more than 2 billion won in just six years — starting from a first monthly paycheck of 1.46 million won.

Kim Dong-myeon, a working investor, appeared Monday on the YouTube channel Jjeonmunga to share his investment strategy.

Kim spent six years preparing for the civil service exam before giving up and taking a job at a small and medium-sized enterprise. His first monthly salary was 1.46 million won, and even with allowances it came to around 2 million won.

To build seed capital, Kim divided his income across three bank accounts. He put 80 percent of his salary directly into an investment account and split the remaining 20 percent evenly between fixed and variable expense accounts, living strictly within those limits. He switched to a budget mobile carrier, brought packed lunches to work and kept his monthly food costs under 200,000 won.

Over two years, he accumulated savings and combined them with his severance pay and a loan to assemble seed capital of 110 million won.

With that foundation in place, Kim began investing in transit-oriented apartments in the Greater Seoul area and US stocks.

"In Korea, 70 percent of household assets are in real estate, while in the US, 70 percent are in financial assets — so I concluded that investing in Korean apartments and US stocks would keep me from going under," he said. "I spread my money across metropolitan-area apartments and major US indexes like the S&P 500."

In the stock market, Kim made particular use of a strategy centered on maximum drawdown, or MDD.

"After analyzing the S&P 500's historical performance, I found it tends to drop about 14 percent roughly once a year on average," he said. "Whenever the decline exceeded that threshold, I increased my position."

He said he bought heavily into Tesla when it fell about 50 percent from its peak and into Bitcoin when it dropped around 48 percent, earning returns of roughly 100 percent after both recovered to their previous highs.

He also said he normally allocated 60 percent of his assets to stocks and 40 percent to bonds and gold.

When share prices plunged, he sold safe-haven assets to buy more stocks, then rebalanced to his original allocation once the market recovered.

On the real estate side, Kim managed four apartments through gap investment. Every two years, when jeonse deposits rose, he reinvested the proceeds into US stocks or virtual assets that had fallen in price, and channeled stock profits back into property.

He also set clear criteria for property purchases. He targeted transit-oriented apartments that ranked in the top 30 percent by price within their area and had at least 500 units. He avoided ground-floor and top-floor units, complexes far from subway stations, and small standalone "nah-hollo" apartments.

Kim acknowledged, however, that his approach was not a novel strategy. "I read around 100 investment books and followed the principles of Warren Buffett and John Bogle," he said. "What matters in investing is reproducibility — by applying principles that many investors had already refined through their own failures, I was able to avoid a lot of trial and error."

Gap investment, however, carries significant risk: if property prices or jeonse deposits fall while interest rates rise, investors can face insolvency. There is also no guarantee that past return patterns will repeat, and caution is warranted.