[Edaily Reporter Nam Soyeon ] A salaried worker who once earned 1.46 million won a month has attracted attention by revealing that he accumulated 2.2 billion won in assets within six years of starting to invest.

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On the 31st, office worker and investor Kim Dong-myeon appeared on the YouTube channel

to reveal his investment secrets.
After preparing for the civil service exam for six years, he landed a job at a small-to-medium-sized enterprise and received his first monthly salary of 1.46 million won. Even with various allowances added, his total income was reportedly around 2 million won. Two years later, he resigned and used his carefully saved salary and severance pay to purchase an apartment near a subway station in the Seoul metropolitan area, marking the start of his real estate investment journey.
Describing his first investment, Mr. Kim said, “I pooled all my salary and severance pay from about two years, took out a loan, and saved up 110 million won to invest in real estate.” He added, “At the time, the apartment cost about 360 million won, but since the jeonse (lump-sum rental deposit) was 250 million won, I was able to purchase an apartment near a train station in the Seoul metropolitan area with the loan and 110 million won.”
Mr. Kim explained, “After analyzing the statistics, I realized that in Seoul, apartment sales prices rise by 13% every two years and jeonse prices by 15%. That’s when I realized that the later I invested, the worse off I’d be.” He continued, “Since my investment capital was limited, I judged that I needed to first grow the size of my assets to increase my actual returns, which is why I started with real estate.”
He invested the profits from real estate, combined with his monthly salary, into stocks. He reportedly repeated this cycle, reinvesting the profits from stocks back into real estate.
One method he found particularly effective was dividing his bank accounts into four separate accounts, each designated for a specific purpose. He categorized his accounts as an investment account, a fixed expenses account, a variable expenses account, and an emergency fund. When he received his monthly salary, he deposited 80% into the investment account and allocated the remaining 20% to the other accounts, living solely off the balances in those accounts.
Mr. Kim elaborated, “Even within that system, there’s room to cut costs. My cell phone bill came out of the fixed-expense account, but by switching to a budget carrier, the cost dropped significantly. I also limited my food budget to 200,000 won and packed my own lunch as much as possible,” adding, “I then put the money I saved that way back into the investment account.” He explained that he was able to save 1.6 to 1.8 million won each month this way to build up his investment capital.
Mr. Kim said, “Looking back on that process, it was incredibly difficult and grueling, but since I had wasted my entire twenties preparing for the civil service exam, I felt a tremendous sense of desperation.” He added, “Because I had already systematized my finances by dividing my accounts, I was able to keep other temptations at bay as much as possible.”
Regarding his investment principles, he explained, “In Korea, I invested in apartments, and in the U.S., I invested in stocks.” He said this approach was inspired by the difference between Korea—where 70% of household assets consist of real estate—and the U.S., where 70% of household assets consist of financial assets. Based on this, he established a principle of diversifying his investments between apartments near subway stations in the Seoul metropolitan area and the S&P 500 index.
In the stock market, in particular, he employed a “buy the dip” strategy, taking advantage of the market’s steepest declines. Having observed that the S&P 500 typically experiences a decline of about 14% once a year on average, Mr. Kim adopted an aggressive approach of increasing his investment every time the drop exceeded that level. He said he made profits by buying heavily when Tesla’s stock price fell 50% from its peak and when Bitcoin dropped about 48%, and then sold once prices recovered to their previous highs.
Furthermore, Mr. Kim stated, “If you allocate 60% to risky assets like stocks and the remaining 40% to safe assets such as gold or bonds, the overall asset portfolio will continue to rise,” adding “Depending on the market cycle, when risky assets rise, safe assets fall, and when risky assets fall, safe assets rise. So I thought that by using a strategy of buying up in bulk whenever a particular asset class crashes, I could expect slightly higher returns.”
Mr. Kim emphasized that this investment method is not new. “By reading many books and applying the safe strategies commonly used by wealthy individuals, I actually seem to have fared even better,” he said. “Warren Buffett, a investing genius, had an average return of 19.7%, and Peter Lynch’s was around 32%. I fully recognized that I couldn’t achieve returns higher than that, and I figured the maximum return I could generate would be around 10 percent,” he added.