Tung Nguyen on how he plans to retire at 50

• Tung Nguyen, 49, plans to retire in 2025
• He heavily invested in gold and crypto
• READ MORE: Planning your retirement

A financially savvy former refugee will retire next year at the age of 50 despite never getting a university degree.

Tung Nguyen, 49, fled Vietnam by boat to Australia with his mother and father in 1979 when he was just three-years-old.

He now works in Sydney’s inner west as a senior corporate finance manager with Link Group specialising in investments and equities.

His wife, Sylvia, is a project manager and the pair are planning to retire when their daughter finishes high school at the end of next year.

The secret behind Mr Nguyen’s wealth is how he capitalised on using his self-managed superannuation fund to invest in gold and cryptocurrency.

Tung Nguyen, 49, arrived in Australia from Vietnam at the age of three and has now earned enough money to retire with his wife by the time he turns 50

The finance guru said he has been investing in gold for as long as he can remember.

‘We were on the losing side of the [Vietnam] war and mum got dad out of a prisoner of war camp using gold, so … I understand the value of gold in a crisis,’ he told the Australian Financial Review.

Mr Nguyen’s mother had bribed a prison guard in South Vietnam to release his father from the camp before the family were able to flee to Australia.

His mother has since died and his father remains in Sydney.

Mr Nguyen explained he became sick of paying for ‘average financial advice’ from professionals in 2015, which led him to start investing on his own.

While neither he or his wife have any qualifications in finance, they managed to start filling their self managed super fund with bitcoin and gold investments.

Cryptocurrency, specifically bitcoin and etherium, account for around 20 per cent of Mr Nguyen’s wealth.

Typically gold and cryptocurrency are not ideal for a retirement investment because of their volatility but Mr Nguyen is confident that now is the time to buy in.

He said money printing throughout the pandemic and wars in Ukraine and Israel are destabilising the value of the dollar.

Mr Nguyen plans to spend his retirement travelling with his wife while helping other people learn the tips on how to gain a fortune like he did through writing a book.

He recently started a Facebook group with the goal of advising people how to invest in order to save $1million.

‘It seems like a good end of a chapter, my wife and I could keep working … and have more money, but we wouldn’t be happier,’ Mr Nguyen said.

READ MORE: The eye-watering cost of retirement in Australia

Retiring now costs more a year than paying off a typical mortgage for those who want to live comfortably, superannuation industry figures show (pictured is a stock image)

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