3 Years And Counting...

 

If I can make a wish come true on my birthday, I would like to wish for my investing journey to start much much earlier. If you have been following my blog, you would know that I started "thinking" about investment in the year 2017 but didn't really get down to it until 2020. I actually wasted almost 3.5 years through procrastination and thinking and pondering but took no action except to attend a thousand dollars guru course. If you are reading this blog and thinking whether of not you should learn a thing about investing, my advice is to start as early as you can. Actually do it now! (Here's my referral link to Webull, both you and I will get rewards when you fund the account, https://www.webull.com.sg/s/7JusgkneFgyujCEEVm)

Today (22 August 2023), I received a Happy Anniversary email from Interactive Brokers to mark my third year into the world of investing. What started off as a 1K investment is now a six figure portfolio comprising of equities, mutual funds, ETF, MMF, T-bills and crypto, my aim for the portfolio is to attain adequate diversification with at least a seven figure portfolio. Assuming if I fell short on the target, I will still fall within a high six figure range so fingers crossed.

Over the last 3 years, I have acquired invaluable lessons which will remain with me for the rest of my life. These learnings fitted in nicely as a result of my first mid-life crisis encounter at the age of 37 years old. I started questioning myself about life goals and started having jitters over what the future might become. I started doing a deep examination into my finances and LORD BEHOLD, It was bad... I had some savings but certainly not enough for retirement (actually I didn't even know how much was needed). I was definitely not into investment and had no future plans on how to make my money work! To make matters worse, inflation was looming the economy.

I wanted to pick up a new skill which can not be taken away by any external factors (e.g. loss of income, lack of skills, improved technology) or lost due to the passage of time. Learning how to invest was one of them, the other was learning the French language. While I still suck in French, learning how to properly invest has allowed me to find a new relationship with money. Money has always been a taboo for me and I am pretty sure, many others. Like most, money is often not talk about or discuss, there is even a Chinese saying "money hurts relationship". When at work, you are not allow to discuss your salary with your colleagues, you should never reveal how much you have with others and the list goes on. This "Money is the root of all evils" quote gets engrained into our minds since young resulting in avoidance of money talk. When you don't talk about it, you don't really know much about it. When something is unknown to us, it is our basic instinct to manifest fear and feel uncomfortable. Think about eating something which you have never eaten before, your first time behind the wheels, the first holiday which you took on your own, while excited in all cases, fear does linger. Since I started building my newly found relationship with money, I started to engage more open discussion about money. I tried sharing my limited experiences and knowledge with the people around me but come to realize that not everyone is comfortable talking about money. This can be scary because the lingo of finance is never taught in school. It is irony to think that we attend school to learn knowledge and skills which is required of a job and earning a salary at work but never really taught on how to manage personal finances. It feels like the journey of learning how to drive a car, going through a driving lessons, passing the driving test, starting to drive car but eventually ended up not knowing where to go. I am not saying that going to school is no good, all I am saying is that elementary school doesn't teach us anything about finances. But that is just plain capitalism at work and that is for another day.

After 3 years of running around like a headless chicken, this is what I intend to do:

1) Diverse into dividends play, likely into REITS or Singapore banks. Important to grow a safe haven going into retirement. How safe is Singapore?

2) Increase my capital outlay by another 200K in 2024. Simple formula = Spend less, save more.

3) Develop another source of passive income through online sales.

4) Sell more CALL option on value stocks as a form of passive income. Selling cash secured put option on highly valued stock on dip days seem to work out pretty well in 2023. Need to allocate more time to screen and monitor price action.

5) Fund my CPF to meet the Full Retirement Sum of $198K. This will eliminate "shifting of goal post" as CPF interests will help defray the rising inflation.

About The Contributor

Ben is not financially trained. He is not a certified financial planner and he does not sell any insurance or investment plans. He is not financially motivated by any entities to produce this blog. He just want his friends to know more about money management and not have anyone fall between the social cracks. Nope, he is not a millionaire though he aims to be financially free before 50 years old.