~~Towards Barista FIRE~~

This month marks the end of the 2nd quarter of 2024.  Thus it's definitely a good time for me to record the performance of my portfolio to track how it has been. To recap, I started my SG Dividends Portfolio in late 2017, and I began tracking the dividends and all reinvestment done starting 2018.  To date, my SG Dividends Portfolio consist of banks, REITs and defense technology.  On the other hand, I only started the US Growth Portfolio in late December 2021.  Currently, my US Growth Portfolio consist of mainly big tech names, bank and exchange traded funds (ETFs). Being a relatively conservative investor, I prefer to dollar cost average (DCA) into the market to slowly build up my portfolio.  The advantages of using Interactive Brokers to buy the US shares via DCA are undoubtedly the low fees and ability to buy fractional shares of mega-cap technology shares like Alphabet and Tesla.  The latest FED meeting in June has once again successfully caused more confusion in the market. 

In mid-June, HSBC released another 'bomb' to HSBC Revolution Card users like myself, which includes: 1)     Starting from 15th July 2024, all contactless payments will no longer be eligible for bonus points. 2)     Starting from January 2025, all travel-related payments will no longer be eligible for bonus points. Since getting the HSBC Revolution card in 2022, this has been my primary card to accumulate points for my miles game, with the purpose to exchange for a Singapore Airlines Business Class experience for 2 to bring my mum somewhere for a nice vacation in time to come.  Yes I know, it is always simpler to just buy the tickets to travel, but the cheapskate in me finds that paying for Business Class tickets is quite a "lugi" trade, as I can pay for the same journey at a fraction of the cost travelling via budget as I always had. In my earlier post , I mentioned that my lifestyle have somewhat inflated a little while chasing for miles, and I think I will only play

This piece is inspired by AK71 once again, who has recently released this video saying that he is considering liquidating his entire portfolio.  He is having such thoughts because his portfolio is sufficiently big enough to be placed into safer instruments like T-Bills or Fixed Deposits to eliminate/ minimize any market volatility to the portfolio, and this amount is more than sufficient to last him his lifetime.   So will I do the same thing?  I am not in the situation to comment on that, because my portfolio is way too far away from this ideal situation, and moreover everyone's situation is different.  If I ever own a portfolio the size of his to be able to Fat FIRE, I think I may probably consider doing something similar, but there may be some factors I personally need to evaluate and assess.  Since my portfolio is significantly smaller, I did think of complete liquidation of all my assets before, but with the help of geo-arbitrage.  I am a Malaysian, with Singapore Permanent R

This is going to be a relatively short post, as this is just to share what I have learnt from Central Provident Fund (CPF) staff regarding some updates on the way how self-employed individuals can contribute to their CPF accounts.  Kindly note that the changes only affects self-employed individuals who contribute more than their Medisave liabilities to their CPF.  If you are self-employed and only contribute the required percentage of Net Trade Income (NTI) to your Medisave Account (MA), this change will affect you. Just for context, it is not a must for self-employed persons to contribute their monthly income to CPF Ordinary Account (OA) and Special Account (SA), but it is mandatory for them to fulfil their Medisave liabilities as determined by Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore (IRAS), which is a percentage of the annual NTI generated by the self-employed person, based on their age group, as shown below: I am a self-employed person as of late 2015, and since then till prior to Jun

For a start, please note that not everyone who play the miles game will inflate their lifestyle.  This is just a personal sharing on how I feel my lifestyle has changed when I started the miles journey. All along, I never cared much about miles or cashback earn rates from the various credit cards.  I just applied for credit cards that I think I have use for, of which mostly are cashback cards, for my necessary spending.  I did not pay attention to how much cashback I can earn, or what rewards am I eligible for.  They are mainly just used for paying for my expenses, and ensuring that I pay in full when its due (so there are many missed opportunities all these years).  However, in September 2022, things took a turn.  I applied for the HSBC Revolution credit card for the sign up bonus, which is a SGD 250 cash rebate, and most importantly it has no annual fees, so I do not have to worry about calling in for waivers annually.  After getting the card, and reading blogs by other fin-fluencers