~~Towards Barista FIRE~~

This will be a relatively short post, just to update on the transactions for the month. For the month of November, it was a down-trending month for my portfolio.  Since the sale of half of the US Growth Portfolio to return the monies back to family,  I have not been doing much with the US Growth Portfolio.  Within my US Growth Portfolio, the pressure is on the performance of Google.  This is especially the case after the Department of Justice has reportedly asked the federal judge to force Google to sell its Chrome browser as part of the landmark antitrust case.  The news caused the share price of Google to plunge by more than 5% in a day.  However, this negative performance is mitigated by the splendid performance of JP Morgan and Palantir, both of which has shot up in value to an all time high.  As such, the overall value of the portfolio has climbed up slightly for the month. Closer to home, my SG Dividend Portfolio is telling a similar story....

This is my second trip travelling out of ASEAN region, where I have to plan every bit of the itinerary myself (the first was back in May 2024 where me and my mum travelled together to Japan ).  With the experience from the Japan trip, I am less concerned and worried about what to plan for our itinerary this time round, as I would have roughly known what mu mum would like to experience, and hence what to include and what to exclude in the planning.   However, this trip has a new worrying factor, and that is the use of Alipay!  As an individual who is not very tech-savvy, so much so that I do not even use Google Pay in Singapore, Alipay is one that I really need to learn how to use (frankly speaking, after using it this trip, it was super easy to use, seamless, but because it is so good, it made me worried if I overspent).  Nonetheless, the decision has been made in July when I saw that Scoot and Jetstar were running some promotions, and I booked the flights for 2...