~~Towards Barista FIRE~~

Recently I came across this article by The Simple Sum Singapore on the Seven Deadly Sins of Your Finances , and I felt that this is an interesting perspective to share with everyone.  1)    Pride: Ego Over Money is Your Motto Personally I do not think that I am guilty of this.  I am a self-employed full time private tutor since 2015.  In the past 7 years, there are good times and bad, and the number of students I managed to get varies.  In periods where I am unable to get enough students for myself, I do not hesitate to apply to work part time in tuition centers, where I get to supplement my income by conducting 1 to 2 extra lessons per week.  Income from tuition centers is much lower than the income I can earn from private tutoring (only about half and the rest go to the tuition center), thus personally I think I view money over ego for now, at least before I achieve financial independence. 2)    Greed: More Is Better To You I suppose I am g...

This is probably an apt illustration of my earlier post , comparing cash versus cashflow, and how financial prudency impacts one's abilities to manage their finances. Once upon a time in the vibrant Southeast Asia, there were two cousins named Mala and Singa.  Despite their similar upbringing and close family ties, their financial journeys took remarkably different paths. Mala, the older of the two, had inherited large number of properties, massive acres of land and abundant cash from his ancestors.  This made Mala the envy of many, as his potential for future success and growth seemed limitless, with the abundance of resources that he owned.  It almost seemed like Mala would no longer need to work for a day in his life, as the resources he owned will be able to last him a lifetime.  This, inevitably made Mala a tad too comfortable with his current status and thus less prudent in managing his finances. On the other side, Singa, the younger cousin, started off with v...

Recently, I watched the documentary by Channel News Asia on Singapore Reserves: The Untold Story Part 1 and Part 2 .  As I watched in awe how the Singapore government handle and managed their reserves through 3 different agencies, namely Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), Temasek Holdings and Government of Singapore Investment Corporation (GIC), I noticed that very much like managing personal finances, diversification and asset allocation is also an important aspect.  In summary, Temasek deals with shorter term and riskier investments like equities in various industries, GIC deals with longer term, safer investments like overseas blue chips, bonds and real estate, and MAS deals with foreign reserves.  In the foreign reserves, what caught my attention is the vast amount of glittery shiny golden metal that Singapore has in their stockpile. With Singapore being looked upon as a 'A1 student' in managing its reserves, at least in my opinion, it makes me wonder if I should...

This will be a relatively short post, just to update on the transactions for the month. For the month of August, it is the month of correction, or worse, it may be the beginning of the change in trend, probably the end of the bull run.  It all started with Fitch downgrading US credit rating from AAA to AA+.  This downgrade may make the cost of debt more expensive to the US government, which is already having a ballooning debt issue.  This caused the 10-year yields to shoot above 4% again, causing stress to the equity markets, especially the tech sector.  This marks the beginning of the downward slide in equity markets at the beginning of the month. One week later, Moody's joined in the 'fun' and cut the ratings of 10 US banks, and also placed some big names on the downgrade watchlist.  This does not go well with investors as it successfully reminded investors the panic and worries of the bank failures and bankruptcies that happened in April this year, and th...

After dabbling with investing for more than a decade now, I have the following thought of property versus portfolio, and wonder how things will turn out if I have done things differently.  Before I begin, kindly note that all perspectives below are my personal viewpoints, which may be biased and have limited scope, and caters to my personal circumstances of being a single Singapore Permanent Resident and is unable to purchase HDB flat of any kind, hence only able to consider private property.  Do perform your own due diligence. Is it better to build up a dividend portfolio first and then use dividend income generated to save up for the down-payment for a residential property, and subsequently use the dividends to pay for the monthly instalments of the property, or will it be better to buy the residential property as early as possible before building a dividend portfolio? Personally, I did the latter.  One important thing to note here is that the main purpose of the priva...