Start with saying the obvious. Main source of living expenses for most people comes from salary income . Even for those who are so called FIRE or Financially Independence, the seeds has to large enough, comes from salary income. Even then they may not completely retire. This statements are generally acceptable with the exceptions few.
As one grow older, various income source comes into play. What best to represent it is to show the Net Worth chart and the allocation within. Financially few things Cory did or don't.
1. Move most OA funds to CPF SA
2. Continue to leave some amount of CPF in Property Loan for another year
3. Continue to have SSB Max Out
4. Have at least 3 years buffers to support housing loan in FD
5. Transferred Allowances to parents. Happy New Year !
6. Annual Bonus to Nanny. Very Professional Nanny.
Cory long term goal is to have salaried income replaced by equity income that is more passive. This seems quite illusive with annual adjustment ! LOL ! Like many people who come from humble background, and has no business acumen, we just have to learn to save or we have to learn through business failures of which most of us could not afford without safety net. How long it takes to save and build up do depends on how much delay gratification we want. This amount becomes very handy once a door open.
One main door open is Stocks Market. While Cory cannot run business, he can find good managers who can do this for him. So this is rather passive income. The trick is how to stay profitable in this business. This is especially make possible when the information gap is narrowed between institutions and retailers. And technology allows cheaper trading and more sophisticated products. Of-course experience in the market matters a lot. And then the saving slowly move in.
The next door opened when he starts to invest in property. This hurdle is harder to cross due to property curbs and needs for cash-flow to sustain. This is different from buying a property for one stay. The mindset is for investment gains and rental components. So why explore this ?
Like to mentioned Cory is not an expert and needs more buffers but the logic seems clear as below.
Cory is no longer young. Getting a loan will be harder. And it will be tough when one is without work one day. So if one want to invest in property, time is an essence too.
20% down for single property is like 5x leverage of a big sum of money. The mindset is quite different from stock investment where Cory do not leverage at all.
Loan is relatively cheap with low rates. Even after all the misc costs, and even so rental unable to cover all the loans, as long the interests part (not the principal) of the loan is well covered into good portion of the principal payment, theoretically one is making good money.
The rates may go up but by then the loan would have been serviced for some period of time and there will be more options. Ideally we like it to be in as long as possible, and as much as possible with comfortable buffer as property loan is one of cheapest to tap on.
Capital appreciation factor for those with good location. Is more pricey logically. With land limited Singapore, unless we are seeing something like no future for Singapore, with inflation the price general trend is upwards with fluctuation in-between that can be quite volatile.
As long one is able to service, after rental, is quite hard to lose money after all the costs. The main risk is cash-flow which is why Cory put this as top priority to mitigate and not to assume Rental Income is sufficient.
What will be the next door ?
Cory
2020-0113
Has been in market for more than 15 years. Over the years strategy changed with ones experience and learning. Sometime change for the better, sometimes worst. One indication is using Cumulative XIRR across all trades through the years.
For Cory, due to strong performance in 2019, the Cumulative XIRR since 2007 is now 7.2% as above. However this is from 2007 when Cory is still young man with all sort of ideas.
How good is it to measure progress over time. Logically the cumulative will have to go up. But is this assumption right ? Let's try another table by injecting additional 10k profit into 2 scenarios. First scenario in Year 2007 and the second scenario in Year 2019 below.
From the above table, there are much larger improvement in the score in 2007 ( 7.54% ) which is much more than Year 2019 ( 7.36% ) can provides. This is probably due to portfolio size and compounding over the years. What this mean is that it will be harder to push up the cumulative value even with good performance in later year. It will have take few more good years to see recovery.
To overcome this issue, we may have to use rolling years to accommodate this limitation. Here's the table. So you can see at 13th, 10th and 7th Years period ... is down trend.
Now, if we have a major strategy change 7 years ago, we could see the progress at 5 years, 3 years and 1 year ago. This way "very past" performance do not cloud the future view.
What I am still deliberating is.... if a Guru has fantastic performance in his early years of investment life, will his performance stick with him for later years using cumulative metrics ?
Cory
2020-0107
The first day of trading for Year 2020 started with a Bang when the P/L hits more than 7 K and it seems like we will have a good start for the year till someone backside itchy and taunted Trump. Here's what I found.
"Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei taunted Donald Trump over the embassy attack."
"Iran says Trump ‘can’t do a damn thing’ ."
As usual Trump tweeted. ‘He should have been taken out many years ago!’
Iran Generals dead in Iraqi's soil. And we celebrated the second say of trading with a reversal.Thank you everyone ! The good thing is I am still net positive for the year. And this tiny margin could vaporize as well.
Since last reported my Asset Allocation Tracking in Oct'19 I think is a good time to do this now again as there is nothing much to shout about on investment .... joking !
Not surprisingly the Saving continues to increase due to year end salary and bonuses. Some dividends came in as well from the Ascendas-h Tr cash distribution which is now merged as Ascott Trust. I also paid most of my major bills and allowance.
The volatility, and weaker USD for the past few months maybe a good opportunity to invest in USD. I could look for 2.5% Fixed Deposits or higher 3% plus structured products that is capital protected. Currently in exploration stage. But decision can be as quick as next week.
I think the cash allocation needs to go below 3% to 4% consistently for efficient growth of capitals that do not need much work from me. I can earn quite an amount of interests.
Net Property did not change much though I did notice an increase in property valuation from the transactions. For Year 2020, I am thinking of a plan for the account that pays for my loan to be self-sufficient. That's mean the cash-flow in > out for the entire loan duration. Not sure this can be done but it has to be safe and only need for me to check once in a blue moon.
MMF is up due to some Equity sales before year ended 2019 which will be reserve for opportunity while collecting interests in cash management account. Equity has a target for dividend in Year 2020. Year 2019 exceeded. So I like to keep this in mind to continue the trend.
Cory
2020-0103
