Retirement

Having lots of thoughts on this lately.

Probably due to my work environment, new bosses come new changes. 

I am seriously thinking of throwing in my letter. But the rational side of me always prevails.

I have plans to stay on my current job for 5 more years, will be 41 years old then.

If everything goes as planned, l should have accumulated 400k worth of investment. Assuming a measly return of 5%, this woukd give me an annual passive income of 20k, which comes to 1.6k a month.

Although my household expenses is around 2.2k (previously wrote that it is 3k but I added some buffer), I think i could scrimp abit and live within 1.6k a month.

Everytime I think of this, thoughts of hastily quitting in a fit of amger dissipates. As the saying goes, when the going get tough, the tough get going.

Private property

I was thinking about the popular belief that buying private property will allow one to retire, by renting it out.

Given the high prices of condo, i still feel that stocks is a better choice. I would easily need to commit 200k to a property that might not pay me after deducting property tax and maintenance fees.

Although same can be said for the dividend streams that it is not guranteed. But in terms of the 200k, i could easily mitigate by investing in 3-4 stocks. Whereas the same 200k would be committed to one property.

Tenancy is also an issue.

Stocks are still my best bet to move towards my financial freedom.

Boredom shopping

It is a nice long weekend so once again I found myself having blogging as I could not think of anything to do on a lazy friday evening.

Had been running errands the whole morning, and playing online games.

I decided to take some time to review my finances. I had not been able to save 25k by August due to some unplanned expenditure (china trip, msia trip etc). Beating myself up over the shortfall will not help. Will try to save more in the coming months.

For now, i have plans to save more and stock up on Singtel shares. The stock market had been battered lately and Singtel shares had fallen from 3.50ish to 3.26. Am expecting it to go lower and will move in at 3.00 price.

Addicted to shopping

I realised that the more I try to control my spending, the more shopping I do.

Recently, due to many expenditure, I found myself 8k behind my planned savings.

As a result, I was trying very hard by trying to spend below my means. But instead, I found myself more stressed up and then doing online shopping i.e. ended up spending more.

As I look around, I found that most of my female colleagues are kind of addicted to shopping. Some are always shopping for clothes, shoes, others are shopping for kid stuff etc.

This is definitely an obstacle.

Budgetting

Budgeting is the first step to creating a financial plan. Because only through this, you can know how much you could save every month.

Without savings, one cannot invest.

There are many budgeting apps nowadays that one can use to track your expenditure.

For me, I tried using apps for a month or two before I will give up because of the hassles. I am a macro person so instead I resorted to using excel to do a budget. This is less hassle as I just need to review it once a year if there are changes to my income.

After coming up with this, I will get the expected savings amount. So again, I just mark my calendar to check the amount in my acc at end of every 3 months if i has the expected amount.

E.g. my saving is X amount now and I can save Y amount every month (note: i used a separate acc from my main account for savings so i will set up auto transfers).

At end of 3 months, I should have X + 3Y in my savings account.

This is not a guaranteed method one can use to save because there will be times when I cant save the y amount due to paying for income tax, holidays etc.

So what i do is that I will try to make up for this in coming months by either saving more than Y. Or when there's bonuses. This involves abit of balancing.

Hunting again

I were expecting to make another investment in singtel in july or aug. But the price of singtel had shot up by 50 cents to 3.50 per share.

I decided to hunt around. Were considering sembcorp industries. It had hovered below 2.50 but one con is that its gearing ratio is quite high and considering the recent loan obligation to sembcorp marine, I decided to wait abit more.

SPH Singapore Press Holding
It is in a sinking industry with revenue from media decreasing. Unless it could transform itself, future outlook is bleak.

SingPost
Initially I thought that with online shopping explosion, logistics companies should benefit. Even though revenue is increasing, i was dismayed when lookig at how thin the profit was over the last 5 years.

Decided to hunt a little longer.

Goal in life

My goal now, is to earn enough passive income to cover my monthly expenses of 3k.

If things go my way this year, I can expect to earn 10k passive income. Around 800 a month.

In 10 years time, I can expect to reach my goal. I am 36 yo this year. I can expect to achieve financial freedom by age 46.