Mar 2019

I just bought 5k shares of Singtel.

I have another 15k on hand which I plan to buy Singtel if the price of the share dropped lower. Currently it is still hovering in the region of +-3.

Lately I have been following up on hyflux news. Not because I owned it shares, rather because I want to know the lessons that could be gleaned.

It boils down once again to the cashflow. Negative operating cashflow is a warning sign that something could be wrong if the company is still profittable. This suggests to me to look at the cashflow from financing. Is the company borrowing too much?

I also took a step back and relooked at my shareholding. Sembcorp Industries caught my eyes. It is currently over leveraged but i could see that its operating cashflow is positive. But it does not have free cash flow because of the capital exenditures back into the business. it also had more than 1 billion cash on hand to help tide over any difficulties.

I would not get too worried to sell it off.

My portfiolio

Keppel Corp 20k shares
Boustead 20k shares
Sembcorp 9k shares
Singtel 10k shares

Aiming to buy another 10k shares of Singtel this year

Update

Bought 5,000 shares of Singtel with cash on 22 March 2019.

As at 20 April 2019, I have $17k cash on hand. This will serve as my emergency funds (sufficient to last me for 6 months if I lose my job).

Debt - Housing loan

Recently I chanced upon some YouTube video of Dave Ramsey.  In each video,  there will be listeners who call in to ask for his advice on their debt problem.

There were times where listeners told of their debt of 300k against annual income of 80-90k and Dave would said that their debt levels are very scary.

When I think about my own situation,  I too am in this same situation but I didn't think I was in that bad a shape.

This kept me pondering about myself.  I always had this thought that if I ever made enough money,  I would go buy a large condo and live there. But after listening to Dave Ramsey,  I realised living with a peace of mind without having to worry about my debts is more practical.  I remember him saying (cant recall exactly his words though)  why do you want to spend money that you don't have,  to impress people that you don't know and don't care about you.

This is so very true.  I ditched my idea of buying a condo,  and will focus on repaying my housing loan.

My loan is 300k,  20 years. MI is 1559, fully financed with cpf. 4 years fixed interest rates. I intend to pay off my loan in 13 years. At the end of 2021, I would have 266k loan left with about 100k in cpf increasing at at annual of 10k. At end of 2031, I should have 200k in my cpf. And I will pay off the rest in cash.

2018 Dividends

I received a summary report from sgx on my dividends received for 2018.

Total received is 6,750.

This is on a sum of 146,600 that I have invested in stocks, considering the entry prices of the stocks. Works out to be a yield of 4.6%

My goal is to earn a passive income of 36,000. I am still short of approximately 30k.

Assuming that I can save 40k a year and gets a dividend of 1600 a year.  in ten years time,  I would have an additional 16000. I would reach my goal in 19 years.

Hyflux

Alamak was writing my post halfway,  and didn't save a draft. Now had to restart again.

Oh well...

Recently Hyflux made the headline as they found a Savior who could inject funds to save the ailing company.

I thought to myself,  as I read the news. What could have caused a once starling blue chip company with a enviable business,  to fall from grace to it's current state.

how could we learnt something from this and Noble group? Although I did not buy either Hyflux nor Noble group,  I thought how could I prevent myself from buying such companies.

I went through my checklist to see if my checklist would be able to help me.

The fall that caused hylfux to be in this mess,  was the fact that the company had took on too much debt. Whereas Noble overstated it's assets.

One common signal is that both companies did not generate positive cash flow consistently. And even though there were profits,  the profits did not translate into positive operating cash flow over the years.

I went to relook at keppel and sembcorp industries that I bought. Although both companies are not in great shape,  it's operating cash flow is still positive. And it had enough cash on hand to handle loans that are due in one year.

Should I downgrade or upgrade?

Recently the topic of shifting places, cropped up again as there were many cockroaches that flew into our house the past 1-2 weeks.

I am very terrified of them and each time, had to rely on my husband to kill them.

We are living on the 6th floor but somehow cockroaches love to fly into our house. We had one night where 2 cockroaches flew into our house! Eew...


We looked online to see what are the HDB prices at Teban, Pandan Garden. We sort of missed Teban (where we rented a flat for 2 years in 2013/2014). Though the neighborhood was not big,  it had everything we needed.

And it is very accessible to Jurong East. And if we feel like going to Chinatown, we could easily hop on bus 143 to get there. My mother's place is at clementi, so it is very easy for us to visit her every sunday night.

Now at our current place at Bukit Panjang, it is abit hard to get anywhere. Nonetheless, in terms of size, you can't get a size so big at such a low price anywhere else.

My husband spoke to his agent friend and she said to wait out the 5 years TOP and buy a private properties. She was referring to the landed properties that have less than 40 years lease left.

The loan quatum for such properties is at most 60% and if the lease is less than 30 years, CPF monies cannot be used to pay for the properties. This is definitely not for me.

what i envision is for us to sell the flat after another 4 years, downgrade to a smaller flat (4-room) flat at a high level. The new flat should be cheaper, I definitely do not want to take on a heavy loan when i am 40 years old. I hope by the end of 4 years, my CPF monies could have grown to 100k in my OA and my outstanding loan is left with 250k.

I bought my house for 422,000, spent 15,000 on renovations. As we also took the HDB grant of 30,000, we must sell the house 470,000. Even after selling at this price, we won't have much size proceeds.



Assuming this is the case, after selling the house, i should have 160,000+100,000=260,000 in my OA. On hand, i would have 17,000 cash. All i need to do is to find a property that is 260,000 and less (Pandan and Teban has smaller units that fall in this range). I could potentially be debt free.

Though my OA would be zerolised, I still have some leeway to build up my retirement nest nonetheless.

New yearly goal

I realised investing fresh 10k a year is not enough.

Will aim for 30k a year. Wish me luck!