Lifelong Financial Freedom in Singapore

My Passive Income (Month of Jan 12)

2012-01-28T08:20:00.003+08:00

Recently I had posted in this blog that I will only track my cash passive income portion and leave out my CPF portion. So I have to adjust my total passive income target to $3000 based on my last expenses update in order to gain my financial freedom.

Total Passive Income(Cash): $1702
Target: $3000
Achievement: 56.8%
For passive income 1, there is an increase of $30.
For passive income 2, there is an increase of $30
For passive income 3 and 4, there are no changes.

Happy Dragon Lunar New Year to Everyone!!!

2012-01-23T08:37:00.001+08:00

Wishing all my blog readers a happy Lunar New Year. And enjoying yourself with your family members and friends in this holiday.

Breaking through my looking glass

2012-01-14T05:47:00.001+08:00

For those who have been following my blog will know that I had undergone Lasik treatment during Dec 11. Recently my vision has almost recovered and I am glad that I have obtained my vision freedom again after twenty plus years.

The total cost of my Lasik treatment is adding up to almost $4000 (including post-consultation sessions and eye drops). Though it may be expensive, but to me it is definitely worth it. It is because I no longer need to find my spectacle every morning when I wake up. No more constraint by spectacle viewing area. No more cleaning of fingerprints and dust on my spectacle. And also no more uncomfortable contact lenses that stick on my corneas.

Well this “glassless feeling” is great and I believe it is one of my best lifelong investments that I have ever made in my life.

My Family Expenses (Jan 2012)

2012-01-07T07:40:00.004+08:00

Today I shall post an update on my monthly expenses. I have decided to take out my housing loan portion as my total family CPF (OA) is going to catch up with it. For my utility (power/water/gas) bill, it has gone up by $50. I also increase my other unknown expenses from $100 to $250.

So in conclusion, my total expense now is $3000.

My New Year's Resolutions For 2012

2012-01-01T09:18:00.001+08:00

Happy New Year to all my readers. I hope that all of you had enjoyed this holiday session with your family and friends.

Today is a time to forget all my last year achievements and to start afresh with new goals for this New Year. For this year, I only have two goals. Firstly I hope to achieve a passive income of $2200 by Dec 12. And secondly I hope to reduce my net debt for housing loan from $14000 to $0. I also will be actively looking for other source of passive income so as to achieve financial freedom.

Last but not least, thank for those who have been following my blogs. And also always stay motivated in achieving your financial goals.

My Full Year Financial Report for Year 2011

2011-12-28T20:09:00.008+08:00

Year 2011 is almost over, and now it would be a good time to generate my full year financial report for 2011 (Jan 11 to Dec 11).

My Passive Incomes:

The above table shows the total for each of my passive incomes collected from Jan 11 to Dec 11. For my passive incomes, I have managed to collect a total of $25080 for the whole year, which is about $2090 per month. If include the realised gain of $8385 from selling some of my shares, the total extra incomes for this year will be $33465, which is about $2788 per month.

My Monthly Expenses:

The above table shows my total monthly expenses. There are no changes since the beginning of the year. I am still following my old rule to keep my expenses as low as possible by not spending money on the things that I will not need.

My debt:
As for my only outstanding debt from my housing loan, it has reduced from $33000 to $14000.

Conclusion:
This year is quite a fruitful year for me though I did not able to achieve one of my New Year resolutions of having a passive income of $2400 by end of 2011. I give myself a "B+" grade for this year performance.

My Passive Income (Month of Dec 11)

2011-12-25T19:31:00.003+08:00

CPF(OA): $175 (from interest and dividends)

Cash: $1642 (from dividends and other passive incomes)

Total: $1817

Target: $3200

Achievement: 56.8%

There are no changes in my passive income 1, 2 and 4

For passive income 3, there is an big drop as I am diversifying my investment portfolio.

How much debt do I have? (Dec 11)

2011-12-24T07:01:00.002+08:00

In Sep 11, I had recalculated my total debt which is totally from the mortgage loan of my flat to be $19K. The calculation is based on using the outstanding housing loan amount minus away my total family CPF OA amount.

Today I have recalculated my total debt again, and it has reduced by another $5k. In my post on "What I hope to achieve in 20 years?", I mentioned that I wanted to reduce my total debt to $0 within the next five years, Based on my conservative estimation, I think it is achievable before the end of next years. I will stop keeping track of my passive incomes from my CPF in my blog for next month onwards.

Last but not least, wish all of you a MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!

Lasik treatment for both my eyes.

2011-12-16T19:57:00.002+08:00

I have my epi-lasik treatment done for both my eyes this wednesday. As the recovery will take about two weeks, sorry to say that I will not be able to do any posting due to poor vision now.

Diversifying my investment portfolio (Part 2).

2011-12-10T18:08:00.003+08:00

This week, I have continued to diversify my investment portfolio to contain more types of shares.

For a summary for the changes in my portfolio, I have further reduced my Singtel to 10 lots and have sold all my CIT shares. At the same time, I bought 10 more lots of Singpost, 2 more lots of SGX and 10 lots of SMRT. The above is the pie chart of my overall investment portfolio based on current market price.

If you have any comments or questions for my portfolio, please feel free to let me know.

My Passive Income (Month of Nov 11)

2011-12-03T07:01:00.004+08:00

CPF(OA): $247 (from interest and dividends)

Cash: $1698 (from dividends and other passive incomes)

Total: $1945

Target: $3200

Achievement: 60.8%

There are no changes in my passive income 1, 2

For passive income 3, there is an big drop as I am diversifying my investment portfolio.

For passive income 4, there is an decrease of $4. However since it is still in the building stage, I will be expecting it to go up and down. In my post "Forget about achieving Financial Freedom if you do not have perseverance or refuse to learn.", I have mentioned that it will take time and effort to build up passive income.

Diversifying my investment portfolio.

2011-11-27T08:07:00.005+08:00

For those who have been following my investment blog would have noticed that I have been doing quite a number of transactions in the last few weeks. The reason is mainly to diversify my investment portfolio after seeing that many good stocks have fallen greatly in prices since last year.

For a summary for the changes in my portfolio, I have reduced my Singtel holdings from 72% to 50% of my portfolio with 15% diversified to SIA and 7% diversified to Singpost.

I will continue to diversify until I will not have more than 30% of my portfolio invested in one stock alone.

Do you have fear after making investment?

2011-11-19T22:45:00.000+08:00

In Star Wars Episode 1, Jedi master Yoda once said, "Fear is the path to the dark side: fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering." If you have followed the Star Wars stories, Anakin Skywalker’s fear of losing the ones he loves is main reason why he eventually turned to the dark side of the Force.

For investor, the fear may come from falling price of the stocks he owned. As the result, he may start to be angry and hate himself for buying in before the stock prices start to fall. Next he would be suffering for holding these stocks and eventually forced to sell them at a loss.

As a pure investor myself, I have overcome the fear of investing by taking the following measures:

1)Always have a saving that can last me for at least one year in case of any unexpected situation.

2)Always invest with the extra money that I will not be touching for the next ten years.

3)Always pay up in full for any stocks that I have bought. I will totally ignore CFDs, warrants and other leveraging investment instruments.

4)Never do shorting on stocks.

5)Always buy stocks from companies with strong fundamental.

6)Always set my own fair price to buy in stocks and be able to hold even the price might fall.

Going for Lasik treatment this December.

2011-11-12T08:41:00.000+08:00

While I guess most of the people have decided to plan for a holiday on December, I have decided to go for Lasik treatment instead. Well I have been wearing spectacle since I was primary six and have been wearing it for almost thirty year. I feel that now is a good time to break free the pair of glasses in front of me since the Lasik treatment has become much safer, accurate and affordable.

I will be going for the new type of Lasik known as Epi-Lasik whereby the vision correction is done surface of the cornea without cutting the cornea flap. My wife did it last year and has no complains so far. For those interested, you may want to google “Epi Lasik” to find out more.

Pay increment vs inflation

2011-11-06T08:45:00.006+08:00

This is a simple post to explain the effect on how inflation affects pay increment. I will first start with a scenario. There was a new company which had four workers. The boss of the company paid each employee $100 per month as salary.

After working for a year, four workers requested a pay raise for their hard work. The boss agreed to the request and decided to give a raise based on the performance of each employee as shown in the below table.

The question now is should all the employees be happy with their pay raise assume that the inflation rate is 5%? We can easily found out the answer by using the simple formula as shown below.

Real % change in salary due to increment and inflation =

% change in salary - inflation rate =

[(New Salary - Old Salary) X 100 / Old Salary] - inflation rate

After using the formula, the result is tabulated as shown in the table below.

For the table, well as long as % increase in salary is less than inflation rate, there will be a pay reduction in real value. Hence worker A and B in fact had their pay reduced in real value.

My Passive Income (Month of Oct 11)

2011-10-30T08:22:00.000+08:00

CPF(OA): $246 (from interest and dividends)
Cash: $1844 (from dividends and other passive incomes)
Total: $2090
Target: $3200
Achievement: 65.3%

There are no changes in my passive income 1, 2 and 3.

For passive income 4, there is an increase of $7. However since it is still in the building stage, I will be expecting it to go up and down. In my post "Forget about achieving Financial Freedom if you do not have perseverance or refuse to learn.", I have mentioned that it will take time and effort to build up passive income.

Importance of Warranty

2011-10-22T18:29:00.001+08:00

Today, I have sent my HP notebook for servicing as some of the keys suddenly cannot be used. Luckily that the notebook is still under warranty and I will not need to pay for the repair cost.

For expensive electronics device, I always make it a point to buy new one that comes with standard warranty. It is to ensure that I am “insurance” from any servicing costs. Warranty gives me peace mind after buying the device.

Buying a second hand item without warranty seems to be a "gamble" to me. Though such item can be much cheaper, the repair cost may not come cheap when something suddenly goes wrong.

Bought Xbox360 console with Kinect

2011-10-16T17:22:00.004+08:00

I will start with some gaming history about myself. I have been a console gamer since I was in primary school. Atari was the very first console that I had played in one of my friend place and since then I am very interested in console games. The first console that I owned was NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) which was bought by my father. Other consoles that I owned were Sega Mega Drive, Playstation 1 and Playstation 2, and hand-held Nintendo DS lite.

I am seeing great improvement in term of graphics, music and videos from one generation to next generation console. However there are not many changes in the game play until Nintendo Wii was introduced. I quite like the idea of motion controllers in Nintendo Wii and I had enjoyed playing with it in one of my relative house. With the introduction of Xbox 360 Kinect, motion control is now more advance whereby the game play can be controlled by your own body movement. I am amazed with this technology and hence decided to buy one to try out.

Currently I have five Kinect games and I feel that they are fairly easy to play with easy instruction to follow. Even my toddler is able to enjoy playing them straight away without much problem. The only problem that I have so far is to consistently tell my toddler to move back in order for the Kinect sensor to track her movement.

One good thing about Xbox 360 is that you can download trial demo for certain new games for testing. This will prevent the gamers from wasting money to buy the game in case they do not like the game play.

My Butterfly Effect

2011-10-07T20:06:00.003+08:00

Recently I had watched an old movie with title “The Butterfly Effect”. It is about a young man who has the ability to go back in time through his lost memory. By doing that, he is able to make small changes for events in the past which will greatly alter the life of people around him which include him. If you have not watched the, I will encourage you to do so. The movie will somehow change your prospective when dealing with changes.

So why am I talking about “The Butterfly Effect” in this post? In August 2009, before the creation of this blog, I have been thinking about my current life and my future. Well it is very easy to project my life linearly since I am having a normal job. However is that what I want? Going through my life working till retirement age and having barely enough for my retirement?

I began to look at myself and think what can I do to improve that? At that time I remembered that I had read the book “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” by Robert Kiyosaki when I was seventeen. I recalled from the book that one has to look into cash flow in order to improve personal finance. Also I discovered that collecting rental income and dividends from stock investment are two ways for me to create passive incomes. I decided to take both approaches at the same time. In addition to that, I have created this blog in September 2009 to share out my approaches and my results.

So what is my "Butterfly Effect” after two years? Firstly, I have collected more than $50,000 extra incomes without too much effort. Secondly, with these additional incomes, my wife now is also able to become a home-maker to take care of my kid full times at home. Thirdly my kid will not feel lonely as there is always a parent around her all the time. Some time I wonder if I did not do anything two years ago, what will happen to me? I believe that I will still be someone who keeps complaining about having not enough money. And also I am not able to share my posts in this blog.

Lastly a message to all, “Though we are not able to make changes in the past, however we are able to make changes at the present which will affect our future. “

My Passive Income (Month of Sep 11)

2011-10-01T17:51:00.002+08:00

CPF(OA): $245 (from interest and dividends)
Cash: $1837 (from dividends and other passive incomes)
Total: $2082
Target: $3200
Achievement: 65%

There are no changes in my passive income 1 and 2.

For passive income 3, there is an increase as I have adjusted part of my investment portfolio this month.

For passive income 4, there is an decrease of $30. However since it is still in the building stage, I will be expecting it to go up and down. In my post "Forget about achieving Financial Freedom if you do not have perseverance or refuse to learn.", I have mentioned that it will take time and effort to build up passive income.

Happy 2nd birthday to "Lifelong Freedom in Singapore" Blog.

2011-09-24T08:55:00.002+08:00

"Lifelong freedom in Singapore" blog has turned 2 year old! For those bloggers who have been following my blogs and have commented on my posts, I would like to say a big THANK YOU for your support. Hopefully my posts have helped you in term of wealth creation and finance management.

What have I achieved for the past one year?
I am managed to gain $26200 in term of pure passive incomes this year as compared to $20100 last year. That is an increase of $6100 which is quite inline with my last year aim of hoping to achieve an increase of $6000.

There is no realised capital gain for this year as compared to $6300 last year. The reason is because I did not sell any shares this year.

My current total unrealised capital gains or losses have amounted to $3095. But since I am looking more on wealth creation, having unrealised capital gains or losses are not as important as having pure passive income.

What do I hope to achieve for the next year?
Well, I hope to increase the earning from my pure passive incomes by $3000 per year or $250 per month for next year. It may be quite tough, but I will try to achieve it. I also hope that all of you can continue to support my blog and I will be continue to post more articles on my journey towards financial freedom.

Having a child is never easy.

2011-09-17T20:23:00.003+08:00

Raising a child takes up a lot of time, money and energy. Parents must spend time and energy with their child to guide his/her every step. Parents have to provide her kid with protection as well as strict guidance so that he/she will not learn the wrong things or habits. Parents will need to engage in their playing activities so as to build up bonding between them.

As a father, I always make it a point to come back home immediately from work so as to spend time with my daughter. As for my wife, since she is a stay-at-home mother, she is able to take care of and discipline our daughter while I am not around.

Having a child is a long term commitment; parents will need to spend a lot of money during his/her growing process. Milk powder, seeing a doctor, enrichment classes, and insurance are not cheap, and these are just part of the cost. Due to that, I find it very hard to have another child as I might not be able to save enough for my retirement fund. I don’t except the money in CPF will be enough, or my daughter is able to support myself and my wife in the future.

Do I need a smart phone and a data plan?

2011-09-10T08:05:00.000+08:00

It is quite commonly seen in buses and MRT trains that quite a number of people are carrying a smart phone. Other than just making calls or sending messages, most of them used it for listening to music, watching video, playing games and surfing web. So do I feel “pressure” to own it too?

Smart phone indeed has many functions with tons of application available. But the question is whether I have the time to use all these features and applications. It does not make any sense to me if I buy a smart phone just to use 5% to 10% of the functions. And also a mid range smart phone is not very cheap if I buy it without signing up for any mobile plans. Dropping it on the floor will definitely cause a pain in my heart.

Surfing internet is one thing that I might want (not need) to do when I am outside home or office. However that will require me to sign up for a data plan (free WIFI connection is not available everywhere). Based on my own scenario, a basic mobile plan which includes data usage will cost two times of what I paid for my current mobile plan. Again, it does not make any sense to me again just to pay more for the service that I seldom use.

In conclusion, I will not buy a smart phone at the moment unless the phone costs less than $100 (with or without signing basic mobile plan). I also will not sign up for any mobile plan with data usage as it is simply too expensive currently. Lastly to all my blog readers, don’t be “too pressure” to follow the trends, think logically and don’t waste money on things or services that you do not need.

How much debt do I have? (Sep 11)

2011-09-03T08:33:00.002+08:00

In Jun 11, I had recalculated my total debt which is totally from the mortgage loan of my flat to be $22K. The calculation is based on using the outstanding housing loan amount minus away my total family CPF OA amount.

Today I have recalculated my total debt again, and the total debt has reduced by $3k to $19k. In my post on "What I hope to achieve in 20 years?", I mentioned that I wanted to reduce my total debt to $0 within the next five years, Based on my conservative estimation, I think it is achievable by the end of next years.

My Passive Income (Month of Aug 11)

2011-08-28T07:33:00.003+08:00

CPF(OA): $245 (from interest and dividends)
Cash: $1832 (from dividends and other passive incomes)
Total: $2077
Target: $3200
Achievement: 64.9%

There are no changes in my passive income 1 and 2.

For passive income 3, there is an increase as I have bought more shares and more dividends are given this year.

For passive income 4, there is an increase of $12. However since it is still in the building stage, I will be expecting it to go up and down. In my post "Forget about achieving Financial Freedom if you do not have perseverance or refuse to learn.", I have mentioned that it will take time and effort to build up passive income.