In my younger days when I started this blog almost 10 years ago, I believed a lot in financial freedom and had the passion to live this out in my life through saving and investing. I was in my mid 20s back then. In 10 years, I've grown older and no longer too young anymore. Somehow, my views towards money have changed as I progress in life and I no longer focus so much on planning my finances anymore. The weird thing is I still believe a lot in financial planning but there is a fear in me that the plans don't work out. Life gets more stressful as I grow older and its no longer as simple as wha ..read more

Growth stocks are good additions to our portfolio to boost our investment returns over the long term. Most of the stocks in our portfolio will be average or even loss making but there may be 1 or 2 super growth stocks in our portfolio which boost our returns significantly.  An example of a growth stock is Netflix which grew by 145x if you invested in 2003. $10,000 invested in 2003 would be worth $1.45 Million now. Its a long 19 years but still the returns are exceptional at average of 763% annually. Another growth stock, Tesla grew by 146x in 10 years from 2012 to 2022. $10,000 invested i ..read more

There's a saying that goes like this "If you fail to plan, you plan to fail". However, most of the time, you may be lost as to how to start your own financial planning to achieve financial independence (FI)? How do I even know how much income, expenses or investment return I must have in order to achieve FI? When is the age where I can finally say to my boss "I Quit"?  These are all relevant concerns which is why I created a financial independence visualisation tool which I use for my own financial planning also. I've made it easy to use so you can just input your age, income, current sav ..read more

Recently, I've been feeling frustrated with work and it's really bad for health. Getting blamed for mistakes, getting scolded and being thrown lots of workload are part and parcel of the working life. Sometimes, missing deadlines is not entirely controllable as there are many factors which can happen and having to go through multiple approvals and stakeholders can delay the whole process. Not everyone is cooperative and in the end most people will protect themselves first. I've worked in 3 companies now and all have its good and bad points. The verdict is whichever company you join, there are ..read more

CNA came out with an article on Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE) and the writer really captured the gist of what financial independence is about. In fact, this is the first time I've seen such a good article from main stream media talking about financial independence. You can read the article here.   Image adapted from https://teenfinancialfreedom.com/ Financial advise from main stream media? In the past, most financial advise from main stream media often comes from financial advisors or experts but are often not so relatable to the people on the street. Most advise ..read more

With physical events coming back after COVID, INVEST Fair 2022 by ShareInvestor is also back with their physical event on 27 August 2022 at Suntec Exhibition Hall 404. It is good to have such physical events where we can immerse ourselves with all the knowledge we can get and concentrate on what the speakers have to say. It is still quite different from virtual talks where we often get distracted at home.  I enjoy physical seminars as I really can concentrate and focus my attention for that few hours when I'm there. I've tried attending virtual seminars and it is definitely not the s ..read more

Bond yields have increased significantly the past few months as central banks all over the world are raising interest rates. Banks are now offering fixed deposit rates at more than 2% again and another attractive investment which people see are bonds where the yield has increased significantly. The SGS bonds, which are issued by the Singapore government has yields of close to 3% for its 2, 5, 10, 20 and 30 years bond. This is 3x more than then average of 1% just 1 year ago.  Looking at the chart below of a 5 and 10 year SGS bond, we can see that the yield has increased significantly from ..read more

Just as we thought all is well after COVID and economies around the world start to recover, we are hearing the word recession now. Is this really happening just as we went thorough 2 years of COVID where recession just happened? Recession just happened during COVID where jobs were lost which led to unemployment going up. Singapore's GDP growth rate became negative in the period of March to June 2020. We would remember that many people lost their jobs, salaries were cut and it was a painful period. Fast forward 2 years later, we are seeing another phenomenon. Inflation went up a lot due to supp ..read more

There has been lots of new stuff happening since my last blog post back in December 2021. A few months back, Singapore started opening up and relaxing measures for COVID-19. It seems life is mostly back to normal now. While we were just starting to enjoy this good news after 2 years of abnormal life during covid, new things start unfolding which is starting to impact our lives and may impact us even further.  Firstly, the Ukraine-Russian war started. This caused oil prices to skyrocket impacting petrol prices immediately. If you own a car, the impact is felt with petrol prices at more th ..read more

2021 has come to an end. The year flew by in an instant as there were quite a few major changes to my life. I got married earlier this year in Jan and moved to a new house in Oct. This was in the midst of a busy work schedule as I continued to work in a public hospital in Singapore. There were a few waves of COVID-19 infections and everytime there's a new wave, the hospital scrambles with everything its got to support the country in need. Every employee plays their part in this fight against COVID-19 no matter if they are doctors, nurses, allied health professionals or admin workers.  I'v ..read more