Mid Year Update

Been pretty busy recently.

On Work

Great to say I am promoted at work (Thank you again WC!), though what came with it after was me being shifted to another team due to business needs, hope to do well in the new place. Just have to approach it with an open mind and see how it goes.

On a side note, this also means I'll lose two month of night shift allowance, meaning less cash injections into my portfolio, though the promotion did help cover the loss.

On Amazon eCommerce

As from my prior post here, I was interested in starting up a side gig in Amazon to generate more cashflow, being inspired by another blogger (A Pen Quotes), as from his posts here and here. More cashflow is always good for my strategy of income investing (though hope to go into some with growth in the future if time allows), as most of my counters are stable and slow growing, and by not going heavily into REITs, a lower yielding portfolio requires a much larger capital base.

I am currently learning the ropes (guided, fortunately), and made only 10 sales for the past 2.5 months. Although I'm still burning cash due to overhead running costs (yet to breakeven each month), I believe this to be a giant step forward, at least this shows that it is working.

This unfortunately is reasonably time consuming (taking up most of my free time actually), but this is to be expected as I am in the initial stages of starting up, so just have to tough it out until it reaches the "maintenance" level. Also, by doing it often for now, I'll get faster at it just like how I used to do really slowly at screening the numbers of stocks, I'm now much faster.

I'm also reading on the side of various materials online about Amazon on how to better what I am doing, hope it pays off.

On Investing

And as a result from above, I have much lesser time to check my charts weekly, which is not that bad at the moment as everything has been rising for the past couple of months, and as I write this post, my cash position is now about 30% of my portfolio.

Investing for these 2 years, also made me realise what works for me in investing, seeing that the Singapore economy doesn't have huge growth, it would be better to focus to buy in when the dividend paying stocks are undervalued rather fair value as you can see from my portfolio (Comfort, Vicom, AIMS and my recent purchases of Singtel).

I'll still focus mainly on yield plays to generate more passive cashflow (plus maybe some diversification overseas to replace my ILP which is currently used for overseas diversification), then from there perhaps I'll look into other strategies such as growth and credit cycles.

I'm currently reading a book called "Investing in REITs" by Ralph Block which was recommended by bloggers (Unintelligent Nerd and Got Money Got Honey), and it is showing itself to be a gem despite my initial skepticism. Hope to finish the book by this month or next.

After chatting in person with a old friend who used to be in accounting auditing firms, I'll probably look to read up some books on accounting, especially in reading the numbers (Financial Shenanigans anyone?).

On Personal Note

I think this is a generally fail part.

My current schedule is really packed due to the above, so for all my friends who I am unable to meet up to catch up with, I'm really so sorry about that. I am also starting to feel the strain of overstretching myself (Heh, and I initially thought of learning app programming as well, but annoyingly, the Skillsfuture funds are not yet topped up for use :( ).

My target this year is also to read at least one fiction book and play a video game, but that seems pretty hard right now. Hopefully I'll be able to free up some time to get those done (some play/enjoyment is always important in life I feel).


That being said, I have managed to increase my profit margins from employment from 55% to about 56%. This is a fall from my original 70-80% margins as I am taking up more financial responsibilities in the household.

Allocation of capital, be it OCBC 360 account interest, or some excess funds from OT, etc, is now even more tight, as I focus giving every dollar a job. So far seems to help from overshooting budget targets, as well as freeing up cash lurking around doing nothing.
I also notice lesser money shortages by setting aside some savings for short to mid term expenditures as well as planning more in advance (i.e. especially for red bombs from peers as it is due to this stage of life ^^", which also provide future expenses visibility) to divide the cash outflow over a couple of months instead of a sudden one time larger outflow where I have to find cash to put it together.


Phew, there ends my Mid Year Update.

I have still got half a year to go and let's see how I can achieve more. :)

How are you performing towards your goals this year?