2020: A Year in Review
I thought I continue my series of reviewing my each year. Both to remember and to see where I can improve.
On my personal finances
Achieved investing savings target of 24k/yr, achieved 30.9k.
Total savings achieved after everything else would be 40.4k.
Despite some replacement costs as well as some adhoc 1-time spend, overall savings increased. I noticed I have a similar situation last year so will monitor to see the recurrence, though the effect is less pronounced, probably due to some additional measures to create more buffers.
I saw a recommendation from Kyith's blog post about saving 75% of any windfall, no matter the size, as well as for any increment. I think I will take that approach for now.
My current net profit margin from work has increased from 59% to 61.3%, exceeding the 60% mark, achieving my KPI of increasing my savings rate by at least 1%.
I have previously said that it is harder to increase savings rate. This can be attributed to the promotion I have gotten this year (thank you ty!). I will look at the effects of saving 75% of my increments and see if it can hit 65% to create a larger margin of safety.
My total net worth less CPF (237.5k) has fallen below my total CPF balances (263.1k, inclusive of CPFIS). My invested cash stands at only 184.6k. This is due to the COVID-19 pandemic exposing many flaws in my portfolio, which I will detail in the investing section below. Hoping that my new focus on quality would help my portfolio to grow better in the future.
I have reduced my lottery spending to about $65, which is a good sign.
This is my updated Financial Independence Excel Dashboard for the year of 2020.
Due to some increased spending, it actually increased to 12 years instead of 11, but at least the withdrawal coverage is increasing slightly.
On my investment portfolio
Portfolio XIRR this year is about -3.52%, with long term XIRR of 2.46% which vastly underperformed VT (15.34% and 8.76% respectively).
I can attribute to a combination of bad decisions as well as the COVID-19 hitting some of my weaker companies.
- Eagle Hospitality (Figured there would be value after being beaten down but the pandemic literally crushed it, now regulators and the Trust is directionless. It is delisted now and I wrote it as zero on my portfolio.)
- Lion Rock Group (A company that was in a sunset industry but was slowly chugging along. However, the US-China trade war, imposing taxes, plus the pandemic actually drove faster adoption of ebooks. I decided to cut losses, ~40%, and move on).
- Weaker companies (Dairy Farm, Keppel, Axos) were cut (mostly with losses) and switched to better companies. Some of them rebounded strongly (Axos) but it was the best decision I could do then.
This pandemic really exposed the weakness in companies, the stark differences between quality and mediocrity really shown themselves. Hopefully, my decision to switch would be beneficial in the long run.
I collected a total of $3162.86 of dividends, which makes up to be $263.57 per month.
This figure is lower because of the reduction on dividend payouts from banks and REITs by MAS. I would expect the figure to go back up once the economy is back to normal.
Moving forward, I hope to read up more as well as keep an eye out for opportunities in the markets. That being said, the markets is surging up as we speak and ideas are getting harder and harder to find. A comforting fact is that I am mostly invested in the markets.
On my CPF
I have invested my CPF OA funds with Endowus as mentioned in my blogpost here.
Here's the performance since end Oct 2019:
Seeing some nice returns there.
In addition, I did purchase all 3 bank shares during the dip in March.
So here's the overall XIRR for all of them:
- Endowus portfolio returns after all fees: 13.22%
- Bank shares (skewed as it is less than 1 year): 44.34%
- Blended OA+CPFIS (Endowus+Bank shares): 7.74%
- Blended OA+CPFIS+SA: 7.33%
Looking not too shabby.
My CPF SA has finally achieved 100k, 102.5k in fact. The combined OA+SA+CPFIS is now 211.8k which already exceeded the current Full Retirement Sum of 186k. It is still gonna take some years before I achieve the FRS without increment with just the SA alone though.
My CPF MA was supposed to hit the Basic Healthcare Sum in 2 years but because of the increased usage from Careshield Life, it stayed the same as 3 years. But hey, that's all good. What's more, once the BHS is achieved, the MA contributions will overflow to the SA which should accelerate the size of the SA.
On my Job
I have received my promotion in September 2020 (thank you ty again), this allowed me to bump up my savings rate with greater ease to move towards the the target of 65% (currently at 61.3%).
Bonus moving forward is definitely much lower compared to the past.
Work is getting tougher and I can feel the strain on my body that I have not felt in the past few years.
Here's the income CAGR chart:
Still aiming to achieve maximum CPF contributions.
Income CAGR is plateauing, but it is partially mitigated by the larger base I have managed to accumulate.
Will hope to find more ways of deriving further streams of income, be it writing or side hustle.
On my personal life
I completed 12 books, hitting my target of 12 books per year.
The list of books I read are:
- IFRS for Dummines by Steve Collings
- Notjohn's Guide to E-Book Formatting by N.J. Notjohn
- How to Write Non Fiction by Joanna Penn
- The One Page Financial Plan by Carl Richards
- Money Wisdom by Christopher Tan
- The One Page Financial Plan by Sam Henderson
- The Index Card by Helaine Olen
- Noble House by James Clavell
- Managing your personal finance: from start of career to retirement and more by Wai Mun Fong and Benedict Koh
- The Hidden Goldmine in You by Sean Seah, Glen Ho & Chris Chen
- The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson
- Get to the Point! by Joel Schwartzberg
The memorable books are the ones in bold. I am still contemplating should I read the entire Drizzt series in one go, and as usual, my reading list keeps piling up.
On a side note, I finished 4 games this year too, as part of my KPI to finish at least 1 game, with an ever increasing list of games to play.
Games List:
- The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
- Shadow of the Tomb Raider
- Sekiro
- Super Mario Odyssey
I published my book, Maximising Returns on My CPF, which is sold in various stores:
I tried Apple iBooks but iBooks store is not available for people in Singapore (it is actually listed there when I realised people couldn't access it).
I also published my first Seeking Alpha article here, hoping to write more articles. Can feel that I learnt a lot doing so. Maybe I would like to take a writing course in 2021 to improve it.
I started on another side project but didn't work much on the side project as much as I would like to frankly, it is a rather steep learning curve than the current one.
I have also spent more in 2020 compared to what I like but quite a bit is a mixture of destressing as well as health.
I have been talking about doing things to better my health and 2020 was the year I took action. Kinda thought that I needed my health if I was going to retire early to enjoy it. A good post about it is by The Woke Salaryman here.
Here are some things I did:
- Bought a Ring Fit Adventure game (along with a pair of Decathlon cross trainers) as a means to gamify exercise (it works for me at least). The effects were rather obvious by the lowering diastolic (or resting) blood pressure, which was slowly creeping up as a result of shift work and stress.
- Bought an electric tooth brush for better dental health.
- Introduce body massage as a routine, which helped to reduce aching and tiredness.
- Moisturiser routine for my dry skin that has been getting more and more significant since I started working shift hours.
- Bought a callus file as a result of calluses from my safety shoes, really feel much better when walking.
My blog income for the year of 2020 was ~497 SGD, where about 12% came from Adsense while the remainder came from Affiliate referrals. I created social media pages (part of 2020 KPI) as well. Looking to revamp my blog and optimise code (maybe hire someone I guess) in the future.
Unfortunately, I couldn't start a new blog, but I am thinking of a new business idea based on a hobby of mine.
So many ideas but so little time to execute them.
Conclusion
Summary of 2021's main KPI and targets:
- Read at least 12 Books
- Finish at least 1 Game
- Maintain my savings rate
- Maintain my health routines
- Write 1 Seeking Alpha article
- Work on side projects (not sure if there's any results though)
Well, that's all for my review of 2020, it has been a hard year for many people. But let's hope that 2021 is a better year!
How was 2020 for you?
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