My Passive Income (Month of Aug 10)

CPF(OA): $193 (from interest and dividends)
Cash: $1696 (from dividends and other passive incomes)
Total: $1889
Target: $3000
Achievement: 62.9%

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

For passive income 4, there is 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.

What is my destiny?

My life has been a straight forward one since I was small. At a very young age, I had been told to study hard by my parents and eventually I had managed to get a local degree. After my graduation, I managed to find a job. Then I got married after a few years and having a child currently. There are not much up and down in my life and sometimes I am wondering what my destiny in this world is.

Well, after thinking for some time, I begin to have more understanding about the word destiny. One destiny did not always mean doing something magnificent till the whole world knows it. It can be just doing simple thing that have positive impacts to other. Destiny is not fixed and can be changed as years go by. Well, I believe that being a good son, husband, father, worker and being able to share financial knowledge with others will be my destiny as for now.

Utilization Rate Of My Personal Items

Under the expenses in “My Cash Flow Framework”, there are two keys points to note. One is to identify what are the necessities and the other is to try to reduce liabilities. For the post, I shall discuss more on the first point.


I like to use utilization rate to find out what are my necessities. The formula is very simple, just take the total usage time in minutes and divided by 1440 (total number of minutes per day). I have tabulated the result as shown above for each of my personal items. For items that I seldom, I will estimate it to be 5 minutes per day. You can see that the top six items that I often use are refrigerator, bed, air conditioner, washing machine, laptop, bedroom TV .

I will spend more money on items with high utilization to ensure the quality of these items. I’m also look for longer warranty period to ensure that they are properly taken care of in case of any break down. For items with low utilization, I will be spending less money on them. I might not even want to replace them if they happen to break down.

This is one way that I use to identify my necessities. If you have other ways, maybe you can share with me.

Three times faster, but cost ten times more

Recently, I had taken a cab home from my office as I was not feeling well after work. The time taken travelling by cab from my office to my house is about 20 minutes. The cab fare that I pay is about $18.00 including the peak hour’s charges. As for normal day, I will be using bus and MRT. The total time taken travelling by bus and MRT is about 60 minutes and cost me about $1.80.

As you can see that it is really cost me ten times more travelling by cab just to be three time faster. I need to spend $16.20 more just to save 40 minutes of my journey time.

Amount of money spend to save time = $16.20/40min = $0.405 per min = $24.30 per hour.

In my opinion it is very expensive to take a cab especially when your hourly worth is less than $24.30. As for me, I will take cab only when it is necessary. This will allow me to save a lot of money in the long run.