My New Year's Resolutions For 2013

Happy New year to all my readers, hope that all of you had enjoyed yourself during the holidays.

Last year I have finally reached a major milestone which is having zero debt and have also achieve $23345 extra income.

For this year, I only have one goal which is to achieve a passive income of $2000 per month by Dec 13. I 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 2012

Happy new year to all of you and here are my full year financial report for 2012 (Jan 12 to Dec 12).

My passive incomes:

The above table shows the total for each of my passive incomes collected from Jan 12 to Dec 12. For my passive incomes, I have managed to collect a total of $20225 for the whole year, which is about $1685 per month. If include the realised gain from selling some of my shares, the total extra incomes for this year will be $23345, which is about $1945 per month. Please note that I did not include unrealised profit of $7400 from shares in the table.

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 $14000 to $0.

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 $2200 by end of 2012. I give myself a "B+" grade for this year performance.

Auto-accumulation of my retirement fund

As mentioned in my last post, I have accumulated enough money in my CPF account to pay off my housing loan.  This means that from next year onwards, my monthly CPF contribution will be in accumulation mode for my retirement fund.

Based on my age, 21% of my monthly wages will go to my OA account and 7% will go to my Special account. This means that as long as I am still working, 28% of my monthly wages will be automatically saved in my CPF account. And also, there are interests given in CPF account, which can create a compounding effect to grow my retirement money.

How much debt do I have? (Dec 12)

In Sep 12, I had calculated my total debt which is totally from the mortgage loan of my flat to be $3K. The calculation is based on using the outstanding housing loan amount minus away my total family CPF OA amount.

Today my total debt has finally become $0. Hooray!!!

How much debt do I have? (Sep 12)

In Jun 12, I had calculated my total debt which is totally from the mortgage loan of my flat to be $8K. 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, it can be achieve by the end of this year.

"Lifelong Freedom in Singapore" Blog is 3 year old!!!

Wow time really flies; "Lifelong freedom in Singapore" blog has already turned 3 year old! Thank to all who have been following my blogs and have commented on my posts. I would like to apologize that recently I am not able do any posting due to my work and family commitment.

What have I achieved for the past one year?
I am managed to gain $20000 in term of pure passive incomes. In additional, there is a realised capital gain of $11500 after selling some of my shares. This adds up to $31500 extra income for the past one year.

My current total unrealised capital gains or losses have amounted to $7160. 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.

My Passive Income (Month of Jul 12)

Total Passive Income(Cash): $1703
Target: $3000
Achievement: 56.7%
For passive income 1, 2 and 3 there is no changes.

My Half Year Financial Report for Year 2012

Half of Year 2012 is over, and now it is time to generate my mid-year financial report for 2012 (Jan 12 to Jun 12)

My Passive Incomes:

The above table shows the total for each of my passive incomes collected from Jan 12 to Jun 12. For my passive incomes, I have managed to collect a total of $8435. If include the realised gain of $3120 from selling some of my shares, the total extra incomes for the first half of year 2012 will be $11555, which is about $1925 per month.

My Monthly Expenses:

The above table shows my total monthly expenses. There are not many 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 $14000 (Jan 12) to $8000 (Jun 12).

My Passive Income (Month of Jun 12)

Total Passive Income(Cash): $1703
Target: $3000
Achievement: 56.7%
For passive income 1, 2 and 3 there is no changes.

How much debt do I have? (Jun 12)

 In Mar 12, I had recalculated my total debt which is totally from the mortgage loan of my flat to be $11K. 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 $3k. 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 this year.

My Passive Income (Month of May 12)

Total Passive Income(Cash): $1703
Target: $3000
Achievement: 56.7%
For passive income 1 and 2, there is no changes.
For passive income 3, there is a decrease as dividends are reduced for some of my shares
For passive income 4, it has become zero.

You only know how much your profit or loss is when you stop investing.

Investing is about putting your money in an asset class in the hope of generating return. All investments come with risk, and this risk could sometimes make you lose most or all of your invested money. As long as you are still investing, you will never know whether you are making or losing money. If you are not careful, your gain in your past investment might be lost in your next investment.

Banned from Adsense

I had been using Adsense for the past two and a half year in my blogs until I received an email last week from Google. The email said that my Adsense account is deactivated. I was told that it is due to “invalid click activity” which I don’t agree as a valid reason to ban my account as I don’t click on ads in my blogs.

After appealing unsuccessfully, I’m no longer able to earn any money from this income source at this moment. I believe it is time to move on and not to get too emotional. I see this problem as an opportunity to me to try out other advertisers. Do let me know if you are using other advertisers that work equivalently well or better than Adsense. Thank.

What is the buy price of my current stocks after incorporating all realized gain/loss and dividends?

For those who have been visiting my share investment blog might know that so far I have gotten $17580.92 worth of dividend and $ 17785 worth of realized gain. So overall, my return is $35365.92 for the last two and a half year.

Currently I am holding stocks from four different companies and in total I have paid $128100. By taking away $35365.92 which comes from my overall return, I am only paying $92734.08 ($128100 – $35365.92) for my current holdings. This is around 72.4% ($92734.08*100/$128100) of $128100.

To see what the buy prices of my current stocks are after incorporating my overall gain, I use 72.4% to multiply by all my stock buy prices. The result is shown in the table below.

I personally feel that this method of calculating the buy price will result in clearer view whether I am making money in the stock market or not.

How do I calculate the return from my share investment?

Normally I just take the absolute dollars to measure my gain and loss in my share investment as it is the most “TRUE” indicator which tells me whether I am making money or not. I am choosing to avoid popular function like XIRR to calculate annualized returns as it is just an indicator to make thing look nicer only.

Let me give an example, if you have invested for 10 years, the XIRR will just show 10 different values of return in each of the 10 years. What is the point to see these values if your true return in dollar is zero?

If your return is negative, XIRR values may only have the consoling effect telling you that some percentage of the investment money is lost in each of 10 years, but in effect you are losing much more in term of absolute percentage.

If your return is positive, XIRR values are just nice figures to show other that you are making some percentage from your investment for each of the 10 years. But how much in absolute dollar, no one will know.

My Passive Income (Month of Apr 12)

Total Passive Income(Cash): $1845
Target: $3000
Achievement: 61.5%
For passive income 1 and 2, there is no changes.
For passive income 3, there is an increase as I have bought some shares this month.
For passive income 4, there is an increase of $30.

My Family Expenses (Apr 2012)

Today I shall post an update on my monthly expenses. Recently I have upgraded my wife and my phone to iphone and have subscribed to 3G plan. So there is an increase of $30. I have reduced the amount of other expenses to $220 as I did not spend a lot for other things during the last few months. So in conclusion, my total expenses remain as $3000.

Don’t just spend on your “needs” and ignore your “wants”!

In a few of my posts, I have always mentioned the following three steps for achieving financial freedom:
Step 1: Learn how to earn money.
Step 2: Learn how to save money.
Step 3: Learn how to grow money.

In order to achieve step 2 with maximum results, one may just spend only on the “needs” and totally don’t spend on the “wants”. However by doing that, one life may be miserable and boring. It is because there is nothing to look forward to since the “needs” are not going to change much in life.

To prevent myself from leading to such a boring life, I always cater a sum of money each year to be spent on my “want”. By allocating a fix sum of money will prevent me from overspending. This sum of money can be used for holiday trips, buying gadgets and gift for my love ones.

My advice is to all is never be a miser. Money that is not spent is not yours and will have no meaning to your life.

Learning about private property investment

As I have written in one of my old posts, keep learning and expanding your financial knowledge is an important part in achieving financial freedom. This year, I will start to learn more on private property investment as I might be investing in one if there is a great opportunity in the future.

Private property investment, in my opinion, is more complex than shares investment as it involves many things like location, housing loan interest rate, maintenance cost, stamp fee, property tax, rental yield, tenure and commission etc.

I will start off to learn searching the internet for more information and also try to find some books on private property investment. If you have any recommended websites or books, please let me know. Thank in advance.

My Passive Income (Month of Mar 12)

Total Passive Income(Cash): $1792
Target: $3000
Achievement: 59.7%
For passive income 1 and 2, there is no changes.
For passive income 3, there is an increase as I have bought some shares this month.
For passive income 4, there is no changes.