As we draw closer to the start of 2019, I thought it would be nice to reflect on lessons learnt and think of how I could improve on those in the coming year.
A) Increase ongoing annual savings by 10,000 over 3 years (2018-2020)
On track . Reduced recurring expenses by about 500 per year, and if I complete the course to quit smoking, that would probably bring cost reduction to 5,000 per year.
The other part of this was to increase passive income from interests and dividends, and I think this went a little lower than what I would have liked at about 1,500 YoY.
Overall, I think I won’t change the 3 year plan but I will need to start planning out how I could obtain this goal for 2021 to 2023. My long term desire is to keep cost reduction efforts towards reducing wastage and unnecessary spending - instead the long term goal should be to grow passive income to defray expenses.
B) Preparing for rainy days
Somewhere there.
At the moment, I guess risk of retrenchment is moderate, and my sense of where the markets will go is… frankly anybody’s guess.
My hunch is the real fun will start in 2020H2, and my free funds look pretty small. Hence, I have made some switches to stash some cash and strengthen the reserve buffers.
I have tweaked my OCBC savings goals to more of an envelope budgetting system to systematically allot money for different purposes. The three main buckets are Rewards, Rations, and Reserves.
I feel more relieved and at ease now that I have some sort of plans. Even though the coffers are less than what I would have wanted, but I believe its a step in the right direction.
C) Getting better at investing?
LOL, seriously I don’t know.
At the end of H1, I was very disappointed with the returns on the SRS portfolio (I still am). I made the tough calls to exit some loss positions (I am glad I did, or the ytd returns would have been worse off by another 5%? )
I did a bit more homework since then, but I do feel its probably not enough. There was once I did quite a lot of read up on F&N and I was quite happy with the analysis I did over two hours. I would like to repeat this exercise for my investments which are than 5% of the total portfolio, before I undertake portfolio rebalancing.
On portfolio, I would still like to keep the no. of counters (other than SSBs) to 18 or less. Balancing between doing homework, and cash constraints, less counters forces me to reach for the better low hanging fruits. Where’s the bad in that?
Here’s to a great 2019!!
Read the original post here:
https://takingstockmyself.blogspot.com/2018/12/reflecting-on-2018.html
