Skip to main content

A Year in Review for 2021 - Finance (Part 2)

This is part 2 of 6 of my year in review for 2021. The area of focus here will be finance. 

Part 1 on a review of my career can be found here

2021 was a year where I was clearer on what I want to do with my money, and have more intentional planning. 

My partner and I did a look at our insurances and net worth to ensure we left sufficient  money for our kids if any happened to us. This was by combining our life insurances and non- property assets, and assuming they are cared for till the youngest is 25 years old. We are in good shape according to the study.Read here for more. 

With even lower cheap interest rates now, we repriced our mortgage for our existing flat. This dropped our monthly mortgage by a few hundreds a month with little effort. I talked more about this here.

I took a deeper look into my assets. I hadn't been putting much thoughts into my savings and am guilty of letting them lose value through inflation. I ended the year purchasing more ETFs and retail bonds, increasing my passive income slightly.

In addition, I started tracking expense. And with myself not working for some time now, I tracked my inflows ( income mainly from bonds and dividends) and outflows each month (expenses). I am using this FREE App called Expense manager available in Play Store. It allows me to put iny inflows and outflow, and breaks down a summary. 

In terms of finance side in 2021,  I gained clarity.



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

After 2 years of Sabbatical from Work, THIS IS IT!

I took a sabbatical from the corporate work back in end 2021. It's going to be my 2-year anniversary for my sabbatical. But , it's time to get serious earning money full-time. Here's why... Meeting Passive Income Objective I haven't been working, and my income was mainly contributed by my passive income from dividends/stocks . If it goes as it is, my passive income this year should be about $2000/ month , or about $24,000 a year. This is $6000 up from last year. Going at this rate, I should grow at $6000/ year. Just like GDP which is always reported as an increment rather than at absolute amount, so does passive income growth, doesn't it? The amount of cash that I have, has slowly been used for invested. And to meet the growth target, it's basically increasing the returns, putting more into the investments, or both. At my comfort level, I'm going with increasing the amount invested. This means finding fresh funds. A full-time job should solve this problem

I worked NOT in 2022 - Here's my income report and lessons learnt

It's late January of 2023, and while it seems a bit late to talk about 2022, it's probably a year where I should pen down because it's different from the rest.  2022 was a year where I worked not at all since I graduated, and I wanted to pen my thoughts. For curiosity sake, I typed in my topic into the chatGPT, and this was what it gave: Well, how do you find ChatGPT's year? I would rate ChatGPT's response as highly excellent. If I were some student writing some journal entry just to submit for as homework, I'll probably submit this. But while AI can help us with general task, it cannot be us, unless we feed in enough inputs for it.  So below is my version, of how 2022 was, a year where I worked NOT. My Income For 2022 Below is a chart showing my income for 2022. And they are broadly divided into 3 sources: Interest from bonds (including the Singapore saving bonds, but excluding T bills), dividends and T- bills. My Income for 2022  The 6 months T-bills become

Passive Income Report YTD and Plans forward

I worked not this year, and here's my income for the first 3 quarters of 2023: My income comes from 3 sources: Interest income from T bills,  Interest income from bonds (which includes Singapore Saving bonds and other retail bonds), and  Dividends (mainly from STI ETFs, with some other stocks). This year was an improvement from last year's income ( read here ), not because of what I've done this year, but from what I've  done last year - delayed gratification. Even more delayed gratification, was from the saving I accumulated since I started working.  Grateful to myself for having few material desires.  If $2000 is the minimum survival sum, I probably survived 62.5% of the time. If I average out the 8 months, I met the minimum survival sum on a monthly basis. My goal for this year is to hit $24,000 passive income, and with 66.7% of the year passed, I'm 70% there. June has been the best month to date, and as you can see, it's contributed mainly through intere