Coming out of hibernation

It’s been more than a week since my last blog post. I have been busy with work, shopping for stuff for CNY & our upcoming ski trip to Austria and some personal commitments. We are trying to reorganise certain parts of our weekly routine as my wife gets busier with work from her new appointment. She got the promotion and now heads a small team. The job comes with a salary increase but at the cost of a higher daily stress and pressure level.

Things certainly get more difficult as you progress upwards in your career. My wife is still learning how to manage the situation and trying to get on top of her busy schedule. It’s good that she’s relatively young because I can see how much tougher this would be if she has to do it when she’s older. Can you even imagine dealing with this while having or with kids?

I’m doing what I can to support my wife so she only needs to focus on settling into her new role for now. My job is more stable with a manageable workload at this stage. But it’s looking like my scope of work is about to expand this year as I take on more stuff to prepare for my own promotion route. Let’s not forget about how our family planning for kids fits into all of this.

Anyway, life is a never-ending struggle to balance everything that matters to you. Nothing new there. But it has been an exciting week for the markets. I exited most of my big equity positions the week before and was overweight in cash. The correction in the markets offered me an opportunity to re-enter the markets and reduce my cash allocation. I decided to take advantage of the dip by manually transferring some funds into my robo-advisor accounts and buying these 2 x Vanguard LSE-listed ETFs:

• Vanguard FTSE All-World High Dividend Yield UCITS ETF (LSE: VHYD)
• Vanguard FTSE Emerging Markets UCITS ETF (LSE: VDEM)

Clean and simple approach to pushing more cash funds into the markets effectively. However, the strategy only works over the long term if I become more aggressive on future dips and crashes. Because I only manually invested about S$1,000 this time round. Which is not a lot when compared to the rest of my cash balances. I hesitate on making big investments during market corrections and bear markets because I keep waiting for the significant drop after that.

My automatic investments (standing instructions to transfer funds into robo-advisor accounts and monthly investment plans) ensure that I have somewhat taken a bigger position than I otherwise would have. Which means I need to be more efficient going forward when manually loading up on my equity positions so I don’t get stuck with investment cash that I haven’t utilised well.