It’s my 1st full week of work in a month and it was tough getting back into the swing of things. Pacing is important when you have a full-time job in the office i.e. 5 working days out of 7 days in a week.
Do it wrong and you run out of energy by the end of the week too exhausted to do anything fun over the weekend. Do it well and you get to maintain your energy levels over the weekend to go out and have fun.
It doesn’t help that the after-work routine on a weekday wears me down as well. Even with my wife and the confinement nanny taking care of the baby, I try to take over when I can just so the baby is familiar with me.
Especially when he already doesn’t get to interact with me for most of the day. I also try to help out with the washing of dishes, milk bottles and pump parts. And still find time to talk to my wife about her day plus doing a bit of physical activity and exercise for myself.
It’s exhausting. Most days are okay, some days are bad and a few days are good. That’s the proportion split in a week. When you get tired, it’s easy to fight over the small stuff and disagree on things. I reckon it’s better we fight now to resolve our differences over our approaches.
Otherwise, the problems are going to escalate when my wife goes back to work in her full-time jobs. Which means we have a few months more to keep practising and sync up. I have to gear up my performance in the next 2 years to chase for a promotion and salary increase. While my wife backs my play, maintains her performance and keeps a look out for her way up or out to get her next promotion and pay raise.
As we keep going and pushing ourselves daily to improve and adjust, there has to be goals we set for ourselves to achieve every year. If not, the days, weeks, months and years will start blending together and life is just going to pass you by. After all, it gives us more focus when we work towards objectives. This brings me to the topic of this post.
I’m going to start off with our financial goal for this year 2020 – Achieve S$1 million in net worth and liquid assets. We graduated in 2009 and started work in 2010. All the effort we have put in and the experiences we have gone through led us up to this point to set such a financial goal one decade later.
It’s ambitious because we just had a baby 2 months ago and the related expenses are skyrocketing. Mostly because we are choosing convenience over cost at every decision point. Like having a confinement nanny for 3 months and probably even extending by another month. This is including having our helper coming in a few weeks’ time. No such thing as too much help at the start.
Anyway, we define our net worth as total assets (excluding owner-occupied property value) minus total liabilities (including owner-occupied property mortgage). It’s a conservative way of defining net worth but we like it because it truly reflects our financial situation. If we bought an investment property value that generates rental income, then we would include investment property value in our total assets, along with the investment property mortgage in our total liabilities.
Currently, based on our 31 Dec 2019 net worth, we are about S$230,000 away from our financial goal of S$1 million by 31 Dec 2020. It’s a big jump but we can make this happen in the year if we remain focused and disciplined at managing our lives. We have to work hard at maintaining the balance among all of our priorities so that not too many spin out of control at the same time. Haha, funny but true.
We define our liquid assets as cash and equity & bond investments. Anything we can liquidate with a cash value that does not impact the quality of or materially affect other parts of our lives. That’s why we don’t include the surrender value of the wholesale life insurance policies in our liquid assets. If we have to give up these policies, we lose our life insurance coverage, so it’s not really liquid assets that we can rely on.
Again, it’s a conservative way of defining liquid assets, but we like it because it shows the financial assets we can actually rely on to get ourselves out of trouble. We have been called out before that the way we define net worth and liquid assets is not accurate. We could care less what other people think.
You can go ahead to inflate your net worth and liquid assets if it makes you feel better about yourself. We rather be strict and hard on ourselves now so we can push on at our own pace. Rather than when the chips are down and life comes in to give you a kick in the ass or a kick when you are down. Good luck trying to find your way up then. Because it’s going to be one of the most painful experiences of your life figuring it out.
how about cpf? do u regard it as your liquid assets?
Nope, I exclude CPF from my liquid assets. I did consider including the CPF OA balance but decided against it since I can only draw it down for housing loan payments. While useful, it’s too limited to be considered liquid assets since I can’t use it for anything else.
Hi sir, what do you mean net worth AND liquid assets?
Do you mean in your conservative definition, your net worth and liquid assets are the same thing,
i.e. Net worth = cash and equity & bond investments ONLY, minus total liabilities?
Thank you.
Hey, it means the financial goal is to achieve S$1 million in net worth (Assets less Liabilities). Conservative definition is because I don’t include my owner-occupied property value but include its mortgage.
Separately, my financial goal is also to achieve S$1 million in liquid assets (cash, bonds and equities). Conservative definition is because I don’t include my wholesale insurance policy surrender value and CPF balances.