The equity markets have kind of flattened in the last week with no real direction going up or down. They seem to be waiting on more data from the real economy to determine the extent of economic damage done by Covid-19. Which is bad and getting worse based on the recent economic indicators.
In flat equity markets, weekly Dollar-Cost Averaging using our salary income for the month works well to keep increasing my positions while they try to find a direction. Because this can drag on for quite a while and I don’t want to risk investing my remaining cash when the equity markets are going nowhere.
The question is how much of the economic damage has already been priced in by the equity markets. Before pressure builds for it to fall further past the mini-floor established. Since my investing strategy is to average downwards, that mini-floor forms the last cost prices of my individual stocks and ETFs.
If the equity markets fall past that mini-floor, I will continue to average downwards until the next mini-floor. And S$150,000 of investing cash has already been set aside for this. I’m going to keep this up until I find the bottom of this market crash. At which point, I should have invested most of my cash balance. Then I rebuild it in the recovery while continuing to Dollar-Cost Average and wait again for my next big opportunity.
This investing plan requires a lot of patience to pull off and a right combination of factors. To be honest, it would have been a lot tougher to execute on my strategy if not for the Singapore Government’s intervention into the economy through the Unity and Resilience Budgets. And even the additional measures and actions taken afterwards.
I’m not referring to the cash handout even though it’s a good to have. The most important thing they did for us (as corporate salaried employees of banks) is to subsidise the wages of local workers to keep us employed. It makes a big difference to staff costs decisions made by banks. Especially when the subsidies are significant.
Without such Jobs Support and Wage Credit Schemes, there would have been large-scale retrenchments at banks by now. Instead, banks are trying to protect jobs by sharing the pain internally (through hiring, pay and bonus freezes/reductions) and externally (through relief measures provided to the customers while taking away some of the benefits). This comes at the expense of shareholders as banks are likely to cut their dividends significantly.
But banks will do this because the message from the Singapore Government is clear. Their foremost concern is jobs and the expectation is that employers should do everything they can to not retrench staff. Given how the Singapore Government is essentially paying for part of our wages now. It almost becomes a transfer of wealth from the country to us. By allowing us to keep our jobs that we would otherwise have lost without such intervention.
The next most important thing they did for us is to strongly drive home the message that employers must allow their staff to work from home as far as possible or risk facing penalties. This has forced the banks to invest in improving their operational capabilities to enhance the hardware and software. To allow their employees to work from home. Costs that they would otherwise not have incurred because it’s not revenue generating.
The effects of this push might actually have the most valuable long-term impact on our jobs. By normalising work from home arrangements, it would address a big problem for us as corporate employees. The fact that we have to travel into and out of the office for 5 working days out of 7 days in the week.
We waste travel time and dealing with traffic (whether taking public transport or driving a car) is always a headache. And we have to clock the minimum number of working hours in a day before we can leave the office. Which leaves us with less time to spend with our families on a working day and causes us to be tired over the weekends.
There are many benefits to working in a corporate job – higher than average stable pay, access to medical & other benefits, coverage for training & higher education courses and professional & personal social interaction. But these benefits come at a high cost of losing time to the office. And dealing with office politics.
Once you can reduce these costs, the benefits of a corporate job really start to outweigh them. Because we start gaining flexibility over our working hours and what we spend our time on. Yes, this may be the largest work from home experiment ever conducted and it won’t be permanent. It’s not even going well at the moment.
But the positive effects are here to stay. My wife is going back to the office next week on Mon to set up her soft token that allows her to work from home the next day onwards using her own personal laptop. I have collected my work laptop and I’m in the processing of setting up my soft token by next week so I can work from home too. While there still are many technical and operational issues to be resolved with this work from home setup, this is now a high priority item that the banks are focused on.
We might never reach full work from home arrangement capability but that’s okay. Because we also don’t plan to work fully from home anyway. It can be isolating and difficult to maintain over a long period of time. We want to be in the office too, just not all the time. If we can even achieve partial work from home arrangement capability, that’s good enough for us. Especially after the Covid-19 virus situation normalises.
Because the world and the way we operate would have changed by then. Just by having this work from home capability, we are already in discussions with our managers to make this a more permanent fixture of the way we work in the office going forward. This is actually our main objective that we are striving for out of this whole life-changing impact of Covid-19.
We plan to work from home at least 1 day a week even after the situation normalises. On stuff that doesn’t have to be done with bank systems and applications access. For the remaining 4 or less days in the week that we go into the office, that’s when we conduct our stakeholder meetings and access the bank systems and applications to work on stuff that require it. We want to build the flexibility into our corporate jobs and that is the future we are aiming for.