Apr 2020 Net Worth Update

Since it’s a public holiday today, I had time to update the net worth figures for Apr 2020 on our Google Sheet and blog pages. The numbers for every component – assets, liabilities, income and expenses, are looking better than the previous month. Salary & passive income have gone up due to higher dividend income from new investments made in Mar 2020. Expenses have dropped from working and staying at home.

With no big investments made other than the regular investment plans (Dollar Cost Averaging), we had more cash savings and a higher cash balance for the month. A rebound in the stock markets has translated to a rise in our investment portfolio value. The additional CPF contributions from my bonus has been credited this month so retirement funds balance went up as well. Assets have grown because of these factors.

Liabilities have fallen as we continue to pay off our housing loan and we are not applying for the mortgage relief. Even our personal tax liability has gone down because my wife now qualifies for the Working Mother’s Child Relief. We even allocated the Qualifying Child Relief and Parenthood Tax Rebate entirely to her since she has the higher income. As we spend less, our credit card payment due balances are lower too since we are not charging as much to them.

As a result, our net worth for Apr 2020 posed a strong recovery coming off the weak positive performance for Mar 2020. We will take this as a consolation because who knows what can happen next. The situation could deteriorate instead of improve and things can easily take a turn for the worse. We are just glad to see our strategies working. They are simple enough to execute but the key is consistency. And a strong belief in why we have chosen and are sticking with them. Not easy to do when there’s so much advice and noise going around.

If you look at our StocksCafe portfolio, you would see it consists of mostly ETFs and some individual stocks. These ETFs offer exposure to the Singapore, Asia-Pacific, Emerging and Developed Markets. They are held in a combination of manual investments with Stan Chart Online Trading Platform and Robo-Advisors (StashAway and DBS DigiPortfolio). In time, our plan is to sell away the remaining individual stocks and only hold ETFs. We don’t have to think, analyse and evaluate before buying ETFs.

Once we have selected the specific ETFs and financial services, we buy regularly and in large amounts when the market falls are big like what happened last month. When market returns are applied against a strong capital base, ETFs can be an effective means of investing. We don’t have to worry about business fundamentals, structural changes in the economy and competitive pressures now or going forward. But we are still plugged into any form of significant mainstream growth in the local and global economies to benefit from it.

By keeping investing simple and easy enough for us to execute regularly, we don’t waste any more time wondering what more we can do with it. We spend that time saved on protecting and increasing our core source of income – salaries from our jobs. We are much more focused on improving this daily aspect of our lives then anything else. Work takes up 10 hours of our day when we have to travel into the office. It takes up 8 hours when we get to work from home. If we don’t improve our working conditions, it doesn’t matter what we do outside to make up for it. It will never be enough. Which is why our most important objective from this crisis is to ensure we transform the way we work in our banking corporate jobs. And we have to keep pushing for it.