Another week of work and stay at home is coming to an end as we finish up with the weekend. We were busier this week as a number of things came through for us to do at work. So we had to focus more and couldn’t spend as much time with the baby and each other during the day. It has also become clear that my job in an advisory function within the bank is more flexible than my wife’s job in a BAU/project function. She is generally on a lot more calls and has a heavier workload than me on most days.
As my wife is the higher earning spouse, it makes sense to prioritise her work matters over mine. Since she’s the one with tighter weekly deliverables and more demanding stakeholders. I will usually schedule my calls around hers and spend more time on the baby and household chores when the helper is busy with stuff. This happens from the morning to early afternoon. Her day starts to free up from the late afternoon and that’s where my work picks up. So she takes over until the evening when we both finish work and can help out together.
This cooperation manages the impact of having the 4 of us in a small 2 bedroom apartment every day of every week during the circuit breaker. We are putting in just enough hours to maintain our job performance without going above and beyond. There’s little incentive for us to perform at a higher level this year because it’s basically a write-off in terms of promotion, salary increase and bonus. We might as well take the opportunity to spend more time together as a family. Especially with a 6 month old baby that’s developing so quickly we don’t want to miss anything.
Anyway, we received notifications about StashAway re-optimising our portfolios. We are not going into detail about the changes. But they involve decreasing exposure to US equities and increasing exposure to Asia Pacific, Emerging Markets, China, Real Estate equities and Gold. Interesting strategy that is different from the DBS DigiPortfolio rebalancing approach. We like the fact that there is variety in the strategies employed for different parts of our investment portfolio. The robo-advisors are doing their thing with re-optimising and rebalancing, while we are doing ours with dollar cost averaging, value cost averaging and lump sum investing. All held with different providers.
This is what we need while we are still learning and developing our human capital i.e. our job capability. Keep our focus on increasing salary income while letting others do the work for us to increase our positions in the equity markets. We do our jobs well to earn the higher pay from our employers while they do their jobs well to earn the higher fees from us. As we get older (probably when we hit 40s), we expect this to hit a limit because we should already be in our specialist fields at work drawing the highest pay we can. It’s not going to increase further significantly unless we take a big career risk.
When that time comes, then it becomes worthwhile for us to focus on developing our active investing capability. To look for higher yields with riskier assets. By then, our portfolio should have grown even more for us to have a lot more investing cash and assets to take more risks. We should also have reached a sufficient level of financial stability and maturity as a family for us to explore riskier alternatives. It’s okay to be slow as long as we are consistently good at what we do and we are patient in getting there. No need to rush and we just have to take our time.