We took the 2nd vaccine jab yesterday afternoon and had some Panadol after that at night as a preventative measure. The side effects are similar to the 1st vaccine jab – sore arm, body feeling warm and tiredness. We are hoping it doesn’t get worse and we start feeling better over the weekend. Anyway, Phase 2A (Heightened Alert) has started and we have rescheduled a few small group gatherings to late August and after. At least the pre-school is still open so our boy gets to go there for half a day to take part in the activities and have fun with his teachers and friends. We just got to find a way to get through this tough period of time.
As of today, we have completely liquidated our OCBC RoboInvest and DBS DigiPortfolio accounts to raise cash for the private property purchase downpayment. These were profitable positions but the fees charged by OCBC and DBS for managing the portfolios digitally were starting to eat into the profits. It was not obvious when the global and local equity markets were on a bull run previously but became more so when the markets have been rather flat. No automatic funds transfers into these accounts for investing also made it difficult for me to have to manually remember to transfer the funds every month. And we still find StashAway to be a superior robo-advisor at this time so we are going back to sticking with the one.
Photo by Kindel Media on Pexels.com
Speaking of StashAway, we recently received an email from them about re-optimising our portfolios. Main reason is to capture growth opportunities globally and to protect our portfolios from rising inflation in the US. This is what they are doing to prepare our portfolios for the new economic conditions:
- US-based assets will be optimised for an inflationary growth environment – positive inflationary momentum and positive growth momentum.
- Non-US based assets will be optimised for a disinflationary growth environment – slowing inflationary momentum and positive growth momentum.
We agree with StashAway’s reoptimisation approach and can’t wait to see what the actual changed target asset allocations are. We are hoping not to have to liquidate any part of the StashAway accounts and will try to draw down our overseas cash funds & surrender values of wholelife insurance policies. There’s about 2 months plus left to pull together the remaining cash funds for the private property purchase downpayment and I’m hoping for more favourable conditions to facilitate this.