Happy National Day everyone and I hope you enjoyed the long weekend! The weather has been great so we went to Gardens by the Bay, East Coast Park and swimming pools over the past few days. It’s nice having a public holiday on a Mon because you get a longer rest over the weekend and a shorter work week ahead. If you haven’t noticed the better mood I’m in, it’s also because of the fantastic news that Singapore will start relaxing its Covid restrictions from Tues 10 Aug onwards for the vaccinated.
2 weeks plus ago when Singapore announced we were all going back to Phase 2A (Heightened Alert), it hit me like a ton of bricks. Even when I was feeling down, I had the presence of mind to bring forward the 2nd vaccine jabs for my wife, helper and I. So we can start the 2 week countdown then in the hope that there may be a positive announcement during the National Day long weekend. Given the high level of daily cases, I wasn’t expecting this to happen and was mentally preparing myself for the stay at home grind to last until late Aug. Regardless, we can finally start going out to dine and gather again with our vaccinated family and friends from tomorrow!
In fact, we may be able to start going back to the office to work for a few days each week from next week onwards. I have missed the interactions with my colleagues and it has been difficult working from home. Feels like I’m alone doing my own thing with no idea what’s happening to my wider team and no sense of connection to anyone else. My view is that corporate work is just not meant to be done full-time from home. It needs some level of engagement with colleagues in the office to make it bearable. This has come at a good time for my wife as she starts her new job in another division next month and it’s important she gets the face time in the office. To be more engaged with her team and stakeholders.
I’m cautiously optimistic that things are looking up but I don’t want to get my hopes up. Just be happy with Singapore taking steps forward instead of backwards when it comes to Covid restrictions. Anyway, my better mood translated into finally working on something I have been procrastinating for the longest time. My StocksCafe portfolio has not been updated for several months now. I stopped out of laziness, general sense of frustration and didn’t see the point of doing so anymore. Well, this has changed. After exiting our DBS DigiPortfolio and OCBC RoboInvest investments, we are only left with StashAway as our robo-advisor account. And they recently re-optimized their investment portfolios i.e. changed the mix and proportion of ETFs in them.
With all the manual investments I have been making on our Stan Chart online equity trading accounts slowly come to a stop as markets rebound, I felt it’s a good time to enter all of these transactions on StocksCafe at one time. Bring it up to speed as a reflection of our total investments. While my son was taking his afternoon nap, my wife was catching up on her TV series and my helper was having her lunch, I sat down for 2 hours at my dining table (also doubles up as my work from home office desk) and updated my StocksCafe portfolio. I was happy to notice these 2 things at the end of the exercise.
Photo by Laura Stanley on Pexels.com
Firstly, our total investment portfolio is still above S$1m and it may stay this way after I complete the downpayment of the private property purchase the month after next. This would act as our financial buffer while I rebuild the cash balance from savings using our salary income. I may take this opportunity to continue investing monthly and keep a much lower cash balance compared to before. I’m changing my investing approach to a more aggressive one as my my previous high cash balance strategy was too conservative and it only paid off because of the Covid V-shaped crash and recovery.
Secondly, our expected dividend income for 2021 is looking to be much higher than our dividend income received for 2020. Singapore has lifted the regulatory caps on the local banks’ dividends and they have resumed their higher dividend payouts. Other Singapore companies are slowly recovering from the Covid crisis and their dividends are gradually increasing too. The same thing is happening at a global level so dividends from our overseas ETFs and stocks are going up as well.
With the passive income and gains from my dividend stocks & ETFs, it has given me flexibility to take larger positions in growth stocks & ETFs and cryptos. I’m still in an overall gain from the latter despite the recent big hit to Chinese technology stocks & ETF. Not forgetting that the recovery in the cryptos market helped to offset this. I’m still working out the right mix of exposures in our investment portfolio because different sectors can be useful hedges against each other depending on the economic conditions.
Anyway, I’m hoping the recovery in banks’ profits this year will translate into better salary increases and bonuses next year after our performance reviews. They were bad last year but we stuck with our banks and it would be nice to be rewarded. I don’t think I will be changing jobs since my wife just changed her job again after getting a new role from the restructuring. Good to give her some stability at home and financially so she can focus on her new job. I’m looking forward to the gradual re-opening of economies and borders as all of us find a way to navigate out of the Covid hole and move forward!