I haven’t posted in about a month and decided to just come up with a short post on what has been happening. I’m mainly busy with maintaining my family life. Weekdays are about alternating work from home and work in office with my wife. It’s important for both of us to have this balance. Working in the office for at least 2 days in the week allows us to keep our professional network active by meeting up with colleagues, managers and ex-colleagues. Now is the time to keep our ears close to the ground to get a feel of what is happening in our financial and other industries. Early rumblings of a job recession resulting in retrenchments can already be felt and this is not the time to lose contact professionally. Any job loss and consequently loss of salary income in the current high inflationary environment will be disastrous.
Working from home for at least 2 days in the week allows us to spend more time with our kids and get some rest from all the juggling work we have to do on weekdays. Pre-school drop-off and pick-up for the toddler, office or mrt station drop-off and pick-up for the spouse and medical appointments for everyone. Yes, when one of the kids fall sick, it usually wipes out the rest of the family but just to different degrees. You can imagine how difficult it is to take care of a baby that has cough & cold and is not sleeping well at night. Loss of sleep for us does the most damage because that means everything else starts to go to shit. It gets even easier to fall sick, exhaustion with little recovery time because something or someone at home or work always needs our attention. A terrible negative life cycle that loops us into a big mess.
This is tough to manage even with both of us being able to choose our work from home or office days in the week. At times, even working from home the entire week just because we are over-tired from taking care of everything and everyone. Ever since having a 2nd kid among the financial stress of 2022 and going into 2023, we took a risk to protect the flexibility of being able to work from home in our jobs while increasing our salary income with me moving jobs for higher pay. It was necessary for our financial recovery and we are barely making it work. We are now in Q2 of the year preparing for Q3, which will be the most difficult part of the year. The final and biggest major expense to be covered – renovation of our new place for a few months while double paying for rent and mortgage until we can move in (estimated to be Q4).
I have been selling my stocks to realise profits and raise cash for half a year now. This has come to a stop as I no longer need to do so. Coupled with the higher salary income, our cash holding has recovered to a more comfortable level. Sufficient for me to build a 6 months T-Bills and Fixed Deposits Ladder. Meaning every month from next month onwards, I will have additional cash inflow (principal plus interest) from maturing T-Bills and Fixed Deposits. That I will roll over for another 6 months. Bigger amounts for shorter durations and smaller amounts for longer durations. Just to make sure I maintain my liquidity for any major shocks. As my cost of living expenses start to stabilise, I also have more cash savings to split into the various monthly investment buckets – T-Bills & Fixed Deposits, ETFs & Funds Investment Plans and Robo-Advisors.
While leaving myself with extra cash to deleverage and manage that high interest rate debt problem I created for myself. It took a few months but I’m finally starting to get traction on the road to financial recovery. Of course, plenty of things can still go wrong from here but at least the financial protection buffers are building up again. The situation was critical late last year and early this year when I was badly exposed financially. Just a horrendous sequence of events that just made the entire situation a lot worse than it should have been. Created a terrible negative financial loop that I have only just started to make progress in breaking the cycle. Still navigating myself through this family financial crisis and I just have to make it out alive. Before I can refocus on financial progress.