I just updated our net worth Google Sheet for the end of the month. As I expected, our investments took a beating and the value has gone down quite a bit since the start of the month. However, equities (ETFs and stocks) only take up 10% of our total assets since we exited our Smartly robo-advisor accounts investments.

This happened to be a few weeks ago when the markets were on a high. It has turned out to be a favourable decision even though I made it on a whim. Because I was just annoyed with how everything else in my life was going – nanny had just left, helper was not adjusting well to taking care of a baby and us having to do a lot more than before.

I’m using that cash injection from exiting our Smartly robo-advisor accounts to re-invest back into the markets now that they are starting to fall quite a bit. Anyway, I’m trying to get the equities portion of our total assets to go up by investing regularly every month. Although the value increases, its proportion remains the same.

Because the other components – our cash position, value of fixed-income investments & wholesale life insurance and retirement funds balances are growing as well. It’s not a bad problem to have since I have a bigger margin of error when it comes to taking risks with our investments and careers. Mistakes don’t hurt as much if I have the means to recover faster.

Anyway, the other 90% of our total assets has grown more strongly than the fall in equities. Which has resulted in our net worth going up almost as much as the previous month after I updated the figures and did a comparison. If you have picked up on the fact that the math makes no sense, you would be correct.

When I found out my wife was pregnant one year ago, I started funnelling excess cash into a bank account owned by her that’s not tracked on our net worth Google Sheet. Excess cash came from various sources:

1. Salary going up and our spending going down that resulted in unallocated savings
2. Higher than expected bonuses
3. Corporate maternity cash benefits
4. Hongbaos from family or cash savings from them paying off big expenses for us as gifts

This excess cash is not meant for the baby if that’s what you are thinking. His bank account balance continues to be zero and it will remain as nil for as long as my wife allows it. Haha, she’s not as amused as I am about this and will probably end up giving a portion of it to the baby.

This excess cash is meant for my wife. It’s to protect her from what’s about to hit her as a working mum. The world is unfair and the corporate office environment can be a cruel place to work. I have to admit that my wife’s bank has treated her well in the last decade. Which is why she has worked at the same company (just in different locations and offices) the entire time.

But the odds are stacked against my wife as a working mum. She will find herself having to work harder at her job to prove herself capable of being a mum and manager at the same time. Also difficult to do this consistently when the needs of a child and demands of a job are constantly evolving.

By the way, my wife caught up with her colleagues over lunch and found out that the upcoming restructure is likely to impact the team she manages directly. Chances are one person is going to get cut and it doesn’t help that she’s not there to defend the headcount or even her own job role.

Easy to go after a team when the manager and a member are away on maternity leave. It’s difficult to expect the covering manager and staff to step up to do anything about it. Because it’s honestly not their problem and they just want to get rid of this additional workload they have taken on as covers. Can’t blame them for being practical.

My wife is also held to a higher standard when it comes to taking care of the baby and managing the household. I know because people are still impressed that I can do most of what she does and I make the effort to do so even after working in the office on weekdays. They don’t know I have already gotten lazier because my wife and the helper have stepped up so much when it comes to taking care of the baby.

It’s not because I’m a good husband and father for doing my part. It’s because you are a useless one for not doing yours. Which somehow makes me look even better in the eyes of my wife. Not that I’m complaining but the game is rigged for working mums. The bar will just keep getting raised and she’s going to be overwhelmed by ever increasing expectations.

So I do what I can by protecting my wife from the fear and doubt that will inevitably creep into her life as a working mum. And money can be a powerful shield when deployed well. This pot of untracked funds has grown to tens of thousands of dollars as I continually channel excess cash into the bank account without monitoring it on the net worth Google Sheet.

My wife is dipping into it to buy herself a nice push gift. She’s been investing some of it into the markets recently as they fall because she’s finally figured out a good time to invest is when all the indices are red. And when they have been consistently down by a few percentage points every day. She’s also going to self-fund her additional month of unpaid leave she will take to extend the time she can stay at home with the baby.

It’s self-empowering and a positive reinforcement for my wife that she’s ready to be a working mum. The fear and doubt will always be there but it can be managed with effort and time. I truly believe that it’s my relationship with her that will form the foundation of the family’s happiness and satisfaction.

Which is why I will continue to prioritise my wife’s well-being above all else, even the baby. She can prioritise his well-being above mine and I’m okay with that. This way, we are all watching out for each other so nobody gets left behind. And we move forward together as a family.

It’s my 1st full week of work in a month and it was tough getting back into the swing of things. Pacing is important when you have a full-time job in the office i.e. 5 working days out of 7 days in a week.

Do it wrong and you run out of energy by the end of the week too exhausted to do anything fun over the weekend. Do it well and you get to maintain your energy levels over the weekend to go out and have fun.

It doesn’t help that the after-work routine on a weekday wears me down as well. Even with my wife and the confinement nanny taking care of the baby, I try to take over when I can just so the baby is familiar with me.

Especially when he already doesn’t get to interact with me for most of the day. I also try to help out with the washing of dishes, milk bottles and pump parts. And still find time to talk to my wife about her day plus doing a bit of physical activity and exercise for myself.

It’s exhausting. Most days are okay, some days are bad and a few days are good. That’s the proportion split in a week. When you get tired, it’s easy to fight over the small stuff and disagree on things. I reckon it’s better we fight now to resolve our differences over our approaches.

Otherwise, the problems are going to escalate when my wife goes back to work in her full-time jobs. Which means we have a few months more to keep practising and sync up. I have to gear up my performance in the next 2 years to chase for a promotion and salary increase. While my wife backs my play, maintains her performance and keeps a look out for her way up or out to get her next promotion and pay raise.

As we keep going and pushing ourselves daily to improve and adjust, there has to be goals we set for ourselves to achieve every year. If not, the days, weeks, months and years will start blending together and life is just going to pass you by. After all, it gives us more focus when we work towards objectives. This brings me to the topic of this post.

I’m going to start off with our financial goal for this year 2020 – Achieve S$1 million in net worth and liquid assets. We graduated in 2009 and started work in 2010. All the effort we have put in and the experiences we have gone through led us up to this point to set such a financial goal one decade later.

It’s ambitious because we just had a baby 2 months ago and the related expenses are skyrocketing. Mostly because we are choosing convenience over cost at every decision point. Like having a confinement nanny for 3 months and probably even extending by another month. This is including having our helper coming in a few weeks’ time. No such thing as too much help at the start.

Anyway, we define our net worth as total assets (excluding owner-occupied property value) minus total liabilities (including owner-occupied property mortgage). It’s a conservative way of defining net worth but we like it because it truly reflects our financial situation. If we bought an investment property value that generates rental income, then we would include investment property value in our total assets, along with the investment property mortgage in our total liabilities.

Currently, based on our 31 Dec 2019 net worth, we are about S$230,000 away from our financial goal of S$1 million by 31 Dec 2020. It’s a big jump but we can make this happen in the year if we remain focused and disciplined at managing our lives. We have to work hard at maintaining the balance among all of our priorities so that not too many spin out of control at the same time. Haha, funny but true.

We define our liquid assets as cash and equity & bond investments. Anything we can liquidate with a cash value that does not impact the quality of or materially affect other parts of our lives. That’s why we don’t include the surrender value of the wholesale life insurance policies in our liquid assets. If we have to give up these policies, we lose our life insurance coverage, so it’s not really liquid assets that we can rely on.

Again, it’s a conservative way of defining liquid assets, but we like it because it shows the financial assets we can actually rely on to get ourselves out of trouble. We have been called out before that the way we define net worth and liquid assets is not accurate. We could care less what other people think.

You can go ahead to inflate your net worth and liquid assets if it makes you feel better about yourself. We rather be strict and hard on ourselves now so we can push on at our own pace. Rather than when the chips are down and life comes in to give you a kick in the ass or a kick when you are down. Good luck trying to find your way up then. Because it’s going to be one of the most painful experiences of your life figuring it out.

It’s mid-week and a pocket of time has opened up tonight for me to blog. I have department lunch, division event, early releases from work, catch-up lunches and dinners all scheduled in the next 2 weeks. Have to say that end Dec continues to be my favourite time to work as I wind up the year with celebrations and fun times.

It’s also a popular time for self-reflection but I’m not inclined to write a post about the things I have achieved, did not achieve, grateful for, can improve on, etc. Maybe in bits and pieces when the topic comes back but it seems like too much effort to consolidate so many things into one post.

What triggered this write-up was my updating of our personal finances Google Sheet and watch the numbers flow into our net worth tracker & graph. Since 1 Jan 2016 when we started monitoring our personal finances progress, I browsed through our monthly net worth figures and even did a year on year comparison.

This is how much our net worth has increased by every year since 2016:

• 2016 – S$120,000 yearly
• 2017 – S$130,000 yearly (8% increase)
• 2018 – S$150,000 yearly (15% increase)
• 2019 – S$180,000 yearly (20% increase)

When I look at the graphical representation of our monthly net worth for the past 4 years, it’s like a wobbly positive slope line.

This is how much our average net worth has increased every month since Jan 2016:

• 2016 – S$10,000 monthly
• 2017 – S$10,833 monthly (8% increase)
• 2018 – S$12,500 monthly (15% increase)
• 2019 – S$15,000 monthly (20% increase)

I have come to realise that compounding is real and it works but only if you don’t keep thinking about it. We didn’t do anything special in the past 4 years since we started tracking our personal finances. We made investments (some good, some bad, others disastrous), used high interest savings accounts well and spending went up along with our income but at a slower rate.

Nothing significant other than a higher level of awareness of where our money is going to. So when we get asked what did we do that made this happen. It’s difficult to pinpoint a specific action we took that led to this result. If we had to pick the most important thing we did, we would have to go with the change in mindset.

At the beginning of this journey, it’s easy to be overwhelmed. You have people telling you all sorts of ways to achieve financial independence, financial freedom and early retirement. Value investing, growth investing, robo-advisors, ETFs, stocks, property, cryptocurrency, all kinds of investing seminars. And the list keeps going on. Start a business, be self-employed, spend less, earn more, be happy, be satisfied, want less, want more, do nothing, do something.

If we followed all the advice that’s given, we would have gone nuts. Because it was a combination of everyone else’s life experiences and none of them were yours. We would just be trying to live everybody’s lives and not ours. So the essential thing we did after realising this was to tune everything out.

And only tune in to what could affect us directly. We don’t read books about investing and attend any kind of investing seminars. Whether they are on stocks or properties. The moment we decided to use ETFs, we had to be okay with market returns. And the average returns are likely to lower over time. Convenience comes at a cost after all. But that means we get to lock out useless financial knowledge that confuses us more than anything.

We focused on what could potentially make us jobless and monitor only the relevant developments. At our age, it’s difficult to pick up new high paying job skills. Neither have we demonstrated the interest or willingness to access these types of jobs. Too lazy because it’s too much work. And so we pivot in our jobs according to our skill sets. Keep ourselves relevant enough to change departments, divisions, companies within the same industries and firms in different industries.

This takes an incredible amount of effort because it means we cannot just go into the office and go through the motion in the way we work. We almost have to be actively working by ensuring we keep learning to continue being in knowledge-based jobs that have longer expiry dates. It’s true, the inevitable outcome for us is that we will eventually become jobless.

While change takes place over time, it has a consistent habit of accelerating when you least expect it. Which means we will eventually run out of time to pivot fast enough into relevant jobs. Not at the pace technology is advancing and developing. New age jobs are already here and not everyone can work in them.

It used to be the case that an average person can go to university, graduate, get a job and improve at it until you can do it well. The job may change in nature but your skill sets would remain relevant. Nowadays, jobs are changing so fast they are rendering entire skill sets irrelevant. Everything you spent years learning now has little value.

You will need to have such a transferable skill set and flexible mindset to be able to switch from one job to another. And probably often from one industry to another as entire industries can be made irrelevant. The average person can’t keep up. Well, we can’t anyway and unfortunately that means a very real timeline exists for us to make this journey work out. The question becomes. How long do we have?