Automated Investing for Oct 2017

Maybank Kim Eng Monthly Investment Plan (Maybank KE MIP)

• Buy 29 units of SPDR STI ETF (SGX:ES3) at S$3.329 per unit on 9 October 2017
• Buy 89 units of Nikko AM REIT ETF (SGX:CFA) at S$1.086 per unit on 9 October 2017
• Transaction costs of S$2

POSB Invest-Saver

• Buy 29 units of Nikko AM STI ETF (SGX:G3B) at S$3.45 per unit on 17 October 2017
• Buy 85 units of ABF SG Bond ETF (SGX:A35) at S$1.17 per unit on 17 October 2017
• Transaction cost of S$1.50

OCBC Blue Chip Investment Plan

• Buy 429 units of Nikko AM STI ETF (SGX:G3B) at S$3.48 per unit on 23 October 2017
• Transaction cost of S$5

Amount invested in ETFs is S$1,900 using Automated Investing for October 2017 with transaction costs of S$8.50.

No Manual Investing for Oct 2017

Robo-Advisor Investing for Oct 2017

StashAway

• Funds transfer of S$500 invested in US-listed ETFs

Smartly

• Funds transfer of S$400 invested in US-listed ETFs

Amount invested with Robo-Advisors is S$900 for October 2017.

Total invested amount is S$2,800 for October 2017.

Hedging against whatever happens next?

We have been doing this every month for a while now. Pushing funds into our cash, ETF and retirement holdings (mandatory CPF contributions). The amounts can vary but the approach is the same because we have no idea what’s going to happen next. We save our cash, invest in ETFs and build up our retirement funds (mandatory CPF contributions) every month to hedge against economic and market events. The cash savings earn interest income (average 1.5%), ETFs earn dividend income (average 2.5%) and CPF retirement funds (mandatory contributions) earn interest income (average 3.5%).

Not high returns but sufficient for us to remain neutral in our asset allocation. This means we try to push about the same amount of funds into the 3 portions every month at this stage. Currently, this works out to be about S$3,000 for each portion i.e. S$9,000 in total every month. Let’s not forget the 4th portion of S$3,000 (S$2,000 of cash and S$1,000 of mandatory CPF contributions) that goes towards paying off the housing loan. We still have some cash leftover for our monthly spending. But this is aggressive and is pushing our salary income allocation to its limit.

Plus it only works if we can maintain our salary income, which we continues to be a challenge as we get older and the economic & corporate environment keeps changing. Ideally, we push ourselves up one more level in our positions to get to the next salary band. This should help to relieve the pressure from the maxed out salary income allocation. Maybe this can be our work objective for next year even though we are still going through our performance reviews for this year.