Life is starting to become more balanced in Phase 2 as we continue to work from home on the weekdays but head out for social gatherings on the weekends. It’s a nice change from Phase 1 when we still had to stay at home on the weekends. Work has picked up quite a bit for my wife due to an upcoming project deliverable by the end of this month. Her work day has gotten more intense and we are starting to take the baby out for our usual evening walk at a later time.

I have been increasingly tapping into the flexibility of my job to keep working around her schedule so that the household keeps functioning. Meaning the baby is taken care of, there’s food on the table during the 3 meals, household chores get done and we all have our own time to rest & relax when needed. The key is to ensure none of us (including the helper) is overwhelmed to the point where we break down physically and mentally. Because it’s going to overload the other 2 people and eventually all 3 of us are going to suffer. It’s such a delicate balance because the baby gets more demanding of our time and attention every day.

Anyway, I signed up for a training course that runs for a few days virtually. It’s part of my development plan at the bank and my manager found this training course useful to the work we do. This is a good test of how our household is going to manage when 1 person has to go off and do self-development. I want to see how viable picking up new skills virtually is when you have a 8 month old baby at home. I already have some background knowledge relevant to the training course so it won’t be entirely new to me. I wonder what percentage of the training material I will be able to absorb in that week. Should give me perspective on the challenges of reskilling and retraining employees later in their careers.

As I was updating our Jun net worth numbers, I noticed another drop in our monthly interest income. It’s going to get worse in Jul and Aug as more banks cut their interest rates again on their savings accounts. While I expected this to happen, the extent of the cuts is annoying. No point kicking up a fuss about this because that’s just what banks do to protect their profits in a low interest rate environment. See how it’s so easy for banks to cut interest rates on their savings account but it’s a lot more difficult for you to refinance or reprice your housing loans at lower interest rates. Usually with additional costs involved and fees you have to pay to the banks.

We have been rebuilding our cash position with each month as we save more of our salary income due to lower expenses. These downward revisions of interest rates on bank savings accounts mean that the opportunity cost of us holding more cash has increased because the interest earned on it is getting lower. Which leaves us with a cash management problem of finding a way to generate a higher return on our cash. It’s time we have a serious re-look at StashAway Simple, which is not a bank account but a portfolio built with a money market fund and an enhanced liquidity fund.

We didn’t explore StashAway Simple previously because the interest rates offered on bank savings accounts were higher than its projected return. Mostly because we could meet the salary crediting and credit card spending criteria to earn the higher interest. As our credit card spending decreases from staying at home more, it becomes increasingly difficult for us to meet that criteria. Or there is even no such criteria anymore to earn higher interest. Which means that StashAway Simple has become a lot more viable for us to consider. Even then, its projected return is going to be lower now as well.

Hence, we should also be increasing our weekly Dollar-Cost Averaging amount by manually making more investments. In an effort to chase higher returns on our cash by investing more of it. We won’t increase the automated investing amount yet because that should only happen in a bear market. But we plan to manually buy more ETFs via Stan Chart Online Trading accounts or transfer more funds into our StashAway robo-advisor or DBS DigiPortfolio accounts every week. We wonder whether higher investment into the financial markets is the intention of a high liquidity, low interest rate economic environment. Because that’s what we are going to do as long as we remain employed. Otherwise, who knows how long we are going to be stuck with earning lower interest on our cash.

Earlier in the week, we received news that Phase 2 will start from Fri 19 Jun. The timing couldn’t have been better. I wasn’t looking forward to another birthday and father’s day celebration at home after we celebrated my wife’s birthday and mother’s day at home back in Apr and May. You can imagine my excitement when we found out Phase 1 would be over earlier than we expected.

So we took leave on Fri 19 Jun and planned a number of celebrations. It seemed like the most natural thing for us to do having been starved of socialising outside of our family for the past 2 months. We should be going out for personal care appointments, shopping, having lunches by ourselves, and dinners with families and friends. And we are feeling better now that our social life is starting to get back on track. While things may never go back to normal, we are happy just to be able to go out for fun.

Anyway, we are likely to continue our work from home arrangements for Phase 2. There does not appear to be a rush for us to go back into the office anytime soon. And we are okay to take our time with this. It has gotten more difficult to keep our focus while working from home with the baby growing up and becoming more aware of our presence. He wants our attention more often when he’s awake and playing or eating. While the helper continues to take on more of his caretaking responsibility during the day, we find ourselves increasingly involved in his daily activities.

This can be tough to navigate when work picks up for either of us, or worse, for the both of us during the week. Like what happened recently. It was a challenging time but we managed to get through it. Our jobs remain intact for now but we know these 2 years will be a critical period of time. My job at a local bank is more stable and secure but has a lower pay. My wife’s job at a foreign bank is less stable and secure but has a higher pay. And it seems like major restructuring is back on the agenda for her bank. The pressure is always there for her bank to move roles back to its head office location from its overseas office location when times are bad.

Like now, there’s a more urgent push by my wife’s bank towards reducing costs in the face of declining revenue at an overseas office location. The good thing is that it tries to avoid layoffs but rather cut jobs via natural attrition. Meaning it just doesn’t replace a staff that leaves i.e. headcount and employee costs still go down. This means that the same workload gets spread across fewer people and they get overworked. Which can lead to a negative cycle of more people leaving over time. Nothing is ever fair but at least it gives her time to prepare an exit strategy knowing what direction the bank is headed.

I don’t have the same problem because I already work in the head office location of the local bank. I just need to weather the bad times with everyone else but there’s less pressure to cut roles and reduce headcount. To ensure the mostly local staff here still have jobs. This stability lowers my retrenchment risk (at the cost of my lower pay) and hedges against my wife’s higher retrenchment risk (at the reward of her higher pay). We have been taking turns doing this for each other in the last decade to ensure at least one of us remains employed at any point in time. Both of us being jobless at the same time would be a disaster.

I won’t say the employment situation is looking bleak for us at the moment. But it’s definitely not good because trying to move jobs now is a bad idea. Too easy for the new offer to be rescinded and for us to get caught out without a job. This has already happened to a few people we know. Even with countries re-opening, it would take a long time for economic activity to resume at a sustainable pace. Based on what we have seen, it looks like we will enter a period of slow economic growth. Which is going to have a sustained negative impact on our lifetime earnings.

As we got busier in the past 2 weeks, we had less time to monitor our investments. There was a small market fall but it has since rebounded. Essentially, nothing interesting has happened for us to manually enter the market. Our automated weekly Dollar Cost Averaging of ETFs continues to increase our vested position and it’s an effective strategy in a volatile market. Cash is still recovering from the big lump sum manual investment made back in Mar. And we are just letting it build for now as a hedge against the tricky and uncertain times ahead we are about to navigate.