Finance Smiths

Personal finance apprentices-in-training

Dividend income for Dec 2016

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It’s the Christmas weekend and I’m about to get off work soon. Thought I will squeeze in a blog post before the long weekend. We have been doing our Christmas shopping for the past 2 weeks to prepare gifts for our families and friends. Will be having Christmas dinners over the weekend with good food and wine. Looking forward to that after such a busy and tough few weeks at work!

I was debating with myself a while back about whether to disclose more details of our dividend income but decided against it. Been thinking about it again and this time round, I have decided to start posting specific details on the amount of dividend and coupons received in relation to the relevant shares/ETFs/bonds from the month of Dec 2016 onwards.

Exciting stuff! Mainly because you can have a better sense of the constituents of the share/ETF/bond type in our asset portfolio. I will try to do the post after receiving all the dividend income for that month.

Dividend income for Dec 2016

SGX

1. Silverlake Axis Ltd (5CP) – S$13

2. Boustead Singapore Ltd (F9D) – S$21

3. King Wan Corporation Ltd (554) – S$39

4. UMS Holdings Ltd (558) – S$16

5. Singapore Press Holdings Ltd (T39) – S$110

Why I read Transitioning.org

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The US Federal Reserve has raised interest rates for the first time this year and there’s talk of 3 more increases to come next year. Stock markets and oil prices reacted. TPG Telecom wins right to be Singapore’s next telco in an already saturated market to compete against Singtel, Starhub and M1 and their stock prices tanked. This is right after a number of days of bullish run for global stock markets.

Look at how volatile the equity markets can be. This is why I know I can’t trade and have to remind myself to ignore short-term price movements. There’s so many factors that impact each industry and they can develop & evolve differently over time. Hence, my preference for ETFs to risk diversify the impact of various factors on a range of industries across multiple countries.

Positive affirmation of my ETF investing strategy aside. I read about redundancies in Singapore hitting a 7 year high in the first 9 months of this year, which is the highest since the global financial crisis in 2009. That was actually more concerning for me.

It confirms my fear that the negative economic conditions is flowing through to the job market a lot more. Plus PMETs with tertiary qualifications formed the majority of Singapore resident layoffs. Feels like we got a target on our backs now.

Do you follow the website Transitioning.org? It’s a support site for the unemployed and underemployed. When I was jobless as a graduate in 2010, I was actually reading this website for advice and encouragement even though it’s more relevant to Singaporeans and I was in Melbourne at that time.

It made me feel less alone at a time when I was desperately looking for work overseas to give myself a reason to stay on in Australia. Even after I found a job and was employed for years after that, I continued to read posts on Transitioning.org. It was a reminder of how tough life can be for the jobless & the problems they face. And a reminder to have empathy.

Even though my wife and I have not had to go through that for some time now, it doesn’t mean we should forget that retrenchment and hard times continue to strike people’s lives. We could be one or two job losses away ourselves from being part of the statistics.

What makes it worse is when I read about how Singapore residents are forced out of their jobs under unreasonable employment conditions with no recourse. I only realised how little we can do about it when writing my post about making a claim against an employer. It sucks.

As economic conditions deteriorate, firms will always cut costs in the easiest manner – by reducing headcount. Sometimes unfairly so. Must we wait for things to worsen before we start addressing this issue properly?

Why I left my previous job

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I don’t think I have ever wrote about why I left my previous job. I mean, I had a post about changing jobs and why I was moving to a job in a bank. But I never went into the triggers at my previous workplace (an accounting firm) that made me decide to search for a new role in the first place.

There were personal as well as professional reasons but they interacted with each other to ultimately result in me resigning. Only my wife is acutely aware of how significant the personal reasons were and I never spoke to anyone about this in detail.

After moving back to Singapore from Australia in 2014, I joined a small tax advisory team in an accounting firm. The team grew in size over time but all of us worked well together. It was a difficult time for me nevertheless because I had to adjust to longer work hours, more demanding bosses and a different work culture.

In early 2016, my tax manager went on maternity leave and I stepped up to cover her responsibilities for several months. Almost burnt myself out in the process but was rewarded with a decent bonus at the annual performance review. However, I wasn’t promoted but I was fine with that since my manager had just returned and I had assumed she will resume her responsibilities.

It’s tough being a working mum in Singapore and I was fully prepared to support her transition back to the workplace. What I was not prepared for was how the relationship between my tax partner and my tax manager will deteriorate to the point where they could no longer work with each other directly.

There were many reasons – mismatched expectations, lack of communication, poor conflict resolution etc. All resulting in a vicious cycle where my tax manager became demotivated, disinterested & resentful and my tax partner became distrustful, small-minded & absent to avoid conflict. Want to guess what happened to me?

 

It’s easy. I got stuck in the middle and I was frustrated & angry that a previously good working relationship was destroyed simply because we couldn’t resolve what I thought was not a hard problem. It’s like watching a train wreck about to happen and you can’t seem to stop it no matter how hard you try.

And that’s what happened. I watched two people that I respected and looked up to become the worst versions of themselves. As a result, we couldn’t win any new client work and our existing client work suffered. So I left. I refused to be a part of a non-functional team where I could no longer learn and felt trapped.

I caught up with an ex-colleague recently over dinner and drinks. Apparently, the situation has worsened and the most likely outcome is that my tax manager will leave at the start of the new year 2017. I was mostly sad at how things turned out but I was a little relieved that I dodged a bullet.

The most important lesson I learned from the whole situation is how essential conflict resolution and communication is to a workplace. It doesn’t matter how technically brilliant, hardworking or even of a teamplayer the people are if they don’t resolve conflicts and communicate effectively.

On a side note, I did consider writing a post about how I could leave my previous job. But I suspected it would end up being about having an emergency fund, cash savings, investments and keeping expenses low. Honestly, it wouldn’t have been true in this case. I already got my current job before resigning from my previous job. It was just a matter of aligning my last day and first day so I got a few weeks of holiday in between.

I didn’t even need to tap into my emergency fund, cash savings and investments. Or even bothered to lower my expenses. One day, I might get retrenched or forced to resign unexpectedly without a job waiting for me. Maybe then will I write a more personal post about the importance of all those things during such an event.

For now, as long as I’m capable and willing to work, my main focus continues to be keeping myself relevant in my industry by being proactive. This allows me to walk away from toxic work environments and that is my best defense against having to tolerate similar unreasonable & negative situations in the future.