Finance Smiths

This is starting to annoy me. There will be another slight increase in our housing loan interest rate from next month Nov 2019 onwards. Not as big as the one back in Mar 2019. But we would still be paying a slightly higher home loan monthly instalment amount. Just the last thing I need as we prepare for our child’s arrival.

I’m just realising how expensive having kid(s) can be. And I’m only at the maternity costs and preparation for kid’s arrival stage. I can only imagine our expenses climbing once the kid is here. Which brings me to the next point about this topic on “Sandwich Generation” that I have been reading about. Defined as working adults who have to support both their parents and children.

To be honest, it’s not that bad for us yet. We contribute about S$500 each to my parents and parents-in-law every month. This adds up to a total monthly cost of living contribution of S$1,000 to both of our parents. We are fortunate it’s not going up anytime soon because our parents are still living comfortably on what they have. Healthwise, they seem to be doing okay so far.

My parents can rely on their enbloc proceeds, CPF Lifepayouts and contributions from my siblings. While my mother-in-law went back to work and could continue her career from when she last “retired”. We still find it amazing she can outearn the both of us combined at her age (she’s 59 this year 2019). Not being ageist but just impressed with her career achievements. Especially when you consider how middle aged PMETs are usually hardest hit by layoffs.

Anyway, this has resulted in us not being “sandwiched” that badly. It may change in the future but this gives us the opportunity to accelerate our wealth building in the meantime. We are in the process of adjusting our cash-investment-retirement asset allocation percentages to have more funds flowing into our investments.

My wife just finished her performance review for this year 2019. While my wife’s performance rating is higher than last year 2018, her salary increase and bonus might be lower. It’s not a good sign when a better performance outcome translates to a worse remuneration outcome. It means the company is not doing well and the outlook is bad.

We are in the 3rd trimester and my wife is really feeling the strain of pregnancy now. She has about 1.5 months of work more to go and just needs to finish up her remaining stuff. Hang in there love! I know it’s tough and I’m proud of her pushing through. While there’s not much I can do to help my wife with the actual pregnancy itself, I can support her from the side by ensuring there’s nothing else for her to worry about. My wife just needs to focus on herself, work and the baby.

Thank goodness for strong financial and parental support. Paid maternity benefits and leave goes a long way in relieving our financial burden. And her parents have been helping us out as much as they can. It’s almost time now for everything to change and we just have to keep going!

It was a matter of time before this happened. A drop in the equity markets due to trade war fears (despite our automated and manual monthly investments) translated into a lower investment portfolio value. As a result, the growth in our total asset and net worth for Aug 2019 was less than half that of Jul 2019.

It’s tempting for us to find a way to increase our total monthly income to make up for it. Either by investing more to generate a higher dividend income or by doing a side gig to make some extra money. For the first time in the past 2 years since setting it up, I logged into my GrabHitch Driver account. Just to see whether I can monetize any of our car trips over the weekend. I even considered changing my investing strategy into higher yielding dividend stocks.

Look at how I got drawn into most likely a knee-jerk reaction to a normal and regular event that happens often. While I’m not saying this is a bad thing (because new ideas do come up in times like that), it’s more important to be patient and wait. Even just for a bit. Before deciding to do anything. To be honest, I distracted myself by focusing on my work, wife, family and friends. A useful way to take my mind off something I have no control over.

This is why I know we cannot do investing full-time or even part-time. I constantly think there are so many other things I could be doing that is a better use of my time. It’s probably a bad active investing strategy but I find it to be a good passive investing strategy. The less I change my approach, the more effective it becomes over the long term.