A Potential Representation Of Sgrean’s Net Worth By Age And Their Portfolio Breakdown

On July 3, 2020 By Mr BudgetIn Financial Goals, Random ThoughtsLeave a comment

One of a recent forum posting caught our attention and we thought we wanted to note down here and share with all of you too.

Salary SG has this forum thread called “Whats Your Net Worth” for over a few years now, and apparently people have been sharing their net worth figure, albeit anonymously.

The thread has recently resurfaced after more than half a year of radio silence, and people has been sharing their net worth.

Here are some figures we screenshot from anonymous posters over the past 2 years (2019 – 2020).

Married Couples

From the various sharing, keeping in mind that some of them may not be true since most are from unregistered accounts, it seems like married couples who are well off, do have a high 6 figure net worth to even millionaires!

Most of the couples are holding 6 figures in cash, ranging from S$100,000 to some even more than S$2,000,000 in cash and stocks. Most of those who shared also has holdings in stocks, and has a relatively high figure in their CPF account.

It also seems like for couples in the early 30s, the joint net worth will rise from S$200,000 to S$500,000. After which for those in their 40s, the joint net worth will be anywhere from S$500,000 to S$2,000,000.

Single Profiles

For the profiles who are single, i think realistically when they are 40 years old, after working for almost 20 years, they should have around S$500,000 to S$1,000,000 if they are financially savvy and have some stock holdings as well as working in an average paying job.

Those who started young also would have a super good head start as compared to others.

Another factor that contributes to a high net worth is of course, a high paying job. Some of the profiles shared that they have 6 figure annual income and that definitely tipped their net worth scale to the higher end.

Not too sure where we are going with this, but thought this is a good thing to cover here, especially since we cant find much people or bloggers who actively sharing their net worth figures. Also, knowing these numbers shared doesn’t really change our lives – life still goes on as per normal.

However, having these figures give us a scale of what financially savvy people are doing and how much they have achieved, and hopefully we can learn from them.

Through this too, we realized that actually there are a lot of people who are quite well off and are secretly millionaire couples in Singapore!

Of course, we also want to point out that this is not a competition, and ultimately everyone is just trying their best to be happy. It is also a matter of perspective – one can be happy with just S$100,000 and another can only be happy with S$1,000,000.

Hopefully this is a good kaypoh read for you! Happy to hear your net worth too! Do you think these profiles are fake, or are they real?

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Also Read: The Dangerous When-Then Trap That We Never Knew We Might Be Caught In

Our Take On Syfe’s New Equity100 Portfolio And How We Will Be Investing In It

On July 2, 2020 By Mr BudgetIn Random Thoughts, Syfe4 Comments

So one of the relatively bigger finance news these few days is the launch of a new 100% global equity portfolio by Syfe, called the Equity100 portfolio.

As one of the early adopters of Syfe, we are definitely excited when we hear this news.

One of the reason why we are excited is for this new 100% equity portfolio is because we are currently invested in the existing global equity portfolio by Syfe. However, due to its built in risk management portion, the portfolio will auto rebalance itself during period of high volatility, resulting in a higher allocations to bonds.

Here’s our current global equity portfolio composition with risk management:

Syfe Global Equity Portfolio 25% Downside Risk Portfolio Composition 02072020

What we would have preferred instead, is for a full equity allocation regardless of the market volatility. While lower risk is of course better for most investors, for Mrs Budget and myself, we are able to stomach more risk on our portfolio as we treat our CPF as the “bond” portion of our portfolio.

Hence for our roboadvisor, we would very much prefer a full equity portfolio – and the new 100% global equity portfolio Equity100 definitely answers that for us!

According to the announcement, Equity100 invests in ETFs which holds positions in some of the biggest names in the world now: the Amazons, Facebooks and Alibabas of the world.

Here’s a quick look at the portfolio allocation:

Equity100 – Lower Risk And Cheaper Alternative For Us To Buy US Technology Growth Stocks

The same reason why we are putting our money into the Syfe REIT+ portfolio, the Equity100 provides us with an affordable and professionally managed solution to gain access to all the US equity counters which are probably too expensive for us to buy individually now.

Take a look for Amazon for example, of which Equity100 has about 5.21% holding now – Amazon just reached another ATH yesterday, hitting over USD2800. Apple too is at its all time high, and while these are counters that we would absolutely love to hold individually, it would be too expensive for us to buy them now.

Hence the Equity100 portfolio provides us a “lower risk” alternative to holding onto these high growth stock and riding on the potential upside.

While there are no active “risk management” for Equity100 (shifting to and fro from equities and bonds), Equity100 touts a smart beta strategy, which means the portfolio might adjust their allocation to ETFs with higher potential returns due to market movements.

For example, say the next big theme is EV, I’d think Equity100 will add some allocation on ETFs with this theme and bring up the overall return of the portfolio.

Because of these reasons, Mrs Budget and I have added a new Equity100 portfolio and we will be doing a monthly contribution into this portfolio. We have contributed our first S$1,000 into Equity100.

Monthly DCA Into Syfe REIT+, Equity100 and Syfe Global Equity

Of course, one of the main question that even we ask ourselves is that, with 3 portfolios available on Syfe now, how should one DCA monthly into Syfe?

An investor can choose to invest in any of these portfolios

While there are no right answer to this, we can share our point of view.

For Mrs Budget and myself, we treat Syfe as our “emergency fund” or a joint portfolio that we may use for future purposes, for example, paying for our kid’s education, or simply as a supplementary retirement fund.

Individually, we also have active bank balances which serves as our day to day expenditure wallet, as well as our war chests.

Hence our time frame for Syfe is for at least 10 years. Maybe more. And we probably wont be touching it unless absolutely necessary.

So for Syfe, we set aside S$1,000 each for a monthly DCA, hence we are allocating a total of S$2,000 monthly to Syfe.

The S$2,000 will be split according to the following ratio:

Portfolio	10Y Return	Monthly DCA
Global Equity Portfolio	9.4%	S$500
REIT+	N/A	S$500
Equity100	13.4%	S$1,000
Total:	10% (est)	S$2,000

Currently, we will be allocating S$1,000 (50%) allocation to the Equity100 portfolio, and S$500 (25%) each to the Global Equity Portfolio as well as the REIT+ portfolio.

This is in line with what we mentioned previously, where we are looking to increase our overall exposure to US stocks as we are currently slightly overweight in Singapore stocks now. Hence taking up the Equity100 portfolio on Syfe will tilt our allocation to US stocks slightly.

Also Read: What We’ve Learnt This COVID19 – Using US Stocks To Boost Overall Portfolio Gain

Depending on the individual portfolio’s annual return, as well as our own portfolio’s composition where we actively invest in individual stocks, we may shift our Syfe monthly allocation among the 3 portfolios.

As we are actively looking around for US stocks now, and if we end up with an overweight position in US stocks, we may then shift our Syfe allocation to get more Singapore REITs.

With the monthly S$2,000 contribution and a 10% total estimated return, hopefully we will be able to see a decent return 10 years later, estimated at an ending portfolio of S$450,296 with a total contribution of S$240,000.

Will we be able to hit that returns? Only time will tell! And 10% PA is a very aggressive and optimistic target! And the past 10 years we are in a bull market, which has probably ended.

Looking to invest via Syfe? You can use our referral code: SRP6X8B8Y when you create an account.

We would both get $10 to $100 depending on your first deposit amount, and you’d receive your bonus within 5 business days.

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What Have We Done This Month Towards Our Financial Goals – June 2020

On July 1, 2020 By Mr BudgetIn Financial Goals, Syfe1 Comment

So June has came and gone now. What this means is that, first half of 2020 is now over, and we are moving into the second half of 2020. Time really flies!

For the whole of June, both Mrs Budget and myself had been mostly staying at home due to the circuit breaker. However, we have also started going back to the office about once to twice a week for office matters and meetings.

While everyone else is doing a monthly portfolio update, we thought it is more meaningful to document what we have done this month towards our financial goals.

Portfolio Transactions

Mr Budget
Position Added: MNAC, Prime US Reit, Syfe
Take Profit: N/A

Mrs Budget
Position Added: MNAC, Prime US Reit, Syfe
Take Profit: N/A

For June, in our previous update, we mentioned that we averaged down on Mapletree North Asia Trust, and initiated a position on Prime US Reit, both of which were still trading at below their NAV.

We have also continued to contribute to our roboadvisor Syfe this month.

In June, we have been tracking the price movements over the last few weeks, and what we’ve noticed is that the market is moving sideways now, and the bulls seems to be losing momentum.

This is expected since May we saw a strong rebound for the various stock prices. With the slow down in price momentum, we probably wont be buying any counters in the Singapore market unless something exciting comes. We may initiate some positions in the US market for the long run and also to increase our US equity allocation.

Home Equity Loan

Regular followers of Mr and Mrs Budget may have noticed that we have briefly included a new portion of home equity loan towards our monthly war chest update last month.

Since April when the market crashed, and along that the drop in interest rates, Mrs Budget has been trying to get a home equity loan so that we can leverage on that as a cheap source of fund to invest in the market.

We are happy to share that the loan has been approved, although the quantum is lesser than what we had hope for. The rate that we were offered by OCBC was 1.6% for 2 years, and Mrs Budget will be taking that up.

The rate is really quite affordable and even if Mrs Budget were to use that whole loan quantum and put it in CPF, the returns will more than double the loan interest.

So if anyone is able to do this, we’d recommend taking up an home equity loan. A few people we know are doing this to leverage on the low interest rate environment now.

The home equity loan process however, took way longer than we thought – since we applied in April, we only received the approval in end June, and are told that the funds will only be disbursed in another 1 – 2 months.

We may probably be sharing an article on the whole process and our further thoughts on that.

Net Worth Updates

Our net worth continue to grow this month, due to contribution from our salary as well as the continued rebound of stock prices.

Our combined net worth is now at S$718,000, including CPF but excluding our property and mortgage. This is up from S$690,000 last month, a change of +S$28,000.

The growth rate these past few months is quite high as we have lowered our spending significantly, and Mr Budget’s Malaysia mortgages are halted.

However, we are mindful that these number may change as we have a significant exposure to the equity market, which currently stands at a total equity exposure of S$280,000.

War Chest Updates And Watchlist

With the various transactions, here’s an update on our war chest:

Mr Budget War Chest	S$90,000
Mrs Budget War Chest	S$40,000
Mrs Budget Home Loan War Chest (pending)	S$70,000

As our war chest has been increasing, and our cash position % is getting slightly larger than what we would ideally like, hopefully we are able to deploy our war chest soon. Counters on our watch list:

Ascendas REIT
Keppel DC REIT
IREIT Global
SGX
DBS
Mastercard
Adobe
Amazon
Square
Tesla (NEW)

We’ve added Tesla into our wishlist as a speculative counter, and may initiate a small speculative position if any opportunity arise.

Stay safe everyone, and happy hunting! We’d be happy to also hear your recent purchases too so that we can keep an eye on them too.

Monthly Tracking

Looking to invest via Syfe? You can use our referral code: SRP6X8B8Y when you create an account.

We would both get $10 to $100 depending on your first deposit amount, and you’d receive your bonus within 5 business days.

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New Portfolio Milestone And The Confusing State Of The Current Stock Market

On June 10, 2020 By Mr BudgetIn Financial Goals, Random ThoughtsLeave a comment

For the longest time, when Mr Budget look at portfolio shared by other individuals, whenever we saw that the figure is more than S100,000, there will be slight envy.

A 6 figure portfolio seemed to be an invisible target to hit – probably because of all the media sharing articles on how one should reach a S$100,000 savings by 30. And for the longest time, our soft goal is to reach S$100,000 in Singapore equities.

Finally, Mr Budget’s Singapore’s portfolio touched S$100,000 for the first time yesterday! And Mrs Budget’s total equities (Singapore and US) portfolio hit S$100,000 too!

While Mr Budget’s equity investment has been more than six figures for a while now as we’ve shared on our portfolio page, our equities investments consist of stocks from Singapore, US, HK and Malaysia.

And when we track these portfolio, we look at these portfolios respectively because all market behave differently, and each portfolio serves a different purpose. For example, for our Singapore portfolio, they form the backbone of our dividend investment for future passive income, while our US portfolio serves as the growth component of our overall portfolio.

Hence reaching S$100,000 of value for our Singapore portfolio was a mini milestone for us and we wanted to just put this down here for future reference. 🙂

Here’s the portfolio value now:

As of 10/6/2020	Mr Budget	Mrs Budget
Singapore Portfolio	$106,392.91	$80,985.18
US Portfolio	$64,537.42	$21,550.35

Excluding Syfe and SSB which is our emergency fund

And we just realized that we have a combined equities holding of over S$270,000. We may be reaching our short term 2021 portfolio target goal of S$300,000 earlier than we projected!

Looking at the figures and penning this down, we realized that this is quite a significant amount, although it did not occur to us that our exposure to the market is quite large. Thinking about it scares us a little.

We will continue to invest and hopefully this rewards us in the future!

Stock Market Disjointed With Actual Fundamentals And State Of Economy

The majority of the growth of the portfolio is from the rebound of the market, and it seems like prices of equities across the board are going back to pre-covid prices.

As each day passes, and stocks go back to their all time high, the likelihood of us seeing a W shape economy (now that we are passed the V shape) is getting higher and higher.

We still think the stock market is very disjointed with the actual economy – how can price levels be at pre-covid prices as if covid never happened?

And then there are news like this:

Hertz skyrockets 825% since filing for bankruptcy as Robinhood traders pile in

Nikola May Not Be Next Tesla, But Its Valuation Is More Extreme

The Nikola article is just ridiculous – Nikola is forecasting zero revenue for 2020 and its first $1 billion year in 2023. And yet Ford Motor Co., which is expected to report about $115 billion of revenue for this year, has trailed Nikola by market cap at several points in intraday trading.

A zero revenue company has a higher market cap than a $115 billion dollar revenue company – the world has officially gone crazy, and for us, we probably will not be able to sleep well if we were to park some money in companies like Nikola.

In any case, the companies on our wishlist continue to hit their all time high, and its becoming quite expensive for us to buy anything.

However, over the past one week, we averaged down on Mapletree North Asia Trust, and initiated a position on Prime US Reit, both of which were still trading at below their NAV. That should conclude our purchase for the month!

Should the market plunge, we still have some cash to fall back to, to pick up more counters or average down on our current shareholdings.

With the various transactions, here’s an update on our war chest:

Mr Budget War Chest	S$80,000
Mrs Budget War Chest	S$30,000
Mr Budget Home Loan War Chest (pending)	S$50,000
Mrs Budget Home Loan War Chest (pending)	S$120,000

Counters on our watch list:

Ascendas REIT
Keppel DC REIT
IREIT Global
SGX
DBS
Mastercard
Adobe
Amazon
Square
Facebook

Stay safe everyone, and happy hunting!

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May 2020 Monthly Expenses Update

On June 5, 2020 By Mr BudgetIn Living ExpensesLeave a comment

At the end of every month, Mrs Budget and I will reconcile our monthly expenses and see what are we spending on, and where we can optimise or cut down our expenses.

We subscribe to the believe that every penny saved is a penny earned – sometimes its easier to save S$100, than to earn S$100, both of which results in the same net worth increase.

In May, here’s what Mr Budget spent on.

Expenses	May
Meals	$286.09
Entertainment	$65.49
Groceries / Home	$202.15
Shopping / Cloths	$7.50
Phone Bill	$40.00
Income Tax	$206.22
Hair Cut	$26.00
Singapore Mortgage	$1,113.84
Others	$644.33

Mr Budget’s total expenditure for May is at $2,591.62, a further reduction as compared to last month’s expenditure of $2,876.07.

Total essential expenses add up to only S$601.23 (meals, entertainment, groceries, phone bill).

If you strip it down further, bulk of the payment goes into mortgage payments and income tax. There was also a $644.33 expenses under the “Others” category made for a miles redemption program as well as a wedding angpao for a friend.

For Mrs Budget, here’s what she spent on.

Expenses	May
Meals	$126.78
Family	$600.00
Groceries / Home	$202.15
Phone Bill	$25.00
Endowment	$303.97
Shopping	$63.34
Gifts (Wedding Festives)	$55.15

Similarly, Mrs Budget also only spent $1,376.39 this month. Total essential expenses add up to only S$353.94 (meals, groceries, phone bill), while the others are variable expenses. Mrs Budget continued her monthly family contribution of S$600 as well as her monthly contribution to her endowment plan.

This monthly numbers also serves as a good indication of our cash flow when we retire, so now we have a good idea of how much we need to retire.

We don’t foresee any big expenditure coming in the next few months, and we will continue to tighten our belts and watch our cash outflow so that we can tide through this uncertain period.

In terms of our expenses, it is hard to further optimize our monthly expenses as we think they are reasonably low and within our expectations.

Our meals and groceries adds up to S$817 per month. If we divide that to 2 meals a day for 30 days, our cost per meal is at S$13.62.

We can definitely aim towards reducing that to S$10 per meal if we want to, but we would have to give up our indulgence like fishes and our love for vitagen, and that would slightly diminish our happiness.

May Meal and Groceries Total Cost	S$817.08
Cost per meal (60 meals / 2 meals a day)	S$13.62

How has May been like for you?

October 2019 Monthly Expenses Update
November 2019 Monthly Expenses Update
December 2019 Monthly Expenses Update
January 2020 Monthly Expenses Update
February 2020 Monthly Expenses Update
March 2020 Monthly Expenses Update
April 2020 Monthly Expenses Update

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Syfe Portfolio Update – May 2020

On June 2, 2020 By Mr BudgetIn Syfe4 Comments

Frequent followers of Mr and Mrs Budget will know that Mr Budget had started a regular savings plan with Syfe, a relatively new roboadvisor in Singapore.

The main reason why Mr Budget decided to go for Roboadvisor is because he is looking for a more affordable way to invest in multiple baskets of ETFs to get more diversification.

Another reason is that, Mr Budget views roboadvisors as the professionally managed portion of his portfolio since he does not have any financial advisor.

As Roboadvisor firms have professionals looking at the funds daily, I’d think the results won’t be that bad as compared to our own DIY portfolios.

So here’s Mr and Mrs Budget’s monthly Syfe portfolio summary.

May 2020

Global Equity Portfolio
Total invested: S$5,572.12
Total Contribution this month: S$0
Current Value: S$5,497.84
Portfolio Return: -1.33%
Downside Risk: 25%

REIT Portfolio
Total invested: S$6,670.01
Total Contribution this month: S$2000
Current Value: S$6,903.46
Portfolio Return: 3.5%

Due to the rebound in market share prices, our Syfe portfolio also staged a rebound in return. Coupled with referral fee bonuses, our global equity portfolio is slowly breaking even, and our REIT portfolio have returned to the positive +3.5% return so far.

We are not too concerned about the returns as we will continue to put in regular contribution to Syfe monthly, and hopefully 5 to 10 years later we will be able to see the returns.

For our REIT portfolio, we may be opting for the full REIT allocation instead of the current REIT + bond allocation as REIT prices have all rebounded back to decent levels the past 1 week.

Will Syfe give us a good return, better than what CPF SA is giving us? Only time will tell. 🙂

You might be interested in previous months update too:

Global Equity:
January 2020: S$2009.00 (-0.25%)
February 2020: S$4248.60 (-6%)
March 2020: S$4918.86 (-11.09%)
April 2020: N/A
May 2020: S$5,497.84 (-1.33%)

REIT+
February 2020: S$3075.90 (-2.35%)
March 2020: S$4333.10 (-6.82%)
April 2020: N/A
May 2020: S$6,903.46 (3.5%)

Based on our records (missing April as we did not contribute to Syfe), the negative performances are now slowly moving into a positive return to our portfolio, so that’s definitely great news.

Looking to invest via Syfe? You can use our referral code: SRP6X8B8Y when you create an account.

We would both get $10 to $100 depending on your first deposit amount, and you’d receive your bonus within 5 business days.

What Have We Done This Month Towards Our Financial Goals – May 2020

On June 1, 2020June 1, 2020 By Mr BudgetIn Financial GoalsLeave a comment

So May has came and gone now. We are almost at the end at the circuit breaker period which means most of the Singapore economy will start to open up soon.

For the whole of May, both Mrs Budget and myself had been mostly staying at home due to the circuit breaker. While everyone else is doing a monthly portfolio update, we thought it is more meaningful to document what we have done this month towards our financial goals.

Mr Budget
Position Added: SEA, Booking, Lendlease, Syfe
Take Profit: N/A

Mrs Budget
Position Added: Syfe
Take Profit: N/A

This month, Mr Budget bought into 3 counters, and these counters should probably be familiar names here at Mr and Mrs Budget. The first counter is SEA – the counter that Mr Budget sold off in March and now bought in again at a higher price.

What a stupid move missing out on so much. Although Mr Budget took profit (18%) in March and bought back in earlier 2 weeks ago at a much higher price, the counter is now at a 33% profit in just 2 weeks. The profit would have been +120% if he did not sell his initial position.

SEA is really quite an amazing counter as it is investing in 3 main growth areas – gaming, e-commerce, and fintech.

Rather than waiting for the counter to drop and buy in again, the strategy now is to accumulate whenever there is a price weakness, than risk losing out on the upside. SEA is now part of Mr Budget’s coffee can portfolio too.

The second counter that Mr Budget bought in is Booking – a counter that Mr Budget has mentioned a few times here.

Bookings is the dominant player in the OTA space, and has various strategic holdings such as in Grab, Didi, and Meituan. In the short to medium term, travel won’t go away, and Bookings is probably the most well capitalized company to ride on that rebound.

Our entry price is not the lowest as we wanted to time the market even more, but we realised that the current price may never come back. Hence we entered a small position and will accumulate more if there are any future price weakness.

The third counter Mr Budget bought in was Lendlease REIT – and this is just to average down on our initial purchase.

The good news is that with the Circuit breaker ending soon, all retail Reits are staging a rebound in price. The price level in May is probably the last chance for us to average down our holdings.

Mrs Budget on the other hand, did not make any purchase as she is looking to build up her cash position. However, both Mr and Mrs Budget did continue our monthly contribution to our roboadvisor Syfe.

The market had also rebounded a fair bit and our positions entered during the circuit breaker gave us a decent rebound onto our portfolio value:

AIMS AMP	+20%
Capitamall Trust	+15%
Ascendas India Trust	+24%
Keppel Pacific Oak US REIT	+43%
Lendlease REIT	+19%
Alphabet	+25%
SEA	+33%

We are slowly thinking and accepting that this is a V shape recovery, although we are still quite reluctant to accept that.

Stock market seems very disjointed with what is happening with the economy. We would have deployed more of our war chest if we truly believe that this is a V shape recovery.

But on hindsight, the government has really helped stabilize the economy by a fair bit – with the GDP forecasted to fall up to -7% this year, the 4 budget announced by the finance minister totalling up to 20% of last year’s GDP can more than cushion the impact of the GDP loss this year.

In any case, we are quite happy with our purchases past few weeks, and if there are any price weaknesses in the counters that we are eyeing, we are happy to pick up more purchases along the way.

Our net worth continue to grow this month, due to contribution from our salary as well as the rebound of stock prices.

Our combined net worth is now at S$690,000, including CPF but excluding our property and mortgage. This is up from S$650,000 last month.

With the various transactions, here’s an update on our war chest:

Mr Budget War Chest	S$95,000
Mrs Budget War Chest	S$40,000
Mr Budget Home Loan War Chest (pending)	S$50,000
Mrs Budget Home Loan War Chest (pending)	S$150,000

Ascendas REIT
Keppel DC REIT
IREIT Global
SGX
DBS
Mastercard
~~SEA (bought)~~
~~Booking (bought)~~
Adobe
Amazon
Square
Facebook

Stay safe everyone, and happy hunting! We’d be happy to also hear your recent purchases too so that we can keep an eye on them too.

Monthly Tracking

Looking to invest via Syfe? You can use our referral code: SRP6X8B8Y when you create an account.

We would both get $10 to $100 depending on your first deposit amount, and you’d receive your bonus within 5 business days.

Like our Facebook Page for more articles like this: Mr Mrs Budget

What We’ve Learnt This COVID19 – Using US Stocks To Boost Overall Portfolio Gain

On May 20, 2020 By Mr BudgetIn Investment, Numbers Crunching, Random ThoughtsLeave a comment

Recently I have been thinking a fair bit about our portfolio structure.

There are two types of portfolio: growth portfolio, and dividend portfolio.

As the name suggest, growth portfolio consists of high growth stocks but the downside is that, these stocks don’t pay out dividends. Dividend portfolio on the other hand, are made up of dividend paying stocks like REITs, which is great especially for Singapore investors looking for REITs as a source of passive income.

Over the past 1 – 2 years since we really started to chart our financial goals, we have been actively buying Singapore stocks which are paying out decent dividends. This is because we are aiming towards an eventual S$5000 monthly passive income in the future so that we can retire reasonably well.

When we look at our portfolio composition late last year to even today, our Singapore stock holdings almost double our US stock holdings.

While that is good news and all, when we look deeper into the returns of the Singapore stocks versus the US stocks, our Singapore stocks, inclusive of the dividends, are not giving even the near levels of returns we are seeing from our US stocks. Most of our returns made from the market since the onset of our investment, is actually from our US stocks holdings.

So we hypothesized that we should shift our mindset from holding Singapore dividend stocks to holding US growth stock instead. This will give us better returns in the long run.

To check on this, we took a look at the public portfolio shared by users from Stocks Cafe, and we found very interesting findings.

Here’s a look at the top performing portfolios (3 years timeframe) shared on Stocks Cafe, sorted by their % return.

To see what are the similarities of these top performing counters, we took a look at their individual portfolios to see how much of these investors invested in the US market and what are the overweight stocks that they are holding on.

When we dig deeper and look at their individual portfolios, here’s what we noticed.

Of the 23 counters which made >30% returns in the past 3 years timeframe, 61% of them invested in US stocks.
The top 2 performing investor jpf and zhengkang, and Cosmicpubes (lol), had over 85% of their stocks in US holdings.
For the top 13 best performing investors, they either made money through US stocks, or if they had invested in AEM, an electronics manufacturer who counts companies like Intel as their largest client.

The common denominator seems to be that, one should have a combination of US stocks to boost the returns of his or her overall portfolio. JPF, the investor with the best performing portfolio, has a 52.47% YTD returns and a 570.06% all time returns, and 85% of his portfolio is made up of US stocks.

So to be in the top 10 on the list, you need to either invest in US stock market, or invest in AEM.

This is definitely easy for us to point out in hindsight, because over the past decade, the theme had been technology, internet, and computer chips. We think this theme is still going to be around for another 5 – 10 years.

Investing in US market also makes a lot of sense because big global companies have bigger addressable market and can continue to climb in value – thus one may end up holding multi-baggers.

I think that gave us some affirmation to the returns on our portfolio: if we have more US stocks in our portfolio, there is a high chance that our portfolio will outperform a portfolio without US stocks.

Hence moving forward, we will be looking at shifting our equity allocation to more US stocks so that our long term returns will be better than what we have now.

Our current allocation:

Portfolio	Singapore Holding	US Holding
Mr Budget	$84,806.08 (60%)	$57,855.33 (40%)
Mrs Budget	$64,139.80 (76%)	$20,025.90 (24%)

Ideally we should swap the percentage around to probably 60 – 70% US stocks and 30 – 40% Singapore dividend stocks.

For friends and family who have been asking us what to invest in, normally I would ask them to allocate some towards the US market too instead of just investing in the SG market.

This is because it is a bit unrealistic for us to think that we can beat the returns of the STI index or Singapore fund managers out there by just spending minimal amount of time choosing to invest in a few Singapore counters. We are better off just investing in robo / the STI index.

However, if we were to invest in the US market or have a US-SG hybrid portfolio, there is a very high chance (61%) to beat the Singapore index.

Happy investing!

Also Read: What We’ve Learnt This COVID19 – Price Levels, Selling And Coffee Can Portfolio

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What We’ve Learnt This COVID19 – Price Levels, Selling And Coffee Can Portfolio

On May 18, 2020 By Mr BudgetIn Financial Goals, Random Thoughts1 Comment

Hello everyone!

It’s been a while again since we last updated here! As usual, we want to write as much as we can, but haven’t really come out with much topics to update here.

So if you have any topics suggestions, or any questions – please drop us a comment below – we love reading them! 🙂

Today however, we thought we want to just quickly pen down some thoughts and nuggets of wisdom we have gathered from others here, both as a sharing and as a reminder to ourselves.

Obsession Towards Price Level

One of the key things that we’ve internalized recently is that, prices are just snapshots of offers from the market and that we should not be too obsessed by it. There was a recent saying we heard: “if you think the current price is too high, this is and will be the new low”.

A lot of times, there are a lot of counters which we are eyeing towards, and we often want to wait for the best time or a better price to buy. Eventually, what end up happening is that, we will miss the boat and the prices just keeps going up and up. And we will just not buy it.

This is true for companies with strong momentum and those that are 100 year old companies, such as amazon. Amazon for example, has been going up non stop – and at anytime you buy over the past 5 to 10 years, literally any day, you would still have made money today.

The lesson here is that, don’t be too obsessed about entry price – if it is a valuable company, just buy in and keep for the long term.

When To Sell

Which leads to my second learnings on when to sell.

Recently there was a few webinar which a few bloggers shared that during the COVID-19 downturn, they actually did not sell or adjust any of their portfolio. Of course, some of their losses might be recovered now. The more important thing though is that they did not trim any of their winners.

On when to sell – you should only sell when there are better opportunities to deploy your money. And it is actually quite hard to find better opportunities that the ones that you have invested in and are winning counters.

Case in point – during the last correction, Mr Budget sold off his winners Amazon, SEA, AXXN to lock in the profit and to buy more assuming the market crash more. However, the prices of these counters have since went back up at least 20-30%, and now his previous entry price is too far behind and quite unlikely that he will be able to get those price levels.

The lesson here is probably that you should never sell your winners and just ride with them. If there are any corrections, these corrections should actually give you opportunities to buy more of the winning counters.

Coffee Can Portfolio

In a recent webinar, the Coffee Can portfolio was introduced by Ser Jing from The Good Investor and I thought it really covers the 2 pointers above.

Coffee Can Portfolio is a concept based on the research done by Rob Kirby. In simple words, one selects a list of high quality growth stocks and invests in them, and then literally forgets about it.

The benefit of this is that, the costs are low in the long run because you don’t trade regularly (and save on fees), and also that you will not be obsessed with checking the prices everyday, and you wont time the market. You also wouldnt need to battle with your internal struggle of whether to sell to take profit.

Warren Buffet also had a similar saying:

“I could improve your ultimate financial welfare by giving you a ticket with only twenty slots in it so that you had twenty punches – representing all the investments that you got to make in a lifetime. And once you’d punched through the card, you couldn’t make any more investments at all. Under those rules, you’d really think carefully about what you did, and you’d be forced to load up on what you’d really thought about. So you’d do so much better.”

And I think this really inspired me to take a look at our current holdings and to start identifying some stocks as our coffee can portfolio.

Of course, it is definitely easy to start a coffee can portfolio, but to actually have the conviction to hold it for long term and not touch it requires a lot of resolve, as well as a lot of financial freedom to be able to leave the portfolio there on the side.

For Mr Budget, I am currently holding about 21 counters. For my own coffee can portfolio, it would mostly be my US holdings: NVIDIA and Alphabet and only CMT for my SG holdings now.

Moving forward, I will also be increasing my US equity exposure so that there are more global high growth counters in my coffee can portfolio.

Will do more updates on this, and add a new “Coffee Can Portfolio” update on our portfolio section.

What have you learnt this COVID19?

Also Read: Our Thoughts On The Very Irrational Market Behaviour

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April 2020 Monthly Expenses Update

On May 5, 2020 By Mr BudgetIn Living Expenses3 Comments

At the end of every month, Mrs Budget and I will reconcile our monthly expenses and see what are we spending on, and where we can optimise or cut down our expenses.

We subscribe to the believe that every penny saved is a penny earned – sometimes its easier to save S$100, than to earn S$100, both of which results in the same net worth increase.

In April, here’s what Mr Budget spent on.

Expenses	April
Meals	$393.69
Transportation (mrt)	$10.00
Groceries / Home	$194.99
Phone Bill	$56.10
Mum	$111.33
Income Tax	$103.05
Malaysia Mortgage 1	$800.00
Singapore Mortgage	$1,206.91

Mr Budget’s total expenditure for April is at $2,876.07, a further reduction as compared to last month’s expenditure of $3,563.78.

Total essential expenses add up to only S$654.78 (meals, mrt, groceries, phone bill).

If you strip it down further, bulk of the payment goes into mortgage payments. There were no expenses recorded under “travel”, “entertainment”, “Haircut”, “shopping” or “Others” as Mrs Budget and I had been holed up at home. This should paint a good picture of our expenses when we retire.

For Mrs Budget, here’s what she spent on.

Expenses	April
Meals	$10.90
Family	$600.00
Groceries / Home	$194.99
Phone Bill	$25.00
Endowment	$303.97
Shopping	$55.84
Dog	$282.63

Similarly, Mrs Budget also only spent $1,473.33 this month. Total essential expenses add up to only S$230.89 (meals, groceries, phone bill), while the others are variable expenses. Mrs Budget bought an insurance for her dog hence that’s recorded as a one off expenses.

This monthly numbers also serves as a good indication of our cash flow when we retire, so now we have a good idea of how much we need to retire.

Before covid and post covid, our expenses has dropped by at least 50% – 60%, showing that we really spend a lot indulging in variable expenses such as travelling, entertainment and shopping – definitely something to think about.

We don’t foresee any big expenditure coming in the next few months, and we will continue to tighten our belts and watch our cash outflow so that we can tide through this uncertain period.

How has March been like for you?

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