“I have an income nearly sufficient for my wants (no one’s income is ever quite sufficient, you know).”-Anthony Hope
Yes, I am saving as usual to achieve my financial independence but the month of January is always depressing because I don’t get any dividend from any of Malaysian or Singaporean REITs.
I had a good month in December 2020 in terms of passive income from my REITs.
INCOME
I only received about MYR4000 from my Singapore bonds ETFs and bluechip stocks. There was no dividend from any REITS I hold for the month of January 2021.
There are currently about 50-100 visitors every day to this blog and I made another USD 9 this month from Adsense.
TransferWise paid me another MYR 150 this month because another 3 readers used TransferWise to convert at least MYR 1000 each.
My USD bonds ETFs paid me about MYR 200 this month.
EXPENDITURE
I didn’t spend a single cent on entertainment this month. However, I started to write more on my Facebook, documenting down interesting experiences I’d gone through during my childhood and early training.
If I come home early after work, I would try to prepare dinners for the kids so that I can save more on foods and somehow, I like to cook whenever I am free. My wife would cook whenever she is free as well.
I spent more this month paying the maintenance fees for a few of my properties.
My January 2021 saving rate is 62.4% and out of this saving, I invest 60% of them into my USD portfolio, 25% into my SGD portfolio, and 15% to EPF.
CONCLUSION
I hope I am on my way to financial independence before October 2025, my USD-denominated portfolio returned an impressive 36% in 2020. Unfortunately, my SGD-denominated portfolio still in red of about 11% up to date.
I notice that I save about 60-70% of my income every month. I will not update my finances monthly starting next month unless there are new developments.
A new reader here from Indonesia. Curious to know why you’re not invested in Chinese Tech ETF or QQQ (Nasdaq ETF)?
Dear IndoVestor,
I certainly share your sentiment, QQQ and Chinese Tech ETF have been performing very well for the last few years but past performance doesn’t reflect future performance. If you can recall, tech bubble which happened 2 decades ago made a lot of people lost almost all their savings. I am still more comfortable investing in S+P 500 index fund which has a good track record.