STE's Stocks Investing Journey

Was having a casual conversation over the dinner with friends last week and some knew that I am not working since 2015, asking if my investment income will be able to cover my expenses. I told them that I am still able to save $60-80 K a year after deducting all my yearly expenses including holidays and staycations. “Then you are saving too much for your retirement !”, one of them said that .. I was stunned like: huh ?? saving too much ?? …Uhhh!

My last post on “ 3 rd Qtr 2018:Dividend and Portfolio Update ”   draw much attention as to how we would be able to accumulate $1.5 mil of dividend without support from family and purely by ourselves. Some readers sent me an e-mail asking how we did that and some with complement and kind words, which I really appreciate.   My friend LP ( BULLy The BEAR ) suggested that I should write another follow-up post to highlight how much we have sacrificed in order to obtain such amount of dividend we have today.   Another friend of mine B (A Path to Forever Financial Freedom ) even help me to think of the title of this blog post. Hahaha… With this short supplemental notes, I hope to provide a more “balance and holistic” view on how we would be able to achieve what we have today and what was the sacrifice we made or need to be done in order not to give the wrong impression to readers that it is easy to achieve this.

Saving vs Investing : Everyone wants to be the genius investor who would beat the market and turn a small amount of cash into a fortune.  We continuously search for “ multi-bagger “ in our investment portfolio, unfortunately, it's pretty difficult to do that and hard to achieve “ Alpha “ by most of retail investors.

孟子 曰： 天时不如地利，地利不如人和 。 According to Mencius studies, the “ 人和 “ (or People’s Harmonization ) is the most important part of any war game or the battle, same apply for investment, I think this is the most difficult and challenging  part, yet the most vital to ensure the success of our investing in stocks. The Art of War ( 孙子兵法 ) , Sun Tzu, a Chinese military philosopher and the strategist in the 6th century BC, he mentioned : 知己知彼 , 百战百胜