STE's Stocks Investing Journey

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.

  I have written about the “ The Power of Dividend “ ( here ) and shared my view on the importance of dividend throughout my investment journey.  I try to visualize it through the chart as below which I published every quarter in my portfolio and dividend update. image credit to thepeopleofasia.com As I am not really good in doing analysis on financial detail for companies or trying to identify the next FANG s type of exponential growth companies, my investment philosophy is quite simple that buying those company with strong fundamental (a clean balance-sheet with fewer debts ) and have dividend pay-out regularly. Of course , buying at right timing especially during a crisis will give you a boost in your ROI but one need to take note also on the importance of diversification as well. ( More reading on My Investment Strategy –Part 1 ! Time & Timing – here )

  Personal Cash Flow Management I have seen many blogs have written about monitoring the expenses and some blogger's recommendation of apps which could monitor our expenses in detail. Frankly, I didn’t monitor my expenses in such manner and for me “ agak-agak ”  know how much I spent monthly on those fix items and some major items yearly such as holidays & staycations, insurance , home appliance ( like recently changing my TV and refrigerator after using it for many years ), no tax since no active income etc…

image credit to asiaone.com You may have came across this article in today’s The Business Times,,, an interesting article in searching of “ The Freedom formula “ for early retirement. The big word “ R ”  or retirement is very subjective and one may not want to retire if he/she really enjoying the works and some may want to retire earlier to pursue their dreams and passion. Here is another article on “ 10 good reasons to retire early “ ( here ), some may choose to retire early because of “health issues, work stress, spending more times with kids etc … “ once they achieved a level of enough “passive income “.

Saving: A Virtue or a Vice image credit to mentalfloss.com The habit of saving always being referred to as a form of “virtue “ in our life and also being encouraged by our parents or financial planner almost universally. Classical economists regarded saving as a virtue and the act of saving virtuous, because according to them, when an individual saves more by spending less on consumption goods, he accumulates a surplus. This surplus can be utilized in the interest of the economy as a whole in term of the investment.

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.