Walter's Journal

Where are you and where are you going?
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walter k
Posts: 2
Joined: Fri Dec 08, 2017 7:09 pm

Walter's Journal

Post by walter k »

Hello!

I am a 34 year old software engineer working in Singapore. I probably found out about ERE 10 years ago but have not been able to do a Jacob and retire in 5 years. However, after 10 years of work (where did all the time go?), I think I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

I should technically be FI in 5 years, apparently the World Cup will be held in Qatar by then. For a laugh, I will bet on England to win with some of my FU money. I will probably want to work a bit more though to give myself some margin for error, but I will feel very warm and fuzzy inside with 25 years of savings.

The risks I foresee

1. Parents
I do not know how much of an allowance I will need to give to my parents when I retire. I currently stay with my parents and give them $550 a month. This covers my share of the household expenses.

2. Girlfriend
My girlfriend is British, which complicates things. I do not know if I will settle in the UK or in Singapore. (Assuming I manage to hold on to my current salary in the UK — which is a very big if since my girlfriend stays down south — I will actually hit the 40% tax bracket, which is very dispiriting. In comparison, I was in the 7% tax bracket in Singapore. In total, I only paid $691 in income tax last year. This was a very small percentage of my annual income of about $50,000

3. House
I intend to buy the cheapest house I can afford from the government in Singapore. (Whether or not I stay in the UK, I still want to buy a house in Singapore. If I do actually move over, I can still sell the house) Since I am single, the only house I can actually buy will be a 2 room HDB flat (about 45 square metres) which costs about $100,000. I will be able to pay this off in full with the money in my CPF (a defined contribution retirement plan with money that you can also use for housing). This will pretty much wipe out all the savings I have in my CPF.

4. Investing
The first shares I bought were the STI Index ETF right when the market was crashing in 2008. A few years after that, I thought that I did not want to pay the fund managers .3% in expenses and sold 4 lots off and bought about 5 different blue chips instead. Just this year, I bought more shares again. I wanted to implement a Dogs of the Dow strategy but did not want to buy some USD denominated stocks and a mass media company. I looked at some small cap stocks and looked at those with high dividend yields (about 4%) and bought 3 different ones. These comprise about 15% of my portfolio. As you can see I have a very haphazard approach to investing, if it can even be called that. I hope to fix this in the coming years.

I hope to keep track of my progress on my road to 2022 and the Qatar World Cup. Let’s begin!

physdude
Posts: 30
Joined: Tue Sep 13, 2016 3:48 am
Location: Kuala Lumpur

Re: Walter's Journal

Post by physdude »

Nice start to your blog and best of luck for your FI! (Singapore is one of the best places to achieve FI IMHO.)

wolf
Posts: 1102
Joined: Fri Jan 06, 2017 5:09 pm
Location: Germany

Re: Walter's Journal

Post by wolf »

Welcome walter k!

finity
Posts: 51
Joined: Wed Oct 11, 2017 4:11 pm

Re: Walter's Journal

Post by finity »

walter k wrote:
Sun Dec 17, 2017 7:47 am
For a laugh, I will bet on England to win with some of my FU money. I will probably want to work a bit more though to give myself some margin for error, but I will feel very warm and fuzzy inside with 25 years of savings.
Depending on how much money you are willing to bet, you may have to work for quite a few more years :lol: Margin for error should be pretty big on this one :mrgreen:

walter k
Posts: 2
Joined: Fri Dec 08, 2017 7:09 pm

Re: Walter's Journal

Post by walter k »

After spending about 30 hours sorting out my finance spreadsheet, I have finally come up with my dashboard!

I started off by adding the standard savings and income and expenses charts. Then, I got a bit fancier and added a savings bullet chart and the expenses bullet charts in the middle. The orange bar is a year to date target so that I know whether my expenses are on track. The disadvantage of the expenses bullet charts is that they are in percentage terms. I added the dot plots on the right so that I can see the actual numbers.

Behind the scenes, I had to reorganize my expenses spreadsheet. Previously, I only copied my monthly expenses into a details worksheet. My expenses were recorded in several columns and this format does not lend itself to pivot table analysis and had to go. There was also a summary worksheet where I put my monthly figures. At the end of each year, I would add a new row to summarize my annual expenses. This is not ideal because the same column contains both monthly and annual figures and you can no longer select a contiguous range of cells for any graphing you want to do.

After reorganizing 10 years of expenses and creating some staging worksheets, I now have my dashboard below! Perhaps if I can be bothered, I will create an online version using reactJS and a nosql db as a learning exercise. It was certainly enlightening googling how plain old excel can be stretched to create some fancy looking graphs :D

Image
high res link here

singvestor
Posts: 205
Joined: Tue Jul 21, 2015 12:48 am

Re: Walter's Journal

Post by singvestor »

The numbers of us "Singaporeans" seem to be increasing on this forum! Dashboard is very neat. For you to have a CPF I guess you must be PR? Which HDB can you buy so cheaply? Interesting. Am looking forward to following your journal.

lightfruit55
Posts: 102
Joined: Mon Feb 20, 2017 10:47 pm

Re: Walter's Journal

Post by lightfruit55 »

Hello, fellow Singaporean! Very cool graphs.

Besides the world cup, what are you other plans post-retirement? What kind of retirement life/lifestyle do you envision for yourself?

Looking forward to your updates :)

wolf
Posts: 1102
Joined: Fri Jan 06, 2017 5:09 pm
Location: Germany

Re: Walter's Journal

Post by wolf »

walter k wrote:
Sun Feb 04, 2018 4:35 am
After spending about 30 hours sorting out my finance spreadsheet, I have finally come up with my dashboard!
Hi walter k! How are you? I looking to see your updated dashboard? How are things in SE Asia, especially Singapore?

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