Monday 23 November 2020

3rd Investment Milestone Reached: Nov 2020


The news reported that Biden's transition will formally begin as markets continue their rally. Yellen as Treasury Secretary is reportedly welcome by Wall Street as being market friendly. As a result, my investment portfolio has hit a new high and I have hit my 3rd investment milestone.

2010 approx: 1st investment milestone reached

Aug 2018    : 2nd investment milestone reached

Nov 2020    : 3rd investment milestone reached

2022 ???     : 4th investment milestone / Financial Independence?


I took a long time to hit my 2nd investment milestone as I was servicing a housing loan.

I am still not ready to declare 'Financial Independence' yet because my dividends collected this year have dropped on a year-on-year basis. Assuming that 2021 is the recovery year where my dividends recover to 2019 levels, I will have to wait for 2022 to grow my dividends more in order to become financially independent.

While there may be different understandings of what Financial Independence means, I prefer the definition in Investment Moats, one of the few local finance bloggers worth reading. He has many good articles about Financial Independence:


However, as one of his articles points out, while passive income > expenses/standard of living, one should always be aware that passive income can drop anytime (just like this year). You can adapt by accepting a lesser standard of living, or you can continue building up your passive income in order to have a 'margin of safety' so that your standard of living is protected.



In case you're wondering, 3M is my shortform for my 3rd investment milestone, just decided to do something like the 3M logo for fun.


 

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3 comments:

  1. Kyith24 November 2020 at 18:21

    Hey Limster! congrats on reaching this! I think it does not have to be dividends. One thing you could do to gain confidence is to see the growth rate of your money for the past 10 years and if the growth rate is pretty respectible, and we think the things you put your money in is well positioned in the future, then a conservative benchmark that you can try is about 3.5% of your capital and then 3% of your capital. I am not sure about your age, but if the so call FI horizon is longer, a 3-3.5% range is pretty close to what we can work with. you can hit me up if you need more definition on what i am talking about.

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    Replies
    1. Hello World7 December 2020 at 21:41

      Thanks Kyith. My target is still the actual dividends/interest collected > standard of living which should be achieved in 2022. Thereafter I'll continue working and building up an additional passive income stream to fund charitable work that I plan to do after I retire.

      Delete
    2. Kyith8 December 2020 at 01:00

      I think if you are able to achieve that with your mainly ETF based portfolio, it might have already buffer for much.

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