Monthly Net-Worth Update - Nov 2019: 1.1M SGD

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Dear Readers,

Thank you for coming here.

This is the first post in this blog. We intend to share monthly update of our net-worth to keep records and to hopefully serve as inspiration to fellow Singaporeans on their journey to Financial Freedom.

In the first few posts, which we will name "Basics" series, we will also describe below topics:

• How the net-worth is calculated
• My investment journey and outcome
• The tracker tool I use

For today, it is going to be the 1st update of our net-worth as of Nov 2019.

• Net-worth as of Nov 2019: 1.1M SGD 

In the chart above, the history was also shown. We started tracking our net-worth from Jun 2018, which was ~750K SGD. Over the past 1.5 years, we have grown our net-worth by~380K SGD, or ~50%.

The increase shows that our income is higher than our expenses.

On the income side, it was mainly active income, as our passive income is relatively small. The interest from bank accounts and CPF is limited and our investment has been doing not great (More on this later). In the below chart, the blue line shows our net-worth by month, while the red bar shows the change month-on-month. There are 3 months where we had net-worth decrease. That was because our investment took a really bad hit in those months.

On the expense side, we have been frugal. We come from a very humble background. Our parents cannot help us much. We have learned to reply on ourselves and increasing net-wroth does give us a sense of security.

Have said that, our monthly expense is higher than average households. We are having trouble obtaining clarity on where the money goes exactly and trying to reduce it. It was a pain to extract Credit Card statements each month, especially so when they are in PDF and we have to convert that to excel for analysis. Seedly currently cannot sync DBS and SCB, which our main transactions unfortunately concentrate on. Please share or point us to the right direction if you have an "easy" way that would enable us to obtain clarity on monthly spending, especially on Credit Cards.

• Investment portfolio as of Nov 2019: 5.49% annualized return, incl. dividend

Our investment portfolio mainly consists of ETFs tracking World, Singapore and China. Unfortunately, we entered the market at the high point and therefore, our return has been negative until Feb 2019, despite continuous capital injection.

In the chat above, the blue bar represents absolute Gain/Loss, including both realized and unrealized. The two lines represent return rate and annualized return rate respectively. At this point in time, they are very close.

We made a lot of mistakes in the beginning of my investment journey. We will write more on this in subsequent posts.


This concludes the 1st monthly update. It would be great to have your comments as we start this blog.

Till the next time.