Singaporean Talks Money

Thursday, 9 September 2021

Running out of money in your later years

Came across this article from The Straits Times recently where it wrote that from an AIA survey, it was gathered that more than half (54%) of Singaporeans will run out of money in the last 14 years of their lives. Sounds scary, to run out of money and what more for 14 years and at a time when you are old and not as healthy or able-bodied as before.

An example given was this means that on average, if someone has the potential to live to 84, his savings for retirement will run out by age 70, leaving him with no money for the next 14 years. Children are some people's retirement plan although you should not think that way because your kids might not know that they are your retirement plan and nothing is guaranteed considering the increasing costs of living nowadays.

With many of the younger generations not having children or having just 1 or 2, retirement is a huge focus of the government as the load on the government will increase if everyone rely on payouts for their retirement. So definitely people have been interested and hoping to plan for their retirement way before they start it.

Sandwiched generation

As we start to grow up and form our own family, we will have children and then with the expenses of having to take care of our children, we also need to provide for our parents and thus the term sandwiched generation which is the situation faced once one chooses to have children and at the same time have to take care of their parents.

DINK

Of course, there are couples who choose not to have children hence the term DINK which stands for Dual Income, No Kids. This allows for the couple to have more disposable income as they have dual income and no kids which means not as much added expenses that come with children.

Having dual income means they are often the targets of marketing efforts for investment products and luxury items. However, if they are concious of their spending, they are able to save at a rapid rate as items are shared and having a dual income means availability of more disposable cash which creates the possibility for further exploration of investment opportunities. The money that might have been spent on children could be put into stocks, bonds, or other investment vehicles. Investing even a few thousand dollars per year can make a substantial difference in the long run.

Things to ponder on as advances are made in the medical field

Living to a ripe old age is a blessing but nowadays, I do come across people who tell me that they don't want to live too long, including my parents. Of course, living to an old age and being healthy is a different story, what you don't want is to be sick or being immobile which can lead to a lot of pressure for caregivers and family members.

As we have lesser children which means that the elderly in the future will not have offspring to care and take care of them, this might mean a higher burden on young population as the government might need funds to take care of the ageing population.

The future might be different from what we are experiencing now, thinking about retirement early can provide some form of plan or change in our behaviour. It is good to be aware of your own finances and to know where you are at currently.

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References:
https://www.straitstimes.com/business/invest/plan-early-to-have-enough-money-for-life
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dinks.asp

Sunday, 5 September 2021

Sharing my Portfolio Tracker | Total Stock and Crypto Value

I have actually been using InvestingNote to track my portfolio but decided to also create a google sheet for it since my portfolio size is not that huge yet which means it will be easier to port over the data and also to input the necessary formulas. It is a really simple tracker as I am no expert in excel and it really just contains the most basic details. I like to go through it and also the process of how I created it (also for memories sake as I might slowly update it as I go along). If you do have any suggestions for me to improve it, do let me know, so let's get down to it.

Categorisation

Currently, I hold Singapore, Hong Kong, US stocks and also cryptocurrencies for my investment portfolio and that will be how I categorise them. And I will also include the currency the investments are in before converting them to Singapore dollar using the exchange rate extracted from Google Finance.

Explanation of table

So you can see at the first top part are my Singapore holdings. I currently have 9 holdings and most are in small amounts, I am not adding more positions and just holding on for dividends. I used the headings of Stocks, Ticker, No. of Shares, Cost Price and Market Price. I have hidden my cost price as I am embarassed to show it haha, I am kidding, just want to keep some privacy on that. For SG stocks, google finance is unable to extract the real-time prices hence I need to manually put in the market prices in order to get the latest updated value.

Next would be my one and only HK holding which is the Tracker Fund of Hong Kong (2800), this ETF tracks the Hang Seng Index, I do not have a large amount of it. I am able to extract out the real-time prices of it by using the formula =GOOGLEFINANCE(Ticker/2800) to get the price of it. Hence this explains the ticker column as it helps extract the prices from Google. Similarly, with my US stock holdings, I use the same formula =GOOGLEFINANCE(Ticker) to get the prices.

Conversion of currencies and sum of value

For converting the value of my US holdings from US dollars to SG dollars, I use the formula =GOOGLEFINANCE("Currency:USDSGD") which gives me the value of USD1 in SGD which I then times the value of my portfolio with it. Similarly for my HK holdings except that I divide it with the value of SGD1 in HKD with =GOOGLEFINANCE("Currency:SGDHKD"). You can switch around the currency in the formula as you wish. For cryptocurrencies, I used these few formulas to extract out the prices.

So yup, that's it for my portfolio tracker that I created with google sheets. Do let me know if you think it can be improved. Hope you guys enjoy today's episode and don't forget to subscribe and like my videos.