Be well and prosper.

Wishing everyone a Happy Lunar New Year of the Dragon 2012.

May your journey towards financial freedom be filled with wisdom, patience and success

Be well and prosper.

The original life list consists of the following:

1. Travel business class on flight of at least 10 hours for business/pleasure
2. Eat black ink squid rice in Korea
3. Visit two of the places featured in Japan Hour
4. Work for a local non-profit organisation full-time for 1 year at minimal pay
5. Become the audit committee chairman of a listed company
6. Run the half-marathon successfully and recover from it without injury
7. See my daughter living an independent,  healthy, happy and productive life
8. Obtain a class 2B licence
9. Complete a triathlon safely
10. Generate $50,000 passive income in 7 years’ time
11. Take a train ride from one end of Australia to another
12. Be a published author with sales of 20,000 copies of my personal finance book
13. Be the champion of table-topics contest for toastmasters at district level
14. Speak conversational Japanese
15. Improve my mandarin to be able to blog in Mandarin

Of course, there’s been hits and misses along the way since 2009 and my priorities and goals have evolved over time.

Revised 2012 Life List

The original 2009 list was somewhat random and didn’t have much of a structure to it. It was mostly about things I want to do before I kick the proverbial bucket.

I still want to do some of the things listed but now I have some structure:

Seeing the World

1. Visit major asian cities: Taipei (Taiwan), Shanghai/Beijing (China), Seoul (Korea), Tokyo/Osaka/Hokkaido (Japan)
2. Visit major south-east asian cities: Bangkok/Chiang Mai (Thailand), Vietienne (Laos), Phnom Penh/Siem Reap (Cambodia), Ho Chi Minh/Hanoi (Vietnam)

Health and Fitness

1. Maintain health readings for cholestrol, blood pressure etc.
2. Do regular low-impact exercise (swimming, cycling, brisk walking)
3. Manage stress levels and emotional well-being

Skills and Competencies

1. Become audit committee chairman of listed company
2. Obtain class 2B licence
3. Re-write “Panzer’s Road Map to Financial Freedom”
4. Deepen audit and data analytics skills
5. Practice conversational Thai and pick up a new conversational language (Japanese/Korean)

Financial Freedom

1. Progress towards my targetted investible net worth
2. Diversify income sources

The life list is aspirational in that they are the things I want to achieve and I consider progress when I am making steady achievement of activities that bring me closer to some of them.

Having a life list does consciously or unconsciously channel one’s efforts and activities towards meeting them. It allows me to question myself how the time I spend on an activity would help or hinder me from achieving the goals in my life list.

What is your life list and how have you gone about achieving them?

Share with Panzer in the comments section.

Be well and prosper.

The recent break-downs in the Singapore Mass Rapid Transit system or MRT (especially the serious ones last Thursday and Saturday along the North-South line) offers us some lessons in our journey towards financial freedom.

Numerous bloggers have discussed the socio-political issues arising from the breakdowns and SMRT’s top management’s abysmal lack of timely response and updates to the commuters. This post will not go over the same issues.

What is more instructive is to learn about how we can avoid the pitfalls encountered by SMRT during this recent crisis.

Preventive Maintenance is Critical for Smooth Operations

Before the Committee of Inquiry seeks to establish the facts and the causes or contributory factors to the NS line breakdown, it interesting to note how the Saturday night to Sunday 11 AM shutdown of the MRT system for thorough checks on trains and tracks led to the discovery of many faults.

This calls into question the effectiveness of its current maintenance regime as it clearly failed to detect such faults before they caused the breakdowns in service.

In our own journey towards financial freedom, we need to consider the need to do “preventive maintenance”. This is why I will continue to update my expenses worksheet to continue to track my cash flows as well as my personal net worth worksheet to track my net liquid assets and total net assets (inclusive of housing loan but excluding the value of my residential property).

This is a form of discipline to always keep in mind my cash flows and if I am saving each month. The accountability in recording what I spend has an effect of making me reflect on whether my spending is aligned to what I want in life.

Financial freedom is a journey and not a destination rings true, and hence in our journey, we should continue to cultivate habits that lead us to maintain our movement towards the goal. The goal is important, but the journey is as important.

Give Timely Updates to Your Stakeholders

Many commuters were angry and frustrated by SMRT partly because they were inconvenienced by the breakdowns. But many were frustrated by SMRT’s poor crisis management and public information sharing about the breakdowns. SMRT failed to keep commuters updated on the nature, extent and alternative transport arrangements especially on Thursday (15 December 2011).

We are our main shareholder in Our own Funds. But I discovered that through my blogging, there is some accountability when I share my own highs and lows of my journey towards financial freedom. Whilst I do not detail the specifics about the actual dollar value of my portfolio. I do give updates on my performance for the year and also some of my mistakes such as punts that made small capital losses from time to time.

Such scrutiny helps me maintain some level of discipline as I know that I will want to share what I’ve achieved (or not) in my own journey towards financial freedom to my readers. Giving periodic updates helps me to think through the issues and challenges that I face in my journey towards financial freedom and clears my minds when it is transferred in bits and bytes to a blog post.

The Buck Stops with Me

The key lesson learnt from the SMRT breakdown is that we have to be accountable for our own financial health. The buck literally stops with me.  I cannot blame the market for the returns. I choose to invest my monies or not. I choose the risks I want to take.

When you take responsibility for your own decisions, you become more empowered to want to decide properly to achieve a decent return for taking acceptable risks on one’s investible net worth.

My walk towards financial freedom will never stop. It make take different forms and shapes but I continue to work on the principles of living within my means, saving and investing, growing and protecting my means.

What insights does the SMRT incident have for your own life?

Share with Panzer in the comments section.

Be well and prosper.

As the year draws to an end with Christmas around the corner, we are only two weeks away from the end of 2011 and the start of 2012.

How has the year been for you in terms of financial freedom?

It has been an interesting one for me and this post will give a short summary of how I’ve fared in livng the principles of financial freedom.

Living Within My Means

Based on my expenses tracking spreadsheet, I end the year with a good sized $xx,xxx savings mainly because for most months of the year, I’ve managed to spend within my monthly income. The year-end bonus will then help to boost up savings for the year.

By now, I’m very used to the concept of tracking all my expenses and have a good idea of where my expenses go and if I’m able to save for the month. As my daughter is approaching four years of age next year, her expenses in fact decline a bit since she doesn’t use up as much diapers and milk powder compared to her first 2 years as an infant and growing toddler.

I’ve also adopted the spend 10-30% of my windfall gains such as bonuses and capital gains. Hence, I typically save 70-90% of my gains for the year. The main big ticket item for me could potentially be a car in 6+ years’ time but by then, a car may not be something I would consider if COE prices persist at current levels as the public transport network would have grown considerably and I should have gotten my class 2B licence by then giving me more transport options.

Saving and Investing

Saving is on track for 2011. Investing has been a mixed bag. Till today, my mark-to-market paper losses on my equities portfolio is -11.30% but my realised capital gains and dividends (net of realised capital losses) is +4.6%. Thus, overall I am showing a -6.7% return for 2011. But I am not too bothered by it because I currently have 63% in equities and 37% in cash and cash equivalents. So I can hold on to my current level of equities and just concentrate on receiving dividends while not taking on too much market risk by buying more shares.

Protecting and Growing My Means

Insurance wise, my coverage hasn’t changed much. When the global financial markets improve, I could consider exiting my investment linked insurance plan and convert to term for next 15 years or so. But current markets are not good and I still have the ability to pay the premiums, so in a way it’s dollar averaging Singapore and Global equities as lower prices. But the mortality charges will creep up as it’s nearing 11+ years for the policy so I may do a review in 2012.

Growing my means has seen some minor improvement. Earned income has increased a bit due to increments. I think my ability to control my expenses helps as there is less pressure to increase earned income although I’ve managed to source additional earned income which is more ad-hoc in nature. 2012 should be the year where I invest more time and effort in my blogging or publishing related income and there are some technology tools that could allow me to scale up content creation and monetising it.

My health is something I need to invest more time in. Due to a ankle injury that is recovering, I realised I should switch to swimming and cycling based activities as jogging has its downsides of wear and tear on knees/ankles. Energy levels are still manageable but I think more fresh air and sunshine would be good. Smiling more would also be helpful as there’s been some recent articles talking about the health benefits of smiling.

Overall, 2011 has been an okay year. Investment wise, performance has been poor as my portfolio achieve net negative return (realised and mark-to-market) but given the slowing down of the US, Europe and global economy, it’s not too bad a performance.

Going forward, I would remain cautious and see investing as a means to get a decent return on my savings whilst continuing to leverage on savings from earned income to drive my investible capital to the desired level.

Be well and prosper.

I was recently approached to speak at an event by the organisers in a neighbouring country simply because I had my professional resume posted up on Linkedin. The organisers had never met me before in person nor had they ever heard me speak at other events. But based partly on the strength of my online profile in Linkedin as well as my track record in speaking at specific events that I’ve listed on my public profile, they invited me to speak at their event.

I am fortunate that they spotted my profile and liked it enough to take the risk to invite me to speak at their event which was run successfully. But what does this little episode have to do with financial freedom?

The world is now open to us through the internet. There are more possibilities and routes towards financial freedom now compared to say, twenty years ago. It is only through networking and having online connections that we can leverage on this global interconnectivity to expand our minds towards possibilites for financial freedom.

Expanding Your Mind Through Old and New Connections

One of the key challenges that I face in my journey towards financial freedom is to think out of the box. When I first started investing my own money, I only knew about fixed deposits and unit trusts. The world of fixed income and equities were understandable to me in theory but alien to me in practice. As a result, it took me some time before I got my hands dirty in investing directly in equities for potential capital gains and dvidend. It also taught me more about portfolio management, cash management and to handle myself pyschologically when the market went south.

Networking through LP’s cbox, having an online presence in Linkedin and Facebook have helped me strengthen existing real world networks and relationships while opening up possibilities for developing new connections and relationships.

Some of the conversations I’ve had in cbox have allowed me to understand a greater variety of ways in which people are pursuing their own versions of financial freedom. In there, I have access to people living, working or studying in places such as UK, US and Taiwan. It has also allowed me to quickly tap on “human intelligence” about what other investments are available as well as how others have managed to get into them. It has also allowed me to connect online with some individuals who have already achieved financial freedom either from physical property or from equities that generate sufficient dividends that cover their lifestyle expenses.

My own ideas and thoughts about financial freedom become richer from interacting with like-minded people who have interesting perspectives about living within our means, about saving and investing as well as growing and protecting our means.

Such conversations and connections serve to enrich the quality of my thinking about ways I can go about achieving financial freedom. I realise the more I talk to people, the more I learn about the world and about myself.

In today’s connected world, it’s easy to go and “meet” up with people online through common interests, topics and hobbies. Over time, when there is sufficient understanding and trust, this process can lead to forming real-world connections and friendships through further conversations over lunch or coffee. Such connections can allow us to break free from the confines of our existing frameworks, paradigms or mental models.

To think outside of the box, we should at times venture out of the box that is our comfort zone, our routine or our day-to-day busyness.

How are you networking and fostering online connections towards financial freedom?

Share with Panzer in the comments section.

Be well and prosper.

I am writing this post from a McDonalds outlet in Singapore using my iPad. It’s already November and I’m clearing some leave as it will expire if I do not by end December 2011.

In our journey towards financial freedom, it is important to take a break now and then to renew, refresh and re-energize ourselves for the long journey ahead. It is in this spirit that I take some timeout for me-time and downtime. In the busyness of day to day work, it’s easy to fall into the trap of chasing after short term deadlines without taking a step back to consider the strategic implications of what we are doing.

One of my colleagues came back to work sick yesterday.Her work is actually quite manageable but she has a lot of other activities as she is at that stage of life where she is pursuing a career while doing part time studies and also running a blog shop. In juggling her varied commitments, her health suffers a little as I think she doesn’t have enough time to sleep well.

Since I had my ankle sprain three weeks ago, I now cherish good health more and the ability to exercise without impediment and pain from recovering from an injury.

I realize that I am at a pivotal point of my life in transition from being a doer to managing outcomes and outputs. More and more I need to exercise leadership and managerial skills which needs me to interact with people more and more in within work and in my other activities.

At the same time, there is tremendous opportunity for growth as I aspire to get my class 2B motorbike licence as well as to pick up conversational Korean. I am also considering getting an MBA as a means to network as well as a means to add more broad based business qualification in my quest to be an independent director of a listed company.

At the same time, I want to spend time with my daughter and see her grow up to be an self reliant and well adjusted individual.

These aspirations exist within a framework of building up my net investible capital towards achieving financial freedom.

Taking time out to see how these big rocks fit into my life helps me establish a measure of perspective. I met up Musicwhiz to catchup and it was interesting to exchange views on things in general as well as to get to know one another as fellow travelers on this journey towards financial freedom.

Have you taken some time out to rest and recharge in your journey towards financial freedom?

Share with Panzer in the comments section.

Be well and proposer.

The analogy was that of the perspective that one takes as we go physically higher into the air. When we take a flight out to another country, the airplane starts off at sea level on the tarmac. As it moves off the airport runway and flies into the air, it gains altitude and we as passengers in the airplane start to see Changi airport buildings, the surrounding sea shimmering in the Singapore sunlight.

As the airplane goes higher and higher, we start to see the islands of Indonesia or the plantations, towns and roads of Malaysia. The higher we fly up, the more we can make out the lay of the land as if it were a map that we were reading.

Taking a Strategic Look at My Life at the 50% Mark

The year is coming to an end and I’ve talked about doing a review about my journey towards financial freedom. It is meant to be a review at 10,000 metres, i.e. to provide a more strategic perspective on the direction of my life, where I have come from and where will I be going 20-30 years down the road.

I am already 40 years old, and if I live to be 70-80, there is 30-40 years of my life to go. Literally, I am at “mid-life”, where half my life has come and gone and the other half is there for me to explore. I would like to bear in mind that the expected 30-40 years is based on the average life expectancies and one can never predict fully how long or well one can live. Thus, one has to bear in mind the balance of living in the present and planning for the future which is not 100% predictable.

Detached Perspective

Self-analysis can be challenging to do honestly as we are reviewing ourselves. Our successes and failures are there but if we choose not to see them, then the review would be a one-sided paper exercise that does no good.

Taking the 10,000 metre perspective could help in detaching one from the analysis. To basically recognise that one is also as flawed and has much room to improve personally, professionally and especially in this journey towards financial freedom.

My own analysis would include the standard assets and liabilities and income and expenditure for the year as the key owner and custodian of Panzer Funds. But it would also take into consideration whether I am living the life that I want. What is the use of achieving financial freedom but be at a loss as to the meaning of one’s life? Financial freedom means something if it frees one up to be happy in being aligned to one’s purpose and meaning in life by providing the freedom of time independent of having to earn one’s income. The freedom to choose is key.

Sometimes, the strategic part of reviewing our lives is the scary part because it is where we confront the truth about the direction that our lives are leading. I would like to conduct it this year in an honest fashion, to face my own fears, doubts and uncertainties as well as to see areas where I’ve done well but also areas I need to push myself more to achieve my dream of being financially free.

How would you go about doing a year-end review of your own journey towards financial freedom?

Share with Panzer in the comments section.

Be well and prosper.