Five Cents Ten Cents

Financial freedom, one realistic step at a time.

Annual Review 2011


Soccer anyone?
I wrote a post about “Writing Your Life List” back in 2009. It was a useful exercise to put down digitally what I intend to achieve before I pass on from this world.

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

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What We Can Learn from the MRT Breakdowns


Taking the MRT (now known as the SMRT) to Marina Bay to see the Marina Bay Sands

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.

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Merry Christmas to One and All :-)


christmas tree pins

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.

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Singapore Press Holdings Annual General Meeting on 1 Dec 2011


SPH Annual Report 2011

I attended my second annual general meeting (AGM) of Singapore Press Holdings Limited (SPH) which constitutes 70% of my equity portfolio. It is the single largest shareholding in the basket of shares that I own. Attending a company’s AGM is one of the rare occasions where you as a shareholder can ask questions to board and management of its performance for the year as well as other related topics.

On a more practical level, attending SPH’s AGM allows you to get complimentary copies of the daily newspapers such as Straits Times, Lian He Zao Bao, New Paper and Business Times as well as have a free bento lunch after the AGM. :-)

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Networking and Online Connections Towards Financial Freedom


Two People - Business Meeting

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.

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