Five Cents Ten Cents

Financial freedom, one realistic step at a time.

The Fourth Quarter of Calendar Year 2011


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It’s the last three months for calendar year 2011. For some if your organisations have hit substantially the key performance indicators set at the beginning of the year, it’s time for staff to clear leave and set aside some down time to recharge, rejunvenate and to refresh.

For others, they may have to push harder at work, business or personal lives to achieve the goals they set out at the start of 2011.

Whatever is the reason, the coming of the end of year in the next 1-2 months heralds the mood for retrospection and reflection.

What have we achieved in 2011?

What do we want to pursue in 2012?

What will the future hold for us and how have we managed our time on the present and the past?

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SGX Annual General Meeting held on 6 October 2011


SGX

As part of my strategy to learn more about how corporate annual general meetings are held to beef up my corporate governance experience, I have started making it a point to attend annual general meetings (AGMs) of the companies that I have invested.

So far, I have attended last year’s DBS and SPH annual general meetings and they were useful exercises in seeing how different blue-chip companies conducted their annual general meetings.

Also, one of my targets is to position myself to be experienced and qualified to become an independent director of a listed company when I am near to retirement age as this could potentially provide a second “career” of sorts when my career as an internal auditor may plateau at some stage near the official retirement age in 20+ years’ time.

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The Markets are Bad Bad Bad!


The Beautiful Farm with Bales

The current market turmoil has seen my stock portfolio’s value decrease as prices of even blue-chips stocks go south. It appears to be 2008-2009 again for many investors. What can we do, how can we overcome the challenges of seeing our portfolios dwindle with the threat of global economic recession threatening growth over the horizon?

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Challenging Myself – Class 2B Licence


Motorbike

One of my life goals that I’ve listed in my life list in 2009 was to obtain a class 2B motorcycle licence. That list was written in April of 2009, more than 2 years plus ago. It is timely to revisit that list as there has been some changes to it since I last wrote it.

I started my new journey to challenge myself by registering for the class 2B motorcycle licence at one of the training centres in Singapore. The road will be long and challenging as one needs to clear quite a number of theory lessons even before one can book the practical lessons to get hands-on training with the motorcycle.

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Make a Decision and Move on in Life


One of the things I’ve learnt in my journey towards financial freedom is to be more proactive and do something instead of lying around waiting for things to happen. In life, we will be faced with many decisions on a day-to-day basis. Some decisions are relatively easy, e.g. what to eat for breakfast, what to wear to work.

Other decisions are harder, e.g. should I cut loss on my paper losses or hold on to a stock? Should I set my asset allocation at 50% equities to 50% cash or 70% equities to 30% cash or 100% cash and 0% equities.

Being paralysed and afraid of making a decision sometimes inhibits our growth as a person because we do not want to accept the consequences of our own decisions.

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