About me

At this time of writing (Oct 2014), I am a 41 years old male, married with 2 beautiful daughters. I am not new to investing. In fact I have been investing throughout my life. My mum introduced stock investing to me. She still do stock investing sometimes buying at ridiculous time during bear market and penny stocks. Sometimes I would give her my puzzled look with her calls haha. But overall she did better than me, collecting dividends and win some tikams. I first started mine when I was doing my NS dabbling with IPOs and buying stocks etc. Now I still do. Just some of my ups and downs of my investment journey:

Downs:
1. Bought lots of Creative Tech stock when Creative was fighting with Apple iPod. The stock fell from $20+ to $12+ and I thought that was very low already and got in. Dividend wasn't very good and now its only $2. :( And no diversification of stock :(

2. Worked in StarHub when I was younger, late 20s, early 30s, I was the pioneer batch and was proud to be involved in StarHub's start-up. I was offered stock options at $0.88. ex-CEO, Terry Clontz, told us not to sell and to collect dividends. At this time, dividend collection was not in my investment mindset, only capital appreciation. I sold all 20 lots of them at $1 :( Imagine if I still have it now and collecting dividend? haha

3. I am quite adventurous in trying out new things to earn money. Tried Forex, CFD trading not once but 3 times and all failed. I used to be fascinated by the beautiful dream of easy money day trading at home and earning big bucks. After 3 tries, I finally concluded that its not my cup of tea :(

Ups:
1. For the past years, after recognising the risk free and high interest CPF SA of 4%, I have been diligently putting away $7k into my CPF SA and enjoy tax relief at the same time. My wife thinks (and still think so) that I am crazy locking up my cash into CPF haha. Proud to say that 2 years ago my CPF SA has reached the limit and CPF wrote to me that I am not allowed to top up my CPF SA anymore. CPF also very smart has a limit for this to prevent people like us from over-contributing to our CPF account. I thought they encourage us to contribute more to our CPF ? But I am happy to know that my CPF SA is compounding and rolling my CPF contributions and interest every year :)

2. 2008 to 2009 was a very fast market recovery caused by the fall of the Lehman bro. I still remember how we made the first decision to buy an extra property. I was driving home with my wife and I heard the radio saying the stock market crashed and things wasn't looking very bright. So I asked my wife, 'Hey I think its time to buy (property)'. She replied 'ok lor'. Wow, so swift and decisive I suan her haha. Its a big ticket purchase and we have been saving up for years, waiting for this opportunity. Bought our first investment property in 2009 and is still collecting rental up to today. About 6% return :)

3. In 2012, interest rate was low and many people switched from HDB loan 2.6% to floating rate bank loan such as SOR, SIBOR rate. At that time, there wasn't any opportunity on the market so we decided to clear our owner occupied HDB loan in 2012 (but still paying for investment property loan) and announced bad debt free. We got no owner occupied housing loan and car loan at all :)