Whats your net worth

Originally Posted by Unregistered

30 years old

car loan: -90k
car worth: 80k
stocks: 15k
unit trusts: 15k
cash: 40k
cpf: 20k

I'm a poor man.

But this are true figures.

Ok, it's been a almost a year.

car loan: -80k
car worth: 80k
stocks: 18k
unit trust: 16k
cash: 50k
cpf: 40k

still a poor man.

Originally Posted by Unregistered

Me + wife + 2 kids, mid 30s
Combined net worth ~ 1M
I thought we were doing well but looks like there's lots of highly successful people here

Indeed u r doing well.Many people would love to be in your shoes.I am nowhere near your level of achievement.In fact,u can be considered a millionaire household already.My wife and I are around your age but we could only accumulate a networth of $50k currently.

Originally Posted by Unregistered

Congrats on your investment achievements and thanks for sharing how you did it. With property prices at current elevated levels, do you think a young guy like myself will be able to replicate your investment successes with property? Call me pessimistic but I feel that the golden era where people can make good money or even strike it rich with the right bets in property is now gone. Some young people can't even afford a roof now, much less make money by upgrading with a second cherry bite.

Someone else commented in this forum that much of the property boom was due to the liberalisation of CPF (people allowed to use CPF to pay for property purchases). I would like to add that opening up to foreign buyers also contributed not insignificantly (I remember reading somewhere about the 6-storey rule). Someone investing at around those times would have benefited the most.

So, if we take property out of the picture, I guess young people are now left with just this strategy and I over-simplify: save up diligently and buy good stocks, hopefully at good prices.

What are your thoughts?

To have the complete picture, I must also share the hard parts (sacrifices). For one thing, we didnt own a car for a long time. And when we bought our first car, it was a second hand (6 yrs old) car. We didnt go on long overseas vacations until recently. Our yearly holidays were always to M'sia, and to top it all, we stayed with relatives when there! Needless to say, eating out means eating hawker fares mostly except on special occasions.

It is all about choices. As middle incomes earners, we cannot have our cake and eat it too.
For us, our choice was to delay gratification till we have built up our nest egg. There is no right or wrong. We are just grateful that we are still in good health to start enjoying the fruits at this relatively young age (we are now 50+) than wait till we are unable to (physically).

Those starting off now certainly do not have the same circumstances as 20+ years back. For one thing property prices do not look like it they will go up few hundred percent anymore (also less chance of en-bloc), and they are also costly now. Another is the fact that long term employment is less of a certainty nowadays with shorter economic cycles. And inflation was always low the last 20 years - now it is 5%!

By the way, we are achieving 60K passive income annually (30K+ gross from rental and 30K from CPF) only problem was the interest in CPF could not be drawndown till we hit 55.

Originally Posted by Mr Middle

To have the complete picture, I must also share the hard parts (sacrifices). For one thing, we didnt own a car for a long time. And when we bought our first car, it was a second hand (6 yrs old) car. We didnt go on long overseas vacations until recently. Our yearly holidays were always to M'sia, and to top it all, we stayed with relatives when there! Needless to say, eating out means eating hawker fares mostly except on special occasions.

It is all about choices. As middle incomes earners, we cannot have our cake and eat it too.
For us, our choice was to delay gratification till we have built up our nest egg. There is no right or wrong. We are just grateful that we are still in good health to start enjoying the fruits at this relatively young age (we are now 50+) than wait till we are unable to (physically).

Those starting off now certainly do not have the same circumstances as 20+ years back. For one thing property prices do not look like it they will go up few hundred percent anymore (also less chance of en-bloc), and they are also costly now. Another is the fact that long term employment is less of a certainty nowadays with shorter economic cycles. And inflation was always low the last 20 years - now it is 5%!

By the way, we are achieving 60K passive income annually (30K+ gross from rental and 30K from CPF) only problem was the interest in CPF could not be drawndown till we hit 55.

I am really encouraged by your prudence and the fact u r now enjoying the fruits of ur labour.I am in my late 30's and messed it up when younger playing with cars and changing cars and i am sure u get it.Sad to say,i am now nowhere on track to retire at all and my networth is even less than $50k.Do u think if I buck up and stick to a disciplined approach to saving,is it too late for me to accomplish anything?I feel that time is not on my side compared to the young graduates who started working

Originally Posted by Unregistered

I am really encouraged by your prudence and the fact u r now enjoying the fruits of ur labour.I am in my late 30's and messed it up when younger playing with cars and changing cars and i am sure u get it.Sad to say,i am now nowhere on track to retire at all and my networth is even less than $50k.Do u think if I buck up and stick to a disciplined approach to saving,is it too late for me to accomplish anything?I feel that time is not on my side compared to the young graduates who started working

It is never too late to start savings. At least you are NOT in debt I hope!

I am not one to give advise and not sure if what I am going to say next will make it worse for you.

If I were starting off now in this current time, I might not have the discipline to go through the same thing I did. The environment and circumstances then (20+ yrs ago) and now are totally different. Back then, there was little pressure to own cars and there was much less distractions and avenues to splurge. Blue chip stocks were "cheap". We could easily pick 1 or 2 lots up at the end of every month with our savings. (By the way, the shares we bought we have not sold. Some may not agree with this mode of investment (buying to keep), but heck, who can complain if stocks were bought at mere cents are now worth $$$ and giving good dividends in all those years. Or how about the SBS shares that we bought in 1986 that just kept giving baby (bonus) shares and splitting and morphed into both SBSTransit and ComfortDelgro shares? No one could imagine that a single lot of SBS shares can grow into 1 lot SBSTransit shares and perhaps 20 lots of Comfort Delgro shares. (I could be wrong on the exact numbers as it happened some years ago, but believe me that was what happened.) Just multiply that by 10 lots of SBS shares and you get a sense of the returns! Same thing happened for Sembmarine, SIA and SPH. Now that we are talking about shares, I am reminded to add the 18K+ dividends from the shares to my passive income. (Technically I discounted the 30K+ interest from CPF since I could not draw them out to spend)

And yeah, it is a damned good feeling to be debt free, and have income (that you didnt have to sweat / work for) to spend every month. But habits are habits, we end up saving even more.

I gather from some of the recent posts that the only thing a young adult can do is:

(1) save up

(2) buy and hold blue chip stocks

Property is too speculative given the sky-high prices now.

Originally Posted by Mr Middle

It is never too late to start savings. At least you are NOT in debt I hope!

I am not one to give advise and not sure if what I am going to say next will make it worse for you.

If I were starting off now in this current time, I might not have the discipline to go through the same thing I did. The environment and circumstances then (20+ yrs ago) and now are totally different. Back then, there was little pressure to own cars and there was much less distractions and avenues to splurge. Blue chip stocks were "cheap". We could easily pick 1 or 2 lots up at the end of every month with our savings. (By the way, the shares we bought we have not sold. Some may not agree with this mode of investment (buying to keep), but heck, who can complain if stocks were bought at mere cents are now worth $$$ and giving good dividends in all those years. Or how about the SBS shares that we bought in 1986 that just kept giving baby (bonus) shares and splitting and morphed into both SBSTransit and ComfortDelgro shares? No one could imagine that a single lot of SBS shares can grow into 1 lot SBSTransit shares and perhaps 20 lots of Comfort Delgro shares. (I could be wrong on the exact numbers as it happened some years ago, but believe me that was what happened.) Just multiply that by 10 lots of SBS shares and you get a sense of the returns! Same thing happened for Sembmarine, SIA and SPH. Now that we are talking about shares, I am reminded to add the 18K+ dividends from the shares to my passive income. (Technically I discounted the 30K+ interest from CPF since I could not draw them out to spend)

And yeah, it is a damned good feeling to be debt free, and have income (that you didnt have to sweat / work for) to spend every month. But habits are habits, we end up saving even more.

Thanks for the advice.I know so far we have been talking about $$ all day long and it is indeed wonderful to have financial stability.In spite of your wealth now,do u still have even higher targets that u want to achieve?Lets say aim for $10m net worth and after that $100m net worth and so on.Do u feel that there is always a compelling force to have more or do you think there is also a time to enjoy your wealth a bit?

we are mid-30, with a terrace house (2M value, 1M loan) and 1M cash.

as the first year housing loan interest now is very low, should we repay the loan for peace of mind, or keep the cash for 1 - 2 years and re-invest if there is a market correction?

[lazyplane]

why not do both ?

Lock in a fixed rate interest rate loan for 3 years which captialise on the low interest rate now. do your shopping and i think there are a few ones which i felt was quite reasonable and has no capital penalty for early redemption after 3 years.

And then now you can work out how much reserve money is need to finance the loan (after the 3 years) . ie

if you took a 1m loan, and with say monthly installments of 5k ... that means at the end of 3 years, you need to pay approx 820k back if you want to do early redemption.

With this in mind, you now know, you can invest around 180k when you see any opportunities.You can also benchmark yourself to see if you really are the ONE ... ie warren buffet of Asia... ha ha... with this initial investment.

I am sure your r smart enoff to do the rest of assumptions.. so i will end here.

Originally Posted by 35 y.o

we are mid-30, with a terrace house (2M value, 1M loan) and 1M cash.

as the first year housing loan interest now is very low, should we repay the loan for peace of mind, or keep the cash for 1 - 2 years and re-invest if there is a market correction?

i'm keeping cash (close to yours) and waiting for crash. (it rhymes!)

i'm not a genius and neither am i buffett, but my advice is: stick to status quo and wait.