Finance Opti: October 2024

Thursday, October 24, 2024

My FI status after 17 months of FI [Financial Independence]

I have achieved FI status in Mar 2023:

https://financeopti.blogspot.com/2023/03/breaking-free-i-have-achieved-financial.html

Now it is timely to re-evaluate whether I am still FI.

I did my spreadsheets and arrived at the following:

As long as the cell in the red box is negative, I am FI.

I will do this analysis at the beginning of every quarter.

So watch out for a similar post at the beginning of 2025 Q1!

From the above, it seems I am still FI.

I have also attached a chart showing the % change in my total investable assets over the years.

It is fortunate that most of the data points are positive, which means I am still able to grow my assets.

Saturday, October 19, 2024

Portfolio Returns for Oct 2024 - New All-Time Highs Again!

I felt it would be good to track the returns regularly since they fluctuate occasionally depending on the stock market.

Here are the movements for this month. Most of my funds reached all-time highs after the Fed lowered interest rates by 50 basis points to the range of 4.75%-5% in September 2024.

Same graph as above but converted to column chart.

For the Robo-Advisors, it did go up but the gains were not as significant as my pure stocks portfolios. What is relieving is that Syfe Reit+ fund is finally positive (for a 2nd month).

Same graph as above but converted to column chart.

Additionally, I think it will be interesting to see the breakdown of my portfolios in percentages (below). There is a component 'X' which I do not want to disclose for now. The concentration of 'X' is now 12.1% but is still too high.

Market events over the last month:

The headline for this article says it all:

Dow, S&P 500 close at record highs and mark the year’s longest winning streak

SP500 is at all-time high of 5864.67.

Some analysts are suggesting SP500 may reach 6,000 by end of 2024:

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-s-p-500-rising-to-6-000-is-hardly-a-stretch-as-stocks-attempt-new-record-45172729

Let's see about this. Anyway I am invested.

Meanwhile, war on the 3 fronts are not letting up:

* Ukraine - Russia

* Israel - Gaza

* Israel - Lebanon (just started)

Hope the situation can get better soon.

Onwards!

Thursday, October 10, 2024

Dividends for Sep 2024 - Towards 5000 a month

The dividends I collected for Aug 2024 were the biggest ever.

Here are my dividends for Aug 2024:

So I collected $2,369 in dividends for this month.

In case you are wondering, some stocks are repeated because I have 2 brokerage accounts.

Here are my monthly dividends over the last 6 years:

Sep's harvest has dropped a bit from the Aug harvest.

Here are the dividends I collected every year until the current day

I have already surpassed my total yearly dividends in the previous year of 2023.

For the year 2024, my average monthly dividends per month is now $2,712.03.

Here is the progress of my average monthly dividends over the years:

I plan to first receive $2500, then finally $5000 in dividends every month on average.

Additionally, I share the interest I received from the various banks for the deposits in this month:

Oops, I only collected $254.30 in interest payments this month. This was because I missed the required $500 spend on card to unlock the bonus interest. I missed it by a few cents!! The mistake was I assumed the transactions that count towards the card spend are based on calendar date of transaction, whereas it is actually based on POSTED date. The POSTED date can be as late as 5 days after transaction date! E.g. transaction date is 26 Sep, but POSTED date is only 1 Oct! This means then that transaction is only counted towards the card spend of OCT.

This is a mistake that cost me a few hundred dollars and should NOT be repeated.

Onwards!