Saturday, September 20, 2014

Alternative stream of income..

Multiple streams of income has been preached to death in financial literature to boost your networth.

You can be a tutor on the side-lines, take free lance programming project, usher the audience in concerts, be a part-time property agent, insurance agent and also taxi-driver. The sky is the limit to what you can do.

Though I have to acknowledge those are unlikely to scale much as you are using time to exchange for money. It is good enough for paying your expenses while your earned income can be saved and invested.

Pouring your heart out into a business would be the most ideal as you could build it part-time till you feel you have enough traction to take the leap of faith and quit your paying job(the one that brings the bacon home) to run the business fulltime.

That is why the most interesting fascination I have currently is ONLINE MARKETING. The earned while you sleep dream painted by many online marketers. Your ability to generate content interesting to your target audience is the key to getting eyeballs. You don't need a large capital to start. All you need is a free blog like blogspot for a start and I am quite sure you will have a happy problem when you need to migrate out of blogspot (though i think it will take quite a lot of eyeballs to force blogspot to evict you). If you are a student without the capital to get monthly passive income from stocks, you will be surprised you can actually get $xxx monthly from setting up a blogspot, getting relevant content and setting up your ads and referrals links. Thus far, I am against the setting up of a website or sales landing page to promise people they can make $x,xxx or $xx,xxx monthly by selling high converting digital products (which usually ends up being another how to make $xx,xxxx online).

I have experimented with it and I am still not good with it thus far. Case in point, Google Ads and Amazon Ads brings me only the low $2xx combined monthly (it has been quite consistent the past one year). I am still unable to bring it to the next level as I have not committed enough effort into it. Taking it slow and easy and there's no hunger in me.. sob sob..

And being a cheapskate, I don't really want to pay thru' my noses for courses conducted in Singapore and I prefer to look for materials online by proven gurus who have shown their income to be consistent(based on good faith, there's no audited records of course).

It quite obvious after a while, everyone who seems successful are able to keep their website interesting with contents to be able to command a high eyeball traffic and then depend on the conversion rate to generate income thru' the sales of digital products, referrals fees, private product reviews/endorsement, etc etc. It's much like any other real world business where you have to do marketing and sales of  external/in-house product to reach your target audience and hopefully convert leads into sales.

A simpler but not easy way would be to do content aggregation like thefinance.sg or a news reporting website like temasekreview.net or ba-gua website like STOMP.sg

Below are the three recommended ones I have been reading whom I believe are worth their salt.



I am still learning, this is based on my experience and I might be wrong. Please do share about your experience.

P/S : Another new HNW entrant to the blogosphere? Do check out his website as he is invovled in internet startups. How cool is that! http://limdershing.blogspot.jp/. Starting to read his 1st blog on January 2013. LOL.. loos like my weekend is filled up.

Monday, September 1, 2014

A normal path to retirement for most singaporeans

Is this possible? Food for thought...

Yes..  the steps to achieving financial freedom is this. Is this still applicable in the current economic climate and singapore have transformed into a developed nation.

1) 30yrs old , Get Married and get a New BTO/EC (No reslae, no DBSS!). - Congrats! You have bought a $1 item for $0.70-80cents. Upside min is 20% within 10yrs(Very high probability! if assume inflation at 2% avg). For property , downpayment is 20%, upside of 20% in 10yrs. So your $100k becomes $200k (100% return in 10yrs which is minimall roughly compounded annual rate of 7% pa (excluding your principal paid down).

2) By 5yrs time, most probably, you will save around $100k real cash(most people pay down bto using CPF) from working. Time to look for 2nd property valued at $500k (100k enough to pay 20% downpayment, exclude stamp duty and miscellany).

3) Work another 5yrs, your HDB should be fully paid off (for most couple with degrees. I know coz many of my friends married paid down theirs within 10yrs).

4) So by 40yrs, you should have 1 fully paid HDB you lived in. 1 rental condo you let out which is compounding the money.

5) by 45yrs old, your $500k condo you can also fully paid(assuming your salary stagnant and you pay down at same rate like your $500k HDB BTO).

6) Congrats.. you can retire officially at 45yrs old ...  But this is the most conservative strategy.. most people within that 15yrs span.. might have acquried another 1 or 2 more property depending on their earning power.