I’ve written past two editions of Year in Review (2021 and 2022) and this year’s will be no different. Before I dive into my portfolio and the numbers, I’ll quickly give some highlights for 2023:
- Passed all 3 levels of the CFA on the first attempt, with CFA Level passed in February 2023
- Ran my first Financial Literacy Circle over six months from March to August 2023
- Attended our first self-help course (TQ by POP) in June 2023
- Rented out a bedroom in our HDB all the way through to September 2023
- Went on a 3 week vacation to Europe in September 2023
- Setup our side hustle in Malaysia in October 2023
- Completed our geo-arbitrage in November 2023
- Sold off our HDB after 5 years of MOP (I have yet to write about this because it only happened recently) in December 2023
- Clocked >$18k in property transaction commissions and >$13k in tuition income as well as transitioned completely towards online-based tuition for 2024
Now let’s take a look at the overall portfolio.
The big story from these two charts is that we’ve finally crossed the $1M net worth mark sometime in the middle of 2023, even without the recent sale of our HDB. With that sale and increased valuation in our matrimonial property by around $300K, our net worth now currently stands at just slightly under $1.5M. Correspondingly, while our CPF used to constitute more than 50% of our net worth back in end 2022, our CPF and SRS combined come up to less than 40%, even with maximum $8K contributions to our CPFs and $15.3K contributions to my SRS. With higher incomes and hence higher income tax in the coming year, we plan to use part of our HDB sales proceed to max out both our CPF and SRS contributions.
The second point is that there is now a small chunk that’s going towards a business venture that we recently started on in the middle of the year. I’m not sure where this will bring us to as it is still early days, but I’m hopeful we can starting turning profitable soon based on the past two months of sales. For now, it’s really all about learning the ropes in a new environment and looking for improvements every single day. I’ll definitely write more about this in due time.
Lastly, the markets brought us on a roller coaster for much of 2023, first going up and peaking in July before nose-diving till October and now recovering back again. My portfolio performance has been relatively on par with SPY after sub-par performances in 2021 and 2022, and this in spite of my portfolio having quite a substantial allocation to SGX shares.
All in, not too bad of a year. Looking ahead to 2024, it is unlikely that there will be another spike in the overall portfolio like it did in 2023, but I’m hopeful to see an exponentially upward trend, with our forays into business and higher yielding side hustles alongside our baseline performance at the workplace being at the receiving end of positive feedback which should also lead to some increments on that front.
Happy New Year everybody!
Making Cents 