Seven money habits of AK71's.

This blog post is mainly inspired by a conversation with my mother on some of my habits. Recalling a popular book titled "Seven habits of highly effective people", I came up with "Seven money habits of AK71's". ;p

Habit No. 1:
I never order canned or bottled drinks when dining out.

Fresh food needs on site preparation but I can walk to a nearby supermarket to buy the same canned or bottled

The very first step to becoming richer.

Singaporeans have a reputation for being very good at complaining. This is not a bad thing per se. After all, if some things are really bad and in urgent need of correction, we should complain. How else would the relevant authorities know about the problems and to take action? I draw the line at taking videos and photos of minor incidents and posting it on Stomp!


However, what I really find

What should a Singaporean have by age 35?

I came across an article in Yahoo!Finance: "The 5 things every Singaporean should have by 35."




The 5 things the author listed are:

1.  A time deposit that would be maturing soon. He thinks that people should start by having a reliable investment scheme in their 20s and went on to say that fixed deposits are a good place to look... er...

2.  A relevant degree. He thinks that a degree is the

Towards a modern day good life.

We have our own circumstances which make demands on our finances, time and energy. Often, we hear people saying that they do not have enough money, time or energy to do all the things they have to do or want to do. How do we work towards having the money, time and energy to have a modern day good life?



Finances:

How much something costs is quantifiable, of course. Although people might find

A common piece of advice on saving.

I want to say something about a very common piece of advice dished out by many financial advisors and that is to save at least 10% of our take home pay. Now, this is an easy enough one liner but is it easy to put into practice?

For me, however, I have always said that saving even 10% is too little. Of course, everyone's circumstances are different. So, for some, 10% is all they can manage. For

2011 full year passive income from S-REITs.

On 7 Dec, income distribution from AIMS AMP Capital Industrial REIT was received. It was also the final income distribution to be received from my portfolio of S-REITs this year.

Total income distribution received in 4Q 2011:
S$ 29,040.65.

Add this to S$ 75,785.49 received in the first three quarters of 2011, the grand total for the year 2011 is S$ 104,826.14.



I received more income this

Mind Your Money: Budgeting.

I have the pleasure of watching "Mind Your Money" on XIN MSN this evening. The first episode is on budgeting. It is basically about managing personal cash flow.

If people were to ask me how I grew my money, I would say that I spend as little as possible and save and invest the rest. So, it all starts with budgeting.

I wrote a piece on wage slaves before which attracted quite a few comments.

$120k annual passive income from S-REITs next?

With the end of 2011 more or less in sight, I decided to take a look at how my aim to generate at least $50K in annual passive income from the stock market has fared this year. Of course, compared to the end of 2010, many things have changed. Don't they say that the only constant in life is change?

Saizen REIT was my largest investment up till early this year. The massive earthquake that struck

Bullish on Noble, IndoAgri, Genting and DBS?

I was reading The Straits Times online edition. Yup! AK71 is catching up with the Times! I love this pun!

There is an interesting article by Andy Mukherjee titled "Don't get seduced by analysts' darlings" and he selected four stocks as examples.

Andy is of the opinion that "analysts are overly bullish. They are beginning to turn nervous, but are far from throwing in the towel."

He also said

Wage slaves should be fearful.

I had a conversation with someone who said he is living hand to mouth and that he is somewhat worried with how things are developing in the world now.



Source: Bloomberg.

The Eurozone debt crisis, the persistently high unemployment in the USA, the political instability in the Middle East and the credit tightening in China seem like a recessionary cocktail.

Although Asia is where we find

Rules for investing in difficult times.

There isn't very much that I want to say tonight because I have probably said all that I want to say in my recent blog posts. I just did some reading which is something I do every evening and came across an article by Aaron Task who is someone I enjoy watching on Tech Ticker.

Aaron shared 4 time honoured rules:

1. If you can't take the heat, get out!  This is something I did not talk about but

An elaboration on my methods.

Someone asked me why have I given up on NOL. Naturally, he asked this after reading my blog post on NOL last night which was a rather short blog post and quite unlike my usual style. Well, the facts were simple and brevity was appropriate.

The reason for buying more shares in NOL is no longer valid, from a technical perspective. I buy in a downtrend only when I see the building up of a positive