There are only that much investing and financial tips I could share here. In order to speed up your understanding to invest safely with a well maintained portfolio allocation across asset classes, it will be of best interest to share real life examples of what people are going through so that we can minimize making the same mistakes.   

Disclaimer: All information stated below are only for illustration purposes. Its not a call to buy or sell any financial products. Please perform your own due diligence before investing as always. 

Here, I will share the first real life example of the following issue that this person is facing.

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Background Analysis:

He/She is working for a few years and emergency funds have been set aside. This shows that this person has planned and set aside extra savings for the sole purpose of investing. With that in mind, he / she will not be pressured into making irrational decisions and go cut loss or sell the investment assets when the bear market comes or prices of assets drop. 

The only pressure comes from the fact that he / she is planning for marriage, purchasing of first home and family creation where a substantial amount of cash is required to be paid for which comes in around 2 years time.

With a 2 years horizon, its still possible to take some risk in investing.

Main issues with his/her existing investing strategy:

• 10K SGD invested in a few RANDOM stocks in SG and US market using Saxo platform. When you invest in random stocks, you will get back random returns as well no joke. 😅 He / she mentioned that the stocks are mainly dividend stocks, means that their prices tend to remain the same over the long run and do not have much capital appreciation. your returns are mainly contributed from the dividend yields percentage of each stock.

• 8K SGD invested in 2 Robo-Advisors. This can either be two different plans in the same Robo-Advisor eg. 36% risk level plan and a 10% risk level plan both in Stashaway or one plan in Stashaway and the second plan in Syfe for example. There are some overdiversification in this strategy.

• Regular Savings Plan (RSP) auto deposits 100 SGD per month to invest into STI ETF index for less than a year. In this case, I assume 6 months has passed, which is about 600 SGD into the plan.

• Current cash on-hand only able to set aside only low hundreds per month for investing. In this case, I assume low hundreds as a value less than 500 SGD per month.

Portfolio Analysis:

• I have personally bought and tried all those investments that this person has done currently so I am very familiar with the returns and what he/she is going through now.

• 10K SGD in random dividend stocks in SG and US markets. Firstly, SG dividend stocks tend to have little price appreciation over the years. Their price increments are so small that its almost non-negligible. 

• To earn from holding onto these dividend stocks, the only way is through their  dividend yield. 

• The first thing is to look at which stocks are performing and underperforming at the moment. If you see that dividend stock is what you still believe in for their returns, I will suggest to sell away those underperforming stocks (either you know that within this 2 years that stock will still be making a loss in price or to sell and buy into a current stock that you are holding to increase your overall stock position to get more dividend yield for the year).

RSP:

• If you have bought the RSP for STI ETF with DBS some months ago, I am making a calculated guess that with the recent rise in STI ETF prices, you are still making a price gain from your stock purchase.

• I myself had purchased the RSP as well more than a year ago and held onto this plan for close to one year with a loss due to Covid 19. Now if you are still making some price gains in this plan, better to take whatever gains you have now and exit this plan while you can.

• Holding onto this plan will not help you much. If you are only depositing 100 SGD per month, you are holding onto very little STI stock shares. With so little shares, your monthly dividend yield return will be less than 4SGD. In 2 years, the most you are going to receive for holding onto this RSP plan is about 96 SGD only (4SGD x 24 months). Are you sure you want to do this for 2 years?? 

Moving Forward:

What I will do in your shoes will be (do not blindly follow)

Strategy 1.1: Aggressive and risk for 2 years

• Exit the RSP plan (600 SGD)
• Exit the Robo-advisor (8k SGD)
• Exit the Dividend stocks (10k SGD)
• Cash on-hand (500 SGD)

• Open an crypto online account