2014 Year In Review

The year 2014 is about to end and it is about time I did a review of the year and also what I plan to do for the year 2015.

2014 Year In Review
This was the year which I first started to take a more active approach for my investment and decided to start this blog to write about it.

One of the most significant investment I made this year was to read. I have read only three investment related books: “The Intelligent Investor”, “Rich dad, poor dad” and ” The Little Book of Big Dividends”. These three books gave me a lot to think about for my own personal investment approach and how I intend to set up my investment analysis of stocks.

In terms of real actions, I have increased the equities holding but it is still a small percentage of my overall financial portfolio. This year, I also helped my wife to invest her HKD savings in a couple of counters on the HKSE.

Overall, 2014 was a year which I took a small step into the equities investment and hopefully it will be the one important step.

2015 action plan
I plan to accomplish a few investment related tasks in 2015. The following are some of the things I hope to accomplish:

1. Refinance housing mortgage
When my wife and I purchased our current resale HDB flat, we took at 30-year loan with a fixed interest rate of 1.35% with a lock-in period of 3 years. The lock-in period will be ending in the second half of 2015 and I will be looking to secure the refinance by the second quarter of 2015. This should be met quite easily because the refinancing has already been sourced and some sort of secured and the remaining action required is the paper work.

2. Equity investment analysis framework
This is the tough one because I have been reading and looking for my own style of equity investment analysis framework. Something which I am comfortable with and able to reproduce after I have done a stock screening. I think this would be my toughest task and I hope to derive  at least the first draft framework by the end of the first quarter 2015 and refine it along the way.

3. Deciding on how to best allocate fund for child/children’s savings
I have a son who’s 1+ years old now and he actually has quite some savings from the ang pow’s that he has collected. They are currently left inside his savings account earning a puny 0.05% bank interest. I have been pondering very hard over this and what is the best way that I can help to allocate this money. The course of action definitely has to be discussed with my wife and hence this will be tough to take action upon and will most likely be done in the second quarter of 2015.

4. Personal financial planning guide
This is a personal passion of mine, a guide for a person not just on investment, but also about insurance, tax, retirement and estate planning. This will be hopefully be guide with actionable. Moneysense is a government financial literacy website, but I feel that it only gives guidance and not actions. How should one person take action after reading the guide is what comes to my mind. Hence, I hope to come out with an “actionable guide”. I do not want to put a timeline for this, but most likely, it will be in the second half of 2015.

The four items pretty much sums up some of the things I have in mind for 2015. This will hopefully be my “workplan” for this blog other than my official work. I will add in more or share more interesting investment or personal finance matters in this blog if it is interesting. Also, please feel free to contact me via e-mail if you would like to connect or share interesting concepts or articles.

This will be my last post for the year 2014 and I would like to wish everyone a Happy New Year!!

Cheers,
Naro