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etf invest wealth

Investment 101

If there is one thing that we didn’t learn from the school, that is investment.

Saving and investing is totally different things.

Since young, we are encouraged to save the money in the bank. But in fact, instead of gaining the money through interest rate, we are losing money because of inflation rate! (ie, you buy lesser things using the same amount of money in 5-10 years time)

Investment is not about taking out $100,000 or even $10,000 in one shot, and put into stocks, running a business, buy a property. Nope, that’s too much.

Investment can be as little as $100 per month. Yes.

Just put aside of $100 per month into a regular saving plan. Then with the magic of compound interest, see the money grow by itself. Even better, if you can manage to invest $500, $1000 or even more per month, apply the compound interest, boom!

Finally, investment is always long term. Don’t expect a huge short term gain. Look for 10 years and average of 5-10% annual gain.

Of course, you should have an emergency fund that can last you for 6 months without any income, that’s after the money put aside for investment.

Tips, you could look into index fund as part of your regular saving plan. And that’s plenty of them, just search ETF.

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etf invest wealth

How to start investing

We had talk about the power of compounding. Now, Let’s go into the baby step of investing.

You may wonder, what to buy first. Stocks of the companies? And heard about people saying about Unit Trust? How about Bonds? And many others terms that are stranger to you, which I can’t completely understand them as well.

The most easiest is to invest into index fund or ETF (Exchange Traded Fund). Take STI (Straits Times Index) for example; It is an indicator to tell us how well that Singapore is doing financially.

Performance of Straits Times Index over the 5 years.

Basically, this STI is tracking the performance of below 31 companies. And this list will get reviewed quarterly based on their financial performance of course.

SymbolCompany name
C31.SICapitaLand Limited
J37.SIJardine Strategic Holdings Limited
C09.SICity Developments Limited
H78.SIHongkong Land Holdings Limited
M44U.SIMapletree Logistics Trust
D05.SIDBS Group Holdings Ltd
O39.SIOversea-Chinese Banking Corporation Limited
D01.SIDairy Farm International Holdings Limited
F34.SIWilmar International Limited
A17U.SIAscendas Real Estate Investment Trust
C6L.SISingapore Airlines Limited
C38U.SICapitaLand Integrated Commercial Trust
N2IU.SIMapletree Commercial Trust
U14.SIUOL Group Limited
V03.SIVenture Corporation Limited
S68.SISingapore Exchange Limited
S58.SISATS Ltd.
U11.SIUnited Overseas Bank Limited
C07.SIJardine Cycle & Carriage Limited
T39.SISingapore Press Holdings Limited
C52.SIComfortDelGro Corporation Limited
C61U.SIC61U.SI
Z74.SISingapore Telecommunications Limited
G13.SIGenting Singapore Limited
S63.SISingapore Technologies Engineering Ltd
Y92.SIThai Beverage Public Company Limited
U96.SISembcorp Industries Ltd
BS6.SIYangzijiang Shipbuilding (Holdings) Ltd.
BN4.SIKeppel Corporation Limited
J36.SIJardine Matheson Holdings Limited

So, buying all these 31 stocks gonna be killer, just too expensive. Luckily, there are fund houses buying all these 31 stocks and re-sell them in another stock, which back to our index fund or ETF. And, in a cheaper option. One of them is G3B.SI from Nikko AM.

So you could invest a fixed amount every month. And just keep it there for 10-ish years. Some may go for extreme, half of the salary into the ETF. Of course, there are many ETFs out in this world, go and look for them!

Index Fund 101: