How am i doing? - My Savings, liabilities and investment view
If you are here, then you want to know about FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early). I have a previous blog post about types of FIRE. But how has my journey through FIRE been and what does my allocation look like?
Savings
If I am being realistic, Fat FIRE is only possible if you have a high income and you save a significant portion of your income every month. So how am I doing?
We are a single income family as the Mrs is staying home to raise the kids. So this definitely puts us at a disadvantage compared to households with 2 incomes.
Income - checking against salary.sg, I am in the top 20% of the salaried employees in Singapore, so i am not doing too bad there.
Mandatory Savings - Singapore has a mandatory savings called CPF - Central Provident Fund for all citizens and residents. So this goes towards retirement and medical coverage. And my employer also contributes to this every month, which is a good thing.
My contribution - 1,200 $
Employer contribution - 1020$
Total monthly - 2,220$
Personal savings - On an average I save 28% of my monthly income (not including the mandatory savings) which goes into investments automatically as soon as the salary hits my account
There are others who save much more, but I am happy with my rate of savings. Also given the fact that I am planning to FIRE in India where the cost of living is significantly cheaper than Singapore - the most expensive city in the world.
The savings do not include the bonus component, which varies year on year. I tend to save 80% of bonus and spend the rest on wants/ gifts. This amount being variable, I am not including it in the calculation of the savings.
Photo by www.creditdebitpro.com
Liabilities
We tend to stay away from loans for the most part. So we don’t have a lot of liabilities. We don’t own a car, so no car loans. I tend to pay my credit card bills on time and never roll them over, so no credit card debt. We do have a mortgage at a very reasonable 1.85% fixed rate. The total mortgage remaining is less than 2 times my annual income, so I think we are pretty ok there as well.
Investments
A significant chunk of my personal investments is made in India. I do have some other investments made in Singapore and International markets which are probably not relevant to the target audience of this blog. If you are interested let me know i can write about those separately.
I broadly split the investments into 2. ETFs and Mutual funds - the investments are split almost right down the middle. Half of India investments in ETFs and other half in mutual funds.
ETFs - NIFTY, NIFTY JR and ICICI Pru Win MID cap index are the three indexes that I invest in every month.
Mutual funds - Mix of DEBT and equity funds - 20/80 ratio every month. I am in the process of streamlining the funds and prune the list further before I list the individual items on the blog.
Now that you have a view on my savings and investments, do you think i can realistically pursue FatFIRE provided the geographical arbitrage that Singapore vs. India provides? Leave your comments below.
