Saturday, October 01, 2022

Strategic Retreat #1 : Personal Update

 


I've been receiving a lot of well-wishers over my health condition so I thought I'd share an update. My medical checkup yesterday ruled out the possibility of pancreatitis, which can be good news or bad news. Good news is that I'm less likely to be suddenly hospitalized over the next few days, the bad news is that we have no idea why my Lipase numbers shot up so much over such a short time. 

Googling my condition is a bad idea because it can be a gall bladder problem or even pancreatic cancer. 

At this stage, there's nothing much the system can do for me as even I tried my best, my next appointment is a month's time, so I pulled some strings to get a private gastroenterologist to look at me next Monday. I'm not impressed with public healthcare right now because the government hospitals just rolled out this white elephant called the Epic system and every consult now is basically waiting for the doctor to waste time with data entry. So as it stands, I need to use the private sector can help me rule out the more adverse root causes, but I'll be paying through my nose because of the bodily scans and I need to manage the conflict of interest with a private doctor. 

At this point of time, I can only say that I'm really grateful for dividend payouts over the years as I'm not on any insurance panel. 

Which brings me to the issue of our strategic retreat from the markets.

I really don't enjoy being right about deleveraging but markets have attempted several rallies unsuccessfully over the past few days and we're not even getting one solid rebound at the moment. 

Fortunately, I have the luxury of time and can carefully plan how to counter attack when the fear is at the highest peak. 

There are several ways to go about the attempt, one involves high yielding REITs which have been beaten senseless by retreating investors, another involves banks. 

A couple of strategies seem credible right now - using dollar cost averaging to go in over the next year. Another is gaming the CPF and SRS system to maximize tax deductibility. A general approach will probably be explained in a free video, but detailed steps will be incorporated into my training program in November.  

We'll see how things go next week.  

 










2 comments:

  1. Think de-levering is the right decision. Some of my SGX REITS could have DPUs drop 17-32% if we get a long term Fed Funds rate of 5%. We've not had inflation over 5% since the 70s. Need to consider that the long fall iin interest rates, from the 1980s till now, is reversing.

    I'm also looking to buy banks in the throes of the upcoming recession.

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    1. Banks look good. But whether my deleveraging is right will take a week or two to find out.

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