Why institutions do not want you to pursue FIRE.

 

Ok, back to the regular YouTube videos. 

I will slow down the more technical investing videos in favour of videos that hopefully trigger more discussion. I will also follow some of the suggestions from the YouTube Inspiration pages. 

The algorithm should have a better idea of what people want to see in future videos.

 

Personal Update - Part 2 - Hobbies and Leisure

 

I want to dedicate a blog post to my hobbies, which have undergone many changes. The process started with the subtle rearrangement of my social life last year, and I found that this has been widely beneficial as I began to feel better about myself. I went further and even suggested that some people do the same- They are constantly being hectored by cranky old men who have issues with their own lives. I tell them there's no point in exposing oneself to so much negativity in middle age - we are not too far from becoming cranky. The outcome is consistent regardless of who does this: there will be a lull in your social life, but things pick up once you fill your time with better people and things. One day, I'll blog about this or even talk about it in a video, but as I rearranged my social life, some friends even got more dividends and money coming into their lives as I took addressing my critics into my own hands. 

So I pressed on and attacked my hobbies. I cut away Disney+ after watching the very terrible and woke Acolyte series. Then, I reduced binge-watching to focus on generating my own content. Then I went after RPGs, but I don't do much RPGs these days, as I just enjoy reading the rules and following the industry. 

On the RPG front, there is a lot of bad news: PI will be closing the gameshop in the Somerset area and possibly moving out of the area. This is a sad day because in my youth, there was always a shop selling D&D books and even hex and counter wargames called Leisure Craft, all the way to PI in its current form. As PI shuts down and moves out, the line of hobby shops in the Orchard area is forever broken. Shops have fled the rental high regions and moved out with new gaming enclaves in MacPherson and Parklane. 

However, the nature of RPG gaming has changed. With social media, we can find our tribe. We do not tolerate folks who share our D&D hobby. I can easily ask a blog reader out for a meal; there's no need to accept a psychologically abusive killer DM or some blue-haired land whale who insists on greeting their NPC elves and using the right they/them pronouns. 

But strangely, I'm gaming more because my son is now 9 years old and has recently learnt Magic: The Gathering, and we have games almost every week. The last time I played MTG was during The Ice Age, so I had to pick it up again. Fortunately, there are cheap ways to play two starter boosters just for my son to learn the basic rules. (E.g., What is a stack? ).

I'm also playing Warhammer 40,000 with my son, but only on a small scale, painting some Space Marines and throwing them against Tyranids. Warhammer 40,000 remains a game rich in flavour but actually very expensive even for adults. The cheapest thing you can buy from Games Workshop is the Games Workshop stock on the London Stock Exchange, which was recommended by The Edge last year as a value stock. 

Recently, some things have happened in the hobby world. A few old-school wargames, all wonderful people, have achieved so much traction that there are now regular wargaming events in local libraries. Remarkably, this can happen without a source for wargaming retail in Singapore. It's totally powered by passion and not capitalism. 

So there is some change, out with the old and in with the new. 

I've also been attending a small Japanese karaoke outlet for several months. It started when someone was part-timing in a bar, and I was asked to tag along, and I ended up singing for 6 hours while spending $6 on soda water. So now, I have found a regular place to sing for at least 3 hours on a budget of $44, as I don't drink alcohol. It's cheaper than Cash Studio for a dedicated Japanese karaoke platform, which can be expensive and hard to find. The hack is quite simple. If a karaoke lounge has no business other than your gang, it becomes a budget karaoke room. Along the way, I made new friends and learnt a bit about the struggles of a small business owner. 

One day, I may pursue singing more seriously for competition purposes, but I probably have one of the weirdest ways to add a new song to my repertoire.

Just a few days ago, I learnt of an old song by Anita Mui called the Song of Sunset ( I know I'm very late, but it's a lovely song. ). I wanted to sing it, but it was hard as it was in Cantonese, and most karaoke songs use traditional Chinese scripts, which I can't read. So I researched using the hunch that 90s Cantopop is seldom original and found a singer called Masahiko Kondo, the song's originator. As I read Hiragana competently, I can belt out the Japanese variant within 20 minutes of practice. 

In hindsight, this was actually shameful given that I'm Cantonese.

I should be back producing new content on YouTube this weekend.

Personal Update

 

Some readers miss my long-form blog articles, where I update my life. As I try to ramp up my YouTube presence to create an alternative marketing funnel, most of my effort has been put into creating video content three times a week. The material is designed to drive more traffic to my previews, so I'm not doing personal updates for a while. So let's do a detailed update this week and skip the videos for one round.

To start with, folks might wonder why I'm becoming a YouTube influencer. The main reason is that my gig at Temasek Poly has been paused for one semester, and there's no guarantee that I will be given more gigs moving forward. AI deployment will make in-house lecturers more efficient, so it will be harder to get gigs moving forward. Still, I might be wrong, so I may embark on a new journey that would not pay off immediately, but it may be helpful to promote my other business lines in the future. 

How do I manage my tempo for new videos? My position is to create 2-3 times a week, spending only 1-2 hours doing up a video, only making incremental improvements along the way. So the sound quality was terrible for many videos, and troubleshooting was slow. The upside is that such an aggressive rate raised my subscribers from 400+ to almost 800 today, and more fans watch my material for the content, and I am slowly improving. 

My logic is that if my pals can spend hours playing computer games, I can do the same for my videos and get better scores while I improve my video and audio editing skills. Of course, my videos can't match other influencers because I only use free software to get everything out. 

So that is one major project that will take up 25% of my time. 

On top of YouTube, as AI is disrupting revenue, the only response is to adopt more AI in my life, which explains why there is a sudden engagement with AIAP for their foundational certificate. I learn about AI in this course, but I also use AI to code the program I submit for marking. On top of it, I developed an AI course for kids, which I marketed pretty "badly" last week as I had to self-teach Eventbrite to get a ticketing and payment system out over an afternoon on a Saturday. This is an example of eustress, stress that is good an rewarding even though it's pretty uncomfortable to suck at something in your 50s. My AI training will pay dividends much later. I'm still digesting the regression and classification algorithms and thinking of ways to fit them into the time series data I employ in ERM classes.

So that is another project that takes up 25% of my time.

So that's not all. To understand the ENTJ personality, we won't do very well if we're put on the defensive, so I gotta charge along if there is a gap in my schedule. I can still optimise my cash flows if I have no classes to teach.

Enter my attempt to reprice my mortgage. It has been pushed down from $2,700 to $2,300. The problem is the annoying request to pay 2% of my remaining mortgage out of "goodwill," which I intend to do once my Bank of China dividends come in today. But my next big project is to clear one room in my mum's place to rent out for a nice sum. We are almost done, but the rental income is secondary as I need another eyeball to look over my mum, so I can be contacted if she falls. Getting a tenant kills two birds with one stone. 

So, imagine that I can finally make some adjustments to my life by reducing monthly expenses and expanding my income.

So, without further delay, I will spend some real money to switch my footwear to Skechers. There was a sale in JB, so I swapped out my old worn-out sandals as they might cause me to slip in the future. I fully intend to sum up my working shoes by the end of this month, for those black trekking shoes that look so much like work shoes, I know some lawyers even wear them to court. 

And it won't stop with shoes, as I spend 8 hours on my bed, I'm looking at getting some memory foam to improve the quality of my sleep. 

To understand what I'm doing, Google "Vime's Boots Theory". I'm repurposing this to apply to more comfort rather than durability. With money, just pay for more comfortable brands - enjoy your life.

Finally, I've made the plunge to get into an insulin injection regimen for my diabetic treatment. Lifestyle changes and medication have finally reached diminishing returns, and I've been having discussions for months. Next week, I will receive training on how I can manage my injections and moving forward, I have to inject myself three times a day, but it's actually cheaper. I get to take out some drugs which have been devastating me with side effects for many years. 

So, what's in store for me in the future? With a basic AI cert, I need to train my gaze on the ACLP. Getting a slot is as hard as getting Lady Gaga concert tickets. Once I do that, I will start experimenting with launching cheap online courses on the web, just to challenge myself on whether I can do so.

Updates on my personal AI Journey

 

I started aggressively taking up AI training the hard way, signing up for the AIAP Foundations Course, a six-month program providing datasets for a series of machine learning steps such as regression and classification. My task is to clean the data, add some features, and then use the data to predict student outperformance, hotel no-shows and loan defaults. This course is not taught by human beings and is largely objective-driven and marked by algorithms. The program's efficiency allowed me to complete the certificate in just 2 months, and I'm ready to take on more AI training from other course providers.

In September, I should be confident enough to get into the Apprenticeship program, given that I have self-taught software engineering basics like pushing stuff to GitHub and using ChatGPT to refactor code and improve my coding skills. 

Wisdom and skills come with a price, and I'm intimidated by the rate at which AI progresses. The course I attended is 2 years behind what folks are using right now, and I've not even started in NLP, let alone LLM coding technologies. Most professionals are light years behind the latest RAG or Agentic AI materials. 

Simultaneously, I'm reading The Generalist Advantage to understand how people plan careers today. This strange book initially looks like a snake oil sales text for folks peddling humanities degrees, which I enjoy reading for pleasure. But as it turns out, it's a great career guide for engineers and scientists who may fall into the specialisation trap and advises on the valuable soft skills required to climb he corporate ladder. Of course, if the book is right, I might also be managing my career wrongly, as I spent almost my first 10 years of my IT career getting IT certifications - I should have started on my CFA in my final year of University.

The book has awakened my greater ambition as I incorporate some serious AI skillsets with my finance and legal skills. Employment is secondary for me; I really want to gain access to a real-world data set and slice my way toward actionable business policies out of my findings. The Yahoo Finance data I use is now child's play compared to what I have worked on. 

Finally, as I pick up new skills, I'm monetising others. 

The link to my AI Explorer's Masterclass is now up here, and we are getting sales : 

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ai-explorers-masterclass-tickets-1378432170729?aff=oddtdtcreator

How to think about Thai SDRs

 

The section on Singapore Depository Receipts is quite large, so I will do one part on Thailand SDRs and, in a future episode, Hong Kong SDRs, which will probably be more enjoyable.

Hopefully, this will round up the discussion on how to think about various parts of the stock market, and I will be free to develop a series on individual stocks and how to think about them. 

The final objective is to come up with free mini-courses for retail investors. 

How to think about Business Trusts

This is my 18th video, and this series has been immensely popular compared to my other videos. I intend to create more videos in this series on SDRs and then drill down into different REIT subsectors. 

This episode also marks a serious overhaul of the free software I have used to bootstrap this YouTube channel. I just can't get OBS and Da Vinci Resolve working without paying expensive subscription fees, so I switched over to Capcuts on the advice of my 9-year-old son, who has been a YouTube creator longer than I have. While some audio issues have been resolved, this video still has faint siren sounds. 

While I must reset my learning curve, I suspect things will improve soon.

Enjoy !

 

New Project - AI Explorer's Masterclass

I can finally reveal details on what I have been working on for the past few weeks. 

As part of my work to "retrain" myself as an AI-integrated freelancer, I've not just been trying to learn AI coding techniques under the AIAP Foundations Course. Like a professional software engineer, I've been actively using ChatGPT to answer tutorial questions, refactor my code, and push code to GitHub. However, I don't have a firm foundation in software engineering skills and find going to GitHub challenging. And it's just amazing that because I have some domain expertise and common sense, AI becomes a powerful partner in solving deep technical questions in data science. 

In the process, I've become a lot more sensitive to possible disruptions in the workplace. It's no longer replacing one senior employee with three cheaper and younger junior employees, as I was in my 30s. Nowadays, it's more like replacing four to five senior employees with one junior employee armed with an AI subscription and strong generalist skills.

So what does this mean for tomorrow's workers?

This is exactly what my cousin-in-law and I wanted to address when we started work on the AI Explorer's Masterclass, a two-day enrichment program for 9-13-year-olds. We intend to pilot this during the June Holidays.

The poster for the program is up, and I intend to use my channels to drive sign-ups.

If you have a kid aged 9-13 and you want to find some interesting activities for them, do refer to this graphic, scan the QR code below, or just email me at waichung.ng@gmail.com.

 

Beginner's Guide to Financial Independence

 

With some numbers, I now have a better idea of what folks want to see in a YouTube video. 

Now, it is time to create longer-form videos that, viewed collectively, would be a free 1-hour course on financial independence and the FIRE movement. 

My first drop just came out during lunch, which explains what financial independence stands for. Over the next week or so, I wil discuss different variants of FIRE, how to specifically invest to become financially independent, as well as special issues that are relevant to folks in the FIRE movement.

Enjoy !

Financial Markets Trend Analysis

I'm in the process of showcasing some of the features of the All-Weather Portfolio Masterclass in videos that show how students can understand key trends in the financial markets by running Python Jupyter notebooks that are demonstrated and taught in the program.

This first video, which will be featured regularly at the beginning of every month, shows me using my trend-follower roboadvisor to examine which broad asset ETFs are trending upwards and attempt to match our findings with geopolitical events. 

The All-Weather Portfolio Masterclass is a course that will be run as and when we receive a critical mass of confirmed students. It covers four types of roboadvisors that students can deploy to make investment choices for themselves. 

For pricing information and available dates, please contact Dr. Wealth by following this link: 

https://drwealth.com/awp/

Fictional works that shed financial wisdom

This video may not do as well on YouTube as the others. Still, I have to do it because I feel strongly about recent revelations about how MP Ng Chee Meng treated trainee teachers, which came to light during his stint as Education Minister.

As I did not have a robust humanities education in the 1980s, being turned off by how humanities like History and English Literature were taught by teachers of that era, a large part of my personal development came from playing RPGS and reading fictional works, with many books from the fantasy genre. I would say that even today, when most of my reads are "serious" in nature, I continue to appreciate comics, manga and even cosy Korean literature.    

I suspect that this continuous exposure to fiction kept my mind open and sharp to survive my SMU JD program, which is still dominated by humanities and the artsy types. It's also consequential when I was building my public speaking skills as an undergraduate. 

As such, I'm upset at the hectoring trainee teachers received from the ex-General. 

Why is there a dichotomy between fictional works and serious works? 

Why should people be shamed for the literature they consume in their spare time? 

One way to position this is that Ng Chee Meng is an electrical engineering major like me, which is true ( but this makes me boil too). I've attended a sociology class in NUS with my fellow electrical engineers, and my peers were reductionist as hell, not to mention endlessly entertaining.  But based on my experience, I've never met an engineer or IT professional who gets shamed for the fiction they read - it's a blessing that some people even read. Still, I've witnessed many senior legal associates disrespected for the "low-class" books they read or the K-pop concerts they attended. An old, grizzled veteran lawyer in his 60s even admitted that he would judge an associate on whether they attended anything made by Andrew Lloyd Weber. 

The fact is that if we understand what sociologists like Pierre Bourdieu have been saying, culture is a tool to distinguish people of different social classes. So even if fiction does not seem practical in finance policy making, it can be a great source of cultural capital, something members of the government need to understand. In this case, Singaporeans have suffered as Jack Neo seems to be our only cultural export, whereas China is levelling up to Nezha 2. 

As a finance guy, I must defend the reading of fiction. Three pieces of fiction say important things about money and finance.

I remain a diehard PAP supporter, but I think it's up to us to clean house to keep our government viable. 

Enjoy!

Is buying Bitcoin gambling?

I'm slowly mining for insights drawn from the general elections, and I should have enough content for two videos.

The first video addresses PAP MP Goh Sze Kee's allegations that investing in Bitcoin is like gambling. I take apart this argument with some nifty quantitative work. It should be enjoyable for both PAP and opposition supporters.

Please enjoy!

My channel is gradually slowing down when it comes to new subcribers, so if the content resonates with you, please share it around so that I can monetise it one day.

 

Election is over ! Back to finance content

 

It's shocking how many new subscriptions disappeared during the run-up to the elections. Once the winners were announced, the numbers started to trend again, so I expect this video on REITS to be quite hot. You can tell from the scammers talking to themselves in the comments section.

Ok, what about this election?

I'm happy with most of the results, but PPP losing the deposits for the entire team warms the cockles of my heart the most. Even as a PAP die-hard in Holland Bukit Timah and enjoying the ridiculous landslide of over 80%, I'm hoping that Jalan Kayu would swing the other way. Something about SAF Command and Control makes me uncomfortable when they make money or business decisions. I choose to be sceptical unless someone can prove themselves otherwise, as Chan Chun Sing has done. Also, rumours of someone talking down to trainee teachers will only push them towards the FIRE movement and get them to reinvent themselves as private tutors.

My support for the PAP will always be conditional. Singapore needs to remain a good business place. It should never fall into the trap like the EU, where the rich get soaked to pay lazy people to do nothing at home. 

The test for me has not yet come up. If I choose between WP and PAP, which party will earn my support? WP needs to disentangle itself from Jamus Lim's socialist policies, which will push the rich away and create a net loss of jobs. 

My ultimate allegiance is to continue collecting dividends without taxation and later enrol in a full-time AI course to collect some welfare-for-school payouts if things go further south.  

In the meantime, expect more content from me moving forward.

 

A simple story of my home mortgage

 

Because of the politically charged atmosphere, I've decided to take a break from the YouTube videos to focus on this blog instead, where I will write about my home mortgage.

As it stands, I have a home mortgage of about $520,000 over the EC I bought a decade ago, the mortgage is paid using my CPF contributions and dividends I receive from my portfolio. It has always been a pleasure paying for my mortgage as I watch my home equity grow. Also, not using my equity portfolio to repay the home loan feels like leveraging my dividend portfolio. 

During COVID-19, the bank offered me a six-month break from mortgage payments, but fearing other events in the future, I stopped paying for the principal but kept paying the loan interest. When SIBOR became SORA, I took the chance to switch to a fixed-rate loan at a promotional price and managed to free up some cash flow for myself as my business turned terrible. It was still tough to feed about $3,000+ into a mortgage as interest rates have increased, so a reduction to $2,700 was a lifesaver. 

So this year was a year of a lot of inconveniences. Last time on my blog, I wrote about fiscal marksmanship as I replenished my CPF-MA after my mum's hospitalisation, thinking that it was the right thing to do.

So recently, I had a new but less unpleasant surprise. 

My mortgage came up for repricing, and the bank is offering an even lower rate from 3.65% to 2.45% for the next two years, followed by SORA+0.7%.

But there's a catch—I need to contribute 2% of the remaining loan quantum, which is about $15,200. 

The loan was attractive as it could reduce my monthly burden, so I took a hit by paying this sum from my cash reserves. If you think about it, it's just another event like a medical emergency, so I have to rely on my dividends this quarter to recover from another drawdown. I'm okay with it because I can catch up with the loan moratorium I took years ago. My only regret is that I can't buy more stocks over the next 3 months as I refill my cash reserves.

This is my first repricing experience, so I'm unaware that banks customarily seek a small repayment before they are willing to process one. I hope readers will consider keeping about 2% of their loan quantum as part of their emergency funds if they get an offer from their bank that they can't refuse.

There's another interesting point in this story. The bank asked me to apply for a credit card to waive a $200 repricing fee. I went through the application process but was rejected by the bank. I earned enough during the past two years, and the bank clarified that the reasons for the failed application would never be shared with me. 

Is it my age?

Or could I always pay my credit card expenses on the dot every month, so I'm not a good customer?

This will remain a mystery to me forever. 

YouTube videos will return next week.